Time to form a Legion of Doom
So the other night, it suddenly strikes me. I haven't checked my mail in forever. Then it struck me that at the moment, if I want to reply to a letter, I have to actually hit the reply button and type something, as opposed to printing it in my next Q&A column. So in other words, I had a good hundred e-mails I had to send out. If I missed something from you, sorry, probably looked too much like spam at a glance. Plus I had over a hundred new "Yanking you off RPGamer Q&A was a really frelling stupid idea." letters and when you're tired, it's hard to remember which ones still need replying to.
Seeing as the bulk of these e-mails involved people griping that there is no longer any daily means for them to be exposed to me, I propose the following three possible solutions:
- Read through an entry of either this page's archives, or RPGamer's Q&A archives every day.
- Start posting on that message board that a whole bunch of people talked me into making, posted on a couple times, and forgot about.
- Go download an IRC program and connect to irc.esper.net then join #google which I just set up. (I recommend ircle for Mac users, and anything other than mirc for the rest.)
Personally, I'd go with option #3. It's a lot like option #2, except that I'm a heck of a lot more likely to pay attention to it.
Moving on, a while ago some people advocated that I do some more writing. Ironically enough, this somehow inspired me to get some serious work done on absolutely everything else on this site. To make up for that, I sat down and wrote this little trilogy of stories found below. I'm rather proud of them, at least the first one, for reasons explained down in that afterword.
Before I post the actual stories though, I've been thinking it'd be nice to get some of this stuff published somehow. I think most things I write suck, but I do have a few good ones, and I figure there's a few other nerds writing good weird pseudo-horror vignettes out there (Thor comes to mind). So I'm pondering the notion of rounding up a book's worth, and trying to get it published under a title like "Tales from the Internet" or something similarly cheesy. Anyone else like that concept?
So anyway, stories:
Night Walks
I have never been in good shape by anyone's standards. When I was a young child, picky eating habits had my parents and doctors extremely worried that I would starve to death. A few personal traumas and diseases later however, I find myself to be an object of quite noticeable mass. It is for this reason that I make a habit of taking a walk every day, and through a combination of this fact and my peculiar ethnic heritage that during the summer months, I almost always take these walks at midnight.
Living as I do in a small town in southern New England, these walks take me down along the coastline, with no life in sight save the trees and a few birds. On rare occasions, another person of the nocturnal persuasion will pass by in the other direction, but by and large I am left only with the company of my own thoughts.
I once walked along the beach during a very peculiar storm. With Long Island a few short miles off the coastline, the beaches of Connecticut have some of the stillest water to be found in the Atlantic. This night however, despite there being not a cloud in the sky, nor any real breeze to speak of, the waves were cresting three meters high, clearing the sands completely and crashing clear across the road which ran parallel, and along which I walked. I personally saw an entire oak tree tossed from the sea, to land perfectly balanced on the end of a jetty. As this happened after the beach season, dead shellfish littered the street, and huge mountains of uprooted eel grass rotted on the beach for months.
On another of my midnight excursions, I heard a strange sound of footsteps behind me, along with some strangely labored breathing. Letting my imagination run free for the sake of self-inflicted entertainment, I quickened my pace to outrun this mysterious follower. Said follower also picked up speed, and as the sounds grew closer, I noticed the breathing did not sound human, and the footsteps were far too rapid. Looking behind me I saw, lit only by the moon reflecting off the water, a shadowy figure coming up behind me. Said figure stood nearly two meters high, looking like a man at a glance. Closer inspection however revealed the silhouette to bear far more than the standard compliment of legs, and bright red eyes spaced too far apart blinked in the darkness. I had to this point been playing with childish fears in my mind, never really suspecting more than perhaps a weary old man on a nightly stroll. While I doubted the possibility that some horrific monster was indeed rushing towards me, the sight in the darkness tossed more than a few logs into the fires of fantasy.
As this figure finally drew into the ethereal ring of one of the all too infrequent street lights, it was of course revealed to simply be a man with reflective headgear, walking a large dog that struggled to get closer to me, a stranger in the darkness.
The next night's events are not so easily explained away however. Walking again in the dead of night, with not even the crashing of meager waves to pierce the silence, I heard a sound behind me.
tick-tick-tack
The sound of a pebble being kicked along the ground. I thought nothing of it and kept walking.
tick-tick-Tack
Closer this time.
tick-Tick-skitter...
