Decay
I have a very specific terror. My only genuine, uncontrollable, unstoppable terror. I am afraid of death.
I indulge this fear by writing novels about vampires and immortals. A silly game.
It’s more specific than that. I am scared of dying without my affairs in order. I don’t want to die alone. I am literally terrified of dying without having finished a book. What if they all read what I’d written so far, and thought that was all I was worth?
This fear hinges into another. Decay. I fear decay.
I spent a long time being vegetarian, but occasionally I became vitamin deficient and have to give in. Not good for the soul, this torment. I looked at a chicken leg yesterday and saw the bone sticking out. I didn’t see meat. I saw a dead thing, human flesh pared from the bone. I freaked at the dinner table. Completely freaked. My throat tightened up. I couldn’t eat anything, I had to leave the room.
Let’s return to my childhood bedroom, the setting for so many of my terrors.
My bedroom is in the attic, and our house has a large garden. In the garden live squirrels. The squirrels occasionally climb into the roof space and scratch around behind the plasterboard walls of my room.
I am scared that a squirrel will die in the roof space, and then I will start to smell its decomposition.
My sister was away on tour not so long ago. While she was away, her room began to smell. Like mould. Organic decay. The smell seemed to be coming from under the floorboards.
Agitated to a point where I could not leave until I had found the smell, I proceeded to convince myself that a rodent had died and was decaying beneath her floor, and that we would have to pull the floorboards up to get it out, because we couldn’t leave it there, could we?
I was frantic, it was late at night and I was in need of sleep. How could I sleep with that thing decaying in the room below?
The smell turned out to be milk spilt in the bin.
But the squirrels are still in the roofspace. My father doesn’t like the squirrels in the roof space because they might chew on the electric cables and short a circuit or cause a fire. He says he should put poison pellets in the roof to get rid of them.
I won’t let him, because I know what will happen. They will die in there, and begin to rot.
I am more afraid of a few dead squirrels than I am of a house fire.
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