Real life fear is worst of all

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

It's the story I hear most often. I will be listening to someone tell me about a day spent at the beach 30 years ago, a glorious day. Everything was perfect until.

And suddenly I will be listening to a different story, a story stained with bewilderment and betrayal and tears. I will be talking to a woman whose husband drinks - he didn't always drink, he used to be a nice guy. You should have known him when.

And then I will hear how his drinking led to his hitting her a few times, and how she put up with this, for the kids, you know, but couldn't put up with the things her daughter said he did to her.

I was 10 when he started coming into my room. He waited until my mother went to sleep. I would hear him creeping down the hall, and I'd squeeze my eyes shut and pray that he'd keep walking. Don't ever tell, he used to say. This is our secret. You know I love you, don't you? But you can't ever tell.

Don't tell. This is between us. This is our secret.

And if you did tell? The child thinks: Daddy would be angry and maybe he'd leave and Mommy would cry or maybe she'd be angry, too.

The child worries: What if no one believes me? What if Mommy blames me? What if it really was my fault.

It's safer not to tell, to pretend nothing has happened, nothing IS happening. The mind buries it; takes it down a long alley and shuts it up behind locked doors. Reality blurs and the memory goes away.

But not permanently.

Sometimes it festers and boils and seeps out of the space between the door and the floor and the door and the molding and the child becomes an adult who can't get through a day without a chemical to dull a pain she can't explain, a fear that claws at her in the quiet, an unease that permeates her dreams.

Sometimes the buried past blisters like a burn and a hardness grows, thick and twisted and scarred, and the child becomes that hardness and a clone of the parent he hated.

Sometimes the memory is fickle, like a stream of cold water that brushes at the corners of warmth, that turns flesh into gooseflesh. Swimming along in a familiar lake, the sun shining, the sky blue, surrounded by family and friends - your own family, your adult friends - you feel it suddenly: icy fear accompanied by an unrecollected memory.

"I don't know what's normal," a woman once said to me. "I have no idea how parents are supposed to act because my father began raping me when I was 5, and my mother knew it and did nothing to stop it. I didn't even remember this until I was 30. I didn't remember until I had children of my own."

This lack of memory, this deleting of what happened, this odorless, invisible, intangible something is as deadly as radiation. It poisons and pollutes and wounds even from behind closed doors; and like radiation, it takes a long time to kill.

It is this that is the theme of Stephen King's new book, "Gerald's Game." The entombed past is alive, King says. It exists. It crouches in the dark and hides from the light behind a door nailed shut to keep it from wandering into the conscious. But it survives there. And too often it thrives.

You have to go after it, King says. You have to hunt it down, shout at it, shine a klieg light on it, confront, recognize, inspect, and challenge it.

Or the past will destroy you.

King, who writes horror fiction, who writes about vampires and plagues and demon-possessed hotels and cars, and monsters that live in the sewer, and children who set fires and children who come back from the dead, has in "Gerald's Game" written his most frightening horror tale of all.

No ghouls walk through this one, only an overweight lawyer, a starving dog, a deranged drifter and the lawyer's wife, shackled by handcuffs and a head full of memories, scratching, clawing and beating her way out of bondage into life.

This is real, shouts King.

In real life there is no such thing as a little child abuse.

In real life there is no such thing as pretending something didn't happen.

In real life there are no monsters lurking in corners, only the shadows of things that were.

The mind knows. That's what King is saying. The intellect can deny, but the mind cannot forget.

"Gerald's Game" illustrates and illuminates that fear.