Nothing to Fear

SHF_FA_NothingToFear - 2002 ish // 01_initial. Polised Aug 24, 2024.

A family moves to the country. The parents can both work remotely now. They want to share with the kids all their experiences of growing up in the country.

The kids are afraid of the dark. “There’s nothing to fear in the dark,” he taught them. He tells often and lovingly of his own childhood fear of the night. Of the haunted old farmhouse in the valley below, the old family cemetery just behind it, the aloneness of a home far out in the country. He wants to make these tales it vivid for his children. He uses white stakes to outline the shape of the farmhouse and, a hundred yards behind it, the cemetery. He tells the all the family stories of hauntings. The footsteps on the stairs at night. The boylike shadow they sometimes saw running inhumanly fast towards the old wine cellar, a collapsing manmade cave the children were forbiden to enter. The antique organ in the farmhouse that played mournful songs on itself at night. The spectres glimpsed with side vision, or in the dazzling seconds after hitting one’s head. The old war uniform hanging upstairs in the farmhouse, twitching its sleeve one time. His point is to show them how easily all of it at last became something to laugh about. Fictions of a child’s imagination. Tales too good and too funyy not to pass on to the next generation.

He tells that what finally cured him was facing his fear head on. His teenage self had waited for a certain kind of dark night, and then waited longer still — till all his family was asleep but his mother. He could see her profile just inside the house’s big front window, spellbound by some book, as he walked on soft feet further and further from the house and from its TV like blessing of ordinariness and illumination.

Down the steep driveway, walking in blackness. Past the ancient wine cellar, where the shadow boy was believe to live. Finally crossing the blacktop highway blindly, envisioning the pavement by means of his feet and ears. At last stepping softly down into the invisible deep grass of the yard of the haunted house. His feet ripping the velcro grip of coarse grass as he felt his way slowly forward — snares that would be hard to run in. Stopping in the middle of the yard, about thirty feet from the ancient, unlived-in house.

The sky rumbled, as he wanted it to. He had no flashlight. He had tried this experiment once before with the powerful four-battery flashlight of his father. The flashlight had not been sufficient. His goal was to expose the night as nothing to fear, to show it as nothing unusual. The flashlight beam had been exactly the wrong kind of light for that. Because as he swept its beam across the porch posts and corners of the house, across the trees of the yard, it seemed to show one shadowy human shape after another, quickly sliding sideways into hiding.

It wasn’t illusion he wanted, it was clarity. He wanted to show himself once and for all there was nothing hiding in the darkness, nothing seeing him without being seen itself.

It was lightning he wanted.

He waited and waited. And when it came, a light as big as day, he was cured. For two bright seconds he saw a photograph as big as the world. There before him wa the farmhouse and yard he always saw in daytime. There were the same trees and the same hill and the same pasture, the same faint driveway leading from the old house back to the fenced in weeds and tall white stones where the long-dead people lay. All of it as clear and bland as daytime. A total and instant demystification of night. And then, the darkness snapped back into being, enclosing him with almost a physical force, like a wind hitting him from all sides at once, and for a moment blinding his mind.

He wanted his kids to have that same liberation. He set up a pair of big stadium lights in the little field where the imaginary farmhouse stood, and beyond it the imaginary graveyard. He waited for a cloudy night. He explained everything again to his children, with laughter and a normal daytime voice, preparing them for the hidden ordinariness all around. He told them it was time, and off they walked, trusting him, hand in hand, into the darkness, the parents and the children disappearing from one another. “We don’t like this, Dad’ said the kids’ voices in the ear buds of the phone, one bud in the father’s ear, one in the mother’s. The father laughed for them, and a little for himself. “It’s fine, kids, it’s fine. The night is just the daytime with its eyes closed. There’s nothing to fear.” He was feeling a kind of visceral echo from his own time making that nighttime walk. His stomach tightened or vibrated the way it had then. He hadn’t remembered it until this minute. Bit now it was simply there again, as familiar and recent as his supper two hours before.

The children had practiced the walk in daytime. They knew when they’d gone as far as the symbolic blacktop road,. They knowhow long they were in crossing it. They knew when they were stepping down into the imagined deep grass of a farm yard in their father’s past. They knew when they had cross that yard halfway. And they stopped there — the spot where it was to happen, a place in the high snaring grass a very short run from a half-real house their father had evoked in order to teach them something.

He stood with his wife a long distance away — on the hilltop yard of the family’s actual house. The family in two places, separated by darkness and silence. He could feel himself in that older, evoked yard again, alone in the middle of that long-agodark night, himself in two places, too. “The night is just the same as day,” he reminded himself — and not for the first time in his adult life, he realized. In fact, had this not been almost a mantra through all his years since childhood?

In the earphone he hears their son say in a shaking whisper, “Okay, Dad, go ahead and do it. Let’s get this over with.”

He presses the button of his control. Below in the valley the big lights clacked awake. Daytime filled the field. They heard the scream and screech of their daughter and son, both in the earphones and in the air. He saw from a distance what his children were seeing up close, people standing all around in the grass of the supposed yard, dark blurs of human shape, all around the symbolized house and cemetery, looking out of what would have been the windows.

Beings caught by surprise. Stricken with panic again.

“Dad! Dad! Phil!” he hears — the urgent pleas of his children and wife. Then the darkness blacker than black again, clapping back into existence around him. And once again that feeling of the air compacting around him, pressing into him.. A momentary darkening of consciousness as familiar as if the first time were yesterday. But quickly waking up again, as he had before. Again with a feeling of fearing fewer things. The relief of greater knowledge.

“Did you see?” his wife cries. “They all ran up here to you! They went into you!”

And finally remembering. He had known it that first time, too. And had decided, in those seconds of blackout, to tell himself he didn’t.

Because of course they had really been out there. They had finally hidden where he wouldn’t keep surprising them, scaring himself, scaring them.

He had not left his childhood fears behind. He had brought them along. He had given his children a ghost story, too.