Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #96 – The Long Trip to the House that Wouldn’t let People Leave

(Female, 40’s) My teenaged daughter and I were on a trip to Toronto together. We were staying in a hotel downtown and going to attend a play in which a friend of hers from high school was performing. We were on our way to the play, which was to be held at a big church far from downtown. We got as far as standing outside the huge church, an old fashioned colonial brick-style building that was surrounded by a wide lawn spotted with huge, old trees in full fall colors. My daughter remembered that she’d left something back at the hotel, something she needed desperately, so we started on the trip back to the hotel, hurrying, because we thought that we could make it back again in time for the play.

We walked for a long while, then we took a bus, then the subway. Then we came above ground and I looked around for the streetcar stop, but everything was different. We started walking, thinking that our hotel was nearby, wandering really. We went far enough that I realized we had been heading in the opposite direction. Along the beach, we saw piles of skeletons, a stack of bare white bones on the sand, and I told my daughter that that was from last winter’s storms!!

Then I thought I knew a short cut back to our hotel. We went into a shopping center and across some walkways and made a series of turns, and suddenly we were inside a children’s hospital. I asked a nurse if there was a way out of there. She looked at us very skeptically, and pointed to an elevator. My daughter walked in, though these plastic flaps that were not like real elevator doors, and pushed a button. I jumped in as the elevator started to descend. She told me it was freight elevator, not a people elevator.

…”You really don’t want to,” she said. But I insisted…

We came out of the building in a parking lot surrounded by a fence. So we went back into the building to go out the front door. We walked a long time, down a bunch of different hallways, looking for an exit. Finally, up ahead, I saw a staircase and a woman carrying a laundry basket. We hurried to the end of the hall, which narrowed as we went. The end was covered with thick wire mesh: you could see those stairs but you couldn’t get to them. I asked the woman, “How do we get over there?” “You really don’t want to,” she said. But I insisted. So she pointed to a door.

We went through the door and we found ourselves in the basement of a house. We followed the woman up the stairs. She was the mother of the family, now widowed, and she lived in the house with her teenaged son and daughter and another daughter who was 6 or 7. The house was full of all sorts of objects; it looked like a very crowded museum.
The woman began to bring out newspaper articles and programs to show us that she was a very famous musician. We said we had to get going because of the play! But the family looked at each other and smiled. “I’m sorry but there’s no way to leave. We are all trapped here. We never can go out. The house will not let us leave. ”

I looked around. All of the windows were covered with an incredibly thick ivy. They couldn’t be opened at all. The backdoor lead down to the basement, the basement where we’d come in from the hospital basement, maybe, but the door we came through had no doorknob on the inside. I opened the front door and stepped outside. There was a
small cement porch with a short brick wall around the perimeter and a rusty wrought iron gate opening to a sidewalk. I could see the whole city from where I stood. It smelled so good to be outside. I looked over my shoulder and saw the family standing inside the door, watching me. I started walking toward the sidewalk. As I did, the
wrought iron gate reached out and grabbed me and held on. I twisted and pulled, but it wouldn’t let go. It gripped and stretched, wrestling with me, until I was panting and sweating. When I backed up, toward the porch, it let go. If I moved again toward the sidewalk, it grabbed me. I want back inside where the family and my daughter were waiting. “Do you see what we mean?”

We stood there in the hallway, trying to assess the situation. “What about food? How do you get groceries?” “Boxes of groceries get dropped off in the yard.” Their crazy claim seemed to be true. Then I saw a metal switch that I hadn’t seem before, like a built-in key that you could turn. I thought maybe that was the way out. So I turned it. A whole series of gears began spinning like I’d set an enormous machine in motion. There were these shiny columns composed
of hundreds of little gears all turning. A huge rumbling noise came up from the basement and a heavy metal drawbridge covered the front door and held it shut permanently.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #95 – The Jack of Every Fable

(Male, 30’s) I woke heart racing and all I could think was, “Finally, something to send to the Grim Gnome!”

In an earlier thread of the dream I’d developed an unseemly crush on a Japanese lady I’d just met. This had just come to a close and I was feeling rather proud of myself for ceasing the flirtation as I wandered along some quasi-Boston streets that gave off a Venice vibe. The classic brownstones and familiar streets ran into what should’ve been the Charles River, sometimes neatly with sun-dappled willows lining unexpected parkways, other times the pavement and sidewalk terminating abruptly and requiring backtracking to equally unexpected bridges that crossed and recrossed the brown water.

