“Libby, take your sister to get some teeth rotting sweets before she gnaws my hand off.”
My sister laughed and took my hand in search of the red and white stand.
“What's gnaws mean?” I had asked innocently enough when the crowd started to get thicker due to the end of a show in the big top. My sister’s hand squeezed mine in vain just before I broke away. I couldn't see for bodies all moving in different directions. I was pushed along with a family that weren't speaking English and I couldn't hear the sound of my sister’s voice calling my name over a language that I didn't understand.
Finally after following them I was left standing in a quieter part of the fairground where there were no rides or stalls. I was on the outskirts of the park. I stood with a wet face from tears of panic when a woman with a kind voice approached me. She was dressed strange, with a number of red and purple scarves around her head like a turban. I remembered seeing people dressed like this in some of the books in my grandparent’s library and I recognised her to be a gypsy.
She wore a white shirt with big sleeves and a red dress on top that tied under the bust with ribbons crossing over. Her arms were covered in bangles and gold bracelets with what looked like coins hanging from them. She wore multiple sets of matching hooped earrings. But her hands were covered in so many rings that you could hardly see the skin on her fingers. One caught my eye as it was shaped like a silver dragon's head and its mouth opened up as though it had swallowed her entire finger. The teeth on the end looked sharp as the spikes interlocked and clamped together.
“Are you lost young lady?” I remember thinking it was nice to be called young lady instead of my usual “Little squirt” nickname Libby called me.
“Yes, I can't find my sister. She was taking me for some sweets.” She smiled showing a full set of yellow teeth, like ones you would find on an elderly person after a life time of heavy smoking. She looked at me strangely, staring deep into my eyes. Even as a child, I had known that something wasn't right about this woman and remembering the golden rule of childhood I took a step back saying,
“I should go and find them and I shouldn't be talking to you, you’re a stranger.” I turned to leave but somehow she stood facing me once more.
“How did you do that?” Her red lips curled up on one side revealing a yellow fang and she bent down to the level of my young face.
“Magic!” She said, and with a movement of her hand she produced a pretty pink flower. She gave it to me and then straightened up revealing a less creepy smile.
“My name is Nesteemia but my friends call me Ness. I'm a palm reader.”
“What's a palm reader?” I was at my questioning phase wanting to know absolutely everything there was to know about anything.
“I can tell you your future my dear by touching your hand.”
“How, I hold my sister's hand all the time and I don't see anything?” She bit her lip trying to hide a smile that would no doubt turn into a laugh.
“You have to know the magic to be able to see.” I nodded my head understanding, thinking she could be a witch. I held out my hand with a firm mind and said,
“Show me please.” This would turn out to be the biggest mistake of my life because when she took my hand in hers what I saw next truly terrified me… and the gypsy.
She closed her eyes as she ran her heavy metal covered fingers across the palm of my cold small hand and she started to chant words I didn’t understand. I got scared and tried to pull away but she held on tighter stopping me from removing my now quivering hand. She opened her lids, but her eyes were somewhere else. Rolling back into their sockets so all you could see were the cloudy whites of them. She started to shake her head and her eyes that had turned blood red in colour were now flicking back and to, as though trying to read the lines in a book a million words a second.
I looked around searching for anyone who might be able to help me, but I hadn't realised she had pulled me further from the fair. We were now completely out of sight. I tried to speak and scream but when I opened my mouth no sound came from it. It was as if she had put some sort of spell on me forcing me to be silent. I was helpless, wishing I had never even wanted candy-floss in the first place.
She started to slow down her breathing and her eye movement was less erratic. She looked at me but now she was the one who looked scared. Fear caught up with her body making it vibrate as mine once did, as though what she had seen in my future had been so disturbing she couldn't contain the terror. I stopped struggling now as a new fear had gripped me.
What had she seen?
“What is it, tell me... what did you see?” I asked in a panicked voice. She just stared at me not speaking a word but she wouldn't let go of my hand.
“TELL ME!” I managed to scream bringing her out of her comatose state.
“It’s all true, but it can’t be...you can’t be real...what trickery is this?” I didn't understand her babbling so I struggled once more to break free of her fierce grasp.
“Let me go!” I said over and over but she wasn't listening to me. She just kept saying the same words over and over.
“It has come, it has come.” Finally I could see someone coming this way and tried to make another run for it. She caught sight of them before I managed to draw attention to us both and she clamped her other hand around my mouth pulling me back behind a work shed, out of sight.
“I will make you see, ready for your master young mistress.” I didn't understand and I shook my head under her grasp.
“Be still,” she ordered as she grabbed my arm and held it out with my palm facing upwards. I was losing strength enough to struggle anymore and was giving up. The tears streamed down my face and on to the hand of my captor. She held the dragon finger out pointing it at my palm.
She said something that sounded like a command only it was in a different language.
