Thursday 4 September 2014

"Smoke & Mirrors" - a little tale for you to enjoy





Smoke and Mirrors”


Samuel T Witherspoon looked deeply at his own reflection in the old bathroom cabinet mirror, it was uninviting, and a cold feeling that crept over him as he reached for the bathroom cabinet door and with the deft movement of darts player, grabbed the small round handle and opened it with grace and poise. He was sick of being a no-one, one of a thousand faces in a crowd, he tried to stand out he really did but tonight was the last straw. He lost it and now he would have to pay the ultimate penalty.

His price for the lives he took would be his own worthless and empty existence; he knew he had the balls to do it, he just didn’t know how he would go about it. He popped the top of the bottle marked Pain relief and thought to himself “well I am in pain I suppose” as he downed ten of the potent hallucinogenic prescription only pills his now deceased father used when his trick knees played up.
He was a Vietnam veteran of two terms and he often delighted in telling his young son of how he made those gooks pay! Well now he was gutted and a steaming pile of meat in his favourite lounge chair and his mother a smile from ear to ear from the wound he had inflicted with her best carving knife.

The blood now washed off his hands and stained the pristine white porcelain bowel an eerie red tinge. The revolver on the side of the bath was loaded with all six chambers full and ready for action. He finished washing his hands and glanced knowingly at the weapon with an understanding his father had used it in anger during his time at war and he thought about the death it had inflicted; only now it would be his own hand that steadied the barrel and pulled the trigger.

You would never have thought a twenty four year old could be so bitter and twisted about his life, nothing really stood out to him now, as to why he turned out bad, he was a good boy who did his chores, loved his mother and got on with his father, but the beatings when he was drunk, well that was just part of the war. That’s what mum had said! Maybe I did resent them deep down, him for hitting me and mum, and her for letting it happen for so long. Ah well not for much longer, the cops will be here soon and I have to be gone before they break the door down. “I wonder should I wait until they are at the door so it’s all dramatic and stuff and when it’s on the CI channel as a special it will be all dramatic, I wonder who they will use to play me.” I said out aloud to myself now holding the pistol on my hand, the Colt single action a great weighted piece and I knew it would make a mess of my brain.

I looked into the old mirror and could see in the corners a slight silver lustre it must be old I thought again as I studied the etching in the corner “REFICUL EMEVOL” written in a circle and what seemed to be a five pointed star in the middle. I wonder how old this is, I remarked to myself in my own thoughts then drifting off to a documentary about a journalist who was the first to ever trek into the head-hunters villages in the mountains of Borneo. He tried to take their photographs with an old Kodak instant camera and they beheaded him and the child he snapped as they believed the device captured the person’s reflection, thus their soul or essence with it.

“Fuck it” I pulled the trigger!

I watched as time almost stopped in my still functioning mind and saw the hammer of the pistol hit the pin sending a flash and the projectile along the spiral path towards the spot just above my ear. It penetrated firstly stretching the skin then breaking it in a shower of powder and led. I felt nothing at all, although I saw everything, it was both unsettling and amazing all at once the damage to my head was slight except for the powder burns around the entry wound and a whole the size of a penny.

My vision started to falter like a flickering TV and I noticed the left side of my head started to bulge and then burst out with force and a whole the size of a grapefruit was where my ear should have been on the other side, viscous matter and fluids, brain matter and blood one can assume, flew out mixed with white bone fragments, my vision left me and existence stopped.

To the outside world it would have been instantaneous, trigger and death, but in the world that is between realities my soul, the essence of what was me was captured in that special mirror.

My eyes opened and my first thought was that I blacked out for a second or I didn’t pull the trigger and I had dreamt the whole thing, but I was nothing I felt nothing, not hot nor cold nor weight or gravity, I just was. I peered at the mirror and I saw a ruined body on the floor, it had shed itself of all vital fluids and the face although mine was subsequently demolished by the power of the forty four calibre slug.

I could hear in tangles of garbled waves and I closed my eyes to concentrate but it didn’t help much. I took a step back or at least I thought I did and I was looking through a dark veil as the light muted around me.

The police had broken through the bathroom door and were screaming and yelling but although my body was now a dead meat sack, I was gone, and I caught sight of what was going on as they moved in one by one to view the prone corpse of a killer.

I looked up and as I did I caught the eye of a police man who looked in at me and then it hit me I was in a dimensional space behind the mirror. An existence I had no idea how I became to be in let alone hold my life experience and thoughts.

The police officer looked deeper into the mirror exploring the spay pattern and vita on the glass. I leaned forward melding with his own reflection moving instinctively as he did matching his every move. He then frowned and I screamed and bared my incorporeal teeth at him and he jumped back from the mirror in fright.

“Bob you ok” An older policeman asked as Officer Tanner regained his composure.

“Yep I think so Jack I just spooked myself is all”. Bob answered knowing in his own mind he didn’t believe it, he saw something come at him in that reflection that wasn’t his making, and it scared him.

“Jack I’m gonna get some fresh air if that’s ok?” he asked.

 And as he left I noticed that from inside the mirror world the name etched on the bottom corner actually read ‘LOVEME LUCIFER’. At that moment something happened and I started to move back from the mirror I was created in and I moved to a mirror in another house somewhere in the world. Again the same words etched into the mirror, and then at will I could move from mirror to mirror almost in an instant.

I could see others like me floating around in the shadows and dull light reflected inward from thousands of mirrored gateways. They all kept their distance and as such so did I, I had no idea why this was but no matter how hard I tried to get close or converse with the others like me, I was repelled like two positive ends of a magnet.

I would soon learn why and as I travelled and traversed the never that was the mirrors I honed my abilities finding newly created, others like me and also those who must have been in this place for a millennia, warped and twisted, almost animalistic in the so called vision I had of them.

Then as quick as I changed mirrors once again I found myself in front of a mirror with a young boy of about eight or nine brushing his teeth and spitting the remainders in the sink then looking up to check if any of the chalky white substance was still on his lips.

That’s when it happened; I found a crack I could use!
 
 
 
 
 
Copyright - Graeme Hawke 2014

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