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First time it happens, he only wakes up in the kitchen.
He’s standing, though, which is what unsettles him. John Carter’s been a chronic insomniac since childhood; sleeplessness was an old and familiar curse. But to come to, standing alone in his kitchen in the middle of the night, the moon so bright outside it was like someone left the porch light on.
He spins around a few times, orientating himself. Yes, definitely his kitchen.
Weird, he thinks, and then promptly takes himself back to bed. A funny story to tell at work tomorrow, perhaps.
A few days later he wakes up outside on the grounds.
He literally shivers himself awake. He’s out in an oversized t-shirt and a pair of boxers, no shoes; can feel dew and soil between his toes. The moment he’s conscious he pulls his arms close to him, can just about see his breath in the waining moonlight. His body shudders violently.
How long has he been out here? And where is here, exactly?
Adrenaline spikes as he does the dance again, spinning around and trying to quickly recognise his environment. Fortunately, he can see the outside lights of the house in the distance, and with a little time he can make out the shape of the building.
He walks himself back there, alone, wincing and stumbling as he can barely see the state of the ground in front of him. He steps on a broken branch and yelps, limping the rest of the way to the house. When he gets there, he finds the side door leading into the kitchen wide open. He scrambles inside and pulls it shut, the door slamming loudly. He winces, hoping none of the staff find him here.
There’s mud on the doormat. Painfully, he tries to wipe off as much as he can from his feet, then he scrambles up the stairs and barrels into the shower, running the water too hot. He sits on the floor for a while, letting it warm him, while also rocking back and forth.
Twice, he eventually convinces himself, is just a coincidence.
This doesn’t stop him sobbing there until the water eventually starts to turn cold.
It’s been barely three weeks since he’d gotten back from rehab, one since he did his first shift. The kitchen incident happened that night, after he got back from dinner with Kerry, but even before then there’s some part of him that knows he’s been followed for some time.
Fear creeps around every corner, just out of sight, but he can hear it. He feels it in the pit of his stomach. Even smells it sometimes, acrid and sour, burning the back of his throat. When it’s dark and he’s alone, sometimes he stops mid-stride, because he knows it’s cresting its way around the corner - fingers long and disproportionate, gnarled and wrong, clutching door frames and walls - and it’s everything he can do not to scream.
The first time the staff find him out of bed it’s because he’s screaming.
He hasn’t wandered outside this time (which later he will quietly thank God for, or whatever entity that might’ve been watching over him), instead he’s in the abandoned music room. Everything in here is covered in white sheets to keep the dust away. Barbara, while she lived here, would practice cello in front of the mirror so she could keep an eye on her form.
John hasn’t been in here in years, decades even, but when he comes to for the third time it’s because Emily is holding him on the floor, stoking his hair and whispering to him softly:
“It’s alright, it’s alright little one. It’s just a bad dream.”
He’s clutching her, little screams still pulling themselves from his throat, and his face is wet with tears. Eventually he realises he knows this because he can see it; the sheet covering the mirror is on the floor; that dead, dusky smell of forgotten memories and decay orienting him to the present, and there he is. Just a scared little boy in the middle of a nightmare.
“Where’s Gamma?” He manages to croak out after a few seconds. “Want… Gamma.” He watches Emily make a face in the mirror.
“Out of town, little one.”
“Oh.”
His head is cloudy. He did know that. He did. Foolish for him to ask for her. She hasn’t held him like this since he was a child.
Something breaks behind Emily’s gaze.
“I will make you cocoa. Come.”
She drags him off the floor - for such a short woman, she is outrageously strong - and leads him towards the kitchen, sitting him at the counter and starting to warm milk on the stove. The moment he shudders, realising how cold he is, Alger appears behind him and slinks his dressing gown over his shoulders, offers an awkward yet reassuring pat on the back, then slinks back off into the dark of the house.
It takes him some time to calm down; awful, hiccuping moans escaping from him every time he takes a deep breath, like a dog whining to be let back in from the rain. Emily slides him a mug, topped with cream and marshmallows, then sits with him with her own. He never goes back to bed, and she never asks him to. She simply stays with him until the sun comes up, and when it does she makes breakfast for them both. For a while, all he can muster is gratitude that he isn’t alone.
