Today there are two new posts. I'm posting part III of Persistence, the hot new story recently rejected by Gaspereau Press. If you've been reading along and wondering about where all this supposed 'horror' is at, this section of the story will hopefully satisfy; it's where things really start picking up speed. You'll find Part III: Stories directly below this post.
But before I get to that, I also want to recommend something else for you to read. This is the work of my good friend Jesse P. Hiltz, which you can find at his writing blog, Not by Needs nor Nature.
Jesse is a man well-versed in the philosophical critical approach, and this knowledge finds its way into everything he writes (it is also the reason why my review of his work won't be nearly as far-reaching as his review of mine, which is an interesting little essay in its own right on the essence of horror). Never satisfied with a simple approach, Jesse evaluates all things from all sides, drawing out and often tearing down our inherent assumptions- assumptions about what it means to read, assumptions about what the real purpose of story-telling is, and (perhaps the greatest fiction of all) the assumption that there is an absolute and inviolable barrier between reader and thing-read.
His latest and (I think) most impressive fictional(?) work is now being posted in sections on his blog. This story, The Split, is a fascinating study of the idea of motivation and guilt, framed within the hazy bounds of a horror story that often seems more like a dream. As we read, we begin to realize that the story is not merely an isolated report of events but the actual product of those events and maybe even the motivator for future events not recorded in the story itself. This is the reason for the question mark above. In the story's process of drawing itself into itself, it also causes itself to go beyond its fictional barriers; as the real story is drawn into the fictional event, the fictional event becomes bound up against the real story and acquires a realness of its own. In the end we are left with the question of what exactly we mean when we say that a thing "has happened."
The Split was written at about the same time as my story, Persistence, and both are the result of hours and hours of frantic discussion between Jesse and I regarding the nature and purpose of horror. This includes the how-and-why of being 'horrified' by things, and the oft-overlooked distinction between 'horror' and 'fright'; ignorance of which leads certain writers (to name no names) to think that merely injecting a stock monster into an otherwise mundane situation is cause enough to label the resulting product a work of horror. In the end, I think that these two stories, the result of that discussion, are complimentary manifestations of a shared outlook; as the one argues that the reality of horror is essentially fear of one's own self, the other takes this one step further, adds the social element, and explains how this fear of self can be spread to or shared by others; although- crucially- the result is not fear of the other, but rather a sense of shared guilt, and an acknowledgment of the fact that all human motivations are essentially entwined.
Take a look at his stuff and I'm sure you'll be impressed. If you've been reading Persistence, I'd suggest you get caught up on The Split, and read the two side-by-side as we post them; they were written side-by-side and they are brothers.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Persistence - Part III: Stories
PERSISTENCE
Dominic E. Lacasse
Part I: Halifax (Link)
Part II: Triumph (Link)
Part IV: Ellen (Link)
Part III: Stories
Cyrus helped me get settled into my new room. I noticed that he had his eye on the whiskey bottle, so when my meager luggage was moved, I suggested that we sit down and have a few drinks– a prospect he seemed to appreciate. He left the room and reappeared shortly with two glasses. I gestured for him to pull a chair up to the desk on which I had carefully positioned my notes about Triumph.
“You said this morning you’d tell me some stories?” I asked. He grinned, poured himself a glass, drank it in one gulp, and poured another.
“Well, if it’s stories you want, I’ve got them,” he said. “I probably know more about the comings and goings of this town than anybody else.”
We talked for a long time about the town’s history, though I didn’t learn anything that I hadn’t known before. However, our historical discussion served its purpose, which was to get enough whiskey into Cyrus that I could begin to ask him about the darker side of Triumph’s past. At first I asked him about fires in general, the worst ones he’d seen or heard about, the fate of the first church (apparently it burned when a Sunday-school teacher forgot to open a flue, a tragedy for such a small mistake, but Cyrus assured me that no one was hurt.) Then, feeling that the time was right, I mentioned the lighthouse.
“The lighthouse? That was a sad thing, alright. The whole town was broken up about it. My father would never even go back to see the place afterwards. Real tragedy.”
“Your father?” I asked. “So then this was quite some time ago.”
