CHILDHOOD FEARS: IN THE DARK I FOUND LIGHT BY ROB TEUN

 
(1988)
 
“Once upon a time…”
I whisper from the darkest corner of the cupboard, drawing my thin legs tighter to my sparrow chest.   
I clap my hands over my ears. Gritting teeth, fighting tears. The dread rhythm pounds through the walls as loud as fury. I want to be anywhere but a shadow in the dark. An ice cream truck lullaby plays outside the house as the shouts behind closed doors climb to screams before fading into pleas before silencing into whimpers.
“There was a Prince …”
Only a matter of time before it’s my turn. Only a matter of time before I will have to tell the world I fell down the stairs again. Me, the little boy, the small commitment that ruined his stepfather’s life. Not the drink. Not the job he hated. Not poor life choices. No. It was everything else that my stepfather had to carry around, the mighty weight around his neck, a cross he had to bear.
“I had one wish…”
The rhythms gather cadence, thunderous knuckles of hard bone crack against my mother’s skull with lightning strikes.
Words. Bad words. Words that no one should use but do. Ugly spiked words. Bitch. Cunt. Whore. Each word punctuated with a fist.
A silence falls.  I remain in the cupboard, lost in oblivion. Dark and silent and complete.
It is the first night I do not hear my mother cry herself to sleep.
“If then the monsters could not see him, then they could escape…”
Little do I know that’s where my habit of telling stories begins, but over time I don’t realise this yet, but it truly hasn’t taken hold yet. 
 
(1993)
 
My friends know I scare easily. They try everything they can because they think it is funny. Jumping, shrieking from the shadows in Halloween masks, even in the height of summer. They lure me into watching horror films without warning me, it’s not until the guts spill and the monsters appear that I know. I begin to imagine stories about my friends being trapped with the monsters as I picture my revenge. Over time, I grow sick of being scared. I start to read scary books so I don’t have to be scared anymore, but I don’t begin with Goosebumps, I go in at the deep end, head on. I go to the library and find a book called IT by a man called Stephen King. It’s about being scared and about being a kid, about kids facing down monsters with their friends. There are times I have to close the book because the monster overwhelms me, a far cry from the Roald Dahl books I had been reading before now. I stick with Bill, Ritchie, Bev, Mike, Ben, and Stanley, this group of friends who find in each other a way to overcome those fears, those monsters. It is then I realise that my friends didn’t actually want to scare me because they were being horrible, they wanted me to be part of something. They knew that feeling of how your nerves clicked like roller coaster cogs pulling up to an inevitable long plunge and that feeling of excitement that came with it and wanted to share it with me. They wanted to find in me the way I could in them in a way to not only conquer the fear but embrace it.
 
(2011)
 
My friends are long gone, I am a man with a family and a library of monsters. I miss that time and those people, that feeling of being part of something bigger than myself, Horror. Fear. I write my first story for an open anthology and I am accepted. I am now a published writer. I now not only want to find more monsters, but I also want to create them. I find that there are others out there also who heed the call of the dark and it is there I find a place I want to belong forever, there in the horror community with the writers, the reviewers, the readers, and the late night horror buffs I now share my passion.
With each new word, sentence and paragraph, I finally understand a little more why I began writing horror and why I continue to do so.
There in the dark, I found light. 

Rob Teun writes Sci-fi, Horror, and Fantasy. He lives in Lincolnshire with his family. He can be found on Twitter: @rob_teun