There was a biker once, got himself pistol-whipped by a young hothead and disappeared into the woods and reappeared with a rifle and started firing at everyone. Sprinting past the bonfire with all the other delinquents, we scattered like embers into the thick Florida brush as the high-pitched rounds zipped overhead. Sure, that was intense, but I wouldn’t say I was terrified. There wasn’t time to be—it was all reaction and chemicals. Terror requires time to really sink in.
Then there was that day my skateboard slipped out from under me as I was crossing the street. I was pumping along and my wheel hit a ghost rock and seized up, flinging me headlong under the front of a BMW waiting for the traffic light. I remember the feel of the tire at my stomach. I must have caught sight of the driver as I was falling, because I remember him on his phone. Just as I looked up, the light turned green. My body gave a spasmic jump and I somehow spun out from under the car using stomach muscles I didn’t know I had.
That was downright distressing. Harrowing. Alarming. But not terrifying. When I think of distressing moments, I often feel weirdly heroic for having survived them. Recalling them doesn’t bring tears to my eyes like when I think of moments of true terror, when my memory plants me so firmly back in the moment that it all comes alive again and my senses pique in preparation for what I know is coming. Like whenever I think of the Fill-in.
Even those times I’m pulled awake in the middle of the night by something I can’t quite name and turn in bed to face the still silhouette of my wife, entirely convinced that if I checked her breathing I’d find her cold and stiff. Even a moment as unimaginably depressing as this, which wells me up even now considering it, won’t affect me in that visceral, hair-raising animal way as when I’m sharing stories at a party, or a dark corner of a bar, and someone asks what my most terrifying moment was, and my testicles draw themselves up slowly and my nostrils flare as I grow still and quiet, transported to that dark bedroom again. I know full well which story I won’t be telling, because to speak of the creature might summon it, and even now as I write this for you, Dr. Siveskind, I fear the give of some webbing whose ripple calls out through the universe, and I’m reminded of the soup-can telephones my brother and I used to make in my grandparents’ back yard, my voice vibrating along a thin string.
Per your instructions, I’ll try to describe my experience, in order to render it mute, bludgeon it with reason, confiscate its power. It’s been hard—a haunting is truly gut-level shit. You know how grabbing hold of a person next to you during a scary movie is comforting, because you share space but also because you sense some strength in numbers? In a real haunting, that doesn’t happen. You sense the helplessness of those around you, and if there’s no love between you, you hope the ghoul goes after them first. Terror debases you. Even as I revisit the event, even as I type these words, I feel singled out, as if I’m reentering its domain, bringing you along with me, and I’m not sure that’s such a good idea. We don’t want something like this aware of us.
Forgive a middle-aged former con and mild technophobe for searching for meaning in what comforts him most, old books. I trust authors to do the hard work of investigating and making sense of the world. So I turn to Anne Radcliffe, who once defined the difference between horror and terror as the feeling one experiences after an upsetting event (horror) versus the feeling that precedes the event (terror). I’m terrified of public speaking, but once I’m up in front of the audience, it’s like I was born to be there. I teach adult students down at the university on Wednesdays and Fridays, and once after reading a fairly disturbing Sarah Kane play, a student asked me what the difference was between the two and I didn’t have a cohesive answer, so I went checking for who might. Terror is the worse of the two, in my opinion, because the potential for what can happen, fed by the imagination, is much greater at times than what actually occurs.
You ever had to wait a few days for the results of a serious medical exam?
But there’s an even worse type of fear, a third type that Saint Anne skipped over, which I would call “terror-in-retrograde.” It occurs after the terror, after the horror, when that trauma is unexpectedly provoked, and there you are again, with the darkness stretching out before you, re-experiencing the terror of a former horror. This is why we have survivors asking for trigger warnings.
I’m typing through a panic attack, something I’ve learned to control, mostly. It rolls up my throat like a skipped beat, and I shiver with the first wave of adrenaline. I’ll feel the aftershocks for the rest of the night now. The anticipation reignites my anxiety, forces a feedback loop that has me clawing at its clutch. It’s especially cruel when the reason for the terror remains unsettled, or unidentified, and revisits with no name you can give it, no definition. Naming a thing is controlling a thing, identifying its borders; if a thing cannot be defined, it cannot be rendered mute.
