CHILDHOOD FEARS BY S P OLDHAM

I was a sensitive and over-imaginative child, always seeing things which were not really there; at least that was what my grown-ups told me. Even now, there are certain memories and events from my childhood that stay with me, making me shudder to think of them. Sometimes they even stray into my dreams.

I remain certain that there were a handful of these ‘incidents’ that did in fact happen. Perhaps I frightened my mother, father and my older sisters (I am the youngest of five) when I talked about them. Maybe that is why they tried so hard to assure me that it was all in my head. Their well-meant reassurances did nothing to persuade me. Even if no one else witnessed it, for me it was absolutely real.

We lived in a three-bed council house in a pleasant village in South Wales. Despite our problems (we all have them, don’t we?) we were a close and mostly happy family. It wasn’t all roses round the door, but it wasn’t the childhood from hell, either.

My parents were keen readers and it is to them that I owe my thanks for my love of both reading and writing. Dad in particular loved a good horror, his favourites being James Herbert, Dean Koontz and Stephen King, though he would read any horror book that caught his eye. He had a small bookshelf which he would fill with his quota of books from the library, or books from the second-hand stall on the market. When I was quite young I used to sneak them off the shelf, to read when I thought he wasn’t looking, but of course he must have known. He did nothing to stop me. Knowing dad, he probably thought they would either be too difficult, too boring or too scary for me to stick with. They were indeed scary, but that was what hooked me.

Were they the cause of my childhood experiences? Categorically not. I remember strange things happening to me long before I ever sneaked a book off dad’s shelf. Later on they may have added to my fervent imaginings, but they were definitely not the root cause.

Let’s go back then, to the very beginning and to my earliest memory of something odd happening to me.

Being the youngest, I was always sent up to bed first. My parents thought my protestations were because I resented this and saw it as unfair. Undoubtedly there was an element of that; but there was something else that made me try to put off going up to bed alone.

There was an old, white-framed and mottled mirror hanging by the front door. Next to it was a double set of light switches: one for the passageway, the other for the stairs. Upstairs, set into the outside wall of the airing cupboard, was a single switch that was also for the stair light. I tell you this because it played an important role in my childhood terror.

My mother would flick the light on, watch me climb up the first three or four stairs, then go back into the living room. That was where the trouble began. What happened next was the inspiration for my short story The Sandman featured in Wakeful Children: A Collection of Horror and Supernatural Tales.

I would suddenly find myself horribly alone, the passageway all at once cold and unwelcoming. The door to the front room was usually left half open and that room held a peculiar kind of terror for me too, one that I have trouble explaining. I had an urgent need to get away from it, up to the comparative safety of my bedroom. I just had to deal with the stairs, first.

I would find myself caught in a terrifying mid-way position, between each light switch. Having no choice, I would race up the stairs as fast as I could, because I knew the switch at the top would flick to the off position before I could get to my room, cloaking me in darkness, separated from the bosom of my family; all alone. The memory of making my way to my room in that darkness, the prickly, intense feeling of being watched every step of the way, still has the power to give me goosebumps even now. I tried, once, to turn the light back on. To my horror it did not work. The light did not come on again, no matter how many times I reached up to flick the switch. I never dared try again after that, for fear of touching a ghostly hand, poised over it, waiting for me.

Perhaps it was an electrical fault. Perhaps one of my sisters were playing a joke with me, using the switch at the bottom of the stairs to repeatedly turn the light off (they all swear they didn’t though, that they would never have frightened me like that as a child.) Whatever it was, it left a lasting, deeply disturbing memory for me. Something no one else ever experienced in that house, which makes it that bit stranger. Was it all in my mind?  I suppose the fear of the dark is a primeval one. Something most humans experience at one time or another. Oddly enough, as an adult, I don’t fear the dark per se. I will quite happily wander about in my own home in the dead of night without putting a light on. It is that memory, specifically, that gives me the shivers, even now. Those stairs, those switches; that house.

For that wasn’t the only frightening experience I had at that address. I used to share a room with two of my sisters, there being so many of us that we had to squeeze in together. In a bid to brighten the place up a bit one day, they decided to paint the walls. All well and good, except the paint they used was very pale and quite shiny. So what, you ask?

Being the first to be sent to bed meant that I spent a good deal of time alone in my room. I distinctly remember lying in bed one such night, trying to get to sleep. The moon was high and bright, shining into the room. At first, I appreciated its light, grateful the darkness was dispelled for a while.

That was until I saw the people processing across the newly painted, shiny walls. I can see them now: a parade of dark, featureless figures walking nowhere. There was a woman, holding something like a parasol or an umbrella – I remember that vividly. There were others, too, though their exact shape is hazy after all this time. I know there was at least one man, some children too. They traversed the walls as if they had every right to be there. As if they had just been waiting for the right shade and texture of paint before they revealed themselves.

That was a bit much, even for me. I don’t remember telling my family what I had seen, but I must have got my point across because the bedroom was redecorated not long after. I wonder if that was just to assuage me, or because one of them had seen something, too?