Three times, he knows, is a pattern, but he decides he doesn’t want anyone at the hospital to know. Doesn’t want Kerry or Mark or, God forbid, Dr. Benton to see the thing with claws and teeth that’s been following him. He will not be treated like he’s made of glass, no more than he already is. Kerry’s been keeping his shifts as regular as she can - no nights for the time being - so maybe, just maybe, he can sort this out on his own.
The incidents become more and more frequent.
They range in severity - most of the time he just wakes up in some random part of the house. Sometimes he wakes up to find Emily - it’s almost always Emily - guiding him gently back to his room. Occasionally he wakes up in bed, thinking he’s escaped it for a night, only to find his door wide open, mud on his feet, or furniture piled up at the foot of the bed.
He finds himself in front of the mirror in the music room a few more times, too, and every time he ends up there, he wakes up screaming. If he replaces the sheet that had been hanging over it, he wakes up to find it on the floor again, and his twisted, distorted expression is the first thing he comes to recognise when consciousness finds him. He’s become so sick of his face, how ugly it looks when it’s pulled to the extremes of anguish and fear that seems to find him in his sleep. When he catches his reflection outside of this room - in the bathroom, in the surface of a bed pan, in the shop front windows as he passes by - he flinches, certain he’s going to see that expression again; that he’s going to turn around and find himself somewhere unfamiliar and he’ll hear the sound of claws on the walls and bile will find its way back up his throat.
(During these nights, the music room nights, he wakes up so exhausted he often throws up. His bathroom floor has become more of a comfort than his bed now.)
He tries every remedy he can get his hands on. His bedtime routine becomes a strict, regimented affair: at the same time, every night, he has a shower and brushes his teeth. He reads for half an hour until his eyes begin to grow heavy. He puts lavender oil on his pillows and practices breathing exercises until he drifts off. He starts chewing valerian root. He refuses to touch sleeping pills, even when Alger starts to suggest they may be necessary.
“Getting to sleep isn’t the problem,” John tells him the second time he suggests it, “it’s what my body does while I’m sleeping that is.”
“Very good, sir,” Alger replies, though John is able to read the mistrust in his eye.
The next morning, he finds the dining room chairs placed in intervals throughout the downstairs corridors, as if they’re leading him somewhere.
“Maybe I need an exorcism…” he mumbles to himself, as he sets about putting them back where they belong.
His body runs cold when he finds the last one in the music room, sitting in front of the mirror. His amygdala whispers to him, loud and close, as if it were speaking directly into a microphone.
Run.
“Dr. Carter?”
Alger stands in the doorway. John blinks, and realises he’s been staring at his own face in abject terror for God knows how long. The sheet is still in his hand. He throws it over the mirror.
“Is there a key to this room?”
“It went missing some time ago, sir, but no one has been in here for so long that a replacement was never requested.”
“Could you?”
“Sir?”
His voice comes out quieter than he intends. It cracks as he tries to speak, his vocal chords so paralysed from the constant fear he feels wrapping itself around his waist, like the unwanted touch a drunk person trying desperately to flirt, that they refuse to come together and make the sound he needs. He coughs, clears his throat, humming a little to test it before he speaks again.
“Get another key for the door.”
“Of course.”
“Before I get back from work, if you don’t mind. Lock it and… hide the key from me. Please.”
“Very good, Dr. Carter.”
He picks up the chair and walks out of the room as fast as his feet will allow him.
For a few days after the music room is locked, he thinks he’s cured. Everything stays in place. He wakes up feeling rested for the first time in weeks, and for the first time since coming home from rehab he starts to feel normal.
Then comes the incident that forces him to buy the restraints.
He keeps most of the bedtime routine; it’s recommended to him as a generally healthy habit by a somnologist he bumps into in the cafeteria at County, and when the sleepwalking stops initially he notices the sleep he does get is improved.
After finishing his reading, he lays down and closes his eyes. Breathe in for four. Hold for six. Out for eight.
In for four.
Hold for six.
Out for eight.
Four.
Six.
Eight.
He wakes up chest deep in the lake.
