Introduction

Jake Wiklacz

I remember the recurring incident clearly. There I am, once again; five years old, lying in bed with the sheets pulled halfway up my face at the witching hour, awakened by a nightmare. But in my wakefulness, the nightmare has only just begun.

Now comes the feeling of dread, the fear that something is going to emerge from my closet, or from under my bed, or from the staircase right across from my bedroom. I can remember fixating on that staircase, which seemed to leer at me through my bedroom doorway. Many times, I pictured some sinister boogeyman walking up those stairs and making eye contact with me when it reaches the top.

As a child, my anxiety about boogeymen, the dark, and the paranormal was quite severe. During the worst bouts, I would dread the night as early as five o’clock, when it became apparent that the sun was getting closer and closer to the horizon. Please don’t let night come, I would think to myself in futile protest. Needless to say, the sun never took pity on me, and nighttime always inevitably came. Many nights, I lied awake in bed, tormented by fears of the supernatural, haunted by visions of death.

I recall one evening that I stayed the night at a friend’s house across the street. It was October, and thus AMC was airing horror films late at night. I unwisely landed on AMC while they were airing Poltergeist II: The Other Side. After watching the scene where Craig T. Nelson vomits a python-sized worm—which then morphs into a goblin-like imp—that familiar feeling of dread coursed through me as I realized I would not be sleeping peacefully for a while.

During the weeks that followed, I was unsurprisingly hard pressed to get a good night’s sleep. And during this bout of anxiety—this one lasting about a month—I asked myself, why? Why, as I flipped through channels, did I choose to land on the station that was playing a horror film, knowing very well that it would land me in another heap of anxiety? I was angry with myself. I had brought this upon myself, and I felt I deserved it. No one forced me to watch these horror movies, after all. In fact, my parents always warned against it. But every once in a while, curiosity would get the best of me, and I regretted it every single time.

It wasn’t until many years later that I was able to answer my question. In high school, my fears of monsters and the dark and the paranormal gave way to more typical adolescent fears. Thus, I began watching horror movies in full, and I liked them. And not only that, but I soon found myself writing horror screenplays and horror short stories. That’s when it hit me.

When I was a little kid and was going through one of my bouts of anxiety, my mother said to me, “Maybe you’re going through this so that you can help other people in some way.” I didn’t really understand it at the time, but now, it makes perfect sense. Because my imagination got so carried away as a kid with thoughts of monsters and the paranormal, I could now harness that very same imagination and use it to my advantage.

What you are about to read can best be described as my confession. It is my fears and my anxieties put down on paper. When you read it, you will be offered a look into my childhood mind, and you will see all of the things that scared me as a small child, and some of the things that may even still scare me to this day. Hopefully, these stories will not only serve to scare, thrill, and entertain you, but also to offer you a sort of catharsis, one that I definitely needed as a child.

Before we begin, I want to take this opportunity to say thank you. If you are reading this right now, then you are committing the greatest act of kindness to me possible: bearing witness to my creativity. By absorbing the words I have written in this anthology, you will know me better than you ever could if you simply just had a conversation with me. Therefore, to you, I offer my deepest gratitude. And now, we begin…