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The year was 1980, and I was nineteen and thrilled to be spending the summer as caretaker of an empty college dorm. My choice that summer had been between going home to the farm or staying at college. If I went home, I would bail hay, weed the garden, stockpile firewood, and converse with the cows for three months. If I stayed at college, I could have a free apartment in an empty dorm, take a couple of easy summer courses, and make a few dollars. Sure, I'd miss my family, but I didn't have to think long to make the decision. On top of the other benefits, I had the company of several good college friends also working in other dorms that summer. They were better conversationalists than the cows.
One of my friends was the caretaker of the women's dorm across the quad, my buddy Katie. She was nineteen too, smart, lots of fun, and (as a bonus) very cute. Although I had a bit of a crush on her, we had never dated, mostly because we were both somewhat shy and late-bloomers in the dating world. I was bright enough to know that when Katie asked me to go to a movie one night that summer, she meant it as "friends," and that was okay with me. After all, I could spend a few hours with a girl I really liked, and the cows were not showing movies in the barn back home on the farm.
The movie Katie asked me to see was The Shining. Neither of us had read the Stephen King book or knew much about the plot, but we heard it was supposed to be scary. We weren't exactly horror fans, but our little college town had only one theater with one screen, so our movie options were limited to this potential fright-fest. On the positive side, I imagined the possibility of Katie grabbing onto me if she got scared. Of course, if I got scared, I planned to grab onto her.
The evening was warm and pleasant as we walked the mile from campus to the downtown theater. We talked about classes, friends, and how much we enjoyed being the only people living in the dorms that summer. We shared the secret that we had both snooped into every corner of our buildings, from the cobweb-laced attic to the moldy basement.
The summer of 1980 was a few years before the multiplexes would take over the theater business, so our destination was one of those cavernous cathedrals with burned-out lights, a stained screen, flaking paint, gargoyles in the rafters, and sticky carpets. Some people might have called it "run-down," but we thought it was charming.
Just as I'd hoped, the movie was scary enough that Katie leaned over into me, and I put an arm around her shoulders. What I hadn't counted on was that the movie was so intensely creepy that neither of us even registered the fact that we were huddled together until the closing credits rolled. When the lights finally came back up after two hours of stomach-churning horror, shocks, and grotesques weirdness, we could find very little to say to each other at first.
Darkness had fallen by the time we left. This wasn't the pleasant summer darkness of my many relaxing strolls around campus that summer. This was a darkness that masked the presence of an insane, ax-wielding Jack Nicholson behind every shrub and that freaky little kid riding a tricycle down every side street waiting for the perfect moment to scream "Redrum!" We walked quickly, arm-in-arm, eventually talking in loud voices about whatever trivial things popped into our heads. The subject we avoided, of course, was the movie we had just endured. We supposed that if we didn't say anything, we might forget about it by the time we got home. Fat chance.
At Katie's front door, we finally acknowledged just how creeped-out both of us were. We both let out a series of nervous laughs, and the tension actually eased a bit. After a quick hug and a few more chuckles, we said goodnight and each went back to our empty dorms.
It wasn't until I went to bed that I realized how similar the movie's situation--being a winter caretaker at a summer resort--was to being a summer caretaker in a college dorm. Lying alone in the dark, I couldn't help but hear every little squeak and creak from the hundred empty rooms all around me. In a very short time, I began to imagine those little noises were being made by chopped up corpses come back to life in an upstairs hallway or by decomposing naked women rising from their bathtubs.
I had to do something to keep my wits, so I jumped out of bed, tossed on a t-shirt, shorts, and sandals, and grabbed the only weapon I had--my tennis racket. Wearing my bicycle helmet, I spent a nerve-wracking forty-five minutes going through every room in the building, slowly opening each door, flicking the lights on with the racket, poking into closets and under beds, and assuring himself that nothing dangerous lurked within.
Of course, the building was empty. The sounds I'd heard were simply the noises every empty building makes at night, the same noises I hadn't noticed every other night that summer. When I finally made it back to bed, I felt plenty silly. I wondered what kind of an idiot I was to let a harmless movie frighten me to the point where I would be foolish enough to search an entire dorm for bogey-men or bogey-women or bogey-children. That kind of tension and embarrassment was exhausting, so I soon drifted off to sleep.
When the telephone rang two feet from my half-sleeping head five minutes later, I sat up so fast that I nearly broke my spine. My heart pounded from toes to eardrums as I picked up the receiver.
"John, this is Katie," she whispered. "Did I wake you?"
Why did I always lie when asked this question?
"No," I replied, glancing at the clock. It glowed "2:37 a.m." in haunting red numbers.
"I think I hear someone outside," Katie continued. "I hate to ask, but can you come over?"
