Healing Through Horror // Brendan Vidito
Brendan Vidito shares an account of using horror as a means of healing as part of our guest curated month examining the theme "Life is Stranger than Fiction."
When I was 15 and in my first year of high school, I came face to face with creatures out of a nightmare. They didn’t show themselves at first, but I heard them. Whispering. Their voices were sped up and garbled like a tape in fast-forward. I wasn’t worried. It probably had something to do with stress or fatigue. But as time passed, the voices grew louder, impossible to ignore. And eventually the speakers revealed themselves. That was when my horror story began.
The first one appeared in the middle of the night. A headache had prevented me from falling asleep and I was sitting in the living room, cradling my head. My parents and younger sister were asleep upstairs and the house was silent. Darkness lay thickly over the walls and furniture. The light from the television screen was like a campfire burning in a dark forest. As I sat there, applying pressure to my temples, a sense of dread clawed at my mind with cold, dead fingers. I felt like I was being watched. I looked around. At first, I saw nothing out of place. I was alone. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I caught movement. The door to the basement was open a crack, and the darkness in the gap seethed with movement.
Something crawled up the basement stairs. My heart leapt into my throat. It was a dog, huge and black and bleeding shadow. Its eyes glowed like red embers. The rational part of my brain told me I was hallucinating. There was no way this demon dog could be real. It took a step toward me, its head low. I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound emerged. The dog advanced further. I couldn’t move. I was frozen. Then I blinked, and the creature disappeared.
I sat there trembling, staring at the dark, vacant space between the door and its frame. Then, I stood up on rubbery legs and walked upstairs to my parents’ bedroom. The bedsprings creaked as I sat down at the foot of the bed. My mother sat up sharply and asked, “What’s wrong?”
I was silent for some time—the only sound, the ticking of the clock on the floor below. Then, with my arms wrapped around my chest, I said, “I think something’s wrong with me.”
She listened, her expression grave. As my words spilled out, the experiences I related took on a new and terrifying reality. It was like talking about a bad dream as though it were real. That was the moment I realized my life would never be the same again.
The following months were a blur of doctors’ offices and examination rooms. My first visit was to a local pediatrician. Her hands were cold, her questions terse and disinterested. After a brief examination, she looked at me, her eyes filled with skepticism. “I don’t think I can help you,” she said. “You’re a poor historian.”
Her words were an unexpected blow. My whole being deflated, withered, and collapsed from within. Wasn’t it the doctor’s job to put a name to your symptoms, to make the fear and doubt go away? What was I supposed to do now?
Frustrated and angry, my parents turned to a psychiatrist to investigate the possibility of mental illness. He had sharp green eyes and pupils so dark they resembled drips of oil. His gaze was unbroken as I answered his questions, my palms clammy. As I spoke, I began to wonder how many times I would have to tell the same story, and to how many people, before someone finally took me seriously. But a second and even more important question haunted my mind: what if I was mentally ill? The psychiatrist’s office was in an outpatient clinic. When I’d walked into the building, I’d spotted some of the patients moving like ghosts through the halls. The sight had been both heartbreaking and uncomfortably familiar. Their faces were like mirror reflections of my own: pale, slack, and tormented. Not for the first time, I feared for my own sanity.
After several sessions and a run of antipsychotics, the psychiatrist released me from his care, unable to provide a diagnosis. He had entertained the possibly of schizophrenia, epilepsy, or a psychotic break, but ultimately ruled out these options due to a lack of symptomatic evidence. Just like that, I was back to square one. Alone with the monsters inside my head.
In the weeks that followed, the atmosphere at home was pregnant with fear and uncertainty. I had been reduced to a quivering wreck; jumping at shadows, glancing over my shoulder at the movement in my peripherals. I never saw the dog again. The creatures instead took on more elaborate and sinister shapes. I saw disembodied faces, like monstrous ritual masks, floating through the air around me. I saw a pink, skeletal demon prowling in my parents’ basement. I saw a knot in a piece of wood snap open to reveal a rolling, bloodshot eye. These visions belonged on the celluloid of a horror film, but instead they haunted my waking reality.
