Creepypasta Files

The Accident

I AM A BLUE whale in the deepest, darkest depths of the ocean, adrift in an unending sea of fathomless blue. I am in my element down here, and nothing can touch me.

“Can you hear me? Are you awake?”

I am entombed in the pristine Arctic ice, clear and pure as ancient rainwater. Comfortably numb, I could wait out the eons in here, safeguarded from all the storms of the world.

“Can you move something for me? Can you respond to my voice?”

That was how I faded back into consciousness after the accident. After what seemed like an eternity of fragmented, half-remembered dreams, that voice speared through my slumbers and dragged me back to reality. I wish it hadn’t. I was happy where I was. I was told I raised my index finger and that was how they first knew I was back in the world of the living again: what they didn’t know was that I was actually trying to punch the owner of that damn voice.

Although I was now awake, this was when my nightmare really began. A nightmare of never-ending pain, anguish and misery. “You’ve been in an accident,” the voice said, “You’ve been very badly injured. Particularly your face.” I knew that already. My face felt like it was on fire. There was a constant, deep-seated ache that never relented, day or night, which was punctuated by occasional random stabs of agony that could strike at any time. Sometimes my entire skull would throb and pound as if it was a giant heart which squeezed my brain with each violent contraction. I had never felt anything like it.

The days passed in absolute darkness. They’d covered my entire head in bandages, with gauze pads over my eyes. It was hot and stuffy, and itched abominably. I wasn’t allowed to touch it. My jaw had been wired shut, which made talking impossible. I had a foul, metallic taste in my mouth which may have been blood. I was barely conscious most of the time, thanks to the medication they were giving me.

I don’t know how long I spent like that, stuck in a kind of limbo between sleeping and waking. There seemed to be a wild panic bubbling just beneath the surface in me – I felt like I was skimming across the surface of it, perhaps because of the drugs, but I knew I was never far from sinking down into it and becoming irretrievably lost. The pain battered and buffeted me like an internal storm, but somehow I clung on and edged my way through it, sometimes only on a second-by-second basis.

Sometimes, when I felt that there was no-one else around, I would press the heels of my hands into the pads over my eyes and rub them as hard as I could. It hurt like hell, of course, but the glowing colours and swirling patterns that resulted would at least give me a temporary relief from the endless, unfathomable darkness that had become my world.

Gradually, however, the intervals before the pain became intolerable grew longer, and I felt the fog begin to lift from my mind. I seethed with questions. They buzzed around inside me like wasps in a hornet’s nest. What had happened to me? How badly hurt was I? What kind of accident had done this to me? Information wasn’t forthcoming from the voice (and who was that, anyway? A personal nurse? A doctor?), and I couldn’t talk to ask questions myself. All I was left with was uncertainty and speculation, which only made the situation even harder to bear.

My salvation came in the form of Sandy, a fellow patient who started spending time with me just when I needed it most. Apparently he’d been through a similar operation – although not as serious as mine – and was in the process of recovery himself. Our conversations were rather one-sided, of course, but I could nod or shake my head to his questions, and it was incredibly reassuring just to hear the rhythm of his voice and remind myself that I wasn’t wholly alone.

I still had long periods of time where I was left to my own devices, though, and my mind would inevitably return to the question of the accident. I had no memory whatsoever of what it might have been or of any of the events that had led up to it. Thinking about it was like looking at a photograph of myself as a tiny infant: there was incontrovertible proof that the event had happened, but not a trace of it remained within my head. I would run over countless imaginary scenarios in my head, as if I could stumble over the truth of things by sheer force of will. A terrible fire in which the flesh had been burned from my skull; a car accident that had sent me flying face-first through the windscreen; an attack by an unknown assailant with a broken bottle. I imagined all these eventualities and more, and each one seemed equally plausible, but also utterly unreal to me. I felt like a stranger in my own skin.