A Tale of Fear

Halloween is coming up.

I always loved Halloween, and not just because I was born around that time of year.
I always loved it because it's the one time of year where most people are willing to face their fears, to stop looking away from the darkness in which lies their own distorted reflection, locked away deep within their subconscious

During that one time of year, people get to see what I see.


I was about 6 years old when I first experienced the agony of true horror.
I only have very vague memories of my childhood, but everything about that night remained in my mind, clear as crystal.
Sure I had been scared before. We all have, it's part of being a child. Fear is a plant that grows deep within the holes of our knowledge, filling the voids until one day the light comes shinning. Until then, we are bound to be scared of the things we don't understand, children and adults alike. But children live in a world filled with the unknown, where the roots of fear have plenty of room to spread. Adults will give them tools to dig their way into it, filling the gap in their knowledge one question at the time, but it'll always come a time when fear catches on.
I thought I was past that state. I had fears, and those had been defeated by simple observations and a little logic. Sure I still had the occasional nightmares, but they no longer kept me up. Until that one night.

I woke up around 2 or 3 am. I often woke up around that time of night, usually to go to the kitchen get a snack and read comic books. Still half asleep, I was clumsily reaching for the light switch when I started hearing this strange sound coming from somewhere in my bedroom. It was soft but distinctive and regular. I dropped the light switch and started listening.
My mind eventually identified it, and the realization that followed chilled my blood.

The sound of someone breathing.

No, not someone.
Something.

The sound was too deep and yet too loud to be human. Unless of course someone was doing it on purpose to scare me. It was the first thought that came to me of course, and convinced a member of my family was pulling my leg, I softly started calling out their names.
First I called my sister's name. The breathing remained steady. I called out my mom, then my dad. No answer.
Being an unusually rational kid, I convinced myself there was a simple explanation to all this and started reviewing all the possibilities.  
I did not have a TV in my room, or any sort of machine that could have made a sound like this. My family did not own a dog, or any kind of pet, and my door was closed so it couldn't be coming from anywhere else in the house.
Suddenly, I realized the breathing sound was coming from under my bed.
That's when my sanity finally popped like a bubble of soap.

For the first time in my life, I was in the presence of something nightmarish and real.
A child's worst nightmare brought to life.


There was a monster under my bed.



That thought finally sank in, and although my first idea was to turn on the light, I realized I was too terrified to move.
The very idea of seeing the creature with my own eyes was unbearable to me. I remained in an agonizing silence, holding perfectly still for what felt like hours, my imagination filling my mind with images of gruesome nature, my thoughts now populated by black and hairy wolf-like monsters staring at me from the darkness with red eyes and grinning muzzles dripping with drool.
My now completely irrational mind had come to the conclusion the monster probably hadn't find me yet, and that I would remain hidden as long as the lights were off.
And so I waited, helpless, for whatever's breathing was now echoing in my head to find me and end this agony. But it didn't.
Instead, the fear brought me to a point where I was willing to die to end this nightmare. I wanted the monster to find me and get it over with. My reason was now but a mad scream, scaring itself at an alarming rate and begging for oblivion.

And so I screamed.

I screamed at the top of my lungs, releasing the terror I had been accumulating and inviting the creature to jump out of his hiding place and eat me alive. I screamed and I screamed, until finally the light came back into the room as my mother opened the door to see what was going on. What happened next is a little less clear, but I still remember looking down to finally gaze upon the objet of my fears and finding my godfather's old dog.

My godfather had gone on a trip for the weekend, and my parents accepted to keep his dog while he was away. I was very fond of it, and so my mother thought it would be a nice surprise for me to find him in my room when I woke up, so she snuck him in after I fell asleep.
I could have figured it out for myself of course, if only I had managed to remain rational for just a little while longer, but through that experience I learn just how fast fear can spread to your mind like a drug, clouding your judgment and twisting your senses.
From a simple lack of information, my fears had been allowed to run wild, like a pack of mad dogs whose shackles had suddenly vanished.

From this day on, my life changed. Instead of locking it all away, I became obsessed with becoming the master of these mad dogs. Inspired by the Scarecrow from the Batman comic books, I began to confront my own fears. One by one, I started analyzing my phobias, and with the help of my mother's psychology books, I started to make sense of them.
I played with snakes and caressed hand-sized spiders, I stood from the highest places and looked down at the abyss, I forced myself into confined spaces and began to live in the dark. I stepped into the shadows of my own subconscious, looked straight in the face of my demons and found their origins, but the more I hunted this forbidden emotion, the more I realized its source was beyond my grasp.

Fear comes from the unknown, and as long as there are mysteries, it will live on.

For at the roots of people's deepest fears, I systematically found the unknown in different forms.
Not knowing what lurks in the dark, not knowing what comes after death.
Masked killers, faceless monsters, invisible presences and unidentifiable sounds.
Everything from ghosts to unpredictable men, people quivered whenever their mind was unable to come up with anything but speculations, never to be denied or confirmed by any facts. Their imaginations would then bring to life the worst things they could possibly imagine, and the nightmares were born.
I guess all the mind games I put myself through eventually rubbed off on me. When I realized most people lived their lives sheltered away from their fears, locking away any thought that would make them uncomfortable, I was outraged.
At the age of 10 I started writing horror novel, at 12 I wrote an essay about what I thought the tortures of hell would be and gave it for my parents to read. In 10th grade, I was nominated for a speech contest and redacted a study about what actually happens to corpses after their coffins are laid into the earth, which I read in the presence of a jury composed almost entirely of catholic elderly whose expressions indicated they had been avoiding to think about it for quite a while.

But all that wasn't enough, and eventually I crossed a line I never thought I would cross.
At the age of 16, I traumatized a little boy by hiding under his bed before his mother brought him in.
I waited for her to leave the room, and after the lights went off I started pulling the sheets from under his bed.
When he bravely came to the side to look down, I raised out a pale hand and grabbed one of his stuffed animals.
He stood perfectly still as I brought the plushy back into the shadows, and finally, when the nervously asked who was down there, I recreated the nightmarish breathing sound from which my waking nightmares were born, completing the damage by whispering his name which a growling chuckle.

The mother never bothered to check under the bed after he called out for her in terror, and either way I was already long gone.
I had made my escape while he was hiding under the covers, strangled by the same agonizing horror I once tasted.
The satisfaction I experienced after that fuelled the worst idea factory ever to fill the corners of my twisted mind, and over the years, I brought a lot more of people's fears to life, each time experiencing the same shameful thrill than I did the very first time, never revealing myself to them so the gap of knowledge would remain and the fear could live on. I was a thing of the shadows, an unidentifiable sound, a faceless monster.
I had become the very object of the fear I thought I would never master.
How could I be scared of the unknown if I WAS the unknown ?

A psychiatrist once told me I had done something terrible to myself by crossing this line.
He said that, while being afraid merely made me human, preying on someone's fear made me a monster.


I think he was just afraid.