Footsteps

The ILLUSIONS

The dreams, they stopped momentarily. Now they came only a few times a week. Not everyday, like before. Something else has replaced them. Something…stranger.

The first time it happened I had just drawn a bath and was settled in when I felt an unnerving presence. I can’t explain it exactly. It felt as if the air had changed or been invaded by something that sought to replace it. The air smelled…different. As I sharpened my senses I could even detect what I imagined was a perfume. That was ridiculous. There hadn’t been any perfume in the house. There was no one in here recently that carried such a scent about them. But I could smell it. It was there. With that, I reached over and slowly pulled the shower curtain back to see if something was in fact in my bathroom.

Nothing.

I pulled the shower curtains closed. At that moment I looked over to reassure myself that all was secure when I saw through the shower curtains what appeared to be a strange, murky silhouette of a person walk out the door. In my panic I grabbed my shower brush, threw open the curtains and prepared to leap out of the tub at…

Nothing.

There was only silence filling the bathroom alongside a frightened man with a soapy, bristled club.

Was my mind playing tricks on me? Had the combination of the heat from the bath water and the steam that permeated the room created this illusion, this trick of the mind?

Now out of the tub and peering through the door I caught, in the corner of my eye, something more strange and frightening than what I thought I had seen before. I centered my focus to a fog-stained mirror that sat in the wall above the sink. There written on that mirror was a name:

LAWRENCE

“Lawrence.”

It was my name!

But I didn’t write it there! Who had?

And then, moments after I discovered it, more steam cycling inside the room stuck upon the mirror and concealed it.

There was another time something strange occurred that had put me on edge. Like with what had happened in the bathroom, this one too kept me awake that same night. It had been two days since the bathroom incident and nothing else strange had occurred. No dreams, no figures, no strange messages or even new surprises.

I was in my study reading on strange tales of beasts and men, of night and the abyss who parted not from the ebbing tides of darkness until light of day would vanquish them; returning them to their abominable dwellings. Such subjects kept me in a trance; an hypnosis of such terror and intrigue that I hardly noticed such a thing manifest before my eyes. A book upon the stack before me rose up, as if by its own will, and tumbled out of sight onto the floor below. A second book then dropped onto the floor: The one in my hand. In my state of shock I could not maintain the kinesthetic competency required to hold it. I rushed to where the first had fallen; around my desk and to that spot. When I arrived there I came upon the book propped open. Something lay on the pages, rooted in the binding.

It was a flower. A lily.

I stood there, my breathing almost ceased. I had not seen one of those in years.

Having seen one of those now brought it all back.

Her name was Lilith, a savage name for a sweetheart, everybody said. Lilith was a tempter, a demon and a witch. To me, Lilith held one sure truth out of such mythological identities. She was the tempter of my heart, and perhaps the tempter of others’, as well. I did not start suspecting so until the night she left and didn’t return. That was ten years ago. And she has still not returned. My suspicions were both obvious and devious. I expected that she had left me for another. My hope is that she succumbed to tragedy. In this I placed my answer on the fact that I have heard not a word from her. Not a note, a call, nor a greeting from even a friend or member of her family. Perhaps my decision to climb inside a shell and remove myself from the outside world pushed her out into it and away from me. After all, she was one to crave adventure and the social world. Whereas, I craved to obtain knowledge of it from books kept safe behind closed doors. Still, my Lilith is gone and here I remain.

I bent down and picked up the book that had fallen down from my stack and closed it hard upon the crushed lily inside. I read the cover: The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. How relevant.