[Analcuck]

CURTAINS

By S. Michael *****



They say you outgrow things like The Boogeyman, monsters, ghost stories, and all that crazy stuff you sincerely believed when you were a kid ‘cause you had a charmed life enriched with comics, Fangoria, and cable TV with its nearly constant stream of horror. Even Disney had The Watcher in the Woods and Something Wicked This Way Comes.

If you didn’t have cable, the Networks still took pretty good care of you with the Saturday Afternoon Creature Feature classics like THEM or Godzilla vs. Your Mom. TV also had those late-night horror anthology shows–real nightmare fuel, some of them–and of course, Elvira and various local horror hosts around the country, usually on primetime UHF.

The best was if you had a theater or one of those new-fangled video stores near you. For a few clams, you could catch newer fare like the Jaws movies, Dreamscape, and dozens of slasher or zombie flicks that never grew tired of ripping each other off or raising the bar on gore (till the dreaded FCC crackdown). Plenty to watch. Plenty to ponder. Plenty to fear.

You grew up with a certain level of horror-fueled fear rivaled only by fear of death and the possibility of burning in hell for eternity descriptions of which a seemingly never-ending supply of TV preachers were happy to hand out in copious supply…when they weren’t too busy snorting coke or whacking it to kiddie porn, that is.

Speaking of porn, you knew where to find it if you were clever. You had the JC Penney catalog lingerie pages, but there was also that secret stash at the back of Dad’s closet, in his nightstand, or in his underwear drawer. We won’t talk about what you found in Mom’s underwear drawer…ahem (what a sinner).

Lots of us saw Debbie Does Dallas for the first time at 3 a.m. on “Skinemax” with the sound all the way down in the middle of the living room while everyone else was asleep. I’ll never forget witnessing the haunting ending of The Devil in Miss Jones at a buddy’s house and how it firmly established a psychological link between lust and damnation.

But most of us had to settle for trying to catch an errant titty or the even more elusive bush shot amidst the electronically scrambled chaos of an unsubscribed Playboy Channel. Many covert boners. Many lifelong memories established. Yeah, life was pretty damn good despite the fear, hell, sometimes because of it.

What was more thrilling than sneaking out in the middle of the night, maybe with a buddy who’d slept over, and running around the neighborhood - or sneaking into places you weren’t supposed to be and sometimes getting caught - your heart pounding as some grownup chased away you pesky kids? Zoinks!

That was the good kind of fear – the kind you will spend most of your adult life trying to recapture – watching old scary movies, telling ghost stories to your kids, compiling obscene amounts of horror comics, riding the haunted house rides at the amusement parks that don’t even scare most youngsters nowadays but thrill you almost as much as they did all those years ago…and then there’s the bad kind.

Maybe it was all those supernatural horror flicks like The Exorcist and The Omen; maybe the TV preachers (or real preachers) took their toll, or maybe you just picked up one too many Chick Tracts. But if you’re like me, something - something evil - got it stuck in your head that there are real demons. Whether you’ve shared this experience or not, believing in real demons and not being religious? It sucks.

It sucks big floppy donkey gonads. You don’t have that “power of Christ” to compel them, you just have your own wits and mental fortitude, and whatever measure of disbelief you can muster in the face of true terror – more than any you ever needed for movies or fiction or getting into trouble as a kid. You’re like a reverse Father Callahan in ‘Salem’s Lot.

It’s in this context that I’m going to tell you about Makanimit. Don’t ask me how he got his name – maybe it’s not even a real name but just something a terrified kid came up with on the fly that seemed to fit. I do know that I wrote it down, M-A-K-A-N-I-M-I-T, in blue crayon on the inside back cover of a kids’ encyclopedia (“M”, naturally), along with an illustration of what I must’ve thought he looked like.

