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 But, in the perpetual darkness of my own private world, monsters flourished. The realms of noise and sunlight most kids my age enjoyed and celebrated in was, for me, one of sincere anxiety, even dread. Amongst the monsters, I was akin. Amongst the children of Summer, I was and have always been alien. I suppose it would make sense to start at the beginning. Already, we hit a problem: what are beginnings, when we get right down to it? By what criteria to we draw the arbitrary line? And how can we apply the notion to something as contradictory and ephemeral as imagination? Do we dream in the womb, before the corruptions and transformative influences of waking life? A romantic part of me would like to think so, even as its rationalist counterpart rises up in contempt of the idea. Because that is the crux of it, my loves: the journey that starts here. A safari, of sorts; an archaeological expedition in other ways. An occult ceremony; a pathway to revelations and frustrated experiments. All of these colliding and interbleeding, becoming components in an engine that is also anatomy, also a work of living art. So, a beginning: In the beginning was a world of nightmares. A world without rules or consistency or fixture. Just because a door opened on a certain room one day didn't mean it necessarily would the next. Just because the shadows were inert and passive in the afternoon didn't mean they would be at night. It was a world of fevers and animated bedroom wallpaper; of faces in fire and storms, of spectres looming over the cot, staring down with mad-eyed fascination. It was also a world of cartoons, candy and sunshine. There's truly nothing like the contradictions and ambiguities of a child's reality. I remember a world that demonstrated no distinction between waking and dreaming; the divide not yet drawn, and therefore not even a concept. The state of molten sunlight, that would fall through rain upon grass and flowers as vivid as paintings, shifted into one of haunted shadow as evening drew in. Early sensory memory makes beauty and deliciousness out of those liminal times of the day, when Summer warmth began to give way to creeping chill, when dew on the grass became mist and stars began to blink where hot air balloons sailed only hours before. That was when the nightmares crept from their warrens. No specific or prescribed monsters these; no werewolves or vampires, no ghouls or Frankensteinian homonculi. Creatures of a more immediate, visceral nature; shapeless things, crafted from shadow and silhouettes, patched together from scraps of distorted feature seen with my waking eyes (that hint of familiarity making them all the more horrific). I recall one entity billowing in the air like a black plastic bag caught up in the breeze, a jellyfish in turbulent ocean. Boneless, filleted, it would dance in the air, hissing its strange promises and prophecies. Another lurked behind trees and bushes in my Dad's garden; a naked, gangrel thing of spider-like limbs and immense, black eyes that almost eclipsed its entire, swollen head. A beast resembling a hybrid between a human woman and an immense, deep green cat, lycanthropic in nature, transforming from smiling human guise to monster only in my company, my sight, cruelly in love with the masquerade. Monsters. Demons. Ghouls. As much part of my world as worms, house-spiders and woodlice. And, to my infant self, far more welcome. Where these things crept from, what fevered, infected, broken part of my subconscious gave birth to them, I can't say. All I know is: they did not frighten me. Not in the way that the waking world so often did, with its too-bright lights, its ugly, barking voices, its bangs and cries and sirens. The night came with cool, quiet and solace. My realm as much as their's, known viscerally, inarticulately, at so young an age; perhaps before I'd even started speaking in my head, telling stories to myself and spinning the web that would become mind. My realm; the realm of shadows, pregnant silences, flickering shapes at the edges of sight. A world so potent, I couldn't resist or deny it. A world I would never want to. From the youngest age, the nighttime hours have always been fractious, for my younger brother and I both. But, whereas my brother responded to that with distress and disturbance, I recall lying in bed for hours, in stillness and silence, making games from the shadows at play on the ceiling, in the corners of the room. I don't know how long those insomniac nights lasted, but it felt like forever. I can hardly recall what horrors were born there, what spectres crawled from the shadows, lingered behind curtains and in wardrobe doors. Only that they were many, varied and persistent, always there when the world grew dark and empty, a strange kind of company when dreams failed to come. In the earliest days, when I still had a notion of a prescribed bedtime, I recall Summer nights, stood at the large window of my bedroom, looking out at late-evening skies that have never been so brilliant since, at a sun that melted on the horizon, seeming to move and dance to my eyes, becoming the luminous hole through which a Lovecraftian worm-god entered our reality, writhing its way across the sky, eclipsing it with its knotted coils. I remember a shaggy, matted, werewolf-like beast bursting through my bedroom door, its growls and snuffles so tangible, they trembled my guts as it sought me out (but never discovered me beneath the covers). I remember, one night, growing curious at a hole in the wall, a ferocious, red glow emanating from within. Crawling out of bed, I found it to be an opening to a network of small tunnels through which the chatter of flames and infernal industry could be heard. I don't know what manner of goblin-people haunted those tunnels; I never saw them face to face. Only their shadows on the walls, their voices echoing as they approached from around the next corner. Horrors abounded in my childhood, long before I even knew what horror was, before any exposure to the books, comics or VHS tapes that would come to obsess me, echoing, as they did, my internal and part-dreaming life far more sincerely than any children's media of the era (though I won't deny, that obsessed me, too). It wasn't long before those visitations started to bleed into my waking reality. