Author’s Note: A little different tune today. A bit of fiction about a particularly scary personal rabbit hole.
April had been a month-long deluge. We used twice the socks; the puddles and rivulets of runoff begged to be jumped in and over, especially after long days in stuffy classrooms with no lunchtime recess. Mom hung our wet pants over the shower curtain rod; they dripped on to a frayed towel spread on the floor beneath. Our sneakers practically lived in the dryer.
Between the school library and the public library, I had gained access to a Halloween-colored collection of books on the horror film classics: The Wolfman, Dracula, Frankenstein. The school library also owned a book on horror films wherein I first met Count Orlock and Erik Claudin. The public lIbrary’s series from Time-Life Books—The Enchanted World—completed my tour of the terrible fantastic; I was set for a month of pleasure reading.
“What have you got there?” Dad asked.
I showed him the book Wizards and Witches. He frowned at it, as if blaming the book for arriving in my hands.
“That’s garbage,” he said, and walked away.
After that, he didn’t ask what I was reading, opting to lace his question with judgment.
“Still reading garbage?”
Of course, the Playgirl he found under my mattress six years later was far worse to him than anything I had brought home before. As I reflect on it, my only regret is that I didn’t start reading comic books sooner, since those were banned in our house as well.
I rolled my eyes and held up whatever I was reading so he could read the cover.
“Yep. Garbage,” he invariable decreed.
That night I awoke to the light of the full moon shining through my window. The clouds had parted, the patter of rain ending just in time for me to notice the silence. No chirping of crickets or cries of spring peepers. No whirrs or croaks, no skittering of rodents over detritus. Not even the rustle of leaves. We lived on the edge of the woods. Silence was wrong.
“Hey Justin?” I asked. I could see the hulk of my older brother in bed beneath the far window. Overweight and a heavy sleeper, he snored badly. But now I heard nothing.
“Justin, I know you’re awake. Answer me!”
I slid out of bed and crossed the creaky old floor. He didn’t stir. I pulled on his shoulder. He rolled back, eyes glassy, lips blue.
Heart pounding, I ran from the room. The attic door was next to our bedroom, and I heard the clomp of heavy boots descending the creaking stairs. I smelled formaldehyde and ozone. The groaning started before I reached my parents’ bedroom.
“Mom! Dad!”
I pounded on their door, grabbed the knob, and flung it open.
They were dead, too, wrapped in thick webs. Something skittered under the bed. I turned. Something with yellow-eyes snarled from the darkness of the bathroom.
I raced past my sisters’ room, sure of the horror I would find if I opened their door. Instead I bounded downstairs, and struggled with the kitchen door, sparing a glance just as Orlock in his rat-toothed glory crept from around the corner that led to the cellar.
The door was locked. Something grabbed me from behind. I awoke.
It happened again the next night, after which I was too afraid to go to sleep. I pictured them waiting, horrors taking shape in the cellar, in the attic, under the bed, their clomps and growls and snarls held at bay just for me. The stink of them—wet wolf and the rusty smell of blood—came to me in my waking hours.
My father decreed that I had too active an imagination, and confiscated my books. I didn’t want to tell him that he shouldn’t take my Mad Scientist book because Fredric March might be the most handsome Dr. Jekyll I’d ever seen and I really wanted look at him some more.
The third night, I made it outside and across the yard. But Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch caught me in the driveway. I skidded across the stone and gravel, tumbling to all fours as her green claws dug into my shoulder and scratched wet grooves down my back. My limbs gave out. A cackle filled the damp, foggy night.
My palms and knees hurt the next few days.
I made it across the street a few nights later. Nearly hit by a car. The witch caught me running up the road, screaming for help. I didn’t know if the car was real. I felt the whoosh of wind and the blare of a horn. It smelled like fire as it passed, contrary to the icy wind that followed in its wake. But I didn’t dare turn. There was no time to look back.
The first time I reached the neighbors, I actually paused to reconsider. These were not nice neighbors: the windbag, the milquetoast, and their spawn. But I pounded on the door anyway. Screamed for them. Something with claws yanked me off the porch and dragged me across the yard.
Finally, one night they answered. A quartet of shambling corpses. Emaciated cheeks and the stink of rotting flesh. Lolling eyes and broken grasping fingers. Not even the unsafe places were safe. I was alone. They swiped at me; I fought back. Tried to pull me inside. I ripped free of their clutches, tearing my t-shirt, and ran up the road, barefoot, crying, alone…
And then I awoke.
The next evening, Justin called me a faggot at the dinner table.
“Well, you should be more of a man, Brian,” my father said. Mom just stared at her salad. Jane leered at me, complicit in her silence. Little Alice chewed her cud, blissfully ignorant. And suddenly I knew what those horrors had been trying to say.
I determined to face my fears this time—not to run—sure that I was alone. Anything I did in my life, I would do for myself. Love and support did not exist; help wasn’t coming. No one would care for me like me.
The nightmare didn’t return.
I’m older now, and there are days, really bad days, when I think I could dream it again. I am no longer the lonely boy in the house on the edge of the woods. But I can sit in the park, or at a restaurant, or drive home on a perfectly blue day, birds chirping in the trees, and feel a hand, clammy against my neck, or glance in the rearview mirror to see a pair of glowing eyes staring back. Or hear the unnatural creaking under my bed as my husband snores gently beside me.
No, the nightmare hasn’t come back.
And it’s my job to keep it that way.
Nicanor Abbott 