Trust me, you don’t want to see that illustration. I’m afraid to even look at it, though it’s still in that book on a shelf in my youngest daughter’s room. But I haven’t seen the demon, so maybe he’s not real, right? Well no, I hadn’t actually seen him in the early days, but I’d definitely “felt” his presence. I’d see plenty of him later. If I were to give him an entry in D&D’s Monster Manual, it might go something like this:

Makanimit is a demon that takes many forms, most commonly a dog or a wolf that climbs onto the back of a victim to make his presence known then feed on the resulting terror. It often appears as a being of pure darkness with a vague outline like the stealth armor of the alien in the 'Predator' movies. This demon tends to bond to one individual and terrorize them for many years, starting in childhood then appearing intermittently throughout their whole life, finally showing its true form at the moment of the victim’s death. One of its favorite modes of oppression is to manifest itself behind a curtain and breathe just loudly enough for its victim to hear.

Cool! Kid stuff. Crazy stuff though, right? I wish. My first experience with this entity was when I was five or six. I was visiting my grandmother in Oklahoma and had terrorized my little brother by chasing him around with my father’s belt and gotten myself punished. I was sent to the garage, which had been converted into my uncle’s bedroom, to sit in the dark and think about what I had done.

The bed was a strange but cool canopy style with dark blue spaceship sheets and curtains my uncle kept closed so he wouldn’t have to make his bed. As I pouted on the edge of it and cursed my lot, I distinctly remember a very soft, not-quite-human, but certainly evil voice in a low whisper say,

You’re a bad boy, Michael. You know where bad boys go, don’t you? They go to hell. That’s where I’m taking you… after I eat you.

And suddenly there it was. Right behind those closed curtains. I could feel displacement of air and material as it slowly worked its way towards me. And then the awful feeling set in of the fact that it knew that I knew that it knew I knew it was there. It sounds goofy when you read or say it, like some bad Abbot & Costello bit, but apply it to the most horrific thing you can imagine and see if you don’t get chills.

I didn’t see it but could sense its large, doglike maw practically at my neck, slavering in anticipation of my yumminess. Goosebumps covered my whole body as a cold chill traveled up my spine. Piss ant that I was I began whining, “Mommy, mommy, mommy,” louder and louder till somebody finally came and turned on the light. It was my grandmother.

“Now what in the world’s gotten into you?” I told her everything and she just laughed.
“Why there’s nothing behind those curtains at all, silly goose, ‘cause those curtains ain’t closed!”

As I agonizingly turned my head to see that she was correct, I didn’t even consciously realize my body was already rising from the bed and headed for the door. When my eyes took in the fact that what she said was true, a scream welled up inside me but came out more like a cross between a groan and a whimper, like Ed Harris right before the giant headstone falls on him in Creepshow, and I hightailed it out of there, not to return to that room again for years.

I swore that I would never, ever, ever, ever, ever terrorize my kid brother again. But I must not have memorized enough “evers” because sure enough a couple of years later I found myself locking the unfortunate lad in our bedroom closet and banging on it from the outside, growling at him in my best demon voice:

“Don’t you know where bad little boys go, Paddy? That’s right! They go to the BAD place!” We weren’t allowed to say the “H” word even though it seemed to be the favorite word of the Baptist preachers we were forced to listen to every Sunday. “That’s where I’m gonna take YOU after I EAT YOU!” and I proceeded to bang on the cheap metal closet door which produced a satisfying rumbling noise like thunder.

I’d kept the volume level down to a dull roar up to that point, but I must have struck a nerve with my last comment to Paddy because he began to shriek at the top of his lungs. As I began to laugh uncontrollably at this latest development, I foolishly forgot that my stepdad, who was sleeping off a hangover, was likely to be woken by Paddy’s cries (never mind my closet banging). Too late I opened the closet door, but Dad had already stormed in.

Wild-eyed and groggy, hair a rat’s nest, huge, hairy monster in his tighty whiteys, he paused to look around, assessed the situation, grabbed me by my hair, and pulled me kicking and screaming to the bathroom. The upstairs bathroom had no windows, one door, one sink, one toilet, and one bathtub. The shower curtain was light blue and matched the shag toilet carpeting and the wallpaper. “SIT.”

