Happy New Year, one and all, from your favorite Pope, John
The Tall (see above for a detailed and most likely confusing explanation of how
I came to rise to this lofty pinochle); my best wishes for a safe and
prosperous 2014, or whatever year it is where you are.
I'm going to tell you a spooky story, so if you're inclined
to be weirded-out by such tales, you might want to stop here and go read
something else, you sissy.
Now strictly speaking, I don't put much credence in stories
of the "supernatural", although I thought Peter Straub's "Ghost
Story" was the most frightening book I have ever read, and I am literally
getting goose bumps as I write this, thinking about Shirley Jackson's "The
Haunting Of Hill House". I didn't sleep real well for a night or two after
I saw "The Exorcist" for the first time, and "Poltergeist"
gave me a pretty good rush as well.
But in real life, day-to-day living, not so much; I can't
say that I've ever even given the subject much thought. Oh, there was an
incident back when I was about 16 when, along with a buddy of mine who swore,
at the right time of night, you could see lights moving across the altar of an
old church in our neighborhood, we entered said church (folks were MUCH more
trusting about leaving church doors unlocked in those days, which was just
after the Civil War, don't you know?), and promptly exited, an hour or so
later, in a bit of a rush, having witnessed something that didn't seem
completely kosher.
But I was, like a lot of 16-year olds, a bit of a doofus then,
and I'm unhappy to say that the ensuing years haven't changed me much.
But belief in the supernatural, nah, not really. To my way
of thinking, things that go unexplained, like UFOs, the Loch Ness monster, crop
circles and why anyone could possibly think Miley Cyrus has any talent
whatsoever are just things which science hasn't stumbled onto an explanation
for yet.
You know, like why this country elected George Bush twice.
Okay, here's the tale (Edgar Allen Poe, eat your heart out).
I recently returned to the city of my roots here in Northern
Illinois, after 13 interesting but increasingly lonely years in Granola City
("What ain't fruits and nuts is flakes"), Los Angeles CA; loved the
weather, but my family is here and I wanted to come home. I'm semi-retired these
days (very small "semi"), working only a few hours a week for the
several clients that still remain from my sales/marketing firm, and since money is
tighter these days, and since I, apparently unlike many others, found the
process of on-line apartment hunting to be impossible ("First Month Rent
Free, Roaches No Charge"), my initial long-distance forays into the local housing market
were less than successful.
My beautiful and extremely bright daughter, Fred (not her
real name; all names have been changed to protect the innocent and confused),
being made aware of my inability to find a place to live by my constant
complaining about it, called me one day with a suggestion: "Hey,
Dad", she says, "I was just talking to Mohandas (my son-in-law's mom), "and she suggested you move into her basement so you could be here
and check things out in person. Plus that would get you home for the
holidays." (This was back in October of last year.)
What???
"Yeah", says my erstwhile kid, "she's got
plenty of room; her basement is ginormous."
Give credit to my offspring: what her description lacks in
proper grammar is more than made up for by how descriptive and accurate it is;
the basement is, indeed, "ginormous". Mohandas and I cut a deal, and
in I moved, after the moving truck loading, the 38-hour cross-country trip with
my son-in-law, complete with trailered car, the unloading at the house and storage
unit, etc.
I filled up about 1/2 of her basement with an easy chair, my
TV/stereo, my desk/computer/printer stand, a bedroom set, complete with
queen-size bed, a refrigerator and some odds and ends, and I'm thinking about
scheduling NASCAR events in the other half. I use a map to find my way around.
Last night, not feeling like cooking nor disturbing my
extremely decent and thoughtful landlady by banging around in her kitchen, I
went to a local eatery, had a very nice meal, complete with a quite interesting
conversation with my wait-person, who was, a) very bright, b) quite attractive
and c) young enough to be my other daughter, which pretty much cancelled out
b).
Arriving home, I switched on the Blackhawks game, and
settled in for the evening.
(I have recently become a hockey fan, after years of
disliking the game for all the gratuitous fighting; said daughter, above, and
her hubby have become big fans of the Chicago team, and she kept assuring me
that the fighting wasn't near as bad as it used to be. Deciding to see if she
was tugging at my extremity, I watched a game or two when I got back in town
and, I'm happy to report, got hooked. The games are exciting, fast-paced and
populated by some incredible athletes that can do things on skates at high
speed that the majority of us couldn't do on the living room rug bare-footed,
in slow-motion. Go 'Hawks!)
Game over, and the 'Hawks triumphant over the NJ Devils 5-3,
it was now 9:00pm and decision time: go to bed and read or sit in my chair and
read. (I'm not much of a TV person; sports and an occasional movie.)
