The Face at the Window

Haunted Songs for All Hallow's Eve

2006-10-31T03:21:00.000-08:00

In a pioneering collaborative cross-post with my music-geek brother over at Pop with a Shotgun, I offer here a selection of songs that have unnerved, unhinged, disjointed, disturbed, and/or flat-out frightened me over the past year and in years past.

Happy Halloween — hope y’all find some sweet candy in your bags, heh-heh.

1. “SHE MOVED THROUGH THE FAIR," artist unknown
Few folk songs have been recorded as often as this one. Folkies love it because it smells of the ancient, while New Agers love it for its affirmation of life after death and love, or at least romance, everlasting. Certainly every musician with a drop of Irish blood has taken the lance to it: versions exist by John McCormack, Elvis Costello, Van Morrison, Sinead O’Connor and The Chieftains, Loreena McKennitt, and so on. The modern lyrics were written by Padraic Colum, poet, novelist, dramatist, and folklorist of Eire, and the tune, by Herbert Hughes, was based on a fiddle air collected in Donegal in 1909; but some form of the song surely dates back to Medieval times and beyond.

Perhaps the best-known version to rock and roll ears — and the style-setter for most later covers — is by Fairport Convention; sung by the late Sandy Denny, it’s on their second album, What We Did on Our Holidays (1969). Denny’s version was based on a precursor by Anne Briggs, and Briggs got it from locally famed Irish banjoist and “traveling singer” Margaret Barry (1917-90). Barry, who had been singing the piece for decades in various long and short versions, can be credited with keeping it alive until modern pop had a chance to discover it. Her sharp, bloody rendition is heard on the Rounder compilation I Sang Through the Fairs, containing songs and memories recorded in discussion with Alan Lomax in 1953.

A bit of web-trawling will reveal any number of versions posted by musicians on the various state-fair and city-jamboree circuits. Few are unlistenable. Listed here is one of the simpler versions I turned up: a single twice-echoing pipe of wood, blowing improvisatory variations on the song’s basic lines. I don’t remember who recorded this, and I can’t rediscover where I found it; but I can hear the piper’s breath draw up sharp and nervous between each long, long phrase. It feels like he’s right here with me. It’s an invocation of the night and whatever might be waiting to come out.

2. “(GHOST) RIDERS IN THE SKY,” The Ramrods
Somewhere out in the American West, as if in response to the Irish pipe, skies darken and apparitions appear.

This song’s author, Stan Jones, grew up on the prairie and recalled the old cowboy’s warning to reckless boys: Look into the sky, and you can see the ghost herd. Be careful out here, or you’ll join it one day. On his 34th birthday, at his home in Death Valley, Jones wrote a song that sounded as old as the ghosts it imagined.

Since then it’s been a favorite of old cowboy stars, nightclub crooners, and garage bands alike, done by Roy Rogers and Spike Jones, Johnny Cash and Peggy Lee, Burl Ives and REM. The Ramrods’ instrumental was the big hit version of the rock era, reaching the Top 30 in February 1961. The snap and beat of the band sound like surf, but the voices that fly over and streak past — whip-snapping cowpokes, a wailing woman — are the sound of that thundering herd, that mythic mass of spirits.

3. “DEVIL GOT MY WOMAN,” Skip James
A small Midwestern town. A man sits on a corner. He plays the guitar, thumps his heel down below for a subtle pulse, and cries high. His cry hangs on the gray afternoon wind for five minutes’ time. He sings about the devil, and about a woman. You know I’d rather be the devil, than to be that woman now. Maybe ten people walk by in those five minutes. One passerby slows, double-takes the shut-eyed singer, stops to listen. Then gets scared, looks at the sky, and hurries on.

By the end of the song, it has turned to night. There’s no sound but the wind and a rusty weathervane turning somewhere above. The man packs up his guitar, walks off, and is never seen again.

Note: I specify the latter-day remake, from the 1968 LP of the same title, over the 1931 Grafton recording.

4. “PHANTOM 309,” Red Sovine
Headlights on the highway, coming around the turn. Sovine, king of the trucker’s ballad, here reverses the legend of the phantom hitchhiker — the wandering ghost, usually a girl, who flags a ride with some unsuspecting motorist in the hope of finding her way home. In Sovine’s version, it’s the hitchhiker-narrator who is the innocent. Down on his luck, he snares a ride with trucker Big Joe, who takes him up the road to a diner and tosses him a dime for coffee. When he tries to cash it in, explaining where he got it, It got deathly quiet . . . and the waiter’s face got kinda white.

Turns out Big Joe took a fatal skid some time back: he twisted his wheel and went to his death rather than collide with a school bus.

5. “SALLY GO 'ROUND THE ROSES,” The Jaynetts
“Spookiest and most exotic of all girl group discs,” Dave Marsh called this, placing it #377th in The Heart of Rock and Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made (1989). Your blogger wouldn’t argue.

The song, Marsh says, “operates as a metaphor, but its message is as murky as week-old gossip. Superficially, Sally’s friends are just warning her against going downtown, because there she’ll find the ‘the saddest thing in the whole wide world,’ her baby with another girl. But the mix and arrangement and the odd metaphor of the endlessly repeated chorus (‘Sally, go ‘round the roses / They won’t tell your secret’) lend the entire production an ominous air, as if some deeper tale waits to be told.

“A quarter century later, after endless spins, it’s no closer to being revealed.”

6. “JOHNNY REMEMBER ME,” John Leyton
The galloping rhythm, the windy echo, the dead girl wailing in the treetops. It’s all Joe Meek: poor mad, brilliant, dead Joe Meek. And it has the power to make you think of Wuthering Heights. Or Goethe’s The Erl-King. Or “Ghost Riders in the Sky.”

I first heard this song on January 21, 2001, at the Walter Reade Theater in New York, while watching a seldom-screened two-part BBC documentary called The Brian Epstein Story. That was a strange, strange night: I met someone who was a ghost, or might as well have been. I’ve got witnesses.

I wrote about it once. To be continued . . .

7. “HOPE THERE'S SOMEONE,” Antony & The Johnsons
If you’re feeling life is too scary to be lived, don’t listen to this. It might convince you you’re right.

8. “DON'T FEAR THE REAPER,” Blüe Oyster Cult
Poison-flavored bubblegum. It’s a joke, some would say not even a good one: “proto-Jehovah’s witness crap,” Marsh called it, “that doesn’t scare (or convince) anybody.” Anybody but me and a few million others. No kid who grew up white, Midwestern, and radio-fixated in the 1970s is without some feeling about this record. You hate it or you love it, or you just shiver when you hear it. It’s like the line from The Usual Suspects: “I don’t believe in God, but I’m scared of him.” I don’t believe in this record, but I’m scared of it.

9. “NAKED IN THE AFTERNOON,” Jandek
Loathsome schizo wanders the impeccable rooms of his suburban Houston home and plots gruesome acts, turns them into twanging, dissonant, tuneless, endless songs. Scares hell out of anyone who has sense enough to not listen to too much of it at once.

10. “WHO DO YOU LOVE,” Ronnie Hawkins
Bo Diddley wrote the lyrics, and they’re lyrics that white would-be badasses like Jim Morrison and George Thorogood have never tired of trying to live up to, earn the right to understand. But what’s to understand? This is the rock and roll graveyard, more vivid than any psychobilly extravagance, subtler than Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, no “Monster Mash” sitcom. This is the Devil coming through. He’s horny, hustling, setting fires, spreading evil.

I walked 47 miles of barbedwire, use a cobrasnake for a necktie
Got a brandnew house by the roadside made from rattlesnake hide
Got a brandnew chimney made on top made from a human skull

Bo Diddley’s original has a haze on it, an aural thickness, an unreality: all that tremelo on his rectangular guitar and cheap amplifier makes the graveyard night fat, soft, surreal, a convocation of Epicurean demons. Ronnie Hawkins, gripped by something — maybe an evil mood, maybe the white would-be badass’s drive to outfrighten the frightener — gets closer to something really raw, really scarred.

I got a tombstone hand and a graveyard mind
I lived long enough and I ain’t scared a dyin’

This is the only record on my list of ghastlies that is sexy and scary both — and probably the only one that wants to be both. That makes it perverse. And that perversity wins Ronnie the right to say he understands, to claim that he has gone all the way there and returned to tell the story, that he reached his hand into the very fires of the deepest pit and will show you the burn.

The night was black and the moon was blue
And down the alley an icewagon flew
Bump was hit lord and somebody screamed
You should a heard just what I seen

This song features one of the great unanswerable non-sequiturs in modern art, up there with I am the Walrus and Mein Feuhrer, I can walk!! And Hawkins does justice to it — to Bo Diddley’s greatest line, his greatest rock and roll idea, an idea that has no right to be scary but nonetheless is:

Who do you love?

11. “LONG LONG LONG,” The Beatles
God, this is so quiet. So, so, so quiet. As a kid I couldn’t hear it: getting my head next to the speaker to hear the words, catch the little noises, was an experiment in fear. Because I knew the song was going to rear up, that it was coming to get me. First in the middle eight, So many years I was searching — one of the simplest and most powerful stretches of music and lyric George Harrison ever wrote — and finally at the climax, when haunted electronics surge upward from the wires and circuits like buried evil at the end of Five Million Years to Earth, and George opens his mouth to release a sound so unearthly, so —

Possibly the scariest song on what is certainly the scariest rock and roll album there is.

12. “BANSHEE,” Henry Cowell
We’ve heard many imitations and apprehensions of the banshee up to now: ghost riders, spirit lovers. Here she speaks for herself in extended shrieks and low drawn-out groans, with composer Henry Cowell as medium. Set amid the futurisms and constructivisms of the 1958 Folkways LP Sounds of New Music — which features such avant-garde curios as Soviet symphonies for power station and steel foundry — this piece of primitive horror protrudes like a gnarled finger. Cowell manually batters and caresses the exposed strings of a grand piano: “By scratching, plucking, pounding and sweeping the strings and taking full advantage of the strings’ sympathetic vibrations,” the liner notes read, “the composer has perfectly evoked the Banshee of Irish and Scottish folklore, the female spirit whose wailings forewarn families of the approaching death of a member.”

13. “VENUS IN FURS,” The Velvet Underground
Me + this song + a dark room = never in a million years.

14. “THE LONG BLACK VEIL,” Lefty Frizzell
The song is a natural ghost story, a piece of commercially canny pop that came out a fully-formed myth: like “Ghost Riders,” it could have been written a century before it was copyrighted. Frizzell’s original version, a hit in 1959, is still preferable to any other. It’s the only one that serves the song’s ghostliness, rather than its sense of biblical justice (Johnny Cash) or its ain’t-that-tough-shit bluesiness (the Band). Frizzell never goes above or below a pitch and energy that are dazed, oddly serene, the crooning equivalent of a whisper, as if he truly is the ghost he claims to be. Behind him, a dobro cries: the banshee is loose again. Stories like this — this must be where banshees come from.

15. “I WONDER AS I WANDER,” John Jacob Niles
You may have first heard Niles, as I did, only about a year ago — in No Direction Home, the half-baked Martin Scorsese/“American Masters” Dylan documentary. You may have felt, as I did, electrified and terrified at the too-brief bit of Niles’ long-ago television rendition of his song “Go ‘Way from My Window,” the key image of which Dylan purloined. You may have experienced the Niles wail as a sudden hot quiver in your nerve center, and felt, as I did for just a second, that no one had ever made a sound remotely so frightening. You may have felt, as I did, that you’d never felt fear before that moment. You may then have rushed, as I did, to hear more by this man.

You may never forget, as I will not, the sound of the voice I wonder the sound as I of the banshee wandahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

16. “SHE MOVED THROUGH THE FAIR,” Menya Wolfe
Did I remind you up front that this song is a ghost story?

My young love said to me, my mother won't mind
and my father won't slight you for your lack of kind
And she laid her hand on me, and this she did say
Oh, it will not be long, love, till our wedding day

I’ve been hearing this song as long I can remember, but about a year ago I became obsessed with it. I trolled the net and the record catalogs to grab every version I could find. I found Anne Briggs’, and Margaret Barry’s, and many others. A few were good, most were okay, many were interchangeable — same drone, same bonnie lass enunciating cold and clear across an Irish spring.

Then I clicked a link and found myself in a very strange place.

A woman was singing, accompanied by a harp. The voice was that of a trained professional, deliberate, crystalline, almost unnaturally high — not in pitch but in ethereal location: it seemed to be of the sky, not merely aimed at it. The harp rang, well, like a harp. But it was the raw sound, over and above the musician’s technique, that transfixed and transported me. I guessed the piece had to date from the 1920s, or even earlier: clearly the recording had been subjected to many audio strippings and sandings, many rounds of noise reduction. And here it was, whittled down to some exquisite essence of sound, some spirit of music — primitive, without physicality, without body. It was all air, feeling, light, atmosphere. I swore I even heard the twittering of birds over the music. It sounded, I’m not entirely embarrassed to say, like music made by an angel.

Well, I’m an atheist, so angels scare me. I sat there bewildered, trembling, not believing. Nonetheless I did some back-clicking and got to the source of the thing.

What I found was a website devoted to a Toronto woman named Menya Wolfe. From the photos and news stories collected by the friends who’d built the site, I learned something of her life. She’d been a musician, archeologist, and artist. Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1996, she had begun an e-mail support group for cancer patients to share information and experiences — a common enough thing now, but not then. The group grew to a membership of 700.

Menya Wolfe began treatment for her illness, which was of an especially rare and inflammatory type.

And she went away from me and moved through the fair
and fondly I watched her move here and move there
And then she went onward, just one star awake
like the swan in the evening moves over the lake

The recordings posted at Menya’s site are, like “She Moved Through the Fair,” of a classical-folk stripe, and include other ghostly or macabre songs like “House Carpenter” and “Two Corbies” (aka “The Twa Corbies” or “The Three Ravens,” an ancient Scottish ballad representing the dialogue between predator birds as they prepare to dine on the remains of a fallen knight — we used to sing that in grade school). But these songs were recorded years before Menya got sick; in fact, her husband Pete Bevin writes, she “sang and played these pieces in 1990 for a friend who, ironically, was dying of breast cancer at the time.” There is nothing of foreshadowing, depression, or self-pity about the recordings; they are clear, sweet, and haunting, as if utterly innocent of tragedy. They’re available for download, and they comprise something almost too painful to hear.

The songs, Bevin says, were recorded on a boombox in Menya’s basement, and are “the only surviving recording of her work.”

Last night she came to me, my dead love came in
So softly she came that her feet made no din
And she laid her hand on me, and this she did say
Oh, it will not be long, love, till our wedding day

Menya Wolfe died February 13, 2001, age 36.

Don't Answer the Phone (Pt. 3)

2006-10-28T14:19:00.000-07:00

The phone -- or, as I lovingly refer to it, the hotline to hell -- rang yesterday evening. Precisely, the phones: we have two. I was near the one in the bedroom; it has a ringer of the electro-cricket variety (Bleeeeeeeeep! Bleeeeeeeeep! Bleeeeeeeeep!), while in the living room is a phone with an old-fashioned bell ringer. (Briiiiiiiinngggg! Briiiiiiiinngggg! Briiiiiiiinngggg!) When the apartment is silent, as it was just then, you will hear the two uniquely eruptive sounds in slightly delayed stereo action:

Brrrlleeeeiiiinnggggppppp! Brrrlleeeeiiiinnggggppppp! Brrrlleeeeiiiinnggggppppp!

Tell me that’s not straight out of a nightmare. Sounds like the primeval shriek-squeals once hurled down New England cliffsides by Lovecraftian succubi.

As it happens, I was just leaving the bedroom and walking towards the living room phone when the call came. Anyone would have thought I was heading out to answer it. But in fact I was on my way to the bookcase next to the phone -- and as the noisy but impotent instrument blared and rattled for my attention, I searched the shelves with perfect blandness, as if cocooned in silence.

Thinking all the while, Ha. Take that, phone. You don’t scare me.

Do you ever find yourself by happenstance performing a dimly remembered scene from some movie? Walking cockily with hands in pockets: Hey, I’m doing Cagney! That expression of exaggerated puzzlement: Thank you, William Hurt. Listening in rapt attention to a friend while thinking, This is just how Michael Caine listened to Dyan Cannon. (Or whatever.) That was the sensation I had walking towards the phone, aware of its ringing but to every appearance oblivious to it. What scene am I acting out right now? I wondered.

