Bad Things Happen in the Night 

-Dan Everson

(This is an informal writing assignment. I had asked students to try to get themselves in the mood for a scary book by going out and trying to scare themselves.)

It’s eleven at night as I approach the cemetery gates, and the first thing to catch my eye is an old, mossy headstone about six feet high in the shape of a cross.  We all like to check out the tall ones, so I walk a bit closer; only to realize that at the base of the cross, my name is inscribed in the stone in capital letters.  I took it for a blip.  It was the beginning of a tense evening, to say the least. 

We stalked deeper into the darkness of the cemetery, and once we were well away from any nearby noise, I split off from my cohorts and walked alone down a paved path surrounded by headstones.  I kept snapping pictures and acting nonchalant, but I could feel my heartbeat accelerating.  I took a right onto the grass, and started walking among the graves.  The sponginess of the grass was enough to make me jump a little bit; even my feet were on edge.  At this point my mind is racing with all sorts of rational and irrational fears.  I’m trying to weigh them all out in my head and figure out what I should do to prevent myself from getting eaten by a cougar, assaulted by a poltergeist, or being taken to prison for being such a creep and wandering around the cemetery at night.  I realize that I’m snapping pictures on either side of me at regular intervals.  I guess my brain decided that was the way to scare off approaching cougars, ghosts, etc.  At this point the fear of getting caught is very secondary to the more irrational ones.  I had been walking off the main trail, and was at this point close to the back edge of the cemetery, which is surrounded by woods – and I thought the cemetery was scary.  This barrier is something I don’t even want to think about, but that I can’t help from craning my neck and checking every 3 seconds.  The hood of my sweatshirt had bunched up on my right shoulder, and on one of my over-the-shoulder checks it almost knocked me down it scared me so bad.  I started paying close attention to the sounds coming from the woods.  I think there were some frogs in there or something, and every once in a while you could hear some kind of bird, which I thought was highly unusual, and was sure I was being warned of an approaching cougar.  A slow wind built up as I was listening, and moving through the trees it just sounded like a shapeless, meaningless sound; the only important thing about it was that it was growing louder and louder.  I can’t believe I even had to convince myself that it was wind – what else could it have been?  Every sound carried with it a hundred ideas of what sinister thing the sound could be coming from.  The only thing that could make me stop speculating about the method of my own demise was the sound that would come after it.  From the wind to a stick breaking to an American flag on a nearby grave thupping as the wind hit it.  Those damn American flags kept scaring the hell out of me.  I finally decided to move away from the edge, before my heart exploded out of my chest.  I guess it’s something like the abyss in Lovecraft.  At least going into the cemetery I knew what I was getting into.  I’ve gone ghost hunting before, and I’m not all that unfamiliar with the scare that comes with wandering through a cemetery alone at night.  Not that I’m immune to it, because I certainly am not, but there is some familiarity there for me.  These woods marked the brink of that familiarity: beyond them lay only the unknown.  I felt so trapped in the cemetery.  I was on this little island that wasn’t all that pleasant to begin with, but the waters surrounding it were enough make your forehead sweat.  If I ever turned my back on it, I could physically feel the side of my body that was facing it tingling; begging me to turn back and just make sure one more time that nothing was emerging from there to get me.

As I turned away from the dark woods, I could see the faint glow of the city behind the trees that bordered the cemetery on the side facing the road.  The part nearest the woods is higher than the road, so I had a good vantage point down to the lights, except for the barrier of the trees.  This gave me the most disconnected sensation.  I felt like I was miles away from anything human at that point, just because I was so high up.  The glow of the city against the silhouette of the trees made the sky look a deep, deep red instead of any hopeful hue.  You would think that looking down at civilization might bring some relief, but it really only made it worse – not to mention the fact that my whole back was tingling about the woods that I was currently ignoring.  My back was not happy, it was sure something was going to maul it.

The whole scene of looking at the city really made me think of how Lovecraft can describe anything in an almost overly depressing, frightening, apocalyptic way.  In Nyarlathotep he describes glittering snow as “hellish”, which just seemed almost laughable to me at the time.  But I realized that when you’re in the state I was in, anything can look sinister.  The glow of city lights, which I wouldn’t think twice to see described as hopeful, welcoming or warm, were pretty much making my blood run cold. 

So in light of all this, I started walking briskly down the hill, and met up with my pals, overjoyed to have such proximity with real humans.  Except now the fear that I had previously neglected came to be.  The irrational fears play out when you’re alone – I was worried about the ghosts and the off chance that a cougar would eat my limbs.  Those don’t have nearly the impact when you’re in a group, but what does scare you is seeing a spinning orange light on top of a vehicle that is driving right at you.  And guess what happened?  So we dove down next to a tree, crouching in the shadows.  I was happy to lie next to a grave that moments ago would have scared the daylights out of me just to avoid being seen by a real person; something that I craved about 30 seconds ago.  The switch in my desires would have made me laugh if my heart didn’t feel like it was pounding a hole into the ground as I lay on my stomach with my palms on the wet grass beside me, ready to jump up any second and run for my life and clean criminal record.  I whispered that I didn’t think they were coming this way, and reprimanded myself in my mind for not knowing where the paths connected to each other.  We jumped up and half-ran half-loped down the paved path, trying to be as invisible as possible. I flipped on the hood of my dark sweatshirt but then immediately took it back off as my frightened brain told me that I might need my peripheral vision to warn me of a quickly advancing … something.  The headlights spun around towards us again and made every trinket on every grave cast a shadow as big as my imagination.  I think there may have been a second truck, but I really couldn’t have cared less at that point.  We turned right, heading straight downhill on the grass; the impact of my feet was multiplied by the decline, and each step felt like it jarred all my bones and skewed my vision.  We got to a gravel path that led out of the cemetery; it wasn’t the way we had come in, but it was a way out, and that’s all that really mattered.  We were able to slow down as we approached the road and the lights.  Suddenly I was happy for the cover of the trees that had scared me minutes ago, and the lights lost their sinister glow and became welcoming again.  We took a couple of minutes to calm down, and then I realized that I wanted to go back in to get a picture of myself next to the grave with my name on it.  We turned around and the path immediately became frightening again.  It could have been glowing when we were fleeing to it, and now every stump looked like some maniac’s head hiding in the bushes.  As we turned around we noticed a “no U-turn” sign on the side of the path, and couldn’t help but notice the irony in that.  Also, this was clearly a walking path, no car could ever fit on it, so why were there traffic directions there?  It seemed so much like a sign to just keep going and get the hell out of there, get back to the van (mystery machine).

The turning around made me think of Johansen spinning the boat around and trying to destroy Cthulu.  This is just never the solution with fear like that.  He plowed into the green blob, and instead of destroying him, Cthulu just reformed behind him, terrifying as ever.  This is just what the darkness does.  You charge into it like it’s no big deal, but you forget that every bit of darkness you will yourself to charge into is a little more that’s creeping behind you.  I know what Lovecraft meant when he said, and italicized, that the darkness had a positive quality to it because you can feel it.  The deeper you go into the cemetery the more you can feel it behind you.  The awful thing is that it’s that terrible, weighty darkness that you have to run back through to get to safety.  The darkness takes on this double meaning – you’re at the same time trying to avoid it and wishing you could just run into it.  This might be a stretch but it makes me think about Riddley Walker and Lovecraft too, just the idea that we have have this draw to technology, but we see the danger in it too.  Lovecraft especially recognizes this expansiveness of human potential, and the possibility that this potential has dark implications.