“укусить!”(Means “Bite” In Russian) Then my eyes saw something impossible. The dragon's head moved, opening its mouth wide releasing its teeth into a biting position. I mouthed the words “Don't!” and “No!” But the sound was muffled by her hand. The dragon bit down hard on my palm making small puncture marks with its teeth. I cried out in pain wanting this nightmare to be over, wondering if I was ever going to see my family again. She whispered in my ear yet more words I couldn't understand.
“Θα τελειώσουν σύντομα ένας γενναίος” (Means, “It will soon be over, be brave” In Greek)
She pulled her hand away from my lips and I was in too much pain to say anything apart from cry. Then she repeated the same words once more to the dragon ring and placed it to her own palm letting it once again taste blood. At least this time it was hers. Unlike me she smiled at the pain as though welcoming it and pressed it tightly to my own bleeding hand.
“It has been a pleasure Electus!" (Means “Chosen” In Latin)
These were the last words I heard until my mother’s voice woke me up. I opened my eyes to the room my sister and I shared in my grandparent’s guest house. I first thought it was all a dream as I looked down at my hand for a cut in my skin but it wasn't there. I later found out that my parents, along with a number of fairground staff had found me curled up asleep near the tool shed. There was no sight of a gypsy woman and nor had there been one working the fair that year. I tried to tell my parents but without proof they put it all down to a nightmare.
I, too, had been convinced until the day I saw her again.
It was on my seventh birthday, we had all gone out to an American themed diner where they served burger and chips (Or fries as it was on the menu), which was a favourite of mine. Afterwards we all walked along the shore to get some ice cream, spotting one made with traditional Cornish clotted cream. I pointed it out as though the colourful ice cream van was a beacon drawing me in.
I walked right up to the open window already knowing the flavour I wanted, when I noticed something familiar. The man that served me had the same deadly red tint in his
eyes as the gypsy in my dream. I tried to shake it off but the red kept getting deeper and deeper until it soon looked as though his eyes would overflow with blood. I stepped back before giving him my order, when my father’s voice came up behind me making me jump.
“Whoa, hey kiddo, what flavour are you getting?” I didn't answer as my dad walked past me giving the man three orders for himself, my sister and my mum.
“Honey what you having?...Come on make your mind up.” My dad was getting impatient as he could see a line forming behind me. I still couldn't speak. Why couldn't he see what I was seeing? He turned to give me a look that translated to if I don't pick soon I wouldn't be getting one so I mouthed a silent “Chocolate” and he frowned at my strange behaviour. He passed me mine with his hands full and walked towards my family who had sat down on a nearby bench. I was about to follow when the man from the van shouted “Hey Guv you forgot your change” in a thick Essex accent.
“Oh Honey could you grab that for me.” I froze knowing I would have to explain myself if I refused. Maybe I was just seeing things. That had to be it, no one else in the line looked freaked. People moved out of my way to let me pass as I reached up my hand to receive the money but the man grabbed my hand forcefully and my eyes met the gypsy woman's face, the one that had haunted my dreams for weeks. Her eyes were bleeding and the blood dripped down onto people's ice creams that lay in the holders. Customers still took them and licked away at them as though nothing was there. Nobody seemed to notice this mad looking woman as she was pulling me closer to the window. They were just going around me as though I was a traffic cone in the road.
“Now you will see...7....7....7…7” she kept repeating the number over and over as she let go of my hand. I fell back and an elderly couple helped me off the floor, picking up the change that the crazy gypsy had dropped around me. I looked back and the ice cream man's face smiled back at me, saying “Are you all right love?”
I couldn't understand what had just happened and my parents just thought my tears were from when I had fallen and lost my ice cream. But from that day on I would see things that made people's nightmares seem like happy cartoons. My nightmares started to come to life when I wasn't even asleep. I would be on a bus or in a car and one minute I would see just a normal person and then I would see them change into something utterly terrifying.
Sometimes I would see them with scales where skin should be or their hair would move as though they were floating underwater. Then there were the very scary ones, the ones that had black empty holes where their eyes should be. Sometimes these holes would glow red and the cracks in their skin would light up in reaction. Their skin would move under the cracks as though thousands of tiny little creatures were trying to claw and scratch their way out from under the rock like skin.
Others would flicker back and forth like the top of their heads kept screaming. As if the other side of them was trying to escape. These would let out a screeching sound so high pitched that I would have to put my hands over my ears and they would always ache afterwards, leaving me with a ringing in my fragile mind.
I now lived in fear of when I would next see one, becoming withdrawn and nervous. I tried to tell my parents about my fears but they put it down to everything and anything. They would tell me off sending me to my room, and then my mum would get so upset about what she was hearing. I would cry to Libby pleading with her to believe me but as the months went on she did less and less. I had no answers to any of her questions, so why would she?
