Joshua Reynolds's Blog, page 18

Fixing the Bones

Another from the commonplace book. A thing about medieval bones and the thieves who love them.

So. Unsanctioned traffic in relics was a thing in the Middle Ages. That’s practically begging for a story – a series of stories, even. Relic-smugglers breaking into and looting the holy tombs of Rome, selling the bones of the saints to collectors and churchmen across the Alps. Think Ocean’s Eleven, only set in a Roman sepulchre rather than a Las Vegas casino. Maybe even Ocean’s Thirteen. 

Not Ocean’s Twelve, though. Nobody wants that.

Dibs on that idea, by the way. That’s my idea. Get your own.

Oh, wait. Shoot. Le Scorpion is a thing. Read Le Scorpion, by the way. It’s pretty great. I’ve read the first three or four albums and it’s a nice little swashbuckling action/conspiracy thriller.

Still a good idea though. I can probably add vampires to it. Maybe something having to do with essential salts. Really punch it up for the after-dark crowd.

Oh, I bet I could even do a fantasy spin on it!

Blacula Lives

I like movies. If you’ve hung around me long enough, I’ve probably talked your ear off about one film or another. The only thing I like more than talking about the movies I’ve seen is talking about ones that were never made. Not lost films, or the scripts that never found a director, but rather the films that exist only in the fevered mind of what Patton Oswalt calls a sprocket fiend. The films that could have been, should have been, but never were. An alternate cinematic history, if you will.

The first of these – or rather, the one I’ve thought about the longest – is Blacula Vs Sugar Hill (1975). Starring William Marshall, Marki Bey and Yaphet Kotto. Based on a screenplay by Bill Gunn and directed by Larry Cohen.

Imagine if, in 1975, AIP had decided to roll the dice one last time on the Blacula franchise – but this time, the vampire is facing another AIP original – Sugar Hill. With a script by Ganja & Hess (1973) writer and director Bill Gunn, and directed by Larry Cohen, Blacula Vs Sugar Hill (also known as Blacula Lives!) finds a reluctant William Marshall returning to the role of Prince Mamuwalde, and Marki Bey once again sliding into the white jumpsuit of Diana ‘Sugar’ Hill.

Other members of the cast include Yaphet Kotto as the menacing bokor, Mr. Sunlight; Julius Harris as hitman turned vampire, Turner; Art Lund as scheming mob boss Morgan; Don Pedro Colley as Baron Samedi; Geoffrey Holder as Baron Cimitière; Zara Cully as Mama Maitresse; Don Mitchell as Justin Carter; Thalmus Rasulala as Dr. Gordon Thomas; with a special cameo by Pam Grier, reprising her role as Lisa Fortier in a stunning dream sequence.

A sequel to both Scream Blacula Scream (1974) and Sugar Hill (1974), the film opens with Mamuwalde’s resurrection by the villainous Mr. Sunlight. Sunlight, working for mob-boss Pretty Johnny Morgan, has drawn Mamuwalde back to the land of the living for one purpose: to destroy the woman who calls herself Sugar Hill.

What follows is an overstuffed-but-exciting seventy minute psychedelic showdown between the living, the dead, and the in-between. Zombies battle vampires; Baron Samedi is captured by Sunlight’s magics; Mamuwalde’s old foes, Justin Carter and Gordon Thomas, are summoned by Baron Cimitière to fight the vampire; Mr. Sunlight matches his mystic powers against those of Mama Maitresse; and in the gore-soaked finale, Mamuwalde and Sugar Hill invade Sunlight’s island fortress, battling undead mobsters in an effort to reach the man responsible for their respective difficulties.

The film proves to be a moderate success, revitalizing AIP’s then-waning interest in horror films. Marki Bey is signed to a two picture deal for further Sugar Hill sequels, including Sweet Babylon (1977) – written and directed by Gunn – and Sugar Hill in Hell (1979). Marshall, less interested in returning as Mamuwalde, is nonetheless convinced to give it a fourth and final go in Blacula, Prince of Darkness (1976), which is the first – though not the last – of AIP’s joint-ventures with overseas studios – in this case, Hammer. In the film, Mamuwalde finally comes to grips with Dracula – played by an equally reluctant Christopher Lee – in a ‘senses-shattering showdown of the supernatural’.

