The Perfect Scare

“You won’t believe what Henry did today,” my husband said. It was early evening, and I was washing dishes while he peeled some potatoes for supper. Henry (not his real name) is my husband’s boss. “Henry,” until this moment, has seemed to be an even keel guy: married, loves dogs, intelligent, generous, down-to-earth, and fairly easy to predict. I looked at my husband, who had taken one of his notoriously long pauses in the middle of his story.

“What?” I prompted.

“I walked in this morning. Didn’t see him anywhere. Then he jumped out at me from behind a door, yelling like a maniac! I did my usual scared jump thing and yelled and almost punched him. He could hardly stand up, he was laughing so hard.”

“Wow,” I said. I was genuinely shocked. I did not see that coming from Henry.

“Ya, ‘wow.’ He scared the crap out of me. And later, his wife just laughed and said, ‘Oh, yes. He likes to do that sometimes.’”

At this point in his story, my smile changed from amusement to understanding — a co-conspirator’s smile — because I know the joy that comes from scaring my husband. That “scared jump thing” my hubby mentioned? Well, it’s more of a scared jump jig. It’s hilarious. And it fills my heart with happiness — a pony for your birthday sort of happiness. 

As you may guess, there have been a few scare pranks in our household. One needs to be careful with ambushes, however, as waiting in the dark outside a closed door may earn you a swift punch when your victim finally opens the door. My sons discovered this while trying to scare each other. As well, scaring people on stairways or near stairways has been deemed inadvisable. Body casts always take the fun out of a good scare.

Recently, I saw an action figure head for sale online. My first thought was, “Who wants a Superwoman head displayed on their shelf?” Why just a head? But then, I imagined a sleepy family member shuffling into the kitchen early in the morning, bleary-eyed and reaching for a coffee mug. He opens the cupboard and sees a life-size Harley Quinn head maniacally staring back. Brilliant. 

Perhaps the gold standard in our repertoire, the intentional or unintentional “unseen presence” is the scare I most love and hate. A felt but not seen presence is truly terrible. The other night, as I passed by the doorway to my eldest son’s room, I saw him lounging on his bed in the pitch black, his face illuminated by the stark bluish light of his cellphone. I stepped into his bedroom and waited for him to look up so I could ask him about his work schedule for the week. After a few moments, I decided he was ignoring me. Annoyed, I stood motionless, arms crossed, and stared at him. In truth, he was night blind from the brilliance of his phone and couldn’t see anything in the darkness. He had headphones on and couldn’t hear much either. Nevertheless, a goose-pimpling sixth sense began to crawl up his shoulders, and he sensed someone in the room. His head snapped up. He looked at me. I thought he could see me. He couldn’t see me. I took another step toward him and… “Here’s Johnny!” My husband heard us both screaming from two floors down.

Generally, my eldest son claims to love a good “jump scare,” particularly in movies. I enjoy ghost stories but not scary movies. And, I hate movie jump scares. Not long ago, we watched The Woman in Black (a 2012 movie adaptation of the novel by Susan Hill). The story is a classic gothic horror set in a remote English village, complete with an abandoned mansion and a vengeful ghost. I watched through my fingers. My fearless teenager teased me for this, mercilessly, and bragged about not finding the movie scary at all. Later that evening, however, I decided to have a little fun with teenage Van Helsing. 

Part of what makes The Woman in Black so wonderfully creepy is the subtlety of the scare. A face in the shadows behind the unwitting main character. A curtain at the end of a dimly lit corridor that is actually a woman clad in a long black dress. An empty chair in the background that begins to gently rock of its own volition. After the movie, while our son was still downstairs, my husband crept into Van Helsey’s bedroom with my dress coat, a navy blue, full-skirted affair. He hooked its clothes hanger onto the ceiling fan. When young Van entered his room later and flicked on the light and fan, a tall dress shape whirled toward him, hovering near the ceiling.

“That’s not funny!” He announced before closing himself in the bathroom to brush his teeth. 

