Halloween Story: The Grim Reaper, Revisited

Years ago, as part of a fiction writing exercise, I wrote the first third of a story about something that scares me—a young man with Prozac Dementia, armed and out to kill. Read scene one here.

I don’t know how many people followed the links to the second third of the story another participant wrote—here. It built up the horror. We started with a madman; now he’s possessed. He’s still going down in flames, but the body count could be much higher.

I was looking forward to someone else’s ending for the story. Nobody wrote an ending. Like most of the stories, mine remained unfinished. So I’ve had to finish it myself, drawing on the “archetypes” trope (best handled by Piers Anthony, in his Incarnations of Immortality series)....

Entering the building, Blake began to giggle uncontrollably at the thought of the evening ahead of him. He envisioned hmiself darting from couple to couple, his sickle slicing through body after body. People tried to follow him but he, Blake, the Grim Reaper, slipped through their fingers and capered on, mowing down one couple after another. The force he had felt at home would possess him and...

He found the prospect so very amusing that he needed to stop in a restroom. Only one other guy was in there and, to Blake’s surprise, the man had chosen the same costume he had. He felt a kind of force field around the other man. It was not the one he was looking for.

“Two Grim Reapers at one dance, huh?” Blake muttered, pulling up his robe.

“No,” said the other Grim Reaper in a voice so deep and sinister that it made Blake fumble, dribbling on his own shoes. “No…I came for the drunk drivers myself.”

“Ha ha ha!” Blake tried to recapture his lost merriment.

‘Ha ha ha,” repeated the other Reaper, but there was nothing giggly about his laugh. It was the laugh to end all laughter.

Definitely alarmed, Blake looked at the face under the other black hood. The man was older than he, shorter by an inch or two, darker by several shades. “Great costume, man,” Blake said, forcing good cheer. “Were you ever in movies?”

“Various actors have played me in movies,” said the other. “I am the Lord of the Harvest. Some call me Saturn. Some call me Grim.”

“Sounds good,” Blake said with sincere admiration. He looked at himself in the mirror. “I am the Lord of the Harvest!” His mind groped for the memory of the deadly power he had expected would fill him, but he couldn’t feel it now. Was it intimidated by Saturn, or Grim, or was he?

“You are no such thing,” said Saturn, or Grim. “You are very sick, though very young. It is possible I might help you.”

“I don’t think I want your help, thanks.” Blake felt very sick and very young. “Someone else...”

“You don’t think. You feel. That is the trouble.” Blake felt as if the older man were holding him with his glittering black eyes. “I know who offered to help you, and he’s exceeded his harvest limit for this year already. I’m the Reaper now. Lay down your weapons.”

Blake found himself laying down not only his blade, but a lighter and a little flat can he’d filled with kerosene.

A swirling trail of metallic glitter seemed to gather itself up and pour itself out through the sealed, opaque window. The weapons had disappeared from the floor.

“The atoms will reunite in similar configurations after everyone has gone home, when no one will stumble over them,” said the Reaper. “Give me your arm, lad.”

Blake felt compelled, though quite sure his arm was about to come off at the shoulder.

“Have you not read,” said the Reaper, “that the Lord of the Harvest was wont to show his age by leaning on a young attendant’s arm? Forth to the dance, my page.”

They walked slowly down a corridor. Small groups of students stopped chattering and watched them pass. They entered the main gymnasium, hung with orange-shaded lanterns, draped with orange ribbons of crepe paper, and full of costumed students. None of them said a word.

“Dance on,” the Reaper boomed. “Death awaits only a few of you tonight.”

“Let’s go home now,” suggested the male to the female of a couple of black cats. Catching their tails up over their arms, they almost ran out of the gym. So did a half-dozen ghosts, a dozen witches, sixteen Disney princesses, and a racing car.

A young man with a large envelope attached to a chain around his neck approached. “I am a Chain Letter,” he said. “The last fellow that introduced me to ten girls got promoted the next week. The last fellow that failed to introduce me to ten girls got mono and flunked out of school.”

The Reaper laughed. The young man looked at him and suddenly hurried out of the buildng.

“I think one of the Sleeping Beauties was waiting for him,” explained the Reaper. “Well, page, find us a pair of partners, that we may dance.”

Wondering whether he was about to faint, Blake approached a pair of misfits who looked as if they might be desperate enough to dance with a pair of Grim Reapers. The one without a costume rushed toward Saturn, or Grim. The one with the pencil behind her ear looked at Blake, shrugged, and stepped forward.

“Don’t you have to pay if you’re not in costume? Or something?” Blake said, tapping his foot more or less in rhythm, which was as close as he came to dancing.

“I am in costume.” The girl showed him her pencil. It was yellow. “I’m a dull student. See how dull?” She touched the point before replacing the pencil behind her ear. “And you’re that loser who passed out in that math class and never came back, aren’t you. What were you, sniffing glue?”

“I’m the Grim Reaper,” Blake muttered furiously. “I’m here to kill people.”

The girl danced away and spoke to a teacher. Blake sat down on a bench. The music stopped. The girl dancing with the other Grim Reaper screamed and ran out. The Reaper approached Blake.

“What did you say to her?” Blake wondered out loud.

“I told her not to have the abortion. Now be truthful.” The Reaper moved away, back to the dance floor with another girl dressed as a real Renaissance princess.

The school guidance counsellor approached Blake. “What did you tell Lacey you were here for? People care about you…”

“I told her I was here to dance,” Blake said, locking eyes with the counsellor, daring him to dispute Blake’s word.

