As a girl, I wasn't frightened of wolves and ghouls and gremlins
I saw burglars everywhere
Melting in with the oppressive velvet dark of my room
Until they took off their mask to reveal bone-white skin
They were intruders come not for the tv or my mother's jewels
But for me,
Always for me, in myopic childhood
I would find them in my dreams, moonfaced and wide-eyed
Staring from behind the bookshelves
Or awaiting, crammed crookedly into impossible spaces
Ready to spring out of closets and cabinets
Like the night-clad devils they were
My father would tour the whole house with me before bedtime
Pointing to every nook and corner, deceitfully empty in his presence
His demonstration over, he would tuck me in
There was nothing to worry about, nothing to be scared of,
Nothing beyond the homely, the known, the expected.
Years flew by and I acquired more adult fears
Bills and failure and the lonely nonsensical abyss
Of life as nothing more than a series of four thousand work weeks
I unlearnt the primeval truths of childhood
The knowledge that at any time, terror can come
And seep, tar black, through the strongest of walls
Shatter the hardest-held sense of safety
See, daddy, I listened, I was lulled and lured in by that nightly ritual
Nothing to fear, nothing to fear, nothing at all
Except, daddy, you were wrong
Today, something did emerge from the shadow
A man, cut from the same cloth
A few steps from the foot of my bed
He appeared backlit in the yellow glow of a streetlamp
Standing by the threshold at the witching hour
Like a monster waiting to be allowed in
All I could think, in the glare of his flashlight, was
'So this is it'
With detached clarity
With shock but not surprise
I knew it. I had known it all along
The dread did not truly sink in until the next morning
When the clear, unchanged light of day
Dragged the image all the way out of its half-dreamt state
The door had been opened.
The stranger had been here.
Not as a specter or a vision
Not as a nightmare from which I could scream myself free
He had been here and he had gone
Almost politely
As soon as I asked him to
Walking backwards the way hunters do in snow
I don't know what woke me, he was so terribly silent
Perhaps the ruffling whisper of the curtains
Or simply the slight change of light
The ominous sense of an unknown presence
What if...
What if I hadn't been so lucky?
What if I had slept through these faintest of warnings?
In my mind's eye, I return to the expressionist scenes of childhood
The man, twice as tall and leaning at a disjointed angle
Bent horribly above me
His unblinking eyes drinking in
The oblivious crescent shape under the covers
The peaceful, naively unalarmed face
The unseeing lids
The closed mouth that cannot speak the magic words to banish it
What if this twitch of disquiet hadn't alerted me?
What if I were someone who rests easy and deep?
Someone who hasn't been christened with dread
And made to develop the instinct of the prey animal
Incapable of quick escape or apt defense
Owing its survival only to an intimate knowing
Of the taste and thickness of the air before a storm
The stillness and musky scent before the tiger's pounce
What if?
What if I hadn't come awake?
As it is, the promise of danger was fulfilled with a soft blow
The incoming terror came and went, brushing past
A gust of fear and nothing more
The stranger retraced his steps, rewound his entrance
And left the scene of his uncommitted crime.
