CHILDHOOD FEARS: WE ARE NOTHING BUT MUD AND DUST AND ATOMS

WE ARE NOTHING BUT MUD AND DUST AND ATOMS BY STEWART HOTSON

6/4/2022

CHILDHOOD FEARS

I’ve never been afraid of gore or jump scares. The monster that’s on the screen didn’t bother me. As a kid, I found it was easy to sneer at Freddie Kruger or Jason Vorhees. The reason being that the kinds of things which made me frightened as a younger person (and certainly remain emotive for me now) are not the things my friends found frightening.

I’m a person with multiple heritages in my background. In other words I have brown skin. Growing up in the eighties it meant I had NF written on my pencil case by classmates and was called paki in any day with the word ‘day’ in it. My fears were not of rampaging monsters because my real life was full of them and, frankly, they were more present and in my face than any thought of a smug imbecile with knives for fingers.

Worse still, from my point of view, someone like Candyman or Freddie was, in many ways, more identifiable for me because I suffered at the hands of the majority. What was uncomfortable in those tales is that their suffering, no matter how intolerable, was seen as a motive force for their evil. Which seemed to be the wrong way around for me.

What scared me wasn’t what my friends found terrifying. The reason I didn’t care about gore or extremes was because they supposed some safe place from which you could be pulled, whose sanctity could be overturned. The biggest assumption was that, except for these cases real life was a place of calm and safety.

Instead, what grabbed me and what continues to grab me, were the fears that hid just out of sight. If I could keep racist bullies and teachers in sight I could control the scenario.

If I couldn’t see them? Shit.

I don’t mean jump scares. I mean the fear of the hidden, of the creeping dread, of the fingers slowly grasping the edge of the door and pushing it open to reveal nothing but shadows. Noises which can’t be located, whispers of words which seem like dreams.

I’ve got three tales to tell of my childhood fears. The first of them was Jaws. You might laugh because Stephen Spielberg’s Jaws is pretty in your face.

For me what was terrifying about Jaws was my bedroom carpet. It was blue. And I was scared a shark would come up from underneath the floor and bite my legs off. So scared I wouldn’t get out of bed unless my bladder was going to do something out of control.

That fear didn’t last long – perhaps a few months at most – but the fear of something lurking just out of sight, waiting for me to let my guard down, was enough to have my parent’s let me sleep with the hall light on.

I still remember the scene with the three of them in the boat, alone at sea, getting drunk and talking while outside the shark circles, draws closer and weighs up its prey. That sense of feeling safe when the truth was they were anything but? That foreshadowing of just how wrong their assumptions were? It still taps into something deep in my gut.

The template of my fears was well founded by Jaws. And, truth be told, since I was a teenager there’s been almost nothing in fiction which had frightened me. Lots has left me wincing or uncomfortable but actual fear? That is an uncommon response.

I put that partly down to my experience as an outsider growing up but my next tale adds a certain other element which I hope explains a bit more.

As a seven year old I lived in an old house. It was a terrace, probably built in the late 1800s. We lived there for maybe six years, moving out when I was eleven.

My room was at the back of the house. I don’t remember much about this time in my life except that room had a presence in it. I would wake at night and see a bright skull in the corner of the room by the built-in wardrobe. It wasn’t out to get me, but it was terrifying. It happened enough that I told my parents what I was seeing and they ‘got people in’. Given my father was a devout atheist I must have been quite convincing.

Those people, whether charlatans or otherwise, confirmed something grim was going on and did whatever people like that do (I believe they were Catholics) and, weirdly, I never saw the skull floating in my room again.

Yet that sense of something hovering, just the other side of what I could see was there in my life all over again.

I have no idea what that experience was about. I don’t know what my parents explained to whoever came to sort it and I don’t know what those people did which resulted in me never seeing it again. I do know I never met the people who came to the house to sort it, so it wasn’t anything they did to me.

I’ve a doctorate in physics. I’m not given to flights of fancy (other than writing) but to this day I will not tell you that all we are is mud and dust and atoms.

The last of my childhood fears came a bit later. I was a proper teenager (which feels young to the now forty something me). For various reasons I was doing youth work with a church up in the North East of England.

We were staying in a church building.

We, as a group, started seeing things. Feeling chills and sudden changes in temperature. We heard odd noises – especially at night. We were there a week and it was thrilling. We did research, discovered the church had been built on a plague pit, discovered it had been founded by Freemasons. That’s right, count the tropes.

I didn’t really understand the concept of the ‘bad place’ as a kid. I do now. I look back on that and reflect about the centrality of the ‘bad place’ in horror and, in particular, my love of horror. I’m a sucker for ghost stories, of people finding themselves in the bad place. If the bad place is really one of those locations with thin walls between here and there then even better.

In my own writing I’m drawn back again and again to these ideas of the creeping dread, of the fight that potentially can be won but often only by escaping. I love the idea that the dread, the fear we feel is in part driven by an unacknowledged recognition that we don’t know what it is we’re facing. That mystery is awful – that double edged word which means both to be terrified and thrilled, to be full of awe. I think of how angels arrive and their first words have to be ‘do not be afraid’ because crikey they’re alien and other and beyond and of course we’re afraid.

As I get older I find I’m also drawn to what that fear does to our sense of identity. As I reflect on my childhood fears I find that much horror, whether it’s body horror or the fear of losing our faculties is a fear of losing the self, of being driven out or taken over. The bad place, the lurking other, they threaten our sense of who we are. They threaten it because they promise that what we believe about ourselves and our place in the world is a lie to be exposed by the painful peeling back of skin.

For me this is horror: to learn I am not who I thought I was, but the lie isn’t that I’m someone else, it’s that there might be nothing coherent behind my eyes at all. That I might simply be something small crawling on the skin of a giant hoping it doesn’t notice me. That someone else may come along and erase me and after they’re done everything I wanted, everything I hoped and everything I loved will be gone.

Further reading: Read Jim Mcleod's review of The Entropy of Loss here

The Entropy of Loss
by Stewart Hotston

Sarah Shannon is a scientist working at the cutting edge of black hole research. She is also a woman seeking to cope with the impending death of her wife, Rhona, the love of her life. Unable to come to terms with this inevitable loss, she has embarked on an affair with her work colleague, Akshai; and that's only the start of things getting complicated.

Something has gone wrong with Sarah and Akshai's ground-breaking simulations of black holes. When they are able to correct the errors the system abandons their simulations, instead spitting out equations as if demanding a response. When they answer, the system takes over their lab and starts to transform their equipment - forcing them to flee. They are left suspecting the impossible: First Contact.

As Sarah's employer steps in and seeks to take control, she risks losing access to her own work. Worse still, when they fled the lab she and Akshai had to leave Rhona behind, and Sarah will do whatever it takes to get her back.

Or Purchase a copy direct from Newcon Press
(limited signed editions are available)

STEWART HOTSON

Stewart Hotston lives in Reading, UK. After completing his PhD in theoretical physics, Stewart now spends his days working in high finance. He has had numerous short stories published as well as multiple novels. He has two novels and a novella out in 2022. Stars and Stipes, Daybreak Legacy and The Entropy of Loss respectively. When Stewart is not writing or working he's a senior instructor at The School of the Sword where he fights with and teaches all manner of swords.

WEBSITE LINKS
Stewarthotston.com
Twitter: @stewhotston