The counsellor moved away. One of the stoner crowd held out a hand to Blake. Blake stood up and followed her moves. He never had had much sense of rhythm. He danced badly with her, and with some other people. Dancing strained his stiff, tight muscles. Each costume was less attractive than the one before it. He had no idea who any of them really was until he found himself facing Saturn, or Grim.

“You should have been truthful,” said the Grim Reaper,

Then the music built up to a scream, and Blake felt himself dissolve into a trail of dust, and knew no more.

Bad Poetry: Dia de los Muertos

Another two-prompt poem: the prompt at DVerse was to write an antiwar poem, and the prompt at Poets & Storytellers United was to write a poem for el Dia de los Muertos. 

A day to pray for all the dead

is needed in a year of war.

So many lives untimely fled,

so many living hearts left sore:

a day to pray for all the dead

is not enough. It will take more.

So much blood's been untimely shed--

a fool in desert drought might poor

fresh water on dust bare and red:

that's much less wasteful than a war.

A day to pray for all the dead

is needed in a year of war.

It's Bad all right. El Dia de los Muertos has a sort of festive quality. People remember the dead, fondly, respectfully; they reflect on mortality and the brevity of life, and try to make the day "sweet," in some places literally, sucking on skull-shaped candies; they pray that the dead can find peace and pardon in the afterlife. I understand the idea of praying for those killed in a war, but I couldn't imagine a way to make it festive.

Spooky Halloween Book Post: The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics

Talkin' about the f-f-f-fifty-dollar edition...I'm still using Firefox, of which more below, and it doesn't have my lovely Amazon link gadget, so you can't click on the picture.


Anyway. This hardcover book, all 400-plus pages, is on sale for cash in the Roberts & Jones Gift Shop on Jackson Street. Run don't walk. If unable to get into Gate City for this Halloween special, try this link.

Now the spooky story...(insert ghastly groan here)...it's taken a while, but I've found something to post on a topic a certain sponsor may enjoy.

Once there was a pop group. At the time there were a lot of pop groups. A lot of young people were buying a lot of records, so a lot of other young people wanted to record their songs on them. In order to stand out in the crowd some of these groups adopted funny names. There were The Rolling Stones, named after a magazine, and The Who, who actually sang "Talkin' About My G-g-g-generation," and then there were these guys who'd been in groups with relatively normal names, like The New Lost City Ramblers, who got together and called themselves The Grateful Dead.

They sang a lot of old traditional blues, at first, with a rocking beat. When multiple voices sang with rhythm and bass, even on the expensive sound devices of the 1960s it was very hard to recognize words in the buzz of noise monaural sound equipment produced. On the cheap transistor radios kids carried around it was impossible. So the people who had been making fun of pop "crooners" like Frank Sinatra, Eddy Arnold, Pat Boone and my family's favorite Jim Reeves, who worked very hard to make it possible to hear the words of their songs, and of Elvis Presley, who distracted attention from any sound issues by tapping his feet so enthusiastically he moved his (shudder!) pelvis, naturally had a good time thinking of snarky ways to describe groups like the Grateful Dead in the mid-sixties.

Then in the late sixties people got interested in lysergic acid, or LSD, which some people claimed was a safe drug. It was not. (Echoes of morphine, heroin, thalidomide, DDT, paraquat, chlordane, cocaine, glyphosate...so many promises of "better living through chemistry" disappointed so many people so horribly.) A lot of cool, popular guys, like guys who were playing in pop bands in California, experimented with "acid." The result was known as "acid rock." At its best, when very talented musicians used just a little, it seemed to encourage them to compose fresher-sounding music, although most musicians were not that talented and merely thought they were composing...anything, actually.

(Pause to salute Dave Barry for getting our generation to agree: We are the generation that invented really bad rock music. Classics, yes, but also clinkers. Lots of clinkers.)

The Grateful Dead became one of the bands, like Ozzy Osbourne's Black Sabbath and Jim Morrison's Doors, that were generally classified as "acid rock." They notoriously hung out with some extremely hip and trendy older "hipsters" like Neal Cassady who took lots of drugs, and yes, one of them was with Cassady as he sped out of control and self-destructed that way. By 1970 they recall, somewhat sheepishly, being sort of exhausted, confused, and maybe even grateful to be alive, which several of their drug-experimenting friends from 1969 were not.

Not that all the private drug experiments, or the inadvertent suicides, were over in 1970. While the core of the Grateful Dead trouped on for a full thirty years, other band members dropped out, some due to illnesses whose progress was probably accelerated by drug use. "Pigpen" McKernan, who took a sick leave the year after his close friend Janis Joplin died, was thought to have died about a month before his body was found. Other stories of the survivors and non-survivors are collected and linked at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Grateful_Dead_members .

But the band had a solid core of four survivors, two of whom were still up for a "fifty-year anniversary" tour in 2015, and also they'd enlisted a real published poet, Robert Hunter, as their primary lyricist. Several other people, known and unknown, wrote songs the Grateful Dead performed. All of them agree that Hunter wrote the best lyrics. 

What they agree got on their nerves, at times, was the way people who met them kept saying things like "I love your song--what are the words, and what do they mean?" Hunter's long foreword, and John Barlow's shorter afterword, and some quotes the others furnished to David Dodd, explain some of the reasons why this is generally a bad question. A song's "meaning" comes from its sound as well as its words; the phrases that make up a good song don't necessarily parse as coherent prose sentences, even if you allow for things like Hunter's partiality for leaving S's off words ("he say") to reduce the s-s-static tones of monaural sound equipment; there are times when songwriters who've struck gold with a lyric that just fits a tune and a genre realize, later, that they're living out an experience they could only imagine while they were writing about it. The Grateful Dead learned to deflect that question with "What does it mean to you?"