“It was in 1910, I think, ‘10 or ‘11.” came the reply. I watched Cyrus carefully, but he didn’t seem at all perturbed by my questions. He sipped his whiskey and leaned back in his chair with the same wistful look he’d had in his eye throughout our conversation.
“I stopped by the church to look it up, it was in a bulletin from 1911.”
Cyrus shrugged. “Well, there you go. I suppose you know the story. For a man to lose his wife and child like that, and he’s just down the road, but you can’t see anything through that forest, so nobody knew. He killed himself, I heard, a few years later. It wasn’t his fault, but you don’t get past that kind of guilt.”
I nodded. “You know, it’s funny,” I said. “Your son told me it happened in ‘28.”
Cyrus glanced at me. “Lad’s got his facts mixed up. The place burned twice.” I was surprised. I had imagined myself as some kind of detective. When I was preparing my questions for the event I had seen myself slowly wheedling out the facts from a tight-lipped Cyrus. But here he had beaten me to the chase. I felt obligated to show off at least a certain amount of journalistic expertise.
“That’s what I thought,” I answered. “The picture in the bulletin from 1911 showed the lighthouse essentially unharmed.”
“Yeah,” he replied. “The first time the fire didn’t get to the lighthouse. The rain put it out before it got through. Nobody ever used it again, though. When something like that happens in a town like this, people would rather forget it than try to rebuild, and the new lighthouses made it so there wasn’t really a point to reopening it.”
“So what about the second fire? That was in ‘28?”
“Yeah, I think so. It doesn’t surprise me that Jeb got the story wrong, he was just a boy when it happened. Some kids got in there, just fooling around, you know. They were smoking, and somehow they managed to set the place on fire from the inside out. They managed to get out okay, they ran and told the constable about it, but by then there was no point in trying to put it out, really. The fire department from Lunenberg came down and we pretty much just watched it burn, kept it from spreading into the woods. Nobody hurt. I think most of us were glad to see it go.”
I was crushed. Once again, it appeared that I had gotten to the end of my search. Perhaps Triumph was, as my friend had suggested, simply not home to many good stories. I had learned a lot about the town’s woeful history, the decline of the fisheries, and the tragic burning of a lighthouse (as well as a not-so-tragic second burning) but beyond the face values of these stories there seemed to lurk no mysterious legend, no grand myth.
I had been scheduled for Monday at my job in Halifax. Here it was Saturday night and I was no closer to my goal than I was when I had left. I had one more day. It would have made sense to return to Halifax and forget the entire event, but somehow I would not allow myself to consider it. It may have been a hunch, or perhaps simply a sense of competition, but I was resolved to stay here and find something where my friend had not. Cyrus and I stayed up for several more hours swapping tales, but when he left and I crawled into my new bed, thoroughly drunk, I was at a dead-end.
Fear. I am running through the woods at dusk. My foot slips off a rock and I fall, hard, on my right shoulder. There is no impact but a sickening cushioning, a sweet-smelling rotten softness as my shoulder goes through a decaying tree-trunk. Potato bugs swarm out of the gash in their putrid home.
I leap to my feet and keep running. Cobwebs and tangled branches swipe at me. It is getting darker. My feet slip and dig in foul-smelling mud and slick black moss. The further I run, the more rotten the world becomes. There is no life in these woods. I do not know what I am running from.
I stop at the edge of a carefully-constructed foundation. The ruins of some long-dead house. Ancient, finished. A piece of humanity left to crumble and rot as the world reclaims all things. It is dark now. I dive into the foundation and shove myself into a corner. Dry things and wet things. Things crawl down the neck of my shirt where my back is pressed against crumbling stone. I become as small as possible, hoping to be overlooked by whatever nameless, mute terror is chasing me. Fear rises inside me like a second self. I am no longer myself, I am made of fear, it conquers my being.
I am standing. I have no control over myself. I know it is foolish to do so, but I walk into the center of the foundation. Whatever hunts me will find me. The fear is turning my mind to ash but I begin to move dead logs and brush from a heap in the center of the foundation. I uncover the blackened head of a rotting horse. An eyelid is open but the eye is gone. A smell of death washes over me.
I hear nothing and see nothing but suddenly I am intent, mystified, staring at the edge of the foundation. A black thing is there. A human’s hand grasps the side of the foundation and the black thing heaves itself closer. The world is full of fire.