And I was directed to sit on the edge of the bathtub and “see what it feels like to be trapped in the dark” as he clicked off the switch and slowly closed off the world of light and life to plunge me into solitude and darkness…in front of the curtain. And Makanimit was wasting no time. In fact, at present not only was he very much with me, but he was stronger than ever because…well, I was more afraid than ever.

After all, I’d brought this on myself. He was practically licking my ear with sadistic glee; I could almost envision his wolf-like face, eyes rolling back in ravenous anticipation. The worst part was that old feeling of knowing that he knew I knew he knew I knew he was there…I realized that once the curtain was peeled back it was going to be the end for me, and honestly? I welcomed it. This was torturous.

But after a mini eternity, Dad opened the door, flipped on the light, and ordered me to go clean my room. Why, oh why did I look back on my way out of the bathroom? Hadn’t I learned anything from Lot’s wife? I may not have turned into a literal pillar of salt (I don’t think she did either, if she ever even existed), but the color drained out of me enough for Paddy to tell me I was “white as a ghost” when he saw me again.

And it was like that for a long time – me finding myself in a dark place with curtains, Makanimit getting ever cozier with my soul. I thought, after a few years of relative peace, that I had shaken him off somehow – maybe I’d accidentally said the right prayer or something at church – but when I was about 19 or so I was lying on my back asleep in bed when this being of pure darkness with the stealth characteristics I mentioned before appeared over me quite suddenly.

He planted two pitch black arms on either side of my head, apparently standing on the floor behind me (how stupid had I been exposing my head like that to an open room?), leaned in and “whisper shouted” I’M BACK!!! right in my face, startling me awake…except I wasn’t quite awake. I tried to scream “MOMMY”, but it kept coming out backwards, “MEMA! MEMA!” and Makanimit didn’t move.

My roommate who was in the bunk above my feet (it was the old one-horizontal, one- vertical bunkbed setup) called my name until I woke, and the demon dissipated. I told him what had happened – I told him all about Makanimit, and it freaked him right the hell out. He suggested I find myself some Jesus, “He’s the cure for demons, bro.” But my agnosticism was a roadblock.

That whole year I was plagued with horrible, realistic nightmares – the half-asleep, half-awake kind...the worst kind. I’d switched sides so that my head was under the top bunk and my feet on the open end and I’d discovered some amount of privacy. Enjoying the recent memory of June’s Playmate who I’d cleverly positioned on the boards under the top bunk, I was having a happy little moment for a change when there was a low growl beside my head.

I actually SAW the sonofabitch – looked almost like Gmork from The Neverending Story. Huge, slavering fangs, very lupine features, and exuding pure evil and hunger. I got up so fast that I bumped my head, waking my roommate and knocking the Playmate (who ended up with a very inconvenient rip over one of my favorite bits) off her board. I don’t think I slept a wink at home for weeks after, choosing instead to nod off in school. He was ruining my life.

The horror culminated in a live, daylight encounter when I was 21. I lived on my own at the time in a crappy room I rented out of a Korean lady’s old house, and I was drinking quite a lot, mostly Southern Comfort (you drink some awful stuff at 21) and Natty Ice. On one particularly slovenly afternoon in my messy-assed bachelor pad I was lit up pretty good and watching Faces of Death II. The autopsy scene came on, and it happened to be a well-endowed lady on the slab.

Okay, I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but I didn’t have any porno tapes at the time. The closest thing I had was pausing that scene in The Fly where that lady who Brundle picks up at the bar is in her panties and spreads her legs just before Geena Davis bursts in with her “Be afraid…be very afraid” bullshit. That and the Jewish chick in Monty Python’s Life of Brian who I’ll be honest was a little hirsute for my tastes. But that chick on the slab…

I mean, boobs are boobs, right? So yeah, scumbag that I am I pause the movie at the appropriate spit…err…spot, and I’m about to take care of some business when I hear this hiss coming from behind the curtains covering my closet in lieu of a door. I knew exactly who/what it was, and I hightailed it right out of there. And for the first time he followed me. FOLLOWED ME!

