A Cheery Little Blog about Fear

This cheery little news bit from the BBC reports that persons in at least FIVE British hospitals have been wrongly certified as dead. We’re not talking about Victorian England; one of these cases dates from 1996. I’m tempted to make a series of t-shirts and buttons with the warning “Are you really SURE I’m not dead?” As long as I can market this fear as a real and present threat, I’m sure to make a mint.

I know we have all sorts of things to worry about these days and there are claims made that those things are more important than, say, finding factual verification for premises from Edgar Allan Poe stories. But honestly, isn’t the idea of being mistaken for a dead person, well, at least a rather novel fear?

The BBC Report from 25 May, 2008 about Living People Mistaken for Dead Ones

(Male, 40’s) This nightmare made me sick to my stomach when I was in the dream, when I woke from it and again now when I’m trying to write it down. It’s the worst nightmare I’ve had maybe ever.

It was a sunny afternoon and my wife and I were feeling like taking a ride in the country. One of us said “Let’s stop in on old JH. We haven’t seen him in years.” That part is true. We’ve been friends with JH for years but we only seem to see him every few months at really accidental moments. JH in both the dream and in real life lives out in the country so we though it’d be a fun little drive. In the dream, JH didn’t have a phone so we couldn’t call to let him know we were coming and since it was all so impromptu and carefree, we didn’t really mind if he wasn’t there when we showed up. Besides, we knew that JH’s wife had left him and we thought he might use some company. After a nice ride in the sun and fresh breeze, we pulled down the long gravel driveway to JH’s house which in the dream was really very small, nothing more than a four room shack, water stained and disheveled. We stopped in the driveway and there was an extremely odd feeling about the place, a deathly quiet. My wife didn’t think we should go in.

What we discovered is that JH had just that instant finished a murder spree. He still had a bloody hammer in his hand and his whole arm was drenched in gore. He had killed his youngest son while he was strapped in a high chair, his older son who was probably 3 or 4 and his wheelchair-bound mother. The bloodshed everywhere was unspeakable, nauseating. JH had a dazed look on his face, a numb, dead expression like he wasn’t at home in his head anymore. When we knocked on the screen door, he was just about to take his shotgun and kill himself. He had it all loaded and sitting ready on a cardboard table. He looked at us with total uncomprehension of who we were or what we were doing there. We didn’t know either. The silence was horrifically awkward, an aching, wrenching discomfort. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know if he was about to kill us. I didn’t know if I should try to call the police or whether I should just let him kill himself, whether that would just be the easiest thing for everyone concerned.

And it was in that stifled instant of indecision, of terror that I woke unable to breathe.

(Male, 20’s) Yeah so this nightmare is pretty obviously about going back to college — that horror that summer is almost over but it’s still pretty weird.

I was moving back into college and I had all these things on my mind like I had only moved in half my stuff out of the car into the dorm room when someone told me that I should run over and buy my books before the lines got too long. On the way, I saw some friends that I hadn’t seen all summer and was glad to see again but still I was in a hurry. So I was racing toward the main college building — which didn’t look like any of the buildings on my campus but more like one of those old stone buildings like in England at Oxford or Cambridge. Soaring arches and stained glass windows. This building was where all the classes and administration happened for the college. It was THE college. I know is strange to say but it sort of had the feel of my middle school, maybe the same general layout of building and grounds, though in the dream everything that was parking lot at my middle school was very well groomed lawn. I had just come out from a tree lined street — just like there was at my middle school — and I noticed this because the sun now was very hot and very, very bright. There were people hurrying here and there with their arms wrapped around large stacks of books. And no one really seemed to notice that there was a dinosaur sized monster as tall as the tallest spire of the college biting at people here and there. The monster was unbelievable, really unbelievable. It was just like an old monster movie monster. It had three heads and frills behind each head. I looked up at it and thought — I REALLY thought this — that having three heads couldn’t possible serve an evolutionary purpose so therefore this creature must be imaginary. Except it was moving and with such fluid motion. It wasn’t stop action animation or anything. It just was a real, 50′ tall green lizard. By that time it had noticed me and even though I still didn’t believe it existed, I sort of hid behind one corner of the building. But it darted its heads around the top of the building and hissed at me so I tried moving again. What’s funny, I guess, is that I wasn’t really *afraid* of the monster, even though it was trying to bite me in two but more I felt *irritated* with the monster because it was getting in the way of the tasks I had to do. Anyway, this back and forth thing went on for several minutes with me never getting very safe for very long. Right about then I woke up.

