I was crossing the road just outside of my house, when I died for the fourth time in my life.
I have a habit of crossing the road without looking, so this time, that was my cause of death. That’s what I was told at the hospital, when I finally opened my eyes and saw Mary the nurse for the fourth time in the past year.
She wasn’t the nicest person, but somehow I always ended up in her care, so now she was nodding her head in a disapproval that hurt more than I was expecting. Not as much as my broken hip though.
This was such a normal thing for me, that it was almost turning into a habit.
“What did they say?” I asked, hoping to get Mary to have some sympathy and lighten the mood.
She shook her head.
“Not much, only that you have about fifteen broken bones, including some ribs that you you’re lucky somehow didn’t puncture your lungs, and that you’re a lucky bastard that just won’t die” she shrugged. “Not for lack of trying.”
Without giving me a chance to say anything, she slid my file into my bed’s pocket, turned her back and left the room.
It’s not like I wanted to die, I was just lucky. Or unlucky, depending on the perspective. I’d had a fall from around a ten metre height from an electricity post at work, I had slipped into the strong current of a river that almost drowned me, I was hit in the head by a massive crow that just flew into my face. It was hours trying to get its beak out of my cheek bone. This time it was a car accident between the uber I was in and a Mercedes-Benz that tried to be my cause of death by almost taking half my body away.
I was getting used to escaping death. This time though… something felt different.
I was discharged from the hospital the next day, and I hadn’t noticed much difference in the long ceiling led lights in the hospital, but when I stepped outside with my wife by the arm, everything looked dimmer.
The sun’s colour seemed to have died down slightly, all the colour around me just looked weaker, like the world I lived in was slowly fading away. I told myself this was me being tired and needing to go home and rest my broken bones, and kept the secret.
When I got home, I had my now usual “coming back from the hospital” routine. I took a natural yoghurt out of the fridge, added some fruit and Nutella to it in a bowl and headed upstairs into bed with the help of my wife.
Everyone knows that the hospital has beds, but no one manages to actually get a good night’s sleep until you go back to your own bed.
I ate my yoghurt, slid it along the bedside table and tried to take a nap until the kids were back to school.
When I woke up some hours later, my bedroom curtains were shut and the light coming from outside was getting dimmer and dimmer. I saw it for the first time, when I tried to sit up straight.
My bedroom door was halfway closed, and the light coming into the house was weak, even from outside the bedroom. I called for my wife, and got no response, so I assumed she went to get the kids from school, which allowed me to ask myself if the dim light coming from outside was because of the same thing I experienced earlier. As I sat there and let my thoughts run, something took a peak around the corner into my bedroom.
It was a dark, thin shadow that looked like the head, neck, shoulders and hand of a person, only three times taller, enveloping the door frame on the top right side.
I jumped backward in bed and slipped up until my back hit the headboard, my heart racing and my throat getting tighter. When the collision between my back and the headboard produced a loud “thunk”, the shadow seemed to quickly retreat from the bedroom and into the stairs landing. When it did, the lights became stronger and normal.
For the rest of the day, from the time my wife came back home until it was actually time to go sleep, I wouldn’t let my wife be away from me. The shadow got me too scared, but not scared enough to talk. I had no idea what it was, or if it was coming back, and by the end of the day, I had convinced myself it had only been my imagination.
I got better and went back to work, and for a while didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Not until I almost died again, at least.
This time, it was raining hard, I had just come off work and was walking to my car. I crossed the road, and decided to jog the last few steps. When I stepped on the slippery sidewalk, my feet slid away from me and I went head-first into a newly planted tree.
I opened my eyes, and the first thing I thought was that someone seemed to want me dead very badly. This couldn’t possibly be a coincidence anymore. The second thought I had was how alone I was.
It was really dark, like the end of a cloudy day going into night time, and there was no one in the hospital room. Not my wife, my kids or my parents. Not even Mary!
