Sleepless

by Lou Morgan

  Izzy read the sign and started to giggle again. “Forty-eight hours,” she laughed. “Why’s it always forty-eight hours? Is it magic?”

  Grey pressed the lift button again. Harder.

  At long last, the lift arrived, and it was only as they stepped in that Izzy realized she was chanting “forty-eight, forty-eight, forty-eight” under her breath. She’d had no idea she was doing it. Appalled, she stopped. No wonder Grey had been looking so nervous.

  I’m not Mia, she told herself. I’m not. I’m not.

  And everything looks better after a good night’s sleep.

  Grey was leaning against the corner of the lift. She could hear his breathing. It was heavier than usual.

  Faster than usual.

  “Grey?”

  He didn’t answer. His eyes were closed and his head was tipped back against the metal walls.

  “Grey…”

  He was breathing faster and harder now, through clenched teeth.

  “Grey…”

  “No.” His voice was ragged.

  The lift pinged as it reached her floor. As the doors opened, he shook his head and, without even opening his eyes, he planted a hand on her chest and pushed – hard. She tumbled backwards out of the lift and landed sprawled on the landing as the lift doors closed.

  He was going up. Alone.

  Frantic, Izzy hammered on the lift ‘call’ button. Nothing happened. There wasn’t a single sound from either of the other lifts – and then she remembered the sign and kicked herself. Only the one lift was working. The lift Grey had taken. There was only one floor he would go to – his own. The eighteenth floor.

  She had run away earlier. She had run away from him, and they had both run away from whatever, whoever, they thought had been after them in Smithfield.

  No more running away.

  As the lift’s floor indicator settled on eighteen, Izzy made for the stairs.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Izzy threw the door to the stairwell open so hard that it smacked back against the wall. The echo boomed all around her.

  “Five floors. It’s nothing, right?” she told herself, as though it would make each step hurt less. Her bones were on fire inside her, and even the slightest touch pricked her skin sharply. Her clothes felt like she was wearing a porcupine inside out. The feel of her hair brushing against her neck made her want to pull it out by the handful. But she could climb five floors of stairs.

  She had to, because somewhere at the top of them was Grey – and there was no way she was going to let him slip away now.

  There was just the small problem of what the stairs were doing.

  All the steps were moving like funhouse stairs. They tipped at crazy angles, shuffled back and forth and popped up and down.

  “You have got to be kidding me.”

  She stared at them. She knew she just had to convince herself that it wasn’t real. That the stairs were really there and they were just normal stairs.

  Which was difficult, because several of them were on fire.

  She could feel the heat from the flames, could smell burning hair. She could almost hear flesh sizzling and popping behind the crackle of the flames – and that was when she caught herself thinking almost. Of course she could almost hear it. It wasn’t actually there for her to hear.

  “All in my head…”

  The first step was cold and solid beneath her foot.

  So was the second, and the third, and the fourth.

  “Izzy! Izzy!”

  She stopped, clinging on to the handrail. Someone was calling her name over and over.

  “Izzy! Izzy! Help me!”

  Four steps ahead of her, Tigs was standing on the staircase. She looked so like herself, as though nothing had happened, that Izzy wondered whether she was really there. Whether it had been someone else who fell from the tower. Her hands were folded in front of her and she was watching Izzy intently.

  “I asked you to help me. You didn’t come.”

  “I did. I tried, anyway.”

  “You didn’t help me.”

  “What was I supposed to do?”

  “You didn’t help me. I needed you.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry…”

  “I fell. I fell, Izzy. All that way and the ground was so hard. You didn’t come, and the ground was so hard.” Tigs shook her head sadly, and a tear slid down her face. “Why didn’t you come? I thought you were my friend.”

  “I am. I was. I…”

  “I told you I was sorry. You said you didn’t blame me. I said I was sorry.”

  “Tigs…”

  “You should be sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry. You will be sorry.” Tigs took a step forward, then another, then another until she was level with Izzy, nose to nose with her. Izzy blinked as a blanket of exhaustion wrapped around her. She had seen the body fall; had heard Mia say Tigs had fallen. She opened her eyes to find the stairwell empty. She was alone.

  She pressed on up the stairs. They seemed to go on forever – first one floor, then another, then another. Three down, two to go.

  “Izzy…”

  She tried to ignore it. It was Dom, his face pushing out from the concrete wall, stretching it into a mask.

  “Izzy! Over here!”

  “You’re dead, Dom,” she replied through gritted teeth. Dom’s face vanished, only to reappear higher up the stairs. She could see the wall bulging around his features as they tried to push through.

  “See you soon, Izzy.”

  He vanished again.

  She kept on climbing.

  Her heart was pounding more heavily than ever and she could hear the blood rushing round her body. It made a faint whooshing, whistling sound. She used the rhythm to push herself up the last few steps. She might as well have been trying to climb the sky – the stairs were impossibly high and steep, towering over her. The door out on to the landing loomed ahead and despite herself, she hesitated in front of it. She was so tired. So, so tired. Her eyes grated in their sockets and she’d almost forgotten what the world was like without the crashing, burning pain in her head. Her hands shook, the palms sticky with sweat. A ball of nausea sat in the pit of her stomach. All she needed was to rest, just for a couple of minutes. If only she could sleep. Just a few minutes.