Daughter Of Hounds (2007) is a captivating horror novel by Caitlin Kiernan set in the darkly fantastic world of the Benefit Street ghouls, a familiar setting to readers of Kiernan’s Low Red Moon (2003). Kiernan has followed the same cast of characters, more or less through several books, including Threshold (2001). Daughter Of Hounds focuses on Emma Silvey, the child of Deacon Silvey and Chance Matthews who were major characters in previous books. Emma is precocious and dauntless and believably child-like as she wends her way through the twisting shocks of the story, through dreams within dreams that turn out to be no dreams at all. Her narrative double is Soldier, a tough and brutally practical young woman who is a “child of the Cuckoo,” one of those children stolen by the ghouls and raised in their dank underground warrens. The stories of Emma and Soldier strangely intertwine crossing again and again to the very end of the book. Another character familiar to readers of Kiernan’s fiction is The Bailiff and personally, I was glad to see this character shown from a few more perspectives. It’s too much to hope for, I suppose to expect a lengthy work entirely about him.

Daughter Of Hounds is a delicious mixture of supernatural horror with splashes of everyday gore. It is intelligent and literary while remaining eminently readable. Kiernan has been called the literary grand-daughter of H.P. Lovecraft, though I find her work actually more compelling than that master of eldritch horror. Her descriptions of magick seem more believable; her depictions of that ineffable, nameless wonder/horror are more effective. Kiernan is an established Mistress of short fiction, whose stories frequently are selected as the best horror of the year, and with Daughter Of Hounds a particularly well-conceived and well-executed work, she is clearly hitting her stride with the book-length format. Read them all if you can, but treat yourself to Daughter Of Hounds in the least.

— the grim gnome

(Male, 30’s) This nightmare had a steady feeling of dread throughout it. It was late afternoon and I was in my grandmother’s house. Incidentally, my grandmother has been dead for decades and I haven’t been in this house since I was a kid. The house was abandoned and I was the only one there. One of the rooms upstairs, a bedroom, was noisily haunted. When I was downstairs in the hallway, I could hear a vacuum running up there. I ran up the stairs and just as I entered the room the vacuum cleaner switched off. The floor was filthy with dust so it was clear to see where the vacuum had just been gliding along, cleaning the floor. There was still furniture in this room which was strange because most of the house was empty. I knew in the dream that something in the room was causing the haunting, that one of the pieces of furniture or something hidden in a drawer was something the ghost wanted someone to find. I started taking things apart, making a mess. I was working against time because I knew that I really REALLY didn’t want to be caught in the house after sunset. One of the pieces of furniture was a chest of drawers. There appears to be only clothes in it. Then I looked at the dresser from behind and I found that there were secret panels behind each of the drawers. In one of them I found a small package of hand-rolled cigarettes, though for some reason I knew that it wasn’t tobacco. This dresser must have belonged to the teenaged girl who lived here. The drawer itself was filled with wildly colored sashes and silk hair ties. The cigarettes — drugs? — were a discovery but it didn’t seem to be the kind of thing a ghost wanted me to find. I had to leave the room for a moment and when I came back in, the contents of one of the dresser drawers that I had spilled out was all tidied up. The ghost was cleaning up after this messy human. Or maybe it was that the ghost really DIDN’T want me to find out about what was causing the haunting. It was getting dark. I was running out of time.

(Male, 40’s) I didn’t believe a nightmare could be hilarious as well as terrifying — though I should admit that I was pretty scared while I was actually inside the dream. It’s only when I woke up and started thinking about it did any of it seem funny. But it is kind of funny, like a B-movie thriller.