I awoke in a cold sweat. It was still night, the lingering effects of the whiskey pounding dully in my head. I had never been so terrified. The dream played itself out over and over in my mind’s eye as I stared into the blackness. That rotting foundation in the dark woods, that feeling of decay all around me, like a terrible black hole in the world’s heart. That unspeakable black horror, dragging itself toward me, more terrifying for the unhallowed mask of humanity it wore. There was no humanity in it. It was a being of rot and plague. But the form it wore was undeniably its own, and the notion that what was once human was now that thing was nauseating.
It was the most vivid dream that I had ever had, but it was a dream and nothing more. Deeply wishing it were morning, I closed my eyes and tried desperately to clear the vision from my mind. Behind it all was the lighthouse, a tortured building calling for me. I would go again tomorrow. I would go on my own and find that which was being hidden from me.
It was raining again the next morning. Cyrus was kind enough to offer me breakfast, but he was obviously in no mood for conversation. He held a large meaty hand to his forehead and kept his gaze directed straight down at the table, eating small bites of scrambled egg and drinking cup after cup of steaming black coffee. Having been in his position before, I knew that his archival gift would be of no use to me until noon at the very earliest.
I, on the other hand, was feeling surprisingly unaffected by the previous nights’ libations. My plan was to hike out to the lighthouse on foot with only a notebook, flashlight, and camera and find some way inside. Given how close the overgrown woods were to the lighthouse, I guessed that if the door would not avail me, I could try climbing a tree and getting in through a window. I couldn’t have explained why I felt that there was something that wasn’t being told about the lighthouse, but I had an odd sense of certainty about it. I felt sure that after only a few minutes of searching I would uncover some piece of this riddle that would either answer all my questions or send more and more swarming my way– either way, the story would grow from this search.
It was raining again, a bleak kind of mist coming down from a bleak kind of sky. The lighthouse was about twenty minutes away on foot, the last five or ten of which wound through the ruts and puddles of the overgrown path leading up to the clearing by the sea. Before I had arrived at the lighthouse my clothes were soaked and my shoes covered in mud and grime. I was having second thoughts about the whole operation. Why was I suspicious of Cyrus’ explanation? Kids make stupid mistakes like that all the time, and it certainly wouldn’t have been the first time things got out of control and something like this had happened. What made this situation seem so out of the ordinary? There was the mixup with the bulletins, but Cyrus had corrected me on that.
Just as I escaped the forest’s clutches and was again confronted by the mammoth structure towering over me, it hit. I was suspicious simply because I had still not found a record of the second burning. Peterson had told me his story and everything seemed to fit– his son’s confusion over the date, the first article’s picture with the lighthouse intact, everything seemed to make sense with the information that Cyrus had given me, but the box that should have logically contained a mention of even the relatively small news of the burning of an abandoned lighthouse by some careless kids had not mentioned the lighthouse at all. I had not gotten the full story, at least not in print.
My inquisitiveness now renewed, I gazed upward at the enigmatic tower. Two small starlings zipped into the clearing and spiraled up through the broken glass at the lighthouse’s spire, making their home out of what man had forgotten. In a strange moment of poetic lunacy I suddenly saw the lighthouse as a grand prison tower, not a guardian to the wayfaring sailor so much as an asylum for those who embrace their own insanity. It towered over me, silent and inscrutable, daring me to challenge its blackened heart.
I sloshed up to the door. It had taken some damage from the fire, the paint that appeared to have once been a lustrous red now a sickened brownish-black. The edges were charred and scorched. There was a heavy padlock hanging from the door, itself smoke-blackened although apparently not broken. I grabbed it and gave it a good shake and found, to my surprise, that it had rusted through. The entire latch snapped off, leaving me with the rusty lock itself, which I absently shoved into my bag beside the flashlight and the camera. I picked the latch off of the hinge which held the door closed and kicked the door in with one go. Strangely, it opened easily, and the excess force caused it to swing around and bang off the inside of the tower, a noisy clang that rang hauntingly through the darkened depths of the lighthouse. I saw a rusty chunk of an old deadbolt, previously mounted inside the door, fly off into the darkness.
