That Horrible Dread

By all outward appearances I am a nice, ordinary lady but I have been trying to creep people out for years now. Years. It’s all necessary of course. For my writing. I knew parts of my novel would fall directly in the category of horror and so I had to study the craft. That’s my dinner party answer.

You, you, read It and Thomas Harris, and books that dabble in possession?

Well, I had to. For the art you see. I had no choice.

But then the curious sort don’t stop at why do you read that stuff, but venture to the more probing, why do you write that stuff and now we have to go into the archives. I trace it back to eighth grade. To the slumber party with all the requisite trappings. A movie was suggested, probably by the tired mother who wanted to find a way to calm the gaggle of wired twelve and thirteen-year olds dancing around her house. The mother suggested a movie. That is worth noting. She didn’t suggest this movie. Not this one. But she did insist I call my parents to ask for permission before we thrust the VHS into the player. “You’ll never shower again.” My grandmother said that in the background while my parents thought about it. They warned me. I was cautioned. And something about needing to be warned made the appeal of this dark apple all the stronger. What was this strange magic? This tale that had the power to captivate and terrorize? Suddenly watching this movie far outweighed the thrill of prank calling cute boys whose voices still cracked or toilet papering the neighbor’s house. After assurances on my part that I wouldn’t let it get to me, they agreed. Reluctantly perhaps. I could watch the horror movie with my friends. Someone turned off the lights. We all clutched blankets. Someone pressed play.

I should have listened.

There are three possible elements to fear in story. Terror, the lowest hanging fruit. Horror, the slimy, harder to reach fruit. And dread, the one in the thorniest branches, right at the very top of the tree. Anyone can write terror, even the most novice writer (I have this on good authority, because when all my characters were still gasping—What, she gasped; Where, he gasped; How, they gasped in unison—I could write a BOO! scene). Horror presents more of a challenge. It’s nuanced and subjective. My little brother once watched The Shining by accident when he was in 4th grade and we were only alerted to his forbidden film exposure by the loud laughter coming from his room. One man’s horror is hilarious to his roommate. It’s difficult for authors to know what will horrify. Sounds tough, she gasped. And then dread. I’ve been writing for over a decade. Read every craft book, done everything Stephen King told me to do, and exposed myself to the best of the best in the genre, despite my own fear and trembling. I’ve scoured scary stories, treated them like textbooks. I’ve followed the spell to the letter. And still. I’m not sure I can illicit dread in a reader. Certainly not like the insidious kind that infected me the night of the slumber party.

For the next six years I required five large bath towels in order to shower. I only started closing the curtain again when I moved to a dorm room and it was no longer an option to shower in the open. Even then I left it cracked too much on the margin for social norms.

Terror: taking a shower in a hotel room and seeing a figure with a knife enter the bathroom. Horror: the figure is wearing his dead mother’s dress. Dread: you have to take a shower.

Despite the burden of added laundry and palpable fear, I am glad I watched that movie twenty-one years ago. It taught me something. That I liked being afraid to a certain degree. That as much I love a great good guy, I love an unexpected bad guy. That maybe I wanted to tell stories about good guys and bad guys, too.

And yet, it would be nice to foresee myself enjoying a shower in a hotel. Especially the ones that take place after a long travel day or in a luxurious hotel. But I don’t think that’s in the cards for me. I love a good hotel. I don’t like the showering part.

Everything costs us another thing. Sometimes the only currency is fear.

Since I’ve opened the creaking basement door and let you in on my strange bathroom habit, I’ll tell you one more. I have taken upwards of 12 pregnancy tests in the last 4 months. That’s a guess. It could be as many as fifteen or seventeen. You lose count fast with those slender ones that come in boxes of fifty. There was the time the pantry smelled off. The time my water tasted weird. The more reasonable occasion when my period was three days late.

Arguably, there is little reason to be found in holding three sticks upwards toward the light, squinting with baited breath and questioning your vision and sanity as you search for the slightest hint of the color pink.

It’s not that I don’t want more children. It’s not that I’m done. I’ve been forced to excavate my feelings on that because strangers ask so frequently. Why just recently, in line at an inevitably disappointing airport coffee shop, it was: Is she your first?(Conceal my clinched jaw.) Fourth. Whoa, all girls? Nope, two and two. So are you done? This question from a man whose occupation, residence, and marital status, were and remain a mystery. I didn’t know his name. He never asked mine. Speaking of insane practices that seem reasonable. Speaking of appropriate times to gasp.

No, I’m not done.

It’s something worse. I am afraid.

I’ve confessed the thing that, were we dating, I’d save for the third date. I read very scary stories. I didn’t tell you when. I’d keep that until probably the fifth or sixth dinner out.

I read them anytime really, throughout the year sprinkled in with short story collections, rereads of my most beloved classics, the big commercial splashes endorsed by celebrities. I read 1 or 2. But if you knew the numbers here, of horror books I’ve read, you’d know the math doesn’t add up. There are too many titles for only a couple a year.