My memory is fading somewhat but it was on this bit of walk that I began chatting with some college girl also walking there. My age hits me a bit; I’m not old, but she’s young enough to be right out as far as flirtation goes. The chatter is very much on the up and up end of small talk and so when we get to her house there’s nothing to read into her invitation for me to come in and meet her family. That being said, I’m constantly pushing to the back of my mind entirely inappropriate thoughts about how hot she is. Hawt. Very. Mm.

And something feels wrong, but I chalk it up to the inappropriate feelings. Still, crossing the threshold into her house, it’s hard to shake, this sense of wrongness. She’s talking about how she wants me to meet her grandmother, her parents, her brother. Something is out of place. The mood has inexplicably shifted.

I’m not kept in suspense long. We walk down the a tastefully appointed hallway and come to a bizarre room. The floor drops off to the right as though partially demolished and one can see the room below. To the left, opening directly onto the hallway are two rooms. As we approach, the contents of the nearest one remain obscured but the further one holds a woman. She’s sitting in a chair, wearing a white shift and as we draw nearer I can see that she’s an aged woman,
starved, with wirey grey and black hair tangled over a seamed face and eyes so sunken in their sockets as to almost be pits. In my shock I realize the girl who’s brought me here has stopped talking. She had been going a mile-a-minute practically since I met her, and now nothing. Am I looking at her grandmother? The horrible sense of wrongness comes over me again.

There’s a sort of noise from the storey below and I look down into the room and see a siamese twin, male and female, connected at the shoulder and torso. Both appear to be imbeciles but in good health – an impossibility given that one of the torsos ends in a twist of vertebrae. The sight is almost comic, like a really bad horror movie prop, but for some reason I know this set of twins is the girl’s parents. There’s something I don’t quite recall about her brother, who I saw next, a memory of something spiderish that’s swept aside as I realize I’ve come far enough to turn around and see the contents of the last room. There, scant feet from me is a creature that (now that I’m awake) I can only assume was inspired by Mattheson’s White Silk. It sat in a Victorian wheelchair, unable to rise. The hands were large, mis-shapen, pocked and clawed. The face was spider-eyed; there were no lips, no cheeks, just long, flat teeth like rodent’s incisors running the whole rim of the upper jaw. This was Grandmother; the other old woman was food.

I fled in terror away from the freakish family, but I fled deeper into the house.

Naturally, I lost my shit. I fled in terror away from the freakish family, but I fled deeper into the house. I made it to a room in which there was a ridiculously small window through which I know I should have been able to make myself fit, but I spent to long considering its smallness. When I quantified it as eight inches by four I knew I’d doomed myself. That’s simply impossible to fit through. The girl came to the room, all wolfish arousal and I tried to get a grip on how I was going to get out of this. As I played along with her entendres my mind scrabbled at my predicament the same way my hands had crabbed at the shrinking window moments earlier. Even though she knew I knew about her family I was still alive, so there were rules to this, if not reason.

I realized I was in a fairy tale. A misbegotten offshoot the Grimm Brothers. Had I actually heard this one somewhere? What were the rules for this story? She was panting and the climax which would either result in my escape or my demise was fast approaching. What to do? Continue? Flee? I was the Jack of every fable and had to come up with the unexpected solution…

And I woke up. Helluva dream.

Categories
Movies Other Haunts

Lycanthropes Only — werewolf-movies.com

My affection for werewolf tales is no secret.  Stories of tormented creatures of one kind who transform into tormented creatures of another kind speak deeply about so many of the profound changes we endure.  Or should I say they *can* speak deeply about such things.  So often, werewolf stories stink.  But that’s never dulled my affection.

