A Fear of the Dark and other stories

By John G. Paterson

Six stories and one diary.

In the diary, "English Weather", we follow a young Ontario soldier's basic training in Saskatchewan, a train ride across the country just as he turns 21, and life on a very crowded troop ship in dangerous waters between Halifax and Liverpool in 1943.

The title story, "A Fear of the Dark", describes the meeting between two young people on a summer's night in cottage country, "a fear of the dark", a fear of life, in 1979.

"Tide Out" describes a hitchhiker's washed-out vision of a tidal bore in 1974, the end of the spirit of the 60s.

"The Midnight Shift" charts the antics of shift workers on the factory floor and the frantic flight of birds trapped in the ceiling above the machinery.

"Oak Trees" brings us to the early 90s and a teacher's essay assignment: the War of 1812.

In "A Nightmare in the Orchard", two unionists, (president and union secretary) pick cherries at a local farm to supplement their strike pay.

"A London Birthday", May 2001: the author visits the Tower of London for his fiftieth birthday, the same month author Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe) dies of heart failure in Los Angeles, age 49.

History and personal life: how does one find the appropriate response to the anxiety of living in your own time and living in a time that is not your own?

The author, John G. Paterson, was born in St. Catharines, Ontario, where he has lived until recently. He has published two other books of fiction with North Door Books: Jon Hart, six tales of the supernatural (2007) and The Vice Principal and other stories (2008).

• Language: English
• Publisher: John G. Paterson
• Release date: Feb 8, 2011
• ISBN: 9780978435035

John G. Paterson

Born in St. Catharines, Ontario. Three short story collections, one novel, and one reference work in print, available at the author's website.

Book preview

A Fear of the Dark and other stories

by

John G. Paterson

North Door Books

St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada

Published by John G. Paterson at Smashwords

Copyright 2010 John G. Paterson

This book is available in print at select online retailers.

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A FEAR OF THE DARK AND OTHER STORIES

in memory of my father

Robert C. Paterson 1922-2000

Where the fear, there is your task! - C.G. Jung

contents:

A Fear of the Dark

Tide Out

The Midnight Shift

English Weather

Oak Trees

Nightmare in the Orchard

A London Birthday

A FEAR OF THE DARK

1979

In the fresh pine air of the evening Mark sits on the porch and watches the lights come on in cottages and farmhouses across the lake. The lights flicker at the edge of the far shore from the air rising above the warm water. Insects sing with intensity as stars, one at a time, pop through the darkening blue sky.

Just after supper Harry and Sheila drove over to Lumensville, ten miles away, to visit Sheila's aunt and uncle. They left Mark at the cottage to wash the dishes and do some reading.

Jessie, the girl who they introduced him to that summer, has not yet arrived. But, after all, her promise to do so had been qualified. (If I can get away.)

He would have gone across himself to meet her if she had not said she might be coming. He prefers she come over to him. That way he would have her to himself and would not have to share her company with her parents. Now he can only sit in the fading light and wonder what she is doing at that moment.

He has not known her for long; she still represents something of a mystery to him. There remains the excitement of discovering new things about her. On the other hand, he does not like the sense of uncertainty about getting to know someone new. He feels a need to make things clear, to define his relationship with her, to become intimate and erase all areas of tentativeness and formality.

Maybe I'm this way because so many things in my life now are uncertain, undefined, without connection, he thinks. Up in the air. As this last thought enters his head, another star pops through the sky.

He is twenty-five years old this year and has just completed his first year teaching high school mathematics. He did not like the high school, or the apathetic students, and felt like an uninspired babysitter for most of his time in class. He discovered his idealism about education was shallow. He had hoped to make a difference to his students—but now that he didn't, he realized that it didn't matter after all. The bright ones went their own way without his help; the others passed their time in class, eager to get out at the end of the day.

Harry and Sheila, who are teachers with him at the same school, are much more suited to the struggle of teaching city children knowledge they try their damnedest to resist. Sheila, the more cynical of the two, does not like teaching as much as she did when she started; she thinks she might be nearing a burnout, especially when she catches herself talking about turning some of her students over to Guatemalan death squads, or to Islamic courts:

There should be a law that allows us to cut their hands off at the wrist if they don't turn in their assignments.

Mark puts his foot on the wooden rail of the porch and leans back in his chair. The bullfrogs make an enormous noise in the bulrushes. Mating calls, he thinks to himself. The cottage is close enough to the lake for him to hear the waves lapping against the shore. Harry's motorboat hits the wooden dock with a slow beat of the drum. Mosquitoes buzz inches from his face, unable to penetrate the Insect Off, a smell that mixes with campfire smoke in his clothes.