It’s barely a lake, really - more like a glorified, oversized pond - but at its deepest it’s about 9ft, and the water is cresting towards his shoulders when he finally regains consciousness. He takes a deep, sharp breath as his brain finally registers how cold he is, like he’d just turned on the shower and was assaulted by icy droplets. It’s so cold he finds it impossible to let the breath go, chill already set into his bones. His skin is numb, painfully so, and it takes him a second to realise he’s holding something rough and heavy in his hands. He pulls one up and out of the water.
The rock in his hand is the size of one of his shoes; his knuckles white with the vice grip he’s got on it. He pulls his other hand out of the water and finds another there, in the other hand.
The world around him is rendered in monochrome under the half-moon light. In it, when he looks up, he sees the thing with teeth and claws looming on the opposite side of the lake, absorbing all the light around it and leaving a black void in its place. It looks skinless, but draped in a cloak of fur; it has antlers that reach up, breaking off over and over again like the branches of a tree, stretching and dividing and multiplying. He watches as it lifts up its hands to its sides and splays out its fingers - too many fingers, each too long - and leans back. Then it howls, mournfully, like a wolf.
It takes everything he has to throw the rocks from his aching hands and try to kick back and out of the water.
It’s harder than expected, but he has to run. He can hear his amygdala again, chanting it over and over and over, urging him into action. It takes him precious minutes to realise what’s slowing him down are the fistfuls of stones in the pockets of his boxer shorts, weighing him down.
He tumbles out of the lake and turns back, breathing hard and fast. The thing is gone. It’s just a tree there now. Maybe it was only ever a tree, he tries to convince himself, but as he walks back to the house (thankful that, even in the dark, he does know the way) he’s convinced he can hear nails on bark, and the back of his mouth tastes bitter.
Emily and Alger are on the porch holding torches, trying to see out into the dark of the nearby woods when he finally stumbles towards them, hair mussed, clothes damp, shivering uncontrollably. As he comes into the light, he sees the faces of the butler and the cook turn horrified as they look him over. He’s about to reassure them - I’m alright, really I’m fine - when he looks down and realises his shirt, his arms, are covered in blood.
“I’m…”
It’s all he can get out. He’s not even scared anymore. He feels distant, like he’s slipped back into dream; this whole thing one of the many elaborate pranks his brain has been pulling on him lately. He’ll wake up soon and find no blood, maybe a chair somewhere it shouldn’t be, and it’ll all be fine.
Emily takes his hand and pulls it close to her face, inspecting. Then she tugs him indoors, gesturing to Alger to fetch something. He starts, and potters off quickly, remembering himself.
She motions for John to sit as she starts looking through the cupboards. John can’t stop staring at his hands. Now in the kitchen light, he can see the layer of blood that covers them, like he’s just placed them palm down into paint, ready to leave his fingerprints on the world.
He’s not conscious enough to diagnose himself. It’s only when Emily sits opposite him and starts to clean his hands (with the first aid kit he insisted on making up and keeping in this room and half the other rooms in the house) that he realises what’s happened.
The rocks he found himself holding left tiny cuts all over his palms with the pressure. The cold of the water slowed down the bleeding, but as he walked back they began to leak. They’re not deep, no need for stitches he can tell now, but when he tries to tell Emily he can do it, she slaps his hand away, and returns to dutifully cleaning and wrapping his palms. She does a wonderful job. He knows residents who could learn a thing or two from her.
“Thank you,” he whispers. She leaves the table and pulls out two plastic bags from a nearby drawer, putting them over his newly covered hands.
“Get in the shower. Don’t get them wet.”
She can’t look him in the eye as she says it.
Alger reappears with his dressing gown again, sliding it over his shoulders, and then guides him up and towards his room. Just as he’s about to leave him there, John turns to him.
“I’m buying restraints. For the bed.”
Alger stares back at him, trying to keep his face impassive, but John catches his eyebrow twitching involuntarily. He continues.
“We have to start tying me down.”
“…If you think that’s best, sir.”
“I just don’t—”
I don’t know what to do anymore.
It gets stuck in his throat. He feels stupid. This whole thing is stupid. He laughs, humourlessly.
“Don’t want to wake up having walked halfway to the city, find myself stuck on the side of the road, right?”
Alger doesn’t laugh. Doesn’t even smile. He just nods and leaves him, the unspoken response rattling around in John’s head anyway.
We both know that something worse might happen, Dr. Carter.
