Trapped Within

by Bradshaw, Duncan P.

  Still shaking, he turned the bedroom light on. Although he was still terrified, he had to inspect the room. He felt like a child again, going through the wardrobe and checking under the bed with his father to prove that there was no monster. The only difference was that this time, there was. Wasn’t there? He was sure that he had seen the ghost.

  Before long, Adrian began to question himself. He had been drinking before bed, he had been watching horror films before bed. He reminded himself that this wasn’t the first time he’d scared himself in the middle of the night. Eventually he concluded that his overactive imagination had been playing tricks on him again, and he went back to sleep with the light and sound of the TV playing to comfort him.

  Sunrise eventually came and Adrian awoke to its bright gaze. He grabbed the bottle of water from his bedside table and proceeded to gulp until the contents were empty. He wiped his mouth, rolled out of bed, and went to the bathroom. He turned on the shower and stood outside the curtain, his hands reaching inside, the cold water pouring over his arm. As he waited for it to warm, he began pulling his boxers down with his free hand. Suddenly, something behind the shower curtain grabbed his hand.

  Screaming, he jumped away from the curtain. His boxers caught around his ankles and he fell backward. Quickly he got back to his feet and pulled the curtain aside. The shower was empty.

  You are really starting to lose your mind, Adrian.

  He kicked his boxers to the floor and climbed into the shower.

  The hot stream of water on his back felt good. He stood idle for a moment, just savouring the sensation. Closing his eyes, Adrian leaned his head back and allowed the water to run through his hair and down his face. After a moment, he stepped away from the stream, wiped the water out of his eyes, and reached for the shampoo bottle at the end of the bath. He squirted the thick blue liquid into his hand and turned back toward the shower.

  A face stared at him through the flow of the water. A young boy, not quite as young as the visitor from last night. This one looked as though it was in its teens. The hot shower suddenly felt as though it had turned to ice. Adrian broke out into an uncontrollable shiver. The face moved closer to him, leaving the water untouched, the stream maintaining its constant flow. The figure reached for Adrian’s face. He screamed. The figure disappeared.

  Too afraid to shower any longer, Adrian rinsed the shampoo from his hands and hurried to his bedroom to get dressed.

  He prayed that he didn’t get any more visions, ghosts, or whatever the hell they were. Even putting his t-shirt on was a rushed task, as he was scared something would appear before him in the split second his eyes were covered by material. He couldn’t help but feel stupid at these thoughts. The fact remained, though, he had seen something in his house. And he didn’t want to be surprised by anything else.

  Grabbing his keys, he walked out the front door and dialled a number on his phone. It only rang once before it was answered.

  “Hello, Bro. How’s it goin’?”

  “Craig, what are you up to? Fancy meeting up?” Adrian asked.

  “Sure thing. When?”

  “Now.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” Craig asked.

  “Yeah, I just…” Adrian paused for a moment. “I just need to get out of the house for a little bit. Fancy meeting at the coffee shop in town?”

  “Yeah, no worries, man. I’ve just got to get a quick shower and I’ll be on my way. Gimme half an hour.”

  “Great. See you in a bit.”

  When Craig arrived at the coffee shop, Adrian was already sat at a table, caressing a mug. The pair exchanged a curt nod and Craig walked to the counter to order his own drink. He then walked to the table to join his brother.

  “You sure you’re okay, bro? You don’t look good at all,” Craig asked.

  Adrian gave a thin smile and took a sip from his coffee. He placed the cup back on the table, hoping that Craig hadn’t noticed the nervous quiver in his hands.

  “I just didn’t sleep very well last night, that’s all. How’s Mum?”

  Craig straightened his posture. A subconscious movement that he did each time he was about to give his younger brother a lecture.

  “Well,” he started, “you know, if you came around more...”

  “Coffee?” an old woman wearing a dirty apron asked.

  “Here please,” Craig gestured.