And so, what one experiences in the reimagining is pure eye-watering dread, and here I go, sucked back into the inevitable Event, back into the pernicious feeling that envelopes me whenever I recall my grandparents’ house in Melbourne, Florida, that summer my dad couldn’t find a job and my mom coaxed my brother and me into collecting aluminum cans from road shoulders in exchange for McDonald’s ice creams. Even now my heart rate is sliding vertical as I look over the ridge of my laptop toward the dark kitchen, my bedroom off to the right, with the door slightly ajar—did it just shift?—trying to track for movement. I wait for a calm moment to groove my thinking as I trace these memories back, back to the tan stucco house on Seminole Blvd, the grapefruit and nectarine trees, the low-hanging mulberry branches with their obsidian fruit, the old-timey church down the block, shuttered and boarded, the hot rising stench of frog-spawn festering in mossy canals…
This was the mid-80s, long summer weekends at the beach and Garbage Pail Kids and Thriller, the job market along the Space Coast collapsing into a sharp downturn following the Challenger explosion—engineers pushed out by disappearing government contracts. At the bottom of the great food chain was my father, a construction worker and mason, who moved us into his parents’ house to wait out the sudden housing slump. My grandparents didn’t mind, their place had four rooms and a pull-out couch. It was customary for family members to crash whenever they were in town or fallen on hard times, and I remember a steady stream of aunts and uncles rolling in, escaping Pennsylvania, dreaming of Disney and gifting us their delicious Lebanon baloney, Charles Chips in big yellow tins, Hershey’s chocolate, and crisp cheddar-cheese popcorn from the factories where they worked.
But nobody stayed long. Nobody but us, that is. Inevitably, by week’s end, these family members would opt instead for a hotel or a friend’s house, because some bizarre occurrence had driven them from their beds in the early hours. I’d hear them arguing in hushed tones in the kitchen at 2 am as I lay crushed in the bed I shared with my younger brother Fig and some random cousin. They’d be trying to convince my grandfather, a WWII vet and fervent materialist, that they’d just experienced something otherworldly, and no, it wasn’t just in their heads, while my grandfather assured them it was creaky attic beams, not voices. He’d laugh with a gusto you’d expect from a combat pilot, a man who carried into the midnight flak state secrets that would later prompt the bombing of Japan—this old devil dog, having to listen to yet another child of his startled by the stubborn scraping of a branch against their bedroom window. He loved them, he’d say, but they were lunatics.
Cradling Fig next to me, I could tell he was awake by his breathing. We lay together, hoping the aunts and uncles would stay—more bodies, better average—and maybe we’d be left alone by the hauntings. We’d all experienced what my grandparents hadn’t, for whatever reason; what they’d perhaps hardened to or blocked out, like the chimes of their grandfather clock. But my brother and I understood what my relatives were going on about: A month earlier, reading by flashlight in the same room we were now curled up in, Fig and I watched the slatted closet doors open by themselves. The floorboards creaked in slow progression, and then the bathroom door opened and the lights inside began flickering spasmodically. I know this sounds cliché—but so are car wrecks on prom night. Water boils at a certain temperature. Cats hate baths. The next morning we woke up to discover, above our heads, fourteen water stains in the form of boot prints stamped across the ceiling.
You might think we’d pick up and go to another room, but the eerie phenomena weren’t relegated to any one section of the house, so switching was pointless. And we weren’t going to move out—we had nowhere else to go. My dad was good at ignoring anything, including us, and my mother was a sometimes-psychic homemaker who saw stuff that wasn’t there on a fairly regular basis, so wasn’t necessarily put off by it.
The room where the freakiest shit happened stood directly across from where my parents slept. It had built-in closets that ran the entire length and height of one wall, which is where my cousin Ben once went looking for a shirt but instead found a chuckling disembodied head. Now, Big Ben was a heavyset yard brawler who once drove a barbell into the forehead of a kid who looked at him funny. He wasn’t one to run from anything, but that night he exited the house at full sprint, jabbering incoherently, and slept in his car the final two days of his vacation. This was the same room where, when my foot slipped out from the covers over the edge of the bed, whatever yanked me floorward was strong and much more violent than anyone playing a prank would be with a child. My parents rushed in with my shouts, but in the end my father chalked it up to yet another nightmare, which I’d been having a lot of lately. My mother, whose portents occasionally made it to the local evening news, was again not overly concerned—the loving god she served faithfully would let nothing happen to her kids.
From then on, each night, Fig and I set up a barrier of stuffed animals around the bed—Shamu and Teddy Ruxpin, guardians at the gates of the underworld—before turning out the lights.
Neither existential nor metaphysical crises were my father’s strong suit, so he did what lots of people do when faced with problems he perceived to be of the mental variety—he created laws to keep the sufferers in check. Our television viewing time was cut in half, and he immediately banned sugar or caffeine after 7 pm. He also began reading us Bible stories at night in a half-hearted attempt to balance out the weird stories my mother made up off the top of her head, stories involving the adventures of Junior Fly, or horror stories about a murderous tree named Gitchy Goomie, who had a peculiar desire to rip the heads off kissing lovers on park benches.
