The Illusionist

The Illusionist is a creature I've sighted numerous times over the course of my life. I had to name it myself as I've failed to find any known record of it on the internet. I have no idea where it came from, what it wants or how it will achieve its goal. Whatever the hell is going on, I don't like it.

The Story...

At this point in my life, paranormal experiences have been a something that I'm no stranger to. I'm used to it, but it still bothers me. The way my heart races every time something out of the ordinary happens, the sweat dripping into my shirt from my neck, my throat aching to scream at something only I can see.

These things have been bothering me for about as long as I remember, and only now, do I piece together this recurring darkness. It all started when I was 2-3 years old. I had a habit of waking up early, usually around 8:00 to 9:00 AM. I woke up on a weekend morning next to my mother. Apparently I had a night mare that night and my dad willingly gave up his spot on the bed for me and slept on the couch that night.

The door of my mother's room was open for some reason, and that didn't bother me, so I decided to look out the door, after all, it was the only real source of light coming into the room, the curtains shielding out the morning son. What I saw that morning was rather unsettling.

It was my father but.. He was.. different. His entire body looked tired, except for one thing. His eyes. Those.. eyes. They stared at me so viciously. His eyes were yellow. But not an unrealistic, glowing yellow. It was as if he were born with a yellow tint in the iris of his eyes. That yellow become vibrant, and it pierced right through me.

His shadow, was as if it didn't belong to him. It was huge, and it looked cloudy.. He stepped out of the doorway, and went back to the couch. His shadow lingered, and I thought maybe he stayed out of sight, but I heard his heavy body slide onto the couch from afar. After staring at it for what felt like hours, the shadow slid away, as it was being sucked into another dimension... Back to where it came from.

I didn't talk to my father at all that day, that made him feel bad, and it made me feel bad too. Even at that age, I had some subconscious understanding of the fact that something else was controlling him at that moment, I just didn't know what it was, and I didn't want to. A few weeks passed, or maybe even a few years, I'm not sure. The way I process my childhood, and the way I process these events in my head, all of this could have happened in one day in the way my mind bends time together, but I find it CRUCIAL that I know that these events happened at different intervals for the sake of my own sanity, which is slipping out of the hands of my decaying mind.

I'm losing track, in more ways than one, so allow me to continue. One morning, I was having a very pleasant dream. We were in my school building, roasting marshmallows over a campfire (at this point in my life I was in the first or second grade). The dream was pleasant enough, until the fire began to smoke as if water were thrown on it. The smoke was thick, dark, and it was dancing, gracefully, but morbidly. I woke up, not of shock, but of habit.

At this point, I had a bed in my mother's room. The bed was perpendicular to the biggest window in the room, and it was the first thing I liked to look at whenever I woke up. There's a fire escape a small leap away from that window, and what I saw standing in it paralyzed me. It was.. a woman.. or at least that's what it wanted me to believe. She.. it.. had these wrinkles.. They didn't look like they were of age but.. they were just.. there. They spread across her face like a system of highways... but the wrinkles were deep like... canyons. Her facial features.. or lack of them is what terrified me the most.

At this point I'm making her sound like a Slender Man-female clone, a Slender Woman, but she is more of his antonym. Maybe it was the "dress" that she was wearing, but she was anything far from slender. It was this big, wide thing that seemed to leak off her body, like some sort of Dementor. Her face... It haunts me as I write this. I feel the sweat drip into my shirt as I even think about her appearance. In place of her eyes, are two holes. It's not as if her eyes were gauged out, there would be dry blood on her hideous face. It's as if her eyes were never there.

Despite her lack of eyes, I can feel her looking into my soul. Her nose was similar, but didn't really serve any other purpose than making her the hideous mess she is. One of the hardest things to grasp at is her mouth. It wasn't there, but it was. The wrinkles in that area merged together to form one morbid wrinkle that was a good inch deeper than the rest. I thought it was my sleepy mind playing tricks on me, but I blinked and she was still there.

She slowly opened her mouth, and her throat and face contorted in ways that would imply that she was screaming, screaming very forcefully, but I didn't hear a thing. At that moment she left. I didn't see her leave, just as I didn't see her arrive, but she was gone. At that point, I wasn't scared, but I did feel different. Angry for some reason. I awkwardly make my way out of bed and go into the bathroom.

I was small, so I had to stand on the edge of the bathtub to see myself in the mirror so I can wash my face off and brush my teeth. What I saw almost threw me off the edge. For a split second, my iris's (the tinted part of the eye for those who don't know) was the same tint I saw in my father's. At that moment, the anger vanished and fear set in. Was this what took over my father? Or was it merely a distraction for the real entity to do it's dirty work?

I never found out, and I'm still searching for answers, I'm searching for IT. Fast forward a couple of years, I'm 6 years old now. I'm laying down with my father watching some football game that I wasn't interested in. I start to feel a nervous sweat, an irrational, causeless anger that I haven't felt in years. I look at my father and he looks tense, as if he wants to hurt something. I immediately thought of that woman. Can she be controlling us at the same time? Can she be here right now? Watching us? Laughing?

I see something that eases both me and my father's tension, but puts us in a state of childish curiosity. We see what looks like a small bundle of glowing, white rags, hovering just above the floor and sticking to the wall as it made its way to my bathroom. Intrigued by this presence, (with my dad's permission) I go to the bathroom to investigate.

As I slowly inch closer I feel that undeniable rage coming back. I wanted to hurt things, I wasn't thinking straight, but at the same time, my primary drive to investigate over powered me. When I reach the bathroom the anger goes away and I feel nothing. I feel numb. I don't feel happiness, I don't feel sadness, I don't feel safe, and I don't feel endangered. I just feel numb. The feeling that something is watching me starts to kick in.

