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Smile scared the piss out of me.
In my middle age, with all its years of nothing inexplicable ever happening to me or anyone I know, I’m not easily scared by monsters. Alien and The Thing are both in my top ten favorite movies. My eyes go through multiple full rotations when my wife listens to “real” haunting podcasts. I’m the character that definitely dies in supernatural thrillers because I’m the one bragging about not losing sleep over the supernatural right up to the moment the supernatural grabs my ankles and drags me to Hell.
Then this by-the-numbers horror flick somehow finds that little Things In The Dark part of me, wrenches away its blankie and stuffed animals, and chases it around all the other parts of my brain with a jawbone.1[1]
I was particularly vulnerable to the assault. It got an emotional wedge in by killing the cat early on. The shady area between mental illness and actual demon reflected some of my own experiences with psychosis. The inability to escape trauma hit home too, as my dreams still dredge up patchwork scenarios of the past that can ruin my day or week. The final reveal felt especially cruel, if predictable. Despite all that, when the monster took its monster form, I thought, “Oh, a big dumb monster, I can handle that.”
The next day, that big dumb monster was in every shadow of my house. It was all I could do to open closets with automatic lights. My basement was out of the question, the laundry room doubly so. Something was out there and also in my brain and my own home gave me more jump scares than the movie. I hadn’t felt this way since I was a child.
I’m so impatient with superstition I’ve been known to ghost people who unironically ask for my astrological sign. And there I was, terrified of empty air, functionally paralyzed, because for all practical purposes this stupid movie had latched onto my traumas and actually put its trauma demon in my brain.
This was unsustainable. My blood pressure is high enough. The laundry was piling up. If the grown up parts of my brain weren’t working, it was time to bring out the big guns.
This was a battle I’d fought before and I remember how I won it, as that child all those years ago. There was a stretch of road that dipped through a small ravine near my house in Maine, low enough that the meager streetlights made no difference. Since pollution killed all the fireflies, there was nothing to disturb the inky dark. You had to navigate by memory toward the dim glow around the bend on the far side. I tested myself against this pure environmental horror during the winter2[2] and was found wanting more often than not.
Then I realized if I had to live with this overactive imagination, I should be putting it to work.
For the most part, I’d been using it to build Dungeons & Dragons worlds that nobody would ever see, since along with the lack of things to do in Maine there’s a severe lack of people with which to do them. In one of these worlds, I designed a character I’d never get to play, and he could be doing something more useful than consuming paper.
His name was Lindar, a wizard of no small power, master of arts mystic and mental, author of world-changing spell books, and he made all his own gadgets. Basically somewhere between Doctor Strange and Iron Man, but better dressed. More importantly, he was much, much more powerful than any wraith or ghoul that the untended parts of my imagination cooked up in their basement.
So I brought him with me. He hovered behind me, blasting invisible monsters back to their hells, warding off evil enchantment, and routing any other spectres from the bad parts of my brain. I wasn’t unafraid, but I knew this was all happening in my head, and I could win that battle with my kickass brain wizard.
As luck would have it, I quite recently designed another Dungeons & Dragons world that it looks like nobody will see,3[3] and decided to resurrect Lindar as a background character, after filling out some more backstory and adding another 500 years to his life.
So when a movie put a trauma demon in my head, I had a thousand-year-old mysticnetic steampunk half-lich wizard psionicist already prepped. Demon never had a chance.
Once I remembered this trick and applied it, it went much as the first round had gone. I was still jumpy, but I could go anywhere in my house. The demon popped up, but got blasted away by my demigod protector. Eventually the battles shortened, and the feeling of dread was met immediately with the knowledge that I was safe.
This is now a mental subroutine. I don’t even fight the battles anymore; any hint of irrational fear and I automatically think the word “ward” and it’s over. Mostly, I forget to be afraid.
A friend suggested imbuing some piece of jewelry with protective powers, and I seriously considered it prior to bringing Lindar out of retirement. The issue with that is my only adornments are rings and I use my rings to remember things. Given a particular association, a ring was as likely to make me remember the fear as anything else. I am also leary of creating talismans, as physical things exist in the world on their own, and can take on unintended significance. Or, maybe more importantly, get lost, then I’ve still got a demon in my head.
Better to make it another strut in the mental bulwark that keeps my various disorders at bay. The unspoken thoughts of subjective machinery are the least remembered parts of it, and years hence, I will probably wonder why my mind whispers ward in dark places, but the imagined terror will have died like the dream it was.
