Afraid of the Dark

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Mark headed to Seán's room, and knocked quickly. It didn't take long for him to receive a response, as he saw a tired Irish man drag open the door, looking somewhat disappointed as he saw who it was standing outside. "If I'm being honest, I was hoping that you had forgotten about this agreement," he stated dejectedly, opening the door wider and gesturing his friend inside. "But a deal's a deal, I guess." Mark said nothing as he entered, simply walking in quietly and making his way to a desk chair. The only difference between Premier Inn hotel rooms were the number of beds inside each one, so there wasn't exactly anything interesting to look at.

Mark sat down and waited as his friend closed the door - with it automatically locking due to the fact that it used electric censors - before walking to the end of his double-bed and sitting down with a depressed sounding sigh. "So," he began, "what do you want to speak about?"

A lot, Mark thought to himself. In truth, throughout the entire day he had hardly stopped thinking about what he was going to say in this one-on-one meeting. So many questions, so many requests, so many statements that he wanted to say that he knew he was going to have to prioritise the ones he thought were the most important, otherwise he would be spending hours chasing answers well into the night.

"I want to start with asking you to do something for me," he said in a matter-of-fact way.

"And what would that be?"

"From this point on, I want you to promise me that anything you say is not going to contain any lies. No sugar-coating, no 'vague' answers, I want the truth."

The Irish man nodded slowly. "I'll try."

"No, you actually have to say it. Say that you promise."

"Fine, I promise, alright? Now what do you want to talk about?" Seán asked impatiently.

"First off, I want you to take me back to the beginning; you said that all of this had been happening for two weeks, so how did it start?"

"It didn't start off as... bad as you saw it earlier. At first, there wasn't really anything wrong except for the fact that small things were starting to stress me out more than they really should have been. Like dropping a pen or something; it's just a mild inconvenience but it would make me stupidly upset or angry. But then where I was getting so stressed, I started struggling to do basic stuff like eat and sleep. I lost my appetite a week ago, and only really ate anything today because there were people watching me. I could hardly get any sleep because everything just put me on edge. The only way I've been sleeping recently is if I get physically exhausted to the point where I feel like I'm going to pass out."

"Why didn't you go to a doctor or tell anyone?"

"Because I didn't feel like I could. If your only symptom is that you are stressed, and that stress is messing other parts of your life up, you would just be told to try and sort out the thing that was making you stressed. I had no idea what that was, so I wasn't going to waste someone else's time on it. I couldn't even come up with an idea as to what was causing this and in my head I thought that it was just irrational, so I tried to ignore it."

"Okay," Mark said slowly, absorbing the information. "So, if that's how it started, how is it going now? It's clearly gotten worse from what you described."

"Yeah, I know. It keeps getting worse, and that's what's starting to worry me," the Irish man replied, dodging the question.

"How has it gotten worse? You said that you'd answer honestly."

Seán stayed quiet for a moment, eyeing Mark cautiously as if judging how he was going to react to what he heard next. There was a tense moment of silence before he slowly opened his mouth to speak again. "I don't know if this was caused because I was stressed, or if this was its own thing which was adding to the stress but..." he leant forward, resting his elbows on his legs and putting his head into his hands so that his mouth was momentarily covered. "How the f*** do I describe this...?" Mark heard him murmur, the words very muffled. Seán took his hands away and rested them on his legs, sighing deeply. "I started having... nightmares. Really, really bad ones. But they were so realistic that it got to the point where I would wake up and not even know if I had been sleeping or if I had just been doing something. The only way I really managed to cope with that is because I'd know that if I woke up with Evelien beside me, I'd be okay. But every now and then, during the day, I wouldn't know if I was awake or not because..."