While neither actor is what one might call invested, the very act of sharing a screen seems to bring out the best in both Lee and Marshall, and the confrontation between them proves memorable. Appearances by Don Mitchell as Justin Carter and Peter Cushing as Van Helsing cement the film’s status as a cult classic.

With both Bey and Marshall moving on to greener pastures in the early eighties, AIP was forced to get creative. Fresh off of his run on Ironside (1967-1975), Don Mitchell agrees to reprise his role as Justin Carter for further films. The first of these, Q (1982), is directed by Larry Cohen and finds occult expert Carter locked in battle with another supernatural menace, and lumbered with a conniving sidekick, Jimmy Quinn, ably played by Michael Moriarty. The duo proves to be popular enough that Cohen agrees to direct another two, including The Substance (1985), which finds Carter and Quinn investigating an alien menace, and Monster Cop (1988), which has the distinction of being written by Cohen himself, and sees the duo go up against Robert Z’dar’s titular undead cop.

This was followed by a short lived and largely forgettable television series, Carter & Quinn, that lasted for a single season. Even a surprise appearance by William Marshall as Mamuwalde in the season finale does little to perk up the ratings but it finds new lease on life later, on DVD.

The Low House

My grandmomma used to warn me about low houses and what might be living in them. Something worse than any drug house or den of sin. A predatory, slinky sort of place that was always just where you least expected it. The sort of place you might catch out of the corner of your eye as you drive past, leaning back up off the road and looking a bit out of place – a bit unusual.

Keep your eyes peeled, next time you go for a ride. But whatever you do, don’t go in.

The house sat back up a-ways off Red Church Road, settled into a rut of kudzu vines and sway-trunked trees. It was abandoned. Or maybe it had never had a human presence in it at all. It was lacking in that touch, that sense of human warmth.

No one had ever owned it. No one ever would. The folks who lived closest to it ignored it. Pretended they didn’t see it. But they crossed to the other side of the road from it nonetheless. The house was a low house, they whispered. A bad house. It wasn’t a house at all, they said. It just looked like one.

It glared out at the world through empty, black windows and its door yawned open, filled with cobwebs from corner to corner. In the summer, hornets nested in the walls and the house seemed to vibrate with their numbers, wooden slats trembling.

Lightning hit it twice in twenty years, but it didn’t burn. Instead it persisted. The wood turned black with mould and it sagged oddly in a fierce wind.

But it never fell down. Never collapsed. Nothing could get rid of it. Seemed like nothing ever would. Until the county decided to tear it down so the logging trucks could get through to the deep, black woods behind it.

A fancy man from the county came out to see it one day, to assess it he told its neighbours, and the house gave out with a quiet moan as he pushed through the kudzu and stepped into its secret places. He stopped, as if listening to the wind. And then he went on in. And the house seemed to groan as its windows rattled even though there was no wind. Not even a breeze.

He didn’t come back out, that fancy man. Just vanished the same way Dell Mark did in ’88 and Poss Hart did in ’69. Vanished and gone. Swallowed up by the low house on Red Church Road. And the neighbours clucked their tongues, and shook their heads and pretended they’d never seen no fancy man come down thisaway. It was easier that way.

When the county trucks came rumbling along a week later, they didn’t find it. It had picked itself up and moved on, that nasty low house. The county-men found holes in the turf full of splinters and brick dust where it had walked off in the night.

They never found the fancy man. Or Dell Mark. Or Poss Hart. Or any of the others going all the way back, climbing up the years like the kudzu vines it had left behind.

The moral is, watch out for low houses. They hard to get in and harder still to get out of.

The Enemy of Evil

Sic pereant inimici tui, Domine.

– John Thunstone, Rouse Him Not, 1982

Manly Wade Wellman is responsible for the creation of a number of supernatural sleuths, occult detectives and werewolf punchers, including Judge Pursuivant. But, arguably one of the more well-known of Wellman’s coterie of heroes is John Thunstone. Big and blocky, with a well-groomed moustache and eyes like flint, Thunstone is an implacable and self-described ‘enemy of evil’. He hunts it with the verve of a Van Helsing and strikes with the speed and viciousness that puts Anton Zarnak to shame.

