Out There Be Monsters!

I was probably about four, or five years old when I saw something that terrified the wits out of me. It was a vision of unbridled horror that crept into my soul and unraveled it fromthe core. It was a television commercial for the movie, "Village of the Damned." Even the word, "damned" was frightening to me. However, nothing, and I mean nothing, was more horrific than the white, glowing eyes of the children. There was something so inhuman, so absolutely corrupt and fiendish about those white eyes.

Whenever I was alone in the house, those devil eyes of neon white were there with me. I could see the evil children materialize before me. If I went upstairs, they were waiting at the landing for me. When bedtime came I was terrified. It was in the dark that they chose to appear and keep me company. It was much worse in the sense that they were children. Kids were supposed to be your allies, the ones you could identify with and understand.

Kids were your immediate support, the ones who helped you view the paradox of the adult world through a more feasible lens. What happens then when kids become the monsters? The world becomes a place where there is no safe haven. Those "children of the damned" paved the way for me to truly grasp the concept of deception. My ever-active semiconscious was able to summon forth from the black depths of school lessons, bigger, better, and much scarier monsters.

Soon, monsters and evil could be seen in shapes. Once my eyes adjusted to the dark, anything was possible. Truth was fiction, and the dead came back to life. A coat hanging on the door was a demented hunchback waiting for my parents to fall asleep so he could kill me. Stuffed animals took on a presence of their own, staring at me in the dark, and moving from one position to another so slyly that I barely took notice. Sometimes if I looked just right, I could see an arm move. If the closet door was ajar, then all hell could literally break loose.

I was always amazed at how stupid adults could be. Leaving a closet door open? Why not let me play with matches, or run in traffic? Anybody with even an ounce of gray matter knew that an open closet door was the gateway to hell. Pathetic, unearthly creatures clawed and slithered their way up from the putrid slime just waiting for mom and dad to go to bed.

Now, here's the kicker of it all: In the daylight, monsters were cool. They were good friends because they were harmless. You could study their pictures and almost say out loud "hey, why can't you be this cool at night?" Whenever monster movies were on TV, or any scary program for that matter, I had to watch. It was only when bedtime came that the monsters became deadly predators