My heart fell as I shined the flashlight into the lighthouse, because the damage was even more substantial than I had thought. Broken rafters and pieces of the stairs lay all over the ground; it appeared that the fire had started near the bottom, for the stairs high above my head were still securely fastened to the wall, though they looked just as charred and demolished as those that now lay crumpled before me. I had a vision of those blackened things coming loose somehow, crashing to the ground, pinning me under them. I shuddered involuntarily but stepped inside.
My feet sank into wet ashes. The rain must have come in through the broken windows and stagnated because a rancid smell immediately rose to sting my nostrils. I trod forward resolutely and even had the courage to lift and flip over a large piece of charred wood. A mass of tiny white insects of some kind or another fled this destruction of their decades-silent abode. I recoiled from their escape. There was nothing to be seen under the object I had moved, only more charred, soggy ashes.
I looked around for another ten minutes or so, dodging all manner of entombed vermin who had decided to take up residence in the abandoned lighthouse, and found nothing. I had begun to accept that what little in this place had survived the maelstrom that engulfed it had surrendered to the elements long ago, working its way back into the earth in the bellies of worms, getting ready for another go-around.
Suddenly a loud sound which I could not identify echoed through the inside of the lighthouse and a small black object crashed to the ground in front of me. I dove for the door, knowing for sure that the stairs hanging over my head had finally taken this moment to come crashing down. I was outside, frantically peering around with my flashlight, when I saw that the noise had been made by several large seagulls suddenly deciding to take off from the top of the lighthouse and out to sea. I spent several seconds analyzing the stairs, trying to read their minds. Eventually I decided that they would probably remain there long enough for me to quickly dart inside and see what had fallen when the seagulls had abandoned their shelter. If it was only another charred piece of wood then I would close the door behind me and head back to the hotel. This lighthouse was not the treasure-trove of clues I had hoped it would be.
I stepped inside and trudged through the soggy ashes to the origin of my haphazard evacuation, passing my flashlight over the ground. At first I had a hard time recognizing it as anything other than a block of wood, but then I saw that the object on the ground in front of me was actually a small black book, what looked like a journal of some kind. I snatched it quickly, shoved it in my bag and stalked off back to the hotel. The rain was falling with a vengeance now, making the walk out even more miserable than the walk in, my shoes buried in mud, my lungs full of the sickeningly-sweet odor of a forest in a hot summer rain.
When I had gotten back to the hotel, dried off, and changed my clothes, I sat down at the desk and pulled out the notebook. It seemed to have fared only slightly better than the rest of the lighthouse. It was damp and moldy, most of its pages blurred to unintelligibility. The cover was of a soft leather; I imagined it would have been a very nice journal when it was new, but now the cover and binding were bent and cracked, warped with moisture, giving off a noxious odor.
The first twenty pages or so were completely useless to me. There was a page beyond that, however, that was somewhat more legible. Taking up a pencil and my own black notebook, I carefully transcribed what I found on these pages:
Nobody wants to talk about them. They call it dangerous. I think that’s foolish– as though simply learning about something causes you to become a part of it. There’s no harm in simply learning. Jameson and his mother were monsters, but that’s not to say there’s nothing that we can learn from their misdeeds. The work begun by Freud in this area could benefit greatly from such a dramatic case. For instance, the nature of their k-
The text faded away here, although indentations in the page hinted at the sinister word that would have followed. The bottom half of this page was covered in scribbles, as though the author’s pen had malfunctioned and he or she was trying to coax it back into life. I eagerly turned the page, but the next several pages were blank, and when the writing resumed again it was in a section that had suffered much water damage and was essentially illegible.
I flipped further into the book. Past more obliterated text there was another dry spot. The handwriting here had changed considerably. Where before it had been a graceful, petite script, it changed to a somewhat cracked, spidery hand, as though written in haste or with pen in shaking fingers. It read:
We say the insane are freaks of nature, we see them as half-animal. We do not understand them to be like us. They are mindless, we are rational. They are chaotic, we are predictable. They see a fragmented and nonsensical reality, we base our lives on fact.
What terrifies me is the idea that we characterize the insane this way because we are afraid of the obvious truth. The truth that confronts everyone and is silenced by such belief is that we are, really, all insane.
