LET’S DO THE MONSTER MASH
By Amelia Pillow
At a cookout recently I found myself sitting quietly alone, sipping my beer and trying to think of conversational topics to bring up with the strangers surrounding me, or how to enter those already in progress. As usual, I found myself sitting alone for quite some time, silently drinking and eavesdropping. When I had finally become used to the virtual bubble of silence around me, I was taken out of my private revelry by the voice of a teenage boy who had taken a seat beside me without my noticing.
“When you were a kid, what was the monster under your bed?”
It took me a moment to respond, not because I didn’t have an answer readily available, but because a) I was thinking how I loathed teenagers, b) I was simultaneously impressed by the question, and c) I was wondering what it meant that the only person who wanted to talk to me was a teenage boy. As he wasn’t talking about marriage, babies, or home- ownership, I decided this was, though unexpected, probably the best conversation I was going to get into, and responded.
“Well,” I said, “there was this movie, Cat’s Eye, that I saw when I was a kid. It was about this little girl who has asthma and her parents just think she’s having attacks in the middle of the night, but really there’s a little troll that lives in her room and tries to suck the life out of her while she sleeps.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen it,” said the kid.
“Well, that’s what was under my bed, except there were, like, a dozen of them. I always thought that if I pulled the blankets up over my head and tried to breathe really softly, they’d think I was already dead and leave me alone.” What I didn’t mention was that I also had asthma as a kid, so the terror of not being able to breath was particularly frightening and real to me.
“Mine was a blob that oozed out from under my bed as soon as the lights went out. If I touched the floor, or even let any part of my body hang over the edge of the bed, it would squish up and absorb me.”
We talked like this for a while, relating how so often our childhood fears corresponded to movies we’d seen. I also told him how, after seeing only the cover of the movie Ghoulies at a video store (which shows a comically suspender-clad, green puppet rising out of a toilet bowl), I was terrified to sit on the pot for months.
As the night wore on the teenager left with his parents, and I was forced into conversation with people my own age. Fortunately for me, people were more boozy by this point and the conversation much more lively. But it got me to thinking, what was the monster under my bed now? And what were the things that I had never grown out of; what monsters still plagued me?
One answer came quickly and easily: the dark. I don’t care how old I get, you leave me alone in the dark, especially in a place that is unfamiliar to me, and I am going to freak myself out. In childhood, the dark was where the evil things hid. They waited until night came, and they could move around without being seen, could come for me, quivering in my bed. The dark was not my friend. As an adult, the dark and I still have a fragile relationship. But when I hit thirteen, I quickly realized that
I could use the dark to my advantage. Under its cover, I could move around without being seen and,
while others slept (namely my parents), engage in all kinds of acts ill-advised by the light of day. The
night allows us all a sense of freedom and anonymity deprived us during the day. We reserve our wildest
parties and most deviant behaviors for the blackest hours.
Despite the fact that I may have had some of my best times in the dark (haven’t we all?), when the sun goes down and I find myself alone on a deserted street, or even in a home behind a locked door, you better believe that the shaky hand of fear is tightening its grip around my stomach at every creak and shuffle. There are several reasons I’m such a wuss. One: I have extremely poor night vision, and every over- loaded coat tree and over-flowing garbage can becomes an escaped convict or rabid dog lurking in the shadows. Two: the night is when most violent crimes are committed. I know, it sounds obvious, but we all know it’s true. Just like I said before, we use the night to hide our identities, to go places we wouldn’t go by day, and to do things we’d rather others didn’t see us doing. This isn’t any different for criminals. Maybe you’d say that’s no reason to be afraid of the dark, but to that I say, you just don’t have my imagination.
So maybe it would be better said that what keeps me awake at night isn’t the void of light, but what that void might contain. But most of all, what robs me of my sleep when I am safe and sound in my own bed, cozy in my familiar room, isn’t what’s outside, but what’s inside. The darkness contained within my own body and what goes on within it has kept me awake more nights than I care to mention. Inside my own mysterious nooks and crannies are curious pains, lumps, and god only knows what. It is a horror to me that something so close to me, something so intimate as my body might be keeping secrets that could not only hurt me, but kill me.
You think you know your body, but then something goes wrong. Maybe it’s not even something that big, maybe it’s just an ache that sticks around a little longer than normal, or a suspicious looking mole.
But combine these things with my out-of-control imagination and you get an enemy that is malicious
and conspiring against me. In the past month alone I have convinced myself that not only are all of my
teeth going to fall out due to an invasive flesh-eating mouth infection, but that I have a tumor growing
on my ribs, a possible concussion, and perhaps syphillis. Do I have any information to prove any of these diagnoses? No. But I also can’t totally dis- prove them, either. (Well, aside from the syphillis, which I am now positive that I don’t have, though I cannot keep images I’ve found on Google from scrolling through my mind and terrifying me into a cold sweat. Seriously, those pictures are the best form of contraception you will ever find.)
The point is, it is the unknown that is terrifying to all people, whether young or old. Maybe you don’t see serial killers at the end of dark alleys or break out in goosebumps at every gurgle and twitch of your own body, but I can bet you’ve jerked awake more than once and tossed and turned, agonizing over whether you’ve made a terrible decision in your career, or whether your partner may be cheating, or whether you could have saved some loved one from themselves. And the truth is, you may never know. Isn’t that worse than the boogeyman hiding under your bed? Happy Halloween.
