Looking Back on 20 Years of Writing, Part 5: Night Light (2000)

I freely admit that "Part 4" of this series started out like a creepy Reddit post. This one's going to be a lot more of that, so buckle up.

If I wanted to give an easy, surfacy answer to the question of where the short story "Night Light" came from, all I'd have to do is say, "It came from a doodle I did while talking on the phone." True story. I used to doodle a lot when I was on the phone, back when all phones were attached to the wall by cords, restricting my options and mobility so long as the conversation lasted. It was during one such phone call in the late 1990s that I doodled a creature that would ultimately serve as the inspiration for the story's antagonist, the closet monster Ooga Booga.

That's if I wanted to give a quick, easy answer.

However, if I wanted to go deep, tell you the whole story behind the story? We've gotta get weird; we've gotta get creepy; like the story itself.

As with Cry, Wolf, this one comes with a bit of a paranormal backstory. I'm going to say this upfront: I'm not trying to convince anyone that my interpretation of what I experienced as a child is the correct interpretation. It is entirely possible that I was, for some unknown reason, insane for years, to the point of auditory and visual hallucinations, and that these hallucinations inexplicably started and stopped parallel to the time that my family moved into and out of this particular apartment. I don't think I was insane, but either way, the experience was real for me. The experience was terrifying.

When I was ten years old, my family moved into a haunted apartment. That's my interpretation of what I went through. I didn't talk about it much at the time, and I don't talk about it much now. As with the thing I saw in the parking lot, detailed in the previous entry, I don't like talking about it. I'm uncomfortable with it. I don't want people to question my sanity or my honesty. I'd rather just leave it alone and ponder its mystery, discuss it only with people who have had similar experiences. But I do want to be open about my experience as a writer, about my influences, about how my personal journey has fed into my work. To that end, I'm going to tell you just a little bit about the haunted apartment, at least as far as it directly relates to "Night Light."

Our apartment building in Dallas was located right across the parking lot from an old slave cemetery. The cemetery was actually directly behind the playground across the street from us. Once a year, for several years in a row, tarantulas would swarm out of the cemetery, adding to the creep factor exponentially. I doubt there was any supernatural reason for this; it was probably more a result of the slave portion of the grounds being run down, gated off, and overgrown at the time. That was something everyone could see. I was not alone in the dread I felt about these spiders; the nightmares they brought on when it was their season.

But I was alone in what I suspect was another result of living beside an old, neglected graveyard.

It didn't start all at once. It built up slowly over the years. I think it started with the incident in the closet. I had a big closet in this apartment, and I loved to go in there and play with my toys. I would build forts under the shelves with some big, cardboard building blocks I had, and I would hide out behind them and draw. One day, I was in the closet, doing just that, and I started to think about ghosts. I had just read something in a restaurant about ghosts in the White House, and my mind started wandering back to the topic. I felt a chill, saw the goosebumps coming up on my arms, and then the closet door slammed shut, the light went out, and I heard a malicious laugh. It was a loud laugh; a man's laugh; not an ambiguous sound at all.

I screamed and bolted through the wall of blocks, opened the closet door, and ran out of my room, through the hall, and out into the living room, where I found everyone behaving normally, barely acknowledging my presence, dashing my hopes that it had been my father playing a twisted, out-of-character prank on me.

I kept it to myself. Actually, I can't recall ever telling that story to anyone before now. I instinctively knew I would not be believed.

As time went on, things escalated. I would hear footsteps in the hallway at night. Very distinctive footsteps. At the time, my maternal grandmother was living with us, and she had taken my sister's room at the opposite end of the hallway, while my sister had moved into the bottom bunk in my room. I always took an auditory inventory at night. I could hear my sister breathing steadily in the bottom bunk, my grandmother in her room, my mother and father both snoring loudly in their room on the other side of the apartment. My dog was often sleeping at the foot of my bed or snuggled right up beside me. Everyone was accounted for, and then the footsteps would come, when I was the only one left awake. When they crossed into my bedroom, I would cover my head and pray, every night, in a state of sheer terror. I would pray, and the footsteps would come right up next to the bed, and then I would hear breathing, right beside my head. There was no question in my mind that whatever this thing was, it knew it was scaring me. It wanted to scare me.

There was a malevolent energy about the building we were in too. Every single couple that moved in upstairs became violent after a few months, fought loudly, physically, broke up, and moved out. My own parents broke up, and my father moved out. This is more likely coincidence than anything else, but it was something I wondered about even then. Was the thing making people angry? Was it feeding on the negative emotions? The fear? The rage? The brutality? I was a child, so all I could do was wonder helplessly.

I lost sleep. Time after time I was too tired to get through school the next day after one of these visits from the invisible man. I would lie awake praying fervently, all night, and I would be exhausted by morning. I would fall asleep in class, or I would stay home sick with my mother. When I was a teenager, I would even cut class sometimes, just because I was so tired and couldn't keep my head up.

After my father moved out and my mother started working, it got even worse. I would be home alone, often. Doors would slam shut. Kitchen drawers would open and close. Most of the door slamming came from the room that my sister and grandmother took turns with. I thought that was actually its room, from before we had moved in. And it would come walking down the hall from there at night and into my room. I was the only one awake, so I would always be the one to get the visit. I have never experienced such a prolonged state of terror before or since. It scarred me for life.