This world is not meant for us. There are those among us who have passed beyond the curtain between what we call sanity and what we call madness, but in the eyes of the world, we are all madmen. We think and write, we build massive monuments to our own selves, we love beyond our lives, we destroy ourselves by the thousands with weapons of unearthly power.
We have walked beyond the path of animal but here there is no road for us to travel, there is no guide for us because we are first, and so we simply act our desires, conforming our madness to the bonds set by our societies, driving down the one fact that we all know to be true, the fact of our own senselessness and chaotic lack of purpose.
All madness is my madness. There is no escaping this truth.
I put down my pencil and stared blankly at what I had written. I could not say what scared me more; the passage I had just transcribed, or the extent to which I could feel myself agreeing with it.
That night, after dinner, I fetched my bottle of whiskey and sat with Peterson in the hotel’s office. We drank and he told me more about the town’s furthest reaches of history, its settlement by Basque sailors, their battles with the colonial French and English before their final defeat. Again, when his tongue was suitably loosened by the bitter whiskey, I began to steer our conversation toward the matters with which I was presently concerned. I had decided earlier not to mention my trespass in the lighthouse, nor the notebook I had found in there. I wanted to know about these Jamesons, and the apparently nefarious deeds they had committed, these crimes about which it was dangerous to speak.
Again, as before, I led him into the discussion by asking about similar events. I asked if there had ever been a murder in the town, to which he replied that once, as a child, he had heard of a man in town who had killed his wife when he found she was being unfaithful to him. Here I decided to speak to the point:
“Was that a Mr. Jameson?”
Cyrus was silent for several seconds. Finally, slowly and deliberately, he put his glass down on the table and leveled his gaze at me across the small table. When he spoke, his voice was quiet, calm. “Where did you hear that name?”
I had devised a somewhat suitable excuse before our conversation began. “I heard some of the kids talking about a Mr. Jameson, something about a murder.”
“That’s a lie,” Cyrus said flatly. I remained silent. After a few seconds, he spoke again. “We don’t talk about them here. The kids have never even heard the name. So where did you?”
I had no answer. If I told him the truth, then he would know I had broken into the lighthouse, and that was the last thing I needed. This town seemed like the kind of place where even someone like Cyrus would be enraged by the thought of an outsider snooping around, breaking into buildings.
“You’re clever, you.” he said eventually. The rain pounded down outside the window. “You keep your mouth shut. You think before you talk. That’s good. Well, it’s none of my business where you heard about those lunatics, I suppose.”
It seemed I may have gotten what I wanted. Cyrus took a long gulp of whiskey, which I had learned to identify as a signal of an oncoming story. But when he put his glass down, he kept a calculating stare on me, seldom breaking eye contact. His voice was quiet, barely audible over the torrent outside.
“I don’t want you mentioning this again in town, do you understand?” the tone of his voice made clear how serious he was, and I nodded nervously. “It’s bad for us to be talking about them,” he said, “It’s a story people shouldn’t hear. But you’re the expert, not me, so I’ll tell you. But once we’re done here, we’re not going to be bringing it up again.” Again, I nodded. He grunted his approval and began.
“A long time ago, I think it was sometime around 1850, there was a family here, named Jameson. A man and his wife, and two sons. They lived with his mother. She was feeble-minded and it was said she was demented somehow. She lived in their attic. None of this was out of the ordinary, you know, not for that time. It wasn’t like today, when people send their parents away when they get old and screws start coming loose. The idea of medicine for problems of the head barely even existed. So if granny cracked, you’d put her up somewhere in your house, and that’d be that.
“Anyway, things went fine for them for a long time. Jameson was a butcher and he made a good living. His family seemed to be happy. But then his wife, she got sick, pneumonia or something. She held on for a long time, but eventually she passed, and it hit Jameson hard. He stopped showing up for work. He wouldn’t answer the door when people came to visit. His boys stopped going to school. Everybody in town was worried sick about the poor guy.
“And then one day he locks the door on his shop, and he and his boys go off into the woods with saws and hammers. They come back a week or two later, and they’re packing up their stuff into a cart. None of them says anything to anybody. They take one cart-load of junk, bundle the old lady in, and off they go.