I feel the sweats again... but this time, I feel cold. I hear footsteps behind me, but they're coming from my mind. I can feel them etching closer, from one part of my mind into another, coming closer into reality. The footsteps stop, and so does the feeling of being overlooked. I turn around and the bathroom door closes in front of me. The way it closed was so swift, yet so slow. It didn't slam, I had no reason to stop, but something in me was so startled by the slight movement of the door and that paralyzed me until the door silently shut.

I feel a push and I turn around and let me hands hit the sink before I bashed head first into the mirror. I look at my reflection and am relieved to see that I am still myself. The light begins to dim. This normally happens, but at the circumstances of this situation it wasn't helping the way I felt. The light got bright, then it flickered off and felt like a strobe light for a moment. The light goes back on, and I'm scared to look in the mirror.

Something didn't feel right, and when I looked up I knew why. My eyes were that tint of yellow again, but this time, it was my entire eyes. I didn't have an iris on either eye, they were just glowing. I stayed that way for a good minute, the light flickered on and off and I was back to normal. I yank the bathroom door hard, expecting whatever that thing was to have locked it, but I ended up opening the door so hard that I drove my hand into the wall along with door knob, yanking that out and severely bruising my hand.

I went to the couch to tell my dad what happened, and find him sleeping. I tap him to wake up; his eyes slowly open and are yellow, just like the day he stared at me. Only this time, they ominously roll back into his head. They never come back down, only a set of his natural, dark brown iris's come back, as if his eyes were stamp rollers. I pretended that didn't faze me, and told him what I did to my hand. I help him off the couch and as we head to the kitchen, we are startled.

There's a woman, in pajamas, with a red towel covering her face. At first, it didn't scare us, it's a prank my mom would pull on us a lot, but after a while, it was disturbing. I notice, we never had a red towel, and that towel didn't look like it was woven in red cloth, more like it was covered in blood. Despite its covered face, I could feel it staring at me. A dark mist surrounded it, I felt its presence more than I could see it, and the anger, the rage was coming back.

There was no holding back now; I had something to take my rage out on. I ran to it with all my force and drove my fist into its gut, but my arm had sliced only through air, and whatever we saw was gone, leaving behind only a feeling of confusion and fear. Other than the silent paranoia between my father and I, nothing else eventful happened that night.

Fast forward, 6 years later, I'm 12 years old now. At this age, I was very obsessed with snakes, and would spent hours a day looking at pictures of them and reading guides on how to properly care for your snake, but I never owned one. One particular night, my mother and sister had left me alone in the house to go wash clothes. I was doing the usual, looking at snakes as if they were my religion.

I saw something at the top of my eyes, a darkness flying over my head. It looked like the small white object that I saw heading to the bathroom, but it was pitch black, and there multiple of them, circling over me. I shut down the computer and jump into my mother's bed, I'm scared out of my mind. I huddle under her blankets and I can see them circling over me through the thin sheets. I try to calm down and somehow manage to fall asleep, and the dream happens.

I'm walking through a dark, lifeless forest. I see her standing there. She's very... formidable, but familiar to her presence and very knowing of her capability to possess I stand in front of her. My hatred for her burns and she can see that. She speaks not a single word out of that putrid mouth, but she communicates with me.

What she says worries me. Is it true? I didn't believe her then, but I am starting to now.

"You are the only one who knows of my existence, and I want to keep it that way. You've never seen anything like me, and I've never seen anything like you. You're so strong; you're so devoted to find out what I am. "The Illusionist" you call me. I give no illusion. Believe your eyes, I tell no lies, only the truth. Keep me a secret, for every time you speak of me, I will torment you when you least expect it. Try finding records of me on the internet. You won't. I am your little monster; I'm your dirtiest secret." She says.

Only... she didn't say it. She carved it into my soul. "I am your little monster, I'm your dirtiest secret" Those words will haunt me forever. Every day I wake. I remember those words. But I don't care anymore. Now you know. Now she'll burden you. Fast forward. Now I'm 15. This happened only last month. I began to know of the slender man and I go to my friend's house to talk about him. As I leave his apartment, I see an average height, suited man standing at the edge of the hallway.

His face was obscured by the distance, almost looked faceless, but the timing was too convenient. That was no Slender Man. I remember how noticeable its eyes were. So easy to spot because they were so DARK. They looked into me and reawakened the darkest terrors in me. All that happened in one, short second, yet I remember it so vividly. She knows me better than anyone now. Over the years... It gets to know you. It knows your fears, it knows your weaknesses.

The Illusionist was made possible by the fact that I acknowledged her existence into my mind. And now that you know of her, it's too late. If I told you at the beginning of this story that I was lying you'd believe me and she'd never get you, but now that you know I'm telling the truth, you'll suffer just like I did. All the paranoia I feel now will boil up in your mind until your sanity decays like mine, until your sanity is as pure as The Illusionist is.

She'll appear to you as she did to me, an old lady with no eyes, no nose, and no mouth, just dark holes to stare into your soul, knowing you better than you know yourself in an instant. She wanted to stay a secret but I won't let myself be the only person to suffer this any longer.

I've rendered as best as I can with nothing but an old pencil and the last page of my journal, what it looks like. Have you ever looked out a window and let your thoughts run free? You should REALLY stop doing that.

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That's my story. The encounters. Has this ever happened to anyone? Have you ever met a creature so bent on creating your insanity that it morphed into everything you fear?