Smoke and Mirrors

When I was little my big brother used to perform magic tricks for me. He loved magic, he loved magic so much he wanted to be a magician so bad. And every time he performed a magic trick, I would never believe it. I think that's why he showed me his tricks more than anyone else, because it's always the skeptics you want to turn, isn't it? It can't be very fulfilling if there isn't at least one person, one realist who is so completely nailed to the earth in logic. To show them a magic trick, something absolutely and flawlessly impossible. To stun every single nerve in there body, to finally show them that this is it. This is magic. It's real. Absolutely anything is possible. To change that person's core beliefs. To make them see that maybe their dreams could come true. That's magic. The problem is, I always knew it wasn't anything more than just smoke and mirrors. He couldn't make my dreams come true.

We used to live in this house as a family when I was little. It felt like the first home. The place you never want to leave. It was a big white house with two big gardens. We had French windows that opened up leading out to the back where we had a hutch and a big run for the rabbits. There was a red and yellow swing set in the front garden and further out to the edge were the flowers. So many different flowers and great hoards of leaves and bushes and trees that were kept so well by the gardener. And we had a strawberry patch and a big white gate and a fence that surrounded the house. The door was blue I think. A dark royal blue with a little window high up so only mum and dad could see into it. The walls inside were a rich cream with champagne hues. Like the tassels and the fringes of the curtains. They draped right down to the floor. They were so regal. Mum made them by hand. She was so talented. She graced everything she touched with such a tasteful majesty. The staircase turned a corner up the stairs. Passing by, every time, looking up at the staircase window, there sat a clown doll. A child's toy maybe, but too fine a quality to let any child touch. On it's cold porcelain face stretched a painted smile and wide open eyes. That should have been the first sign. The little clown on the staircase windowsill that lifted the hairs up on the back of my neck every time I passed it. My parents bedroom was grand. My mother's beautiful wardrobe and her dressing table with her lipstick. And her perfume to seal the glamour in the room. The lamps standing at either side of their enormous bed were looming and warm. Only one of them survived the aftermath. On her bedside table sat a crystal. It was thick, heavy. Like it had grown out of the table right there in that very spot. Sharp glistening stalagmites cramped together pointing upwards. It began at the tips like crystal clear water and fell slowly to a feminine violet. But as the colour got darker and darker towards the core of the crystal, it lost its shine. It was so deep and dark and black like the ocean at night. It was amethyst. Believed to protect one from negative, harmful, corrupting energy. My mother could foretell a person's fortune just by looking at their hands. She could read the lines on their skin like words on a page. A now long forgotten gift of hers.

I remember having nightmares. I've always had nightmares. I would often wake up in the middle of the night and my mum would say I can sleep in her bed. Between her and my father, I was safe. And when I slept there, the nightmares waned. I thought they were leaving me. I was wrong. Instead, they merely transformed and multiplied into many other beings. I began to wake, each morning, trapped. Paralysed. I couldn't open my mouth to speak or ask for help. It was as though I had been holding my breath for the longest time while I slept and now that I was awake I had to try and take a breath but I couldn't, I just couldn't move. I thought I was going to die. Finally, before my heart struck its very last beat, I regained functionality and forced my body to breathe in. That first breath, long and stretched and raw, splitting my ribs apart. That first breath was always the most painful. I thought that it was normal, I thought sleep was just this terrible thing that people have to suffer through every night. "What hard work everyone has to do. How brave of them to not linger on it or talk about how hard it is."

I was wrong again. I realised only in my teens that it was not normal. I always wondered why people happily went to bed at night. I realised late on that it was because most of them never had sleep paralysis making them face true life or death panic or night terrors so consuming it took control of the body and walked it across the house at night. Horrors so real, it made you dread the end of the day time, the creeping feeling of tiredness, the heavy sleep that shuts down the body. I was ripe for the taking.

I can't remember how old I was when I first saw it. The first time it happened. I remember how real it was though. I was reading a book in my bottom bunk and my brother was just drifting off to sleep on the top bunk. He asked me to turn my lamp off and I said no of course. And in my peripheral vision, I saw a flicker of darkness by the open door. Small enough to be a shadow, big enough to be an intruder. I turned my head to the doorway, the door; ajar so that I could see the glow of the downstairs lights, so I could hear the faint muffled noise of the television all the way downstairs. I looked out. I waited. I knew. I stopped my breath. My bones grew frozen. The hairs on the back of my neck, rising, like the clown on the staircase window. I saw him. A man in black, walking by the doorway. Creeping almost. Like he needed to be quiet and unseen. His eyes were white. He crossed into another room passed the doorway, into my mother's sewing room. I screamed so loud and so fast and called for my mother and I was so afraid I couldn't possibly hold in the explosion of tears and fear. I told everyone clearly what I saw, a man in black, like a shadow, with white eyes. There was someone in my house, in my mother's sewing room. They turned all the lights on and my dad checked everywhere. Nothing. My brother was wide awake again. My mother took my hand and walked into the sewing room with me. She walked me right around the walls of the whole room. "See? You don't need to be afraid. I wouldn't let anything get close enough to harm you."