“For a long time, nobody saw them except for when Jameson or one of his boys would come in to town for essentials. They hunted and cured their own meat out there in the woods, living off deer and bear, whatever they could get. After a while everybody just sort of forgot about them.
“Then they got a real bad winter. Even the people in town were snowed in for a good part of it, not to mention the Jamesons, out in the middle of nowhere with nobody to help them out. Difference was people in town could stock up on food when the snow melted, get ready for the next snow-in. The way I heard it, the Jamesons didn’t have enough meat put away and couldn’t get out of their house until the spring.” Cyrus’ gaze was distant. He was looking down at his hands but there was no focus. He was quiet for a long time. He cleared his throat. I had the sudden, unbidden image of a rising tide. “Not to put too fine a point on it, his boys weren’t seen again after that winter.”
I shuddered at the implication. I considered asking for clarification, just so I could be completely sure of what I was being told, but the look I was getting from Cyrus told me all I needed to know. A chill passed over me. Cyrus took another sip of whiskey and stared out the window for a long time. I thought the story was over, but then he suddenly began again.
“Nobody asked questions,” he said. “Everybody knew, but nobody asked. The place became sort of a haunted house story around here. People avoided it like the plague. Kids dared each other to go out and sneak a look at it. On the rare occasion Jameson came to town, he looked dead inside, and people stayed out of his way. A thing like that happens to you, whether it’s guilt or something I don’t understand, it puts you off-kilter. And Jameson didn’t need any more of that, what with what he went through when his wife passed away, and being cooped up all the time with an old bat who had gone around the bend years before. Word spread that he was out of his head, but good. Them that lived closest to him said when the wind was right they could hear him screaming, just screaming and screaming.
“And then the worst of it. Kids in town started to go missing. At first it was just one, and everybody figured she’d gone off into the woods and gotten lost, or else drowned in the ocean, something like that. Things like that happen sometimes, and you’ve got to get past it. But then there was another a couple months later, and then another. Eventually it got so parents kept their kids locked inside, too scared even to let them out for school.
“Everybody got together to talk about it, try to figure out what the hell was going on, as you’d expect. Nobody could figure out where these kids were going to, one after another like that. And then somebody says when Jameson’s been in town, that’s when the kids go missing. It wasn’t so hard for them to notice that, because everybody was so scared of Jameson, they knew when he was in town and when he wasn’t, they stayed away. But of course they hadn’t told their kids about what he’d done and what they thought he’d become out there in the woods, and every time Jameson comes into town, one of the kids goes missing.
“So a bunch of the men got together and headed out there. And I hear when they got to about fifty yards from the house, one of them trips, and they find this barbed wire, strung up about six inches off the ground. They follow it all the way around and it’s strung in a circle all around Jameson’s house.
“So they go in and it’s like something out of a bad dream. Jameson’s mother, that crazy old demon, she’s in the living room, she’s laughing, and she’s got this kid, and she’s just breaking her fingers, one by one. Kid’s not even screaming, just sitting there crying, not resisting at all. So the men come in and knock the old bitch down, and this poor girl, she doesn’t even understand what’s happening. She just stares at these guys, doesn’t say a word. And they’re hugging her and telling her it’s alright, they’re here now, she’s not gonna get hurt anymore, and she’s just standing there, blank-faced, like she’s not even a person inside anymore. So somebody grabs her up and heads back to town with her. I heard she never said a word for the rest of her life.
“They tie up the old lady where she fell down, and she’s hollering bloody murder and ranting and raving all kinds of nonsense. Next thing you know Jameson’s in the room and he’s screaming all kinds of madness and swinging at these guys with this butcher knife, catches one of them right in the arm. Somebody cracks him with the butt of a rifle and he goes down cold.
“The rest of the house seems fine, they can’t find any of the other kids. So they go down into the basement, and it’s a fuckin’ nightmare. The blacksmith’s boy is strung up and skinned, just like a deer. What’s worse, there’s a pile of bloody bones and clothes in one corner, no flesh to be seen. The crazy bastard was kidnaping these kids, and when his demented old crow of a mother was done playing with them, he was... dressing them out just as neat as you please, for dinner.”
