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By Root 365 0

in the dark inside. They had fierce red eyes and sharp teeth, and they ran fast in circles, in coiling motions. I decided they were rats, and I was afraid of being devoured by them. Other times, I dreamed that something lived in our basement. In the dreams, the basement was like a dungeon—like what you might imagine from Edgar Allan Poe’s descriptions of the labyrinths that ran under houses rotting from their own secrets, though I didn’t associate Poe with the dreams until many years later, after reading him and taking him for my first muse. What moved in that basement in my dreams had no form. It was like a vapor, and stepping halfway down the stairs, I saw it swirl at my feet. I ran upstairs and tried to wake my family and tell them there was something coming for us from the depths of our home, something that would enter our breath in our sleep and kill us. But I could never succeed in waking them.

My other childhood dreams were more disturbing, and I have never disclosed them until now. The most common scenario of these dreams ran like this: I was a policeman or a detective—a little blond boy in a detective’s suit, with a snap-brim hat and a pistol—and I was investigating a killing. I always had a partner in the dreams, and the partner was always a little girl, also with blond hair—somebody I knew I was in love with. But as the dream went along, I would realize it was I who was the killer I was seeking, and the only way to protect myself and my guilt was to kill the little girl who was my partner, whom I loved. I would kiss her, hold her close, then shoot her. I remember also—in one particularly horrible variant of this dream pattern—that sometimes I would kill any other child or baby that I came across in the story.

I had no idea what these dreams were about when I was a child— naturally, I had no idea that dreams could be about anything—and even at this date I wouldn’t profess to understand or explain them. I know that I would wake up from the dreams feeling terribly guilty, and I never told anybody about them. Sometimes, I’d go to sleep at night praying to God: “Please don’t let me dream the killing dreams.”

But prayers never stopped the bad dreams. Never once.

AND SO I BECAME MY father’s constant companion. Every several weeks, we would pack up and make the two-hundred-mile drive to Seattle or Tacoma. We would sing songs the whole way—silly, spirited stuff, like “Giddyup, Napoleon, It Looks Like Rain” or “Oh, Susannah” or songs from Oklahoma! We even sang “This Land Is My Land” and “Blue Suede Shoes.” And when my father felt like taking the solo spot, he’d try his hand at a Verdi or Puccini aria. We were both god-awful singers, but I don’t think we knew and I’m certain we didn’t mind. On the occasions when somebody else came along for the ride, they could barely withstand the musical part of the trip.

When we would arrive in the town where we were going to stay, my father would rent an apartment or small house. These accommodations were always in an aging, somewhat forlorn part of town. In Seattle, we lived in neighborhoods like Queen Anne Hill and Ravenna. Today, Queen Anne has been refurbished and looks like it could have been transplanted from San Francisco’s Nob Hill. In the 1950s, though, it was a tired part of town—a bargain district for affordable housing—and parts of it were creeping up on dilapidation. We usually rented rooms or suites in old post-Victorian-era houses that were clearly on their last legs. Sometimes we were the only tenants who would occupy rooms in these places. To me, they resembled the moody, ramshackle, haunted houses you saw in a black-and-white ghost thriller, and maybe that’s how I got my abiding attachment to horror stories.

I suppose these places we rented reminded my father of the older world he had grown up in, or maybe the disappearing world where he had hidden for so long and where he still found a certain comfort. These were the years before fast-moving urban renewal projects had razed cities of many of their antiquated structures of desolation and replaced them with cleaner,