I booked it down the stairs, out the front door, down the street, the thing following me the whole way…who would have thought so many houses would have closed curtains? Lean-tos? Van windows? I had a friend stop me and ask if I was okay. I was not okay, I informed him. The damn thing was after me. Makanimit was after me and my time had come at last. I kept sensing him. Seeing him. He was relentless. I told my buddy I’d been whackin’ it to Faces of Death, and he suggested I turn myself in.

And so, I did. The folks at the loony bin did their best to convince me that no demon dog shadow man was after me, but every time I saw a set of curtains in an unusual spot, I knew…I knew he was just waiting for an opportune time to strike. I got my meds. I got out. I made it a couple of years without incident, but the next time he came I was lying back in the seat in my car having another private moment when he got all wolfy again in the backseat. I looked in the mirror and saw him back there…grinning.

Don’t know how I mustered up the courage to get back in that car, but I sold it not long after…which made me homeless. Yeah, things hadn’t been going very well for me. Jersey has a high cost of living, and it’s tough to get a job, especially when you’re suffering from sleep deprivation, just one of the many perks of demonic oppression. I made a pretty good homeless guy but a lousy employee.

The best I could do was a gig at the porno store in Lakewood. I may have hit rock bottom, but at least I’d be surrounded by naked chicks all the time…well, that was my reasoning anyway. Turns out the charm of naked chicks on boxes is soon overshadowed by creepy, real-life dudes hanging around raising their frickin’ eyebrows all the time. Even total immersion in a cornucopia of porn and sex toys couldn’t erase the shame of getting handed a bucket and sponge and told to go clean the booths.

Sleeping in the alley behind the porno store and waking up to a mini-Makanimit sitting on my chest was the last straw. I called my folks who lived in the Midwest and had my dad come pick me up. He did, I got some Jesus, I got my head out of my ass, I settled down, I got married, had kids, put the awful memories of demonic oppression behind me, and found happiness for a time.

And here I sit, telling my tale, trying to decide whether I believe it actually happened or if I just hallucinated all of it. But I’ve watched a documentary film on Netflix recently called The Nightmare, and it showed the very creature I described, at least the human form of it – a being of pure darkness who terrorizes his victims when they’re in the half-asleep, half-awake state.

And I’ve also recently seen a photo of what appears to be the head of a demon dog in the wedding photo of a man who had been struggling with lust and alcoholism at the time--its wide eyed, hungry face poking up over his shoulder and peering right at the camera and into our souls…as if to let us know that it knows that we know that it knows we see it.

These are real things, not stuff I made up. To me they are a form of confirmation. But my mama didn’t raise no fools. My wife’s been instructed to wake me up immediately if I start thrashing around in my sleep talking backwards or in a panic. I have insisted we only use very sheer, see-thru curtains if we use them at all. Five years now without a very bad incident - five long years…

[Morbid75]

I had an experience once with a dark shape and sleep paralysis. We had been playing around with occult stuff, the Ouija board, divining rods and spells. I stopped after that night. I have a few other experiences not wanting to share just yet.

[Analcuck]

Originally Posted by Meraxes ↗

I had an experience once with a dark shape and sleep paralysis. We had been playing around with occult stuff, the Ouija board, divining rods and spells. I stopped after that night. I have a few other experiences not wanting to shar just yet.

Can't wait to hear about them. I love demons and ghosts... and sleep paralysis... it's cotton candy for the tortured soul.

[chris]

Had to stop reading, got to drive home from work, will pick it back up when I get home.

[chris]

Good stuff man. We must be around the same age, as a lot of that was memories from my childhood as well.

I think that's around 3000+ words or so, how long did it take you to do that if I can ask?

[Analcuck]

43 here. Couple of evenings at the laptop for the original draft, so maybe four to six hours? Add all the edits though, and I really couldn't tell you - maybe tack on another hour. I try to edit as I go, but it's always best to let it sit for a day or two before having another go with the magnifying glass.

It's been published in three places now though, so I love sharing it. I really appreciate the compliment - it means a lot coming from someone I respect.