Sometimes there was a private meaning that could be elucidated in prose, as in the song "Cassidy," which was partly a memorial to the recently dead Neal Cassady and partly an expression of good wishes for a baby who'd been named Cassidy, and the instrumental "Sage and Spirit," also dedicated to children who'd been given those names. More often there wasn't.

Sometimes people who were able to read the official printed lyrics (which weren't always what the band members sang in live concerts, anyway) would ask whether they were meant to suggest some other song, or poem, or story with similar words. Hmph. Maybe they were, maybe they weren't. Hunter's lyrics as printed could only be the product of revision by a sober and well educated brain, but that does not necessarily mean they first occurred to a sober mind, nor does it mean that Hunter consciously remembered what might have suggested them to him even if he was sober at the time. Even poets who do all their writing while stone-cold sober don't necessarily remember everything that might have suggested a poem or a song. One major influence on songwriting, as Cecil Adams observed while tracing other popular songs, comes from thoughts like "Hmm, I don't think anybody's used 'Chevy' and 'levee' in a rhyming refrain before," and another comes from the fact that sometimes, if you have a contractual obligation to write a new song and you've not thought of a good one yet, and you sing "la la la" a few times, especially if you run the "la la la" version through monaural sound equipment, sometimes somebody will hear it as something bizarre enough to suggest a fresh-sounding verse.

Barlow tells a spooky story of having written a song just to fit into a genre people wanted, having it succeed enough that he went on singing it until it finally did have meaning for him. Many if not most "creative" people have the experience of...perhaps unconsciously seeking and finding real-life counterparts to things we had "created" from imagination? But you have to read Barlow's story as he tells it.

Anyway the Grateful Dead never were all that popular in any given year. Their image put so many people off that even radio stations that specialized in rock didn't want to play their songs. Their sound kept evolving, featuring different singers and guitarists, because they kept losing band members. Nevertheless they had a fanatical following, the Deadheads, who just would not allow the band to die. They still have. They still have an active web site: http://www.dead.net/ . They are still releasing new music--remixes of old tapes, and new performances by those members who are still alive.

It's downright creepy. The force that's kept an "acid rock" band going this long, after almost twenty-five years of declaring themselves dead and accepting huge fees for yet another "Final Reunion" performance, has to be sinister.

I found this big book of song lyrics on sale cheap in the Friday Market. People who take nice new-looking books into open-air markets are very highly motivated to sell them before the next shower of rain. I offered a dollar for it and a fellow vendor said "I'll take it." I did know better than to sell the book for a dollar, or take it back into an open-air market. I've given some people some fabulous bargains on books that have gained value since they were published. For this one...I gave the gift shop a bargain price, but not that fabulous.

I collect song lyrics, whether or not I know the tune or like the words. Some people like songs I don't. Some songs whose words don't appeal to me have delightful tunes. I didn't know, and still don't know, any of the tunes to a single one of the songs in this book. I do know where to find them online, but since I go online in public places I don't intend to restore the sound on the computer. (Of which more below.)


I didn't expect to like any of the songs the Grateful Dead would have sung. I was pleasantly surprised. Some of the other songwriters commented that Hunter's songs, without making much sense as prose sentences, manage to suggest complete novels. I'd agree.

The book, as a whole, tells a true story. Not that it's written as a history of the band; its annotations do not, for example, mention McKernan's full name, much less the story of his short life, nor do they ever explicitly mention Donna and Keith Godchaux being a married couple. But in an indirect, evocative, Hunter-like way it is the story of how four guys with creative synergy went from being just another garage band, with a silly name, playing old songs about other people's unhappy lives, to being one of the great legendary bands of American musical history, spanning generations, like The Weavers or the Carter Family.

Dodd's annotations are informative. A librarian by profession, and the curator of the Grateful Dead web site, he prints each song alongside references to the songs, books, and movies of which the lyrics remind people, with full-length lyrics for several vintage songs, so even if you've never heard a Grateful Dead song you can still sing your way through the book. (A Californian, he's familiar with variant versions of some classic songs that are sometimes even fresh, to those of us who learned the songs in the Eastern States.) He anticipates that every reader can think of a few references he missed, and writes cheerfully that the annotation of these songs will never be complete. After the literary references, or in lieu of them for some songs that aren't especially rich in reference points, come historical notes on when and where each song was first performed and first recorded and how often it was performed thereafter. For a few songs he's able to add reminiscences by band members.

In some ways the leader, the organizer, sometimes the lead singer and/or guitarist and the old friend who recruited Hunter, was Jerry Garcia. A rock star for exactly thirty years, Garcia died just after his fifty-third birthday in 1995, and the Grateful Dead declared itself--as a band--dead without him.

But the band was not quietly laid to rest, as Garcia was.  Toward the end the songs and annotations become a testimony to the way life goes on, though good men die and you forget just why. There's a decline in the quality of the songs as lyrical poems; there's even one that reads like a typical rock song. Then there's a revision of "Joe Hill"...Joe Hill was an early labor union activist, best remembered for a song that affirms that Hill's spirit was still alive, ten years after his death, in activism for his cause. Hunter's version of this song initially envisioned President Kennedy, John Lennon, and Martin Luther King living on (or not) in the continuation of things they were did. Then, he claimed, another verse popped into his head: "I saw the sun explode...I heard a sweet guitar lick...It sounded like Garcia but I couldn't see the face."