The majority of my deep dives into dark waters occur in the early days of my pregnancies. At the grim intersection of intense physical pain and mortal fear. I read to anesthetize myself. The medicine must be very strong.

One absolutely riveting book I read, a far, far cry from the horror genre, was a memoir of homeschooling. Second date fodder. The writer, the mother, had eight children and something like fourteen pregnancies. She wrote briefly about her miscarriages. How in the early days of those pregnancies she felt well. She never felt sick prior to a loss. Wellness preceded death. How was it she described her state preceding life ... that terrible sickness. And then it would come, that terrible sickness.

I could have wept from the feeling of recognition.

Morning sickness is terrible. That’s her word.

But it’s an ailment that, despite its all consuming grip on me, I find impossible to describe to the uninitiated. How does morning sickness feel? I once told my husband I didn’t feel sick, I was sick. I was sickness, all over, to my core.

Morning sickness doesn’t have the mundane violence of appendicitis or a bad fall. It doesn’t have the gore of food poisoning—that would require eating.

Morning sickness is dread.

It is the unexpected footsteps on the stairs, now in the hall. In my body. In our house. In the tired eyes of the man left to care for the remains of me.

Me, swallowed by the invisible robber. Him, the machine. The animated creature that does not ever come to rest.

I look at us now from where I lie with this abominable blueberry bagel. I am sitting perfectly still, buried in blankets. He is jogging, his hand on the microwave buttons, his voice directing a child to a sanitary spot in order that he might clean something unmentionable that in fact he has already cleaned twice today.

It’s a man locked in a tower now, in this story, trapped by a frail monster. Forced to clean, cook, and worse, think like his wounded captor. I lurch back to my book about the ill-fated summer camp.

I worry. Does this all seem over the top and over wrought (that sickly, cloying sweet fruit every writer should pick only to toss far away) and terribly self-indulgent? Are you reminded of that final scene when Norman Bates is narrating his confusion over the strange events you witnessed and you think, ah, he’s innocent in a way. Just a disturbed man, abused by his mother in some heinous manner, he doesn’t know right from wrong. And then he delivers one of the creepiest lines in film while looking right into the camera, and curling his lips into a bone chilling grin. Innocent?

Have I been taking you for a ride this whole time? This is why I hate to bring it up. I feel guilty. Woe is me, I get so sick, it’s so awful, it’s scary. Everyone hates a horror movie girlfriend. There is only so much whining we can take.

A little secret: this whole thing is comprised of eighteen-month old field notes. Not the wild exaggerations of a person’s memory. I wrote this from my nest of blankets and stale Gatorade. I had to. I need a weapon against my dread.

I’ll be going back in the dark, dark woods again. I can’t know how I’ll get out. I need only know that I always do.

***

The next boyfriend I had after the slumber party came many months later and didn’t much like scary movies. He thought they were, and I quote with unveiled horror, “dumb.” But he’d read Jurassic Park. Not hopeless.

He’d patiently listened to me wax on about the genius of Psycho though most of high school. He came over to my house once and laughed when he found me dozing off in the afternoon after a long morning of swim practice, smack in the middle of some cable TV marathon featuring all of the crummy sequels. Dumb is justified here. Don’t waste your time.

But he hadn’t watched it with me.

On Halloween night our senior year of high school he agreed. When the credits rolled I felt nervous, exposed. Now’s the part where he realizes I am a freak and he breaks up with me for a normal girl and they discuss accounting on dates while I make a career at Hot Topic or something. I couldn’t tell him I wanted to write someday, I didn’t know it. I couldn’t explain that to write a very, very bright story sometimes you have to start with the color black and the bravest heroes need four-dimensional adversaries, I hadn’t learned that yet. I was thinking it was time to tell him how I showered. So I ratted on Janet Leigh, the doomed actress.

“She never took a shower again, not if she could help it. Only baths. With all the windows and doors locked but with the bathroom door open and no curtain.”

He made big eyes, appreciative and understanding, and said, “yeah.”

I laughed, right on cue. “Yeah, it’s kinda stupid but when I first watched this my parents got so annoyed with me. I, uh, didn’t close the shower curtain all the way. I was just kinda spooked a little or whatever and I’d put towels on the floor and shower with the curtain open. My mom would either trip on the wet floor or have an entire washer load of towels. Ha!” Ha. Ha. I’m lying. I still do this. Don’t run from me.

He didn’t laugh. He didn’t run from me. He didn’t yawn and grab his keys and mumble something about taking me home. He said something like, showering at home wouldn’t bother me but I’ll probably think about this the next time I’m in a hotel.

I married him.

He bought me a glass shower. A good one. None of that claustrophobic, roadside motel business. It has a 200 degree view and a great little bench if you need to sit down when you get light headed after puking.