Cyrus stopped talking, a haunted look on his face. I felt sick. I had come here for a story, and I had gotten it, and I wished that I had never even heard of Triumph. Cyrus poured us each a short-lived glass of bourbon. When we had taken a few seconds of silence, I asked in a shaky voice, “And Jameson? And his mother? What happened to them?”
Peterson leveled his eyes at me. “We take care of our own around here.” he said at length.
“You take care of your own?”
“That house was burned to the ground before those boys even started back to town. They stayed and watched it go to make sure nobody got out. It was the right thing to do and nobody ever had a problem with it.
“I said you were clever because you think before you speak. You keep your mouth shut when you think it’s the right move, which is the only reason I told you that story. If you’ve got any brains at all, you’d keep your mouth shut about this. That was the worst thing that ever happened in this town, but it’s finished. We don’t talk about it, and you shouldn’t either. Some stories are best left untold, for any number of reasons.”
That night I had a hard time getting to sleep. It wasn’t only the gruesome story I’d heard that kept me awake, although that in itself has caused me many sleepless nights in the years that have followed. It was that I had two halves of what I was convinced was one story. The lighthouse, the house in the woods, the house whose foundation I was sure I’d seen in my terrible dream. Jameson and the author of my anonymous notebook. 1850. 1911. 1928. And now, 1958. A drama that played itself out over a century of mysterious events.
Suddenly, I was struck by a memory of the notebook. It was a hunch, but at the same time, as I turned on my bedside light and leapt to the desk, I knew exactly what I would find. I frantically scanned the inside of the black diary’s cover with a magnifying glass. And then I found it: in a tiny script, a poem which I curiously remembered from an ancient McGuffey’s Reader I had somehow inherited, and the name that had been on my mind since my first night in Triumph:
Don’t touch this book if you value your life,
For the owner carries a leather knife.
This diary is the property of
Ellen Daress
Dominic E. Lacasse
Part I: Halifax (Link)
Part II: Triumph (Link)
Part IV: Ellen (Link)
Part III: Stories
Cyrus helped me get settled into my new room. I noticed that he had his eye on the whiskey bottle, so when my meager luggage was moved, I suggested that we sit down and have a few drinks– a prospect he seemed to appreciate. He left the room and reappeared shortly with two glasses. I gestured for him to pull a chair up to the desk on which I had carefully positioned my notes about Triumph.
“You said this morning you’d tell me some stories?” I asked. He grinned, poured himself a glass, drank it in one gulp, and poured another.
“Well, if it’s stories you want, I’ve got them,” he said. “I probably know more about the comings and goings of this town than anybody else.”
We talked for a long time about the town’s history, though I didn’t learn anything that I hadn’t known before. However, our historical discussion served its purpose, which was to get enough whiskey into Cyrus that I could begin to ask him about the darker side of Triumph’s past. At first I asked him about fires in general, the worst ones he’d seen or heard about, the fate of the first church (apparently it burned when a Sunday-school teacher forgot to open a flue, a tragedy for such a small mistake, but Cyrus assured me that no one was hurt.) Then, feeling that the time was right, I mentioned the lighthouse.
“The lighthouse? That was a sad thing, alright. The whole town was broken up about it. My father would never even go back to see the place afterwards. Real tragedy.”
“Your father?” I asked. “So then this was quite some time ago.”
“It was in 1910, I think, ‘10 or ‘11.” came the reply. I watched Cyrus carefully, but he didn’t seem at all perturbed by my questions. He sipped his whiskey and leaned back in his chair with the same wistful look he’d had in his eye throughout our conversation.
“I stopped by the church to look it up, it was in a bulletin from 1911.”
Cyrus shrugged. “Well, there you go. I suppose you know the story. For a man to lose his wife and child like that, and he’s just down the road, but you can’t see anything through that forest, so nobody knew. He killed himself, I heard, a few years later. It wasn’t his fault, but you don’t get past that kind of guilt.”
I nodded. “You know, it’s funny,” I said. “Your son told me it happened in ‘28.”
Cyrus glanced at me. “Lad’s got his facts mixed up. The place burned twice.” I was surprised. I had imagined myself as some kind of detective. When I was preparing my questions for the event I had seen myself slowly wheedling out the facts from a tight-lipped Cyrus. But here he had beaten me to the chase. I felt obligated to show off at least a certain amount of journalistic expertise.