Well read and well-armed against vampires, werewolves and all things dark and devilish, Thunstone seeks out malevolent occult menaces in a variety of locales. The sixteen stories and two novels have settings which range from the steel and glass corridors of Manhattan to the mountains of the rural South, or the pastoral fields of England. He faces off against Inuit sorcerers, demonic familiars and worse things in the name of protecting the Earth and all its peoples from the hungry shapes in the dark that would otherwise devour it and them.

Thunstone made his first appearance in Weird Tales in the November 1943 issue with “The Third Cry to Legba”, which was followed  by “The Golden Goblins” in the January 1944 issue of Weird Tales. Every other issue of Weird Tales in 1944 saw a new Thunstone story, with “Hoofs” (March), “The Letters of Cold Fire” (May), “John Thunstone’s Inheritance” (July), “Sorcery from Thule” (September) and “The Dead Man’s Hand” (November) appearing in rapid succession.

1945 saw a further four stories in Weird Tales-“Thorne on the Threshold” (January), “The Shonokins” (March), Blood from a Stone” (May), and “The Dai Sword” (July). Thunstone only appeared in the pages of Weird Tales twice in 1946, in the March and July issues in the stories “Twice Cursed” and “Shonokin Town”. The final three stories-“The Leonardo Rondache”, “The Last Grave of Lill Warran” and “Rouse Him Not”-appeared, respectively, in the March 1948 and May 1951 issues of Weird Tales, with the final John Thunstone story appearing more than thirty years later in the fifth issue of the Lin Carter edited fanzine, Kadath. There were two subsequent Thunstone novels-What Dreams May Come in 1983 and The School of Darkness in 1985.

Beyond this, there was also the seminal episode of the anthology TV series ‘Monsters’, which saw actor Alex Cord play an intense and business-like John Thunstone in a wonderfully creepy adaption of “Rouse Him Not”.

Throughout these stories, regardless of medium, Thunstone remains a dedicated opponent of evil in all of its guises, though the origin of his one-man crusade is never delved into by Wellman. Thunstone, like many pulp heroes, sprang fully formed from his creator’s imagination and remained largely unchanged throughout his career.  And what a career it was!

Only Carter’s Anton Zarnak or Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin fought as many world-shaking menaces as Thunstone matched muscle and wit against in his time. Armed with a silver sword-cane gifted to him by Wellman’s phantom-fighting patriarch, Judge Pursuivant, as well as a nigh encyclopaedic knowledge of the occult learned at the feet of other enemies of evil, including the aforementioned de Grandin (whom is mentioned as Thunstone’s mentor and friend in at least four of the stories, including “The Last Grave of Lill Warran”), Thunstone faces off with a diverse cast of (occasionally re-occurring) enemies.

Among these are the arch-occultist Rowley Thorne and the pre-human Shonokins. Thorne, a seeming combination of M.R. James’ villainous rune-caster Julian Karswell and Aleister Crowley, is a burly, bald-headed menace to humanity. He routinely bargains with outer monstrosities for powers which he inevitably attempts to inflict on his enemies, of whom Thunstone is first. Thorne made his first appearance fittingly enough in the first Thunstone story, and came back for a rematch no less than three times, including in the novel, The School of Darkness. Indeed, one short story, “Thorne on the Threshold”, was entirely devoted to Thorne, with Thunstone only appearing at the very end.

Next to Thorne, the Shonokins were Thunstone’s most insidious opponents appearing several times over the course of the series. A strange pre-human race desirous of reclaiming that which they have lost, the Shonokins claim to have ruled the entirety of North America before the arrival of the first humans. Each and every Shonokin is a sorcerer on par with Rowley Thorne, and their cunning is wholly alien. More often than not, only their inability to stand the sight of a dead Shonokin saves Thunstone from their powers and the latter takes advantage of this weakness with brutal efficiency.

More so than many of his literary peers, Thunstone is less a detective than he is a soldier, serving a higher power in an unending war against the unholy and unnatural.  He employs none of Carnacki’s technological tricks, or John Silence’s spiritual remedies, instead relying only on his own two hands and his skill with a silver sword-cane supposedly forged by Saint Dunstan himself. In this aspect, Thunstone resembles Howard’s Kirowan, though he lacks the haunted wanderer’s gloomy outlook. If anything, Thunstone is surprisingly optimistic, given the threats he faces on a seemingly daily basis.