One of the beauties of retirement (even semi), at least for
me, is the flexibility of the schedule: if I want to crash at 9:00pm, or even
6:00pm for that matter, although I only did that when I had the flu a few weeks
ago, who cares? I mean, there's no desk to be at nor clock to punch in the
mornings, so I don't concern myself with my rather, at least to some people,
odd schedule (you'll understand more below). Besides, I'm going to wake up at
least once in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom anyway, so why not?
(I am the embodiment of the old joke about a
"senior" all-nighter being not having to get up once to pee. As I've
aged, my bladder has shrunk to the size of a walnut and my brain has installed
software therein that does a "WARNING! WARNING, OLD PERSON! BLADDER
IS NOW AT MAXIMUM CAPACITY AND MUST BE EMPTIED IMMEDIATELY! WARNING! WARNING!"
kind of a thing. My friend Ron, who is the same age as I am, says he never
wakes up to pee at night, but since he smokes dope all day and goes to bed
stoned, I don't think that counts.)
I'd give 1000 bucks to, just once, sleep all the way
through the night. Shit.
So I crashed at 9 o'clock, dove into "Eisenhower,
Soldier and President", which is pretty interesting, although when I first
started reading it, after 12 pages or so, all I could think was that I hoped
the author, Stephen E. Ambrose, could fornicate better than he could write,
otherwise I would have predicted a lonely life for the man; it read like a
high-school textbook. It's gotten much better.
I managed about a half-hour's worth, turned the light off
and fell asleep.
Right on schedule, Ol' Walnut Bladder woke me up about
1:45am, and believe me, after turning on the light by my bed, walking the 200
yards across the basement, turning on the light in the basement stairwell and
trudging up the steps, walking down the medium-length hallway to make a right
turn into the short hallway that leads to the bathroom, turning on the bathroom
light lest I urinate all over the toilet, the floor, the tub and myself,
washing my hands thoroughly, then reversing my steps to return to bed, I am now
completely awake.
So I read some more, and finally fell back to sleep about
3:45. (This is pretty much every night; remember what I said about the "odd schedule" above? Yeah.)
And dreamed.
I sleep on my left side, for no other better reason than
explains why I'm right-handed, that is, I just do/am, on the right side of the
bed; I'm not democratic enough to sleep in the middle.
Suddenly, I was aware of a woman, a rather tall woman,
standing at the foot of my bed, just at my feet, clothed in what looked to be a
long, white nightgown, wearing a straw cowboy hat. (Hey, it's a dream, they're
not supposed to make sense, okay?) She was facing the same way I was, to my
left, with her left shoulder to me, and muttering something under her breath
that I couldn't make out. It was scary how real it seemed, so there somehow, like I could have reached out and touched her.
(At first, I thought it was my mother, who met her demise
about a year ago at the ripe old age of 98, but realized in an instant I was
wrong; this woman was much younger, with flowing blond hair. Glad too that it
wasn't Fran; she and I stopped speaking about 5 years before she died, then she
cut me out of her will, which I found out about when my brother called to tell
me that she had died, and I didn't go to the funeral. There's a LOT more to
that story, believe me.)
My spectral lady began to move to the other side of the bed,
and as she moved, still saying whatever in her low voice, I found myself trying to call out to her, to ask her what her
name was, to tell me what she was saying, (to try to get her to climb in with me; I am the
epitome of what Jean-Paul Sartre said about guys: "I breathe, therefore I
perv"), to try to get her attention in some way. I kept trying to say something, but nothing was coming out.
She stopped a few feet past the bed, and as she did, I was
finally able to croak out a sound, and that's when I woke up. In that moment of
startled wakefulness, in maybe 5 seconds of passing time, I flipped onto my back,
glanced to my right and saw it was 4:18am, realized that I had had this same
dream just recently, although I hadn't awoken that time, and turned back to
look at the spot where my dream-lady had stopped moving.
Which was directly under the smoke-detector, which like my
printer, my clock radio, my modem, my computer and other myriad devices here in
my basement home, has a small, green LED light that glows all the time,
steadily, not on and off or blinking or anything, just on, only right then, it
wasn't glowing, as it always does, but pulsing, becoming brighter and dimmer
and brighter and dimmer until, after a few moments, it stopped.
I ran, shrieking and half-naked, into the cold Illinois
winter night, never to return again. (Okay, that part isn't true.)
But the rest of it is, and I have to tell you, it was weird;
not Justin Beiber weird, not unexplained lights across the altar weird, but
pretty weird. I know what you're thinking, that I was still asleep, but I
wasn't, because I had to get up and go pee again.
Honest.
I'm hoping she comes back tonight; I mean, yeah, it was just a
brief encounter, but I gotta' tell you, she looked pretty hot.
I wonder if this kind of thing ever happened to Peter
Straub?
Love and Lovecraft,
PJTT
copyright 2014 Krissongs Inc
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