GROWING SMALLER
GROWING SMALLER
I fall asleep—pass out—on the bed with the walkie-talkie still in my hand. My wife always said that it was impossible to wake me when I drank too much. But she was wrong because something does wake me and it isn’t the walkie-talkie. It starts as a small sound at first. The variety that infiltrates your dreams so that it becomes part of them. Hiding, unnoticed, until the sound is too out of place to fit within whatever you were dreaming about. Like an itch you have to scratch. It distracts me from the imaginary scenes my subconscious mind has conjured, pulling me from the no-man’s-land between sleep and wakefulness where dreams and reality blur. I hear the noise again and struggle to identify it.
It sounds like breathing.
And it sounds like it is coming from beneath my bed.
I wake up drenched in sweat. I don’t move but I do open my eyes, blinking into the shadows, adjusting to the dark. I keep perfectly still and listen.
At first, I think that it was just a dream within a dream, but then I hear it again.
Someone is slowly coming out from under the bed.
I am lying on my side and I daren’t move.
All I can see at first is a shadow, and again I think I must be imagining it, unable to believe my own eyes. But the shadow is shaped like a hand. Someone really is crawling out from beneath the bed very, very slowly. They must have been down there the whole time I was sleeping.
I should get up, defend myself, say something, do something.
But I do none of those things.
I am paralyzed with fear as the dark shape of a person finishes crawling and starts to slowly stand. My heart is thudding so fast and so loud inside my chest I am sure they must be able to hear it. I close my eyes when they turn to face me. Like a child who thinks they can’t be seen by a monster if they can’t see it . I have never been a brave man. When it comes to fight or flight I guess I am a coward; I’ll choose to run every time. But I can’t even move.
I hear them lean down then, looming over me until their face is so close to mine I can feel their breath. For a brief moment I think it is Abby because I can smell her perfume. But when I open my eyes, all I see is the shadow of a person with branches instead of arms and twisted twigs instead of fingers. Part man, part tree, some sort of tree man.
I scream.
Columbo barks and I open my eyes for real this time, and nobody except my dog is sitting on the bed beside me. His hot breath in my face, his eyes filled with inexplicable joy, his tail wagging and thumping loudly on the duvet. It was just a dream. There was nobody hiding beneath my bed—except maybe for the dog—and I feel like an idiot. My racing heart starts to calm down and I wipe the sweat from my brow with the back of my hand.
I am trapped on this island in so many ways: I can’t leave unless a boat will take me, I don’t have any money to stay anywhere else for long if I do, and now my missing wife is here and I need to understand how and why. My options seem to be growing smaller every day and it feels like the walls of my world are closing in. I remind myself that what happened was only a dream. Nobody was really hiding under the bed. And nobody knows about Charles Whittaker’s book, or what I’ve done. Nobody knows except me.
It’s only when I sit up that I feel the cool breeze on my skin. I look over toward the door I remember locking, and see that it has been left slightly open.