One night, I found a website open on the family computer. The title said: How to Tell If Your Child Is Possessed by a Demon. My family wasn’t religious, but my mother had been traumatized by the film The Exorcist as a child. Now, she was forced to watch her son experience trauma that wouldn’t feel out of place in a story about demonic possession. Old fears had obviously bubbled up in her mind like bones stirred from a watery grave. I didn’t blame her. We were all stumbling in the dark, desperately searching for answers.
Life at school was equally bleak. I was plagued by migraines that impaired my ability to concentrate. They were so severe I temporarily lost vision in my left eye. It was like someone had pressed a thick layer of gauze over the socket. The pain was intense, and I often found myself kneeling in front of the toilet, puking up streams of acid and shaking violently. Most days I left early; others I didn’t attend at all. Meanwhile, my friends and classmates went about their daily lives, making adolescent memories that seemed light-years away from own my experiences. I had become a stranger not only to myself but the world around me.
Then, one day, things began to turn around. At the time, my mother worked as a registered nurse for a home healthcare company. Her longtime colleague suggested I attend a clinic held by a group of rheumatologists from The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. A suspicion had grown in both their minds that my condition could be some form of autoimmune disorder. It was a shot in the dark that would end up saving my life.
The head rheumatologist was a middle-aged man with a kind face, glasses, and a beard threaded with silver. He stood out immediately from the other doctors I visited over the previous months. His interest and concern for me was plain in every line of his face, in the way he absorbed my every word. He ordered a battery of tests, including blood work and a brain MRI scan. He also recommended I make my way to Sick Kids for further examination.
My family made the trip on a gloomy day in late spring. I watched the world rush by outside my window, hoping and praying this nightmare would finally come to end. Once we arrived, nurses drew enough blood to fill a small basket of vials. I was then conducted to a dismal, white room for another brain scan. At the end of the day, I was given a lumbar puncture. The needle was obscenely long and made an audible pop as it pierced my dural sac. Once the procedure was over, I waited in a hospital bed for the results. The clock ticked slow and loud.
The rheumatologist’s office was all earth tones, mahogany, and leather. I sat with my parents, and the rheumatologist faced us in a chair of his own, bent forward, giving us his full attention. The lumbar puncture had detected an abnormal protein in my cerebral spinal fluid. Central Nervous System Lupus. His voice was kind even as he delivered those words.
“Imagine your body is a castle,” he explained. “And your white blood cells are the soldiers hired to defend it against invasion. With lupus, the soldiers are confused and they’re attacking the castle instead of defending it.”
In other words, my immune system was attacking my brain, which was causing the blood vessels to swell, leading to migraines and hallucinations. The swelling was so severe I could have slipped into a coma or died. The rheumatologist had uncovered the truth just in time. Despite the gravity of the situation, I felt a smile creeping into the corners of my mouth. I couldn’t help it. I’d suffered in the dark for so long and now I finally had an answer.
Before my family returned home, the rheumatologist prescribed a laundry list of medications, including oral chemotherapy to tame my rogue blood cells and a corticosteroid to reduce the swelling in my brain. I was also given a letter written to my school that effectively pulled me out of class for the remainder of the year.
The next morning, I set my alarm for seven, opened the curtains and stood at my bedroom window, waiting. I heard the drone of an engine in the distance, steadily growing louder and closer. A school bus rolled into view, blindingly yellow against the steel-grey sky. Passengers climbed aboard. The bus remained stationary for a beat after the stop sign folded back, and I imagined seeing my double seated near the rear, watching me with a melancholy expression. Then the bus drove away, carrying with it the ghost of everything I had lost.