Never having been a Deadhead, I opened this story-in-song-lyrics of friendship and bereavement, for the first time, about the time Robert Hunter died. He was seventy-eight.

Writers are, of course, always discovering books, and new favorite writers to add to their ever-growing lists, about the time older writers die. If there's a meaning to this phenomenon, it's that too many public libraries rush to discard older writers' books so they can use more of the taxpayers' money to buy new books by living writers who need the money from more sales to individual readers. Harrumph. Libraries should not be allowed to discard old, hard-to-find books patrons are still reading, nor should they have much freedom to compete with bookstores during the first two years after books are printed. But it's Halloween, so somebody out there may enjoy a good shiver, thinking of a reader discovering Robert Hunter as a poet just as his life ended.

(Status update on the computer:

It is officially a dying computer. I wondered what was going on when Google Chrome wouldn't open any more; poked around and found that the laptop's memory had shrunk down to something close to that of the older laptop I nicknamed The Sickly Snail, a few years ago. It'll still run Firefox, which is a little better than the Snail's Opera, and Microsoft Office, which is much better than the Snail's Open Office, but it won't run Chrome. I talked to the friendly local wizards about adding memory, then realized that one reason why this laptop was runnning low on memory was an increasing tendency to crash due to overheating because its fan's wearing out. Its keyboard is well beyond the stage a less professional typist would call usable. Its mouse pad is wearing out too.

I do actually like playing with new computers--if they're other people's original computers. It's the waste of electronics that bothers my conscience. What Americans call recycling computers (or cell phones) means shipping them to some desperately poor part of the world where the "recycling" process forms mounds of toxic waste, to be handled by people who don't fully understand the future implications for the health of children they allow to earn the local equivalent of pennies by "helping to recycle." That is not something I want to be a part of. I'd rather keep what I have, even if it becomes unusable, until the manufacturers take a hint and start "supporting" it again.

Nevertheless the time has come for this laptop to retire. And that means not even pushing the limits of what Firefox allows it to do. It means minimal use of computers and the Internet, preferably for paid work only, no surfing-for-fun, until I get another computer that can run Chrome.)

Happy Halloween! Pris Wins Lottery

Seriously. This is another whiny me-me-me post but I think it at least contains enough irony to be worth typing, unlike the me-me-me post I decided not to inflict on youall on Friday afternoon...

First, my thanks to Jim Geraghty for this priceless seasonal greeting, which explains why I'm willing to recognize a holiday I usually don't:

"
Happy Halloween! Try your best, ghosts and goblins. We live in a world with North Korean nukes, opioid addiction, Antifa, Russian hackers, a mass shooting in Las Vegas that still lacks a revealed motive, and Harvey Weinstein. Honestly, by comparison, ghosts and goblins are kind of relaxing.
"

Russian hackers? Oh dear, I hope that's not where my Russian readers have been this weekend? The computer shows a lot of Turkish readership, which may be bad, or not, and an increase in Italian readership. Well, salaam alaikum Turkish readers, benvenuti Italian readers, I hope you're all here with good intentions and I hope some of you will go to Google + and socialize a bit. Russians, too.

Now the status update: Last week I accepted a serious writing contract and spent most of my online time, and substantial amounts of my offline time, writing an e-book. The payment for the e-book is supposed to be more than I've made in any two Fridays...any two days in any market since the early days in Duffield. That's a good thing, because I wasn't able to go to Friday Market at all.

I had the e-book to finish. I hadn't left enough of it to need more than one hour to finish, on Friday, under ordinary circumstances. Circumstances have not been ordinary. I've been having a lot of celiac reactions to food that is naturally gluten-free but has evidently been contaminated with glyphosate, this fall. I've been sick as a mule through all of October and most of September. The celiac reaction itself is limited, but it compromises immunity to everything else...Some sort of boring little streptococcal infection has been going around. Early last week I noticed my usual reaction to streppy-bugs: bad breath, occasionally a prickly sensation at the back of the throat, and an energetic mood.

Then on Thursday I'd planned to go somewhere after the day online, and a car pool buddy didn't show up. So I walked about two miles carrying my nice warm laptop under my big thick blanket shawl, and the sun was bright and the temperature was about 70 degrees Fahrenheit...and what was going on? I felt cold! I felt tired! I felt as if I'd walked ten miles when the temperature was about 40 degrees Fahrenheit. So I knew I had a fever. Also the back of my throat started to feel inflamed. Also instead of feeling energetic I felt exceedingly tired, spacey, and sleepy.

Most people don't become ill from most streptococcal infections so it's easy to forget, even if you've lived in the same house with someone who did, that it is occasionally possible for someone who's not already in a hospital to become seriously ill from strep. People I know joke about it, "If I have to go in I'll breathe on you!"--but it's not funny when someone is going through chemotherapy.

On Friday morning, in addition to the need to allow time to finish a writing job while feeling spacey, and the fear that I might actually be immune-compromised to develop streptococcal pneumonia like Old Sick Patients get, another reason why I didn't want to go into Friday Market was...that the weather was perfect. A friend was likely to be there. Her husband has cancer. If she was there, and I was there, she was likely to talk to me, and I was likely to breathe on her, and she was likely to go home and breathe on him. If I wasn't there, some other infected person was likely to breathe on her anyway, but at least she wouldn't remember me as the one to blame.

