HOW TO SCARE A
WOMAN TO DEATH
by Stephen King
Who would want to scare a nice
lady half to death, keep her up most of the night, make her race to shut doors, close windows, and then lie awake shivering,
perspiring even in her lightest nightgown? Well, me for one. Just the thought raises a grin that, though I cannot
see it since I have no mirror, feels wonderfully sadistic. As the little street urchin in Oliver Twist
says, I only wants to make yer flesh creep . . . and it's been my experience that ladies like a good scare as well as anyone.
So if you're an apprentice flesh-creeper (or even if you aren't), let me offer some hints on throwing a jolt into what some
of us still refer to as the fairer sex.
Who's minding the kids?
It would be sexist to say that only ladies care about their children -- in fact, it would be a downright lie -- but there
does seem to be such a thing as "maternal instinct," and I go for it instinctively. Thought the idea of children in
jeopardy is sometimes looked upon by critics with a disapproving eye, it's as old as Hansel and Gretel and as new as
the books of Mary Higgins Clark. Except, in my case, who's minding the kids is apt to be something green and scally
that just stepped out of the closet.
Pretty dark out here, isn't it, Maude? You're a woman, maybe
young, maybe pretty. You don't spend all day and all night aware of the fact that you're a target, but you take the
usual precaustions: you don't talk to strange men, don't wear a see-through blouse on the first date, don't pick up
hitchhikers on back-country roads. And then, one night, while you're driving on a deserted highway, you look up
into your rear-view mirror and see a face . . . and suddenly there's warm breath on your neck . . . and hands wround your
throat. All of which says that women see themselves as uniquely vulnerable, and in a way or ways that men are not.
Despite unique physical advantages (increased lung capacity in the female makes it possible for her to hold her breath longer
underwater, for instance . . . remember it if your husband or lover decides he wants to drown you in the bathtub), most women
are lighter and shorter than their men, often less well-muscled, sometimes less well coordinated -- in many cases because
of the sexual molds they've been forced into. I've never consciously made any of the women in my books into shrinking
violets, helpless screamers waiting for the knight in shining armor to rescue them, or know-nothing twits, but I like to play
on that unique sense of vulnerablility. It terrifies.
I must pause here and say that after racking my brain for at least two minutes,
I've decided that all the following other techniques work equally well on men. So, take a deep breath and try these
on:
My, it's getting close in here. When you came, you thought
it would be just another dull cocktail party, but now all the doors are locked . . . and there's a funny rumbling in the walls
. . . and speaking of the walls, aren't they moving? This is that delicious feeling of claustrophobia, fear
of tight places, and I play on it with great joy at every opportunity. It's the feeling you get when there are twelve
people in the elevator and it suddenly stops between floors . . . and someone starts to scream.
Oh, dear, I don't know what that is, but it's not chopped liver!
You drop your damn compact, the one your mother-in-law gave you, and it rolls into that funny little hole in the baseboard.
You reach in to get it, and your hand closes on something there in that musty darkness between the walls . . . and
then the something starts to squirm in your hand . . . and sting. . . and you can't get your fingers out. This
is a highly usable combination of fears, centering perhaps on the phobia -- the fear of the horribly slimy or squirmy
something that you just can't see. It works well on women, who traditionally scream about mice, gag over spiders, and
faint at the sight of a snake slithering ut from under the bed, but it works just as well on men, who do all the same things
. . . inside.
What happened to the lights, Jane? No doubt about it, this
is the greatest fear of all -- fear of the dark and what might be there. Turn out the lights in a lady's own peaceful living
room (or even better, have a blackout at the height of a screaming thunderstorm), and that peaceful room becomes a jungle.
You forget where things are; you're apt to stumble over the hassock, lose your sense of direction and run into the bookcase
thinking it's the door to the hall, and end up feeling your way with your hands groping the air in front of you. Absurd
imaginings no longer seem quite so absurd, do they? You could almost scream, couldn't you? And when an inhuman
voice begins whispering your name over and over again in the dark, perhaps you do . . .
The dead. They don't come back. I know it and you know
it. There are no such things as ghosts, except in the stories told around the campfire. Vault doors do not creak
open at mdnight. And then, three days after you bury Uncle Harry (and no one even suspected the rat poison you fed him,
you clever girl), the telephone rings . . . and it's Uncle Harry . . . and he says you and he have something to talk
about . . . and twenty minutes later the door knocker begins to rise and fall in a slow and horrible rhythm . . . and you
think you'll just go to the peephole and make sure it's only the paperboy . . . and that's when the moldering hand pokes
through the letter slot and clutches your wrist. What fun.
These are five of the ways I go about my task of scaring ladies. There
are others I'll not mention (I can't give away all of my trade secrets), but let me add one more -- a very quiet
scare that perhaps works best on women because women are slightly more imaginative than men, slightly better tuned to the
nuances of terror. So: What's missing from this picture? In some ways, this is the most wicked
thrust of all, aiming directly to a woman's need for pattern and order. This is the terror of coming home and finding
that the furniture has been subtly changed about; that the slip you'd folded so neatly into the third drawer is now in
the second, that the book you put on the dresser is lying open on your favorite chair; that the radio you left tuned to AM-91
is tuned to FM-106.
This is coming home and finding that the dog your husband left to protect you
is mysteriously mising -- and one knife, the longest and sharpest, is gone from the rack over the sink. And . . . just
perhaps . . . at that point you hear breathing in the next room.
For me, scaring women is all part of the job, but in this case I admit with
no shame at all that my business is also my pleasure. And it might not be unfitting to close with the words of Shakespeare,
another writer not above throwing a scare into the fairer sex when the chance came. "Good night, ladies, good night,"
said Ophelia, who was drivin mad by her own fears." "Sweet ladies, good night, good night . . . "
And sleep tight.