Later it came to me: I was unconsciously aping Susannah York in the first sequence of Images (1972), the post-Gothic psychodrama directed by Robert Altman.

Images is a marvelous spooky contraption, a schizoprism of the unreally real and the brutally fantastical, and one of the coolest, creepiest enigmas that exists. Yet despite earmarks of success -- hot director, international star, plot involving sex, murder, madness -- it slipped between the seams of popular favor and was chalked up as a disaster best forgotten. Entered in the festivals at both Cannes (where its star was voted Best Actress) and New York, it somehow went largely unreviewed, and those notices that did appear were uniformly negative. Even Pauline Kael, on her way to being the Altman booster par excellence, dismissed it.

Well, see the film. See it, and try to forget it. You’re unnerved from the credits inward. A woman, Catherine, is alone in an expansive two-story cottage located, evidently, in a remote patch of Irish hill country. It will transpire that her husband, Hugh, some unspecified sort of prosperous businessman, is away for the evening. Catherine is writing, thinking, daydreaming, and we hear her words as they run in her head: the text of a children’s book she is composing (titled, the credits inform us, In Search of Unicorns -- and written by Ms. York herself).

Catherine is langorous among her pillows and pages, serene as she spins inwardly the brisk and avid sentences of her preadolescent adventure. Serene, that is, until she snaps into another frame of consciousness -- looks right at us, as if suddenly aware of our watching, or bites into an apple that comes up rotten -- and at each cut point we cut from Catherine to sinister still lifes, objects like cameras and chimes suddenly made fearsome, like monsters in wait. Accompanying them are the scary, elemental “sound sculptures” assembled by Japanese avant-garde composer Stomu Yamashta: explosions of percussion, flute, crazy echo, possessed voices in high cry.

Briiiiiiiinngggg!

The phone! There is a world beyond these walls. Or is there? Catherine leaves the cottage’s dark, stone-built lower floor and goes upstairs where the decor is incongruously white, smooth, modernistic. The ringing continues. She goes to a black telephone on a low table, sits on the floor -- and picks up a book near the phone. Leafs through it as if searching for something. Is she deaf?

The ringing ceases -- and almost instantly begins again. This time, Catherine snaps to and answers.

Which is the real ring, which the fantasy? Is it live, or is it Memorex? Where does objective reality end and Catherine’s fantasy life begin? This uncertainty is the movie’s motor and motive. Its game, its “ploy,” as Kael had it, its fun and its fright. An old game; you can vaguely recall each of the movie's moves as it comes into shape. You've seen Don't Look Now (1973); you may even have seen the Kathleen Turner vehicle Julia and Julia (1988). Other movies too play these same games, all feeding on each other as neighbors in a subgenre will tend to do. But damned if the game isn’t still fun to play; damned if those moves don’t creep as quietly on your blind side as if you’d never fallen prey to them before.

The caller is Joan, some obnoxious friend of Catherine’s from town, too much money and liquor in her voice, kvetching because the cat just scratched her boob. Suddenly, mid-kvetch, a new voice -- lower, cooler, no booze or humor in it -- intrudes.

Hello? it says.

Joan? Is that you?

No. Who did you want?

I was talking to Joan.

Is that you, Catherine?

Yes? Who’s speaking, please?

Don’t you know?

Catherine terminates the call. A moment later, the phone rings again. This time she answers the phone in the bathroom, a white phone. The same woman. Her voice grows more familiar as she taunts Catherine about the absent Hugh.

Do you know where your husband is tonight?

Who’s speaking, please?

Laughter.

There is a third phone call. The first voice is Hugh’s, and it coos at Catherine in patronizing tones. (Economical sketch of a smug prick.) Again, the strange woman breaks in -- again, laughing. As if she were going slightly mad with laughing. She maintains her taunt, to the point of telling Catherine the name and number of the hotel where she claims Hugh is sheeted down with a mistress.

By now you’ve counted at least four phones in the house, upstairs and down. The heckling voice has run Catherine round to each of them.

Against herself, Catherine phones the hotel room. Dials nervously in the darkened living room and waits. Busy.

She has barely replaced the receiver before it rings again and again the woman is laughing, baiting Catherine for her credulity, her ignorance. Catherine listens briefly, puts down the phone, and wanders off. The voice continues in the dark.

From there, Images evolves and unfolds, puzzling and unpuzzling itself. Hugh shows up and proves himself a fastidious twit, occasionally human but otherwise long on shows of male bluff and action while more convincingly incarnating the fussy sleekness of a well-kept mink. He trades off with her two lovers -- René, an ironic Frenchman, and Marcel, a painter and sexual brute -- and the three men circle Catherine in an unending roundelay, taunting, fucking, evading, morphing identities in her mind. (Hugh steps behind a wall and emerges through a door as René. Catherine smashes lips with Marcel and screams when it is Hugh's face she sees.)

Catherine realizes at a certain point what she must do: free herself from each of these ghosts. She sets about doing this, and the film spirals up into its heroine’s real madness. Beyond that lies more madness, the last madness, and an ultimate enigma you will find either comprehensible and satisfying or as thudding, leaden, and wince-making as a boulder on your instep.

Images is a prize entry in that genre of expression that runs, conceivably, across all art forms: what I think of as the ghost story without ghosts. One day I'll write about this genre at length, but the point of the moment is to say something that, to my knowledge, has not been said but which Images makes obvious: Robert Altman, with his preternatural sense of the roaming camera, his layered soundtracks, his gift for the mystic ordinary, is one of the all-time great directors of ghost stories.

Look into his golden age: 1969-1977. Start with That Cold Day in the Park, a claustrophobic little creepshow starring Sandy Dennis, and an important precursor to Images in particular. It’s the Altman style a-borning -- no fantasist’s haze covering the imagery, but with long passages of near-silence and a concern with the psychosexual frustrations of a plain woman. M*A*S*H (1970), the popular hit that made Altman’s name, is outrageously sexist and boldly fascist in its admiration of an empty-headed, empty-hearted cool. But turn off the sound and look at the imagery: all strange faces and indistinct bodies caught on the fly, interactions overhead and flowing past, images of cold, muddy reality destabilized by distance and gloomy lighting. The flames over the face of the straitjacketed Burns as he’s driven into oblivion: people are swallowed up in this world -- they simply vanish. All is transient, flesh is weak, and faces are lost in the mist. As something to listen to and think about, M*A*S*H is an abomination; as a thing to watch and feel through the eyes, it is amazing, mysterious.

Look at McCabe and Mrs. Miller: its landscape moving from rain to snow, long autumn to endless winter. Look at its many dead, who in the very moments before they died were more alive than we are now. See if that film -- still Altman’s masterpiece, one of the greatest movies we have -- doesn’t qualify as a ghost story at least as much as it qualifies as a Western, or as a love story, or as anything else.

Look at The Long Goodbye and see how it grips all the necessities of earthy humor, L.A. satire, and revenge scenario while seeming to blow its characters gently about like dream figures in a night breeze, Marlowe the only character not dressed in brights or pastels or prints or hip rags, and yet the only one who is so utterly out of his time that he must walk out of the world at the end -- back into the noir past whose symbols obsess him, or perhaps into a future that has some place for him.

Look at the very last images of Thieves Like Us, in which a morose clutch of humans climbing a stairway in some small-town pit of Depression America slow into the slowest and most unnatural, most inhuman movement, and then vanish. Look even at California Split, specifically its regard of Charlie, the Elliot Gould character. Charlie is Philip Marlowe several steps further into the beyond, more hustle than human, no blood in his veins, only gambler’s juice. George Segal, sane man, chooses to step back into life, but Charlie lacks that option. He is less man than spirit -- a vibrant, life-giving spirit.

Okay, forget Nashville in this discussion. Good movie, but it has no ghosts and is weaker for that. Move on to the impeccably created, dramatically stagnant, still fascinating Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson: ghosts walk in and out of the action, until the end when Paul Newman’s Bill delivers a soliloquy to the immobile spirit of Sitting Bull. Ghosts aplenty in this weird American pageant that spends two hours laboring through mud and midday fog, but Altman sees them too easily -- points them out, gawking like a tourist who has paid $10 to tour a famous haunted house and is by God going to see him some spooks.

And finally 3 Women, which succeeds, for some perverse reason, in being as ethereal as heat waves and as prosaically surfaced as formica. The story of three women who are ghosts already or are turning into them. A subject for further study, as is the theatrical trilogy of 1982-84: Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, Streamers, and Secret Honor, each its own unique kind of ghost story.

But none of those movies -- with the intermittent exception of That Cold Day -- is really creepy, let alone scary. Their ghostliness is of a different kind, the kind that inhabits another dimension of reality (somewhere between the life we know and the death we imagine), but is comfortable being there. Images is unique in Altman's work because it both feels and fears ghostliness. Catherine’s ghosts wait behind doors and drift in the air. (Literally. There is a tinkling of wind chimes whenever weirdness is afoot.) She looks up and there they are, as near as the doorway or as far as the horizon.

Catherine jousts with the ghosts, beds down with them, teases and is teased by them. (She tells René he can’t be real, because he died in a plane crash three years ago. “Oh!” he exclaims, with a droll spread of the arms, “I am a ghost.” Later she throws a heavy trinket at his head, laughing as he hits the floor: “My, my. So the ghost bleeds.”) There is one other ghost, a girl named Susannah, who it is suggested may incarnate a younger version of Catherine herself: this is the heroine's natural ally, her only friend, the only one about who doesn't mean her some kind of harm.

The film’s movement is toward Catherine joining with her ghosts, becoming more engaged in the ghost world than the real world -- wherever that might be. Catherine has a habit of gazing through windows or peering across waterfalls and seeing herself staring back. Standing on a hill, she spots herself entering the house on the lakeshore below; down on the lakeshore, entering the house, she sees herself up on the hill, far away, a tiny silhouette against endless sky. (This shot of women staring at each other over distance, sharing a spectral recognition, recalls similar images in Jack Clayton’s 1961 The Innocents, adapted from Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw -- another study of female hysteria manifesting spooks right and left.)

Altman has the spiritual collusion of an amazing set of collaborators; how lucky he was, and we are, that he found a crew of artists who could see the same ghosts. Vilmos Zsigmond photographs landscapes that are like fantasy scenes inside crystal balls: nestled glens and thickening skies, stunning shots from hilltop of long thin clouds moving slowly over a verdant patch of God’s country. John Williams writes an effectively strident score, blending seamlessly with the nightmarish sound sculptures. Leon Erickson’s production design incorporates the rough and the delicate into an absolute aesthetic whole. There is the usual eccentric Altman sound mix, courtesy of Rodney Holland and others, mingling noises so low they hardly register (apparently sourceless moans, whispers, tinglings, rustlings) with others, natural and artificial, that rip gashes in the silence. And not to mention the editing of Graeme Clifford, so jagged and spot-on and mirror sharp that Nicolas Roeg instantly tagged him as the man to cut Don’t Look Now into life. (Suggesting the influence an editor can have on the films of two very different directors.)

Images feels a lot like Don’t Look Now, which I’d nominate as our greatest movie about ghosts. It has that elegance, its objects and surfaces are alive with the same malign potential. Both are about characters who believe they can outmaneuver their ghosts, that the empirical will subdue the fantastic, that spooks disappear if mocked or ignored. In both cases, they’re wrong.

Pauline Kael hated both films, and for pretty much the same reasons. She wrote that Images had a style “different from anything of Altman’s I’ve seen before” -- and didn’t mean that as a compliment. She meant that it was “an empty, trashy chic film.” Certainly there are turns to this game that yield nothing but obscurity. (What does Hugh's camera have to do with everything? What does it see that we don’t?) Kael thought the film was “concerned not with why [Catherine] is going mad but with the coquetry of madness . . .” Well, yes, it is fancy. It is stylish. And yes it is a game. But games have their place. Games can get in the way, and games can be fun, intriguing, absorbing. Games can be particularly intense ways of passing time, not to mention reconnecting in adulthood with those sensations that could transport you as a child.

Even Pauline lauded “the creepy use of the telephone in the early scenes.”

The phone.

Graeme Clifford-like cut to now:

So I was just leaving the bedroom and walking towards the living room phone when the call came. Anyone would have thought I was heading out to answer it. But in fact I was on my way to the bookcase next to the phone -- and as the noisy but impotent instrument blared and rattled for my attention, I searched the shelves with perfect blandness, as if cocooned in silence.

Thinking all the while, Ha. Take that, phone. You don’t scare me.

But I was weak. Our answering machine, you see, is so decrepit that one must bend over and place one’s ear virtually to its speaker grille to hear messages as they are recorded or replayed. And so, the requisite number of rings having rung, I bent over to hear what message, if any, would be left. All I heard was a dry stretch of line static as the inquiring party, whomever they were, considered the pros and cons of leaving recorded evidence behind. Then click. Graveyard quiet.

That bothered me. It always bothers me, just a little.

Images was right: ghosts don’t necessarily disappear if mocked or ignored.

And in my world, the phone always has the last laugh.

In this case, the laugh was mirthless, cold.

Because it wasn’t me that was cocooned in silence as the little scene ended.

It was the phone.

The Continuing Adventures of Passage Man in Nether Nether Land

2006-10-18T18:22:00.000-07:00

You may remember the name. Or the squeak of his heel as he rounds another corner, trenchcoat aflap. I've written of him before, here in our dark patch of webbing at the fringe of the net -- but only because we at "The Face" know our readership is sufficiently small and discerning to pose no threat to the secrecy upon which his life depends.

I call him -- for my amusement, for his sins -- The Passage Man. But his real name (as real as these things can be supposed in this shadow world) is Fred Spark.

You may remember the name.

Fred is like the sky. That majestic, that stormy. It is no overstatement to say that Fred's influence on our culture is as pervasive as sky, and just as intangible. Just as invisible. One clutches, holds, and knows Fred Spark as easily as one captures sky in a bag. The sky is not there to be captured in a bag but to do its business and its business is to overhang all human affairs great and small, intervening tragically or benignly at its whim.

Your life depends on Fred Spark, and you don't even know it.

Well, Fred has come back. Not all the way, but as far as he ever might. He has reappeared in the passage between his netherworld and our strobe-lit overland with something called The New-York Ghost. The New-York Ghost is a new publication that is burning up the haunt-lines and inspiring dissection of the hottest variety. Yes, Fred has come back, and though the comeback be halfway, the effect has been seismic.

Fred's idea, cherished long before present technology was ever conceived by the visionaries of our chip-emitting laboratories, was simple and inspired. Subscribers are sent a weekly e-mail with a .pdf attachment. They download the .pdf, print it out, and there in their hands are four pages of undiluted, unedited communication from the The Passage Man himself -- notes from underground, rodent squeals on damp mortar, dank and crepuscular music of the passage -- all the qualities of his lifelong subterranean commute through the conspiratorial sewer system that determines our world, and whose first dimensions were determined by no man or woman so keenly as Fred Spark himself.

The New-York Ghost is comment and curse, dream and document, farce and phantasma, the beautiful of a beautiful mind and the damned of our damned Gotham. It is a depressed gargoyle and a tempestuous drummer. It is the show that never ends in Plato's Cave, the ink forming human sentences upon the pulp of pines of centuries too few to count. It is the concrete and the cosmos. It is how to lounge with life, how to dance with death. It is all. It is all.

And now it is yours. Do not forego this chance, nor take lightly its implication. Small, discerning: that is the "Face" readership. We are a small band but brave; not an elite, but a unique. I pass on Fred Spark's web address, through which a The New-York Ghost subscription may be acquired, because we deserve this knowledge.

We not only deserve it -- we know what to do with it.

"Mommy, he scared me"

* * *

Halloween nears. Air chills, branches go skeletal, ghosts yawn and mutter after their long summer slumber. Enter the bleak months when the world passes back to the inexplicable shiver and the terror by night, even the sun races at day's end to be home before dark. As evocation and encouragement to the unseen entities of our season, I offer this poem found in the street. (The circumstances of its discovery were vaguely suspicious: I turned a corner in a Greenwich Village mews and there it was, fluttering in the center of the sidewalk, as if beckoning me, waiting for me. Its crumpling, quite frankly, appeared contrived. It could be that I was meant to find it.)

WHAT WAS THAT I SAW?

What was that I saw
through the leaves outside the window?
What was that I heard
creeping low about the room?

What was that which drove me
muttering from the bed?

What was that I saw
as it slipped beneath the dresser?
What was that I heard
as it scratched against the brick?

