The Witch and The Man

It began with the face in the wardrobe. It is the first clear encounter that I can recall. Having never been particularly fond of the dark as a child as with most children, I often found my way into my mother's bed if I awoke in the middle of the night. On that night, as I curled around my mother, my eyes turned to the wardrobe in the far corner of the room and there it was. A face shrouded in all the darkness of the night watching my mother. I lay motionless, my breathing coming faster with every exhale. It did not notice at first that I could see it, it merely stared through black holes that eyes had once occupied. The air in the room turned to ice and its eyes moved to mine. There was a moment’s hesitation and then it looked at me. The smile that came over its face was slow and horrifying. For whatever reason, the smile broke through my stillness and as those black holes followed me, I lay down gently afraid that too rapid a movement would bring more than just a face. I rolled away and faced the wall. For some time, I could feel it there, still grinning like some demented Cheshire Cat and it seemed it was trying to speak with me. My brain tingled with half formed words that were not my own. Eventually, my childish fear put me to sleep.

As I sat at the kitchen table the very next morning, eating breakfast with my mother, with the old gas flamed heater hummed merrily next to us, I came to the opinion that the face, belonged to a man, one whom I was quite certain had lived in the house we now occupied. I told my mother, prepared in my own way to be met with disbelief but I was not. Instead, as I described what I saw, her face turned ashen and she sipped her coffee with shaking hands. She did not try to tell me it was a figment of my imagination or a trick of what little light there was in her room, instead she listened, nodded and after some deep breaths, she spoke.

"I had hoped that this would come later for you," she said resolutely. "If you say you saw this man's face, then you saw it. There are those in our family who have always seen things that others would have them believe are not there."

After this, came the footsteps. Night after night I would hear the relentless, tired footsteps as something walked up and down my stairs as I lay in bed. When through exhaustion alone I would fall into the realm of dreams, I found my sleeping self leaving my body and wandering through my home. Always the wandering ended in the dining room even when I could feel myself trying to stop the movements of my feet, except the room did not look like ours, the furniture was gone, the wallpaper tattered and old, the room cold and uninviting and by the patio doors, stood the man. When I entered, the door would slam closed behind me and no matter how I willed myself to turn to it and pull it open, I could not move. Instead, he would stand, shoulders back, in his strangely formal suit and turn precisely on his heels, hands still clasped behind his back and as his face became clear he began to smile. That smile summoned me closer. It beckoned to me and though his lips did not move his soul whispered quietly, "dance with me."

As the nights went on, the process would repeat itself, the footsteps, sleep, the dream and each night I moved a step closer to the man in the dining room. Then it changed. The footsteps came except this time, as I watched through my open bedroom door, fully awake, as he reached the top of the stairs, I saw him. There was no hesitation this time. He knew that I could see him, and he walked slowly towards me, smiling that horrific grin all the while. He entered my room and though I wanted to scream and run I was stuck as if in cement. He sat on the edge of my bed and again I heard the words in my mind, "dance with me." Without my permission my physical body began to move until I sat bolt upright in the bed with arms outstretched. I fell asleep this way and that night my sleeping self did not wander. It appeared instantly in the dining room, standing next to the ghostly apparition. He opened the patio doors, took my hand and we walked out into the night together as a Waltz began to play from the trees themselves.

In the morning, my mother shook me awake having found me in the same position I had wound my way into sleep from. I told her what had happened, and she said nothing. Only smiled sadly and brushed the sweat from my brow.

"What is happening to me?" I asked her.

"Nothing we cannot put right."

After that, it stopped. A candle holder bearing the effigy of my mother's favoured Saint, appeared in the dining room window. It was lit often, and I would find my mother walking the room in a circle, praying with her rosary beads. I did not know then that she had the sight too, in her own way and this was her method of protection.

The man left me, but the "gift" did not.

Over time I learned how to control it. I practised the old ways, learned how to read Runes and find my way through the cards. I grew accustomed to what I saw and the fear though always present when something from beyond the veil would appear to me, I became hardened to it. I used my gift for others. It went from simple mediumship to more. I knew things before they happened. I could smell death on someone before it came, it clung to their clothes and their hair like the smoke from the cigarettes I choked down to stay shaking hands.