Perhaps this is due to in part to Thunstone’s sociability. Many of the stories revolve around his friends or allies, including medicine men, magicians, and occult adventurers of all types. Rather than being a lone warrior like Zarnak or Kirowan, Thunstone seems quite happy to seek out the help of others and give help when it is required.

Romance too is not absent from the Thunstone stories, with women of all descriptions passing through Thunstone’s orbit. From his long-simmering relationship with the Countess Monteseco to his brief flirtation with the femme fatale Sabine Loel, Thunstone’s blood runs as red and as hot as any of Howard’s barbaric heroes.

Optimism and sociability aside, Thunstone stands as a stalwart sentry over the mundane world; wherever evil rears its head, John Thunstone rises to confront it, pitting the strength of his body and his soul against the fury of Hell. Again and again, he hurls himself into the teeth of the void in order to put right that which is wrong and to prove once more why he is among the front ranks of those who call themselves the enemies of evil.

*Author’s Note: This essay originally appeared in 2012, at Black Gate Magazine.*

Ghost Dance 1894

Another entry from my zibaldone to start the month off, but just a short one, though, as I’m a busy fellow this week. Enjoy!

In 1894, James Mooney, an ethnographer, recorded a series of Ghost Dance songs, performed by the Kiowa and the Arapaho, among others. Several of the recordings are still available, via the ever-helpful Internet Archive.

Mooney also wrote The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees (1891), which is interesting reading, if you’re into that sort of thing. Or if you’re a fan of Manly Wade Wellman, who used the book in several of his stories. Which I am.

I haven’t made use of any of what I’ve read, yet, but I might at some future point. I find older volumes like this to be more interesting than modern ethnographies.

While they’re often full of inaccurate or blatantly false material, they also contain a lot of great seeds for story ideas. Granted, some (most) of those seeds are based on erroneous scholarship, but given how often I use Elliott O’Donnell’s writings as inspiration it’s not like I’m going to let that stop me.

The Amateur’s Amateur

Today’s look at the world of the Royal Occultist centres on one of Charles St. Cyprian’s better-known associates, the amateur occultist, Philip Wendy-Smythe.

Philip Wendy-Smythe is the last of a once-proud line. Avowed orientalist and amateur occultist, he has amassed a substantial collection of mostly fake, but occasionally extremely dangerous artefacts, grimoires and statuary.

Over the course of his life, he joined and was subsequently expelled from over a dozen secret societies, prior to (and after) meeting St. Cyprian and Gallowglass, including the Cult of Gla’aki, the Order of the Cosmic Ram, the Starry Wisdom, the Golden Dawn, and a heretofore unnamed sect of cultists inhabited by brain-eating insects. He is also the only man to be expelled from the Voyagers Club on three separate occasions, most recently after accidentally unleashing a phantom clowder of ancient Egyptian cat-ghosts in the communal billiards room.

Wendy-Smythe’s abiding obsession was the exploration of reality’s darkest corners, and it often led him into dangerous situations, such as the incident with Gussie Winkers and the Cult of Anubis, and necessitated his rescue on more than one occasion by the Royal Occultist and his plucky-yet-vicious assistant.

Of late, Wendy-Smythe has taken on the role of occult adventurer, with mixed success. He is a person of interest in a number of unsolved cases, including the fiery destruction of an Inuit mummy belonging to the Pitt-Rivers Museum, the disappearance of a bohemian artist of ill-repute in Southwark, and the theft of a certain unpleasant mezzotint from Oxford University. It remains to be seen whether he will grow into the role he has chosen for himself, or whether he will be consumed by his obsessions.

Wendy-Smythe was mostly created to give St. Cyprian and Gallowglass an excuse to become entangled in various events. An amateur occultist and collector of eldritch kitsch, he’s at once a foil and a McGuffin, dragging the heroes into one problem after another, often with the best of intentions. I imagine him looking like a younger and thinner Lou Costello, with the same sort of slapstick energy.

