The experience I am about to relate is one of my darkest secrets. It may well have been my first contact with the world of the Paranormal, and considering my age at the time, nearly nine years old, definitely one of my youngest. It was most probably my so called awakening event, if you hold to such beliefs, though I suppressed the actual details for a very long time due to their horrific nature, and to some extent seemed to forget that I was, in fact, awakened at all.
Now my ex-girlfriend and I actively experimented a lot with psychological magick and the power of auto-suggestion while we were together, and it was during one of these impromptu sessions a year or so ago that the full details of the event came flooding back to me, hitting me like a hammer blow in the pit of my stomach. Just to clarify, the following are actual memories, not constructions of my subconscious, and no hypnosis was used in their retrieval. I now remember remembering them for a while when I was a child, and I know enough about the workings of my mind through my Magickal dabbling to recognise the difference anyway.
I've always had problems sleeping, ever since I was a child. During my teens I suffered from terrible, apocalyptic nightmares, the walking dead eating their way through everyone I've ever loved while I am forced to look on, unmolested by the undead but unable to help the living. Yet even before this period in my life the thought of going to bed scared me, leading to insomnia and sleep deprivation, the solace which I witnessed others finding in their nocturnal dream world forever denied to me. Perhaps the following experience, my suppressed memories, can form something of an explanation for both this and my continued fear of the dark to this day.
We lived in a damp, draughty first floor maisonette in the east end of London. There were only two bedrooms, and the smaller of the two was so riddled with mould that it was used as a storage and play room while my family and I shared the master bedroom. My parents slept in a double bed, I had a small single bed in the corner of the room and my seven month old younger brother slept in a cot on the other side of their bed from me. I was overjoyed that he had been born, even now the number thirteen, his birthday, is my lucky number, and though there have been huge periods where we didn't get on, developed outright and occasionally violent hostility towards each other, I still love him.
I fell asleep quite normally on the night in question, as I always did up to that point, though I was awakened during the night by an overwhelming feeling of being called or enticed forcefully into the Spare bedroom, though I heard nothing. Now because of the old fashioned layout of the top part of the house, the only door to the smaller bedroom was through the master bedroom, and I could see light flooding under the closed door as I walked towards the it, the feeling of unreality subsiding somewhat as I crossed the threshold from the carpeted main bedroom onto the cold, bare floorboards of the largely unfurnished smaller one, only to return with a vengeance once I realised that the room was lit by an almost neon, artificial daylight, and that I was not alone.
The creature itself was about the same size as my brother at the time, a foot or so high, wearing what at first looked like one of his blue all in one baby outfits, the ones that zip up at the front and have attached shoes/gloves. Yet closer inspection showed certain inconsistencies in both the fabric and zip area, and this, coupled with the odd hat that the child was wearing, almost akin to the old fashioned leather headgear which pilots wore during world war one, albeit without the associated goggles and in a creamy off white colour, lead me to second guess my first instincts that my brother had simply climbed out of his cot and gone into the spare bedroom to play.
And then the thing opened it's mouth and spoke. They were not words, not even sounds, just a stream of odd whistles and beeps, something like a modem makes, though you have to understand that this was the late 1980's and such technology did not yet exist, at least not to the general public. And my reaction was absolute and merciless, the actions of a cornered child who has suddenly been confronted with something so undeniably unreal, something that was threatening to harm and possibly replace his brother, and something which exuded such an aura of fear and loathing that it had to be destroyed utterly.
So I attacked it. I won't go into the details of my assault on the creature here, as it would probably prove far too graphic an account. But suffice to say that I remember every blow, every broken bone, everything down to the feel of the dismembered creature's blood on my hands as I tore away one of it's arms at the shoulder, the sound of my own maniacal laughter the only thing that I could hear as it struggled to escape me. Not the normal reaction of an nine year old boy, and an outpouring of outright hostility which forever coloured the way in which I interact with the spirit world to this day.
Then all I remember is a bright light flooding through the windows of the spare bedroom, something like a helicopter spotlight shining point blank through the glass directly into my eyes, and then blackness. I couldn't tell you just how long I was unconscious for, but when I jumped awake in the master bedroom I was spotlessly clean, sweating profusely and terrified beyond reason. I assumed, perhaps somewhat childishly considering my age, that whatever those creatures were, they would take my brother's life in exchange for me murdering one of their own, and when I finally plucked up the courage to force myself across the bedroom to my brother's cot I was relieved to see that he was sleeping soundly, unharmed and unknowing of exactly what had occurred so few feet away from him.
The next day I checked the spare room in minute detail, finding no evidence of the creature, living or dead, and no biological residue from the attack. Yet I refused to accept that it was a dream, and fearing the ridicule of my supposedly sceptical family I dealt with the pain and uncertainty on my own, throwing my life into an almost obsessional interest in the occult and paranormal which continues even now. Even so, I was relieved when we moved across town early in the next year, and my reasoning that they would be unable to find me in the new house was partly responsible for my suppressing the memories of the event, along, no doubt, with my young age.
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