I would test myself in my youth. Always willing to prove that what I saw, heard, felt, knew was not real, but the more I got things right, the harder the truth was to deny. People who believed in nothing, would believe in me, because of what I knew.

The only way I could justify any of it was by finding ways to make others’ lives more bearable. I fixed haunted houses, took dreams left by ancestors, supressed dream walkers who could not control where or how far they walked. Fought demons, saw hell.

By the time I was 25, little disturbed me anymore. I thought myself too strong to be infected by the other world. I was wrong.

After working a particularly difficult case for a friend whose dreams were tormented with what he called an evil presence in which I went deeper this time than I ever had before, exploring his past with him and pulling memories from his mind he had long since buried along with the remnants of a father who knew nothing of love; I stood outside my little cottage, smoking before bed as I always did. It was mid October, All Hallows Eve a mere step around the corner. I was exhausted, all my energy had been poured into that case. There was a darkness in his father's heart that touched everything around him and had infected his child when he took his last breath and shuffled off this mortal coil. The boy's inheritance was all that pain his father had not been able to stuff his soul full of when he was alive. I saved my friend, but in doing so, I felt a little of the protection I had painstakingly built up fade away. It was cold that night, I remember that and though it was Autumn, it felt colder than it should have been. To my horror, I recognised that cold, from a memory of my childhood and a man who's name I never knew. The ice wind tickled my face though the trees did not sway nor the leaves blow. I turned into that cold, feeling the first pangs of real fear I had felt in almost a decade.

Though he was not clear, I knew it was him. Standing just out of the reach of light, cast in shadows, the ghost of my own past. He smiled and he waved.

I turned away in panic burning my hand with the still lit cigarette. As it fell to the ground, I hissed in pain and in the wind that didn't exist I heard the words, "dance with me." I turned to the voice and there he was, not an arms breadth from me, hand outstretched, smiling with sinister intent and curling a finger. I moved back towards my door, sliding down it, staring at my ghost, prayers pouring from my lips as my hand gripped the crystal at my throat. His smile dropped from his face and the cruelty that remained betrayed him. He rushed forward and then vanished from sight, but as I sat on the ground gasping for breath, I could still feel him. He did not leave me. Instead he took up residence in my mind, whispering incessantly, beckoning to me, daring me to follow him and always, always inviting me to dance. When I could sleep, I would wake in my kitchen waltzing in the darkness like a mad woman to the echoes of laughter. He began to offer deals to make it end. If I danced with him willingly, gave myself to that darkness then the encroaching insanity would cease, and I would feel freedom. There was no respite. How could there be when this was inside of me now? I could feel him scratching at the inside of my head, like a rat trapped in a wall. I heard him laughing at my pain and always came the offer. I refused. The more I refused, the more it hurt.

My mother came. She walked into my house, hand clinging to my Grandmother’s rosary beads. I had not asked her to come, she had simply known. My table was covered in the herbs I knew repelled evil, my favourite Rune set displayed in a circle of protection, my crystals by each window and salt lined every door and windowsill. As I sat curled in a ball on my sofa, she cleared it all away and I was too weak to protest. From her bag she took the candle of my childhood, she lit it and placed it on my living room windowsill. She handed me the rosary beads and my fingers stung where I touched them.

“Magic cannot fight the devil,” she told me, and, in that moment, I understood.

We prayed together, my friends prayed for me, the candle flickered in the window and I felt what infested my soul rage back. The more it raged, the harder we prayed until after days locked in this battle, his voice began to fade.

For generations, the women in my family had been called Witches. Powerful, intelligent women who understood the ways of magic and nature, angels and demons, God and the Devil, Good and Evil. The devil longed for these women, creators of life, some were driven to the madness of the dance, the deal taken, just to make it end.

After that, I closed the door between myself and the unseen realm; terrified that if I stepped between the gates of this life and the next again, I would not be able to find my way back.