I’ve toyed with the idea of spinning him off into his own stories, as he fits the Wodehousian aesthetic a lot better than St. Cyprian, and would be a natural protagonist for a series of occult comedies. I’ve resisted the urge thus far, but I’ve got a list of ideas that I think would make terrible Royal Occultist stories, but excellent Wendy-Smythe adventures, including the aforementioned incident involving ghost-cats and a communal billiards room.

Only time will tell if I ever manage to sit down and write one, though.

These Cold Eyes

I don’t like things I can’t understand.

– Danny Foster

A shaggy shape prowls the night, hunting for victims. Men and women are slaughtered by simian hands, their spines shattered, the fluid within…stolen. Is it an escapee from the low rent circus that just left town under a cloud of misgivings, or something worse?

The camera draws back. The shape scrambles into view. A hairy mask is torn aside, and Karloff the Uncanny glares at the audience, his eyes wild, face twisted into a grimace of righteous madness.

The Ape (1940) was one of the slew of low-budget horror films that graced cinema screens in the wake of Universal’s success. It’s also one of the several starring Boris Karloff, taking a turn on the other side of the electrodes as the melancholy Dr. Adrian, a mad scientist intent on curing his daughter’s mysterious illness via a healthy application of human spinal fluid.

When an overly-aggressive circus ape breaks loose and goes on a rampage, Dr. Adrian is caught in the middle, much to his detriment. When he makes the mistake of treating the ape’s abusive trainer for wounds suffered during the creature’s escape, he draws the bestial ire of the monster.

It breaks its way into his lab in a surprisingly effective sequence, ripping a window right out of the wall and proceeds to destroy the hapless scientist’s lab. Adrian manages to kill the beast, but not before it ruins his life’s work, and any chance Adrian has of curing his daughter’s illness.

Luckily for the girl (and the audience), Adrian is just cracked enough to hit upon the perfect scheme, namely skinning the ape and wearing it for nightly jaunts out on the town, where he’ll collect more spinal fluid by cracking the backs of handy victims. An unorthodox scheme, but effective, at least until the end. Mistakes are made, things go badly and Adrian is outed and slain, without having cured his daughter.

All told, it’s a cheap effort, but entertaining for fans of Karloff, who does his best despite things. It’s a rough patch when compared to, say, Universals’ The Wolf-Man which came out a year later, with less-than imaginative special effects and a watered down script that drowns what could have been an interesting morality play in standard second-rate horror cheese.

Interestingly, while we’re on the subject of The Wolf Man, the two scripts share a writer-Curt Siodmak. Siodmak would later state that he wrote The Wolf Man with Karloff in mind for the lead role. One wonders whether or not seeing Karloff bound around in an ape costume gave Siodmak the inkling of the idea that would eventually become The Wolf Man.

Regardless, we have Monogram Pictures to thank for Karloff’s turn in said monkey suit. Monogram, one of the so-called ‘Poverty Row’ B-movie studios of the time, churned out a large number of low-budget films between 1931 and 1953. The output was a melange of mysteries, westerns, thrillers and, of course, horror films.

In 1938, Monogram adopted a policy of building films around actors with face-name recognition, including Karloff, who starred in a number of thrillers for the company.

The Ape was the last in the long string of films Karloff took the top-billing in for Monogram. Previously, he had been in the lead as the eponymous Asian detective in the Mr. Wong mysteries, Monogram’s answer to Warner Oland’s more successful turn as Charlie Chan at 20th Century Fox.

By the time The Ape rolled around, however, Karloff was growing tired of the pound-the-pavement pace of working for Monogram (and perhaps tired of playing Wong, an obvious caricature of and on the whole less interesting character than either Charlie Chan or Mr. Moto) and was looking forward to getting out of Poverty Row pictures. Monogram decided that after five relatively unsuccessful Mr. Wong pictures, Karloff’s last film with the company should play to his perceived strengths. Thus, The Ape.

After Karloff’s departure, his slot at Monogram would be taken by another icon-Bela Lugosi. At Universal, Lugosi famously turned down the role of Frankenstein’s brute creation, only to play a hunchbacked second-fiddle to both Karloff and beast in The Son of Frankenstein (1938). He continued to haunt the career of the man he’d inadvertently gifted with stardom, appearing with Karloff in several other films, including The Black Cat and The Raven. If there was ever the slightest fancy in anyone’s mind that poor Lugosi seemed doomed to follow in Karloff’s footsteps, his tenure at Monogram turned fancy to fact.