So I was delighted to find a blog devoted solely to werewolf movies.  (http://www.werewolf-movies.com)  It doesn’t have the largest collection of reviews or articles yet but it sure seems headed in the right direction.  I also really appreciated the generous links section which has clued me into various different facets of werewolf related culture.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #94 – Mechanical Gorrillas

(Male, mid 40’s) I was a member of a scientific field study, the first to go into an area over run with a strange new creature. This area was an old abandoned amusement park. As part of the initial de-briefing, we were shown a home movie. In the movie, a family is riding on a train that traverses a large open plain. Roaming across this plain are life-size dinosaur robots that are skeletal dinosaurs. They move quite gracefully and effortlessly and are programmed to have interactions like real creatures. It’s sort of like a marionette show with self-directed marionettes that are larger than a house. There are also other kinds of animals living on this plain to make it feel like a real place — jackals, gorillas, etc. Then all of a sudden in this movie, a high school kid jumps out of the train and goes running out into the plain. The lead investigator stops the home movie and comments: He was never seen again. And furthermore, he was her brother. He had been depressed and her family had gone to this amusement park during spring break to cheer him up. This was nine years ago. The scandal had forced the park to close but it had been impossible to close down the plains fully because the dinosaur robots ran on solar powered batteries and they still roamed the area. Plus the living creatures were supported by a self-sustaining ecosphere. We were being sent in to see what was up, I think half expecting that everything would be dead.

…Roaming across this plain are life-size dinosaur robots that are skeletal dinosaurs…

Clearly that wasn’t the case. There were about a half dozen of us and none of us carried weapons, just scientific gear, pens, paper… I was a little concerned that we watched the de-briefing movie while we were inside the plain because it gave the resident creatures plenty of time to come over and size us up. There were jackals roaming around behind us but everyone’s attention was drawn to these gorillas. There were four or five of them. Some had heads with albino hair on bodies of chocolate brown and some that the exactly reversed pattern. For some reason we took that to mean they had been assembled from parts, that these were mechanical. Perhaps the boy who ran away had assembled them. The creatures kept getting closer and closer to the team and everyone just kept standing around taking notes. Finally a gorilla stood up and hammered on his chest threateningly. We realized the danger we were in and started running off down the track toward the amusement park’s offices.

Categories
Movies

Movie: Kwaidan – Gorgeous Japanese Ghost Stories

I’d never heard of Kwaidan (1965) before I checked it out this week. The DVD is released on the Criterion Collection so I knew it had to be nutritional, if not down right crunchy. It’s a pretty darned interesting film especially if you think that Japanese horror started with Ringu.

Kwaidan however, is an anthology, consisting of four separate stories all directed by Masaki Kobayashi, and as such it suffers the drawbacks of most anthology films. That is, at best it’s like a mini-film festival of short films and at worst they’re a bunch of unrelated stuff strung together. Kwaidan is more unified than many anthology films but it does feel really rather long. One suggestion that might sound heretical to cinema-snobs would be to watch each story separately, say, before watching another movie.

But Kwaidan works as a whole piece as well. Speaking personally, the stylistic unity was most effective. There is a gloriously theatrical sense to the movie; that is, it feels like it was mostly shot on a sound stage, one filled with meticulously constructed sets and folks in great costumes. For me, this sense of an artificial frame bolstered the “once upon a time” quality of the ghost stories. It’s a really different sensation than watching a lot of contemporary horror films that feel almost like documentaries and I found it quite refreshing.

I can’t say that Kwaidan is exactly scary but then I don’t find ANY ghost stories scary so much as sentimental. Better to say that it’s creepy and has many very nice, arresting images – exactly what I’d expect from a horror film on the Criterion Collection.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #93 – Alligator Children

(Male, early 20’s) This one qualifies more as a weird dream, I think, than as an actual nightmare but it was vivid enough to keep me thinking about it all day.

There were these three small alligators playing in a dried up creek bed. The sand was a dark green and the little alligators were blue or at least they has a bluish color to them. A mother-alligator was watching over them. But all of a sudden another alligator showed up. It was huge and scary and it pushed the mother-alligator out of the way. The evil alligator was able to open its jaws so wide that they stretched from one side of the creek bed to the other which allowed the alligator children no way to escape. They were trapped and facing imminent death. The little alligators looked at each other and decided to charge. They ran straight into the mouth of the large alligator. They ran down his throat straight to its belly – I could see them bulging against the skin of the large alligator – but they didn’t stop at its belly. The small alligators kept running inside the large alligator down its tail until they reached the tip which they made look like an over-stuffed alligator-skinned bag.

That’s when the dream ended but I can imagine that a pretty one-sided battle continued with the large alligator being devoured from within by these three small but feisty creatures.

