Shadow on the Window

Chapter 4

"They tell me it's all in my head/They don't know, they're yet to check/What lies within is a mess" - Cursed, Jacob Lee

"Jiya!" - I could hear someone whispering my name into my ears, muffled, as if it traveled underwater. I felt like someone was holding my head in arms and trying to wake me up. My neck felt so heavy, my whole body felt like a lifeless stone. I couldn't move at all. I tried to open my eyes to see who it was, but suddenly drowned further, feeling like slipping off someone's grip. 

Struggling to breath, I gasped and flapped my arms around and woke up, only to find the water was overflowing my bathtub and it was chilling cold. From all this haste, I couldn't remember how long I was in bathtub, that the lights went out. My throat was dry and choked.  I sat for a moment in the tub, panting and processing what just happened. 

I was shivering, frozen in my body. Hypnic Jerk, that's what Science calls it; triggered by twitching of a muscle during sleep. It had happened to me before, for so many times that I got habituated.

The cold was unbearable, I got up and wrapped myself up in the towel and came out; trying not to slip through the pool.

The dragging sound next door had stopped. My one-bedroom apartment looked blue with a fading hue of yellow coming from outside Manhattan. I dried myself up and put on a t-shirt to look out for the electricity-box in the corridor outside. 

The power was fused and cut off, I pulled the handle up.

 While coming back, I could no longer see the lights under my neighbor's door. I stopped for a second or two staring at it, blank; but hurried inside my place remembering to clean up the mess in the bathroom. 

I just could not stop thinking about the dream in tub; although I convinced myself it was another Hypnic I had, deep down somewhere I knew it wasn't a mere Hypnic; it felt like someone slipped me because I realized his presence, as if I wasn't allowed to know it, as if I wasn't supposed to see so he disappeared before I could open my eyes. 

I was wiping the water towards the floor-drain, rewinding the feeling again and again, of someone holding my head underwater.