So I went in and fulfilled my contractual obligation and stayed away from this friend, thereby spending the last two dollars I had, and walked home. And it was a warm, sunny, delightful day for a quick two-mile walk on mostly level ground. And it felt to me like walking ten miles on a cold day, uphill. I still had a fever.

On the way I saw a garishly colored scrap of cardboard in a dry gutter. I often see them. People buy lottery tickets and throw them down without even checking whether the tickets are good for a dollar or two in online "Extra Chances" winnings.

I don't like gambling...but with state lotteries, as with charity bingo games, even though I see these things appealing to gambling addicts' weakness, I don't see them as actually gambling. When you buy a card in a charity bingo game you're donating money to a cause, and you may or may not acquire a piece of junk, which you may or may not be able to use, sell, or re-gift, as a souvenir. When you buy a state lottery ticket you're making a payment to a state fund. I'd actually support state lotteries as a desirable way to make taxation voluntary if they were covered by strict regulations that lottery revenues would be used to replace tax revenues and lower taxes, thus transferring the burden of taxation from frugal people to spendthrifts, which I don't see as a bad thing. The idea of being able to win the "Extra Chances" prize some lottery-ticket-buying wastrel threw away has always appealed to me. People who aren't going online anyway usually don't consider the "Extra Chances" prizes worth going to the computer center for, so...call it the payment this public-spirit-challenged person owes me for removing a piece of ugly litter from the road.

So I picked up the discarded lottery ticket. Lo and behold, the litterbug had bought one of the more expensive cards that contained two "instant win games, played separately" and hadn't even played the game on the back of the card. Wotta hoot! I took that ticket home.

I spent Saturday, Sunday, and Monday sweating out the fever, sitting by the space heater, heating chicken soup over a candle, taking lots of naps, and agreeing with the cats that this business of being sick during my designated cat-entertaining time was a total bore. At some point, while sitting up, I scratched off the coating on the back of the lottery ticket.

Say whaaat?! It said "WIN"!

Ah, yes...I've been saying for a long time that when I win the lottery I'll remember how supportive various so-called friends and relatives have been since I became a rich man's penniless widow. Well, I remembered them. I remembered, as promised, what I've had to say to them for all these years:

Thptptpt.

And the $5 winnings were good for today's lunch and coffee, too.

Everybody wins a state lottery once in their lifetime, but, duh, what people usually win represents a big loss on what they spend. For me $5 is a real win. For the person who paid for the winning ticket, $5 was exactly the amount he or she paid...for that ticket alone...probably the amount the person paid every time he or she cashed a paycheck or went to the convenience store or whatever, for who knows how many years.

But in Maryland I knew a chap who claimed he never bought lottery tickets for himself, but one day he went to the store for a sick friend who specifically told him to buy a few tickets...and when they divided the tickets and scratched off the coating, he won the million-dollar jackpot. So he said. And I know his bank really did freeze his account for a few days while verifying his claim, and he really did retire.

I'm still feeling my normal reaction to the little streppy-bugs my now immune-challenged body hasn't completely wiped out yet. It's sort of a weird feeling to have, these days. I don't always know which members of my own generation are seriously concerned about strep infections, sometimes with good reasons, and which ones would be insulted by the idea that they need to take streppy-bugs seriously. I didn't feel bad about handing the card to the kid in the convenience store, but I felt bad when a friend came up to me in the cafe to ask if I was feeling better. I would have preferred not to get a good look at any faces, today, that are framed by even small patches of white hair...

Is it possible to find an Amazon book link to go with this story? It is easy. One of America's very best writers of scary stories happens to be remembered best for a hypothetical-scary-future story called...

Terribleminds Writing Challenge: Part 2 of Another Scary Story

This is so not the sort of thing you usually find here...the writing of this story is a story of its own, with links.

Chuck Wendig started the whole thing with this writing challenge. Lots of short, scary stories take off from the comment section on this page...some occult, some obscene, some gory, some even with comic potential.

http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2016/10/07/flash-fiction-challenge-a-scary-story-part-one/

I wrote this right away...

http://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2016/10/scary-story-part-one-grim-reaper.html

...and then clicked, printed, and read all those other stories. All of them are passable, publishable-quality fiction. If you like short scary stories, they'll be a feast. Here's the one by the writer who's offered to tell us how Blake the Grim Reaper crashes the college party...the site has an adult content warning, although this particular post is just leading up to the real horror in the addict's mind, whatever that turns out to be. (I'm sure some Terrible Mind knows enough about addiction/recovery to tell us.)

http://youcantgoback-andotherimpossibilities.blogspot.com.au/2016/10/the-bubble-part-one-of-four.html

I'm most comfortable writing about scary things that really happen, so this fictionalized memory of a summer camp panic inspired me...

http://jemimapett.com/blog/2016/10/07/fridayflash-fiction-spooky-tales-1-black-dog/

...And this is how I imagined the panic growing as Fear Trigger 1 drives the panic-stricken characters straight toward Fear Trigger 2 (which may also be harmless) and then Fear Triggers 3, 4, maybe more. Next week, some other Terrible Mind gets to tell us what's happened to the other characters, what's crashing around in the woods, and whether poor old Paddy, the big black Lab who was just running for fun, has actually protected Lori and Mimi from the Real Danger, or...I have no idea.

Fiction Begins Here

We ran blindly.

Lori and I each knew the way back to the cabin where our buddies were supposed to be waiting for us to come in, if we’d stopped to think about it. She would have turned off to the right, and I would have turned off to the left about fifty yards further along the trail.

