Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

If this seems fanciful or melodramatic, think of your own children or the children ofclose friends (never mind your own childhood; you may remember events that took place then with some fidelity, but most of your memories of how the emotional weather was then will be utterly false), and of the times when they simply find themselves unable to turn off the second-floor light or go down into the cellar or maybe even bring a coat from the closet because they saw or heard something that frightened them-and not necessarily a movie or a TV program, either.

I've mentioned the fearsome twi-night double-header already; John D. MacDonald tells the story of how for weeks his son was terrified of something he called "the green ripper.” MacDonald and his wife finally figured it out-at a dinner party, a friend had mentioned the Grim Reaper. What their son had heard was green ripper , and later it became the title of one of MacDonald's Travis McGee stories.

A child may be frightened by such a wide sweep of things that adults generally understand that to worry about this overmuch is to endanger all relations with the child; you begin to feel like a soldier in the middle of a minefield. Added to this is another complicating factor: sometimes we frighten our kids on purpose. Someday , we say, a man in a black car may stop and offer you a sweet to take a ride with him. And that is a Bad Man (read: the Boogeyman), and if he stops for you, you must never, never, never . . . Or: Instead of giving that tooth to the Tooth Fairy, Ginny, let's put it in this glass of Coke.

Tomorrow morning that tooth will be all gone. The Coke will dissolve it. So think about it the next time you have a quarter and . . . Or: Little boys who play with matches wet the bed, they just can't help it, so don't you . . . Or that all-time favorite: Don't put that in your mouth, you don't know where it's been.

Most children deal with their fears quite well . . . most of the time, anyway. The shape-changing of their imaginations is so wide, so marvelously varied, that the gorilla pops out of the deck only infrequently. Besides worrying about what might be in the closet or under the bed, they have to imagine themselves as firefighters and policemen (imagination as the Very Gentle Perfect Knight), as mothers and nurses, as superheroes of various stripes and types, as their own parents, dressed up in attic clothes and giggling hand in hand before a mirror which shows them the future in the most unthreatening way. They need to experience a whole range of emotions from love to boredom, to try them out like new shoes.

But every now and then the gorilla gets out.