Categories
Art

Hand-Drawn Matchbooks “Smokin’ Zombies”

Smokin Zombies1I picked up these hand-drawn match books at an “Alternative Art Fair” a couple months ago in Ypsilanti, MI and ever since then I have regretted that I didn’t buy more. Each matchbook features a different, hand drawn “Smokin’ Zombie.”  They’re the work of the artist Sean Bieri who has a blog over here at:   The Man Who Japed.  He does LOTS of cool stuff and is a member of HATCH, a collective of artists in Hamtramck that also does lots of cool stuff that I’d like to plug but to be honest the zombie matchbooks are the only things that are really nightmare-related. The HATCH table is one that I ALWAYS hit at the Alternative Art Fair.
Smokin Zombies2I’m no longer a smoker but I’ve got lots of friends who are and I think these little gems would make great things to sort of slip in their coat pockets… if I had just bought them by the HANDFUL.

Categories
Other Haunts

Other Haunts: A Devil Museum in Lithuania

DevilStatue  With its finger firmly monitoring the pulse of weirdness, The Fortean Times has a great profile of a Lithuanian museum devoted entirely to depictions of devils.  Like many great collections and for that matter, many other eccentric achievments, the Devil Museum started as the obsession of a single collector.  There are devils from around the world, mostly depicted on their own but frequently the depictions are incorporated into useful objects.

     So ya don’t believe in devils?  The collection is interesting even to a staunch materialist because of its political dimension. During  Soviet times, this collection was illegal because it fell afoul of the prohibition of religion and religious artifacts.  Ironic to think that, say, a nutcracker shaped like a kitschy/folk-arty demon could land you in the gulag which was one of humanity’s better attempts to recreate hell on earth.

Lithuanian Devil Museum 

 

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #92 – Gotcha!

This wasn’t a nightmare like the other one on your site but it still gave me a fright.

I just laid down the other afternoon to take a little nap. I mean that’s what weekends are for, right? I started to dream about my kitchen about walking along past the cupboards when all of a sudden a black cat jumps out from nowhere with claws fully extended and it slashes me across the back of both my calves. I literally yelled out loud so forcefully that it woke me up.

After that I wasn’t in the mood so much for a nap!

Categories
Book

Book: Move Under Ground by Nick Mamatos

The premise sounds like the stuff of particularly trippy fan fiction: Jack Kerouac squares off against Cthulu but Nick Mamatos pulls off an enjoyable first novel based around this theme. Move Under Ground (2006) is a breezy read, perfect for summer, without the labored prose of Lovecraft and with only a nod at the self-indulgent excesses of Beat literature. Mamatos’ work is a loving pastiche, including appearances by various authors such as Nelson Algren, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs who appears in a blaze of gunfire. I confess that I’m more a fan of the Beats than Lovecraft and more a fan of Burroughs than Kerouac so I was particularly delighted when <slight spoiler> Burrough’s “cut-up” technique was used late in the novel to speed their progress across the country. The text is peppered with with quite delightful allusions to other works and to the later lives of the characters/authors.

I know I should say something critical just to appear intelligent but, heck, taken for what it is, this book is a charmer. The novel can’t really be faulted for not having a taut plot; neither Lovecraft nor Kerouac were particularly tight. Characterization is always tricky when dealing with real-life figures but Beat literature didn’t dwell on psychological characterization so much as a delicious stream of interiority and anyone who’s read On the Road is familiar with Kerouac’s stream. (Someone stop me now–I’m starting to sound like an English professor!) I suppose the only thing that could be said that it isn’t exactly a horror novel but even that isn’t a damning criticism. While not exactly terrifying, I found the long tour of the nightmare landscape quite captivating. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so interesting for some one unfamiliar with Beat literature or the Cthulu mythos but heck, do many American youths escape adolescence without delving into either of those schools of literature?

Categories
Nightmares Poetry

Nightmare #91 – The Back of my Head in the Mirror

(Male, middle aged)

the tilted mirror turned my gaze upward, inward.
my skullcap was discolored skin, scalded
freckled with scab-crusted sores.

how long had I been bald? A shameless
scalp naked to the sun’s corroding rays
too preoccupied to notice my corruption?

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #90 – Outlaw Biker

(Male) It was twilight, nearly dark and my wife and I were digging up the last few roots of a tree in the yard of the house where I grew up. The roots were thick and pale, more like horseradish roots than that of a tree. A helicopter flew over head slowly as if it was inspecting was we were doing. I ran up to hide under the porch. I think it didn’t see me. My heart was pounding.