I was one of four people performing an extremely large scale bank heist. Basically we were going to cause a natural disaster which would force a whole town to evacuate and then we’d rob a pre-selected set of banks and burn down everything else. Not a subtle plan but it gets points for audacity. The disaster we had planned involved flooding the city by draining a dammed reservoir. That part worked fine, sort of. The water left the reservoir and started flooding down the river toward the city. It must have taken quite a bit of time because the city was largely evacuated before the water got to it. But there was trouble back at the reservoir. When all the water disappeared, all that was left was all the wildlife that lived in the water — and an improbable collection of creatures was that: fish flapping for breath, thousands upon thousands of frogs, a good half dozen alligators … and an immense amphibious dinosaur. I believe it was a moasaur. We had just finished our work at the dam and each of the four of us were carrying a large satchel of hand grenades, gasoline “molotov cocktails” and C4 explosives. In the dream, though I don’t remember any of us carrying a lighter or a detonator or anything — these things were just supposed to go “boom” on their own free will or something. I saw the moasaur as it was eating two alligators. Yup, that was quite a sight! I tried to warn the others but one of the conspirators shrugged me off “Haven’t you ever seen an alligator before?” He tossed a hand grenade in the direction of the fuss and we all made our way toward the city. There was devastation everywhere, uprooted trees, overturned cars… somehow there were still people running away from the water even though the water had already torn through town. The ground was soggy, like after a rain but there were no pools of water. We ran across an open field behind some houses. I had the distinct feeling that the dinosaur was following us but then I looked around and saw that the situation was even worse. There were at least three of these same dinosaurs crawling out among the houses, casually eating stragglers. Again I tried to alert my conspirators and again they said “Stop daydreaming. Keep your mind on the task” while they casually tossed a couple firebombs over their shoulder. I think the plan was to burn down the city so the loss of the money wouldn’t be noticed. The next thing I knew one of the dinosaurs had grabbed one of the robbers in its mouth. He was shocked and surprised. That’s when Jodi Foster… did I mention that one of the robbers was Jodi Foster? It was really strange because throughout the dream I wanted to compliment her on her acting work but she was very serious and very focused on the robbery and I thought she’d just yell at me again. It seemed that Jodi Foster was the brains of the operation. The whole thing might have been her plan, too. She tossed a hand grenade at the moasaur that was now chewing on one of our companions and she told the rest of us to hurry. We’d made it to the outskirts of the city — why hadn’t we planned to have a vehicle, especially if we were going to be carrying loot? — but we were blocked off from it by an immensely tall chain link fence. The fence was easily three stories tall and it had barbed wire at the top. I took off climbing as soon as we got to it. I knew there were more than one dinosaur out there and I wanted to get as far away from them as possible. When I got to the top, I wrapped my leather jacket around the barbed wire and climbed over it. Climbing down was the hard part. I could see the dinosaurs massing in the field we’d just left. The other guy was refusing to climb the fence while Jodi Foster was sure taking her time. I knew I needed her if for no other reason than I didn’t know where we were supposed to go next. I mean she’s a great actress but it was getting down to every one for them self. She had gotten roughly half the way up the fence and I had gotten rough half the way down. I was yelling at her to hurry when the dinosaur attacked the guy on the ground. When I say attacked, I really mean more he just bit the guy in half. The dinosaurs were roughly the size of a garbage truck. I jumped the rest of the way down. There were dozens of people still running around, still trying to escape the flood that had already passed through town. Now they had something worse to worry about. I opened up my satchel of explosives and told people to take them, not that the bombs had shown themselves to be very effective against the monsters in the past. The dinosaur went for the fence and effortlessly toppled it down. There was nothing standing in the way between it and me. It was huge, black and green, sleek skin, squat like an extremely large and extremely angry frog, though its back legs weren’t that big. It had cold, unthinking eyes and breath that smelled like a damp basement. I was done for.