What was that I felt
as it felt beneath my ankle?

What was that I heard
as it stumbled in the bedroom?
What was that I failed to catch
as it whispered on the stairs?

What was that the cat stared at
as it waited in the doorway?

What was it that I conjured up
from the darkness all around me?
What was the thing I dreamt to see
in the moonlight on the pane?

[The note read:
What was (illegible)]

What was that I didn’t see
when I couldn’t look behind me?
What was that I didn’t feel
when I didn’t light the fire?
What was that I couldn’t hear
when I held my breath for an hour?

Every silence of the sky and sea
humming silently in choir.

It had been a year

2006-09-25T11:41:00.000-07:00

It had been a year, and there were different ways of looking at a year.

X would say one was now merely a year closer to death: 365 days harder, more set and selfish. As life is a continual process of narrowing down and tightening inward to that day when time freezes and the human statue cracks, a year is only a unit of decay toward an end to be welcomed.

Y might counter that, no, one was in fact a year further into life, and so that much closer to life’s real substance: the “sweet spot” of existence wherein we know ourselves with sufficient gravity, insight, and forgiveness to be useful, generous, and lovable to those nearby.

Z held to the last position. This was both the safest and the scariest position. It held that a year, like a moment, was the greatest and most tragic gift. That the staving off of death is the process of life. That were the true end and nature of time revealed before its rightful moment, the most rational among us would quiver and dissolve, the strongest would surrender the battle, believer and skeptic alike would wail as abandoned children. Then we would know every answer, and yearn for our ignorance. A year was a gift of time -- time to create, contribute, be alive, revel in the avoidance of a finality past imagining, the luxury of seeking the truth without knowing it.

And Z feared, as ever, that he had wasted much of the year, squandered much of the gift.

Pages from an Imaginary Album, Vol. 1

2006-09-23T17:49:00.000-07:00

The "Exorcist" staircase
Georgetown, July 2000

St. Louis Cemetery #2
New Orleans, January 2005

Brooklyn
September 11, 2006

Freaky Friday

2006-07-29T02:47:00.000-07:00

It was an ordinary Friday evening. It began innocently enough.

My wife was out in the kitchen, making her dinner. I was reading a magazine story in the bedroom.

End of the week. Relaxing. Nice.

Little did we know what the next few hours had in store for us.

The story, in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, was about the recent influx into America of quiet, slow-moving ghost movies from East Asia. The story itself wasn’t scary, merely informational and comprehensive in the manner of trend pieces written well after the trend has been recognized and popularized by millions the world over. But it reminded me of the Japanese spooks I’ve been watching more of lately, delving into this phenomenon known as “J-horror” (though some of its signal directors hail from China or Thailand). Some of the movies have been better than others, but the genre’s fundamental tropes remain intriguing to me: it appears in these early investigative stages that Asian horror and I are on roughly the same wavelength.

But last things first.

We were watching, along about 10:30 EST, a show on the Travel Channel called “Most Haunted.” It comes from the UK, and we’ve seen it several times before. Frankly it’s on the ripe side -- ripe as cheese is ripe. It doesn’t pretend to great scientific rigor, or even a convincing skepticism. Rather, it situates its crew of regulars (host, psychic, historian, camera crew, a few assistants) in an ancient castle or baronial mansion somewhere in the sceptered isle and leads the viewer on a touristy circuit of well-dusted rooms and velvet-roped-off antiquities. Each place has its ghost story, some legend pert and polished from years of being told, embellished, and retold by frustrated actors wearing beefeater costumes or Victorian bustles. Bluntly put, “Most Haunted” is for the tourists, and not for anyone who is interested in catching sight of something unaccountable. (You need “Ghost Hunters” on Sci-Fi for that.)

In the UK, “most haunted” must be synonymous with “least active.” Nothing happens on this show. Nothing, anyway, that can’t be explained by nature or human presence. A floorboard creaks. Yes. That happens, even in non-haunted domiciles. There’s a tap at the window. That also happens. Shadows. A flashlight fails. The rest is merely whooshing shock music, psychic Derek Acorah’s vaudeville trances, the occasional thrashing camera move, and some very overactive imaginations.

The main attraction of “Most Haunted,” at least for jaded postmodern hipsters like us, is not the ghost but the host. The host is Yvette Fielding, and Yvette Fielding is a woman on the edge. Either she is overacting strenuously -- admittedly a possibility, given her publicized background as a sitcom star and hostess of such BBC-TV faves as “What’s Up Doc?” and “Karaoke Challenge” -- or she is desperately neurotic. Never, in life or on the tube, have I seen anyone so susceptible to the influence of spooky stories or a dark room. Literally true: the instant the lights are switched off and the pea-green night-vision video comes on, Yvette turns into a quivering mass of inconsolable fear. Whether sitting in a chair waiting for a ghostly squeak or tiptoeing through a haunted boiler room, she spends every instant on the verge of explosive hysterics. If the cameraman moves, she gasps. (“Oh my God -- tell me it was you that just moved.”) If she bumps into a wall, she screams. (“Oh my God -- tell me that was the wall I just bumped into.”) If she hears a sound, she has a seizure. (“Oh my God -- tell me that was you that just belched.”)

Yvette had such a bad time in tonight’s location (a spirit-ridden brewery) that she abandoned her post, vowing tearfully that she wouldn’t enter that basement again. (Not essential anyway, since most of the show had been shot by that point.) We were beginning to wonder, watching Yvette’s lip quiver and her eyes melt like a puppy’s as it enters the euthanasia room, whether it was strictly ethical for the show’s producers to continue to place this unstable woman in such psychologically traumatic situations. But later I checked the website and found that “Most Haunted” is produced by the company Yvette founded with her husband.

She’s crazy, all right. Crazy like an executive producer.

Most of us have an inner heckler, and Yvette brought out ours tonight. But in some measure we may have been trying to laugh off our own, quite recent meetings with the unaccountable.

My wife had just told me about an eerie experience she’d had last Tuesday, while working at home. She was alone but for our cat. The apartment, she said, was silent: no stereo, radio, television, or other conduit of sound was active. The windows were closed against the heat wave that's been wilting our fair metropolis for more than a week now. So she was at her desk, absorbed by work, when she heard, she said, the sound of a human voice coming from the direction of the kitchen.

This apartment is a decent size by the New Yorker’s standards, but tiny by anyone else’s. Meaning that the kitchen is maybe 20 feet away from where our desks are. That’s close enough to remove much of the ambiguity around any perceived sound. Close enough, in other words, so that you know the sound didn’t seep through a brick wall, or several layers of floorboard and insulation.

My wife noted the sound and reflexively looked back toward the kitchen. Nothing there. She was vaguely unnerved. But soon enough she was back into her work.

It happened again.

This time she stopped and looked hard at the kitchen. I can picture my wife in my mind, staring over her shoulder. Waiting to hear the voice again. The same way I would. Or you, or anyone would. The way we all probably have, those times we’ve heard voices where no voices ought to have been heard.

Her gaze must have been withering in its focus, enough to deter even an envoy from beyond. The voice didn’t come again.

I quizzed her. What did the voice sound like? A man’s voice, I guess. What was it saying? You couldn’t make it out. How long did it talk -- was it a long sentence with several words like this one? Or short like this? More like the first one. An actual sentence.

I was a little creeped out, my wife said. She’s a psychologist by training and profession. A scientist by nature, a rationalist by lineage. She isn’t creeped out that easily.

So that was another tile in our freaky Friday mosaic. Asian horror film article; voice in the kitchen; “Most Haunted” gimcrackery.

But the weirdest part of the evening came in between the first and the second.

I went to the kitchen to make a snack, leaving my wife in the bedroom, watching “The Soup” on the E! Channel (more jaded postmodern hipsterism for us). The cat came out behind me, wanting, as usual, to be fed first. I rushed around testily, wanting to get back into “The Soup” before the commercial break ended.

Quite suddenly, there came the sound of a music box from several feet away. No music box had played in our living room for years, if indeed ever. It was startling. Very crisp and loud for a music box, as if it were not only fresh from the craftsman’s workshop, but large enough to chime and vibrate like the tiniest of carillons.

My first thought was, do I recognize that song? Had the tiny wind-up mechanism that plays “Imagine" -- given me as a gift by my wife years ago -- somehow migrated from the back room to the living room? No, that wasn’t it: I’d never heard this song before.

My second thought, Asian ghost movies in my mind, was: this is like a scene in a scary movie. Music box music from nowhere. Twilight tinklings from the other side. Followed by -- what?

I tried to determine the source. Perched at the end of our fireplace mantle was, and is now, a small tin toy that my mother had sent me some time back: a fairground carousel. Could it be that? But it seemed that was merely a spinning toy; I certainly didn’t remember it having a music box built in. But that had to be it. My wife must have wound it, or cranked it, or whatever, some time earlier, and now it was playing in a sort of delayed response. A half-baked explanation at best, but sometimes the truth is half-baked: dull, doughy, unsatisfying, unexciting.

The music box, or carousel toy or whatever it was, completed its tune. I finished constructing my snack and hurried back to “The Soup.” My wife was laughing wildly at something and I was frantic to see what.

After the show, I went back to the living room and examined the tin carousel. Indeed, there was no music box component to it, merely a lever one pulled back and released, whereupon the carousel would spin rapidly, sending its riders flying out at near-perpendicularity to the centrifugal center. Ah! -- but nestled behind the carousel was something that had been there for years, long enough for its presence to have gone unremembered at first: a black wooden box, painted Japanese-style with brightly colored birds and drooping willows, containing inner compartments for the storage of jewelry. It was my wife’s, inherited from her mother, and long unused except as incidental decoration to the fireplace.

I opened wide the maw of the box. There, sure enough, in its bottom corner beneath a lift-out container, was something that looked like a stippled steel roll -- as in a music box. And on the underside of the larger box was a small handle for turning -- as with a music box. All came clear to me: my wife had, for some reason, earlier opened this jewelry box for the first time in years. She’d cranked the steel roll. Maybe it had played for her, maybe it hadn’t. But evidently it had come to unexpected life some time later, during my snack preparation. And that was the source of the music I’d heard.

Still not quite fully baked, this revised explanation, but nearer to fullness than before.

I cranked the handle and took the box to the bedroom to present to my wife. As a peculiarly rusty, dispirited tune clanged forth, I told her what had happened earlier: the sudden springing into play of an unidentifiable music box tune. It must have been this! I said; I’d forgotten all about this. It is a music box, after all, and it was in the exact area I heard the music coming from.

Her eyebrows went up, then down. She assured me she hadn’t touched the box in years, and in any case hadn’t felt compelled to twist its musical crank since childhood. How did it simply begin playing by itself? Out of nowhere, utterly crankless? I assured her in turn that I had heard a music box and that it had to have been this one -- even though I now realized what a thick coat of dust the box bore, indicating its long neglect by human hands, and was troubled by the utter dissimilarity of its damp and joyless donging to the clear, ringing tones I’d been startled by earlier.

No. This had to be the source of that mysterious music. Didn’t it?

The box thudded dustily in my hand.

My wife and I stared at each other. She said it was really, really weird. I said something to the effect that maybe her mother -- a physicist and the single most intractably rational person I’ve ever met -- could explain the whole thing sensibly, with perfect scientific satisfaction to all.

Then my wife told me for the first time about the voice she believed she’d heard in the kitchen a few days ago. I remembered those Asian ghosts, blurry and blinking on staircases and at the ends of hallways, here this instant, gone the next. And before long we were laughing at Yvette Fielding’s quivering lip and credulous openness to every hypothetical spook in the universe.

It seems the obvious answer to the music box conundrum: the box did, somehow, begin playing by itself, by some natural or preternatural incidence of spontaneous energy, and I just happened to be there to hear the result.

Hmm. Wish I could buy that. But I remain -- to invert the standard disclaimer -- skeptical of the rational.

Just another freaky Friday.

Human Sacrifice in Mayfair

2006-07-03T15:22:00.000-07:00

Funny, the fakeries a literary artisan can work on even an experienced reader. Michael Arlen has just done it to me. His Hell! Said the Duchess: A Bedtime Story -- remarkable title -- is in most ways a routine work of its time (1934), place (green fields of the popular English novel), and genre (the fanciful crime-and-detection narrative). It may even deserve its obscurity. But it's remarkable for being, for most of its length, a piece of well-stitched frippery, smooth to the touch and dozy on the brain, which turns, when least expected, into something more louche and lascivious, something that more than hints at extreme depravity.

Michael Arlen is an interesting writer ripe for rediscovery. I came across him recently while reading Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night, in which he was name-checked as an avatar of the 1920s and the Jazz Age mentality -- as if Fitzgerald himself hadn't been acclaimed as avatar above all. I knew Arlen's son was Michael J. Arlen, once a brilliant television critic for The New Yorker, as well as author of Passage to Ararat, a memoir on his reclamation of Armenian roots. He'd also written a memoir of his father, Exiles, and it had told the story of an Armenian who moved to England as a young man and was so taken with the country, its culture and manners, that he Anglicized himself in every conceivable way, from language to name to tastes. The only thing he didn't take on, apparently, was English snobbery: the certainty that class determines destiny.

Arlen's great success, The Green Hat (1924), was something of an English equivalent to The Great Gatsby (despite being published a year earlier) in summing up its flappers-and-philosophers moment, even as that moment was playing out. Numerous short stories and a successful West End production of The Green Hat starring Tallulah Bankhead cemented Arlen's notoriety as a generational observer. His foreignness was an open secret and nothing Arlen hid away; yet he came, much like T.S. Eliot or V.S. Naipaul, to be adopted as a more or less honorary Englishman. Unfortunately his career dwindled in a run of pop novels, failed plays, and minor essayistic work; finally a devouring case of writer's block prevented him from producing a word for several years before his death in 1956.

Anyway: Hell! Said the Duchess. Young men are turning up dead in London, their bodies naked and debauched, their throats deeply slashed. Evidence points to a female culprit (soon dubbed "Jane the Ripper"), and the likeliest, albeit least expected suspect is the virtuous Mary Dove, Duchess of Dove and Oldham, young society widow. Those on all sides of Mary -- fair-weather friends, opportunistic politicos, flummoxed CID men -- wonder how this model of respectable upper-class English womanhood could be the perpetrator of such ghastly crimes; when she is spied leaving her Grosvenor Square townhouse late at night for parts and deeds unknown, they begin to wonder how it could not be her.

The novel chugs, motors, tootles along. Margins and typeface are quite large. Pages fly past. It's all very funny and just barely diverting from the cares of the day: that's all popular fiction has to be. The fleet and modest narrative is clued in to the class life of Mayfair, and full of those tasty rhetorical turns once minted by Wilde and Chesterton, observations of duplicitous humanity which are both undeniably brilliant and a mark of the minor sensibility, no matter their truth.

Then there is a quite extraordinary scene. I give nothing away to say that it involves two detectives knocking on the door of a shady foreign man; that his tart phrasing of plain truths disarms the dicks; and that he is seen to be wearing, for some reason, a salmon-colored, shoulder-strapped lady's swimming garment.

Hmm, is the thought, now there's a wrinkle. Soon the climax winds into view and the wrinkle becomes a crevice. The novel turns irrevocably from being a piddling, polite procession of manners into something hell-fired. The man who has become our hero is plunged into a nightmarish little scene whose possibilities could not have been presaged but whose logic makes good enough sense, in addition to being surprising, frightening. The wrought-iron gates of Grosvenor Square are burned red and twisted into the gates of hell, and beyond those gates lies an ending with some small and troubling ingredient of tragedy. The last paragraph is terse, free of pity.

What has Arlen been up to all this time? Quite certainly, more than you imagined he was at the start. But has it been a joke? Or merely the set-up for a joke that never came? Is this the punchline? Why am I not laughing?

I may not be haunted long by this silly tale with its preposterous denouement. But I'm haunted today. And today has several hours left in it.

The Grenadier Pub, Wilton Row, Belgravia, London, June 29, 2006
"Cedric"

I don't believe in seances, I just believe in me

2006-04-09T02:44:00.000-07:00

"I'm not afraid of death because I don't believe in it," he said a long time ago. "It's just getting out of one car and getting into another."

He might want to switch cars again when he sees what people are up to back here.

Don't Answer the Phone (Pt. 2)

2006-04-02T00:42:00.000-08:00

Somewhere in New England, there was a house. In the house lived a woman named Helen: thirties, divorced, an antiques dealer. The house normally bustled with the comings and goings of her friends and relatives, even her ex-husband. This night, a night not long before Halloween, it was empty but for Helen.

