I have read Stephen King since I was a teenager in the Seventies, but an incident in Nineteen Eighty-Eight made me think twice about reading him again.
I was twenty-five and pregnant with my third child - technically my second pregnancy - and living with a group of people in Waterford, Ireland. Three of the people I lived with were from the same family, and Peter was the only brother, a soft, quiet twenty-three-year-old who never stood out much and who taught computer programming at the local college. His youngest sister was my friend and I had met them through her; she shared the top floor with her older American boyfriend, who also taught in the college.
We lived in a townhouse, which had been separated into three flats and although I had the bottom floor, we congregated in the livingroom of that flat mainly because it had the only serviceable kitchen. The ground-floor living room was the main hub of the house and we ate and watched T.V. there in the evening when everyone was back from college. The others lived in the flats upstairs but had turned their kitchens into offices where they designed Dungeons and Dragons games, every surface of the rooms covered in computer monitors and video tapes.
There was a lovely communal feeling on these nights … when we were not arguing about the dog and his bad rubbish-bin habits. We were like a family, of sorts, but over time, we began to notice Peter was beginning to act out of character. He stopped taking care of himself and would sit in the living room anxiously picking the hair from the back of his head until he created a bare patch. He stopped going to work, never changed his clothes and retreated further inside himself, spending much of his time watching TV.
The bald spot expanded; it became two.
We all noticed how he was becoming quieter, but no one wanted to bring it up with him. I thought he was depressed, but depression wasn’t a thing people recognised in Ireland then. We all worried about him but none of us knew how to deal with it.
A little while later, I moved into my own flat further up the road; the dog’s habits having proved too much to cope with. Peter and his sister’s American boyfriend, came to my flat every evening for dinner, because back in the old place they had paid me to cook for them so they would have something substantial to eat after work. It was a habit they were happy to continue, now that I lived separately from them, and I needed the money so I was happy too. Soon enough, though, Peter stopped coming. I assumed it was because of his depression but I didn’t ask. Dealing with the daily demands of raising twins by myself was more than enough to keep me occupied.
One night, just as I had gone to bed, there was a loud knock on the door. When I opened it, Peter’s older sister rushed in.
‘I think Peter’s possessed,’ she exclaimed, breathless from having run up the street and the flight of stairs to my flat. With her hand grasping her crucifix, she added, her voice frantic. ‘We have to get him a priest, Ann. I have some holy water! Do you think I should use it?’
Although I did not see Peter’s problem as stemming from some demonic possession, I understood what she meant. The previous night, having gone to bed (I slept in the front room because my twin daughters were asleep in the only small bedroom) there had also been a knock at the door. It was well after nine p.m. and I was annoyed because I was heavily pregnant and everyone knew not to disturb me after nine. I might live in another house but we were still a family. Reluctantly, I heaved myself off the bed. It might be an emergency, I rationalised, otherwise, why would they come at this hour?
When I opened the door, Peter stood in the hallway. He looked pale, his hair lank and unwashed, and his eyes glassy. Yet he had a slight smile on his face as though he knew I would not turn him away even though it was late in the evening. I let him in, feeling immediately uneasy. He’d never visited me alone before and he hadn’t been well lately. I made him a cup of tea- an incurable Irish habit - chatting to him about nothing, reassuring myself everything was perfectly normal.
He sat on the dining chair against the back wall of the space adjoining the kitchen. This space served as both my living room, and bedroom, and his presence there, added to my disquiet.
I put his tea on the small coffee table beside him and sat on the edge of my bed. As soon as he saw I had settled he declared he had come with a purpose.
‘Really?’ I was still feeling uneasy but I was also curious. After all, he was still my friend, and it was the first conversation we had had in weeks.
‘The book, “IT”,’ he said, rocking back on the chair so it precariously balanced on its two rear legs. With his back leaning against the wall, he explained, ‘I understand what it means now.’
‘What does what mean?’ I took a cigarette out of the packet, feeling his eyes on me. We had all read the book, but it was only a story. At least I thought it was only a story. Peter evidently thought it meant something else.
‘We are the Seven,’ he stated, his voice quiet as he waved away the cigarette I offered him.
‘The seven?’ I lit my cigarette, and inhaled, blowing the smoke sideways into the air so he did not have to inhale it too. 1
‘You know … The Loser’s Club!’ He stared at me, as though I ought to know exactly what he was talking about. The chair rocked forward allowing all four legs to rest solidly on the carpet again.
‘Oh,’ I said, realising that I did know. ‘That seven2.’ I tapped the ash into the ashtray, still not sure where he was going. When he did not offer any more information, I asked, ‘So who do you think the seven are? Of us, I mean?’
He went on to name all those who lived in the old house, which made five, including me, even though I no longer lived there, and added two friends who were regulars and part of the group. There were indeed seven if you didn’t count my toddlers. Adding them would have made his numbers wrong.
He went on to tell me that we were all in danger and then described how Pennywise the Clown was trying to kill him and that we were probably on the list too because we were the seven. However, he was the only one who knew that because he was the one who had figured it out, which made him the logical first victim.