After 1942’s Bowery at Midnight (ostensibly a zombie film), in 1943 Lugosi appeared in The Ape-Man (which was followed by a sequel in 1944, The Return of the Ape-Man) for Monogram. The Ape-Man was a remake of The Ape, with a few tweaks to get the most out of Lugosi, who had to lope around in yak hair for a bit before getting strangled by a gorilla.

The story elements are slimmed down some, and the Jekyll/Hyde elements that simmered under the surface of The Ape are played for thrills, but it’s still recognisably Siodmak’s script. Later in the year, as if to trap him forever in Karloff’s shadow, Lugosi would don the makeup he had rejected years earlier and appear as Frankenstein’s monster in Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man.

Monogram continued cranking out films until the early Fifties, when television put a stake in the heart of the Poverty Row film studios. Monogram was absorbed by Allied Artists and disappeared from cinema screens. Nowadays, many of their films are in the public domain and easily found in part, or in whole on the internet for download, if you’re of a mind to seek them out.

Physician Extraordinary

“Learn how to THINK and you have learned to tap power at its source.”

– Dr. J. Silence, A Psychical Invasion, 1908

‘Rich by accident and a doctor by choice, John Silence took only those cases which interested him.’

The above is from “A Psychical Invasion” (1908), the first of Algernon Blackwood’s stories to feature Dr. John Silence, the ‘psychic doctor’. Blackwood chronicled six of Silence’s cases, though only five appear in the initial collection, John Silence (containing “A Psychical Invasion”, “Ancient Sorceries”, “The Nemesis of Fire”, “Secret Worship”, and “The Camp of the Dog”; “A Victim of Higher Space”, the sixth story, was included in later collections) released in 1908 (then re-issued in 1942). Even if you can’t get your hands on one of the many reprint collections (or on the 1942 re-issue as I was lucky enough to do), you can rest easy…Blackwood’s work is in the public domain and is freely available from a variety of electronic sources.

The stories themselves are in the inimitable Blackwood style, seen at its most effective in “The Wendigo” and “The Willows”. The horrors that Silence faces are nebulous things, at once more vast than the horizon and smaller than the inside of a cupboard. They range from nightmare assaults out of deep time to unrequited yearnings gone impossibly savage, originating in both human action as well as from events far outside of human understanding. Time and space are suggestions at best, and as in the works of Hodgson and Lovecraft, reality itself comes under assault from outside entities which seek to impose themselves on their victims.  

Enter John Silence, MD.

Described as a handsome man, bearded and kindly-eyed, Silence is an anomaly to his peers-a genuine philanthropist, accepting only pro-bono cases of peculiar (RE: psychic) affliction, the cases which, as stated above, interest him in some way. How Silence went from a simple medical man to the ‘psychical physician’ is a story never told, but the origins of which likely lie within the mysterious half-decade that Silence undertook his long and severe training.

We are not told where this training took place, or what form it took beyond being at once a strengthening of his physical, mental and spiritual muscles. For five years, Silence disappeared from the world completely and when he returned, he took up his investigations into the supernatural.  And it’s at that point that Blackwood introduces us to him.

Despite his morbid sense of humor and his quirky impatience, at first glance Silence appears little different from his predecessor, Le Fanu’s Dr. Hesselius, another ‘psychic doctor’. But as his confrontation with the malevolent possessing entity of “A Psychical Invasion” progresses, Silence shows himself to be an altogether different sort of medical practitioner. To Silence, the loss of a man’s sense of humour (as in “A Psychical Invasion”) or persistent dreams of cats (“Ancient Sorceries”) are neither simple nor natural ailments brought on by a confluence of coincidence. Instead, they are spiritual cancers that must be rooted out of the minds and souls of the afflicted by any means necessary, though not, unfortunately, always successfully.  

‘The Other’ is an infection in Silence’s view…a dangerous toy at best and a fatal condition at worst. Whether it takes the form of hapless Sangree’s lycanthropic night-wandering as in “The Camp of the Dog” or poor Mr. Mudge’s involuntary transportations in “A Victim of Higher Space”, it is something which must be excised from the body social for the benefit of everyone. 