Harry bought the cottage a couple of years ago, and on long weekends and summer holidays spends his time making endless repairs on the rundown shack. He plans to build two more cottages on this property and make some money on his investment. Harry, unlike Mark, is a perfectionist, forever enthusiastic about new projects and careful to follow them through to completion, even if they bore him in the end. Sheila teases her husband about his compulsive behaviour—although she confessed to Mark that Harry is very useful if she wants to get something done. She sets him on track and then follows his industrious pace.

A motorboat is puttering along the far shore of the lake. The beam of a fisherman's flashlight reveals its location. The idea of night fishing makes Mark uneasy, although Harry did take him out once—but only after exhausting Mark's reluctance. Mark did not like the darkness of the water, the boat gently rocking on an immense darkness with the dark forest to the north of the lake where few cottages stand. For him the darkness took on a metaphysics that he could not understand and did not want to understand.

Harry assured him that coming out at night on the water was the best way to see the stars. The sky, with its depth and vast number of stars, surprised Mark after living all his life in the city. But its unwelcome clarity of vision was more a terrifying mystery than a revelation. A dark field of blazing, unknown worlds.

Mark is afraid of the dark, and has been for as long as he can remember.

Nyctophobia! Interesting was all that Sheila said when Mark confessed his neurosis to her late one night.

When I'm outside at night, he said, I feel anxious. I fear something out there in the grasses, or in the bushes. Evil spirits. And sometimes I feel waves of panic begin to wash over me, slowly flowing through me, although it never comes down to losing control.

Losing control, said Sheila. Mocking him, or showing sympathy?

Where does such a fear come from? Is it genetic? Or does it come from some childhood experience? He asks himself these questions as he sits on the porch. Sheila had only said it was interesting, meaning she did not find it very interesting at all. Besides, she had other things on her mind that night. Even so, her insensitivity brings back a tiny pain to him. His fears all sounded so childish when he spoke them out loud. He should have said nothing.

Yet he still feels there is some significance to his fear, a significance connected to the deepest Africa of his childhood.

He is not able to remember if he had a very happy childhood or not. How can a childhood be thought of as happy or unhappy? As a child he never questioned his state of being. Things then were just as they were, not open to examination. He can still remember crying after his mother gave him a good spanking, or after he did not get what he childishly felt was his. At other times he must have been so excited and happy that his little body bounced involuntarily with the pure energy of childhood. Humiliation and ecstasy of babies and children.—But there is no history there; at least he had never been able to make order out of his childhood days, although many things did happen to him and around him.

But why am I afraid of the dark? His feet are pressing hard against the railing of the porch, the blackness of night enclosing him and the cottage on this northern lake.—He should have gone with Harry and Sheila. He would have sat beside Sheila in the front seat of the car (she in the middle, with Harry driving), her warm thigh warming his as the Studebaker bumped over the endlessly bumpy back roads, roads which circled the lake and wandered off in all directions into shrub lands and dusty farm country. Half asleep, he would have closed his eyes and listened to the rhythms of Sheila's endless talk.

—But he is waiting for Jessie. Why hasn't she come yet? When they last talked, did he make some foolish remark that only she noticed? He thinks about Jessie for a long time, and then thinks about his mother.

Thunderstorms terrified his mother, especially the ones that passed directly over their house and shook the whole neighbourhood with their explosions. When these storms came rolling out of the south (one end of the street darkened before the other), she would grab his hand and take him three houses down the street (towards the incoming storm) to his grandmother's house. The three of them (Mark, his mother, and his grandmother) would go down the basement to the recreation room, the budgie cage in his grandmother's hand. (The little bird was also afraid of thunder and would cower at the bottom of the cage near its feeder.)

The sky was always dark when his mother rushed him down the street, the houses covered in hot, humid darkness, and huge drops of rain just beginning to explode on the hot sidewalks. The water marks from the raindrops seemed to steam away almost immediately in these first few moments. Only later, when they were safe at his grandmother's would the pavement darken with rain and the gutters and eaves troughs begin to run with water.

The basement was the safest place during electrical discharges, his grandmother would tell his mother. And there they would sit, his granny sewing, his mother gossiping, and little Mark poking this finger in the budgie cage, frightening the poor bird until it fainted, its little feet in the air as it lay on its back.

As he sits on the porch, he tries to remember the sensation of his mother's plump hand in a warm, nervous grip on his own hand. Dark, damp curtains (always closed) hung from the two small windows of his grandmother's low-ceiling basement. Even as a child he noticed how low the ceiling was. His grandmother was almost sixty at the time. Although she died a few years later, he had a vivid memory of her