LOVECRAFT once remarked that the “oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” Naturally, I learned this lesson the hard way.

Having first left home at just 15, I inevitably found myself caught in a debilitating spiral of dead-end jobs and soon entered the depressing surroundings of what the English commonly refer to as ‘Bedsitland’. For a number of years I lived in a series of one-room flats, with nothing but a single bed, very little food and a steadily-increasing pile of books and records that sat precariously in the corner like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. We kids had to get our priorities right, after all, and I would rather live on broken biscuits and pilfered sachets of sugar than miss out on the latest Bad Manners EP.

During one of my residential adventures, I ended up living in an incredibly narrow room that was perhaps two metres wide by around seven metres in length. The headboard of my bed was directly underneath the window at the furthest end of this oddly-shaped dwelling, which meant that whenever I was lying in bed and facing the wooden door it seemed like a ridiculously surreal distance away. Well, these money-conscious landlords do like to carve up a house until they can squeeze in as many tenants as possible and it seems that in the grand hierarchy of allocated living quarters my curiously elongated room had been something of an architectural afterthought. In fact the person who dissected the place into a series of mismatched shoe-boxes probably ended up running out of house. Furthermore, whilst one side of my bed was tight against the right-hand wall the space remaining between the left edge of the bed and the wall on the left-hand side was so narrow that in order to walk towards the door one had to turn sideways or keep both hands firmly pinned by one’s side.

One lunchtime, in the absence of a chair and presumably after eagerly consuming a pile of broken biscuits and several sachets of stolen sugar, I lay down on the bed to read a book. Suddenly, or at least I imagined it to be sudden, I was deeply shaken by an enormous crashing sound and realised that the room had been plunged into total darkness. The kind of darkness, I should add, in which it is impossible to see beyond the end of your nose. A thick, enveloping darkness in which everything had merged into a single mass of nothingness. The loud noise, caused by something forcing its way through the locked door, had been tremendous and I quickly understood that I must have fallen asleep and woken up at some point during the evening. My book was lying across my chest and I was still fully-clothed. Nothing had changed. At least nothing apart from a terrible moaning sound that came from the direction of the door and which now seemed to be getting closer. And then I heard it breathing. A strangulated rasping that rose and fell like the sound of somebody dragging a concrete paving slab across a corrugated iron roof. It was getting closer. I then realised that I was completely unable to move. I was frozen to the spot like a disorientated penguin at the full mercy of the polar elements, unable to react in any way.

In fact the only physical response I noticed was that my eyes were starting to bulge from their sockets and I was holding my breath in terror. It moved closer. My brain was reeling and the gruesome details of every Hammer film I had ever seen were streaming through my mind like a blood-spattered newsreel. I still couldn’t move and it seemed as though my arms and legs had been glued to the bed. The sudden transition from reading a book in the full glare of the midday sun to a state of all-encompassing gloom in which something was crawling towards me with evil intent was simply too much too bear. I wanted to leap from the bed and attack it with my size-10 Doctor Martin boots, kicking the indescribable beast into an even more indescribable pulp before hacking my way over to the light-switch.

I still couldn’t move. Not a single muscle. The creature was drawing level with me now, moving alongside me in the small space between the left-hand side of the bed and the wall. It had dragged itself a full six metres and its horrifying breathing – somewhere between a ruptured windpipe and Darth Vader’s asthmatic grandmother – had become as deafening as a rushing steam train. And then it stopped. Right beside my pillow. I was still caught in a state of total incredulity, longing to defend myself and yet utterly immobilised by fear. Very gradually, the invisible figure moved closer and closer until I could feel its hot breath on the side of my right cheek. I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth. I was waiting for the inevitable stab of pain as it ripped my youthful head from my shoulders.

Suddenly, the demon spat in my face and my entire body jumped inadvertently. I was still unable to move, yet a foul liquid was now coursing down the side of my face and onto the collar of my shirt. Almost immediately, my unknown persecutor began dragging itself back along the wall – in reverse, given the limited space available – and towards the door. I listened, helplessly, as it dragged its form out of the room and then went galloping down the twenty or so stairs that led down to the main entrance of the house in a chaotic cacophony that threatened to relegate the worst excesses of freestyle jazz to the ‘easy ‘listening’ section. That’s when the life returned to my limbs and I quickly jumped up from the bed and switched on the light.

An endless trail of black liquid, almost like a miniature oil slick, led all the way alongside my bed, out into the hall and into a neighbouring flat that was rented by two brothers. The door was open and I stepped inside. One of the brothers was sitting on the edge of his bed, half-naked, and on an adjacent bed the covers had been dragged back to reveal an enormous black puddle in the centre of the fitted sheet. It was far too dark to be human blood, surely? We looked at one another and then ran down to the main entrance, where his hapless brother was located at the bottom of the steep staircase in an untidy heap. It was then that I realised who had come crashing into my room, dragged himself along the floor like a severed torso and then spat a generous mouthful of black liquid into my face. He was completely drunk and had distributed enough regurgitated Guinness to quench the thirst of ten Irishmen.

As to the moral of this little story, and every word is true, never underestimate the power of the human imagination.