Terror

..when I find myself there. The lights are very weak and the shadows and
dark and endless. The switched are old, round and made of metal and sometimes
they do nothing. There are doors down each side of the corridor. Often the
doors are shut. Above some doors is a glass panel where occasionally the pale
yellow of an incandescent globe shines.
When the doors are open there is either darkness or dancing shadows on the
dirty plaster walls. When there are people they sit hugging their knees on
the bed. They look at me passively but say nothing. They are pale with dark
circles under their eyes and have no age. Often they gently close the door
in my face with something like regret. They are saying that this is none of
my business. They will not help me. I am on my own – they are in my dream
but they are dreaming it as well. If I stop dreaming them, they can return;
if they stop dreaming me, I can return
Once there were stairs, but now there is just the corridor. The stairs were
a place of dread, and turned upward from the dark into another more impenetrable
dark. The staircase has a landing with large cupboards. I know that someone
is waiting for me somewhere on the stairs. He always wishes me harm. Sometimes
he kills me.
There are two other ways that I have seen the house.
At the end furthest from the road there is a kitchen that has a door opposite
from where you come in, which is barred with crossed timbers that stops you
getting to the rest of the house. I think the door may go to the corridor.
You enter the kitchen through the overgrown garden. Sometimes it is daytime.
The kitchen has wooden cupboards and an enamel sink. Nothing happens; I just
go there. And then I am not there.
I have also seen the house from the outside a small number of times. Even
though it is dark, I know that it has two stories and a front porch. Nothing
happens while I watch. There are no lights. The person beside me in the car
says nothing. I don’t know who it is – only that he is there.
I never look at him.
Many years ago, when I was quite young, the dreams would return night after
night, one night segueing into the next night’s mare, starting where
the previous night’s terror had ended. They were inexorable, far more
violent and full of fear than now. I would wake up knowing that, no matter
how hard I tried to stay awake, I would fall back into the clutches of the
dream.
The house is formed from the early recollections of several rambling North
Canterbury farmhouses and the first two houses that we lived.
The houses were spooky enough, but the terror is a direct result of sixteen
years of Brother Michael terrorizing me at any opportunity: Dark corridors
were seen as divine providence as far as he was concerned. Every one of these
houses had long, dark corridors where he could hide, knowing that I had only
one route to the bedroom, and knowing full well that I knew he would be lying
in wait for me. Even if he wasn’t, the fact that he might be
was just as terrifying
On behalf of all younger brothers I would like to ask; why is it that, after
years of harassment, you only have to beat your elder brother once in a fight
and it all stops? You don’t get to inflict sixteen years of terror in
your turn.
Being possessed of a good imagination, I can take any material and fashion
it into horror – one reason that I think that the ‘Wizard of Oz’
is one of the most frightening films of all time.
I saw the film at the age of six. It was the first time that I realised that
the universe was indifferent to one’s life or death. Dorothy’s house
has fallen on the Wicked Witch of the East whilst “on her broomstick
thumbing for a hitch”. All you see are the red shoes sticking out from
under the house. There she was pootling along on the fringes of a storm and
a house falls on top of her – whereupon a hundred and twenty four garishly
dressed “Singer Midgets” are obscenely happy. From there the film
only gets more disturbing.
Now, I find movies extraordinarily real, and far more frightening than life.
We look at the earliest film created on hand-wound cameras and wonder how
people could be as transfixed, as we know they were from the papers of the
day. When the first grainy black and white movies were shown of a train approaching
a station, people screamed and left the theatre thinking that they were going
to be run over.
For me the power of movies lies in the fact that one is in the grip of someone
else’s logic. You are lead by the imagination of another, to a world
where the characters’ fates are predetermined and unchangeable.
The first film I ever saw was a black and white projectionist demonstration
film that my mother showed whilst training as a teacher. A couple walking
through a daisy strewn English field then climbed over a fence stile. Then
without warning she ran the movie backwards, thinking that I would think it
funny.
However, I was terrified that the natural order of things was broken when
the world went into reverse. I ran without looking from the building across
a busy road and took refuge in a small park.
I have never looked back.