Not Pictured: Normal
With Halloween just around the corner, I thought it would be festive to relate an old fashioned ghost story to all my faithful readers (and not to my unfaithful readers, you adulterous whores). This story takes place waaaaay back in October of 1994, when I was but a lad of 9. My family was living in the town of Columbia, IL, and my siblings and I were attending Immaculate Conception School. Now, at this time in my life I was a big reader, and the books that I loved were RL Stine's Goosebumps and Fear Street sagas. I also enjoyed reading Bruce Coville's Book of...series, like Bruce Coville's Book of Monsters, Bruce Coville's Book of Aliens, et cetera, et cetera (you fuckers didn't know I could speak Latin, did you). I was really into scary stories and horror movies. I think it started even earlier than 9, like maybe 4 or 5. You see, one of the earliest memories that I have is of being a small boy spending the night and Grandma and Grandpa's house. My Grandma usually stayed up late, and as I was too terrified to sleep in one of the upstairs bedrooms by myself, I slept on the living room couch. On this particular night, my Grandma let me watch the vampire movie Fright Night. I'm not sure why exactly. Maybe she thought that I was too young to understand it, which is true. At age 4, the plot of Fright Night probably went over my head a little, and I probably didn't understand much of what the characters were saying. Although my cognitive abilities were still being developed at that age, my eyesight was pretty much goddamn perfect! It wasn't the dialog or story pacing that scared the shit outta me! It was a fucking cross being burning into Evil Ed's forehead! It was Evil Ed being killed, but not before transforming into a hideous beast! It was the main characters being chased by vampires with huge fangs! It was the bloodshed! I remember my eyes peering through a cage of clenched fingers as Grandma asked, "Are you OK, Eric?" I nodded furiously. You see, as much as the movie terrified me, I couldn't help but watch. I didn't want to close my eyes...and I've been that way ever since. Anyway, let's jump back to 1994. As I said, I was very much into what young adult had to offer in the way of horror, and the coup de grace, the mothership of all horror anthologies, the motherfucking scariest thing I possessed was a series of books entitled Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones. The books were written by the late children's author Alvin Schwartz. And I use the term 'children's author' very loosely. I went back and reread these books recently, and I haven't taken a shit since, OK. These books are bowels-pluggingly scary. Come on, Eric, you're being a pussy. They can't be that scary. Really? According to Wikipedia, the Scary Stories trilogy "was America's most frequently challenged book (or book series) for library inclusion of 1990-2000 (Source: American Library Association)." Did you need to read that again? These books were so fucking terrifying that for an entire decade people wanted them taken out of the library. The target age for Mr. Schwartz's books: 9-12. And the horror of the books did not end with Mr. Schwartz's nightmare-inducing prose, oh no. The writer wanted to make sure that the reader could picture exactly the terrifying creations he was writing about. He didn't trust a child's imagination. He called on the talents of illustrator Stephen Gammell, a fellow Iowa boy who draws images so gruesome, schizophrenic demons jack off to them deep in the pits of hell. Seriously. If you don't believe me just click on following links: http://roberthood.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/gammell.jpg and http://stateofaffairs.info/wp-content/gallery/art-by-stephen-gammell/two_people.jpg and http://stateofaffairs.info/wp-content/gallery/art-by-stephen-gammell/alien.jpg and http://media.photobucket.com/image/stephen%20gammell%20gallery/decalonmysticker/church.jpg. Are you back from sitting in the corner weeping and etching crosses into your flesh with your fingernails? That shit was meant for 9-12 year olds! And I loved it! I fucking loved it! I devoured these books the same way I devoured my signature nacho creation (Lays sour cream and onion chips, topped with melted slices of Kraft American cheese. I made these all the time in fourth grade, until my dad yelled at me for wasting the cheese). My friends read the stories aloud to each other during sleepovers. We sang the macabre songs that Mr. Schwartz put in the books ("Both are dead in the very same bed, and neither one of them know it" is a lyric that comes to mind). I even did my own drawings based on Mr. Gammell's creations. I was a fan to put it simply. That is, until one fateful Autumn night in 1994. My brother, Dale (I've mentioned him before, right?), and I shared a bedroom in the basement of our house. And it wasn't a creepy or spooky basement; it was a nice, finished basement that on any other night would have caused me no fear. But on this night...I. Was. Fucked. You see, the basement, as nice as it was, did not contain a bathroom, so anytime I had to pee I had to march through the darkness, up the stairs, down a hallway to the bathroom. Well, it wasn't total darkness. I had a nightlight that stayed plugged in near the foot of the basement stairs. In hindsight, I think I had a genuine fear of the dark, as that nightlight stayed with me until I was in high school. Yet, the light cast was never really a beacon of safety, as it only served to give sight to all the crawling things I was afraid of. Also, I should note, that I peed a lot