I wasn’t the smartest boy in the household by a longshot. I knew of wandering the graveyard that it’s best met with an onslaught of something called shudders. It’s when your body trembles and your heart skips, sputters, and you mutter counter-evils, and you grip on to your charms. I’ve never comprehended the alarm caused by things described variously as scary, terrifying, ghastly. Could I follow this? Barely. Certainly never felt it. Never shuddered, and my pops sent me packing, called me bad luck kid, head full of rocks. I talked so loudly of my ignorance as I roamed, complained I couldn’t get frightened, and might have bemoaned that I’d been disowned. A friendly hangman beckoned but I partied with his danglers, didn’t shudder for a second. Then I heard about a castle in the distance that was haunted. Nobody lasted there an evening. Could it be just what I wanted? Didn’t know.
Didn’t know there was anything in the world to be frightened of.
I wasn’t the first one to show up claiming bravery. The rumored ends of my predecessors were unsavory. They’d become the catering at a feast of ghouls and spirits! Neither the king nor his people would set foot near it. This seemed good; fear, it glistened in their eyes as they spoke. I figured I could pick the habit up and go (maybe all the way back home, having understood shuddering). Did the townspeople deem me a simpleton? Utterly. What a first night it was, too! The hellbeasts were like from a nightmare. I think? I don’t get bad dreams. I tried to nap but the furniture floated and spun. We did some doughnuts in the stable yard! Fun. The second night’s vigilance wasn’t any more fruitful: zombies down the chimney till the whole rec room’s full. All-bone nine-pin, glad I brought my lathe. Though I lost some money gambling, my denseness was unscathed.
Third and final evening, my reanimated corpse cuddle-buddy tried to strangle me. Reliable sources report that I chucked him back in his coffin and sighed, despaired of finding shudders locally and set to stride. Didn’t I want my reward? The hand of the castle’s princess? A path to power and riches, and this is its ingress? And this is my dimness, I guess, but I choose to keep questing: find the next hypothesis of scariness and keep testing. But here’s that princess requesting that I reconsider. And as I spy her she reminds me of my babysitter, a village girl I had a crush on as a lad who never even noticed that I couldn’t make eye contact. This one’s staring me down. She’s used to getting her way, been wearing a crown. Is she scaring me now, with her “think about it, please?” I got this odd involuntary shaking in my knees.