A kid surrounded by strange monsters; I wonder what he’s going to do when he grows up? Probably write fantasy.
I think most horror writers, mystery writers, or thriller writers have something in their childhood that send them into the worlds of darkness and fear. Something in our young lives causes us to gravitate towards murder and psychopaths and demons and very graphic sex scenes (yes, I said that). Some of us have more trouble than others remembering and figuring out what childhood traumas we have, if any.
For a while, I thought I didn’t have a childhood trauma, that I just naturally liked murder and monsters. Of course, that says some scary stuff about yours truly, so what do I do? I try to rack my memory for something in my childhood that might’ve made me like hell and high water.
This evening, it finally came to me. Toledo Ohio, my old hometown, where I lived until I was nine, but when it happened I couldn’t have been more than seven, most likely five or six. My parents were both rabbis at the same synagogue, so I had free range pretty much over the whole building. And behind the bimah, which is the raised area in the back of the sanctuary in a synagogue, was a small little passageway that opened up on either side of the bimah. The passageway led to where the boiler/furnace/whatever were hidden, and I thought I’d go exploring.
I went into the sanctuary, where two men on the synagogue staff were collecting prayer books from the seats. I didn’t really notice them–they were staff, I was a privileged rabbi’s kid, you get the idea–but they noticed me. And they decided to play a prank on me.
I walked into the passage, and I heard the humming of machines keeping the synagogue at the right chapter. I stand there listening for a second when the two staff members show up on either side of me, with freaky smiles on their faces. The taller (and I think older) says to me, “You hear that sound?” Me, being a little kid and freaked as hell by their smiles, nod in the affirmative. The other one says to me, “That’s the sound of death.” After he says that, the sound of the machines humming seem to change and to become the sounds of buzzsaws cutting things in two, at least to my little ears.
So what did I do? I ran! I ran past the shorter one, out the passageway, and did not stop till I was halfway between the sanctuary and my dad’s office, which to a six-year-old is quite the distance. I didn’t tell my parents. I bottled it up and got on with the day.
A few weeks later, I went into the sanctuary again, this time when those two staff members weren’t around. But it didn’t occur to me that they might not be in that part of the synagogue today or even in the building; to me they were in the passageway, waiting to kill me. Or at least, I thought they might be. I wanted to go in there, to show I wasn’t going to die and that I wasn’t scared.
I went in. Nobody else was there. I left, alive and healthy and full of hyperactive pep. I’d conquered my fear, proven that I was stronger than my fears. Later I forgot the incident, but I remembered I’d conquered my fear, that I’d been stronger than it, that I had ruled over it.
From that time onwards, I slowly but surely became entranced with the macabre and freaky, the stuff that fills nightmares, even when I felt scared by it too. Why? Because I felt that even if something scared me, I could control that scary thing, just like I had conquered and controlled my fears in the passageway. I started really getting into writing, and then after a while, I started really getting into writing scary stories, as well as reading them. Recently I’ve had some luck with publishing them.
And tonight I remembered what scared me back then. I called my dad to see if he remembered the staff members in question. He said that judging by their descriptions, they were most likely two men by the names of Bill and George, though he finds it hard to believe they’d pull on a prank like that on a kid, let alone the rabbi’s son. That, and he likes to joke I was dropped on my head as a child, and that’s why I’m so strange.
So now I remember my traumatic episode that propelled me towards controlling the things that scare others. It’s all because of two men with really sick senses of humor. But I’m not resentful; in fact, I’d like to thank Misters Bill and George, wherever you are today. Did you know that I’d become a writer of scary stories? Probably not, but I hope you eel sorry for what you did. If you don’t, it’s going to be really hard for you to accept that you’ve been outed on the Internet (my little revenge).
Well, now that that’s out of the way, I’ve got classes tomorrow, so it’s time for bed. Good night, and if I can’t write a post tomorrow, have a nice weekend.
Rami Ungar The Writer 