He sits in the shower for a while, watching blood and dirt wend its way down the plughole. He finds sticks in his hair and his back hurts. He doesn’t cry. He wonders how he’s going to explain his bandaged hands at work tomorrow. He wonders, absently, if they’ll even care.
John orders the restraints from a bondage shop. It occurs to him that five years ago he probably would have played the whole thing off with bravado, would have cringed inwardly as the store clerk looked at him knowingly, approvingly, of his choices. He’d have probably been quite pleased someone thought he was interesting enough for this. But when he places the order he doesn’t even flinch.
He also knows he looks like shit, and the woman at the counter stares at him with an air of concern, her eyes catching over the bags that have taken up permanent residence under his, the pale pallor of his skin. He can’t even look at himself in the bathroom mirror anymore. He put an old bedsheet over it recently.
They work, the restraints, at least in keeping him in his bed at night. But he wakes up unrested, worse than before, every muscle in his body aching. He realises quickly that he’s pulling on them in his sleep, trying to escape. He takes long, long baths to try and relieve the tension, starting terrified when he thinks he’s about to fall asleep.
The screaming starts again. Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night and he can’t move, his body locked in position. It’s then he sees the thing with teeth and fur again, hanging on his ceiling, staring down through eyes he can’t see but can feel. It reaches out, somehow so far away and right on top of him, and it’s then he can taste blood. When he regains feeling he thrashes about and yells, trying to escape but unable to. He spends long hours awake, not because he can’t sleep, but because he’s too scared to do so.
Mark’s been testing him more frequently. He doesn’t say it, but John can tell there's some part of him convinced he’s using again. He hasn’t looked at himself in the mirror in so long but he must look abysmal. But no one asks him. No one calls him on it. They avoid his gaze in the corridor. He can’t remember the last time he had a normal conversation.
He’s so. Damn. Tired.
It’s been four months since he got back from rehab. He’s gotten most of his privileges back, and he can tell Kerry wants to put him back on the occasional night shift, but every time they have their mandatory check-ins, he watches her chicken out. She asks once if he’s okay, and is convinced his performance must have been Oscar-worthy because she never asks again.
On this particular day, the ER has a lull. He decides to take the opportunity to catch up on some charting he’s not managed to get to. He’s at the desk in the hallway, leaning on his propped up arm, staring down at his notes.
He blinks.
And he’s on the floor of the roof, snow gently floating down on top of him. He can feel someone else’s arm around his middle, clutching on to him. It takes him a minute to realise he’s screaming again. He wrestles his way out of the unknown person’s grip and ends up with his back to the wall.
Dr. Benton lies on the ground, staring at him, arm out like he’s taming a frightened animal.
“Carter?”
The thing with antlers and no skin stands behind him. He’s never seen it in the daylight before. It’s so dark the light around it even seems to dim, as if acting like its own black hole, eating everything around it.
John squeezes his eyes shut, covers them with his hands.
“No, no, no, no, no…”
“Carter, it’s Peter.”
He can hear Benton shuffling closer to him. His skin feels wrong. He’s so tired. Why can’t he sleep? Why won’t it leave him alone? It’s been eating his dreams and leaving him hollow. It’s taken more from him than the drugs ever did. He’s so tired. He’s so tired.
“Look at me, Carter, come on.”
He squeezes his knees to his chest and makes himself as small as he can. He wants Benton to go away. He can’t look at him. Can’t let any of them know. He doesn’t want to infect them with it. It’s his burden, he’s dealing with it, just keep avoiding his eyes like they have been.
He feels hands, warm and sturdy, grab a hold of him and pull him in. He reacts, fighting them off, but they bat away his attempts to flee easily and cradle him. Something in him snaps. He weeps, melting into the touch. It takes him a moment to realise Benton’s shushing him, speaking in low, comforting tones.
“It’s okay, man, I got you. It’s okay.”
When he finally opens his eyes, the thing is gone.
Benton gets him inside, hands him coffee, then sits opposite him and simply stares at him. They’re in the family room up on the ICU floor. It’s warm in there.
He doesn’t say a word. Benton doesn’t either.
This game of silence chicken goes on for some time, before Benton loses.
“I’m not letting you out of here until you tell me something.”