at night, maybe 3 or 4 times a night. So, making the trek was a pain in the ass to begin with. One night, Dale and I lay in our beds and I was suddenly awakened by the need to pee. I threw the covers off my body, trudged sheepishly out of the room, past the nightlight, which cast my stretched and black shadow against the basement walls, making me the terrible things I feared, but only for an instant. Up the stairs I went, ascending into the unknown pitch, an ominous void of nightmares, imagined or otherwise...I didn't know. Through the living room, where slips of light broke through the windows from the streetlights outside. A little bit of light. Not enough for comfort. Down the hall. It was so black it could have gone on forever. I stopped before the bathroom door, pushing it open with a soft nudge. I reached to the light, praying to God that when the light came on there were no goblins or ghosts awaiting to be shone. The light comes on...nothing. The same old bathroom I had been in countless times before. Now, let me say that the memories I have of that trip up to the bathroom are pretty familiar, as I had done it so many times. And I know that each time I made it there was always a little fear, but nothing more than an average child's wild imagination. Certainly not enough to keep me from going upstairs. I shut off the light, plunged once again into the blanketed depths of night. The journey to safety was not over. Down the hall I went, but this time something was different. Something was wrong. All at once Mr. Schwartz's words began to flutter through my mind like terrifying mental butterflies. These were soon followed by Mr. Gammell's illustrations. One in particular. The story that the image was attached to escapes me, but to this day the drawing is fresh in my head. It was of a small and elderly man wearing a black suit. His face had been made grotesque by old age and bad deeds. An evil rictus was cut across his mouth, and bright light burst out from a gash in the man's head. For whatever reason, this image has stayed with me from the moment I saw it, and even as I write this I am looking over my shoulder to make sure the creature has not found me. This image filled my mind, like water in a pitcher; I thought of nothing else. The hallway completed, I turned into the living room. Every silhouette of furniture was a mammoth beast waiting to tear me apart. Every sound was a footstep of some malevolent entity. I could sense the monsters closing in on me, my heart threatened to break through my chest, my breath slowed to a quiver. The basement door approached...the demons were upon me...I turned the corner to open the door...It's HIM! The man with the broken head! He had found me! I turned from the basement door in horror and literally, and when I say literally I mean I actually fucking did this, ran through the house with my hands flailing wildly above my head screaming bloody murder at the top of my lungs, tears cascading down my face. Through the living room I ran, down the hallway, before slamming into my parents bedroom door. I remember in the midst of my panic I could not find the door knob. Instead, I beat the door like a maniac, begging to be let in as the man's hands began to slither over my shoulders. Just as I began to feel his noxious breath on my neck, the door opened in a blaze of white light. My mom stood before me, looking like an angel sent from heaven. A severely pissed off angel, but an angel nonetheless. I threw my arms around her and buried my face into her gown and sobbed. "What the fuck are you doing?" Came my father's sympathetic voice. "Do know how goddamn late it is?" My old man was angry, my mom was angry, and my two younger sisters were also making their way into the room. In my rampage I had awoken them, giving real credence to their terror over my imagined one. "What's wrong? What is wrong?" My mother kept asking me, but I could not find the words. All I could do was continue to bawl. After a while, when nearly all the lights upstairs had been turned on, and I was beginning to calm down, my mother looked at me, and I remember her words perfectly, "This is because of those fucking books you read!" With tears still pooling in my eyes, I replied, "No, it's not!" Even then, in the middle of what was the most terrifying thing to ever happen to me, I would not implicate the source of my fear. I could not bring myself to give them up. They had mind-fucked me something awful, but I still refused to part with them. There was a spare room next to my sisters' room. My dad made my older brother get up and sleep in the double bed with me. I "slept" with my back glued to the wall, while Dale's body lay under the covers facing the open bedroom door. Outside, the hallway light was turned on. Every two seconds my head shot up, just to make sure the old man was not at that moment sneaking into the bedroom to finish me off. "Eric, lay down!" My brother would yell, so often in fact my dad once screamed from the master bedroom, "Shut the fuck up you two!" "It's Eric! He won't go to sleep!" "Get the fuck to sleep, Eric or I'll put you in the basement by yourself!" My dad always did know how to calm me down. My mom ended up sleeping between my two sisters in their room, because apparently I had scared the shit out of them. It was a long, long night, and the daylight did not come fast enough. The next day my mom rounded up my Alvin Schwartz books (I convinced her that RL Stine and Bruce Coville were innocent of the previous night's events) with tyrannical enthusiasm. They disappeared from my life at that moment...but the