When she said it, something felt off. I couldn't place it. I asked if I could come downstairs with them until I fall asleep. My dad said no and my mother agreed I needed to be in bed but she said I could sleep in her bed.

"But I won't sleep. I'll wait for you both to come to bed" I promised.

And I sat up, in the middle of the large luxurious bed in the grand, glamorous room in the dark, staring at the slightly open door. Longing for more of that warm glow of the lights from downstairs.

The second time it happened was after the divorce. Though it was my mums final executing decision after a hidden, slow and bloody war to sever the ties, it was my dad that left the country. He fled because he was driven out by sheer hopelessness. I understand now that he, like any human, simply didn't know what else he could do to save himself. The heartbreak of failure is an historic conqueror of men. I remember seeing him crying one day in the old house and it was so confusing. I had never seen him cry. It looked like he was almost laughing, only it wasn't happy. There was no joy in the air around him, only sadness. He came from the bedroom. I asked him where mum was and he said I should leave her to come down by herself, when she's ready. The separation didn't tear me apart like it did my big brother. It was slower for me. It was a realisation that life was changing. That people don't last forever, that love doesn't last forever. We had to move into this ugly house with bare floorboards. We slept on mattresses on the floor at first because my mother could only get so much of the house to feel like a home before she eventually sank back in to her fear at the end of the day. Her fear of being independent. And independence is a heavy burden to bare for anyone at first. It took a long time but eventually the house felt a little bit like a home. My brother grew into his emotions, and he had lots of them. If only he knew he wasn't alone. He had me. I would never leave him, no matter how angry he was or how spiteful he became. No matter how much he tried to burn his bridges with our family. No matter how much he blamed our parents. No matter how many fights he would get into, no matter how many bad people he surrounded himself with. No matter how many times he put poison in himself. No matter how many times he would call me in the middle of the night asking for help because the poison consumed him. I would never leave him.

I was about nine years old and my mum was sat in the armchair sewing her cross stitch pattern. I was sat on the floor at her feet, drawing. I felt a cold breath roll down from my shoulders to my chest and spread slowly throughout my body. I stopped my breath. I listened. My bones grew frozen. I waited. I turned my wide eyes toward the staircase. There, sat perfectly still, too dark to see the detail behind the banister pillars with which it had wrapped its long, thin fingers around, was someone else. I couldn't tell who exactly it was but I would never forget its eyes. White. White eyes, burning through me like a sun beam through a magnifying glass and in that moment, time slowed down. I was horrified. I didn't scream. I turned to my mother, her gaze, focused on her needle.

"Mummy, there's a man on the stairs. A man with white eyes."

She stopped and looked down at me. Her eyes shifted over me, examining every angle as if there was some thing, some part of me that was making it up. I could tell by her face, the honest empathy in her blue eyes, she knew I was telling the truth. She knew I believed every word I'd just managed to shake out of my throat. She validated my honesty even more when she calmly spoke to me...

"I want you stay right there, can you do that for me?"

I nodded. Afraid for her. I knew what she was about to do and I knew I couldn't stop her. She went to the staircase, turned the light on and pointed to different areas of the stairs until I told her that she was pointing at the spot where the white eyed man was sitting. She then turned the light off and glared at the stairs, inspecting as much of it as she could in the dark. She stood there, still, for a few minutes before calling out to me.

"Can you see him now?"

I couldn't. Those empty white eyes were not behind the bannister pillars anymore. They were seared into my memories.

The next thing I remember was looking up at her as she came back from the hallway and sat down next to me on the sofa. She paused for a minute. She picked the up house phone and made a phone call. She looked like she was concerned, but not surprised.

It hit me just then. That first night in the old house before the divorce, when she walked me along each wall of her old sewing room. She said,

"I wouldn't let anything get close enough to harm you."

'Any thing'. Thing. I had told her that I had seen a person. Every time I recounted the event I said I'd seen a man in black. But she didn't say she wouldn't let any 'one' get close enough to harm me. She said she wouldn't let any 'thing' get close enough. She knew it wasn't human. She knew more than me about it and she hadn't even seen it. And she was careful not to open that conversation with my dad. So if these beings were not intruders, comfortably lurking in our houses, what were they?

My mums validating reaction to my fear had infused a sudden realisation in me. Maybe my brother was right. All those years ago, when he would show me his magic tricks, maybe there is something otherworldly and powerful in the air. Maybe absolutely anything is indeed possible. Maybe my dreams could come true. Instead, it was my nightmares had decided to manifest.