When I was a boy, there were four nightmares repeating again and again, night after night. In the first, I was chased from my bed to the basement. In my pajamas, I run for my life down the basement stairs away from the butcher behind. The walls beside me are lined with his other victims, tortured souls impaled on meat hooks, screaming their pain. The steps are endless, the chase has no end. I have to keep running, just out of reach of the cleaver carving the air behind.
Other nights, I was lost in a maze. Again I run, but this time it is not a butcher behind but a boulder. Pushing the boulder through the twists and turns is a Nazi officer in full SS regalia. Occasionally I stop and try to push back. No matter whether I choose fight or flight, the Nazi always wins. He keeps pushing, the boulder always gains momentum, and eventually he forces me through the maze and out the end where I fall before waking to the real terrors of the night and the third dream.
For as I lie, torn between dimensions of reality and dreams, the light at the bedroom door begins to recede. If I try to scream, no sound escapes my mouth. The light moves away faster and faster. Soon my room is a million miles away, a million miles from help, and I am alone with the things at the end of the earth.
Sometimes my parents let me sleep with them. Even then the dreams came. My feet begin to itch. There are little people building villages on my toes. Just as I am afraid to look under the bed, because I know what lurks there, just as I must have all doors firmly closed to keep the closet monsters where they belong, just so am I afraid to pick the little people off my feet. “What if they really are there?” I ask myself. I would really rather not know. My mother picks them off.
When I made it through the night, I’d trundle off to school where further terrors awaited. We had ‘duck and cover’ drills during which you hid under your desk and put your head between your knees for protection against a nuclear blast. We studied the effects of a nuclear attack on Calgary. Teachers put up maps on the overhead with concentric circles spreading out from the city. If you were downtown or in the suburbs, you were vaporized. Further out, a few seconds after the flash, a firestorm raged into you, burning the skin and flesh from your body. In Frenchman’s Creek, you would be blinded if you looked at the flash. If you were in the open, you might be similarly toasted. If you were fortunate enough to be under cover, you would last a few days before your hair fell out. Then you would begin to throw up as the radiation ate away at your insides. We were evil. If we did not mend our ways, the holocaust was coming.
Even when we were just little, the teachers couldn’t leave us alone. Instead of reading books like Anne of Green Gables or Lad: A Dog, they read us stories about little kids who were afraid there would be a nuclear war that would blow them up. The children’s mommies would soothe them with stories about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and how it could never happen again. I remember the kids hiding in terror in their closet, waiting for the bomb to go off. Then there is a flash, and they think it’s all over, but it’s only their mother opening the door and turning on the light.
I have a vivid recollection of the collective disappointment in the class at this point of the story. We had done the drills. We’d hidden under our desks and put our heads between our knees. We’d lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis and nuclear annihilation just around the corner. We could easily put ourselves in the place of the children in the book, half hoping that it was indeed the time we had been promised, the apocalypse both verifying our training and legitimizing our fears. Society had sacrificed our innocence, and then, as the book tells us, it’s only Mommy.
Weird books weren’t the only landmines that littered the field for children growing up in the sixties. Once a year, they’d show The Wizard of Oz, with the horrible old lady riding her bicycle, picked up by the growing wind, riding around Dorothy as she is swept away too, circling faster and faster, then becoming the witch screaming at her. After the movie, because you were the youngest and had to go to bed first and because you were the only boy, had to sleep by yourself, they’d send you up to this little room at the top of the house, the house which was haunted by another little boy who had died after sliding down the banister and breaking his back even though he’d been told by his parents any number of times not to and also by the little girl who’d drowned, the location marked by a metal cross in the lake, and where there was a cave where my neighbour, the albino Brenda, showed me her pure white parts; the room where you were banished a million miles from anyone else while they watched TV, laughing, while you wished that you could be in one of the trains or cars going by, where you would be safe and not in the room by yourself with the doorway getting further and further away, the butcher looming, the Nazi goose-stepping, the people building villages in your toes, and you tried to cover the blank screen of the bedroom walls with boogers to block the anima before she came, and all the time waiting, waiting, waiting, just waiting.
I had always had a clear understanding of the rituals required in order to keep the powers of evil at bay. As a toddler I wore a Davy Crockett coonskin cap. I had a toy gun and a broom horse. I’d ride back and forth in front of the chesterfield in the living room. Above it was a painting. In the foreground were cows, cows grazing. Behind them was the hill, and behind the hill was evil. Back and forth I would ride alone on my broomstick horse with my toy gun and my sweaty head, trying to herd the cows, to muster them into our last line of defense before the gates of Hell. “Humbedy, humbedy, humbedy, ” I chanted in my solitary quest to keep the demons at bay.
The predators are gathering as the nightmares return. I hear the rustling of fronds, the restless clink of the shrike’s cruel talons. When I turn, there is nothing there but shadows on the wall. More and more students are asking about Chester. The paint on the wall over the mural is gone now. Chester’s eyes follow me everywhere. When the paint over his mouth disappears, he is laughing.
I can’t wear anything but cotton; anything else attracts tens of thousands of volts of static electricity and I have to rip off the clothes before they constrict me entirely and make me blow up. I can’t wear watches for more than a couple of days before they start to speed up and then break down. Plastic lawn ornaments are appearing outside my house. Today, there was a black and white bird hanging from the fence, its neck twisted completely around, Linda Blair-like, staring at me. The bird joined Dwarves, Bambis, an alien head on a stick, and plastic ducks, all staring, waiting.
When I drove by the church, the sign said, “And the simple answer to truth is...” but the lights had gone out and the rest of the message was dark. Now, the only messages I am receiving come f rom my electronic razor. To begin with, it was relatively benign displaying messages such as “Test OK, ” or “Shave time 5 minutes and 12 seconds.” Then it became demanding, insisting “Intensive cleaning required, ” “Recharge in 9 minutes, ” “Replace cutting heads now.” It seems to have become possessed by the spirit of Judy Garland. I hear it electronically beeping show tunes at night, finally settling on “Follow the Yellow Brick Road, ” which it repeats over and over.
Instead of the printed programmed messages on its screen, there was first flashing:
Lions and tigers and bears. Oh, my!
Lions and tigers and bears. Oh my!
But then, as I watched, it began to change:
Lions and tigers and rats, Oh, my!
Lions and tigers and rats, Oh, my!
Lions and beavers and rats, Oh my!
Witches and beavers and gophers, Oh my!
Then it switched to a single word and the screen froze.
“SURRENDER!”
The sore on my shoulder has taken form. There is a little bald head with spectacles over weasel eyes. When the mouth appears, its first words are, “Who’s taken a plop now?” The boundaries between dreams and reality have disappeared.
Red Flower has not returned since she left, crying, that night. Now, there are witches projected on the walls. Their animated shadows fly at breakneck speed. As the witches fly around and around my room, they scream at me. Sometimes it is three. “Boil and boil!” they cry.
Sometimes there is only one, first riding her bicycle then transforming to a witch on a broom. “Surrender!” she screams. Then the water comes. I wake up gasping, exhausted from the struggle to stay afloat.