Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [101]
Then my father would lie down, with him on the side closer to the chairs and me on the wall side, and he would fall asleep. I, however, would lie awake. I could never sleep through these nights.
I would lie there in the dark, waiting for the sound of my mother’s footsteps, prepared to see the glint of a blade. I heard sounds—maybe my brothers moving around upstairs or stealing off into the night—and I’d wonder: Was it the sound of somebody coming down to kill us?
I sat up in the bed and studied the shadows of the forms about me. I could see the outline of the chairs. I could see the bells hanging on the string. But in the far reaches of the room’s darkness—in the corner by the staircase, in the doorways leading to and from other rooms—I thought I could see other things. I could imagine what might be moving in that darkness. Anger and hatred and the spirit of murder moved there, in my mind’s view. My mother’s madness moved there. My brothers’ pain. They were crouched in the shadows: forces ready to sweep down on us and stab out our lives.
Next to me my father kept sleeping, one arm sprawled out toward me, his mouth open, declaring his age: the pink, vulnerable gums that showed when he removed his dentures. In that dim light, in that insensible pose, he already looked like a dead man.
I lay back and kept listening for a movement. For a creak from the floorboards. For the rattle of the knife drawer. There are so many sounds that make so little sense in the silences of a deep night. So many that could be everything you fear the most. I would shut tight my eyes and try to force sleep to come, but it never would. Then I’d try studying the patterns on the stained wallpaper, the configurations in the lacy curtains. I think sometimes during these all-night vigils, something in me went a little mad. The forms in the wallpaper, the web in the curtains, looked like little silhouettes of demons, vignettes of hell. I was afraid I’d caught some of my mother’s madness. Maybe it had found its way to me, through the straits of darkness that moved in that house and in our lives. Or maybe it was merely the sleeplessness of an anxious child. I’ve never been a very good sleeper. Sometimes, even now, I wake up sudden. I know that something has just moved in the dark room that I am in. I feel somebody standing by my bed, and I have just heard the quick sucking sound they made, as they abruptly hold their breath. Of course, nothing is ever really there. It’s just something that comes up out of my sleep, up out of me and my memory.
I would lie awake for hours on those nights, expecting my mother to come and keep her promise. When the sky began to lighten, and the room’s blackness turned to the horrible dull gray of morning, I would finally feel safe enough to roll over on my side, press my feet up against my father’s legs, and fade into sleep.
THAT’S WHEN THE DREAMS STARTED. When I was around five or six years old, the dreams took basically two forms. The first set of dreams had to do with things dwelling in the darkness. My father and brothers had built a wooden porch on the back of our house, and at ground level the porch had a door which led to a storage shed for garden tools. It was a dark, dank place, with a dirt floor, and I hated it. I would never go into it. In the dreams, I would be standing in the night in front of the porch’s door and it would open. I would see things spinning