 I was the kind of child who became frightened of everything - the house catching fire, bees, global warming, magicians, the possibility of burglars, other children, distorted faces and even certain kinds of ragged lettering. Although these seemed small and ordinary enough by day, they all swelled with implicit menace and terrible proportions when I lay awake at night, and I would watch the shadows on the curtains and listen to the distant creaking of the house while hardly daring to breathe. But as overwhelming as these phantoms might have seemed to me at the time, each of them was only temporary, some lasting no more than a handful of days. The thing that really scared me remained in the background, wearing these lesser terrors like so many masks. The oldest, simplest fear of all. Put simply, I was afraid of the dark. I know, I know - it's nothing special. Every child needed a light left on or a landing door kept ajar. Every child shrank from cupboards and cellars and unseen lurking monsters. You've probably got a hundred similar memories that you laugh at now, wondering how you could ever be so imaginative - and yet you still feel uneasy in dark woods or deserted night-time alleyways. But for me it wasn't so simple. I didn't just shrink from the dark - I was also fascinated by it. It all started when I first read The Hobbit, and the moment where Bilbo becomes lost and abandoned in the goblin tunnels, waking up in pitch blackness so vividly described that I could feel the same rough stone under my fingers. And much as I loved the rest of the book, from mountaintops to Mirkwood, the chapter that stayed with me was Riddles in the Dark. But if the Hobbit stuck the first blow for my affair with the dark, The Tombs of Atuan drove it home. The second book in Ursula Le Guin's seminal Earthsea series, Tombs tells us of the daily life of a young priestess, Arha, pledged to the Nameless Ones and charged with overseeing the vast subterranean labyrinth beneath their tombs. Light is forbidden in the undertomb, so she can only navigate the labyrinth by memorising every turn and junction in utter darkness, all the while trying to appease her inhuman masters. And while these lightless underground passages only took up a small portion of The Hobbit, The Tombs of Atuan has them dominate the entire book, giving us a heroine so assured in this environment that she seems diminished above ground. All of this fuelled my young imagination, tearing it away from sunshine towards Cthonic depths and long-forgotten catacombs; but while these sustained my daydreams they also lent new form to my night-terrors. The shadows in my bedroom didn't simply hide monsters but instead became a part of something far more dreadful, a vast and malignant dark with mind and purpose of its own. Every unlit doorway, every seaside cave, every hole and pit and drain transformed into a portal to the greater darkness, a formless entity I could neither name or shape; but could unquestionably feel whenever I was alone. And I also knew, in the particular way that children feel sure of these things, that the dark was just as keenly aware of me. That it meant me harm. Thinking of the darkness embodied like this is a very old belief - the ancient Greeks placed Nyx and Erebus (night and dark) among the first primordial deities to be born from the void; the Egyptians had Kekui and Kekuit (day and night) among the original company of gods called the Ogdoad; and night gods and goddesses similarly recur throughout most polytheistic religions. Giving face and form to the dark seems to be a fundamental human instinct - some theories claim it was originally a species survival trait that helped us escape from sabre-toothed tigers*. But even had I known all this when I was younger, it wouldn't have been much comfort - fear is never reasonable, and neither are children. No matter how many times you might have told my juvenile self about the fundamental order of the universe, or given me any number of scientific explanations regarding photons and electromagnetic radiation, I would still have suffered from sleepness nights and been haunted by half-imagined faces. Of course, things are different now. I watch all the horror films that used to scare my younger self and thoroughly enjoy them. I go on ghost walks and visit Halloween mazes. I write the kind of books that I would never dared read. But every day when I come home from work, I pass through a local park that's made of wildland and farm fields, populated by deer and rabbits and foxes. In summer, it's a beautiful unspoilt place to go walking. But on a winter's night, the final stretch of path through the wooded valley is completely unlit, the shadows under the trees so inky-black that you can barely tell which direction is the right one. And every time I walk a little faster, careful not to stare into the surrounding darkness for fear of what might be looking back. *The theory goes that an early human who imagines they may have seen the sabre-toothed tiger in the dark has a few seconds head-start over the human who waits until they can actually see the tiger; and therefore survives to pass the same imagination onto their descendants. Benjamin Appleby-Dean Benjamin Appleby-Dean is a complex event sometimes mistaken for a writer. When recognisably human, they live in the North-East of England with their wife and a collection of dysfunctional animals. The Stickman's Legacy Mary never knew her father until he died and brought his enemies to her doorstep. Searching his house for answers, she unearths an ancient nightmare and is drawn into a world of corporate magicians, subterranean kingdoms and living architecture, all of whom have history with the Stickman - and their own sinister agendas for his daughter.   Comments are closed.
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