15cert.

The other children were allowed to watch horror films, and Timmy envied them for it. They didn’t understand how lucky they were; how lucky, how blessed, to experience such dangers and risks and come out the other end completely safe. They got to stare hideous, gory death in the face and laugh at it. Their victories were frequent; nightly they conquered fears they were then able to put aside. These were the brave young ones. These were the ones who were able to lead healthy lives, filled with promise and society. These were the ones who vanquished the monsters in the dark and kicked the thing that hid under the bed. Their pillow was warm and comforting, and their only worry was that they hadn’t yet been able to copy their homework for tomorrow’s first lesson. Timmy, alas, was not one of these people.

He’d wonder what these imaginings, these dark and perverse directors’ dreams, could possibly be like. A boy of eleven, he could not begin to comprehend the violence he would not even be capable of watching until his fifteenth birthday, a violence that would forever discombobulate his undeveloped brain circuits and irrevocably alter his nascent outlook on the world were he to gaze upon it prior to that sacred day. He feared that bright red encircling of the numerals “15” on the DVD cases at Blockbuster. It promised revulsion, dementia and morbidity. It was his Medusa, and so he feared it with the reverence it deserved. Timmy did not want to turn to stone. He was a good boy, so he wanted to remain soft for as long as possible.

He had watched the first twenty minutes of one once, though. The gorgon had tempted him with its deceitful siren song, and he, powerless to resist the temptations of forbidden fruit and an aura of premature maturity, had asked his older brother to rent a copy of it for him. His brother had not minded; the film he wanted happened to be funny and exciting, and he had a large crush on the leading actress, so he’d get it as long as Timmy would pay for it and he could watch it afterwards. A film called 'Gremlins', it told of a cuddly little animal, not dissimilar to a puppy, which, if fed after midnight, would turn into something hideous and wrong. Timmy, however, did not last past the twenty-minute-mark. The dread of the viscous arteries, the burst eyeballs, and disembodied colons he would no doubt see in the ensuing eighty minutes was too much for him. He put it back in its case and walked up to his brother’s room, holding his victor in his left hand, shaking and self-loathing. He had forfeited the dare. Later, in bed, when he heard his brother laughing from the next room, he envied his adamantine constitution; a braver man than he, kicking the unholy spectres of the shadows’ fringes into humiliated submission.

Later that night, everybody else had fallen asleep and he had stopped crying over his cowardice; that was when the night-things came. Staring at the shadows thrown across his bedroom ceiling, he did not notice them at first. To begin with, there was only a heightened awareness of the subtler night-sounds; there was the drip of taps and the creak of wood beams, but, aside from the common paranoia of the neurotic, nothing with an uncanny face. He rationally chalked it down to nerves; a dripping tap cannot harm an eleven-year-old boy. But it is from these sounds, from these drips and creaks and buzzes, that the night-things come. Their gelatinous multi-torsos writhe and squirm out from inter-dimensional spaces; spaces that our minds manifest between the innocuous happenings of the witching hour and the dark thoughts that we attribute to them. By the time Timmy had gathered that something was amiss, they were upon him. Timmy tried to cover himself with his blanket. They ripped it off of him. With their talons and their tentacled snouts they smothered and sliced, filling up his aesophogus with their lumpy bile, to clog his screams. His eyes, wide and bloodshot and afraid, the only things left to scream for him, were soon forced shut by slippery hands, and he never saw his bedroom ceiling again.