As night begins to fall,
The cats begin to crawl.
When everything turns black,
The cats, they arch their back…

The Rules Of The Game

When the night begins to fall, and the darkness begins to crawl, it is silent, and still for a time. But only for a time. The time when it is silent is short, short enough for me to grasp the concept of what is happening, what is crawling, what is falling, who is making that horrific screaming. Those noises — then come the noises. I can only imagine what is making them.

The realization of the high-pitched screeching, (like nails down a blackboard would be the best way to describe them) was indeed a fact of life that I had come to live with. It was a daily routine, more like a nightly routine actually, like brushing your teeth or saying your prayers or kissing your father on the cheek before bed. Yes, as odd as this may sound today, these are the things that actually went on growing up in the 1950’s. Back in my days as a child, we actually kissed our father and mother before going to bed.

As a young child in the early 50’s, there was something about the dark. I don’t know what it was exactly, maybe it was the way it seemed to creep up on me as I was in my bed. Or maybe it was the way that it would always be there in my bedroom after I had gotten up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water. There it would be, waiting, watching, as I would enter my bedroom, the wooden bed with cool summer sheets, all the way across the room, with nothing in between but the pulsating darkness. There it would wait, and if I did not move quick enough, if I did not run through it, slicing it like a knife with my body, it would get me. If I didn’t jump on my bed at the exact moment before it’s hands reached and clawed and sank their vicious fingers into my innocent flesh, I would be history. But I always made it to the bed. The safe place. The bed was my comfort zone. I would never even dare to hang an arm or a leg over the side of the bed, because once I did that, they were fair game to anything that was lurking under there. I would have hated to wake up one morning missing a limb, simply because I wasn’t smart enough to keep them under the sheets, right where they belonged.