I looked around, and even the hospital seemed different. The curtains weren’t their usual colour of depression. Instead, they were just greyed out, and the same applied to the rest of the room. Outside of my room’s door, the rest of the hospital was the same, deserted and grey. I wasn’t sure how or if I was supposed to be able to walk around. I didn’t know the extent of my injuries, but I seemed fine.
I called out for my family or someone, and got no response. I must have wandered around for hours without finding one single soul. Some of the hospital lights were flashing, and it was cold enough to feel like someone forgot the aircon on at five degrees Celsius and left for the night. I focused on the cold and my shivering body while I walked around, but suddenly, I froze.
The lights were still flashing bright here and there, but at the end of the corridor, just far enough that I could see, something seemed to be peeking from behind the door frame. A recognizable thin set of head, neck, shoulders and hands seemed to be waiting for me on the other end, and I was starting to feel terrified. The more I remembered my latest accident and started to convince myself that someone wanted me dead, the more I was connecting that to whatever this was, and whatever this was seemed to be stuck in there with me somehow.
I must say, having a murderous something be my only companion in this empty hospital was not the most comforting thing.
I took two small steps back until I felt one of the arches’ frames behind me, but with every step I took the shadow seemed to come out of its hiding more, revealing a thin torso with no other features and long legs with no feet that didn’t move even when it slid towards me.
After taking as many steps back as I could and wearing off the shock, I turned around and took off running, getting lost inside this dark hospital’s labyrinthic corridors. The more I ran, the more my breath seemed to run out, the flashes of light above me turning so strong that sometimes I couldn’t really see, but it wasn’t so much periodic, as it was random.
Every time I looked back, there it was, a big shadow sliding after me as fast as I was running, moving its head from side to side like it was watching me with it’s non-existent face.
Eventually, after running for what felt like eternity, I reached a dead end. Hospitals don’t have dead ends. Usually you’d see the end of a corridor with a room on each side, but not here. It’s like someone just cut the corridor in half. It’s like something just wanted me to finally die.
Just like in a movie, I threw myself against the wall, tapping it with my hands like an opening was going to show up somewhere, but it didn’t.
I turned my back against the wall and squeezed myself into it, almost hoping to float across it and escape miraculously.
When I didn’t, the shadow covered my only exit completely, the dark mist floating closer and closer to me, until I opened my mouth to scream.
As soon as my mouth opened, I felt a weird set of hands grab me by the inside of my chest and pull so hard it almost felt like my soul was about to be taken away. The shadow seemed to be farther now. I panted, grabbing my chest and panicking without any idea of what the hell was going on. Was that thing trying to kill me?
As soon as this question made it to my brain, another massive yank came from inside me, wanting to turn my insides out, and again, the shadow seemed a little further and more agitated.
At the third tug from inside, the hospital image seemed to turn into a gigantic white worm hole, moving at incomprehensible speeds while I looked around and tried to figure out what was next as the shadow seemed to swirl around further and further until it was completely gone.
Now, I was back in my normal hospital room. From your point of view, you would have thought I was too lazy to open my eyes, but I was just scared. At first I opened my left eye and saw an empty side of the room filled with cold coloured lights and metallic utensils. Then I opened my right eye, and there was the team of doctors holding their breath, the one that looked like the main doctor holding two defib pads, one on each hand. That’s when I realised what the bright flashes of light I was seeing in the empty hospital were.
I was told I had died for about 2 minutes during the emergency operation because of how bad my head trauma had been, and that they were starting to think that was it for me. Obviously, everyone knows me in that hospital.
Because of the kind of injury, I spent the rest of the month in the hospital, just recovering and staying under surveillance. My family came to visit every day and brought me gifts and my wife almost forbade me from going outside because I kept trying to die, according to her. I told her I wasn’t trying to die, but at this point, she just wouldn’t believe me.
When they finally left and the room was left empty, I took a deep breath and leaned back into the bed to try to get some sleep. I heard a loud clink that made my eyes shoot open, and saw the long lamp glass cover dislodge from the lamp frame and freefall towards my face. That was the 6th time I died. If I die again, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to come back.