Then there was the strange noise that came from within the walls. Now this I did not imagine; my mother and at least one of my sisters also heard it, so it was not the stuff of fantasy. My mum told us that it was a ‘tick beetle’ living in the walls. Given my wild imagination (my sisters had fertile imaginations too) mum undoubtedly refrained from giving it its proper name – Deathwatch Beetle – for obvious reasons! I have done a little research on this creature since. Given that they live on rotted wood, preferably oak around 60 years old – then either that house was seriously structurally compromised or mum simply could not find any other explanation. On a quiet night in winter, that tick-tick in the walls could be very creepy.

Then there was the very scary event that happened to me yet again alone in that bedroom. My bed was adjacent to the door, directly opposite the chimney breast that climbed up through the house. I was dozing one night, almost nodding off, when something caught my eye. I watched as a pale, indefinite shape rose from the base of the chimney breast in my room. It drifted up it, parting from it before it reached the top, when it started coming for me.

I had a blue candlewick bedcover at the time (early 80’s, don’t judge me.) I drew it up over my head and closed my eyes tight. I was absolutely convinced that shape was hovering over me, looking down at me through the cover. I gripped it so tight that my fingers hurt, holding my breath until my lungs nearly burst. It was only when I felt it had receded that I dared let go. Whatever that shape was, it had gone, leaving no sign that it had ever been there.

That only happened once, but once was enough, thank you. I was a bit older then, about twelve or thirteen. Perhaps it was hormone induced. Perhaps it wasn’t.

These last three experiences combined were the inspiration for the short story Crawl, which is also featured in Wakeful Children: A Collection of Witchcraft and Wickedness.  Elements of them, plus the next anecdote I am about to share with you, also inspired another story.

This time it was not so much an inexplicable event as a vivid, dread-laden dream I had around about the time my dear Uncle Albert passed away, rest his soul.

There was a wing-back chair in our living room that my uncle used to sit on when he visited. I have very fond memories of him, a lovely man with a large frame and the deepest voice I have ever heard on a man. He also had a stutter, which probably explains why he was rarely chatty, bless him.

Anyway, in my dream this chair was empty and altogether different, although in that weird way that dreams have, it was simultaneously the same chair. It was upholstered in dark green leather, with dark wooden legs leaving a few inches clear below it. Invariably, it was placed in the centre of an otherwise empty room, which at the same time was also our living room, rendering the whole thing familiar yet strange.

I don’t know if I was in the room with the chair, or if I was looking at it from somewhere else. Either way, the green leather would slowly begin to grow body parts; tongues, hands and feet suddenly protruding from what was now a green skin, alive and clammy, covered in a cold sheen of sweat. Those limbs would reach out into the nothingness, tongues licking the cold air, searching. I would wake in a cold sweat myself, shuddering as the memory of this horrible image gradually receded.

This is in fact a recurring dream, one of a few that I have from time to time even now. It was probably induced by grief, loss and stress. Regardless, it was the inspiration for my stand-alone short story (free on my website should you care to read it) called Dark and Moving Things.

There were many other things that happened to me in that house as a child. The most obvious explanation for them all, Occam’s Razor and all that, is that they were simply manifestations of an over-imaginative, relentlessly active mind as a child.

There again of course, they could have been manifestations of a different kind…

Apart from Dark and Moving Things, all the short stories mentioned above, plus more, are featured in my book, Wakeful Children: A Collection of Horror and Supernatural Tales, which can be found on Amazon and Troubador.

Thank you. I have enjoyed looking back at my childhood fears, in a strange kind of way. I hope I don’t dream tonight!

S P Oldham

S P Oldham is married with two grown up children and an adorable Cocker Spaniel named Milo. She lives in the beautiful Sirhowy Valley in South Wales, U.K. She has always enjoyed writing and only ventured into self-publishing four years ago, though she has been published numerous times in anthologies, magazines etc. Although she has published mainly horror and dark fiction, she likes to dabble in other genres from time to time, including Dark Fantasy. She is also an avid reader. 

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WEBSITE LINKS

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https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/15116823.S_P_Oldham  Goodreads

Wakeful Children: A Collection of Horror and Supernatural Tales:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01C04VGUG   Amazon UK
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01C04VGUG#nav-subnav Amazon US

https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/poetry-short-stories-and-plays/wakeful-children/  Troubador Publishing (Paperback Edition)

When you open the pages of Wakeful Children, you peer into the mind of a depraved killer who started out small; the panic-stricken thoughts of a recovering alcoholic, just trying to get to a group meeting; the anguished, silent prayers of a man whose only wish is to get a peaceful night’s sleep. You get a glimpse into the greediness of a collector of old, even ancient artefacts – just don’t ask how he came upon them; the idle thoughts of a girl, playing innocently in the grounds of her grandparent’s house, oblivious to what she really is; the calculating machinations of an apparently frail, beautiful woman who is not all she appears to be.

The thoughts and actions of all these beings and more, including entities too old to truly age, spirits too nebulous to name, make up eleven short, intriguing, unsettling stories by S P Oldham, every story fresh and original. Beautifully descriptive prose, sometimes shockingly brutal passages coupled with vividly imagined and clearly depicted storylines make Wakeful Children: A Collection of Horror and Supernatural Tales an intriguing, inventive debut for this author.

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