It took some time before I grasped the severity of my diagnosis. The medication worked almost immediately, banishing the hallucinations to a dark recess of my brain. But the side effects were awful. The steroids alternately filled me with manic energy and debilitating fatigue. Sleep was impossible. I gained nearly 40 pounds and my face swelled to disfiguring proportions, a condition known as moon face. I hated seeing my reflection. It was like looking at a bad copy, rendered imperfectly with cheap materials. I cried often, from the fatigue and isolation. And as I convalesced at home, I researched deeply into my condition and realized I would have this disease for the rest of my life. It was a difficult truth to accept, and I was terrified. I needed to find a way to cope.
One day, I was exploring a bookstore in a daze, only half aware of the world around me, when I rounded a corner and encountered the section dedicated to horror fiction. My eyes slid over the lurid images, bold typefaces and grim colour palettes that made up their covers. I recognized the obvious names: Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Edgar Allan Poe. But there were many I did not recognize. I found myself drawn to them, those deadly, poisonous flowers filling the shelves. They were important, but I didn’t fully register their significance. Maybe you should buy one, a little voice at the back of my head suggested. It was very much my own, not the insidious whispers that haunted me for last few months. There was no deceit in that voice, and I didn’t question its reality. It was the clearest and most sensible thing my faulty brain had produced in a long while. I would be fool to ignore it. I ran my fingers over the spines of the books, searching for a title that appealed to me. Working on intuition alone, I withdrew a copy of The Mammoth Book of Monsters, edited by Stephen Jones. The word “monsters” was printed in embossed, blood-red letters. Below that, there was a painting of some grey, fanged monstrosity. As a child I’d enjoyed monster movies, so this book seemed like a good way to start what would eventually become my very own unorthodox course of treatment.
I watched every horror movie I could get my hands on and worked my way down an endless list of novels and short stories. With every word and image I absorbed, a new strength entered my body. It was exposure therapy, an attempt to inoculate myself against fear. And through my education, I came to understand the genre on a deep, personal level. The next step was obvious. I needed to write my own horror stories.
Now, 13 years later, I have published over a dozen short stories and have a novella—very loosely inspired by my experiences with lupus—due to be released this year. My writing focuses on a subgenre known as body horror, which includes such topics as transformation, disease, and distortions of the human body. As opposed to supernatural fiction, the horror is internal and therefore more difficult to combat or escape. In one of my stories, a crippled businessman pursues an unorthodox form of rehabilitation, only to become the host for a bizarre aquatic plague. In another, a young man develops an unhealthy, romantic relationship with a tapeworm living inside his body. A running theme in all my stories is that my characters are ultimately betrayed and/or destroyed in some fashion by their own bodies.
Aside from my writing, I’ve been fortunate enough to be in remission for a little over a year. It was a long road, paved with complications, surgeries, and setbacks. I ended up needing a double hip replacement due to complications with my drug treatment. My immune system also crashed a few years ago, and I even tore the lining of my stomach, again because of my medication. But, at this moment, my life has never been better. I like to think the cathartic powers of horror were at least partly responsible. Even so, I struggle every day with the memory of what I experienced. At night, I sit at my desk, open my laptop, and allow my fears to run through my fingertips, into the keys, and onto the screen. I weave the metaphors necessary to keep my sanity in check. I will never forget those nightmare creatures and their insidious whispers, but there’s value in that. The horrors I experienced have become my ink, and for that reason my pen will never run dry.
Brendan Vidito is the author of the Splatterpunk Award-nominated collection, Nightmares in Ecstasy (Clash Books, 2018). His work has appeared in several anthologies and magazines including Dark Moon Digest, Dead Bait 4, Tragedy Queens: Stories Inspired by Lana Del Rey and Sylvia Plath, and the upcoming Pluto in Furs. He will also be co-editing the upcoming anthology The New Flesh: A Literary Tribute to David Cronenberg with Sam Richard. He lives in Sudbury, Ontario with his partner and pet reptiles. You can visit him at brendanvidito.com, or follow him on social media.
