The Nightmare is iconic. It’s instantly recognizable to anyone who’s ever flipped through an art history book. A woman arched across a bed, a demon squats on top of her chest as a mare with blank eyes looks on. If the image wasn’t so dark, it would be mounted alongside the Le Chat and Starry Night posters that were so popular among freshmen who arrived at college with a yearning to be seen as intellectual.
I bite my thumbnail, tapping the plastic spot between the space bar and mousepad on my laptop with the other hand. I deny myself the impulse to glance at the clock. This thing won’t be over until it’s over, that is to say, once I’ve reached thirty pages at a bare minimum. My eyes flit to the page count and my stomach twists as I’m reminded that I’m on page five. So far I’ve described the painting in exhausting detail, exploring minute details such as the Neoclassical drape of the sleeping woman’s nightclothes for paragraphs on end.
The fact is, I don’t know where to go with this subject. I thought it would be easy. Sexuality, horror… When it comes to writing an undergraduate thesis, Henry Fuseli’s Romantic masterpiece should be a shoo-in. I turn away from the bright screen and unzip my bookbag, noticing how silence has crept over the library. All the finals week study groups have departed and I’m alone with the buzz of sleeping computers.
I pull out the thick art history book I bought second-hand at the beginning of the semester and flip to the full-color illustration that takes up both high-gloss pages. I roll away from the desk and settle the book on my lap, staring. I’ve covered context. I’ve covered Henry Fuseli’s life story. He was essentially a 16th Gothic edge lord. His entanglements were political rather than sexual. At every turn, my heart sank with boredom.
How much space could I take up if I changed the font size of my periods to 15? Professor Stephens would notice. I wouldn’t be able to stand him lifting one fuzzy caterpillar eyebrow in my direction. I shake my head, scanning the page for inspiration. The dark folds of curtains offer nothing new. The woman’s arched neck irritates me. How could anyone sleep like that? My irritation at the long-dead artist boils, the intelligentsia pervert. I’d bet ten bucks that he probably never saw a woman naked. I turn the page back and stare at his etching, a study for the original work.
Some of the tender feeling I once had for The Nightmare returns as I study the sepia tone print. The woman’s arms seem to fall more gently, her fingertips graze the floor. I can see under the bed clearly in this print and although nothing lurks underneath the platform, the empty space makes my insides squirm. I stare at the imp’s eyes. He’s staring down the viewer, his head twisted to meet my gaze.
A loud thud that I can feel through my thin-soled tennies brings me out of my reverie. I slide the book off my lap and onto the table next to my laptop before getting out of my chair. My lower back is stiff and my hips click as I take the first steps since I settled in, two hours ago. I lean out of my cubby to gaze around the library, looking for the source of the spill.
Lights hum overhead but that’s it. No papers rustle. No printer hums. I’ve never been here so late. I wonder, for the first time, if I should email for an extension. Make something up. But Stephens has been telling us that we should have our first draft complete for close to a month now. No death in the family can save me now.
A rustle behind me stills the schemes in my head. Panic driven blood rushes through my ears, impeding my ability to listen. Listen. Nothing. Papers rustled as the vent came on. Something of that nature.
In this modern age, the things that saved us from something frightening us in the stone age have become inconvenient. When we were wild, we could release our urine wherever we pleased in order to run unencumbered by a full bladder. But here in the library, that’s not an option. The darkened corner where the bathrooms are stares at me from my desk. My heart thuds in my chest still. I breathe, glancing around once more.
Trying to seem casual, I shake out my hands, ridding them of the numb bloodless feeling that comes with a scare. I close my laptop, arrange everything neatly for when I come back. Ready to work, right? The admonishment in my head is annoying, but I’d expect nothing less. I let myself glance at the clock. It’s one in the morning. I’ve got time, then. The paper is due at six. If I hit inspiration, I could do it.