This third pebble skipped right past me. I turned to see if perhaps some unruly child was tossing small stones at me, but there was no one to be found. I continued down the road, turning to follow the curve of the beach.
TACK-TACK-THUNK!
To my left, the sound of a rock being thrown into one of the dinghies, kept on the beach to reach ships moored offshore by yachters dodging docking fees. At this point I stopped and gave the area a good looking over, trying to find from whence these stones were being thrown, but again, I was completely alone in the night.
Tack-Tack-Skittack
Tack-Tack-Skittack
As I proceeded, the pebbles and rocks became more frequent. More inexplicable. More unsettling. I moved along until it was completely impossible for them to be thrown from behind a jetty or the corner of a house, turned around, and waited. In the distance, I heard faintly what sounded like the laughter of a little girl, coming from the direction of the water.
I spun on my heels and kept walking my usual path. The stones continued behind me until I started heading inland, but I was no longer stopping. Whether someone was really throwing these my way, or I was caught in the middle of some freak meteor shower, it clearly seemed I should get home as quickly as possible, with a nice solid roof overhead.
TACK-TACK-THUNK!
Spiders
Some people have terrible problems with insects. Cockroaches in their kitchen, termites in the walls, ants in the pantry, flies around fruit bowls, and so forth. Some people even have luna moths twice the size of their hands flying through their windows. Me? I've never seen any sort of insect in my house. Spiders are another story.
I live you see in an arachnophobe's nightmare. I've counted at least twenty varieties of spider in my room alone. they lurk in the corners, hang down from the ceilings, take residence inside various electronic devices, and teem out of any small holes in the walls.
I myself have nothing against spiders. Without them I may be overrun with mosquitos every summer. They seem to like me well enough too. Frequently I am made anchor to one of their webs. Once a young spider even settled upon my head and wove quite the intricate web between the frame of my glasses and the edge of my eye socket.
While the bulk of the spiders I share residence with are harmless and small, there are some exceptions. Frequently I wake up to find bites on my ankle, always arranged in an equilateral triangle. Then there's the big ones. Spiders with abdomens the size of large grapes. Again, these show a good deal of variation. Brown and hairy, not unlike a coconut, white and translucent, black with white markings. These are more than a little unsettling. A friend less accustomed to the sight once decided to kill one of these rotund fellows. After three strong blows with the nearest blunt object, each costing the arachnid a leg or two, it finally dropped to the floor. Five or six bludgeonings later, with a sickening crunch or two, the creature finally ceased moving.
I have to wonder what these spiders eat. Again, I've never seen any insects in this house. Even assuming the spiders find them before I do, their mummified husks should be visible in their webs. Perhaps at some strange hour of the day they depart my home, seeking their prey in the woods behind the house, or perhaps a colony of beetles resides on my roof.
The only time I've ever felt fear of these spiders came a year or so ago, around four A.M. on a hot summer's night. A spider the size of a quarter crawled across the monitor of my computer as I was typing. Giving the oversized arthropod a wide birth, I stepped away for a moment, reaching for my drink. It was then I noticed there were at least a dozen such spiders in the room. Unsettled, I retreated downstairs, passing several more on the stairs. The lower floor of the small cottage also suffered from this invasion however. Doors lined with the unsettling little beasties. They crawled along the floor, on shelves, the windows, everywhere. Standing in the middle of my kitchen, the spiders around me turned, and started rushing towards me, some having to leap off countertops to do so. This quite frankly was the last straw, and I fled into the streets, walking a mile in the pre-dawn light to the home of a relative who failed to believe my tale. Indeed, as the spiders were gone without a trace when I returned, nobody believed my tale until it was repeated exactly a year later, in the presence of a friend.
Perhaps a month ago, my furnace was in need of repair. The repairman was forced to crawl across bare dirt in the meter high crawl space under the house. He was quite apprehensive to do this naturally, and seemed a bit shaken when he returned. Specifically he mentioned that he saw spiders the size of a human head down there.
I assume of course that he was exaggerating this. True, I've seen larger spiders in my home than I would think existed in this part of the world, but the notion of spiders that size is preposterous.
Of course, I haven't ever seen any mice around here either. Or rats. Or any other small rodent really.
Come to think of it, there used to be a whole lot more squirrels around here...