The lights were out downstairs. The telephone rang.

She frowned at the school things piled on the stairs and picked up the receiver of the telephone, which was sitting on a meticulously refinished Sheraton table at the entrance to the living room.

"Auntie Helen?"

She was looking through the glass to the right of the door, looking beyond the porch at the yard, where Randle had left his shovel leaning against the sign that read "HELEN CONNELLY - ANTIQUES," and at first she wasn't certain just what she'd heard.

"Yes . . . hello? Is that you, Rosalind?"

"Auntie Helen . . ." She frowned; not a girl's voice. "Auntie Helen, I missed the school bus. Will you come get me?"

Wrong number, she thought. "Who is this?"

"It's Michael, Auntie Helen."

"What?"

"It's Michael."

Helen said nothing at all.

"Are you coming?"

"Just . . . a minute. Now, who is this?" But the connection was broken before she finished.

Michael, it transpires, is Helen's nephew, the son of her deceased sister. Or, rather, he was: Michael has been dead for 16 years. And now he's on the phone. Calling Helen "Auntie," just like he used to. The voice is . . . the same? Helen's not certain. But she's scared.

If you require more than that to be unnerved, you're in the wrong place.

When Michael Calls originated in the fertile cerebrum of cult novelist John Farris. Published in 1967, it is a lean chiller-thriller, all narrative, no art in the prose -- save for the unique and underrated art of telling a no-nonsense story about intelligent adults suddenly caught in otherworldly circumstances. A few years on it was made into a TV-movie, directed by Philip Leacock (British-born veteran of episodic US television, and brother of visionary documentarian Richard Leacock), scripted by James Bridges (soon to be writer and/or director of such trendy Hollywood fare as The Paper Chase, The China Syndrome, and Urban Cowboy), and starring Elizabeth Ashley, Ben Gazzara, and Michael Douglas. It aired as an "ABC Movie of the Week" on February 5, 1972, and it was in this form that I first made the acquaintance of Michael's haunting voice, and first learned to be afraid of the phone.

I'm fairly certain I didn't see the movie on that first showing (I'd have been all of five and a half), but I must have encountered a rerun not too long after. For me its memory is inextricable with the house we lived in in the early '70s, the bed I slept in, what seemed like the teeming darkness of the room I inhabited. Nothing is clear to me anymore about these things but their feel: the context of childhood may be a panoramic blur, but the memories within it are precise, engraved. The tone of Michael's voice, along with a few other details, runs in my mind even this moment with the unvarying accuracy of an archival recording, while the film as a whole, which I last saw perhaps a good decade ago, devolves into a generality.

Therefore, speaking generally: in its early stages, When Michael Calls (also now marketed under the inane title Shattered Silence) offers the same pleasures as the novel -- dialogue you can actually imagine people speaking, plausible interactions between mindful grownups, an ongoing attempt, combining the frightened and the common-sensical, to figure out what could rationally explain something that cannot be happening. Additionally there is the kind of windswept New England atmosphere, pure autumn, that could pimple the flesh of the most rational goose. The cast may be overqualified for such a modest project (the film, sans commercial breaks, is barely more than an hour long), but Ashley, Gazzara, and Douglas are all first-rate, never once smirking at the story that engages them, never falling back on private memories of Broadway success or cushy Hollywood adolescence to carry them smugly through a third-rate, check-cashing pop movie.

An adult reviewing of Michael is both revelation renewed (what used to be scary still is) and desire defeated (it's just not that strong on the whole). There is a compulsion in it, finally, to convert a refreshingly naturalistic portrayal into cardboard -- granted, not an abnormal complaint against a TV-movie. And the picture peaks early: richly unnerving for its first part, it's more scantily so in its second. But to the extent the movie has left its peculiar marks on my stunted psyche -- and on several others similarly inclined, to judge by the Internet Movie Database and Amazon message boards, When Michael Calls is more important for the things it does right than the others it does less right.

A word about John Farris. I knew scarcely anything about him before researching this, but he turns out to be an interesting character. He began as something of a prodigy, writing the bestseller Harrison High -- a sort of adolescent Peyton Place -- when just out of high school himself. It was followed by several sequels. Before and after Michael, Farris produced numerous thrillers and straight dramatic novels under both his own name and the pseudonym "Steve Brackeen." In the '70s he wrote and directed a cult slasher movie, Dear Dead Delilah, starring Agnes Moorehead and Will Geer, and published The Fury, basis for the 1978 Brian DePalma movie (for which Farris wrote the screenplay). There have been several other novels since, but All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By (1977) is evidently held in special esteem by aficionados. Though he still publishes, the author himself seems somewhat reclusive, even curmudgeonly when met with attempts to draw him out. But a few of his more devoted fans maintain a most interesting website devoted to his work, with interviews, photos, and well-written essays on the Farris ouevre.

But back to Michael. Back to the phone, and the lost spirit at the other end of it. I've written in previous posts, here and there, about the power of a ringing phone to fill me with fear. To set my heart racing with a shock out of any rational proportion to the event. Undeniably, the fear is greater when I'm alone; when I'm not expecting a call; when the wind blows branches against the window and the sky outside is edging dark blue into black.

Among others in this dream world I've constructed, I have Michael to thank for that. I was noting the quality of his voice -- or that of the young actor employed to "voice" him in the movie. It's an adrogynous quality, or rather unisex: the voice of a young male adolescent, certainly, but with a middle-aged woman's hysteria pushing it up the throat. The tone is human, but too human. The inconsolable sob is only barely contained -- and then not contained at all. Michael's voice is not merely frightened, but fearful to the point of madness.

Do dead people feel fright? Do they cower, cold, lost, alone? Can a ghost fear its own ghostliness?

Michael's voice is that of the ghost, the demon, who has realized, just this instant, what he is. Such pathos and terror in that voice. Maybe that's why it haunts me. Maybe that's why, even now, when the phone rings in the dark, far past the hour when considerate folk have ceased calling each other, I freeze when picking up the receiver. Why I am half expecting to hear Michael, pleading, panicking, asking me to come for him.

We here at "The Face" proceed on the assumption that our readers may wish to one day experience for themselves the prose, film, and televised works described here. So I'll not reveal or even imply what the solution to the Michael perplex might be. Suffice to say it is worth tracking. And that we're fortunate, those of us with a collection of such childhood shivers -- precise and manageable in proportion, yet timeless and powerful in content -- to revisit for the rest of our lives.

Suffice, finally, to say that the scariest passage in the novel is also the scariest scene in the movie. It's the one I've never forgotten the sound or feel of. As it occurs early in the narrative and gives nothing away, I'll quote the Farris original in full.

About eleven the phone rang again, startling her. She had been absorbed in an expensive, beautifully photographed study of antebellum Louisiana mansions which a friend had loaned to her, and the wind had lulled her into a series of yawns. Helen sat up straight, and a dark bust of a child caught her eye.

"Time for all good little boys to be asleep," she said, looking again at the pendulum clock on the wall opposite her desk to check the time. And she felt a little worried, not because it might be the same boy calling again, but because she was automatically assuming, whenever the telephone rang, that it was him.

After all, he'd had his fun.

Yes, but, she thought, and hurried across the foyer to lift the receiver before Peggy woke up.

She heard someone crying.

You've had your fun, Helen tried to say, but she couldn't; her mouth had dried up.

He was weeping this time, heartbroken, and his sobs shocked her because it wasn't a child playacting; she was certain of that. He was terrified, helpless, alone.

"Auntie Helen--"

"Y-yes--"

"I'm . . . home . . . and there's . . . nobody . . . here."

"Oh, my God," Helen said quickly and harshly, "don't keep this up. Whoever you are, please--"

"There's . . . nobody here. Where's my mother?"

The wind outside, to which she had paid little attention for the last hour, suddenly turned on the house and thumped at the door. Helen fell back against the table, trembling.

"Where's Craig? Where's my brother?"

"Please," Helen whispered. "What are you trying to do?"

He was weeping again. She put the receiver down on the table and ran from it, into the kitchen. But the blackness outside the windows was too forbidding; she couldn't stay there. And it seemed she hadn't escaped him after all; she was still trembling, still vulnerable, and still pathetically frightened for a mature woman who was sure that she knew a great deal about the foibles of children.

Yes, real children. But this one is a sadistic, depressing ogre.

When Helen felt she could breathe normally, she returned to the foyer and picked up the receiver of the telephone. She heard nothing this time except the sighing, the tricky fade and rise of the wind, somewhere.

I'm going to be rid of you, she thought. I'm going to stop you if it takes-- "Hello," she said, and paused. "You wanted to talk to me. That's a good idea. I certainly want to talk to you." Again Helen paused. "I know you're still there, so why don't you say something? How long do you think--"

He screamed then, not in her ear but seemingly from a distance, and Helen cringed.

"Michael!" she said, not meaning to. "Mi--"

"I'm dead, aren't I? I'm dead, I'm dead!"

I'll leave you with that: the voice on the phone. The face at the window.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Zurich, an aging gentleman remembers

2006-03-25T16:36:00.000-08:00

Despite these afternoon misgivings and self-reproaches I clung to my notion, ill defined though it was, that a serious study of any important body of human knowledge, or theory, or belief, if undertaken with a critical but not a cruel mind, would in the end yield some secret, some valuable permanent insight, into the nature of life and the true end of man. . . .

The only thing for me to do was to keep on keeping on, to have faith in my whim, and remember that for me, as for the saints, illumination when it came would probably come from some unexpected source.

-- Robertson Davies, Fifth Business (1970)

Do You Realize We're Floating In Space?

2006-02-16T21:55:00.000-08:00

I am drawn to the unconscious for the reason I assume most people are, which is the belief that something it contains, if recalled and examined, has the power to release you from torment. Or that something lost can be recovered there.

I finished reading this article ten minutes ago.

The deepest subterranean chamber in midtown Manhattan is the size of a small cathedral and lies beneath Central Park. An elevator leads to it.

I was sitting in a rocking chair back in our little extra room, alone, three floors above the silent courtyard between our building and the grade school next door.

No one answered the door at either the second or third house from the corner. As it happens, I know the man who owns the house on the corner. He wasn't home when Stanley and I knocked but a woman who worked for him was. I described the tunnel and she said, "Well, there is something in the basement."

I breathed haltingly as I read, and several times stopped to go over a sentence very, very, very slowly, to understand each detail as it was given.

A man who owns a restaurant in the Village told me that he knew people who had built tunnels to connect buildings they owned. I asked why and he said, "Paranoid."

I felt funny after a while, like I couldn't be certain anymore of where the ground was.

When I shined my light on the door I saw that it was actually a dark shadow filling the doorway of a small chamber, and I got spooked because it looked like the kind of ambiguous doorway I sometimes see in dreams.

I haven't been this creeped out in a long, long time.

"New York Underground: Many Floors Below Your Shoes is a Room with the Lights On" by Alec Wilkinson

Black Dogs on Meon Hill

2006-02-14T20:40:00.000-08:00

At early dusk on St. Valentine's Day, 1945, a body was discovered near the village of Lower Quinton in the county of Warwickshire, England. It was that of 74-year-old Charles Walton, a laborer and handyman. A pitchfork had been thrust through his neck with sufficient force to stand upright while pinning him to the frozen ground. A hedge-cutting implement called a billhook, or trouncing hook, was embedded in Walton's torso, and a symbol resembling a cross carved into his throat. Both hook and pitchfork belonged to Walton: he had been chopping hedges that morning, near the foot of a huge, flat rise called Meon Hill.

This harmless, by all accounts fairly dotty old man is considered to be the last victim of a ritualistic witch-killing in England's long history of ritualistic witch-killings.

I first came upon the Charles Walton case as a youngster, by way of a brief but intriguing account in Strange Stories, Amazing Facts (1976), an absorbing miscellany from the folks at Reader's Digest. "The Pitchfork Murder" explained that Walton had lived alone with his niece in a thatched cottage, favoring homemade cider to public-house ale, and the beasts of the field to human society. "He apparently spent many hours in the fields talking to the wild birds, and he believed that there was an understanding between them." Some felt they knew the identity of the guilty party, "But no evidence could be produced to justify a prosecution. Only tales of Walton's communion with the birds ... and sinister whisperings that he was killed because he was a witch."

The story stayed with me for years. I thought of Walton's pierced and bloody body lying near the hedgerow on that cold, silent stretch of desolate hill, near a tiny village in a hidden part of the world that looked, sounded, and behaved much the same then as it had centuries before. There was something haunting to the anachronism of the crime, the brutality of it, and the fact it had never been solved.

I encountered no further details of the case until reading, years later, the Encyclopedia of Murder, a cultishly famed 1961 compendium of famous and forgotten homicides by Patricia Pitman and Colin Wilson. (Wilson was acclaimed at the time for The Outsider, a social and literary study of existentialism; thereafter, he became known mainly as an authority on murder and murderers.) In laying out "the Lower Quinton murder," Wilson and Pitman write that the Scotland Yard investigator on the case, the once-famous Chief Inspector Robert Fabian, "found [in the village] a reluctance to discuss the crime, although he heard rumours that this was an evil-eye killing." (Note how that witchy term is used so casually — as casually as we'd say "revenge killing" or "crime of passion.") "Some villagers," the authors continue, "referred darkly to bad crops 'despite the good weather,' others mentioned a heifer that was found unaccountably dying in a ditch ..."

Fabian and his assistant, Sergeant Andrew Webb — outsiders snooping into village business among hostile natives — worked in coordination with a local officer, Superintendent Alec Spooner of Warwickshire's Criminal Investigation Division. Through Spooner, Fabian learned that an eerily similar murder had occurred in the neighboring village of Long Compton in 1875: an eighty-year-old woman (identified in other accounts as Ann Turner, or Anne Tennant) had been killed with a pitchfork by a man named John Haywood (or James Heywood), part of whose confession was recorded in the book Warwickshire (1906) by Clive Holland. Haywood evidently promised "that he would kill all the witches in Long Compton, and that there were sixteen of them."

At his trial for murder, during the course of his defence, he said, "If you had known the number of people who lie in our churchyard, who, if it had not been for them [the witches] would have been alive now, you would be surprised. Her [the deceased] was a proper witch."

It came out in evidence that this man for years had honestly believed that when cattle or other animals died, or any evil fortune befell his fellow-villagers, such things were the direct result of the "Evil Eye" of some unfortunate old women he asserted were "proper old witches."

His mode of killing the unfortunate woman he attacked was evidently a survival of the ancient Anglo-Saxon custom of dealing with such persons by means of "stacung," or sticking spikes into them; whilst at the same time wishing that the portion of the body so wounded might mortify or wither away.

(For some reason, the passage on Evil Eye killing was removed from later reprintings of the Holland book, rather as the chapter on the Process Church did not survive the first edition of Ed Sanders' The Family. To read the 1906 edition, find Warwickshire on Google Book, not Internet Archive.)

Once witches were thought to fly in profusion over England, and fear of them nestled securely in the British heart. In his own account of the Walton case, in Fabian of the Yard (1950), Inspector Fabian notes that England's Witchcraft Act of 1735 "is still unrepealed upon the statute books." But apparently the area around Lower Quinton reeks particularly strongly of witchery and its ancient symbols. Near the Hill is a collection of tall, knobby stones arranged in a circle and known as the Rollright stones. "Like mighty Stonehenge," writes Dr. Abner Mality, "the exact origin of the Rollright Stones remains a mystery, but there is no doubt they predate Christianity by many, many generations. The Stones have been the site of occult practices and occurrences for as long as there has been a record." It was said even after World War II that the Stones formed a sabbath circle for local covens.

As well as a gifted detective, Robert Fabian was an inveterate celebrity-hound and self-promoter: a 1950s BBC-TV series was based on his exploits, and he played himself in a couple of movies. His recollections of the Walton murder and other notorious cases is fanciful and at least semi-fictional, but he writes with descriptive color and an affectionate smirk of Lower Quinton, "its thatched roofs golden among the Cotswald hills, [where] they speak of witches with a wry grin and many people will not pass from Bidford down Hillborough-lane for fear of a headless horseman and a ghostly woman in white." Superintendent Spooner — who clearly had seen at once the ritualistic nature of the killing — gave Fabian, along with the Holland book, another one called Folk Lore, Old Customs and Superstitions in Shakespeare-Land by J. Harvey Bloom, a local clergyman.