“Why can no one else see them?” She would often ask but I just hung my head feeling helpless in a secret world no one else could see. Occasionally I would see a kind looking one but even these were disturbing. They would glow with eyes bright but their veins would move as though you could see the blood flowing through their bodies. But it was normally a bluish light that would follow through into their back to what looked like wings. These too would differ in shape and size sometimes and also material.
I remember one woman looked as though hers were made from clear plastic bags stretched out onto long thin twig like fingers that curled at the ends. But the images would flash in and out so quickly that sometimes they would change. It got that way, that I didn't know what was real any more.
One day at school it was getting too much for me when a new teacher had asked why I was crying and why wouldn't I go outside to play with the others? When I had replied,
“Cause there's a boy in my class that's a monster,” She had rung my parents to come into the school. The meeting had lasted the rest of the day with different teachers and staff being involved. No one spoke to me but my father came out and barely looked at me. My mother just placed her hand on my back and said,
“Come on, we're going home.”
Nobody said a word in the car.
Later that night I had heard my Mother and Father having an argument and I had tiptoed to the landing to hear. I found my sister there already with her face full of sorrow. Marks down her cheeks revealed she had been crying. The voices downstairs grew louder and I could make out that my mother too was crying.
“But she's not sick and I won't send her to that place!” My mother said between sobs.
“You know I don't want to send her there either but what else can we do?” Tears filled my eyes at all the trouble I had caused. I wished I could erase it all. I wished I could go back to the happy kid I once was and then none of this would be happening. My sister turned to me and wiped away my tears.
“I don't understand why this is happening to you but I know you're not faking it. However mum and dad will send you away if you don't do something.” She looked at me with pleading eyes and her face blurred through my watery vision.
“Send me where?” I tried to control my sobs so as not to alert my parents that we were listening.
“The school thinks you should be sent to a special hospital so you can be monitored by doctors and therapists.” She lowered her head in shame to be the one to tell me this.
“They think I'm crazy don't they?” She nodded and a single tear rolled down her pink cheek.
“What am I going to do, I don't want to go, I'm scared Libby.” She held me close to her, hugging me tight not wanting me to be taken away. She leaned into my ear and said one word.
“LIE” My head popped up and looked at her. She was serious.
“What?”
“LIE. Tell them it was all a lie to get attention, tell them a girl at school put you up to it, tell them it’s scary films you have been sneaking downstairs to watch, I don't know but tell them anything so they won't send you away!” She was almost as desperate as I was but she clearly had time to think about this.
I nodded saying,
“Ok I will but Libby what do I do about keeping the monsters away?” She looked worried at my response and sadly said,
“I don't know but let’s deal with this problem first.”
It felt comforting to hear my sister's semi belief, so it gave me the confidence I needed to do what I did next. After telling my parents one of the excuses Libby had come up with, everything went back to normal pretty quickly. Apart from my seeing things I could not explain, my life went back to the usual young girl’s life I had originally had. Only now I had to fake a lot of things. Why, for example, I would jump at nothing and looked shocked at some random person walking past. But my parents were more than happy to believe that I was fine. If only for one day they saw the same things I did. I would sometime dream that this would happen but then felt guilty about it instantly. I would never wish this curse on anyone. Even at such a young age I still knew the consequences such a life altering event had on one human mind.
However it all changed again six months later when Libby came running into my room with an idea. She had recently seen a documentary of a man that travelled around the world talking about different cultures. My dad was watching it as he did every week when my sister took notice of one part in particular. It was when he tried to take a picture of the Abo
rigines, they held up their hands in protest. The guide then explained why this was.
Spiritualists would claim that the human image on the mirrored surface was akin to looking into one's soul. The spiritualists also believed that it would open their souls and let demons in. Aborigines believed that taking one's picture took part of one's soul away. It somehow kept it locked away.
Locked...that was the key.
This was how her idea was born. She thought that if taking a picture of someone let demons in then maybe taking the picture of a demon would somehow contain them. But it didn't quite make sense and I could hardly go around taking every one’s picture just in case. So she came up with another way, she told me to try and draw them whenever I saw one. Maybe this would act as a sort of prison for them to be locked out of my mind. It was something I had never thought of, so I did as she asked and started sketching them every time I saw one.
I found that every time I did this it would lock the image from my head and I wouldn't see it any more. The effects didn't stop there, because after years of seeing these living nightmares they grew less and less until one day I realised I hadn't seen one in over a month.
However they didn't go completely, they were now only coming to me when I was asleep. I would play back part of the day and somewhere there would be one changing into something horrible but as long as it remained in my dream I could cope with it. I would then get up and draw what I had seen and keep it in a hidden folder, locking it out of my head forever. The next time I saw the same person, they would be just like everyone else and I wouldn't dream of them again. By the time I hit my teens the dreams had also stopped, only coming back to me a few times a year. I owed it all to Libby and she would never know the full extent of what she had done for me. She had saved me from my curse.