The Devil’s Greatest Trick

Have you ever woken up from a deep slumber? Do you know the foggy feeling that hangs over you when you first open your eyes? When your eyes flick open you may feel the urge to close them once more. Sleep’s warm embrace still lingers, begging you to return back into the depths of unconsciousness. You may give in for a few minutes, but eventually you must get up to face the day and so sleep begrudgingly releases you. However, as you leave the warmth of your bed behind the feeling that you're forgetting something flares in your mind. Like an alarm bell signaling danger. Did you forget something important? Or perhaps that is simply just the feeling of last night's dreams retreating back into your deep subconscious. Part of you will want to cling to these dreams. To hold onto them, to pour over them, and to analyse them. A small part of you will think that there is something important hidden within the hazy images, a secret that needs to be discovered. However, in the end you will push away the dreams. Push them far to the back of your mind. As you do this the foggy cloud hanging over your mind will fade and you will go on with your day.

I get this feeling sometimes, but not when I wake up in the morning. Instead this foggy feeling will catch me during my waking hours. As I try to carry out my daily routine, a memory will surface to the forefront of my mind. With it, the memory brings an uneasy feeling. Not the jolt that one gets when they suddenly remember something they forgot long ago nor the warm nostalgia one feels when they remember a wholesome childhood memory. Instead it is a slowly building resentment as if you are walking towards a person you despise and are now realizing you are going to have to talk to them. Along with the feeling of uneasy resentment the memory also brings with it the foggy feeling one experiences when they have just woken up from a deep slumber. When the memory fully surfaces it begs me to hold on to it. To hold on and not let it fade back into obscurity. Almost like a book begging to be opened, wanting to be read in its entirety. I allow the memory to surface and I allow the film to play out in my head, but I never hold on to it. After the memory finishes playing out I push it to the back of my mind. Pushing this memory away is harder than pushing away the previous night’s dreams. A part of my mind always screams at me. Trying to tell me that there’s more to it if I just looked at it harder, but I never listen. For some reason I’m never too inclined to try to hang on to this memory and so away the memory goes. As the memory leaves so too does the foggy feeling. Thus I continue on with my life, until the next time the memory rears its head. 

I wouldn’t say that the memory is a bad one or a traumatic one, rather it just seemingly exists. No particular emotion or significance tied to it. It’s never anything more than a simple recollection, albeit a hazy and most likely skewed recollection, of a past experience. The memory itself always tells the same story. A story that begins with a small child version of me dressed in their Sunday best and seated uncomfortably between their mother and father in the hard wooden pews of our church.

My parents were devotedly religious people and thus that devotion was drilled into my head from a very young age. It didn’t really work though. As a kid I went along with it, but as soon as I grew up and moved out I strayed from religion. I suppose God and I just never really clicked. 

Looking back on it I don’t think I ever really enjoyed church. To me it was a boring use of a Sunday morning, that very well could have been better purposed with literally any other activity. I was, however, forced to bear it. Although on this particular day I was especially miserable. It was ungodly hot to the point where it felt like hell on Earth and due to the solid wooden doors that separated the chapel from the rest of the church there was no airflow to speak of. On top of that my “Sunday best” was unreasonably tight and itchy and I constantly had to fight the urge to squirm as sweat caused my clothing to stick to my skin. To top it off the hard wooden pew beneath me had no padding and supported my back in all the wrong ways.

The church service itself, to my young mind at least, was so incredibly dull. Standing before the congregation was the pastor. He had dedicated this sermon to warn us of the danger of falling for the temptations presented to us by the devil. He spoke to us like he was a shepherd trying to warn his flock of all the wolves in sheep’s clothing wandering the world. It didn’t really help that I had barely slept the night before. My mother had to force me out of bed in order for us to get to church on time. And as one would imagine the only thing that has more trouble paying attention then a child is a sleep deprived child. With the spiel of the pastor as my lullaby I almost nodded off several times, but one of my parents would elbow me to keep me from falling asleep. 

Knowing that I would get in trouble if I gave into the sweet temptation of sleep I instead began to space out. My mind wandering off to explore more interesting and entertaining thoughts. The insufferable heat and the itch of the rough fabric against my skin no longer bothered me. So too did the uncomfortable ache in my back fade into obscurity. Eventually my mind had wandered off so far that even the loud speech of the pastor became nothing more than a low drone, mere background noise to my daydreams. I wasn’t asleep nor was I fully awake, more caught in a hazy in between if you know what I mean. 

It was at this moment when I faded into this state of semi conscious, that I first heard it. A loud bang rang out through the chapel, like the sound of someone knocking on wood. Slightly startled I turned my attention to the back of the room, also known as the source of the knock. This side of the room was where the doors were located. Two very large and solid oak doors that separated the chapel from the rest of the building. A second knock sounded off and again I was slightly startled. However, this time it was not because of the knock itself. Instead it was because when whoever was knocking banged on the door it shook. The very heavy oak door shook much harder than a door as heavy as that ever should when the only force being applied to it is a knock. To make the situation stranger I seemed to be the only person who had turned to face the racket. The dull droning of the pastor still buzzed on and no one else seemed bothered at all. This was extremely odd as the knock had not been a gentle polite knock, but instead loud and stern. Not to mention the fact that the door made quite the racket on its own as it shook from the force of the knock. Was I the only one who was hearing this?

