Death game

Hank woke in a cold sweat, his muscles exhausted from thrashing in his sleep. His heart was pounding out of his chest, and his head felt like it was ready to split. He tried to grab his face to feel his forehead where it hurt the most, but his hand his a thick stone form that was laying on top of him, crushing his face. It took both hands to be able to lift it off and throw it aside.

He looked around his room, trying to see if there was any evidence as to where the stone slab had come from, but he saw nothing out of the ordinary. His room was exactly as he had remembered it being when he went to bed. Without anywhere else to turn, he looked at the stone that had been resting on his face, rubbing his face to feel the roughness that it had caused. It was really more of a mask. A basic one at that, but it had been carved to have a mouth and eyes, and it had simple been resting on his face - there was no kind of strap that had been holding it on his face, and yet in his sleep it had remained perfectly in place, or else he would have suffocated underneath it.

The thought of someone entering his room and placing a stone mask over his face was making him uncomfortable, so he got out of bed and made his way to the bathroom. Without the stone weighing him down, though it had only been in his sleep, he felt lighter, like he didn't have to push quite so hard on the ground in order to move around. He tried to think if maybe he had done something the night before, but the details were hazy. Which only served to confuse him more. He didn't remember drinking, and even if he had, he had never gotten black out drunk before. He didn't even drink that much.

Looking in the mirror, though, he looked surprisingly pale, and his eyes were sunken into his face. It was hard to tell if it was because of the nightmares, or the stone mask. He was starving, thirsty, and in desperate need of a bath. But it felt as though at every turn, he found himself thinking about those dreams and that mask. Again and again, his mind returned to that. The thought of what demons he had faced in the darkness, and the weight he had felt.

And when he entered the living room, he was only faced with more questions, as he found the massive pool of blood that was left in the middle of the floor, a knife discarded to the side. The scene of murder was evident, though whose it was was an unknown. But the stains physically hurt him. They made him hurt in his chest, in his throat, in his eyes. He felt like he was burning.

He spent the day cleaning the blood, feeling sick and in pain throughout. He needed it gone, though. He washed the knife as well, before discarding it. The longer he spent on the task, the worse he felt. There was something in the back of his mind.

He knew the truth, as much as he hated to admit it. He knew. He was dead.

So why wasn't he?