Mike Shevdon - Sixty-One Nails

There was something in the forest. In the dense shadows at the edge of the trees, something was trying to get closer without being seen. I spun around, trying to catch a glimpse of it as it moved. There were only still shadows across the grass. I started to move down the side of the hill, convinced that once I was unable to see beyond the crest, it would slide, unseen, out from under the trees.

I woke with a start, sweating, the dream hanging over into the waking dark. I knew it was much later because the background city sounds, omnipresent even in the outer suburbs of London, had died down to the minimum. The alarm clock confirmed that it was close to 4am. My bladder told me the beer had followed its natural course and I got up in the chilly darkness, still half asleep, finding my way by faint moonlight out to the bathroom to relieve myself. I shook my head to rid myself of the remnants of the dream, flushed the toilet and headed back to bed.

As I reached the bedroom, I stopped. The moonlight in the room was moving. I jumped back, expecting something to leap out from behind the door, but everything remained quiet. I glanced at the window, wondering if I had absentmindedly left the curtains apart, but they were pulled tight. Strangely, the light was on the inside of the curtains.

My heart was beating fast now and I was wide awake. The unseen pursuit of my dream came back to me and I strained to see what was causing the shifting light. Cold sweat condensed down my back as I tensed, waiting for it to jump out.

But now I looked, the light was with me in the doorway. It was following me around. I went hesitantly back into the bedroom, observing that the strange luminescence accompanied me, falling on the back of the door as I pushed it closed. I turned into the room to find the light dancing on the walls, like moonlight through a leafy tree canopy. It had a bluish night-time tinge and while it wasn't bright, you could make out the whole of the room by it. I turned up my palm, but my hand was dark. How could my hand be dark when everything else was glowing?

I went to the wardrobe and opened it so I could look at myself in the long mirror on the inside of the door. The reflection made no sense. In the mirror, the room around me danced in the faint flickering light, but I was completely dark. I was so dark, even close to the mirror I could see no feature of my face in the strange radiance. What on earth was going on?

I turned around and the light shivered as if it passed through water disturbed by a languid hand. Even when I was completely still it shifted as if rippled by a wind I did not feel. I turned to the mirror and placed my hand upon the surface. Where my hand touched it was completely black but around it the glow intensified as if the glass itself had taken in the light, outlining my hand in a nimbus. When I moved my hand the glow trailed behind it, fading back to normal after a second. Experimentally I wrote "HELLO" on the glass with my finger, but the letters didn't last long enough for the word to show. There was no doubt, though, the glow was connected to me.

I stepped back, perplexed but intrigued. I looked around me and tried to encourage the glow, or at least that was the closest I could come to describing what I did. The glow pulsed and brightened, allowing me to pick out creases in my pillow and the darker pattern in my dressing gown. Then I damped it and it dimmed down until it flickered and died away. I stood in the near dark of my room, but it didn't come back. I turned back to my reflection and noted that even though it was now darker, I could see the features of my face and body in the meagre light leaking around the edges of the curtains.

Is this what Blackbird had meant by my magic? Is this what I could do?

Having done it once, I had to try again. I tried to glow, thinking of the strange light, but nothing happened. I looked at my hand, wishing it dark, but there was no change. Why didn't it do it again? Had I exhausted it? I thought not, but I wasn't sure what had started it. How did one glow when one wanted to? I wished Blackbird were here to see it as I was sure she would know, but then I remembered I was naked and somehow those thoughts didn't mix. She was sixty or something, or a lot older. Either way I could not imagine being naked in front of her. It felt wrong.

I went back to thinking about the glow, putting aside that troubling train of thought. What had she said to me? Magic responds to need? I tried to need to glow, but you can't just need something because you think you can.

I shook myself, shedding my confusion like water.

Blackbird told me that the power was within me, that all I had to do was learn to reach for it. I knew I could do it, I had seen it for myself. What had sparked that connection? The dream?

I closed my eyes and remembered the feeling from the dream, bringing an involuntary shiver. Then I imagined myself standing in my bedroom, with the glow starting dim and building until it flickered over the walls. I made that thought real in my mind, assuring myself that was how it would be when I opened my eyes. Within me, something that had been waiting stirred to life. There was something inside me, something dark and deep. I reached within, and as I did, it reached for me and the connection was there.

I opened my eyes and the room was filled with milky-blue dappled light.

Alarmed, I pulled away and the light flickered and died.

I tentatively reached within myself again. It was there. The connection formed at once. Light spilled out into the room.

I grinned at myself. I had made magic. It was me doing it. I could make a glow. OK, it wasn't summoning lightning or transforming base metal into gold, but I had made a glow.

I relaxed my hold and the connection within me subsided so that the light flickered and vanished. Then I called it back and it returned, quicker this time and stronger, the light brightening until the walls swam like a room underwater. I was so pleased with myself. It was strange and exciting. I couldn't stop grinning.

I released it again, shivering in the pre-dawn chill. My earlier doubts and depression were swept away by my new talent. Maybe I could do other things as well? It made me even more determined to find Blackbird again tomorrow, or later today as I realised it would shortly be. I was tempted to experiment some more with my new-found skill, but I made myself get back into bed and settle down. I needed more sleep if I was going to be able to face the new day. Briefly I summoned it back and made the interesting discovery that the glow wasn't stopped by the bedclothes. It flickered across the ceiling over the bed. It formed around me rather than on me. I was so thrilled, I couldn't wait to show Blackbird. Mind you, she would probably say everyone could do it from the age of three and that I should concentrate on doing something more useful.

With thoughts of what I might say to her tomorrow I drifted towards a deeper, more restful sleep.

That was when I heard the stair creak.

There are some noises that you immediately recognise. Something about them, the resonance or quality of the sound means that they are unmistakable. My creaky stair was like that. When I'd first moved into the flat it had irritated me. I had kicked it, banged it and knocked nails into it. It still creaked. It didn't creak when the house cooled or when the wind was in a certain direction. It didn't creak when my neighbours downstairs moved around in the lower half of the house.

It only creaked when someone stood on it.

I slipped quietly out of bed and went to the door. It was shut and I put my hand against it, listening intently for any other sound. Maybe it was Alex. Perhaps she'd stormed out after a bad argument with her mother and turned up here for tea and comfort, all hormones and teenage angst. But I had bolted the front door. Alex would have had to ring the bell or hammer on the door to get me to come downstairs and undo the bolt.