Dark Terrors 3: The Gollancz Book of Horror

I’ve been in therapy for a long time, but it really hasn’t seemed to help. Oh, sure, it’s made me break down and cry a few times — something that men, in our society, aren’t really supposed to do, no matter what Phil Donahue says — but it hasn’t improved things any. I wasn’t even sure why I was there in the first place, except that something just seemed. wrong.

Just a few days ago, it hit me. It was like a lightning strike, like a sixties acid flashback, or some sort of memory flash a Vietnam vet would have. My father hovering over me in bed in the dark of one rainy night, telling me that we were just playing a game, that’s all, but a secret game, a secret game that no one else could know about, so I would have to keep it a secret, a deep dark secret, and tell nobody. But the game hurt. It hurt bad.

It came to me while I was sitting alone one night on the sofa in only my underwear reading a magazine article about child abuse, and it seemed to come out of that part of my brain that was only black, with nothing in it, like a blind spot in my eye. In fact, it exploded from that part of my brain and, at the same time, the fourth and fifth toes dropped off my left foot, which was dangling loosely from my knee, and fell to the carpet with soft little tapping sounds.

Of course, that wasn’t my only problem at the time. My wife had just left me because, as she put it, ‘You are un-understandable. There’s something about you that is unreachable and untouchable and it seems to make you just as angry as it makes me sad. I can’t take it any more.’

So she left. A few hours later, my right earlobe broke away and peeled off like a piece of dead skin.

But I guess that’s getting off the subject, isn’t it? Back to the secret games. I’m not sure when they happened or how long they went on. I’d never brought it up with my therapist. I’d stopped therapy some time ago because I figured I could sit home and cry for a hell of a lot less money, and the memory flashes did not start until my appointments stopped.

I had six weeks of vacation coming at work — I’m a shift manager at a power plant — and after my wife left me, I decided to take them all at once. I had nothing in mind, just. rest. A relief, I guess.

I remember something my wife told me. She said, ‘There’s something inside you that you know nothing about and you have got to take a break, just take a vacation from your life and find out what it is!’

That wasn’t my reason for taking the vacation. I was just tired. I mean, your wife leaves you, you get hit with some memory you hadn’t conjured up since you were a kid. you deserve a vacation, right? So I took it.

To tell you the truth, I wasn’t that concerned about my earlobe or my toes. I tossed them into the trash. No big deal, really. It hadn’t hurt, there was no bleeding and I didn’t even have a limp. But I admit I was surprised by the suddenness of their departure. But so what, right? A couple toes? An earlobe? Big deal.

So, I took the vacation. I had nothing in mind but to sit around the house and relax, do nothing. Watch TV. Watch movies on the VCR. Read. Sleep. Relax.

Then I got broad-sided by that memory, that. thing.

I put it out of my head, went out of the house and browsed through a video store and picked up half a dozen movies to watch. The video store was in a mall and, to pass the time, I decided to do some window-shopping.

It was outside a store called Art 2 Go that the next memory hit me. In the window, I saw a painting of a little boy who looked so innocent. and yet, there was something in his eyes that seemed so adult, so grown up and mature, and so very, very haunting.

My mind suddenly filled with the memory of my father holding me down on his lap and I remember the hard, throbbing thing beneath me.

My left hand dropped to the floor.

I stared at it as if it were an ice cream cone dropped by a child.

A fat woman with red-dyed hair began to scream. She screamed loud and pointed at the hand and dropped her brown paper bag.

I swung the plastic bag of videos under my left arm, picked up the hand, and hurried away, hoping no one else had noticed. The woman’s screams faded behind me.

I took it home with me, that hand, and put it on the coffee table, staring at it as I sat on the sofa. Suddenly, I didn’t want to watch any of the videos I’d got.

But I put one in anyway, just for the noise. I sat on the sofa, mostly staring at my hand on the coffee table. Occasionally, I looked up at the movie. At one point, I saw a screaming little child being chased down a hallway by a man whose big hands reached out like mitts to clutch the child’s hair and—

— I suddenly remembered the time my father had done the same to me. The memory had come from nowhere, slamming into my face like a slab of concrete;

My right arm disconnected itself from my body and slid out of my shirt sleeve, falling to the floor with a thunk.

The child on television screamed, and was dragged backwards to the bedroom.

My eyes widened until they were bulging.

My left arm plunked to the floor.

I began to cry uncontrollably. I couldn’t help myself. The tears flowed and my body — what was left of it — quaked with sobs.

My father had done that very thing to me. He had done many other things to me, things that pranced around at the edge of my memory. I wanted to remember them, to bring them up…and yet, I did not, because they were horrible, far too horrible to hold up before my mind’s eye for inspection.

I looked at the coffee table and saw my hand. I thought of my earlobe and toes. I looked down at the floor and saw my pale, disembodied arms.

And suddenly, I felt sick.

I rushed, armless, to the bathroom and vomited for a while, then hurried into the bedroom, assuming I had little time left.