It got so bad during the last year or so that we were in that apartment that I would make a run for my mother's room and sleep on the floor. There were times when I didn't make it. It found ways to scare me, to herd me back. One night that I was too terrified to be in my room, it made itself known in the living room when I tried to escape to my mom's room, and I had to close myself into the hallway and sit, vigilant, with my back in a corner so that nothing could come up behind me, crying and waiting for morning. I was in Hell.

I told my mother finally. I told her exactly what was going on. If you've read "Night Light," some of this will start to sound familiar to you. My mother told me very plainly that it was "just the air conditioner" making those sounds. I felt invisible. I felt completely alone. No matter what I told her had happened, she insisted it was the air conditioner and that I should go to bed and not be afraid.

Just the air conditioner ... laughing in a deep and menacing voice, slamming the closet door, my sister's door, opening and closing the drawers in the kitchen, and a great many other things I don't feel an immediate need to get into. The point is, if it had been the air conditioner, I'm pretty sure an AC repairman would have needed to bring along an exorcist.

We finally moved out, and things had begun to escalate daily as we made our preparations. I had to walk home from school to an empty apartment for a week or two, and I eventually just resolved to spend the whole time on the front porch, waiting for my mom to get off work and come and pick me up to go to the new town house each day. I was so relieved when the nightmare ended. We moved into the new place, and whatever it was that had been assaulting me for all those years stayed behind.

But here's the part that upset me the most; the part that really did trigger this short story years later, when I set out to write the story of this silly looking monster I had doodled on an envelope. The topic came up, after we were settled in the new town house, and, for once, my mother did not return to her tired old "just the air conditioner" explanation. Instead, she shocked me with the truth.

She told me that when we first moved into the apartment, they had found bloody clothes stashed in the space above the shower, in the bathroom that was between my room and my sister's room; that she had thought about it when I had started to tell her I was being harassed by a ghost; that she had kept it from me in order to keep me from being frightened. I was so angry when she told me this! I'm glad she did, because it was a validation. Proof of the paranormal? No. But it was something that began to give credence to my story outside of my own experience. Still, it was knowledge that would have helped me at the time; that would have told me I wasn't invisible, unheard, disbelieved. I had suffered all those years with nothing more than, "It's just the air conditioner," when she had known full well the whole time that there could be something to what I was telling her.

I know she wasn't being malicious. No parent ever gets everything right. All they can do is try. Her call was to protect me from the truth. Having never, as far as I know, experienced such a thing herself, I suppose she had no idea just exactly how terrified I was every night. I forgive her for that now, but when I wrote "Night Light" my subconscious was still processing the waking nightmare that I had lived through. I think that apartment is a big part of why I wound up writing horror stories when I grew up. You write what you know. You write from your experience.

As I wrote "Night Light," all of these old wounds opened up; the horror of being a child who wasn't being heard, the mother who insisted it was just the air conditioner and went to bed to sleep soundly while her child lay awake in terror. It was a retaliation, this story. It was a "What if it had gotten even worse?" scenario. I saw my mother's choice as negligent at the time I wrote the story, and so the story was about the possible lethal results of a parent not listening to their child. It was cathartic.

My feelings about "Night Light" have taken a couple of dramatic turns over the years. And I definitely don't think my mother was being negligent anymore; I just think she made the wrong call while trying to make the right call. All parents do it from time to time. All parents.

One of the things that happened to change my feelings about this story was the birth of my then-best friend's son in 2005. I had loved "Night Light" for its creepy weirdness, for its catharsis, for its brutal, ballsy ending. But, when Sebastian was born, and I bonded with him, my feelings for "Night Light" turned. I hated the story. In fact, it was the only story I had written that I felt this way about. I felt like it was a stain on my soul. I hated it for its hopelessness, for its brutal, heartless ending, for its failure to hear the cries of its protagonist, Luke, for help. The narrative left Luke's plight ignored, and he suffered without end until the monster at last got its meal. Yes, it's implied that his parents were punished for their neglect after the story, when they went in to their son's room to find him gone, to find his blood all over the floor. But that wasn't the way it should have gone! Luke was an innocent! He deserved to be heard and seen! So, I hated it from he moment I looked into Sebastian's eyes and saw his smile as he wrapped his tiny hand around my finger for the first time.

Of course, things changed for me again, when the characters started reaching out to me, telling me the story didn't actually end where I thought it did, showing me what happened next, that Luke was okay, that he did indeed get justice after all. They showed me "Night Light II," and the journey of these characters continued. I'll tell you all about it when we get that far in this retrospective blog series, but that's all I really have to say about the inspiration for the first one and how I relate to it; why I wrote it and how I wrote it.

"Night Light" was published directly to my Website in February of 2000, replacing "The Ghost in the Olive Grove," with which it shared a universe. This story is a key piece for me. Not only for my strong, emotional link to it, but also for the fact that it started my horror fiction down the path of universe-building, when Luke's mother mentioned her friend Amy, the protagonist of "The Ghost in the Olive Grove," whom she hadn't heard from since June.

Nineteen years later, "Night Light" stands as one of my all time favorite short stories. It's creepy. It's weird. It has ... teeth. As I look at the unpublished manuscripts currently on my desk, as I contemplate all of my plans for the future of the Nightfire Universe, it is abundantly clear that "Night Light," along with "Night Light II," is really the cornerstone of that fictional realm. And as for that realm, there is no end in sight.

Next: The Chronicles of Nightfire, Texas, Volume I: The Vampire Murders