Night terrors.

An impromptu trip to see my family this week found me sleeping in my childhood bedroom, alone, for the past two nights. And when I say "sleeping", I mean "staring wide-eyed into the dark and trying desperately not to pee in my jammies".

This is not an unfamiliar sensation. Many things have changed in my parents' house since I was a child, but this -- the strategic placement of terrifying objects in spots where they ought not to be -- remains the same. I appreciate the sense of continuity, if not the constant goosebumps and sense of impending doom. Oh, yes, darling, you can go home again... IF YOU DARE.

I should be used to it by now. The house is old, and it creaks, and there are cold corners and long hallways and high-ceilinged rooms that swallow everything in darkness. It's all run-of-the-mill and not that frightening, until you factor in the other Various Scary Things that have become part of the landscape over the years -- the carved bust of a long-dead relative staring with sightless eyes from the corner of the living room, the odd Halloween mask dropped jauntily over the head of the newel post, paintings of flowers that have creepy faces in the center of the blossoms. (Yes, they do.)

This is my mother's doing. Mostly. Okay, I admit: some of it, like the empty-eyed bust, is genuine heirloom-whatever, and we have it, and so it has to be displayed no matter how scary it is. But there are other things, other things, for which there is no such excuse. Items that have been purchased, intentionally, and I can't even begin to imagine where; somewhere, there must be an untravelled store aisle marked "Things That Will Make People Scream and/or Pee". When I was seven, my mom brought home a life-sized Raggedy Ann Doll with oily glass eyes and a frozen smile. She put it in my room. She put it in a chair facing the bed, you guys, so that its black, empty stare would be the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes. Incredibly, she was never arrested for child abuse.

When people say, "Wow, I've never known someone who was almost thirty and still scared of the dark!", I tell them about Raggedy Ann. And then I shudder.

Anyway, twenty years later, Mom hasn't lost her touch. Raggedy Ann is long-gone, of course, but there's always something to serve the same purpose. Like, say, this.



The perfect addition to your boudoir decor, dear readers. By day, a dressmaker's dummy; by night, a shadowy, humanoid form, lurking in the corner behind the door, so that your guests can periodically wake up and discover that there's somebody in the roooooooooooom.

Mom, I know you're reading this, and I know I was all, "Oh, it's fine. Fine. I'm not bothered by it at all," but I lied, okay. Please get it out of there. For the love of God, you do not even MAKE DRESSES.