Hope buoys me along to the shadowy corner of the library where the bathrooms are. As I move, the lights flicker on, the magic of motion sensors. By the time I’m finally there, I’ve fully shaken the feeling of dread. The bathrooms are lit by an overhead buzzing fluorescent tube light, which flickers loudly in protest after being turned on after settling in for the night.
I walk past two closed doors in favor of the roomy handicapped stall, which is halfway open, inviting. When you’re pulling an all-nighter, you’ve got to delight in the small things. And when your library doesn’t allow snacks in the stacks, sometimes those small things have to be reduced to taking a leak in the big stall. I sigh as I sit, rolling out my shoulders and indulging in the break.
After I’m done, I stand up and stretch, taking advantage of the stall’s square footage. Then I unlatch the door, swing it open, and freeze. There, in the mirror, the two stalls I passed as I came in, the two stalls that were tightly closed, are open. Both cracked just enough for me to notice, as I noticed that they were firmly shut when I entered.
My spine feels steely stiff as I make my way to the sink, eyes frozen on the image of the doors in the mirror, not daring to turn around to see them in real life. The thought of turning on the tap to wash my hands seems ludicrous. Instead, I wipe my hands on my sweatshirt and sidestep out of the room, avoiding eye contact with the open stalls.
With the heavy wooden door of the bathroom safely shut, I sigh and feel silly. The stalls obviously shifted when I shut the last door, causing the others to creak open. Or something of that nature. Still, I stand and stare at the bathroom a moment longer. Then it hits me. An idea. A blessedly beautiful idea.
I’ve got to zoom out. I have to write about fear. I could write about sleep paralysis, in general. And then, horror literature and art in Victorian society and how the fumes from gas lights affected the genre. How the Madonna-whore complex was woven into the stories then, with Camila and Dracula, and how it still is a central concept to horror to this day. If I allude to the painting throughout, Stephens will have to accept my broader view.
I spin away from the doors, through the well lit space and towards my desk, creating an outline in my head. Not only will I finish tonight but it’s going to be good. Like, actually interesting. I have to stop myself from skipping.
When I sit down, I open my laptop, open a new window and start a new document. I open the paper with an bang, a description of sleep paralysis. It’s a blessed half a page long, easy. Then I describe the horrors of Victorian society, buttoned up, repressed, and poisoned by industrialism. Three pages of delicious academic fodder. I transfer my description of Fuselli’s life to this part for ever-important context. Bam, I’m back to five pages in less than an hour and I’ve got four pages of painting description saved in my other doc. I’ll be hitting double digits in no time.
But there it is. A rustling. Loud enough to break through the rolling steam engine train of my thoughts . Everything comes to a clumsy, clattering halt in my brain as I listen. It was damn close. And low. A rat? My feet instinctively leave the floor, resting on my backpack under the library table.
I arch my head around, noticing that the library has fallen back into shadows since I’ve gotten back to work. Of course, it’s quiet now. The sound I heard could have been nothing but imagination or some other poor student on the ground floor, shuffling their books as they also pull an all-nighter.
The idea that I’m not alone in the library doesn’t soothe me as much as I hope. I glance around, wondering how still someone would have to be to keep the lights in the stacks off. I stretch, pretending to be casual while looking behind my head. Nothing but a long bookcase full of topography and geography reference books. I crack my neck and settle back in. I finish my sentence, adding a period resolutely and hit the return button with a crack, entering into the sixth page, a milestone I’ve been struggling to for, I glance at my phone, five fricking hours. Five hours! I shake off panic. We’ve got a path forward now. The end is far, not quite in sight, but there’s a path forward.
And there it is. That goddamned rustle. I clear my throat.
“Hello?” I ask, a parody of every horror movie I’ve ever seen. “Is anybody there?”
Of course. There’s no sound. I start to wonder if I should simply pack up and go home. Finish this from the safety of my bedroom. But my bedroom contains my bed and the temptation to give up and go to sleep would be too strong.
I can’t give up, now that I have a path forward. I’ve got to use this fear. Stir it in to make my description of the painting fresh and exciting. I take a look at my first draft. How was I so clinical about a painting that’s so atmospheric? No wonder I was getting nowhere.