  The woman placed the cup on the table, gave both men a smile, and then disappeared back through the door behind the till.

  “She misses you, you know,” Craig said.

  “I know.” Adrian stared into his coffee mug.

  “And I know that you miss her, so why don’t you just come round and see her?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “It really is that simple.”

  “I can’t. I just… I can’t.”

  “Okay, so tell me then. What is the matter with you? You look as though you haven’t slept for a week, and I can’t remember the last time you asked me to meet anywhere other than a pub.”

  “I just had a bit of a weird night, and… ” He hesitated. “I don’t know. I just felt like we should meet up, you know?”

  “Adrian, are you in some kind of trouble?” Craig asked with what seemed like genuine concern.

  “No, nothing like that. I just got a bit scared. I saw things last night.”

  “Saw things?”

  “Yeah,” Adrian continued. “I think I saw ghosts.”

  Craig began to laugh, but the look on his brother’s face seemed to stop it. Adrian proceeded to tell Craig about what he’d seen, looked to him for some kind of explanation. After reaching various wild theories, the pair arrived at the conclusion that Adrian had perhaps hallucinated through a lack of proper sleep. Too many nights of drunken unconsciousness doesn’t give you the proper rest that the body requires.

  Neither of them really bought the theory, but just having a long talk about it made Adrian feel better. As though he’d gotten something off his chest.

  “So do you think you’re going to be alright now, ghost whisperer?” Craig smirked.

  “Shut up,” Adrian smiled back.

  “Do you want to come back for a bit. See Mum?”

  Adrian shook his head.

  “Bye, Craig.” He reached out and hugged his brother. It felt strange. It wasn’t something they would normally do, but he just did it without thinking.

  Craig pulled back and gave his brother another concerned look.

  “I’m fine.” Adrian laughed. “Go on, you get going. Give Mum that hug for me.”

  The pair left the coffee shop together and then went their separate ways.

  Standing outside his house, Adrian stared at the front door. Although he did feel better after meeting his brother for a chat, he still felt a little bit uncomfortable about going back into the house right now. After a few minutes of deliberation, he decided that the pub sounded like a much better option. He turned away and walked back down the road, completely unaware of the face in his bedroom window that watched his exit.

  Several hours and several beers passed before Adrian eventually returned home. He unlocked the front door and stumbled into the living room. Before he had a chance to stop himself, he tripped over the coffee table and fell to the floor.

  From his fallen, drunken state, he stared at the table in bemusement.

  “Well, how the hell did that get there?”

  A loud crash came from the kitchen. He climbed to his feet and ran toward the source of the sound, grabbing a vase on the way to use as a weapon.

  When he reached the kitchen, it was empty, but there was a broken glass on the floor.

  “Hello?” he called.

  The house remained silent.

  “Listen, if there’s anyone there, then your chance to come out is now. Don’t make me come looking for you.”

  A glass flew toward his face. He managed to move out of the way just in time
before it exploded on the wall behind him. When he turned back he was faced by a young man. He looked familiar, but Adrian couldn’t place where he knew him from. The man, who appeared to be in his early twenties, was screaming, but no sound emerged from his mouth. He shared the same faint glow that the earlier visitors had.

  “Who are you?” Adrian screamed. “What do you want?”

  The figure answered with another silent scream. Not knowing what else to do, Adrian repeated his question. The figure seemed frustrated at this and grabbed another glass from the side of the sink.

  “No, no wait!” he pleaded. “Please tell me, who are you?”

  The glass was launched at his head again. He turned to run and smacked his face into the corner or the door frame. A red gush of blood exploded from his nose. He fell backwards, his head hitting the marble kitchen floor with a loud crack.

  Adrian fell unconscious.

  Adrian woke with a thumping at the back of his head, and his face throbbed. Lying on his back, he glanced around his kitchen.

  What the hell?