I bet you’re thinking the house was haunted more by our anxieties than any sort of spirit. I can already hear you diagramming how these stories affected us subconsciously.
It’s true that I still have nightmares of the place, strange premonitions with bright metaphors of biblical ascription—emaciated cows on the ceiling, a life-size Virgin Mary statue whose cement eyes flung themselves open and followed me around the room. The small Baptist church we attended down the block was wrestling with a couple controversies, sexual in nature, and I can’t ignore the possibility that this was shaking my young faith, that certain paradigms and structures were crumbling between the stated nature of the church and its reality.
But one night I woke to the high-pitched screeching of a demon seeking permission to enter me, and to this day I remember that grazed-metallic sound, and the request made not so much in words as in a deep pressure in my mind. Most horror films get it wrong—they don’t want you dead, they want to get inside you.
Eventually we did move out of my grandparents’ house and into a literal shack infested with enormous spiders the size of an open palm. Wood spiders, harmless, but alarming to a child. My mother kept us collecting roadside cans for nickels and dimes while my father took day labor jobs doing whatever was needed. We chased snakes in the backyard, Fig and I, climbed pine trees, and fashioned bows and arrows from palmettos, finding outdoors what kids now find mostly online, some measure of wilderness. And we were happy, I remember. But the local economy continued to dredge downward, and when my father’s work dried up again, we were evicted from the small house and forced back in with my grandparents.
Nobody was excited by this prospect, but it just so happened that before we were being evicted, my grandparents decided to move as well, from Melbourne to Palm Bay, a densely wooded town that was more or less an extended farm at the time.
Lucky us. We didn’t have to stay in the haunted house again. Whatever had claimed the place as its own could have it. Let the next occupants decide what was real and what wasn’t.
My grandparents’ new house was smaller but nicely divided—my grandparents kept to one side of the house and we kept to the other, meeting in the kitchen for meals. My brother and I shared a room with a bunkbed, the door opening to a hall which ended at my parents’ bedroom, with a bathroom situated in-between, so that whenever I got up to use the restroom at night, I could look down the hall and find my parents lying in bed. We were a family of open doors, for the most part, and this is a great comfort for a kid of a certain age. Children later gain some measure of independence by choosing to shut the door themselves, but for a younger kid, safety is valued higher than freedom.
The new house was very recently constructed, cinderblock coated in orange stucco, nothing special about it. It felt safe, in the way certain things feel too boring or stale to be impactful, which is why doctors’ waiting rooms look and smell the way they do. Purposeful insignificance.
I’ve mentioned nightmares, and my mother’s on-again off-again psychic ability: When I was young, my mother noticed that some of my dreams were also beginning to correspond to real events. I won’t go into too much detail here, save to say my mother and my grandmother have been sought out for their specific abilities by others. By a president’s son, for instance, who wanted to know how my mother knew his father would be shot, and why she had decided, unprompted, to share that information with the police chief, for whom she worked as a secretary. My mother compared her gift to weather forecasting, but from an armchair, that old hurt in one’s knuckles and knees before a storm. A short narrative would appear in her head, an image or two, like some memory she couldn’t quite place. I had no real belief in my own abilities, if I actually had any. It was uncontrollable, anyhow, and slightly embarrassing to report. I recall my mother apologizing for passing it down. She said if I wanted to, I could learn to ignore it. So I did. The thing I couldn’t ignore, she said, was that I was an “attractive presence,” her words for people that act as a kind of lightning rod for the bizarre. I was too young to care or argue over the statement when she told me, which was the night I discovered I might be psychic too. I was watching TV and got this eerie feeling, and the back of my neck got immediately hot and sweaty. I turned around to find my mother in the kitchen, her eyes boring a hole in me.
“Do you feel that?” she asked.
I didn’t know what to say. “Make it stop,” I pleaded, after a few difficult seconds.
“It will in a minute,” she said in a flat voice. “Someone died.”
And then the phone rang and spooked us both. One of the aforementioned aunts had passed away.
This is all true. I have no reason to lie about any of this, and I have people who will corroborate the stories. All but this one, the one I’ve been paddling around this entire time, not wanting to really dive into it. But this is what you said I needed to talk about, so here goes.
Summer was almost gone, the mood some fleeting ember dancing about the tropical evenings. Fig and I had spent that day racing and jumping bikes in the woods. We came home complete sweat-monsters, showered half-heartedly, and collapsed on the couch to watch old movies on TBS. Mom had bought us a two-cheeseburger meal on her way home from church—my father stayed on for his deacon duties—and let us eat three scoops of ice cream from the freezer before we conked out on the couch. It was our father who’d wake us, patting our backs as we drifted wearily to our bunkbed. I slipped into the bottom bunk as Fig’s bony knees slowly struggled up the ladder to the top.
