Father's Smell
The summer I turned thirteen, I had an extremely vivid dream that I was inconsolably upset about something. I don't know why I was upset, but every particle of my being was consumed by the intensity of my weeping and sadness. Eventually my dad came to my room and picked me up and cuddled me, trying to get me to calm down.
I lay still in my father's arms for a few moments, but then I smelled something bad in his sweat and looked in his eyes and understood immediately that this thing that held me was not my father; it was wearing my father's skin, but inside was some kind of beast - some breed of satanic gorilla with an advanced malicious intelligence. It was pretending to be my father, but it was actually very, very dangerous and it meant to harm me.
I woke up screaming, hysterical. It was 5 AM and I was filled with an overwhelming sense of dread. But - I was old enough to start coping on my own; I understood that nightmares were sometimes just random phenomena of the mind, with no particular bearing on reality. I mean, it was just a nightmare, right? My dad was after all a loving parent, and I a loving son. I'd just got to the age where I could start to really appreciate his wisdom about people, his authoritative and arcane knowledge of cars, windsurfing, electronics. And he was so patiently perceptive about my various childhood anxieties.
I didn't even try to get back to sleep, but by dawn I had talked enough sense into myself to laugh about the whole thing. And my dad laughed about it too, when I explained why I was so groggy at breakfast.
That was the last summer my father was in possession of his sanity. As the months passed into winter, he succumbed to a persistent delusional disorder that would eventually obliterate our entire family. Rule by inflexible rule, he constructed an elaborate belief system, always brilliantly intellectually defended, that required him to dominate our household through a system of fear, physical and psychological punishment, and, eventually, sexual humiliation. By the time the psychiatrists saw through his charm and manipulation, some six terrifying years later, spirits had been broken, and lives ruined.
I don't believe in premonitions, but the connection between that powerful dream and the waking nightmare our lives would become is undeniable. It is also something I can perhaps account for in logical terms. I believe that my sensitive, 13-year-old brain, even at that very early stage, had picked up on subtle changes in my father's psyche, of which none of us was yet consciously aware: cryptic signs of mental decay, visible only to the big-picture processing of the subconscious.
I still don't know what those signs were, exactly - perhaps some sort of subtle personality shift, an ever-so-slightly more rigid and irrational way of putting things...
Or, simply, a smell. A bad smell in his sweat: a sick new pheromone, born of mental pathology, for which I alone had a receptor.
Whatever it was, it had been detected, and now it needed to be reported.
Something deep inside me sent out a warning that my father would become a monster.