My tennis racket was still in my hand. This time, I left the bicycle helmet in the closet.
When I got outside, I saw Katie across the quad peeking out the edge of her window. I waved at her with the tennis racket, and then made a circular motion to let her know that I was going to walk the perimeter in search of prowlers and stalkers. In the very back of my mind, I considered the possibility of ghosts or decomposing corpses, but mostly I was on the lookout for something far more frightening: real people.
After making a circuit around her dorm and whacking every bush with my tennis racket, I rang Katie's doorbell. She invited me in for hot chocolate and told me that she had called campus security. They had promised to send a car for a "drive-by," and a few minutes later, we saw the cruiser crawl slowly up the street, going maybe five miles an hour with its lights flashing to scare away any interlopers who might have evaded my racket.
When our cups were empty, Katie said, "I hope you don't think I'm a big baby for asking this, but I'm still kind of scared, and it makes me feel better that you're here. Would you like to spend the night?"
I must have been staring because several seconds later Katie said, "I have bunk beds. You can be on top."
"I like being on top," I blurted, and then pretended that what we had just said was perfectly unambiguous.
Katie smiled, and we went to her bedroom. I climbed up her desk and hoisted myself into the slender top bunk while Katie settled in below. The darkness eased our inhibitions, and we talked for a while about times in our lives when we had been frightened. Katie had once been caught in the middle of a near riot at a high school football game and barely escaped unhurt by climbing underneath the bleachers. As a child, I had been lost on a neighbor's farm for the longest hour of my little life.
Eventually, inevitably, our conversation turned to The Shining. Katie confessed that she probably wouldn't have cared that someone may have been walking around outside her dorm, but the movie had put her nerves on edge.
"Do you think I'm silly for letting a movie get to me like that?" she asked.
"Wanna hear what I did tonight?" I replied.
I told her about my goofy march through the dorm brandishing a tennis racket. We started chuckling about how silly we both felt, and when I told Katie about the bicycle helmet, we laughed for what seemed like hours.
When we finally settled down and lay silently in the dark bedroom, I felt a wonderfully pleasant glow. I had started out the evening just hoping to hold Katie's hand at a scary movie and ended up with a bond much stronger. I felt a real deepening of our friendship because we had shared our fear and our embarrassment. I felt that Katie might just be my friend for life after this crazy night.
I was just about to fall asleep for the second time that night when I heard footsteps outside. Someone walked up to the bedroom window, paused for a few long seconds while taking shallow, ragged breaths, and then walked away into the night. Every hair on my body wiggled and stood up, and I held myself as motionless as possible.
Ten seconds later, I heard Katie say in the quietest whisper possible, "Did you hear that?"
"Yes," I whispered back, barely audible.
Before I knew what was happening, Katie had clambered up into the bunk beside me, quick as a gymnast mounting a balance beam. She pressed her body against mine and buried her face into my chest. I wrapped my arms around her, one holding her back and the other cradling her head. We didn't say a word, and each could feel the other's heart thumping in time with our own.
The footsteps didn't return, and our hearts eventually slowed. I don't remember falling asleep, but when I awoke entangled in our embrace, morning light flowed brightly through the gaps in the curtains.
Katie lifted her face to mine, and our eyes met for a second. My mouth tasted stale, one leg was asleep, and my full bladder ached where her hipbone pressed against me. Katie's hair felt clammy, and I could smell the light acid scent of her sweat. We shared small smiles and muttered good-mornings from the side of our mouths, careful not to breathe in each other's faces.
More than two decades have passed since that night, and both Katie and I have read the book and caught The Shining a few more times on television or video over the years. With every viewing, it seems less scary and more goofy. The characters seem over-blown one minute and wooden the next. What in the world were these people with a rocky marriage, alcohol issues, and a troubled child thinking when they took a job in an isolated, empty resort--haunted or not? For that matter, what was Stanley Kubric thinking? Thank goodness for Misery, The Shawshank Redemption, and The Green Mile--without these three, there wouldn't be a movie or miniseries based on anything by Stephen King that's worth seeing.
Katie and I did stay friends and saw a few more movies together during college. When neither of us had a steady boyfriend or girlfriend, we'd occasionally take in a romantic comedy together--anything but a horror movie--and complain to each other about our dead-end love lives. We lost touch after graduation and now live on opposite sides of the country.
But when Katie saw my name listed in an alumni directory a couple years ago, she sent me an e-mail asking if I'd seen any good horror movies lately. We've been exchanging movie reviews and updates on our lives since then. Katie runs her own public relations firm and is married with two teenaged daughters. Not long ago, her whole family rented a certain scary movie for Halloween, and Katie got a big kick out of telling her husband and kids the story of that long-ago night of The Shining.
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