nixtress's Diaryland Diary
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scary things
My mind has been on spooky things lately, the cause being (I'm sure) the upcoming holiday.
And I was trying to remember the things that scared me when I was younger, that gave me shivers or haunted my dreams.
In the times that I wasn't terrified of waking in the middle of the night to the sounds of my father beating my mother, or the sounds of drunken arguing, I can remember other fears. There used to be a show on HBO, called the Hitchhiker, little stories sort of like The Twilight Zone. And I recall one being about a set of twins in love with the same man, a story that resulted in them taking a hatchet and splitting this man equally down the middle...just as they'd done with everything else in their lives. I remember that haunted me for a time.
And once, before my little brother was born, my parents took me to a drive in theater that was showing scary movies. The one that stuck with me was called The Boogeyman, I believe. And the reason it scared me? It began with two small children, a boy and a girl, and a set of adults who were obviously drunk and cavorting sexually. They tied the smallish boy to his bed with pantyhose because he was out of it when he shouldn't have been. As they carried on, the girl got a nice, shiny knife and cut the boy free, and as the adult male began to smack their mother around in the midst of some rough sex, smallish boy took that knife and stabbed them to death.
The premise of the movie was that while all of this was going on, we watched it in the reflection of a mirror, artsy glimpses of slasher gore. And further into the movie, accompanied by the sound of a heartbeat and rough breathing, people begin to die. To a young girl such as I was, lying in the back of a beat up old station wagon, hearing the sounds of violence overlaid with heartbeats...it was scary. I think more than anything it was because it wasn't so far removed from my daily life. Lying in my bed, hearing my own heart beat, waiting for the sounds that signalled rage in my house.
I wasn't afraid of ghost stories, wasn't frightened by typical things like shifting shadows and darkness. Those were comforting to me, peaceful in their quiet ways.
We moved to a little town here in Ohio the summer before my sixth grade year. That summer, I watched the Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the first time, as well as Children of the Corn. I'd read Stephen King's mini-story but it didn't have the same impact as the movie. Just beyond my backyard was a field of corn..rows and rows and rows of it. And just beyond that? Yup. A slaughterhouse. In the summer heat, the perfumey odor they used to try to mask the slaughterhouse smells just didn't cut it. And by midsummer, that end of town was thick with the smell of blood and spoiling meat combined with a sickly-sweet old-lady perfume. I remember after watching those movies, back to back, being petrified to take the dog out or even open the back door. I used to get the biggest chill just from imagining what went on out there.
It was made worse the summer my older brother moved back with us, the summer I first met my future husband. They both began working at the slaughterhouse and would come home for lunch, splattered with the bright red of new blood and the rustybrown of old, stinking of that peculiar odor of iron that blood has. And I couldn't help but think back to that damn movie...
As I've gotten older, scary movies don't scare me as much. Startle, yes, but really scare, no. It's the things I've seen at work that scare me. At the hospital, in the E.R., it was the boys brought in with injuries from ATV's and broken bones from the typical boy activities, teens brought in who'd been hurt while thinking they were immortal and invincible. With working in a law enforcement agency, it's seeing all the predators out there; people who prey like sharks on children for sex, drug dealers waiting to feed kids their first big buzz, the teenagers who've gotten lost along the way and are trying to find their way back. Those are the things that scare me now.
Now,I sleep pretty quietly, not afraid to wake up to the sounds of crying or shouting or slaps and punches. It's the daytime that scares me most, and the monsters that hide their teeth and claws in the masks and cloaks of normalcy.
N.
4:40 p.m. - 2003-10-18
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