I happen to have the Bloom book right here. Published in 1930, it's a modestly-worded, often twee but thoroughly interesting work of regional history, peculiar facts, and stories once passed by lamplight. A chapter called "Occult Influences" mentions the murder of Ann Turner in passing, as well as recording such local legends as the ghostly carriage of Hilborough Lane, and the lady in white who was said to haunt Ragley Park. But near the chapter's end is the most arresting paragraph. In its entirety it reads:

At Alveston a plough lad named Charles Walton met a dog on his way home nine times in successive evenings. He told both the shepherd and carter with whom he worked, and was laughed at for his pains. On the ninth encounter a headless lady rustled past him in a silk dress, and on the next day he heard of his sister's death.

Evidently, Walton was marked by fate from an early age. 15 years after Bloom's book was published, and some 60 after the event thus recorded, the "plough lad" lay skewered outside the village where he'd lived all his life — done in, no doubt, by someone who was likewise a lifelong inhabitant of Lower Quinton.

Bloom goes on to recount some facts about Britain's legalized persecution of "witches" over the centuries, and concludes, "It is said that nearly 2000 persons must have perished in England under these various legal enactments. What a ghastly mistake and travesty of religion!" Perhaps most amazing is merely that Charles Walton, growing up under such clouds of doom and foreordination, escaped righteous execution for as long as he did.

Back at the crime scene, Inspector Fabian called in aircraft from a nearby RAF base to take aerial photos of the plains under Meon Hill. Mine-detectors swept the fields in search of Walton's tin watch, which had gone missing; Fabian hoped it would bear telling fingerprints. The good Inspector narrowed the field down to a single juicy suspect: "a swarthy Italian," with suspicious bloodstains on his coat. Despite blood and swarthiness, though, the Italian was soon cleared.

Things got strange toward the end. Spooner informed Fabian of the legend around Walton's boyhood encounter with the black dog. "That afternoon," Fabian writes, "a police car ran over a dog. Next day another heifer died in a ditch. And when Albert Webb and I walked into the village pub that evening silence fell like a physical blow. Cottage doors were shut in our faces, and even the most innocent witnesses seemed unable to meet our eyes. Some became ill after we spoke to them." At last, a final promising interrogatee slammed his door on Fabian, wondering why the police were still curious about the murder, Walton having been "dead and buried" a month already by then.

At which point, Fabian threw up his hands and returned to London, admitting, if not defeat, then certainly helplessness in the face of inbred superstition and tribal hostility. "Maybe somebody in that tranquil village off the main road," he wonders in conclusion, "knows who killed Charles Walton, who lies buried among the neat grey tombstones of Lower Quinton churchyard? Maybe one day somebody will talk? Not to me, a stranger from London, perhaps — but I happen to know that in the offices of Warwickshire Constabulary the case is not yet closed."

By now, it most certainly is: whoever killed the rheumatic, eccentric hermit Charles Walton surely fed the worms himself some time ago. But as with anything that holds your imagination and compels your return over a period of years, there's that gap in the storyline you just can't get over. The lock not secured, the question unanswered. The black dog out of nowhere.

Supposedly, Walton saw a black dog as a boy; and the black dog was thought in the village, as in many locales around the world, to be a ghostly harbinger of death, a curse made flesh, as in Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles. But even in more recent times the image has been so employed: think of the "black dog man" of Dealey Plaza, the canine shape claimed by conspiracy buffs to be hiding behind the stockade fence on the grassy knoll. And think of "Black Eyed Dog," one of the last songs written and recorded by Nick Drake, the gifted British singer-songwriter who killed himself at the age of 26:

A black eyed dog he called at my door
A black eyed dog he called out for more . . .

I'm growing old and I want to go home

Robert Fabian saw the black dog, too, during his time in Lower Quinton.

Once a black dog came running down Meon Hill, and a moment later a farm lad followed. "Looking for that dog, son?" I said.

He went pale. "Dog, mister?"

"A black dog." But without further word he stumbled off in his heavy earth-clogged farm boots.

Was this frightened boy destined to be the next Charles Walton? Was he running away from the curse of the black dog, or running towards it? Was he cursed from that day onward, if only in his own mind, and the minds of the villagers all around him? How old would that boy be now? Coming up on Charles Walton's age, perhaps? Is he even alive today? Or did the Warwickshire witch-killer — the half-wit John Hayward in some later incarnation, actual or spiritual descendent of the person or persons unknown who slashed and speared old Charles Walton — get him too?

As of today, Charles Walton has been dead for 61 years.

Happy Valentine's Day.

The Receiver

2006-02-12T18:39:00.000-08:00

Mai Takano picked up the phone on the fourth ring and said "hello." The only answer was a ghastly scream. A shudder came over the line. Fear itself came through the line from Ryuji's apartment to Mai's. Surprised, Mai held the receiver away from her ear. The moans continued. The first scream had been one of shock, and the subsequent moans held incredulity. She'd received harassing phone calls several times before, but she immediately realized that this was different, and brought the phone back to her ear. The voice ceased. It was followed by dead silence.

-- Koji Suzuki, Ringu (1991; trans. Robert B. Rohmer & Glynne Walley)

Further Entries in the Morbid Archives

2006-02-09T20:49:00.000-08:00

Firstly, an inquiry into regionally notorious "murder houses" and those who choose to live in them.

"Standing in a Shadow" by Paul Duggan and Michael E. Ruane

And secondly, an essay by one of my favorite writers, Luc Sante -- cultural critic, photographic historian, fin-de-siecle tunnel-rat, and Morbid Archivist of the first water -- on the phenomenon of "spirit photographs." This is only the first paragraph, mere morsel of a typically flavorful and satisfying critical-investigative spread. So hie thee to the nearest newsstand for the latest issue of The New York Review of Books.

Luc is a modest and likable guy. Maybe that's why he's so gifted at luring out the ghosts.

"Summoning the Spirits" by Luc Sante

There is No Known Passage

2006-01-31T19:38:00.000-08:00

Among our correspondents here at "The Face" is the semi-legendary Fred Spark. His calling card defines him as a "Morbid Archivist," but he's being modest -- not to mention obscurantist. In addition to his hundreds of private investigations and manuscript procurements for wealthy (and anonymous) clients, he has been an archeologist on the Andes plateau; product tester and resident ethicist for the now-defunct Surveillance Technician's Quarterly; crafter of birchbark canoes in northern Minnesota; surveyor for the United States Department of Agriculture; manager of an Associated Supermarket in Redwood City, California; orderly at a retirement village in Ocala, Florida; industrial arts teacher at a grade school in Midlothian, Texas; "tonal consultant" at the Reuter Pipe Organ Factory in Lawrence, Kansas; groundskeeper on the campus of Yale University (where he is rumored to have taken photos of the inner sanctum of the Skull and Bones society); and all-around imp of the perverse. He is also known -- though not publicly -- as the foremost authority on the life and philosophies of James Jesus Angleton, coordinator during the Cold War years of the CIA's crack counterintelligence unit.

I wish you could meet Fred. Like a Nabokov villain, he appears and reappears at will, in wildly divergent forms yet always vaguely familiar, leaving only a scrawled signature in a Motel 6 register or defaced menu from a rural-route diner as evidence of his passing. Those few of us in his orbit exchange excited stories of our encounters. I have met him only once -- a brief, awkward midnight rendezvous by the enormous black cube at the center of Astor Place in Manhattan. Five years later, I am still working the chill out of my bones.

It's Fred's peculiar gift, not to solve mysteries, but to find them -- and then to pass them on, by way of his many media conduits (witting and unwitting), into the general stream of public knowledge. It's long been rumored that his career began in the US military in World War II, that he was a key player in the so-called "Roswell" cover-up, and that most of what we know or suspect about the strange occurrences near Corona, New Mexico in 1947 is due to his leaks of vital information. Other speculations have placed him at or near the sites of most significant post-war American conspiracy theories. Fred Spark is sufficiently elusive to make even the unlikeliest scenarios virtually plausible; still, one knows enough to be suspicious of any theory that claims to encompass everything.

Fred has a different method of alerting each individual on his list of "friendlies." The method he has assigned me is this:

I find on my cell phone a voice-mail message consisting of a music box playing "The Lincolnshire Poacher," recorded from a short-wave radio "numbers" station -- a government-owned transmitting outlet for encoded espionage messages. (I finally discovered that this unvarying piece was actually Track 6 from Disc 1 of The Conet Project; but I still don't know which government{s} is/are involved, or what the message conveyed might be). I then let Fred know I've received his alert by posting a message to the "comments" section of a heavily-trafficked "Sex and the City" fan site -- a message consisting of exactly eight lines of romantic verse from any prominent 19th century English poet. This posting must be unsigned but for a single letter, that being the third letter of the middle name of the poet in question. Fred then sends his message through encrypted lines left in text-file form at an auxiliary mirror site of one of the smaller, less stable file-hosting services. (He employs a basic encryption schema recognizable to anyone who has read Robert Graysmith's book on the Zodiac murders.)

Fred dispatched me this item earlier today. The mansion in question stands a mere 10 blocks south and three west of where I work every Monday afternoon. Fred may be trying to tell me something. I don't know what it is. But I'll be nosing around.

Good to hear from you, Fred.

Stay safe.

Wherever you are tonight.

Something in the Air

2006-01-29T23:25:00.000-08:00

About 45 minutes ago, my wife tugged on the sleeve of my T-shirt and sniffed it.

"What?" I asked.

"I don't know," she said, "there's a smell somewhere. It's not good."

"Pee?"

"No."

"Vomit?"

"Uh -- no."

"Well, what's it like?"

"A combination of cigarettes, B.O., grease . . . "

We'd just been watching an old "X-Files" episode: one called "Grotesque," from the third season. (I find that it originally aired February 2, 1996, according to Red Wolf's superlative "X-Files" episode guide. That's almost exactly 10 years ago, by an utter coincidence.)

In this installment -- one of the more graphic and disturbing of the series, more akin to Se7en than "The Twilight Zone" -- Mulder is brought in to consult on a case by Agent Patterson, legendary FBI profiler of serial killers. Patterson has just captured his nemesis, a former mental patient responsible for several murders that involved dismemberment, facial mutilation, and ultimately the encasement of severed heads within clay gargoyle masks. The killer admits to committing the murders and acting alone, but insists he was inhabited by an evil force controlling his movements. And now, with the murderer in custody, a copycat is out carrying on his work. The evil spirit, it would seem, has moved on to a new host. Hence Mulder's involvement. He listens to the killer's wild claims, and studies up on the subject of gargoyles.

Patterson is disdainful of Mulder's openness to "alternative" theories of criminal motivation -- but Mulder senses that he and the dour profiler are closer in their thinking than the latter lets on. "Patterson had this saying about tracking a killer," Mulder explains to his partner, Scully. "If you want to know an artist, you have to look at his art. What he really meant was if you wanted to catch a monster you had to become one yourself."

For a while, it looks like Mulder is intent on doing just that. He becomes obsessed with finding and understanding the evil spirit that possessed the killer. Pretty soon he is hunkering down in the killer's lair, studying his dozens of gargoyle sketches, dreaming in his bed, discovering his grisly hidden menagerie of gargoyle heads and their mutilated contents. He wakes in the killer's bed and is attacked and nearly killed by a shadowy assailant, who escapes.

You see the end coming, but it's still disturbing. Patterson the profiler is the one now inhabited by the spirit, the gargoyle, the mutilator and defiler. He's the copycat killer. He's the assailant who attacked Mulder, then let him live -- perhaps precisely so that Mulder could find him out and put an end to the killing. He and Mulder chase and tangle. Patterson is wounded, but will recover. The last we see, he is straining against bars in the darkest dungeon of a D.C. penitentiary, a Medieval hole. He's insane. His eyes are wild, and his cries resound through the hollow corridors: "I didn't do it! Listen to me! It wasn't me! It wasn't me!!"

"We work in the dark," Mulder says in voice-over. "We do what we can to battle with the evil that would otherwise destroy us. But if a man's character is his fate, this fight is not a choice but a calling. Yet sometimes the weight of this burden causes us to falter, breaching the fragile fortress of our mind, allowing the monsters without to turn within and we are left alone, staring into the abyss . . . into the laughing face of madness."

So the episode was at least partly about the mystic surmise that madness is not a disease or chemical imbalance contained in one person, as much post-Enlightenment thought would have it, but a universal trace, something of the body but not limited to it. Like a thick fog that leaves its residue of moisture. Reach your hand into madness, like Patterson or Mulder, and something might very well be clinging there when you pull it out.

"Well, what's it like?" I asked my wife.

"A combination of cigarettes, B.O., grease . . . "

That couldn't be me: I reckoned myself acceptably clean. Besides, I quit smoking more than four years ago.

She sniffed my sleeve again. No, she decided, I wasn't the source.

"It's like mental patients," she said.

"What?"

My wife is a mental-health professional. In the course of the last 15 years she has spent much time in hospitals and halfway houses and back wards, counseling and treating the mentally ill.

"A lot of mental patients smell like that. Cigarettes from smoking constantly, B.O. and grease because a lot of them don't bathe very often."

"Were those mainly schizophrenics?"

"Schizophrenics, manic depressives, some borderlines."

"But no psycho killers, as far as you knew."

"Well, there were a few taken away because they got violent. But no one claiming to be inhabited by a gargoyle." She still looked puzzled; her face remained scrunched at the unpleasant smell -- which I, meanwhile, wasn't sensing at all. But then I've been snarky and coldish all weekend long. (See, there's a rational explanation for everything.)

"It must be coming in through the window," she said. "Maybe someone's frying fish."

"Mm-hmm. Did you notice it before we watched the show?"

"No."

A waft of air came in from the street. I breathed it for some trace of grease, cigarettes, even B.O. Maybe it was there; maybe it wasn't.

My wife shrugged. I shut off the TV and the lights.

"Skeery," I said. That's one of my favorites words: skeery. My wife laughed.

Outrage!

2006-01-22T20:45:00.000-08:00

Memo to fellow liberals: Could your heart use a good bleeding, your hands some brisk wringing?

Check out this item from my native state.

Never have I seen so brazen and insensitive an assault on the rights of dead people and those who believe they see them.

Don't Answer the Phone (Pt. 1)

2006-01-20T01:45:00.000-08:00

Here's the thing:

A deep and abiding terror strikes me whenever the telephone rings.

It may be foolish to admit that. Articulation can lend substance to notions best left vague. But I've already made some preliminary notes toward a definition of phone fear in a previous post, so the cat's out of the bag anyway.

My phone fear goes back a long way, and has had many years to dissipate -- to be eroded by the steady dripping of common sense and general reality. Years of post-adolescence have deadened the terror so that it's more like a sudden dull reflex down in my gut. Yet it remains there, even in these latter days when calls generally come from only a small pool of potential inquirers (a friend, a parent, the receptionist at the animal clinic, a fund-raiser from the alma mater). Phone fear is by no means a debilitating or even serious factor in my day to day life. But I'm glad for the answering machine, which for me is like those heat sensors and motion detectors placed by ghost-hunters in dark rooms to record the passings of ambulatory spooks: blessedly unemotional, it performs a job I'm disinclined to do. The phone rings, the machine catches, and I freeze, ears atingle -- until I'm certain the caller is familiar or otherwise non-threatening, at which point I will either pick up the receiver and talk, or go about my previous business.

We needn't venture far into the causes behind this odd condition. Memories of early telephonic trauma are vague and distant but perfectly plausible: a run of obscene phone calls at an impressionable age, creepy pranksters and heavy breathers crackling through in the wee hours. Visit these upon a latch-key adolescent in an empty house -- a kid already endowed with an excess of morbid imagination and psychological fear of being singled out, by anyone, for any reason -- and you have the basic recipe for phone fear. Then there was, later on, the odd call from a creditor chasing down some unpaid bill . . .

Thinking about this recently, the obvious began to dawn on me: I'm by no means alone in this particular phobia boat. The phone is every bit a modern conduit of primal fear, and horror writers may have known this long before the rest of us did. Think of how many times the phone has been the fulcrum of fright in movies, TV shows, novels, and short stories. What stirred this realization was a recent viewing of a "Twilight Zone" episode entitled "Night Call," starring Gladys Cooper, directed by the estimable Jacques Tourneur (Cat People, Out of the Past, Night of the Demon), and scripted by Richard Matheson from his 1953 short story, "Sorry, Right Number."