We forgot, OK? Just like the kids in horror movies always do, we completely forgot. Jake and Dave ran ahead and left Lori and me behind. We could hear that dog behind us, and we kept running.

It might have flashed through my mind as I raced deeper into the woods that almost any dog will run after a person who is running. I was too panicky to think of that, too. I was not about to turn around and go “Nice doggie” when that thing was chasing me.

If I had slowed down to think I might have remembered, too, that at a certain fork part of the trail circled back around to the cabins, while the other branch of the trail sloped down to the lake. That was the branch that looked closer to “straight ahead” as Lori and I pounded on. It was also the part of the trail that wasn’t often used, so it had loose rocks and stuff on it.

Lori skidded on a rock and slid downhill. I slowed down and grabbed at her arm. That took me down, too. I heard something snap as I crashed to the ground.

We felt ourselves and realized that whatever had snapped hadn’t been one of our bones or teeth or anything. However, my arm was bleeding and Lori’s knee hurt.

The dog was gaining ground as I saw the spooky glow from the lake.

I remembered about a kind of fungus growth that can make rotten wood glow in the dark. I’d never actually seen “fox fire” so I hoped that might have been what I saw ahead of us.

It wasn’t.

It looked sort of human. Humanoid. The head looked more like the mass of roots around a small uprooted tree. I could just make out a sort of face with that creepy red glow your face gets when you shine a flashlight up from below your face, only the face looked more like a big glob of sourdough.

Behind us, the dog stopped, and growled. It had an extremely loud growl.

Ahead of us, the Creature from the Black Lagoon seemed to sway back and forth.

Something whined. It was the dog. It barked a big, loud, growling bark.

“What’s the matter, Paddy?” said the creature. “What do you see?”

As if in answer a bright light flashed out of the woods. Barking madly, the dog charged into the woods.

Now we could see the creature clearly. It reached up and tore off its head.

Under the mass of branches and junk it pulled off, the creature was just a guy…John, one of the older camp counsellors. He looked seriously scared.

“Paddy! Paddy! Come back, Paddy!”

The dog was snarling. Large bodies were crashing around in the woods.

“Paddy! Paddy!” John yelled. He sounded desperate.

Bodies crashed. The dog growled, yelped, then growled again. Then all I heard were heavy feet crashing, and that bright flashlight jerking around, making long dark shadows jump in all directions.

“Lori? Mimi?” John said. “I did mean to scare you. You're late...”

The dog shrieked. That’s the only word. I will never forget that sound.

At least two more bodies were still moving around in the woods.

Lori reached out to take John’s hand as he climbed up the trail. I reached out, too. Instead of climbing up to our level, though, John pulled us down. “Get into the canoe,” he muttered.

He must have rowed out from the docks and tied the canoe to a bush. We waded into the ice-cold knee-deep water and climbed into the canoe. John untied the rope and tossed it toward us as he pushed us off.

We felt around as we bobbed out into deep water. Neither of us could find an oar in the canoe.  

The light kept jerking. I could just barely make out the  shape of John, crouched down beside the bush, while they—whoever they were—were apparently having a real fight up in the woods.

I reached over the side of the canoe. The breeze felt cold on my wet legs. I didn’t really want to drift all over the lake for however long it took John or whoever to row out to us in another boat, so I started pulling my hands through the water, trying to guide the canoe toward the dock area without making any splashes that might remind those guys—or whatever—in the woods that we were in the canoe.

It was like a nightmare. I pulled and pulled and wasn’t getting anywhere. Behind me Lori seemed to be pulling too, and still we weren’t getting much of anywhere, except maybe a little further toward the middle of the lake. Our floundering and the fight must have gone on for half an hour; it felt like forever.

I wondered whether Jake and Dave were two of the bodies in the woods and, if so, who the other body or bodies might be.

Finally the moon shone down past the trees and I could see Lori's hands working in the opposite direction from mine.

“What are you doing?” I whispered. “I’m trying to get to the dock area.”

Lori said, “I’m trying to keep us close to John!”

Without further discussion we decided to take a rest. The canoe bobbed and drifted a little further toward the middle of the lake as we watched the light, dimmer by now, lurching to and fro in the woods. 

Then I noticed that my feet weren’t drying. Water was seeping up into the canoe.

Scary Story Part One: The Grim Reaper

Here’s that scary story Terribleminds suggested—the first 1000 words of a 3000-word tale. I’ve started by introducing a character that really does scare me: a classic victim of Prozac Dementia. (Notice how I’ve placed him at a good healthy geographical distance from myself!) Next week some other Terrible Mind will have to tell us how he gets into the party, since he is not and has never been a student at this college, and what he does there, while I’ll have to figure out what someone else’s scary character does to make that character’s situation even scarier than it already is. During the week after next these stories will reach their gruesome ends…

Blake studied the effect of the hoodie in his bathroom mirrors, then cut out the back of the hood. It’d take three regular hoods to give his costume hood the right shape. It’d take three or four shirts to piece out the sweatpants to make the long robe. Blake didn’t know how to make the seams neater, but he liked the effect of a robe patched together with messy seams, dangling ends of thread, a tattered, even decayed effect. If that wasn’t the way people expected the Grim Reaper to look, it would be by next November.

He didn’t know how long he’d planned to celebrate this Halloween as the Grim Reaper. He thought it started when he’d been tortured in front of the Introduction to Household Wiring class.