We fell asleep.
I remember waking up drenched in sweat.
I remember clearly the shirt sticking to my neck, my breathing heavy—feeling very much in an unknown place, enough so that it took some time to get my bearings. I sat up slightly, my heart racing in the dark, and turned toward the dimmed bathroom light coming from the hallway. It took me a moment to realize a huge face was blocking the light—my brother’s face. He was leaning over the top rail of the bunkbed looking down at me.
I must have shouted in my sleep and woken him. I did this a lot, and still do, half-awake with dead limbs, my disconsolate murmuring growing steadily to a scream until I wake up to my wife rubbing my chest and head, clenching my hands, as I gurgle through the horrific lockjaw of sleep paralysis.
Fig must have leaned over to see if I was okay, and I was, and said so. “It’s okay, I’m okay.” But he was unsure, and watched me for a little longer. Until his watching felt…different. And it was then that I realized I needed to pee really badly, and went to move from the bed, which cued my brother to get out of the way and rise back up. I rolled out of bed and took a few steps toward the bathroom, but something made me turn back.
Fig sat there scrunched forward, watching me intently. “What?” I asked him. He didn’t reply, simply watched. When I stepped toward him he retracted, pulling further into the shadows. I could make out his dark brow, the cut of his hair, the full shape of his shoulders—and I recall thinking he seemed afraid of me.
What had I shouted in my sleep?
My bladder reminded me why I was up, so I made my way into the hallway. Before cutting into the bathroom, I peered down toward my parents’ room. And there I saw, laid out across the floor beside their bed, the shape of Fig, asleep. I’d later learn that he’d had a nightmare, and pulled his blanket and pillow down the hallway to carve out a little cot for himself from pillows he’d stolen from the couch.
I felt the creature’s gaze on my sweaty neck.
I’m telling you, Doc, I felt its gaze emanating from the top bunk, crouched there. My mind was reinterpreting its previous reaction, which now seemed like that of a nocturnal animal surprised its camouflage hadn’t worked, startled to be seen much less spoken to. The space behind me curdled with cold as I anticipated with terror what might happen next.
My eyes are watering as I write this. The creature’s presence, it’s almost like it’s here with me now. I can sense it.
It knew my brother’s face enough to own it, to get inside and wear it. It watched me as I struggled out of my nightmare, its stolen face hanging there above me. I should have run but I couldn’t move. I stood very still and listened to the covers rustling behind me.
I turned because I had to see it again—
The shout I gave would send my parents straight up in their bed. My brother would tilt his raised head toward me. I anticipated my father rushing down the hall, just as I knew that the thing, the doppelgänger demon or whatever it was—the Fill-in, as I call it—was already gone.
My father would flip on the lights and together we’d check every nook of the room, finding nothing. I would sleep with them that night, and every night for a week, before returning to the bedroom. Fig and I would share the bottom bunk well into the school year. We slept with baseball bats, despite the logistics that confirmed any attack would be thwarted by the cramped space, and we’d probably end up knocking each other out. But they made us feel safe, especially after my father took away the bb air pistol I kept under my pillow.
You’ll ask me, Dr. Siveskind, if I knew then that I was going to murder my brother, and I can tell you I did not, not in any real way I can recollect. But I can tell you that while I was strangling him in the carport, not knowing I was actually killing him, both of us greasy with chain oil and arguing over who would be the first to ride the bike we were fixing, I recognized the creature’s fear in his eyes. Not terror, exactly—just disbelief. His face going purple. I might have worn the same expression; what was happening surprised us both. Perhaps if he’d inherited our mother’s sight, he might have seen it coming. Or maybe…I think this, forgive me…maybe some part of him was able to return back to that summer night in our bedroom at our grandparents’ house. Maybe it was the Fill-in that I saw. It’s an idea that creeps up on me sometimes.
I’ve always believed the creature would come back, and it does. The terrible things, they do come back.
To fight them, I’ve trained myself into a place of daily monotony, a place of disbelief, which is a kind of serenity. I like to think of the world as helplessly boring, dull, unimaginative. I like to listen for the trains out beyond the woods, hushing down the tracks, carrying diapers, or coal, or something equally innocuous. I take pleasure in watching cars drift gently down the block, people working with saws, old folks trying to cross streets. Summer campfires. I try to avoid walking into small rooms alone. Places in shadow. Unattended places. I like to lose myself in the sonorous repetition of ceiling fans and their incessant warp, letting each object slide into its perfectly facile, boring niche. I don’t own a TV. Because if you don’t seek to actively construct the world you want to live in, the world will build itself into whatever it wants. And that world is full of all kinds wickedness and terror.