Joshua Ginsberg is the author of Secret Tampa Bay: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful and Obscure (2020), Tampa Bay Scavenger (2021), Oldest Tampa Bay (2022), and co-author of Secret Orland: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful and Obscure (2023). His work has appeared in numerous print and online publications including Trembling with Fear (The Horror Tree), The Chamber Magazine, The City Key, 365 Tomorrows, Atlas Obscura, Travel After Five, and on his own blog, Terra Incognita Americanus. He currently lives in the Town n’ Country neighborhood of Tampa with his wife, Jen, and their Shih Tzu, Tinker Bell.
THE APPLIED SCIENCE OF FEAR
by
Joshua Ginsberg
“No one believed me, and then it happened again.”
That was how it stated. How, almost without exception, they all started. Each of the cases recorded in the journal. Hundreds upon hundreds of them.
Clinical Psychologist Dr. James Outhred leafed through the book, skimming page after worn, creased page lined with his own shorthand in blue script. This was not the journal he kept for the practice and the various regulatory agencies that might one day have cause to review it. Rather, this was one of his personal journals that he kept for those most extraordinary, unsettling and, therefore, useful cases. Only the last dozen pages remained blank and he sighed upon seeing that it was nearly complete. And that his work would be complete with it.
Still, there was time for him to flip back through and revisit some of his more memorable patients and their disorders.
The first page at which Dr. Outhred halted contained the story of Mr. Dan Laporte, the first prisoner he had ever worked with. Laporte had been deemed criminally insane and institutionalized after murdering and then trying to cook his elderly next-door neighbor. The police, alerted to the woman’s disappearance by her family, had found her remains stored in Laporte’s freezer, the outside of which had been covered in tortured scribbles of shadow monsters with long, sticklike hands and arms. Laporte claimed that he had committed the vile act not for his own need, but at the insistence of a Wendigo, (his great uncle, he believed) who whined and whimpered and whispered to him through the wind, begging for the one and only thing that could sate its hunger.
The next entry that the doctor paused at was that of a troubled, pre-teen girl, a Tianne K., who seemed to be exhibiting an intense and distinct form of anxiety and ommetaphobia. All eyes, she felt, were always on her. Staring. Glaring. Judging. She shared with her family her dreams of removing their eyes and sewing the lids shut. Pets too. Eyes were scratched out of family photos and yearbooks. She went after a classmate’s face with a pair of scissors in art class. Everyone had assumed she was in an early and treatable phase of her disorder. Everyone, that is, except for Dr. Othred. He had no doubt that some sort of jar or container would be found secreted away in a compartment in her bedroom. No doubt at all of what it would contain.
Then there was the case of PFC Sandor. PTSD certainly wasn’t all that uncommon, especially in veterans who had seen combat in Iraq and Afganistan. What made Sandor’s case unique, however, was that he had witnessed six other members of his patrol torn limb from bloody limb by things he had described as being neither quite human nor animal, but some combination thereof. Wolflike creatures that stood on their hind legs and used both their long, curved teeth and their long, clawed hands (with opposable thumbs), to shred clothing from flesh, and flesh from viscera. Though he never retracted or revised anything he claimed to have seen, he appeared to be successfully readjusting to civilian life with a steady job in landscaping sales and service. Until suddenly he wasn’t. He became convinced that his office manager was exhibiting telltale signs of lycanthropy. Shortly after he had started casting his own silver bullets, Sandor was brought to the attention of local law enforcement. And to Dr. Outhred.
On and on they went, categories, and types and subsets of terrors that were limited only by human imagination. Some were broad and based on relatively rational fears, such as government collapse and civil war, disease, environmental disaster, fire, mass shootings, car crashes. Others were fascinatingly specific and obscure – fear of beards, of clowns, of certain numbers or articles of clothing. And the effects they produced were every bit as wide ranging, from measurable, physical symptoms such as rapid heartbeat, perspiration, muscular contractions, and nausea to the perceptual and mental, which included vertigo, catatonia, disassociation, even an irreparable fragmentation of identity. He bore witness to every conceivable form of damage and abuse that one could inflict upon themselves and others. This information he gathered diligently and approached with more than just a cursory curiosity and a mission. Scratch the surface, he discovered, and it was always fear lurking just beneath. So he immersed himself in it until fear became his all-consuming passion. He took great pride in his painstakingly curate curated collection of psychic scars, his anthologies of anguish – so much so that he realized anew how deeply saddened he would be to see this particular assignment come to a close.
Almost done, he sighed again. Once this last of his journals was filled, he would return to his home world, lightless and incalculably distant, where he would present his findings to his own people’s scientists. The contents of his journals would be thoroughly and thoughtfully reviewed, analyzed, and weaponized. Eventually, his contributions would be integrated into an updated edition of the combat manual titled “Psychological Warfare Against Aggressive Alien Species.”
Then, perhaps, he would be permitted to return. To see his research put into practice.
Once the next phase began.