I turn back to the painting, leaning over the spread for a fresh perspective. I focus on a part I never even mentioned in my earlier notes. The woman’s hand, dangling from the bed, into the dark space below. There’s something. That feeling that every child has felt. The rule that all horror movies agree on. Keep all your limbs securely on the bed. She’s falling off. She’s susceptible. The only thing keeping her on the bed at this point is that heavy incubus, weighing down her torso so she doesn’t slip and succumb to something even darker, below.
Maybe that’s Fuselli’s unconscious there. Maybe he knew that oppressing an entire generation’s sexuality would lead to a slip into puritan perversion. It’s a stretch. I look at the incubus’s face. He’s really not having any fun, for a creature that’s supposed to be a sexual demon. He’s in the pose of the thinker, and his face is set in the expression that someone might make when their bus is late and they are late for work and it’s raining out. Not the kind of face you might make when you’re torturing a beautiful woman with perverse nightmares.
There’s a lot there, but my thoughts are all jumbled. Where did I leave off? Horror in general or Victorian society?
Ugh, I left off at Fuselli. He just rubs me the wrong way, even centuries later. I can just picture him, judging everything as he works all alone in his studio and avoids all that is lovely and joyful in life. It’s actually his fault that I’m here tonight, struggling. If he were a little more lovable, a little less dry, then I would have had this done a long time ago. He’s kind of a tease, creating such a dramatic painting and leading such a boring life. But, isn’t that the way? Ok, no more moping. Screw the transition. Start the description.
My hands are posed over the keyboard. I’ve decided to zoom in on the lady’s hand and zoom out from there. That’ll be different. Different will get me to double digits. And if I have double digits, I can get to 30 pages before six.
Another thump, deep in the library. This time I bristle rather than shrink, getting angry. What is that, and why is it interrupting my goddamn flow? But before I can call out, there’s another deep sound. Low and repetitive, it’s coming out of the darkened stacks, towards me.
My head turns, mechanically, staring at the place the thumps are coming from. A different corner than the shuffle from earlier. The opposite area from the bathrooms and the opened stalls. Suddenly, I feel hemmed in, surrounded. Like I should have left after the first shuffling sound. Another thump like something clumsily getting rolled my way. And if there’s something moving in the stacks, why aren’t the lights coming on?
The sound shuffles, bumps into a bookshelf. A large book, heavy and brittle with age, careens from a high shelf, into the dark with a thud. I hear a gurgling moan from the shadows.
That’s when I grasp my laptop to my chest and grab my backpack in one motion, tripping over my chair, before running to my exit. My book remains on the table, the ghoul staring at the fluorescent space above him until the lights go out.
The next afternoon, in the bright sunshine of my living room, I make my plea to Stephens via email. A death in the family caught me unexpectedly. I got a call early yesterday evening. Completely forgot to turn in my final draft, but here it is now. I’ll have to be gone in a few days, though, for the funeral.
His reply doesn’t come right away. I’m boiling some pasta in the late October twilight when I pull up my email for the umpteenth time, trying not to sweat. I scan it, noting his terse acknowledgement of the death. The acknowledgement is followed by a reminder that he does not accept late assignments. My heart is sinking. Then I read on and see words such as “inspired” and “publish” and my legs go weak and I sit in my tiny kitchen, rest my head on the cabinets behind me and smile the smile of someone who’s run a long distance and reached their destination.
When I close my eyes, taking a deep breath, I see the goblin, his reproachful stare looking through me. He knows about my lie. He saw me flee the library, like a child, book bag flapping open, bouncing up and down as I sprinted for the stairs and out the door.
When I open my eyes my roommate is standing there in her corduroy jacket, tucking her hat over her curls.
“Where are you headed?” I ask.
“I can’t concentrate.” She sighs as she answers, “I’m going to study at the library.”
***
Theresa Crozier is a writer who loves art and nature and believes that horror and comedy are two sides of the same coin. Read more of Theresa’s fiction here.
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