  He pressed his hands to the floor to push himself up; small shards of glass pierced his palms. He cursed in pain and rolled onto his side. When he eventually got to his feet, he stood and looked at the mess in the kitchen. Blood and broken glass all over the floor, blood on the door and the wall.

  Jesus Christ. What happened here? How much did I drink?

  After pulling as much of the glass as he could from his hands, he leaned over the sink and gulped water directly from the tap.

  The phone began to ring from the living room. Adrian walked into the room to answer it. He noticed the coffee table had been pushed across to the other side of the room and was now positioned in front of the other door. A vague memory of falling over that table entered his mind.

  He was reaching for the ringing phone when something stopped him. An overwhelming feeling that he was being watched took hold of him.

  Slowly, he turned around. He was met with a glowing face. A face he knew very well.

  The lips of the face moved, but no sound came.

  “I don’t understand,” Adrian said.

  The figure’s mouth mimed its message again. Tears filled Adrian’s eyes. Through blurred vision he watched the figure come closer to him. It wrapped its arms around him and turned his whole body to ice. A second later it was gone.

  Adrian stood alone, staring into the empty room. The ringing of the phone still filled his ears. He retrieved the phone from the table and looked at the display.

  “Craig!”

  He began to tremble. With shaking hands he slid the green icon on the screen and placed the phone to his ear.

  “Hello?”

  “Adrian, is that you?”

  “Mum?”

  “Adrian, there’s been an accident. It’s Craig.”

  “I know, Mum,” Adrian whispered, and hung up the phone. “I know.”

  Andrew Lennon is the bestselling author of Every Twisted Thought and several other horror/thriller books. He has featured in various bestselling anthologies, and is successfully becoming a recognised name in horror and thriller writing. Andrew is a happily married man living in the North West of England with his wife Hazel & their children.

  Having always been a big horror fan, Andrew spent a lot of his time watching scary movies or playing scary games, but it wasn’t until his mid-twenties that he developed a taste for reading. His wife, also being a big horror fan, had a very large Stephen King collection which Andrew began to consume. Once hooked into reading horror, he started to discover new authors like Thomas Ligotti & Ryan C Thomas. It was while reading work from these authors that he decided to try writing something himself and there came the idea for “A Life to Waste”

  He enjoys spending his time with his family and watching or reading new horror. For more information please go to www.andrewlennon.co.uk

  “Sir, we believe you have Schizophrenia.”

  … those words, those dreaded words every person hopes they will never hear. How I wished I could hear those words. I could only hear his words, though. No, my words. My words?

  Everyone has thoughts, right? The ones that just come to you when you are daydreaming. Or conversations with yourself:

  * Hot girl walks into pub *

  You #1: “Go for it, what’s the worst that can happen?”

  You #2: “Pal, seriously? Punching above your weight, move on.”

  But not many of us have another voice, or voices, with differing opinions. It is just that one voice, your voice, saying your thoughts. You pretty much agree with yourself, because, well, it’s you and you wouldn’t have that opinion if you didn’t agree with it. Okay, so you may have had times when you have talked yourself into or out of something, but it was still only you, talking to you. Right? I guess it’s complicated.

  Despite it all, though, I never heard those words. I was told I had a form of OCD or Borderline Personality Disorder or Tourette’s; that I was in shock or had PTSD (although they could never offer an explanation when I asked why the diagnosis), but no, that wasn’t it. It just didn’t fit. I was asked if I was taking drugs by every doctor I saw. None of them appeared to believe me when I told them I had never touched drugs. I was eventually diagnosed with depression, given a prescription, and sent on my way. I think they had me down as a bit of a weirdo, a socially inept guy who had just spent too much time in his bedroom on his own playing console games for a whole decade in the “Noughties”.