In the other house, his bedroom was on the middle floor and his window, to the right of his bed, looked out over the back garden. (I only know this because when I still lived there, we had a gas leak in my room downstairs from an old gas meter and I got gas poisoning. He very kindly offered to let me use his bedroom for a few days and he stayed on the top floor).
Peter went on to tell me that he awoke every night at the same time, around Midnight, knowing that the clown, Pennywise, was outside his window. He could not risk going to sleep because if he did, Pennywise would kill him, so he forced himself to stay awake until three a.m.
From outside his bedroom window, Pennywise the Clown would make his way towards the first window which gave access to a short landing halfway up the stairs. He would then enter the window and climb the rest of the stairs towards Peter’s door. There, Peter said, the clown would listen to see if he had fallen asleep yet.
Lying in bed, knowing what Pennywise was doing, Peter lay rigid with fear, nearly too afraid to breathe. But once he heard the floorboard squeak on the landing, he knew Pennywise was no longer a threat and he could finally, safely, go to sleep.
How he knew that he was safe, I don’t know. But the danger was past, he felt. For another night.
Listening to my friend’s tale of nightly torture, I felt bad for him and I tried to understand why he might be having this experience. He was obviously having a breakdown of some sort. But then he went on to tell me that the baby I was having would be a boy. The way he said it, so confidently god-like, I knew he absolutely believed his prediction. For some reason, that made me more nervous than his story about Pennywise. But I laughed, humouring him. I did not want a boy, but I did not want to disagree with Peter either. I did not feel safe enough. I went along with it until he got up to go, satisfied that he had warned me of the danger.
He had been in my flat for nearly two hours and I felt anxious after his visit, even though when he was there, I didn’t challenge him, instinctively knowing I needed to hear him out. When his sister arrived at my door the following night, I knew Peter seriously needed help, but I also knew he wasn’t possessed.
He was eventually taken to his parent’s home, and while he was gone, my baby was born. Peter was diagnosed as manic-depressive and medicated. A couple of months later, he visited me again, sheepishly laughing when I told him the baby was a girl. He told me what his thinking had been like before medication and I realised just how far down the ‘Pennywise drain’ he had fallen. He said he wandered the streets of Waterford, giving away hundreds of pounds of his money to homeless people, completely emptying his bank account. But he also told me he felt immeasurably powerful and could attack a woman in the street - if he wanted to. But he didn’t, of course, because another part of his mind was still keeping him from acting that desire out. That was reassuring. Had he been feeling powerful when he visited me that night? I wondered.
Some deep things had been triggered in Peter’s psyche after reading Stephen King's book. After that, I decided that King’s ability to drag things out of the psychic murk was just a little too real for my liking. But it was only later that I began to question why that particular story might have influenced Peter so much.
Thinking of his terror at having to stay awake at night, hearing the footsteps of someone who should be good, but who is really a predator, outside in the hallway made me wonder where that psychic wound originated. He could not sleep until the danger had passed and he knew it had passed when the floorboard squeaked. Did he go to a boarding school with priests for teachers, as many boys from my old home town did? Did he stay awake, listening for the sounds of the floor, waiting to see whose turn it was and then knowing he was safe, but that someone else had not been so lucky? What Peter described was common in catholic boy’s boarding schools - I’ve heard the stories from my father - and they would certainly explain Peter’s fears. He would probably have gone to New Ross as a weekly boarder, it being the only secondary school for boys.
But what if, in Peter’s manic-depressed mind, he also had some psychic ability? I know from experience that some people with psychiatric disorders can often be very psychic, but that the unbalanced part of their mind sees it as physically real. What if Peter was picking up on someone who had lived in that house before it was turned into flats? There had been an old Christian Brothers school on that road which had burned down in the early thirties. Another one later replaced it, built by distant cousins of mine. But what if the original inhabitant of that house had been a student there when he was a boy? The abuse that happened in many Christian Brothers schools in Ireland was terrible. Had Peter unknowingly picked up on another child’s experience, energies that remained in the atmosphere around that street? Or had he inherited, through his DNA, memories of ancestral abuse?
Who knows?
As a healer myself, psychic impressions are not alien to me. I have picked up energies like that too, but I knew they were impressions of energy, echoes of the past, and not real in a physical sense. In Waterford, I did not know I had that ability, so I would not have recognised it anyway.
For all these years, though, I can’t shake the feeling that King’s book triggered some memory that Peter may have been acting out, without realising it. Too much for his psyche to handle, the dark content of the book proved to be a turning point from which he never recovered, triggering a latent tendency to manic depression. Not that the book was to blame, but King’s ability to delve so deeply into the darkest parts of the mind meant that for Peter, at least, it may well have come too close to the bone.
It was a long time before I read another Stephen King book. But my next experience in Egypt, twenty-five years later, proved that it was far safer for me not to read King’s books at all. It also proved how very careful we have to be when working with the collective unconscious.
Part two to follow.
In those days we all smoked, pregnant or not. No one knew about possible dangers.
You are pointing to something very important here… I think about the effect of what we put into our psyches too…