They're Just Stories
New England may very well be the horror capital of the world. It has the rest of America beat at least. All the greats lived here. Sure, the big name directors of slasher flicks are more likely based in Hollywood, but that's not the same thing. Anyone can throw buckets of blood at a gang of dopey teens. I'm talking about the minds who come up with supernatural horrors, weird paranoia, and so forth. Edgar Allen Poe resided in Boston. H.P. Lovecraft spent his whole life in Providence. Steven King for what it's worth is up in Maine. Some relatives of mine once considered purchasing the former home of Rod Serling right here in Connecticut, but they were put off by the pentagram inlaid in the floor.
That brings us of course to the first possibility here. Salem Massachusetts as everyone knows was home to one of the most disturbing events in American history. Over one hundred innocent people brutally murdered upon being accused of various supernatural crimes in that town, and a fairly wide area surrounding. Now, you could argue that a certain glorification of these events could give the region a background of horror, but you would be dead wrong. Growing up here, not one person gets the impression that there was actually any consorting with the devil going on in the area. Quite the opposite in fact. Today Salem is something of a wican mecca, and New England has a pretty high concentration of nature worshippers. There is something one must consider here though. Assuming, as we must, that there were no human agents causing the various events in colonial New England that set off the witch trials, what did?
The age of the area could also be a factor. Discounting the native people as people so often do, the original thirteen colonies are a good deal older than the rest of the country, indeed, older than the country itself. If age were the sole factor however, we'd be awash in the horror writings of europe, or Georgia for that matter.
Speaking of the Native Americans, a point should be made about the relationship early settlers had with them. The western states were taken in a series of bloody wars with the people who first lived there, but in New England, things were much friendlier. The island of Manhattan as we all know was purchased for essentially nothing. People like to sympathize with those who dwelt there for being swindled. It's possible though is it not that they simply wanted someone else watching over that land?
When asked what sort of area I live in, the reply I usually give is to picture the setting of the movie Beetlejuice, but without the ghosts. Once, upon hearing this, someone in attendance shouted back to me, "What do you MEAN without the ghosts?" Fair enough. While they won't typically admit it, everyone who's lived in the area has a ghost story or two to tell. Nobody brags about it, and nobody talks about it in broad day light, but if you get a few people together at the right time of night, and the right sort of mood, out they spill. "I think I have a poltergeist. Once I was drinking a cup of coffee, and suddenly there was chili powder mixed in." "I woke up the other night and there was an old woman sitting at the foot of my bed. I asked who she was, she screamed and disappeared." "Some friends and I were playing with a ouiji board... ...it yanked forcefully over to no, and the needle cracked in half."
When I was little, I used to see monsters. In the back yard, late at night, when nobody else was looking. That I assume is typical. When you're three years old, you see monsters everywhere. Childish fears, overactive imaginations, and a lack of grounding in reality. I mention this mainly to discuss the sort of monsters I saw. I didn't see creepy clowns, or big monkeys, or giant spiders, none of the standard boogiemen. In nightmares, sure, but those weren't what I saw lurking by the bushes in the back yard late at night. I saw strange amorphous bubbling mounds with too many eyes and tentacles. I couldn't really describe them back then, but the memories stuck with me over the years. I wonder if the classics of the horror world are perhaps based on similar childhood memories.
Speaking seriously though, it's all just stories. Sure, everyone has one, sometimes several. Sure, the oldest part of the country is still full of dark old woods while the rest of the country is paved over. Sure half my neighbors keep gargoyles on their doorsteps and circles of stones in their back yards. Sure I'm surrounded by centuries old mansions built on "ancient Indian burial grounds." Sure 90% of the houses around here seem to be abandoned. The point still stands that it's purely a coincidence that all the great American horror writers live in the same area. There's just something about the smell of dried maple leaves that makes you think of death. Something about the sands on the beach that makes you think of otherworldly horrors. There aren't really any malevolent forces at work around here. They're just stories.
Probably.
Afterword
In case you thought any of the above were fiction, I must stress to you that it was not. These stories above are true accounts from my own life. Anything contained within which does not match up with reality, then it can only be chalked up to my own misrecollection of facts. For instance, I'm not entirely sure it was Maine where Steven King lives.
Oh, and it seems that twice in a row I have a scary pic for you. This doesn't really fit my usual criteria, but I think that when someone actually goes to the trouble of sending me Clock Tower fan art, I'm obligated to post it.