  It started after an accident. A horrible, stupid accident. My own fault, of course. I’m my own worst enemy in life and this was no different. I shouldn’t have been surprised, really; it’s what happens when your nose is in a social media app on your phone and you walk into a road. Don’t judge me, we’ve all done it; played that match 3 game on the bus, or on your coffee break. Inviting everyone you can to get more ‘lives’. Even me… when I was about 20. These days it’s all work, overtime, deadline, weekend, rinse, repeat. I had kept the social media account and kept in general contact with people, but was unceasingly annoyed with each buzz-buzz I felt in my hand. And, having suffered a whole week of false alarms thinking I had missed texts or calls from work, I decided, mid-march to my next meeting, to open the app and try to disable the notifications.

  SMASH

  They say life is full of surprises, and I concede this point. I have had, what I would consider, my fair share of these ‘surprises’, some good and some bad. Some I would happily re-experience over and over, others not so much. Surprises are, I suppose as the definition suggests, unexpected, and that day’s surprise was fully on form in this department. The lorry came out of nowhere. Well, I say ‘out of nowhere’, but various witnesses would disagree and tell the police that the lorry had been waiting at the red light, dutifully awaiting his turn to shift. And shift he did, when the red light disappeared and the amber light signalled its brief role in my near demise. The lorry pulled off and I had stepped out into its path.

  When I awoke the first thing I did was squeeze my hand and try to raise my arm to look at my damned phone. What is this thing on my face? I thought as I pulled at something on my nose that resisted and pinged back on my forehead with a soft thud. Then I realised I wasn’t dressed, and followed that thought up with the fact that I also wasn’t at home in my own bed. Is this a hospital? And, OWWWW—why does everything hurt?!

  “Oh, try not to move,” cooed a soothing voice from somewhere to my right and behind me. My eyes focussed on the ceiling tiles, and my mind made face patterns out of the random holes and peaks of the textured material. A chubby hand appeared over my head, reached down, and adjusted the thing on my face. I became aware it was blowing cool air onto my nose and mouth, which made my lungs feel like they were being slowly dried. I wriggled in resistance.

  “Now, now.” The hand came back but this time was followed by a chubby arm and the warm-smiled face… of a nurse. Yes, definitely hospital. Shit. I tried to sit up and resumed my attempted removal of the o
xygen mask.

  “I don’t have time for this,” I grunted. It wasn’t meant to be a grunt, but I had assumed that I would be able to speak properly. Instead my throat crisped up and my voice box suddenly regained consciousness to produce a noise that sounded much like I had smoked for 50 years of my 30-year life… And that I needed a drink of water, badly. I did actually. I looked around the room. The cloudy water in a vase of flowers nearby suddenly looked appealing.

  “Back into bed, I’ll get the doctor.” I put up zero resistance to the hands pushing me back down by my shoulders into crunchy plastic pillows. It hurt too, and I took a few seconds to groan quietly and quickly regrow my bollocks to grimace through the pain. My sides ached and my head pounded. “Broken ribs tend to hurt for a while, dear,” she said as she tucked the blanket under my arms. “Lie still.”

  She wrote something on a chart that she hooked back onto my end of my bed, and smiled at me before she left, drawing the curtain slightly and pulling it closed after she had stepped out. I must have been in a ward, but none of the noises had really registered until she left and I was on my own. The doctor wasn’t quick in getting to me and, as I lay piecing my last few waking moments together with my last conscious memories, I started to feel like a complete idiot.

  Why the hell did you just walk out into the road? Just my luck. Bloody idiot.

  I shook myself and told myself it could have happened to anyone, at any time. It was just one of those things. No point dwelling on the negative, got to deal with it and move on.

  After a while the doctor came in, pulling the curtains back in a parental ‘MORNING!’ sort of way. And like a teenager with their first hangover I winced at the bright light that had been rudely let in. My head felt like it was almost split in half with pain, and every waking moment seemed to make it worse. Like someone had sliced the top of it clean off and prodded my exposed, soft brain matter with their chewed finger nails. It was almost indescribable. I guess the doc noticed.