…These folks definitely had the death’s head insignia of the Angels. The sound of their bikes shook my heart and belly like a good Harley does…

Later, camping with my family, one of the entertainments offered is medieval re-enactments. I’m to be shown how to shoot a bow and arrow. The bows come in two pieces, both long, spindly sticks that will be held together somehow by one hand while the other hand draws the string. I get what I think are two parts of the same bow, some arrows and join the others standing in the yard. Just then a motorcycle rumbled by and somehow it is PULLING a van. The van is like a commercial delivery van and it’s obvious the guy had stolen it for the tools that are kept inside. Someone mentions that it was a Hell’s Angel but I didn’t see the guy’s jacket. A moment later, several police cars and a low flying helicopter scream down the same dirt road obviously in pursuit. Then several people desert the re-enactment, hop on their bikes and zoom off down the road. These folks definitely had the death’s head insignia of the Angels. The sound of their bikes shook my heart and belly like a good Harley does.

We left the park ground to visit my dad who was an elderly widower. (Oddly enough in waking life, it’s my Mom who’s been a widow now for nearly 20 years) He was older and slower than I remember him, thinner too and paler. He lived alone in this very small brick house. Dad seemed more interested in listening to a baseball game on the radio than in talking with us, even about the possible danger. He lived near the park and I was afraid for him given that there was an outlaw biker on the loose, one made desperate by police pursuit. My plan was to sit around at his house until the guy was caught. But the police helicopters were swarming overhead which suggested the suspect was somewhere really close by. I didn’t want to worry Dad but I wanted him safe too. I tried to check around a little in the backyard but I just kept finding more and more places where someone could hide and escape detection. I gave up and started checking the front yard. Then I realized that I’d left the car unlocked and for that matter that one of the kids had left the back door wide open. The guy could be in my very car. Or under my car waiting to slash my ankles with a knife at that very moment. My heart was hammering inside my chest. I think that’s what woke me up because it still was beating heavily as I lay there in the dark.

When I went back to sleep, I continued the dream, sort of. Somehow we got home to a neighborhood of extremely small houses, like trailer homes made of brick, tidy, compact. There was no grass on the yards, only dirt. There were very few cars but in front of each was at least one shiny Harley Davidson motorcycle. They ran the gamut from Sportsters to Electra Glides, very old ones to new ones, all very well kept, nothing overly fancy or customized, just honest working bikes. These were what folks road to work. And I was stuck riding down the street on the same bicycle I had as a kid with the banana seat and ape hanger handle bars. I wonder whatever happened to the guy with the delivery van?

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #89 Murder Art

I was walking through a suburb very much like the one where I grew up except at the edge of a cluster of houses instead of a woods, there was a wide expanse of water, possibly an ocean, possibly just a Great Lake. Leading up to the water was a long flat sandy beach and on this beach were houses just like those of the suburb though much farther apart. From one of the houses, I heard cries, then screams. Someone was being beaten, then murdered. I recognized the assailants but since there were three of them and only one of me I didn’t intervene.

Later, I was at a small bookstore, so small it was the living room of a house. They were having an art exhibit and when I looked at the names of the artists, I recognized them as the three young men who had killed that person. Evidently everyone seemed to know that they were guilty, but that no one seemed to care too much beyond the fame it brought them. The artworks weren’t extremely compelling, though they used some materials in slightly novel ways. One of the artists for instance seemed to paint with melted wax crayon and to paint inside old cooking pans. Interesting perhaps but his brushwork and composition were barely competent. The bookstore owner noticed my attention and said the artists themselves would be stopping by later. It was as if he didn’t know how dangerous these young men were. I was afraid and I left.

I was walking home from the exhibit, angry and scared, through the suburb I grew up in, in fact just a block or two from the house where I lived. I passed a liquor store and two men started following me. They were twins, slender, brown-grey, in ragged suits with crumpled hats. They talked as if they were drunk, or more precisely as if they were pretending to be drunk. They were following me rather closely. I tried to let the pass but they jumped me instead. One held me while the other kicked and hit me. It wasn’t like they wanted to rob me, just to beat me to death. I struggled and broke free but they chased me. I ran up to the house of a neighbor. Oddly enough, I didn’t try to run to the house where I once had lived. No one came to the door. I woke when the men reached the porch where I was standing.