Finally one last decisive knock rang out through the room. When the noise stopped echoing there was a long pause, as if whoever had been knocking was deciding on whether or not to enter. After this long pause I then heard the familiar sound of metal and wood creaking as the door slowly began to open. No sooner had the door been opened then a figure stepped through the doorway. 

The first thing I noticed was that it was tall, so tall in fact that the top of its head brushed the top of the door frame. That is really the only noticeable feature I could discern as not its face or skin nor any other part of its body was visible. All of this was covered by a thick cloak the color of deep crimson. It appeared to be quite the heavy garment as the fabric it was made of seemed to be similar to the heavy cloth used to make stage curtains. It’s face might as well have been nonexistent for one would find that its face was completely invisible under the hood of their cloak.

Once the figure stepped into the chapel it began to make its way down the aisle. It moved with a slow, methodical, and yet strangely fluid march. With every movement the figure made a ripple was sent cascading through the fabric of the cloak. Like how a soft breeze would send ripples along the surface of the pond. As it approached me I began to notice more details that had been previously overlooked. The air around the figure was strangely distorted, shifting and reflective like the heat waves that hover over sun baked concrete. Even when it passed people sitting in the pews, no one seemed to give the figure even the smallest glance. Whenever the figure walked by one of the lit candles lining the aisle the small flame flickered ever so slightly. A few people might have caught the flame flicker out of the corner of their eye, but ultimately the figure who caused it went unnoticed.

Eventually the figure was about to pass by the pew I was sitting in. I quickly averted my gaze, as my parents always told me that staring was rude. Furthermore the figure had the sort of aura around them that made me think that they were the type who might not appreciate unwanted stares. Thus I watched it from the corner of my eyes as it approached me. Despite the heat waves radiating off of the figure I was overcome by a cold feeling when it passed. Goosebumps spread over my arms and I almost physically shivered. However, it wasn’t quite the cold that results from an actual temperature drop. More so the type of cold feeling that develops when one’s mind is shadowed by dread. 

Soon enough the figure left my row of pews behind as it continued its descent down the aisle, taking with it the cold feeling. Eventually its slow and steady march brought it right before where the pastor was standing. From watching it I got the sense that the figure was listening to the pastor’s sermon. Although not in a serious way, but rather in the way that a punk teen might mockingly listen to their teacher. Or perhaps like an amused adult listening to the ramblings of a small child. Then it happened. Slowly the figure’s head began to turn away from the pastor and towards me. I had long since resumed observantly staring at the figure and so when they turned to face me I was caught looking right into the shadowy void obscuring their face. Their eyes were not visible, however, I could tell that they were intensely staring me right in the eyes. The feeling of the figure’s gaze was practically burning holes in my head. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever been looked at like that since. It wasn’t just looking at me, it was looking through me. Staring straight into my soul as if they knew all of my secrets, the mere seconds it spent looking at me felt like hours slowly ticking by. That dreadful cold feeling returned in full force, but then no sooner had the figure looked at me did it disappear.

Do not misunderstand me when I say it disappeared. For the figure did not just vanish into thin air, oh no, rather the figure slowly began to blur until it was no longer there. The best way I can explain the moment is that it was like I was a camera being pointed at a scene. All the time I had spent observing the cloaked figure I had merely been out of focus. Or maybe not so much out of focus as focusing on the wrong thing. Focusing on something I wasn’t supposed to be paying any attention to. However, as the figure looked at me, stared at me for those long few seconds, I began to involuntarily refocus on what I was supposed to. I slowly began to come back from the hazy state I was in and my surroundings came into focus once more. The unbearable heat hanging in the air and the itch of my “Sunday best” against my skin once more grated on my nerves. A dull ache in my back from sitting on the hard wooden pews for so long only now began to register. So too did the pastor’s words begin to register. His voice was no longer the dull background noise it had previously been, but was now a fully recognizable sermon. My surroundings were now once more in crystal clear focus, but the figure in the crimson cloak was nowhere to be seen.

Of course it had never really been there. Things don’t just appear and disappear in the span of seconds. Inhumanly tall figures in blood red cloaks don’t just walk down the aisle of your church, completely unnoticed by the rest of the congregation nonetheless. These were all established facts that my childhood brain knew to be true. And since the existence of the cloaked figure defied these facts then it couldn’t have really been there. This is part of the reason why I was able to so easily shake off what I had seen. After all, there is no sense in giving attention to boredom induced dreams from childhood. The other reason was a little more abstract. I had this feeling deep in the back of my mind that if I lingered on what had just transpired for too long then I may find something I couldn’t forget. Thus I shook the incident off and turned my attention to the pastor. I turned my attention to what I should have been focusing on this entire time. I of course had been spaced out for a good portion of the pastor’s sermon and had missed most of it. He had already expended his allotted hour warning us of the dangers of falling for the devil’s tricks and now at this time he was finishing things up. I tuned back into his sermon just in time to hear his last few words:

“Beware for the Devil is a deceiver and his greatest trick was convincing humanity he never existed.”