I disagreed. It was very funny. I turned off the hall light and placed an antique child-size rocking chair a few steps from the bathroom door. As Van crossed the silent, semi-dark hallway, he glimpsed an out-of-place object in his peripheral vision. He turned and saw a small ebony rocker, empty and facing him expectantly. It was a better scare than the dress coat.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about what makes something scary in fiction. There seems to be a lot of gory and gross, violent and disturbing, but not a lot of scary — things that make me want to sleep with the lights on and not venture into our basement for a week. Of course, the first thing to recognize is that we are all frightened by different things. I live on a property that has joint tenancy with tarantula-sized wolf spiders. (You know they’re big when you can see the wet shine of their eyes.) While I’m not comfortable with close contact, I have grown accustomed to their presence. Bats, on the other hand, forget about it! Yes, they’re welcome outside. They’re great mosquito eaters. But, the telltale brush of air over your face in the middle of the night? Terror! And the metallic scrape of their chatter? Horrible! Before I was married, I lived in a house prone to these winged visitors. On one occasion, upon waking to the knowledge of a bat breezing about my bedroom, I made a 2:00 a.m. phone call to my dad. Despite echolocation, once in the house, bats are total head-bombers. They play chicken with your face, flying as close as they can and then swooping away at the last moment. When my dad arrived at my front door, he found me sitting on the kitchen floor with a laundry basket over my head, whispering frantically. He couldn’t see the phone clasped to my ear — I was talking to my mom, who was coaching me through the ordeal like a 911 operator — and he thought I’d lost my mind. Point being, we all have our own personal terrors.

In my investigation of “scary” literature, I read contemporary thrillers. I read ghost stories. I read classics. Finally, I arrived at a book I had been afraid to read… until now. Pet Sematary. Like a kid who begs her babysitter to tell a scary story, is awake half the night terrified, and then asks for another scary story the next time the babysitter comes, I didn’t want to feel afraid, but I was curious about what makes a true “Did you hear that?” work of fiction. Stephen King’s Pet Sematary has the impending horror of a monkey’s paw wish and the hint of an open ending. The jewel of this novel is the anticipation, the unbearable anticipation. I finished the book in record time.

Was I sleeping with the lights on? No. Was I afraid to go into our basement alone? No. (Okay, maybe for a couple of days.) However, a week after reading this novel, I had a nightmare. This is unusual for me. Additionally, it was the sort of nightmare in which you don’t know if you’re awake or dreaming. When I did wake, my heart hammering in my chest, my first objective was to also wake my husband, sleeping like the dead beside me. Only, he wasn’t there. I heard a clatter in the kitchen and realized he was downstairs. Moments later, he returned to bed, and I, needing to shake the after-tremors of my nightmare and talk about something mundane, attempted to chat.

“Why were you in the kitchen?” I asked, my words light and conversational in the dark of our bedroom.

“Oh, nothing,” he said — confirmation, I thought, that “nothing” was a midnight sandwich, the crumbs and juices of which I would discover in the morning, smeared on the laminate countertop like a crime scene. Instead, he continued with, “I just heard something in the backyard. Thought it was an animal getting into the bird feeder again.”

“A bear?” I cut in, thinking the worst.

“No, no. Just a racoon,” he reassured.

“Oh,” I sighed. Racoons tearing apart the bird feeder were nothing out the ordinary.

Quiet returned to the bedroom, and I wondered if he’d nodded off. The dull flap of the curtain beside the headboard and cool night air on my face reminded me that I’d opened the window wide before going to bed. Then, as a casual afterthought, he said, “I could see something moving around out there, but the shape was funny. Couldn’t tell what it was. Then, I shone the flashlight out the kitchen window and saw it was a racoon. Only… there was something wrong with its legs. Like it was dragging its back half instead of walking.” 

I froze. My husband huffed out a perplexed sigh. “Who knows,” he concluded, as though he were discussing the best time to plant tomatoes. “Maybe he’d been hit on the road.”

“Where’d he go?” I whispered.

“Don’t know,” he answered, pulling at the covers and rolling over to sleep. “He was dragging himself slowly across the backyard when I last looked.” 

Then, silence. I heard his breath soften into sleepy puffs. I lay on my back, bug-eyed and listening, while visions of Pet Sematary racoons crept round my bed.

As I’m sure Henry would agree, the perfect scare is most often the unintentional one.