Though I -- like you, no doubt -- have been watching "Zone" reruns since approximately forever, I'd somehow never caught this episode, which premiered the night of Friday, February 7, 1964. It uncurled before me like an old dream revisited. An elderly woman, whose only companion is the paid nurse who looks after her during the day, tosses and turns over a sleepless night. The looming, windswept tree outside lashes shadows over her bed. The invalid woman is lonesome, restless, seems gripped by an ambiguous fear. Suddenly the phone rings, exploding the silence. She answers: nothing from the other end but a distant, unvarying crackle.

Another call the next day. More crackling. The nurse is urged to the receiver; she hears nothing. Late that night, the third call comes. A voice emerges, peculiarly hollow and lifeless. "Where are you?" it asks. "I want to talk to you." Whereupon the old woman quite reasonably screams, "Leave me alone!"

She calls the phone company to report the harassment, and is told that a wire has fallen somewhere out in the country. It happens to be lying across the grave of her husband -- who has been dead for years, killed in the car crash that also crippled his wife. Putting two and two together -- and getting a sum that exists nowhere . . . but in the Twilight Zone, Rod Serling might have said -- the woman realizes she has heard her husband's voice from beyond. Overjoyed at the surcease of her loneliness, she excitedly utters his name into the telephone receiver. "You told me to leave you alone," the voice says. "And I always do what you say." Click.

Spooky. And harsh, even for a "Twilight Zone" twist. That poor old woman, more alone than she was before.

But that was only the half of it. The next day, I climbed to the high shelf where I store my modest collection of first-edition pulp novels, and checked the Matheson titles. There it was, in the 1961 collection Shock!: the original story, its title changed to "Long Distance Call." As literature, it wasn't brilliant. Matheson's writing was less vivid than usual; in fact it was just barely serviceable. (Even at his best, Matheson was not quite the equal of Charles Beaumont, who along with him and Serling completed the triptych of top "Zone" writers. You'll see more about Beaumont here in the coming months.)

But "Long Distance Call" was, in terms of plotting and denouement, far more alienating than the TV version. In its artlessness, its oafish exposition and dull description, it had an almost -- dare I say it? -- existential quality. Like Kafka from the pen of an American primitive. There was no emotional referent to the ghostly calls, no connubial back-story to explain them. The calls themselves are the same: the ring in the dark of night; the initial maddening crackle; the voice from the grave. Only, it's not the woman's husband calling. You aren't told who or what is at the other end. But the story ends with the words, "I'm coming over."

Did I say the ring of the phone strikes terror in me? Yes, but the ring is merely prelude. What really terrifies me, I guess, is the possibility I'll hear those exact words: "I'm coming over." It may have something to do with that common nightmare of being pursued by a shadowy figure, from which no escape is possible no matter one's effort or desperation. It may be that both fears spring from the same psychic seed, which is a basic fear of other people: not their actions so much as their mere presence, not of being hurt by them but of having to interact with them. The supernatural element of horror literature is a displacement, I'm certain, of something that basic, deeply rooted, and ineradicable; and it may be that those of us who seek terror in storytelling are indulging that fear, reliving it compulsively. The fear will erode over time, but it will never wear away entirely, and it will never be cease to be a source of perplexity to its owners, or a self-generating producer of good old-fashioned goose-flesh.

Not that I want to waste a good scare on any merely psychological, reductively flesh-bound explanation. Those phone calls from beyond? They weren't in the old woman's head. They were from beyond.

Join me again soon for further recollections, ruminations, and midnight sessions on the subject of phone fear. We've got a lot to talk about, you and I, in that realm and elsewhere. But not over the wire.

Oh my god . . . the phone just rang.

Keep Hearing the Skies!

2006-01-08T18:51:00.000-08:00

At New Year's Eve, as 2005 -- our planet's most recent annus horribilis -- passed into mist, we were in the bedroom, at the rear of our apartment on the third floor of an 1870s brownstone, which is tucked quietly away in the normally placid heart of a peaceful Brooklyn neighborhood. The radiators had come silently on, and it was already hot in the room. So despite the near-freezing temperature outside we opened a window and let a bit of chill in. Heard all the noises from the surrounding streets carried in on crisp air, the air of those crystalline cold nights when everything is silent until someone shouts blocks away, or a foghorn blows, or a trashcan lid closes, and you feel the sound could reverberate for infinity, ringing into the sky.

Then, at about 11:30 p.m., a low-flying plane began performing laps over our heads. Now the sound of airplanes is not in itself unusual for us. We seem to be situated in a major flight path, so that frequently we hear, descending from greater or lesser altitudes, jets making their way back to LaGuardia or JFK from points north, south, west, or east. (Impossible to tell which just from the sound, given that circling maneuver employed by pilots preparatory to landing.)

But I don't think we'd ever heard this before: a plane so low it might have been buzzing our antennae, its diesel growl traveling from one ear to the other, going silent for perhaps 30 seconds -- and then flying back towards us, thence to its 30-second oblivion on the other side. And back again. And back again. It wasn't a helicopter, which I've heard in the neighborhood twice, when the police were spotlight-sweeping the area for some fleeing suspect. This was clearly the engine of an airplane moving in a swoop. It continued for easily 45 minutes to an hour.

Someone with more knowledge of aeronautics than myself (i.e., anyone) could posit 15 reasonable explanations for what was going on up there -- why a small aircraft was flying laps at low altitude for such a length of time. But I can't think of one. Not that I've devoted this past week to pursuing an answer.

But the sound was oddly appropriate to our activity just then. As others were popping corks and waiting for balls to drop, we were watching TV -- and getting caught up, to our surprise, in a movie neither of us had seen in years: The Thing from Another World. The 1951 sci-fi thriller concerns an Army Air Force detachment sent to investigate a peculiar discovery at the military's northernmost outpost, near the North Pole. Seems the expeditionaries have found an object of almost immeasurable size lodged beneath the polar ice. Upon investigation it appears to be a spacecraft. No telling how far back it landed, or what crypto-metalloid substance it was made from, let alone the craft's point of origin. Or the identity -- if that's the word -- of the strange-looking creature seen through a transparency in the craft's outer shell, frozen within.

The craft is irrevocably damaged in the process of extricating it from its frozen coverage; but the creature is removed and preserved in its sheltering block of ice. The base personnel decide to thaw it out. The ice thaws. The thing gets loose.

We'd both witnessed the film at younger ages and remembered it as a silly, pre-fab, atomic-era creature feature about an extraterrestrial carrot. It's good to know you can actually get more open, more innocent in a way, as you get older. The Thing revealed itself at greater distance as solid B-grade horror, far better than the '50s average, and undoubtedly a classic of its modest genre. The literate, lightning-quick screenplay, by Charles Lederer and an uncredited Ben Hecht, takes off from Don A. Stuart's creepy short story "Who Goes There?" Though credits list Christian Nyby as director, it's generally assumed that the producer, Howard Hawks, had the decisive influence. (Nyby had been Hawks' editor on Red River, among others.) The film is Hawksian in many respects -- the fast talk, the clean staging, the respect for professionalism in tight situations, the women wearing pants and not taking the macho stuff seriously. There's one great screaming shock, and the rest is absorbing in an efficient, low-key way. The cast is full of familiar second- and third-tier players from noir and sci-fi and exploitation genres of the '50s: Kenneth Tobey, Margaret Sheridan, Dewey Martin, John Dierkes.

The airplane, our own Brooklyn Buzzer, materialized not long after the movie started. There's a preponderance of flying scenes in the early part of the picture -- tight cockpit, jammed cargo bay, exterior shots of the craft. It was strangely appealing and even synchronous that an actual plane should come through just as we were watching planes fly on the TV, the movie soundtrack growling and huffing just like the enormous wasp over our heads.

As the narrative transpires and events get out of hand on the polar airbase, tempers rise and cross-talk multiplies. It was about here that shouts began to reach us through the window -- clusters of people gathering outside, calling to each other as midnight approached.

Climactically, the pilots and scientists must rig a succession of flash-fires and explosions to keep the thing at bay, and finally to kill it. Just as this began to happen, midnight chimed, and fireworks went off all around us: in the street, in the park nearby, in the yards between buildings. We couldn't see, but we could hear. Rockets flying skyward in a spritz of spark, tiny bombs whistling up and cracking open, pinpoint bursts of hot color in a vast and freezing charcoal sky.

The Thing ends with its valiant journalist character (a Hechtian tribute to his old comrades in the ink trade?) dictating his lead to the scribes back home. He ratifies the heroism of the base crew, and warns of the necessity for vigilance against those who would visit violence on us from outside. (That's "us" as in U.S. We won't go into the political implications of that in the early '50s -- or today.) The journalist concludes with words that have become de rigeur in the post-atomic age, the age of conspiracy, the watch-phrase for a generation or two of alien-huggers and hopeless plot-heads:

"Keep watching the skies!"

Or listening to them. You never know when life will imitate art, when the skies over your head will put on a radio play for your entertainment.

Here's to 2006, annus mirabilis.

Stull

2005-11-05T03:31:00.000-08:00

Forty miles west of kansas city
down a county road like a lonely
soul - i see sharon and i see jack
its me and roman dressed in black
tell my bride to bury me in stull . . .

sixty-five, fifty, forty-four, thirty miles to go
in the dark i see the sign - six miles to stull
thirty-seven seventeen six more miles to stull
in the night i see the sign - six miles to stull
she told me that she had come by to meet me

don't be afraid -- do not be afraid -- its great.

-- Urge Overkill, The Stull EP (1992)

What Fear Was

2005-10-30T17:48:00.000-08:00

It's possible to spend too much time in the company of the dead — even the fictive dead. I feel caught in some kind of festival of the dead that seems to exist in the world as a whole these days, but probably exists nowhere but in my own little mind and the immediate space around it.

Exhibit A: These past weeks I've noticed, not all at once but gradually, that there are more programs on TV devoted to the otherworldly (ghosts, UFO's, haunted places, fucking sea serpents) than ever before. I know it's the run-up to Halloween, but this year the horror-themed programming has gone well beyond the standard annual showing of Dracula and It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. I'm talking a subtle slew of ha'nts, creeps and monsters running up and down the cable grid. One new show's entitled simply Supernatural; another, consisting of reenactments of real-life ghost and poltergeist encounters, is called A Haunting. Medium and Ghost Whisperer are star vehicles for, respectively, Patricia Arquette and Jennifer Love-Hewitt. Even the old Night Stalker has been revived, though sadly without the old Night Stalker himself, Darren McGavin. There's World's Most Haunted Places, and something called Most Haunted Live! My favorite title is Possessed Possessions, in which people display their ghostly knick-knacks, heirlooms, and collectibles. Kind of Poltergeist meets Antiques Road Show.

Remember ten years ago, when The X-Files was a TV novelty? Or ten years before that, when Unsolved Mysteries was pretty much the tube's only outlet for true spooks?

We haven't seen most of these new entries, but we did watch an interesting reality show a few weeks ago about an East Coast Roto-Rooter man who moonlights as a ghost-hunter. With his crew of tech-brats and intrepid investigators, he creeps around famous spooky places like the Queen Mary, the Lizzie Borden house in Falls River, Massachusetts, and Shawshank Prison in Ohio, wiring them for sound and video. Roto-Rooter Man struck, it seemed to me, just the right attitude — that of a sensible skeptic who wants to see the unbelievable, but refuses to see it where it ain't. None of the spook-traps into which they descended yielded anything beyond vague whispering sounds and one pretty good hoax involving the bedspread in a Queen Mary stateroom. Don't remember the name of the show or what channel it was on, and I haven't found it again in running through the schedules. Maybe it was a one-timer. Maybe it was ghosts. Boo.

Exhibit B: The New York Times today has an article about the infiltration, or perhaps the return, of Goth style into mainstream fashion. "A traditional outcast look suits scary times," runs the tag to Ruth La Ferla's story: "Books, movies, stage productions, photographs and, perhaps most emphatically, fashion are all evoking those familiar Gothic obsessions: death, decay, destructive passions and the specter of nature run amok. They've surfaced at times before, of course. But rarely since the mid-19th century, when it became a crowd pleaser, has the Gothic aesthetic gained such a throttlehold on the collective imagination." Rag designers, clothing buyers, and an English professor from upstate New York are brought in to consult on the phenomenon, and the professor says "We're somehow trying to deal with calamity and death ... Revisiting Gothic themes might be one way to embrace those things and try to come to terms with them."

Might be. Maybe it's just another manifestation of our recurring popular infatuation with entertaining forms of death and diabolism, like Bridey Murphy in the '50s and exorcism in the '70s. I don't know, but I think something is going on. All I know for sure is by early next year we'll be on to other things and most of these ghost shows will have dried up and gone the way of all flesh.

Exhibit C: It's my wife's birthday today and I got her the first four albums by Goth-rock originators The Cure, remasters of which have been issued with bonus discs full of demos and live material. She's been a huge fan of theirs since adolescence and we spent part of the day doing our doings with the Pornography bonus disc as accompaniment. Grim, often groaning, dark, dank, and desperately depressed music. One of The Cure's best and most typical songs is called "A Forest." Its lyrics go like this:

Come closer and see
See into the trees
Find the girl
While you can
Come closer and see
See into the dark
Just follow your eyes
Just follow your eyes

I hear her voice
Calling my name
The sound is deep
In the dark
I hear her voice
And start to run
Into the trees
Into the trees

Suddenly I stop
But I know it's too late
I'm lost in a forest
All alone
The girl was never there
It's always the same
I'm running towards nothing
Again and again and again

Exhibit D: While listening to The Cure, I was trying to get into a book I've tried to read many times before and failed at, that being Beyond Belief: A Chronicle of Murder and Its Detection by Emlyn Williams — also author of Night Must Fall, the great creep-out murder play of the 1930s, and The Corn is Green, about his boyhood in the coalmines of Wales and the teacher who nurtured his brain and aspirations. (I acted in that play in high school, by the way. Played the Squire. Thought you'd enjoy knowing that.)

Beyond Belief, published in 1968, is the story of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, the most infamous and hated British killers of the 1960s. Brady and Hindley were lovers who kidnapped, tortured and murdered a series of children on the outskirts of Manchester in 1963-65, burying their bodies on the Yorkshire moors. They were caught when they killed their last victim, a 17-year-old boy, in front of Hindley's brother-in-law, who managed to escape and alert the police. Brady and Hindley were convicted of everything possible and locked up for eternity. Hindley died of lung cancer in 2000, and Brady has gone on periodic hunger strikes in the hope of killing himself, thus robbing his jailers of the chance to watch him rot. At present he goes on living, though often with a tube down his throat.

The Williams book is sporadically brilliant and often banal. In both modes it gets deeper into wormy, depraved states of mind than most other murder books I've read, and I've read quite a few. But that's only a comparative judgment and doesn't get behind the larger question. The nature of the crimes is so disturbing that I wonder again why I am so interested in depravity. In his prologue, Williams says something to the effect that, just as no physical aberration should be beyond the interest of science, no psychological illness, however horrible its results, should be ignored by the student of humanity. Maybe that ought to be answer enough. Though it still doesn't explain the frosting of pleasure one gets from that illness, from those horrible results. Really, it doesn't explain anything; it only justifies.

There's no dearth of horribleness in this horrible case. But the most awful detail, for me, is this. Brady and Hindley tape-recorded the torture session they performed on one of their young female victims, 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey. As the girl screamed and begged, Christmas music played in the background: the Ray Conniff Singers' version of "The Little Drummer Boy," from the album We Wish You a Merry Christmas. Emlyn Williams describes the experience of hearing the tape played back in open court as the murderers were tried.

Exhibit E: I was reminded of all these things — Beyond Belief, screaming children, voices in forests — just last night, while rereading The Blair Witch Project: A Dossier. Along with the soundtrack CD, the website, the video game, the stick-man necklace, the baseball cap, and the oven mitts, this book was released as a tie-in to the enormously successful horror movie of 1999. Unlike the usual tie-in, this one was actually worth the money. It's an imaginative, absorbing, and frightening extension of the movie, just as the website was a meticulous and chilling prelude, just as the Curse of the Blair Witch documentary was a spot-on simulacrum of the Discovery Channel and History Channel docs that creep around real-life mysteries.

