In spite of a family-wide aversion to spiders, my worst childhood fear wasn’t arachnoid in shape. My worst childhood fear had no shape. It was the dark.
Rather it was what lay within the dark, in the privacy of my bedroom late at night. The shapeless, nameless, formless terror of whatever Lovecraftian monster lurked beneath my bed or haunted the shadowy hollows of the badly shut wardrobe, watching me from the gloom.
It is the biggest cliché of them all. And the truest. Mostly I imagined zombies waiting outside of my door for the right opportunity to jump out and attack (though why exactly they would wait outside my door, I have no idea).
I’ve always slept with the lamp left on. I still do. I know how to control my imagination these days. I know there are no monsters, no real ones.
But it’s all very well denying my fear by the light of day. It changes when I am alone, working late at night. Instead of monsters I imagine intruders, burglars, rippers who break into houses and murder families in their beds.
It’s very late right now. And I can hear noises outside.