  Everything looks better after a good night’s sleep.

  What would it be like, anyway? If she gave in, if she went to sleep? Would she still be herself when she woke up, or would she be someone else? Would the part of her that was her, that made her Izzy, disappear?

  You shouldn’t be here, dearie…

  What had it felt like to be the man in the video they’d seen? Had he known what he was doing? Was he locked away in the back of his own head, looking out and watching someone else pilot his body, helpless to stop it? Or did he simply not care?

  She thought about Mia’s laughter.

  Worse, had he known exactly what he was doing and liked it?

  No, thought Izzy. No sleep. Not now, not yet. If she was going to die – and by now, it was looking like the odds of that were pretty good – at least she would die as herself. Not as someone else like Mia had – a twisted version of herself, willing to do anything to win.

  She would win by staying Izzy.

  It would be nice if she could manage to keep breathing, too.

  She pushed open the door.

  There was a draught on the landing, and it only took her a moment to understand why. The door to Grey’s apartment stood open. She could faintly hear an answerphone message playing on a loop – a beep, and then Grey’s mother’s voice. The clatter of plates and glasses from a party in the background; laughter. A burst of static, and then her voice again, and then a beep and the whole thing started over again. The door swung gently back and forth in the moving air.

  The flow of air was coming from the lift shaft on the far side of the landing. The doors had been forced open. A screwdriver lay discarded on the carpet and there were shreds of metal and rubber littered about the
floor.

  “Grey? You don’t want to be standing there.”

  He was standing with his back to her, his bare feet already at the edge of the open shaft. His toes stuck out over the drop. His trainers lay at the bottom of the central lift-control console, the laces almost torn out.

  “Come back from the edge. Come over here to me.” She held a hand out, talking to him in what she hoped was a calm sort of voice. He ignored her.

  “Grey, don’t.”

  In the lift shaft, the wind whistled. Grey swayed.

  What should she do? What could she do? He didn’t look like he was going to move, and she had to get him away from the open shaft. Whatever happened after that, she would just have to deal with – but after she got her best friend away from the eighteen (and then some) storey drop.

  “Right. I’m going to come over there to you, seeing as you won’t come to me. Don’t freak out,” she added, more to herself than anything else. She trod gently, trying not to make her movements heavy or sudden, talking quietly all the while, her voice soft and low, the way people talk to cornered animals. She said anything that came into her head, anything that might keep him there. She had no idea whether he could hear her or whether he was lost in a world only he could see. She didn’t know how long it would last, how deeply he would go into whatever it was he was seeing. She didn’t even know whether he would come back at all – as Grey, at least. Nothing was right, nothing was real, but all that mattered was now.

  She reached the edge of the shaft and stopped alongside Grey. He was staring at the dark wall on the far side, or at the taut lift cables that stretched down from the top of the building. The emptiness yawned up at them, and Izzy swallowed hard. Her head felt like someone had trapped it in a vice and was squeezing it harder and harder, but she had to keep trying to get through to him.

  “I’ve never seen inside the lift shafts,” she said, trying to sound conversational. “They’re not all that.”

  Beside her, Grey’s shoulders heaved. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see his chest moving up and down with each breath.

  “I mean, I thought they’d at least be encrusted with diamonds or something. Or do you think that’s only the lifts in Shakespeare? Tigs said…”

  She stopped. She couldn’t talk about Tigs. Not now. Her name had just slipped out, unthinkingly. She tried again. “Come away from the edge.”

  Still nothing.

  She tried a different approach. Perkier. Like everything was the way it should be – the way it would have been if only Tigs had never found the pills, if only they’d never taken them, if only they’d told her there was no way they were getting involved, if only… “This is getting so old. Can’t we just go to sleep? I just want to sleep.”

  “So sleep.” His voice sounded like it came from the bottom of a deep well.

  “Funny.” She peered down the shaft. It was a very, very long way down and she very, very much wanted to not be standing so close to it. She could stand next to Grey without standing so close to it. She could.

  She tried to step back. She couldn’t. There was something stopping her.

  It was a hand, pressed flat against the small of her back.

  It was Grey’s hand.

  “Hey!”

  He turned his head to look at her, slowly, slowly. And when she realized that his eyes were empty of everything that made him Grey, were flat and cold and steely, and that the grin that was spreading across his face was sharp and cruel – that was when she realized she had made a terrible mistake.

  “What’s the matter?” He tipped his head to one side and blinked at her. “Don’t you want to see what’s down there?”

  He pressed harder against her lower back, forcing her to lean towards the lift shaft. She tried to push back against him, away from the gaping dark of the shaft. “Get your hand off me.”

  “You know what’s down there? Sleep. Sleep forever. Isn’t that what you want? To sleep? You could fall asleep… Get it?” He laughed, and his laugh was empty. “Fall … asleep. Falling … asleep. Fall … asleep. Falling … asleep.”

