Dave's Anatomy: My History as a Writer #22: Short Horror: You Are Here

Continuing to write horror, I tried to remember things that really scared me. When I grew up, one of the scariest shows on TV was The Twilight Zone. Now there were others. I remembered being frequently frightened by a program called One Step Beyond;  there were also Chiller and Thriller, regular prime-time shows that made me jump and want to sleep with the light on, but the Twilight Zone excelled them. That program was consistently scary.  

William Shatner in "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"

What was Twilight Zone horror like? It varied a lot. Not everything it had on was creepy. Some of the episodes, in fact, were funny. But there was what I would call a "brand" of horror that went with the show and that you saw consistently. It involved confusion. The protagonist in the story often did not know what was going on. Weird bizarre things took place and they baffled both the character and the viewer. As the show built to its climax, the inexplicable events grew more frightening and threatening. Then, at the end, came the denouement, the "unraveling," and both the character and the viewer understood what had happened—the ending might be redemptive, it might be horrific, but you only found out at the end; or if you didn't, you got a vague idea of what had happened.

A Twilight Zone Episode titled "The Hitchhiker" 

exemplifies this strategy of story-telling. A woman

driving cross-country begins seeing a hitchhiker. He asks for a ride, and is obnoxious, all but insisting she let him in the car. She refuses and drives off, but he begins to show up in different places. Once her car will not start and he begins slowly walking toward her. The car finally starts and she pulls off. Another time, she is stopped by a train, sees him standing there, looks around for a way to escape his presence, but finds he has disappeared. Another time, she asks a filling station attendant to tell him to leave her alone. Again, he has disappeared. Distraught, the woman calls her mother. She is informed that her mother is sedated after breaking down when she found out her daughter had been killed in an automobile accident three days ago. The woman goes back to her car. She turns the mirror down to see the Hitchhiker sitting in the back seat. "You are going my way," he says. He is Death 

and has come for her.

Lots of Twilight Zone episodes followed this pattern. I decided I would write one as well. The story was called "You Are Here."

In that story, a woman (named Felicity) goes into a highway rest stop. After using the bathroom, she notices the familiar push-pin on the map with the caption YOU ARE HERE has fallen down. She tells the janitor, who says he will fix it. She sees he has put it in the wrong place, goes to tell him, but sees he is not the same janitor as was working before. Soon she encounters people:  four young women dressed in sixties style. One of them has a turquoise transistor radio and listening to "Look Through Any Window" by the Hollies. Felicity goes outside and finds the parking lot empty

Back inside, she sees a new janitor, a woman this

time, who tells her that once again the YOU ARE HERE

pin has fallen down. Spooked, Feicity runs outside. She is relieved to see cars on the parking lot again, though they look old—she sees Studebakers, Desotos, and classic Corvettes but then is horrified to find them inhabited by decaying corpses of drivers and families. She runs back to the rest stop. Inside, a woman with an Obama for President button approaches her. Felicity is relieved that someone from her own era is there. But in the last sentence of the story, the woman addresses Felicity: “Could you tell me exactly where we are?” she asked. “I think the marker on the map must have fallen off.”

What will happen to the Felicity? You're not sure. But she is somehow trapped in a non-reality—or a different reality. You sense she will never escape. Is she like the retro girls, the janitor, the woman with the Obama button, trapped? Is she dead? The corpses in the parked cars suggest as much. The reader (and the author) are not sure. But something strange and frightening has occurred.

The Twilight Zone began with a monologue spoken by the show's creator, the late Rod Serling. The opening varied from season to season. Here's the one I remember most:  You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's the signpost up ahead - your next stop, the Twilight Zone. In a different dimension, strange things can happen.

Uncertainty, the disruption of normalcy, and the fear this brings were key elements in this show that sometimes frightened me as a child so much I would hide in my bedroom and put a pillow over my head so I couldn't hear the sound from the TV in the living room.

This is the stuff of good horror.

The story appeared in Monster's Travel Anthology--no longer in print or available.

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