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the hereditary insomnia from which I'd already begun to suffer, even at that tender age, was starting to take its toll on my developing mind. Anxiety and non-specific bouts of depression were commonplace, as were questions of the systems and assumptions into which I was born (whilst I've never been diagnosed, I'm fairly certain I'd be identified as operating on the Autistic spectrum if I were a child today). Sensory hallucinations, whilst not common or overwhelming, did occur; momentary visual episodes in which the patterns in wallpaper or tree branches would form faces or the tangled masses of monsters, in which phantom music and voices sometimes echoed so clearly, I could swear their makers were in the same room. For the most part, I learned to mask and divert myself from this monster-haunted world, to the point that I simply stopped talking to people about it, especially adults, who always became visibly and obviously troubled by the subject. Of course, it found expression in other ways: drawings and paintings of monsters, ghosts and grizzly tableaux, stories for assigned English projects that echoed the horrors I'd already come to love (a story I wrote in Junior school involving a scientist who manages to capture The Loch Ness Monster, but falls out of love with the myth, seeing the reality of it, gained some accolades that likely set me on the path to the here and now). But, more often than not, whilst earning high praise for technical acumen, those stories excited concern from those that read them. More than once, I was forced to attend meetings and explain where certain images and entities in my work came from, or was quietly encouraged to move away from such subject matter (more on that later). But, in the perpetual darkness of my own private world, monsters flourished. The realms of noise and sunlight most kids my age enjoyed and celebrated in was, for me, one of sincere anxiety, even dread. Amongst the monsters, I was akin. Amongst the children of Summer, I was and have always been alien. And, whilst I was an anxious and -unbeknownst to me at the time- powerfully depressed child, the love of subjects waking reality would condemn as morbid or monstrous never left me, never diminished, despite that world's sincere efforts to shame me out of it. If anything, the passions coalesced and crystallised under pressure, finding new and more eloquent expression as I grew into my love of painting and sketching, of film and video games. And, of course, the stories that would become abiding to the point of obsession, in both the reading and creation of. As for the nightmares that came at the beginning, and sustained up to this point? They grew as I did, elaborated into fresh shapes and concerns the more I fed and fertilised them with those of others; with the daily traumas and revelations that are part and parcel of growing up. The dark and the night have never been still or uninhabited. But now, as the agonising transition from childhood to the nowhere-years of teenage liminality began, I became more part of them. Continued in Part 2: At War With Self and Sunlight Thank you for indulging me thus far; there will be more focused, precise explorations of these early years and experiences in essays to come. A warning for part two: Though they will remain general for now, it will include a variety of problematic subjects, including: developing sexuality, insomnia, anxiety, depression, social isolation and suicidal ideation, amongst others. In particular, please be aware of content that refers to active suicide attempts. The essay itself will reiterate these content warnings. george daniel lea George Lea is an unfixed oddity that has a tendency to float around the UK Midlands (his precise location and plain of operation is somewhat difficult to determine beyond that, though certain institutions are working on various ways of defining his movements). An isolated soul by nature, he tends to spend more time with books than with people, consumes stories in the manner a starving man might the scattered debris of an incongruously exploded pie factory, whilst also attempting to churn out his own species of mythological absurdity (it's cheaper than a therapist, less trouble than an exorcist and seems to have the effect of anchoring him in fixed form and state, at least for the moment). Proclaims to spend most of his time "...feeling like some extra-dimensional alien on safari," which he very well might be (apprehension and autopsy will likely yield conclusive details). Following the publication of his first short story collection, Strange Playgrounds, is currently working in collusion with the entity known as "Nick Hardy" on the project Born in Blood. check out the today's other horror feature on |
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