Night Terrors

The nightmare was fading by the time I forced my eyes to open.Unfortunately, although I couldn't recall the substance of the dream, its essence--a hair-raising sense of impending calamity--clung to me like a sweaty sheet.
The bedroom looked all right. Everything was exactly where I'd left it before climbing under the covers.The closet door, since childhood the first item to be checked off on any nocturnal security list, was firmly closed. (I know that nothing lurks in my closet, ready to shamble out and gobble me up. I also know that if I keep the door to the closet closed, it won't be able to get me.)
No, everything was in order...at least on the surface. Underneath, however, something was seriously wrong.
It was hard to say just what. Awfully important, though. Because whatever it was, it was--
coming closer.

I could almost--no, check that, I thought, I could actually hear it coming. A nearly subsonic humming that lodged in my brain. All but paralyzed with terror, I stared at the walls. It looked like there was electricity arcing just behind the studs. The part of my mind that could still think, after a fashion, was suffused with an image of Frankenstein's monster, about to burst through the wall, probably right over there, right in that darker space where the open closet door yawned invitingly...
I gotta get out of here.
My legs were hopelessly tangled in the sheets. Now the mad horror-movie in my mind cut to an image of me at about eleven, swimming at Grundy Lake provincial park. I'd just dove off a floating barge, splashed down six or seven feet, and found myself wrapped in clutching fingers of seaweed. I damn near drowned in that trying to wrench myself free. Now it had come back: taut ropes holding me hostage in my bed, and the monster was coming. It was almost here.
Fuck this, I thought. Here you are, twenty five years old, scared of noting at all. Pull that sheet through there, like that, yes, get out of bed, and look, the closet door is completely closed, you're fine, let's just go over there and turn the light on, like that, just flick the sw----

A searing flash turned everything white-hot for a split second. It was accompanied by a colossal BANG! that almost drowned out my scream. Darkness instantly re-asserted itself. Behind my eyes, a negative image of my bedroom was imprinted.
I grabbed yesterday's clothes from the top of my dresser, jerked the door open, and stutter-stepped out into the hall stark naked, closing the door after myself. Only when the door clicked shut did my heart start beating again. There was no way in hell I was going back in there until daylight.
I threw my clothes on en route to the kitchen, where the stove clock cheerily informed me it was 2:56. The sun would come up in three hours or so. I left the house, not looking back, and walked down the street to 7-Eleven, my workplace. I was never so glad to see bright lights.
After the sun came up, I went home. My bedroom door was still closed. Some light from the window in there extended its tendrils under the door. At least, I hoped that was where the light was coming from.
Working up no small amount of courage, I opened the door. The room, as always, looked perfectly fine--messy, but fine. Nothing capered in the shadows; the closet door was still closed. The smell was a tad off, I thought, sniffing. It smelled like stale sweat, with an almost-electrical undertone I thought of as the fragrance of fear.
I climbed onto my bed and regarded the light first. Four bulbs boxed the compass...and all four were blackened, burned out. My fear abated a bit as I considered this. What were the odds, I thought, of four light bulbs burning out at the exact same second? What the hell had happened?
So thinking, I climbed into bed and eventually fell asleep...but not before I'd wedged my clothes under the crack in my closet door.

It was seven years before I heard an explanation for that episode. An electrician told me that a truck had struck a hydro pole in my neighbourhood--he knew this because he'd been called to fix the damage. One of the problems arising from the collision had been a localized power surge. That surge, he said, would have produced an electrical charge in the air, capable of raising the hairs on the back of my neck...not to mention popping four lightbulbs at the same time.

Whew. What a relief to hear that.

As a child, I had a vivid imagination that would work overtime at night. Almost anything could--and did--chase me through childhood dreams: blue spruces, my grandmother's room divider, an old clock. You can laugh all you want at the images that confession produces in your mind, but to my five-year old mind, any one of those things could rob me of sleep, and I lived in outright terror of all of them ganging up on me.
The blue spruces had haunted me since I was three. My dad had taken me to the Royal Winter Fair in Toronto, where I'd noticed my first blue spruce. It seemed about four thousand feet tall, and it leaned in my direction, and I was sure it didn't like me much. I must have let my apprehension show on my face, because my dad (never one to raise a wussy son) looked down and found little Kenny scared of a tree, for Chrissake. Drastic measures were called for. He picked me up and scooted me RIGHT UNDER the tree, which chuckled to itself as it witnessed the birth of a phobia that lasted almost a decade.
My grandmother's room divider (which three-year-old Kenny pronounced "OOOM-di-ba-da") was almost as tall as the blue spruce and looked just as threatening, so it was a natural addition to my night time terror team. As for the clock, I can't tell you why I thought it was evil...nor can I tell you why I called it Harald. And I have not the slightest idea why it chased me all over the house so many nights. I couldn't begin to guess how the beckers got into its belly. I just knew that if that clock ever caught me, the beckers would emerge to eat me up.
Beckers--which were likely named after the variety store, since I can't think where I would have come up with that word otherwise--were black, stick-shift-shaped things with a taste for boymeat. They could lurk anywhere. Like in my closet, for instance. But they lived in the belly of that clock. I knew that. And they were real. I knew that, too.

I've outgrown beckers and blue spruces now. At thirty three years old, these things have no power over my bedroom anymore. I can even sleep with the closet door gaping wide open. But something happened last night that regressed me to the age of five. I damn near wet the bed in my fright.
I have a lot of trouble getting comfortable in bed most nights. My arms seem to grow to be about ten feet long and it can take forever to find homes for them. Even after I fall asleep, they can turn traitor and start wandering. Last night, at some point, my left arm crept out from under the covers, beckoning to the monster that most definitely does not live in my closet.
One second I was sleeping. The next, my arm was under attack by something with fur and claws. My eyes snapped open and I stared straight into the gullet of the closet, while the thing it had finally loosed after all these years commenced to feed on my exposed flesh.
I swear I levitated straight up off the bed, provoking an unmistakeable BLURT! from our younger cat, B.B., who then detached herself from my arm and slunk off to terrorize the dust bunnies downstairs.

Thanks a lot, you furry bitch.