“
She went straight to bed. She hadn’t told her family, but she had been dreaming of the Bellweather every single night for months. The reason she’d ceased to wake herself up, shaking and crying, was that she’d become too tired to fight; the fear had won. She had accepted that, in her dreams, she would always be afraid. Then The Shining—and no other movie would have done for this first, critical dosing—inoculated her. She had been exposed to the fear that was eating her, slowly but surely, in the light of day; she had confronted it in her waking hours and was rewarded with a night of black, dreamless peace. When she woke up the next morning, a kind of rested she’d forgotten she could feel, Minnie at last knew how to train herself to survive in the world. She would spend the rest of her life pouring the fear out of her dreams and into scary movies.
”
”