“I’m fine.”
“Carter.”
John’s avoiding his gaze. He’s running all the excuses he’s concocted in his head for the past few months in case anyone asks. He thinks he’s settled on one, and looks up to throw it at his old mentor.
And it dies in his throat.
“I’ve been sleepwalking.”
“…Sleepwalking,” Benton parrots, his tone flat, disbelieving. John nods.
“For months.”
Benton doesn’t say anything else. He just waits, patiently, for the confession he knows is coming. The silence he leaves draws it out of John, pulling it from him, like a pair of tweezers pulling stones from a cut.
“Started when I got back from rehab. Little things at first. Then I started ending up outside. Moving furniture. There’s been… night terrors, I guess you’d call them. But I don’t remember any of it. I just fall asleep, wake up somewhere else.” He laughs, hearing it for the first time, tears pricking his eyes. “I think I’m being haunted.”
“Did you… ever talk to someone? After the attack.”
John shakes his head. “I didn’t need to. I was fine.”
“Carter, I took you to rehab eight months ago, and I just had to stop you jumping off the roof in your sleep. You are not fine.”
“I will be, I’m handling it.”
Benton stands suddenly, and there’s half a second where Carter thinks he’s going to hit him. Benton blinks like he wasn’t aware of the moment he decided to stand up. He sighs.
“Go home, Carter. And see a fucking shrink. I’m not asking.”
He goes home, but he doesn’t call a shrink. Not yet. He has to try something first.
He finds Alger cleaning silverware in the dining room.
“Could you give me the key to the music room, please?”
Alger hesitates. “Are you sure?”
John holds out his hand.
“I’ll return it to you once I’m done.” When Alger continues to hesitate, John continues. “I’m awake, I promise.”
“Alright, sir.”
The butler pulls the key from his front pocket. John smirks.
“Find somewhere else to hide it when I’m done.”
“Yes, sir.”
He strides across the house to the music room and unlocks the door. He’s moving with purpose, convinced if he doesn’t think too hard about it he won’t chicken out. He needs to see. He needs to see.
Closing the door behind him, he yanks off the sheet from the mirror and stares at his reflection for the first time in weeks.
He looks dead.
There are deep, dark circles under his eyes, set in so deep they look purple. His skin is wan and pallid, almost see-through. He looks as if he’s been going through rigour-mortis. He realises how much weight he’s dropped, too, without him noticing. His clothes hang awkwardly on him, like a child wearing his dad’s suits. His hair has become long and unruly, growing out in awkward directions, mushrooming slightly.
How long has he been like this?
He has to sit down on the floor. Now he’s seen it he can’t stop staring. He barely recognises himself.
He’s not okay.
The thing with fingers that howls crawls out from behind the piano. For the first time, he doesn’t try to get away from it. It creeps forward on all fours, stalking, watching, clicking slightly as it approaches.
John doesn’t move. It cocks its head curiously.
“I’m not afraid of you,” he lies.
Adrenaline spikes in his body, and he can hear his amygdala screaming at him RUNRUNRUNRUNRUNRUNRUN. But he stays still, allows it to get closer, feels its hot breath snort out against his neck. It smells like sulphur and ash. Antiseptic and alcohol. It burns in his throat.
It regards him in the mirror, the two of them together, the thing over his shoulder like an awkward prom date. It tickles the back of his neck as it regards him and he sucks in a breath, holds it.
“I am not afraid of you,” he says again, and it’s still a lie. The thing knows it’s a lie.
It grumbles, so bass-y he feels it more than he hears it. He thinks it says something, but he can’t make out the words.
Then, with a heavy shove of his shoulder, the thing pushes past him, opens the door, and crawls away.
John stays sat for a long time, his breath still stuck in his chest, then he scrabbles up and throws open the door.
It’s gone, and with it a weight that’s been in his chest this whole time. He returns to the mirror and looks at himself once more, eyes fully open, and regards himself kindly for the first time in a year.
He’s still here. Despite everything, he’s still here.
He replaces the sheet over the mirror and closes the door on the way out, palming the key. Then he pages Dr. Benton to call him at home, and is delighted when the phone rings quickly in response.
“Is everything okay?”
“Yeah,” John says, smiling. “Did you have the number for a shrink?”