The Dossier takes the movie in directions, and to extents, you'd never guess. Among the things you learn:

The unique knowledge of the case held back by Sheriff Cravens, whose stubborness on certain points belies his insistence that the student filmmakers' disappearance and found footage are parts of an elaborate hoax;

The encounter that Heather's grandfather, Randy, had with the Blair Witch as a boy;

The "energy" that Heather has been sending out to Elly Kedward for two years, long before she and her two-man crew ever ventured into the Black Hills Forest.

Exhibit F: Midway through the Dossier is the transcript of a faux-interview between a faux-investigator and a faux-scholar of regional American folk tales. I get the idea you don't believe in the Blair Witch, the investigator says. "No," the scholar answers. "Not in some woman who lives in the forest and eats children."

Doink! It was one of those moments you literally hear a sound in your head — the sound of something hitting the floor in some other part of your memory mansion, some dusty and distant antechamber that's gone untouched and unopened for years.

That room contained the Brothers Grimm and their marvelous, horrifying little fables. Like most of us, I read and heard sanitized versions as a child. The fables as the brothers began collecting them in 1812 actually began as folk tales not intended for children, and are far more graphic and frightening than was thought fitting for American youth in the 20th century, even we progeny of Dr. Spock's enlightened counsel. But thanks to our postmodern fascination with the muck beneath the rose garden, there are a number of unexpurgated Grimm collections available. I put down the Blair Witch book, went to the shelf, and pulled down mine.

"Some woman who lives in the forest and eats children." That's Hansel and Gretel. The Blair Witch is their witch. No blazing insight there. But among the other tales was one called The House in the Forest. Now there was a connection I hadn't thought of. (A house in a forest, if you don't know, is where the movie's climax occurs and where the whole legend leads — specifically to the basement of the house, where several children were murdered.) So I refreshed myself on the Grimm story, which is a characteristically, though uniquely, grisly narrative of three sisters and their serial experiences in the house of the title. I won't tell the story. Enough to say that it involves an old man, some talking animals, a cellar, and a climax which — after Freud, modernism, and the householding of words like "incest" and "child abuse" — we cannot help but read as a deeply horrific allegory of violence upon children.

And finally, Exhibit G: I read the Blair Witch Dossier because last week, drawn no doubt by the shift of season into cold wind and autumnal beauty, I'd watched the movie for the umpteenth time. It's something of a major project with me to re-view that picture. I have to get myself up for the experience; the simple reason being that whenever I do watch it, its creepiness creeps outward in every direction to touch, seemingly, virtually everything else I do or think of for the following week — or however long it takes the spell to dissipate. If you wonder what I mean by that, reread this post and retrace the long path we've followed to rearrive at Exhibit G, G for genesis — the starting point of the morbidity that's pervaded my thoughts this past week.

It was a weird night last night. Weirder than most by far. I went to bed thinking of Brady and Hindley recording the screams of their victim; the children's screams that terrorize the students in The Blair Witch Project, as they run through the forest toward a voice that isn't there; the screams that we may only imagine issued from the cellar of the house in the Grimm story.

As I said at the start of this post (back before the sun went down), you can spend too much time in the company of the dead — even the fictive dead. The morbid threatens to colonize your mind. Everything that enters it, even music, even sunlight, is put in the service of dark thought. As intellectually exhilarating as it can be to chase centuries-broad connections between folk narratives and documented horrors, between Brothers Grimm and Brady and Hindley and Blair Witch myth, there is such a thing as too much darkness. Too much darkness and your soul might moss over.

While perusing the Grimm book and reminding myself of the stories I knew so well as a child, I spotted this title: A Tale About the Boy Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was. I'm not familiar with this story, and haven't brought myself to read it yet.

Paws

2005-10-23T18:01:00.000-07:00

I'm pleased to say that outside of cats I've had no intimate relationship with the smaller, furrier animals of our world, with one exception.

When I was very young I stood beside a lake in Iowa and did something I've never done since. Upon finding myself confronted with a dead, prostrate beaver -- an enormous one, easily three and a half feet long, and weighing a good 60 pounds -- that had been killed by a hunter, I spontaneously grasped it by the wrists and lifted it as high as I could. Not very high, since I was, as I say, very young, and a huge dead beaver is an unwieldly bulk for even a strong, well-proportioned man in full charge of his limbs to heft manually.

Why did I do this? Ah. I did it, I remember, to impress the people who were standing around me, all of them adults except for my sister, who was two years older than me. I wanted to appear objective and only abstractly interested in the question of dead beasts, unafraid of death or of incipiently rotting animal corpses. I wanted to appear a little man, and little men like big ones never pass up the chance to hoist a dead beaver.

There was nothing pleasurable, let alone scintillating, about the contact, but undeniably there was a sensation to it. That was of dull fascination at holding something so large and so dead. I've never seen a dead person (though I've walked past one or two covered in sheets) and certainly never lifted one: this was the closest I've come in 40 years to holding death in my hands.

Though there was a follow-up to that. The same hunter responsible for the death of the 60-pound beaver presented me with the severed paw of yet another -- one which, judging proportions from the paw alone, had to have been, in its wholeness, at least the size of the one I'd lifted. It was a reasonably fresh kill, since the fur upon the paw was still smooth, the bones inside firm, the skin black, leathery, and supple. It was only a glorified rabbit's foot or other prosaic dime-store charm, but I discovered it had one magical quality: If you applied the right pressure at the right point, the talons of the hand would extend and the paw would appear to flex, as if alive. Release the pressure and the paw would go lifeless again. Press, flex; release, die. It was a little god-like, life-giving, death-dealing, Frankensteinian action you could perform in your hand upon the hand of another organism, so recently warm-blooded and animate, now skinned, sectioned, and disseminated to a half-dozen places and purposes.

The dead beaver thing (as we may as well call it) had a weird resonance with me, for two reasons:

Firstly, I was well familiar even by this young age with the story of the monkey's paw. Though the little plot itself had doubtless been around for eons, W.W. Jacobs got the royalties for setting it down in 1902, in a story that somehow turned up in every ghostly collection I had as a youngster, and to this day is anthologized as a classic story of the macabre. That it is. A husband and wife come into possession of a monkey's paw, which they're told was once charmed, or cursed, by an Indian fakir, so that each successive owner will be granted three wishes. They're warned, of course, to use their wishes wisely: "Be careful what you desire, for you may receive it," et cetera.

The first wish, for money, is granted, but in the most terrible manner. The husband and wife lose their beloved son to an industrial accident -- a factory worker, the boy is mangled in some monstrous mangling machine -- and receive a windfall in the form of a settlement from the company. The second wish: that the beloved son might return from the dead.

If you've never read the story, give yourself a shudder.

What I always recalled was that, in the Jacobs story, the utterance of each wish causes the monkey's paw to flex and vibrate in the speaker's hand: the dormant thing comes alive to work its evil magic and draw a startled shriek from the maker of the wish. So I always thought of this when holding my beaver's paw, making it flex with subtle digital movements so that it looked independent, possessed of disembodied life. And of course I made my wishes, and fancied that one might come true, and that the beaver's paw might move of its own power, and that a startled shriek might be drawn from me. I was always tensed against the horror I couldn't help but enjoy imagining.

None of my wishes came true, and no shriek was inspired. Soon enough the paw shriveled, lost its suppleness and flexibility, and began to emanate a noxious aroma. It had always been a dead thing, and now it was visibly, palpably dead. With some reluctance, I threw the paw away, fearing I'd never know miracles through the agency of a furry creature's dismembered member. And to date I haven't.

I said there were two reasons.

The other, more extensive and strange, also came from a story I'd read, dating from the early 1930s. It was that of a talking creature which some believed had taken up residence in a remote farmhouse on the Isle of Man, a tiny archipelago in the Irish Sea, two hours' boat ride from the west coast of England. The farmhouse was inhabited by the Irving family, James, Margaret, and daughter Voirrey. In September 1931 they began to hear animalistic noises of scuffling and chattering emanating from their attic. These were followed by the incomprehensible sounds of a high-pitched voice. The voice began to mimic the Irvings' words, and soon had garnered full use of the English language.

In response to the Irvings' questions, the presence began to explain itself in detail. It called itself Jef (or "Gef," in the version I first read, in a thin Scholastic Books paperback by Margaret Ronan called House of Evil). Jef claimed to be a marsh mongoose born in New Delhi in 1852, who had been purchased and transported to England many years before. He refused to show himself at first, but gradually assented to sliding a tiny hand -- again, the creep of the paw! -- through the rafters of his attic perch so that the family might examine it. (Jim Irving described it as resembling an intensely miniaturized human hand.) Eventually Jef came into full view and moved about the house more or less freely, becoming close with the Irvings despite causing no end of poltergeistian mischief involving midnight noises, food gone missing, and general irascibility with regard to visitors and other inconveniences.

I'd only ever seen the story of Jef in the Ronan book, and, since this was a collection of brief, anecdotal entertainments for preteenagers and not a footnoted work of scholarship, believed the story to have been largely invented by the author herself. But come to find out later in life (much later -- just last week, in fact) that Ronan got her facts down with essential accuracy, and that, no matter how ridiculous, the story was not her invention but quite well-known by many. Believe it or not, in its time this story was taken with, if not general credulity, then surprisingly broad interest: the famed English ghost hunter Harry Price conducted an investigation, and many newspapers sought out the Irvings for interviews and Jef for demonstrations.

Suffice to say, nothing to satisfy either science or common skepticism was ever produced, or we most certainly would have heard of it somewhere. Jef mischievously refused to perform when called upon, and only one photograph was ever taken -- Voirrey Irving's gray, skewed shot through tall grass of something that could be a log just as easily as it could be a talking 80-year-old Indian mongoose. Another photo is supposed to show Jim Irving pointing out Jef's humanoid paw as it creeps through the rafters. But this image too makes the Loch Ness photos (the first of which would appear in 1933-34 and all but wipe Jef off the UK's monster map) appear detailed and revealing.

So Jef was an entertaining hoax, and my beaver's paw had no otherworldly powers. Both are in the garbage, more or less. But both bespeak the same story-telling instinct, the need felt by many of us to fill gaps in reality with fancy and invention, to supply a bit of whatever life and excitement seem missing in an Isle of Man farmhouse, or beside an Iowa lake, or in a house with a loved one now gone. Sometimes, to fill those gaps, we outright lie; sometimes, we write it down and call it fiction; sometimes, against every kind of evidence and sense, we merely leave open the chance that the impossible could be possible. But if that dissatisfaction with mere fact is placed in a person by psychological quirk, behavioral model, or some other factor, it will be powerful, undeniable, present throughout one's life. To deny it would be, to those of this mind-set, to surrender to reality, the dullest levels of what is factual, observable, inarguable, and therefore pointless to discuss or discover.

The story-telling impulse, even shading into the hoaxing impulse, is not to be downgraded as a positive influence, a bold act of pure imagination in a world often scornful of anything not preapproved by mass acceptance (or merely mass resignation). After all, if animals talked in real life, we wouldn't need Bugs Bunny; if children didn't have a natural instinct for believing the unbelievable, we wouldn't have rabbit's feet; and if real life answered our every wish, we'd have no compelling reason to live.

Here endeth the lesson, and you may now converse amongst yourselves. Meanwhile Jef's humanoid mitt reaches out even now at his own tribute page; W.W. Jacobs' story of the monkey's paw will always be with us; and I still remember the weight of that poor beaver, the feel of that paw in mine.

That for which there is no name

2005-10-22T19:15:00.000-07:00

There are so many things which are impossible to explain! Why should certain chords in music make me think of the brown and golden tints of autumn foliage? Why should the mass of Sainte-Cecile send my thoughts wandering among caverns whose walls blaze with ragged masses of virgin silver? What was it in the roar and turmoil of Broadway at six o'clock that flashed before my eyes the picture of a still Breton forest where sunlight filtered through spring foliage, and Sylvia bent, half curiously, half tenderly, over a small, green lizard, murmuring, "To think that this also is a little ward of God?"

-- Robert W. Chambers, "The Yellow Sign,"
from The King in Yellow (1895)

Mr. Stapleton's Secret

2005-10-08T20:14:00.000-07:00

by
Lord Clive Bilk-Wallinger
(“ A Man of Insufficient Continence,” et al.)

Being a weird Narrative once briefly Celebrated and summarily Forgotten, and now an Archived Document of the Utmost Obscurity; first distributed under imprint of Meinhof Bros., Oxford Street, London; redistributed here with Apologies and Humble Thanks to the still-existing Heirs of that Most Distinguished firm

* * *

TO THE READER

It has been many years since my friend told me of these experiences, but I have never forgotten the rapt intensity with which he related them. He told me then that it was without qualification the strangest set of circumstances he had ever encountered, and that because of them he would be quite happy to pass the remainder of his life in utter silence and dull safety. He had, he said, lost his entire taste for intercourse with the dark and fantastic side of life.

He also asked that I not pass on this account to any other ear or eye until after his death, and that I apply pseudonymous names to the principal figures in the horrible narrative. I have complied with both of these requests.

Here, then, is my late friend’s story. The transcription is mine, but the words, etched in my memory as they have been these forty years or more, are his.

1.

Upon my graduation from the prestigious medical school at Luxembourg, I was eager to return home to England and take up my practice there. As you well know, I am an Englishman in every particular of character and manner; and I had entertained no hope other than to offer my humble ministrations to the good denizens of my native Blackburn.

One of the more obligatory responsibilities of a country doctor newly established is that of touring the estates of his district, making introductions with those who are to be served. I say “obligatory” merely because one English landowner, whatever his peculiar qualities in private life, tends, in outward manner, to be quite like another: the crippling handshake, the roaring laughter, the well-fed bonhomie are traits common to those in gentrified life, so that making the acquaintance of three squires a day can never be thought of as an adventure in the diversity of human character.

It was, then, with only a modest enthusiasm that I knocked at the baronial mansion of one Mr. George Stapleton. Had I possessed a premonitory bent of mind, I might have noted more closely the subtle differences marking this house and its surrounding grounds from those of the landowners whom I had previously visited. Here, one was instantly aware of a certain decrepitude in the aspect of the great house: cracks branching upward through the stone facades, pillars with entire pieces missing from upper and lower escarpments, and viney foliage falling unchecked in thick masses. In addition to this, a certain darkness pervaded the premises, a darkness not entirely attributable to the late afternoon hour, nor to the season, which was autumn. One felt an ineffable discomfort at this gray spectacle of dissolute grandeur, and I resolved to make my visit a crisp one.

Then the immense door groaned and opened, and this resolve was shaken by the sight of my respondent. It was a girl, and she possessed a loveliness I have yet to see surpassed, or even equaled. She stood in the gathering darkness with the luminous aplomb of a destitute angel, regarding me innocently with slightly bowed head and deferential aspect, awaiting my statement of purpose.

I confess to being so enchanted with my taciturn hostess that I found it difficult to myself speak for several seconds. But I regained the power of locution sufficiently to tell the lovely creature my name and the business which had brought me to her door.

“Yes,” the young woman said, “I expect my father will want to meet you. Please come in.”

I entered, and she closed the door behind me. The interior of this strange abode was quite as redolent of faded elegance as its exterior: fine marble floors through which cracks ran like rivulets of black water; oil portraits and wall hangings dingy with accumulated dust; a grand spiraling staircase with several chipped steps. And throughout the cavernous environment, an all-pervading gloom barely qualified by the candles which flickered from the wall fixtures.

“Your father is Mr. Stapleton?” I asked the girl.

“Yes. If you’ll wait here, I’ll alert Father you’d like to see him.” She moved off and disappeared down a shadowy passage, a dolorous figure in ghostly white. As I languished in the silent hall I noticed on one wall an enormous oil painting which had the appearance of a family portrait. In a red velvet chair sat a woman with an infant in her arms, while towering over her was a man with a face the like of which I had never seen. His eyes burned with a malignant ferocity, and his expression generally appeared scarred by the striations of a perpetual scowl. Looking at the visage I was gripped by a nameless panic, a presaging of some dread I dared not articulate even to myself.

“This is my father, Mr. Stapleton.” The girl had returned, and her thin voice crept up on me from the rear like the fingers of a spectral hand. I turned to face my visitee.

I drew breath at the sight of him, for as surely as I know my own name it was the man in the portrait! True, he was approximately twenty years on in age, with gray hair and reading spectacles to signal the fact. But the essence of his pocked face remained unchanged by the interregnum, save that time had deepened the creases of his scowl, giving it even more the appearance of a piece of stonework. I fancied it reminded me of the marble pillars and the floor beneath me, with their deep-set cracks and rifts.