terror of that night lingered. As I said, our basement did not have a bathroom, but I still had to piss. But if I went upstairs, I risked being butchered by the old man with the cracked head. How did I solve this problem? Simple. I just walked out to my nightlight and pissed on the carpet. I did this night after night, giving no thought to what I was doing. To me it seemed like a perfectly normal solution: I was able to relieve myself in peace without being set upon by the terrors of the above floor. Now, let me do a quick side note: the actual reason that sent me running like a madman through the house was that in the corner by the basement door, where the door's hinges would be, I thought I saw the dark outline of a person, a person shorter than me at age 9. In my head, I saw the man with the split skull. I never told my mom or dad this. Instead, I told them that I had touched the door handle and felt this little knitted witch's head that slip over the knob, and not recognizing what it was, I was sent into a frenzy. Why lie? Once again, I did not want my parents to blame those books. I was loyal to them to the end. So, back to the pissing. This went on for a while. When I told Dale what I was doing he didn't believe me, so that night he stood in our bedroom and watched me piss all over the carpet by the nightlight. "You idiot," he said. "That's going to smell." But I didn't pay any attention to him. Pissing on the carpet was still more reasonable to me than walking up to the bathroom alone. One weekend in November, as my 10th birthday neared, my Grandma and Grandpa paid a visit. The same grandma that allowed the seeds of horror fandom to be planted. My brother and I were watching TV in the basement, as my mom walked downstairs with her folks. I will never forget my grandpa's words as he reached the bottom of the stairs: "It smells like piss down here." And I will never forget my mother's response: "Steve just put some varnish on the wood trim going around the bottom of the walls." Yes, Mother, yes. That's all it is. Varnish. And that is all it will ever be! I thought I was out of the woods, but the whole weekend my damn grandpa kept pushing the issue, insisting the basement smelled like urine, inviting my dad down on several occasions. My grandparents left, and I was sad to see them go. It sucked being that far away from them. But, I thought, at least things can get back to normal, i.e. me pissing mercilessly on the carpet. Well, my dad and mom did not forget my grandpa's urgings and they must have had a meeting, because not long after my mom sat me down and asked me if anything was wrong. I denied that anything was wrong, but the issue was not dropped. To be honest, I'm not sure if I broke down and told them, or if Dale told them (after all, he had to live down there with the stench too), but my parents eventually found out what was going on. But here's the kicker: my mom thought I was doing it in my sleep. She thought that I was sleepwalking, seeing the light from my nightlight, and thinking it was the bathroom, pissing right there on the carpet. Besides, no child functioning at full mental capacity would willfully piss repeatedly on the same carpet he walked on. My old man was pissed (pun intended) and paid to have a large section of carpet torn out and replaced. My mother suggested installing a toilet in the furnace room across from my bedroom so I didn't have to walk upstairs anymore. My dad suggested installing a goddamn five-gallon bucket in the furnace room. Guess which idea won out. So, carpet replaced, smell evaporated, but now I was reduced to sulking into the furnace room each night and pissing into a five-gallon bucket, then hauling it upstairs each morning to wash out in the tub. As pathetic and humiliating as this was, I still thought it better than the alternative. So, a new routine developed. Night after night I pissed in the bucket, day after day I rinsed the bucket out. Eventually, my dad did get around to installing a toilet in the furnace room, so a small amount of my dignity was able to be salvaged. Sometimes I think about that house in Columbia. I hope to this day that toilet still sits there. No sink, no mirror. Just a single, white porcelain toilet set in the middle of a nearly empty furnace room, a standing vestige to one little boy's imagination run amok. So, that is my little story for you all. As I wrap this up I am amazed at how those books affected me so. I don't think I have felt something so acutely since that night of pure unadulterated terror. Blinding fear, everyone should try it once. As for Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Gammell? Well, Mr. Gammell is still drawing, and hopefully scaring the piss out of a new generation of husky dreamers. I was saddened to hear that Mr. Schwartz had passed away, but the man has left an indelible mark on my childhood that I carry with me to this day. When I was in high school I won some awards for writing my own scary stories, and I can't help but feel that I owe some of that success to these two men. And though I have yet to earn any money from my imagination, I can at least say my imagination has caused others to lose money (here's to you Dad)! Happy Halloween everyone!
PS: My mom eventually did give me my books back. Thanks, Mom.
The Moore You Know: So, the popular saying goes, "Here's where the magic happens!" when referring to your bedroom. Well, magic actually does happen in my bedroom, because with just a few awkward jerks I can make my girlfriend's libido DISAPPEAR!
© Eric Moore - 2010
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