Blake had reported that incident to Dr. Klein right away. The next time he saw Klein he’d asked whether his psychiatrist had followed up on his report, and Klein had told him that, according to City College records, there was no course called Introduction to Household Wiring, nor had Blake ever been enrolled in a class at City College. Then why, Blake said, did he continue to have pain, stiffness, cramps, and scars—couldn’t Dr. Klein see the scars?—where Professor Porrua had attached the wires? Klein admitted she could see scars on the arm Blake had put through the window the night the police removed him from his parents’ home, but that was all. Klein was a slimebag.

Blake remembered how Porrua—apparently known by some other name to the college staff, who insisted there was no Professor Porrua—had jabbed the pointed wires into his flesh and lighted him up like a lamp. Everyone jeered. The girl with the grayish-greenish fish eyes, the one who’d also told him that the name “Blake” came from an Anglo-Saxon word that meant either to bleach or to blacken, to discolor—that girl had been sitting in the front row and had laughed with her mouth wide open, food stuck between her teeth, gurgling like a drainpipe. The guy his mother used to think he should have wanted for a buddy, or at least wanted to be like, Martin Hewlett, had come up front and spat in his face as the bell rang and the others left the room.

Blake hated them one and all, especially that whole phalanx of goons who looked just like clones of Martin Hewlett, blond, skinny, tan, and broad-shouldered, with big wide mouths full of perfect teeth. Then again he also hated blacks, on principle, because he’d read how they hated whites; Blake hated whites too, despite being white. He also hated the girls for crowding into all the programs, even the Electricians’ Assistants programs, and raising the academic standards. He also hated all Chinese people for being Chinese, all other Asian people for being the next thing to Chinese, and all Mexican people for looking so much like the Chinese. That was why he really liked what that slimy fish-eyed girl had said, once he thought about it. Removing the color! Taking out any and all kinds of color! That’d be him all right. At the City College Halloween costume party he’d take out all the different colors. Everybody there, or as many of them as possible.

He giggled as he pieced a long triangular section of one of his hoodies in between the slit-open legs of the sweatpants, because he’d just remembered that people who made clothes, like his slimy crafty sister who was married in Armonk, called that kind of patch a “gore.” He wondered how much of the gore he planned to leave on the floors of City College would get onto the gores of his Grim Reaper robe.

Blake had heard people speak of the Grim Reaper carrying a sickle, but that, he knew, was not the correct word. What the Grim Reaper carried was a scythe. Blake had looked around, failed to find a real scythe at a price he could afford, and decided to go with a silly little plastic version. In the end the distraction factor was what he liked about his toy scythe. Anyone looking at the harmless little strip of hollow gray plastic that could never be mistaken for a real blade would be unlikely to notice what made the handle of Blake’s scythe so special.

A rotary saw with teeth an inch deep, its motor camouflaged by the layers of duct tape that held it below the little hollow plastic handle of the scythe, was what made the scythe so special. After Blake sawed up the slimebags of City College, politely withdrew to the men’s room, and sawed off his own head, everyone in the city would remember Blake and his scythe for a long, long time.

As he sewed and glued the edges of the hood to the grinning skull mask Blake remembered all the long-buried memories that he’d started to recall only after being tortured in Introduction to Household Wiring. His mother’s husband, who was not his real father at all, had sexually abused him for years before passing him around at a party. He’d completely blanked out the years he’d lived with some sort of relatives—who his mother really irritated him by denying were relatives, or even people she knew—in Minnesota, where he’d become a good speed skater before the fall and the broken knee. (Dr. Klein said neither of his knees had ever been broken, the lying slimebag. Why did his knees hurt the way they did if he hadn’t overstrained the one on which he’d hobbled around while the other one was broken?)  He’d thought he’d been depressed because of his grades and test scores, but in fact, he now remembered, his grades and test scores had dropped after the broken knee, and having to quit the speed skating program and move back to this city, which he hated.

He was going to leave his mark on the city, though…

Ghosts and Fungi: Halloween Spooky Post (Updated)

"In the basement, my skin felt clammy and clenched tightly around my bones. My heart pounded so wildly in my chest, I felt as if I was facing my own death. I felt so uncomfortable underground, in fact, that I thought I was going to pass out."--Theresa Wiza at http://paranormalminds.blogspot.com/2014/10/a-true-chicago-haunting-its-halloween.html .

In that basement...but not in another basement? I thought, reality-testing as I read. Yes, I can believe that a sane, intelligent person could have this reaction in only some basements, because I've watched it happen. Just as vertigo is a physical reaction that's distinct from fear of heights but is triggered by looking either up or down a "visual cliff," the phobic reactions some people have in only some buildings or basements are physical reactions to substances in those places, distinct from claustrophobia.

As discussed here ...real "horror" houses that seem to be exuding palpable waves of evil at almost everyone are likely to be physically polluted with nastier things than ordinary mold or insects. Houses that make only a few people feel "sick with horror" are likely to be polluted with mold or other natural substances to which only a few people have the nasty reactions that produce the sense of panic.

As when I was writing for Associated Content and working a flea market that was set up in an old tobacco warehouse. Some days it reeked of black mold, Stachybotrys atra, and some days blue mold (Aspergillus, usually a mixed growth), and some days my nose clogged up and I couldn't smell anything until chlorine bleach had become the dominant odor. And the funny thing about the warehouse was that, although the building was well aired, well lighted, and frequently scrubbed, people acted so weird as they walked through it. Sun would be pounding down on the big tinted skylight overhead, vendors' booths would be ablaze with lights, and we'd hear would-be shoppers babbling, "It's like walking into a cave," "It's spooky," "It's like being in a coal mine." 