It his methods in regards to these cases which truly set Silence apart; less a doctor than a holistic shaman and more spiritualist than surgeon, he possesses a keen insight into human nature and an almost empathic grasp of his patient’s ailment, whether it’s ensorcellment or ectoplasmic manifestations. It is these two traits which form the basic tools that Silence employs. Where other occult detectives make use of science or magic to battle back the darkness, Silence employs only the power of the mind, whether channelled through the combination of a sensitive cat and protective dog as in “A Psychical Invasion”, or through the ‘good feelings’ of his occasional assistant, the ever-hapless Mr. Hubbard, as in “The Nemesis of Fire”.

This is not to say that Silence doesn’t confronts malicious psychic forces face-to-face; in both “A Psychical Invasion” and “Secret Worship”, Silence places himself in harm’s way to stare down respectively the ghost of a witch and the earthly manifestation of a fallen angel.  

In all cases, however, Silence achieves his aims not through superior force, but through an almost Zen-like understanding which unravels the complexities facing him and reduces them to but the merest scraps of ill-feeling.  For Silence, knowledge is indeed power and he employs his vast arsenal of the former with the deft touch of a scalpel, illuminating the darkness with the power of raw thought.   

Unfortunately, as with any surgeon, his skills can only take him so far, a fact which Silence himself readily admits. Indeed, not one of the six stories ends on an unequivocal up-note. Silence triumphs (or at the very least, explains) but not without cost to either himself or others…bodies are battered, minds are strained, and souls are frayed by the presence of the infernal. The scars of surgery, whether psychic or physical, always linger. As with anything, there is always a price to be paid by those who pit themselves against the darkness.

Luckily, John Silence is always available for a free consultation.

*Author’s Note: This essay originally appeared in 2011, at Black Gate Magazine.*

No One Ever Goes There

Jackapo County has Greece beat for ruins. Forgotten houses and stores, burnt out shells of places that no one owns – or no one will admit to owning. Claimed now only by the night birds and the kudzu. The old store in this story, and its odd decorations, is a real place. As far as I know, there’s nothing inside but empty shelves and cobwebs. Not that I went in, mind. The door was unlocked, but it wasn’t what you might call inviting.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s still there.

The store has been closed now for close to fifty years. The paint has all curled off, like strips of dead skin and the tin roof is full of flyspeck holes that make a whimpering sound during the lightning season. 

In the back room, fifty years ago, something happened. Just something, nobody knows what. Not really. A baby was born. Or a baby died. Maybe it was knives over cards, and blood dripping on an ace of spades. Some folks, when they were younger and more honest, said there was a woman there, in a cage, who’d tell a story for a taste of something, but she wasn’t really a woman, because what woman has eyes that yellow, or hands that rough, with palms so thick they might be pads? What woman has wings?

She killed a boy, who couldn’t answer her question. That’s what they said. Now they don’t say anything. Children’s stories. All of them. Just ideas. Something happened, we know not what. It doesn’t matter. Not now. Not after sixty years. 

Trees grow close on all sides now and crowd the road that runs in front. You miss it, if you blink. Just a ghost of a place that once was. Something happened, but it doesn’t matter. The windows are barred with iron and pregnant with dust and pollen residue and spiderwebs that stretch from crack to crack like tiny ladders.

The door through which the smell of pork cooking and sweet sodas sweating in the hot air once drifted is closed and barred and locked triple-tight with iron and there are curled yellowed pages from a book stuffed in the cracks and corners. Sometimes, they wriggle loose and whip and writhe across the road, plastering themselves across the thick, black-barked trees, revealing their skin-names to the world.

Deuteronomy.

Genesis.

Judges.

Ruth.

Isaiah.

The storm season boils through, sending old, crumbling pages flying high and tumbling low, pulling them from door and shutter, sending them away into the deep woods. Leaving the door bare and blank. On the windows, the iron rusts softly, crying red tears through the dull years.

They say, that sometimes now, you can smell those old-timey smells coming from the door and from the windows again.

They say, sometimes, you can hear a woman laugh, in the wind. Or the rustle of great black wings against the bars of a cage that is rusting away into nothing as the tide of years laps against the shore. Waiting.