“Doctor,” this man said gruffly, gravely. He stepped to me and extended his hand. His eyes flamed with distrust and hostility.

“Mr. Stapleton.” I shook the thin white hand; the touch of a corpse could not have chilled me more profoundly.

“My daughter has informed me of the reason behind your visit,” Mr. Stapleton said.

“Yes, it has been my pleasure -- ” I began.

“Quite so,” said Mr. Stapleton distractedly, whereupon he glanced cursorily at his daughter. “Emily, go to your room so that the Doctor and I might conclude this business privately.”

Emily, a docile wraith, mounted the spiraling staircase without a word. She ascended into an upper reach of shadows so deep and thick that it might have been the passage to some unspeakable abyss.

Upon her disappearance Mr. Stapleton said, “Doctor, I shall be blunt. We are not in the habit of receiving visitors here.”

“I apologize for my unsolicited appearance -- ”

“Be so good as to allow me to finish.” The man’s voice was clipped and cruel; his eyes continued to glow like cinders in the shadows. “This is a private house, and we are private people. The sole reason I speak to you now is to inform you of these facts, so that you may be mindful of them in the future.”

Quite taken aback by his brusqueness, I was at a loss to articulate my indignation, except feebly. “I’m sure I am very sorry to have invaded your sanctuary, sir. I only sought to advise you of my presence in the district so that you might avail yourself of my services when and if the need arises.”

“We have no need of physicians,” Mr. Stapleton said with unveiled contempt. “We are from hearty stock and not given to maladies untreatable by simple domestic remedies. Your services, sir, will not be required here.”

I took a moment to absorb the impact of his pointed rudeness, and then drew myself up with as much impressiveness as possible. I fitted my hat and said, “Very well, Mr. Stapleton, you have made your position clear. If you and your daughter are as sound in body as you say, then indeed my presence is redundant.” I moved to the door, almost feeling Stapleton’s eyes sear me as I went. “I dare say that if your good health is at all in proportion to your lack of manners, you may expect a life longer than most.”

Except for a small tightening of the lips Stapleton seemed unmoved by my barb.

“I shall not be back, Mr. Stapleton, have no worry on that score. Good day to you, sir.”

I opened the door and was near to quitting the fetid, dying house when a high, resonant sigh, its sound like a midnight wind, issued from the darkness at the top of the winding staircase. Stapleton and I turned toward the sound; whereupon our astonished eyes were met with the sight of Emily tumbling down the stairs in a cloud of white to lay supine and unconscious upon the fractured and dusty floor.

2.

Fully an hour passed before the poor injured girl stirred among murmurings of pain. Her father and I had taken Emily to her room and laid her abed; I had made an examination of her vital functions and concluded, with no small amazement, that the fall had not inflicted extensive damage. There were, however, slight wounds, and employing a few household chemicals I prepared a medicated poultice for Emily’s lacerated forehead and a cold compress for her twisted ankle.

Now she roused, and looked from Stapleton’s face to mine with an expression of inquiry. I explained what had occurred.

“Oh,” she said weakly; “I fell on the stairs. Yes.”

“You’re all right, daughter,” Stapleton virtually spat out. I raged silently at his conspicuous lack of tenderness, not to mention simple gallantry.

“Father,” Emily whispered, “I wonder if I might have some tea. Is it all right, Doctor?” I indicated that in fact it would be most appropriate just now. Stapleton looked at the two of us with a fierce suspicion, but slowly stood and went to the door. Then he pointed a finger at Emily and said, as if it were a threat, “I’ll be back in ten minutes, daughter.”

She shivered when he had gone, and we passed a healthy interval in silence before she spoke.

“I must talk to someone,” she whispered hoarsely, in tones of barely repressed hysteria. Clutching the sleeve of my coat, she said, “I can tell you’re a decent man, and you’ll help me.”

I was, perhaps, more shocked by her urgent entreaty than I had been by her father’s untoward hostility.

“I tumbled on the stars intentionally,” she said. “I had to find a way of holding you here. You are the first person my father has allowed inside the house in several years. Most accidental visitors he turns away before they can lift the knocker. And accidental visitors are the only ones we receive here. No one who knows this place will come. Oh, the many times I have prayed for someone who would listen to my tale of woe!”

There was something about the fervency of her words that made me wish I had never entered this house myself. And yet it was that same fervency, joined to the desperate helplessness which illustrated Emily’s angelic face, that convinced me to hear her.

“How is it I might help?” I managed to ask.

She reclined a bit on her pillow, and her eyes wandered from mine as she spoke. “My father is a widower; I, a motherless child. When he deemed me of proper age my father told me of my mother. He explained that one day when I was but an infant she had left the house in a rented carriage which was supposed to convey her to a luncheon in the town. But she never came back.

“My father told me of his agonies, the searching, the failure of the officials to turn up any indication as to my mother’s fate. It was as if the hand of God Himself had snatched her from the earth. And it was from that time, my father explained, that he determined to shun the society of people, to curse the world itself, to make every day a fresh rejection of the Lord who would allow such misery to befall an honest Christian man. For many years, I believed what my father told me, and I honored, as a dutiful daughter must, his resolution to blacken the days with spite and resentment.

“But then, near the time of my fourteenth birthday, I had an experience so horrifying that even now I blanch at the remembrance of it. In cleansing myself with soap and water I began to feel the trickling of a substance which was thicker than the water. It was indeed blood, and it ran to the floor in a dark puddle as I stood amazed and horrified -- ”

Emily shut her eyes in pain and turned from me at this point, and her hands gripped the bed covers. She continued in a voice nearly choked with shame.

“At that moment I knew I was marked for a singular doom, for I had been anointed by Satan. I saw that my days were destined for the blackest horror, and that my mind would be beset by visions -- demons, the faces of the dead and damned. For these were now to be my familiars.

“Very soon I suffered the vision I so dreaded and yet fully anticipated. But this vision was of double horror, since the specter who visited me was that of -- my mother! She appeared to me one night in a mist of white, sighing pitifully and regarding me with tenderness and fear. I recognized her face from the family portrait which yet hangs downstairs and was painted I was a mere six months old. To see the insubstantial form and face of my dead, unknown mother -- what can be the sin that warrants such a cruel and melancholy encounter?

“My mother’s wavering form sat at the foot of my bed and, as I shivered in fright, spoke to me. ‘I’ve come so that you will know the truth,’ it said. ‘I did not leave you, as you have been told. I suffered the wickedest, the meanest of all ends. I was murdered by your father -- by my husband.’

“Words have no power to express the horror I felt at this ghastly revelation. But it was only worsened when my mother explained that her body lay buried in a grave near the arbor in the west garden -- on these very grounds.

“’You must avenge my death,’ my mother implored me. ‘Your father has committed evil, and will do so again. For you, my daughter, the alternatives are but two: you must either become the slave and prisoner he demanded that I be, or you must expose his crime and set both our spirits free.’ My mother smiled regretfully and said that she was sorry she could not linger, but that we would meet again. With that, her form vanished, leaving the room dark and me alone with my terror. That was six years ago, and I have not escaped the terror since.”

I had no immediate response to this astounding account. But something in Emily’s manner convinced me that she believed all she had said, irrespective of its objective truth.

“Again I ask -- what help can I give you?”

“You can help me to lift the horror that veils my entire life. Help me to free myself and my poor mother. Help me to expose that man’s evil.”

The nature of her request was by now more than clear, and I attempted to be reasonable in weighing the sense of my options. Being a man of science I am not inclined to extol the virtues of grave robbing -- for surely this was her implication. But this realization led to questions, the most pertinent of which was this: Was there in fact a grave to be found near the arbor in the west garden?

My puzzling was disrupted with Mr. Stapleton’s bustling entrance. He bore a tea service and a deeper scowl than previously. Setting down the tray he said, “Doctor, she is doing well enough now. The time has come for your departure.”

I pulled on my overcoat and retrieved my hat. I stood at the bedroom door and took a moment to study the two of them together; I was surpassingly moved by what I saw. Stapleton was standing over his daughter as if he were a great tree prepared to block the sun’s rays from falling upon the tender bud below. Emily’s eyes, wet and sad in the dim yellow lamplight, held out to me a desperate question.

I nodded my assent to her, cloaking it in the noncommittal politesse of a farewell, and left the room.

3.

A brief time spent in the gardener’s shed produced a lantern and spade, and with them I moved west in search of the garden and its arbor. The night was brightly moonlit, so I was wary of being espied from the house. A ferocious wind slapped at my face and slowed my progress.

After some time I reached the garden. I circled the foliage and found the small arbor of white latticed wood. The grass surrounding it was fairly uniform in height and thickness, but there was a patch to the rear that seemed, in the lantern light, distinct from those patches on either side of it. I set the lantern down and began to shovel earth with the spade, not fully convinced that the present scene was not some particularly vivid and horrific dream.

I dug steadily and patiently. Soon I had created a hollow of about two feet in width and depth. Then the spade hit an object of some solidity -- perhaps a rock. I set aside the spade, picked up the lantern, and with my jaw shaking from fear as much as cold bent down to see what I had discovered.

Just then I was gripped from behind by thin but powerful fingers. They pulled me up and brought me face to face with their owner -- Mr. Stapleton.

In the raging wind his face bore a look more feral and less human than I would have thought supportable by the physiognomy of man.

“You forgot to hide your horses, you fool!” he shouted at me. “You should have left, damn you! You should never have come!”

I fell back in shock when I saw him lift a pistol and aim it squarely at my heart. I was certain George Stapleton’s loathsome countenance was the last earthly thing I was ever to see.

Then we heard a cry from a distance, mangled by the wind. Stapleton spun about at the sound. Behind him, standing white and solitary in the moonlight, was Emily, dressed only in her bedclothes.

“Mother!” she cried out.

Stapleton was suddenly paralyzed, the impotent pistol now hanging limply from his hand. He stared off in the direction which seemed to attract Emily’s gaze.

“There!” Emily called. “Do you see her, Father? Do you see her!”

George Stapleton’s jaw went slack. He croaked out the words “Good God,” and fell to the cold ground with the lifeless weight of a stone.

The moment I regained my senses I ran to Emily and embraced her. Her skin was ice cold, and yet she did not shiver. She seemed contained within some inviolable membrane of calm. Her eyes remained fixed on the same spot. I looked, and saw nothing.

I shook Emily and shouted, “You’re free now! You and your mother -- both of you are free!”

She did not respond to me, nor did she seem cognizant of any other external condition. Her body, though still possessed of life and breath, was rigid and insensate in my grasp.

Her whole being had been sapped by the horror of a vision perceptible only to her and to the late murderer lying dead near the arbor -- that vision which was now and forever safely locked in the deepest chamber of her lost, tormented mind.

THE END.

London
March 1888

I Like to Watch (Myself Get Scared)

2005-10-02T01:04:00.000-07:00

We saw The Ring Two a few hours ago. It came and went pretty quickly last year, but it's not bad at all -- especially if you found One an effective creep-out, as I did. As you'd expect in any sequel, there were plenty of familiar elements: young David Dorfman bulging his eyes and being unnaturally intelligent and self-possessed; the matchless Naomi Watts speeding hither and yon, recovering chunks of back-story in hospital hallways and cobwebby basements, with the barest aid from a friendly, stubbly stud.

The picture had only a few jump-back shocks, but overall it sustained a mid-level dread, and like the first picture it was photographically stunning: sinister green forestry, boiling black waters. There was also the screenplay's unexpected interest in the pathologies sometimes attendant to motherhood, specifically post-partem depression.

I was not aware of being in creepy-crawly mode this crisp, brilliant autumn day (no more so than usual, anyway), so it must have been pure subterfuge of the unconscious that a few hours before seeing The Ring Two I listened for the first time to the whole of John Holowach's Melodies of Fear. I found this album-length collection of MP3s a while back at the Internet Archive and was intrigued by the come-on: "A side project/album for musician/samplist John Holowach, this one detailing various new and old songs and music tailored to horror and fear." Horror and fear: well that right there got me panting.

I didn't get around to hearing the whole thing until today. Turns out the album is mostly sinister but not really scary, with some tracks sounding like Trent Reznor on a mild upper, others like Julee Cruise remixed for the dancefloor. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But the track I'll always come back to -- the way I come back to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, or Charles Beaumont's "The Howling Man," or Lord Bulwer-Lytton's "The House and the Brain" -- is something entitled "Phone Call." Dial tone, numbers laboriously punched in, and then a succession of terrified voices -- all different, a 35-year-old man becoming a 12-year-old girl -- gasping, breathing, and whispering things like "Don't . . . don't leave me here" and "I'm not by myself." Throughout, the echoed barking of distant dogs. (Is someone out there?) Then silence. Then the line goes dead.

It's obvious. The stuff of a thousand (well, maybe a dozen) horror movies. But cut free of an image and all its surface or subliminal details -- an actor's face, a blue-painted wall, the night sky as seen through French doors -- the pure sound of the scare is both beyond and beneath description. There is undoubtedly something crucial about the electronic aspect: the mechanical phone music, the vocal distortion of fiber optics, the anonymity of the wire and implied death of the broken connection. It all sounds right at home in an age of globe-spanning cables and invisible filaments, yet it's as visceral as the most ancient superstition. If this is what scares you, this will scare you.

First heard it a few months back, sitting right here, fat cushy earphones wrapped around my head. For the 90 seconds or so that "Phone Call" lasts, I kept glancing behind me to make sure no one was creeping up. My wife was sleeping in the bedroom. If she'd awakened just then, come out to say hi, and innocently tapped me on the shoulder, I might have died.

Yet I know I'll never stop listening to "Phone Call" as long as I live.

I like to watch myself get scared.

Tinny Doink #1

2005-09-29T02:18:00.000-07:00

"Fancy our meeting, when days are so fleeting . . . "
-- From an old song

Hello, friend. This instant, I'm mildly queasy and increasingly drowsy. I drank one too many beers with a friend earlier -- another friend, you don't know each other -- and since coming home I've taken an excess of French peanuts (a crunchy candy delight consisting of the essential legume baked in an encrustration of vanilla-flavored spikes and lumps: a belated birthday gift from my mother).

DId I remember to say hello?

Out into some emptiness or other these letters spiral, hitting the rim of cyberspace with, I imagine, much the same tinny doink as issues from my word processor when virtual paper hits the virtual wastebasket.

This is not depth, if you haven't guessed. This is fun, or an attempt at it. My kind, and maybe yours. Probably only mine. But as I understand it, there's no waste of physical material in cyberspace, only of time and virtuality, if that's a word -- and this is the perfect spot (corner of Oblivion and Nowhere) to try and say things that may never be tried or said with perfect appropriateness anywhere else. As many, many, many have discovered far ahead of me.

This will be a space for words and nothing but. I hope that if you're stymied you'll move on, that if you're bored you'll check out -- and without scorching this piece of property or cursing its sole owner and proprietor on your journey south. We can only do what we can do, and what I hope to do is share coincidence, delight, revelation, shock, spiritual transport (atheism always!): those fast-dissolving droplets of magic and mystery that douse us daily like drizzle, slide off our scotch-guarded rags, and are forgotten just that easily.

No, it's not a waste of time. Nor even of virtuality. What is virtuality for, what function can cyberspace serve, if not to provide a housing for the unlimited preservation and infinite archiving of ephemera? A vast store of intangibles, a compendium of the ineffable? Besides, this box is mine. My time, my space, my virtuality, my tinny doink.

But now it's late, and that will have to do for a manifesto, the barest of territorial pissings. Substance, we hope, will accrue from here. I'm still queasy from those damnably delicious French peanuts, and tireder than before. And this headache will not cure itself. But I'll take an Alka-Seltzer before sacking in with my loved one and furthering intimacies with a pillow or two, and by sunrise and worktime I trust every bodily acid and inner humour will have settled and sunk, more or less contentedly, to its designated place.

I wish that for you, my friend, and more, and more besides.

"Now it's time to say good night . . . "
-- From an old song

Sometimes a wind blows

2005-09-25T00:00:00.000-07:00

He opened his eyes.
The curtains of the window were flung back,
The fire and the candle were out,
And the room was filled with green moonlight.
And pressed against the window-pane
Was a wide, round face,
Winking -- winking --
Solemnly dropping one eyelid after the other.
Tick -- tock -- went the watch under his pillow,
Wink -- wink -- went the face at the window.

-- Amy Lowell, "Nightmare: A Tale for an Autumn Evening,"
from Men, Women and Ghosts (1916)