  He sounded horribly like Mia had, his voice just as distant. He even used the same words – was he that far gone? She couldn’t bring herself to believe it. Not him. Not Grey.

  The lift shaft yawned up at her. Far below in the darkness, a voice was calling her name. Two voices. Three. Her friends’ voices, calling her, screaming for her to help them as she balanced on the edge of the drop.

  “You don’t want to do this,” she said, hoping he wouldn’t hear the fear in her voice.

  “Don’t I?” He nudged her again and she forced herself back before she could lose her balance. “I mean, how do you know? How well do you think you know me?”

  “Grey, I know you.”

  “Do you? Are you sure?” He narrowed his eyes at her. “How well does anyone ever know their friends?”

  Izzy didn’t know where he was going with this, but as long as he was talking, she had time to think. And if she had time to think… “I know you well enough. I know that this isn’t you.”

  “Isn’t it? You and me, we’re the only two left. Imagine how much easier it would be if there was only one left. No one else to worry about. No stories to get straight. Just one story – the only story. And when there’s only one story, it becomes the truth, doesn’t it?”

  “And that story would be yours, would it?” Her heart was pounding so hard that she could feel it in her teeth. There was a way out.

  Grey was still talking, but she couldn’t make out the words any longer. He might as well have been speaking through cloth.

  Only one story, whispered a voice in the back of Izzy’s head. Only one story.

  She could make it hers. She could tell the story. No one needed to know about the pills. No one.

  All she had to do was…

  No. She shut the voice out. It was Mia’s voice, Grey’s voice – the fake Izzy’s voice. It was the pills. It wasn’t her. Not at all.

  “My story, my ending,” she said as Grey’s hand twitched on her back.

  It was all she needed.

  Chapter Twenty

  She threw herself back as hard as she could, dropping all of her weight towards the relative safety of the landing – away from the awful darkness of the shaft and the voices that were still echoing up from inside. The sudden movement took Grey by surprise, and they both tumbled to the floor. Izzy’s shoulder twisted beneath her and she fell hard, knocking the air out of her lungs. She gasped for breath, trying to sit up and to get away – to the open apartment door or to the stairs, anywhere.

  On the carpet beside her, Grey groaned and shook his head. He had fallen better than she had, but he was just as tired and it looked like he had caught the edge of the lift console with the side of his head. A trickle of blood ran down the side of his jaw from his ear as he lunged at her.

  She rolled sideways out of his reach, but he was already on his feet, staggering drunkenly towards her. He shook his head again – harder this time – as he moved in. Izzy scuttled back as fast as she could, but the floor was too soft and it clung to her hands, sucking them down into the carpet like quicksand. Everything was getting bright, too bright. Grey was moving more slowly, still shaking his head and squinting as though the light hurt his eyes, too.

  Time… thought Izzy. Time. That’s all I need…

  With the last of her strength, she pulled herself to her feet and threw herself at him. Again, she surprised him and again she knocked him to the floor. They rolled over and over, away from the shaft, and the taste of something rotten filled her mouth. The lights were getting brighter and there was an itch somewhere in the back of her brain and something was happening, and the vice around her skull was tightening, tightening, tightening – squeezing her out of her own head.

  They slammed into the wall together – and Izzy stared up into the light. Everything had a gleaming white halo – even the figure leaning over her and closing his hands around her throat.<
br />
  She wriggled, pulling herself first one way then another, but he was pinning her between his knees and the wall. All she could see was the white light, closing over everything. Swallowing it. Even his face. Her throat burned and she coughed for air, but Grey held firm. She couldn’t keep fighting. She was too tired. Too tired to fight Grey. Too tired to fight the other voices in her head. Just too tired. But…

  Something was different. Something was changing – she could feel it. She could feel the buzz in the back of her head, something she hadn’t felt in an age. Something she hadn’t felt since the first time she’d taken one of the FokusPro pills. The walls bulged and the lights were blazing overhead, and for a second she saw broken glass and heard a scream, bleeding through from the past into the present – and she was out of air.

  Out of air, out of time.

  Her fingers wrapped around Grey’s, but she might as well have been trying to open a statue’s hands. They were strong and cold. So cold. Or was that her. She was cold. She was tired. So tired. So cold.

  Just sleep.

  She could sleep…

  With one last effort, she pushed back against him – and, miraculously, Grey’s hands dropped away from her neck. The world snapped back into focus as air rushed into her lungs. She gasped, gulping it down as hard and as fast as she could, tensing herself for whatever was coming.

  It never came. He was sitting in front of her, his back against the centre console, blinking groggily.

  “We were on the steps…” he started, then stopped and blinked at her again. He kept glancing down at his hands as though he didn’t quite understand what they had been doing. “We were on the steps, Iz.”

  “We’re not on the steps now,” she managed. The words grated her throat.

  “No.” He swallowed loudly, holding his hands up in front of his face. They were shaking. “I’m sorry, Izzy. I’m so, so sorry. I didn’t know. I couldn’t… I wasn’t…” He hung his head. “What did I do?”