They say, under the moon, you hear a voice, asking a question. One that nobody has answered yet. One that will never be answered, because we’ve forgotten how.

They say these things, sometimes. But usually, no one says anything. Just children’s stories.

No one goes there anymore, though.

Swamplands

“South Carolina is too small for a republic, but too large for an insane asylum.” 

– James Louis Petigru, 1860

South Carolina has a sort of dark magnetism to it. It’s hard to explain, unless the person you’re talking to has lived there. There’s a cosmic wrongness to it, amongst all the right. Streets that crack in curious ways, buildings that slump as if exhausted, railroad tracks weighed down with kudzu. Everything is ancient there, even things that have just been built. They accumulate years in days, and the light of the Circle K sign out on Garner’s Ferry flickers with portentous meaning. Oracles spit five dollar fortunes in broken bathroom stalls and the sins of past generations stalk their descendants through the swamp of years.

Time does not flow steadily in the Palmetto State, but instead eddies in out of the way places. Past and present collide like litter in the Congaree River, striking and spinning out in unpredictable ways. We hold tight to tradition – so tight that it warps in our hands or breaks entirely. There is a tension, everywhere. A communal pause, awaiting the inevitable drop of the other shoe. We lack Florida’s joie de vivre and Georgia’s stateliness.

It’s a shaggy sort of place, full of strange and wonderful things, if you know how and where to look. There are wraiths wandering the old paths, stinking of cinders fresh from Sherman’s fire. Devil-dogs loping through empty parking lots, in pursuit of half-glimpsed, hell-fuelled Cadillacs. Wild shadows that stretch and stumble in unsettling fashion. Witch-bottles clunk in the evening breeze and even the least-superstitious make sure there’s a bit of haint blue on the doorposts.

It’s the place I grew up. The place where I decided I wanted to be a writer. Southerners – and South Carolinians in particular – have one innate gift that no-one who has spent any time in the South can deny…we can tell good stories.

Sure, some folks call them lies, but that’s just jealousy talking. We’re born storytellers, right down to our blood and bones. We blend fact, fiction and fancy with every breath and fill the air with stories. Some good. Some bad. Mostly funny, though not all in that particular way as to be socially acceptable.

When I started writing, I started with what I knew and what I knew was South Carolina. I knew it – know it – like Lovecraft knew New England or Wellman knew the mountains of North Carolina. Or so I fancied. The truth is, I didn’t know what I knew or what I didn’t know and I still don’t.

But I feel it. I hear it and smell it and taste it. I can still hear the cicadas’ song and feel the summer breeze. I can taste rusty water and banana pudding and catfish stew. That’s what I wrote, and hope to write again.

I called my part of South Carolina – a nasty, low down dog mean part – Jackapo County. A sort of broke-down get back boogie of a place, where the Devil wouldn’t stay on a bet, but he might be inclined to visit. I’ve written around thirty stories set there – many of which feature the character of John Bass, a crochety old haint-breaker – plus an unpublished novel or two.

Over the years, I’ve drifted away from my roots and from Jackapo County. My writing has improved, but when I look back at those old stories, I see a spark of…something. Something I’m missing more and more, as the years roll on. Maybe it’s homesickness, or maybe it’s simply my muse – feral boo-hag that she is – digging her knucklebones into the underside of my mind, reminding me that sometimes you can go home again.

Sometimes you never really left at all.

At any rate, I’ve decided to indulge the hag, and try something special. Back when I started out, when deadlines did not loom and writing was a more leisurely activity than it is today, I engaged in regular free writing – pieces jotted down in ten or twenty minutes, with no regard to plot, character or structure. It was about playing with ideas that would never become stories. Most of them were set in Jackapo County. They were largely raw and – I thought – unusable vignettes, but I’ve come to see that the term ‘unusable’ don’t mean what it used to.

They were the stories between the stories. The the tall tales and urban legends that my characters knew but the readers didn’t. The swamplands of Jackapo County, where stories sink into the mire to wait for the unwary.

I aim to get back into the practice of free writing in the coming days, more for my own amusement than anything else. And maybe yours as well. I intend to share a few of them, at least – something new to entertain you. At least I hope it entertains you. We’ll see, won’t we?

Welcome to the swamplands. Try not to get mud on yourself.