These days, my older brother Jake is a calm, competent professional. He’s skilled at his job, and so laid-back and reserved that it actually used to intimidate his students when he TA’d classes. That’s now. Back when he was a little kid, he was scared of everything.
Bugs. Balloons. The vacuum cleaner. Basically any loud noise. The dark. Dogs. The basement.
As I child, I feared neither god nor death, and so it was my job to protect my big brother from all the minutiae of life that he found terrifying.
Being afraid of the basement was a real problem, because his bedroom was in the basement. I used to have to go downstairs every night and turn on all the lights before he would come downstairs. Once I’d done that he was fine.
At least he was fine up until he thought it would be fun to spend an afternoon building a spooky fort in his walk-in closet and tell scary stories in it. The four of us huddled in the dark closet-fort with a flashlight and Jake cooked up the scariest story he could: that our house was actually built on top of an old burial ground, and there were horrible undead monsters under the floors, trying to claw their way up. This was a very scary story indeed, and my younger brother and sister were terrified. I was old enough to remember when the house had been built, however, and therefore knew for a fact that the story was untrue.
Jake, despite also having been there when the house was built, and having made up the story himself, was terrified.
He spent the next week insisting that I not only turn on all the lights for him before bed, but also check all the closets and make sure that there were no sounds coming from the floor under his bed. Which I did, dutifully, every night.
And then came the day that he punched me in the face and broke the lens out of my glasses.
Now, we roughoused a lot. Scraped knees and elbows were absolutely the norm, and mostly that was fine. But an outright punch to the face? Heinous. Unforgivable. Deserving of the direst revenge my seven-year-old brain could concoct.
“Mom and Dad are gonna kill you when they find out you broke my glasses,” I told him, and quietly slid my foot over the fallen lens where it rested in the front lawn. “You better find that lens or you’re gonna be in trouble until you die.”
Jake, who already knew that he’d crossed a line, went pale and immediately began scrabbling through the grass for the lost lens. I waited long enough for him to turn away before lifted my foot, pocketed the lens, and went inside to sit on the couch and watch him freak out.
He spent a good hour looking for the lens before he went inside and realized I’d already fixed my glasses.
I had spent that hour in my most natural state: scheming.
So when night fell, I did my usual basement sweep. I turned on all the lights, loudly opened and closed the closet doors, and then returned upstairs to give Jake the all-clear. “It’s fine,” I told him, “Only….”
“WHAT,” Jake demanded, thoroughly terrified of monsters entirely of his own making, and not at all afraid of the only thing in the house worth fearing, which was, of course, me. (Our ancient and malevolent demoncat, Kitten Little, was also worth fearing, but that is a story for another time.) At age seven, I had never heard of the concept of ‘excessive force.’ I had also never heard of the concept of ‘psychological warfare,’ but that was hardly going to stop me from using it. Jake demanded, “What was down there?? What did you see?”
“Oh, nothing. But maybe…I thought I saw eyes? Glowing eyes? Under your bed.”
“GLOWING EYES UNDER MY BED??”
“Probably it was just Kitten Little. Goodnight!”
I bounced upstairs to my room in the attic of the house. The ceiling was plastered with glowy stars, and I flopped down in my bunkbed and watched them idly while I waited for the rest of the house to settle down to sleep. One by one, lights turned off across the house, and soon the only noise was the creaking of the old oak tree outside my window.
I reached up and removed one of the jumbo-sized stars from my ceiling. There was a wad of sticky tack on the back. Quietly, I slipped into the bathroom, turned on the lights, and carefully drew two eye-shapes on the star, as large as would fit. Using the pair of scissors I’d stashed in a drawer earlier, I cut the shapes out of the heavy plastic star. Then I used the sticky tack to attach one to each of the lenses of my freshly-repaired glasses.
And then I snuck down to the basement, and army-crawled under Jake’s bed.
Now, I’d been patient. It was well after midnight; everyone else was deeply asleep. That was about to change.
I set my nails against the underside of Jake’s bed and dragged them loudly. I pushed up with my legs just enough to shift the bed a little. I could hear him starting to wake up, so quietly, using a deep, grating growl I’d spent all afternoon practicing, (and which, later in life, would scare our class bully so badly he fell backwards out of a hay wagon) I moaned, “JAAAAAAAAAAAKE.”
Slowly, visibly terrified, Jake lowered his head over the edge of the of the bed.
I whipped my head sideways and shoved my legs against the wall as hard as I could, launching my glowing-eyed face towards him like a snake.
Something thumped overhead as everyone in the bedrooms upstairs woke up all at once. I knew I had about sixty seconds of getaway time while Jake cowered under his blankets. I crawled out the door, making sure to move as oddly as possible in case he could see me, and darted into one of the unfinished storage rooms down the hall. I waited until I had heard both parents go into Jake’s room before I sipped out and quietly returned to my room.
Jake insisted on sleeping in my parent’s bedroom for the next month.
At the opposite end of the house, I slept peacefully every night.
On the ceiling over my head, carefully attached with sticky-tack, were two glowing eyes.
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