So, some people don't know much about caves or coal mines. But things got weirder when other people wanted to work the booth with me. A laid-off father of young children who honestly wanted a job, especially a job where kids were positively appreciated, came in for a day. As he walked through the building his eyes teared up, his hands started trembling, and he began to cough. "I can't do this. I don't know why, but I cannot be in this building. I could not bring the children here."

A human friend and partner (yes, I do have a few of those in real life) had gone into the building, without blathering about caves or mines, and happily reported that she'd found me a booth with doors that locked for lower rent than I was paying in another indoor market, farther from home, at the time. Great job! Now she could work the booth and market her own wares some of the time! She came in with me, and after half an hour her mood and manner changed. She started looking nervously around, clock-watching, wanting to go to the bathroom or go out to a store or go home early every few minutes, like a child. Didn't she want to sell her stuff? She did, but..."I don't know what's wrong. I know it's not cold, but I feel cold." Halfway through the day, despite all those breaks, she was obviously trying to cope rationally with irrational mood swings, as her sinuses began to clog. She didn't like the people in the building, even when they bought things. She didn't like the way I'd set up the booth. Something might have been wrong with the food she'd bought. She just had to get out of that horrible building! She couldn't breathe! Her heart was pounding, her head was throbbing! She was going to faint! And this lady doesn't faint easily, nor does she have any kind of heart disease or suffer from migraines...

There's no local legend about the warehouse being haunted. Nobody's ever died there, or even become ill in any dramatic way. There is a solid history of vendors having failed to make a profit there, no matter what they've done. I was one of those vendors. So I left. Around that time, the tornado about which I wrote my last AC article passed by. No funnel cloud was seen, but the "spin-off cyclone" took out one wall of the building. The vendors voted to take out what remained of that wall in hopes that better air circulation would reduce panic reactions in shoppers. From what I've heard, either this didn't work (mold continued to thrive in the shade) or any benefits were offset by the loss of what the building had in the way of climate control, which was inadequate.

Anyway, those people's reactions started to make sense to me when I researched an AC article about the effects of exposure to mold and mold spores on different people. What was "toxic black mold"? (Stachybotrys atra is not toxic but, for reasons unclear, it's more likely than any other mold to cause a toxic chemical reaction when people are exposed to it.) Was there, then, a non-toxic black mold? (Aspergillus niger is generally regarded as safe enough to be the source of most of the citric acid used as flavoring in processed foods...but now we know, although a few years ago we didn't know, that A. niger can cause significant chronic illness for a few unlucky people: 

http://blackmold.awardspace.com/aspergillus.html .) 

What, exactly, does mold do to people? Different things depending on who they are, what they've been eating, what other chemicals they've ingested, and who knows what-all. Allergy reactions definitely include mood swings, panic attacks, rage outbursts, depressive episodes. Mold does not usually mess with most people's minds, but it can mess with some people's minds.

Some sane and intelligent people believe that various kinds of paranormal influences are involved when they have panic attacks, or unexplained surges of rage or depression or, for all we know, maybe even manic energy. There's no proof that these paranormal influences do not exist. If evil spirits exist, they must absolutely love Stachybotrys atra. There is, however, proof that various kinds of allergies and sensitivities can be involved when a long series of nasty things happen in a specific place.

Last winter I wrote about a cancer survivor whose wife had also become ill, while caring for him at home, after another death in the family. Thanks perhaps to some of you and to other kind people, they got the trailer house parked on their own property, as requested, and have reclaimed their right to privacy. But the Kingsport Times-News printed a sequel last summer. A house close to their property seems to be unsalable at any price because it's been described as haunted or at least unlucky--a long series of occupants died of different kinds of cancer in that house. People who don't believe in ghosts or aliens feel creepy about that house, too...should it be called the Hawkins County Horror? And, er um, are that family still sure they want to live there? Should they at least have the place tested for known carcinogens before they rebuild a solid house?

Some people's panic attacks occur frequently, and may be a symptom of something wrong with a natural warning system. Other people seldom have panic attacks, but when they do, theirs may be a healthy indication that something is genuinely dangerous--at least to them. A place where some people feel comfortable, some think that if there's a ghost it might be a friendly one, and others feel sure that the place is haunted by evil spirits, sounds to me like a place where physical triggers of those people's physical sensitivities are present.

This does not necessarily prove that ghosts aren't present...especially if humans have lived in the area and kept records for a long time, and several of those humans have had psychological reactions to the same physical trigger. In theory, if a lot of people's reactions included paranoid panic, there might be a history of murders and suicides, and for all we know the ghosts of all the people involved might haunt the place, as is rumored to be the case with some historic houses in England. But, for those of us who are skeptical about ghosts, "evil spirits" like mold, radon, pesticides, and other pollution are evil enough to explain why some places evoke feelings of horror.

(Update: I didn't search for links to authorities who could validate that mood swings and other psychological phenomena can be allergy symptoms, because that had been recognized in the 1990s. However, for those who are interested in more complete and recent discussions of mood swings as symptoms of mold allergies, here are some links:

http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/blogs/paging.dr.gupta/2007/08/are-you-suffering-from-brain-mold.html

http://www.mold-help.org/

http://sonoranallergy.com/2013/06/26/news-acaai/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16200814

The doctor a landlord is likely to call as a witness if you sue for damages from mold in a building: http://users.physics.harvard.edu/~wilson/soundscience/mold/lees.html He doesn't say that mold does not cause insanity or major brain damage; he just says that lots of people live with mild brain damage, and it's hard to prove that mold does or doesn't cause damage to any specific brain.)