“That’s what I thought,” I answered. “The picture in the bulletin from 1911 showed the lighthouse essentially unharmed.”
“Yeah,” he replied. “The first time the fire didn’t get to the lighthouse. The rain put it out before it got through. Nobody ever used it again, though. When something like that happens in a town like this, people would rather forget it than try to rebuild, and the new lighthouses made it so there wasn’t really a point to reopening it.”
“So what about the second fire? That was in ‘28?”
“Yeah, I think so. It doesn’t surprise me that Jeb got the story wrong, he was just a boy when it happened. Some kids got in there, just fooling around, you know. They were smoking, and somehow they managed to set the place on fire from the inside out. They managed to get out okay, they ran and told the constable about it, but by then there was no point in trying to put it out, really. The fire department from Lunenberg came down and we pretty much just watched it burn, kept it from spreading into the woods. Nobody hurt. I think most of us were glad to see it go.”
I was crushed. Once again, it appeared that I had gotten to the end of my search. Perhaps Triumph was, as my friend had suggested, simply not home to many good stories. I had learned a lot about the town’s woeful history, the decline of the fisheries, and the tragic burning of a lighthouse (as well as a not-so-tragic second burning) but beyond the face values of these stories there seemed to lurk no mysterious legend, no grand myth.
I had been scheduled for Monday at my job in Halifax. Here it was Saturday night and I was no closer to my goal than I was when I had left. I had one more day. It would have made sense to return to Halifax and forget the entire event, but somehow I would not allow myself to consider it. It may have been a hunch, or perhaps simply a sense of competition, but I was resolved to stay here and find something where my friend had not. Cyrus and I stayed up for several more hours swapping tales, but when he left and I crawled into my new bed, thoroughly drunk, I was at a dead-end.
Fear. I am running through the woods at dusk. My foot slips off a rock and I fall, hard, on my right shoulder. There is no impact but a sickening cushioning, a sweet-smelling rotten softness as my shoulder goes through a decaying tree-trunk. Potato bugs swarm out of the gash in their putrid home.
I leap to my feet and keep running. Cobwebs and tangled branches swipe at me. It is getting darker. My feet slip and dig in foul-smelling mud and slick black moss. The further I run, the more rotten the world becomes. There is no life in these woods. I do not know what I am running from.
I stop at the edge of a carefully-constructed foundation. The ruins of some long-dead house. Ancient, finished. A piece of humanity left to crumble and rot as the world reclaims all things. It is dark now. I dive into the foundation and shove myself into a corner. Dry things and wet things. Things crawl down the neck of my shirt where my back is pressed against crumbling stone. I become as small as possible, hoping to be overlooked by whatever nameless, mute terror is chasing me. Fear rises inside me like a second self. I am no longer myself, I am made of fear, it conquers my being.
I am standing. I have no control over myself. I know it is foolish to do so, but I walk into the center of the foundation. Whatever hunts me will find me. The fear is turning my mind to ash but I begin to move dead logs and brush from a heap in the center of the foundation. I uncover the blackened head of a rotting horse. An eyelid is open but the eye is gone. A smell of death washes over me.
I hear nothing and see nothing but suddenly I am intent, mystified, staring at the edge of the foundation. A black thing is there. A human’s hand grasps the side of the foundation and the black thing heaves itself closer. The world is full of fire.
I awoke in a cold sweat. It was still night, the lingering effects of the whiskey pounding dully in my head. I had never been so terrified. The dream played itself out over and over in my mind’s eye as I stared into the blackness. That rotting foundation in the dark woods, that feeling of decay all around me, like a terrible black hole in the world’s heart. That unspeakable black horror, dragging itself toward me, more terrifying for the unhallowed mask of humanity it wore. There was no humanity in it. It was a being of rot and plague. But the form it wore was undeniably its own, and the notion that what was once human was now that thing was nauseating.
It was the most vivid dream that I had ever had, but it was a dream and nothing more. Deeply wishing it were morning, I closed my eyes and tried desperately to clear the vision from my mind. Behind it all was the lighthouse, a tortured building calling for me. I would go again tomorrow. I would go on my own and find that which was being hidden from me.
It was raining again the next morning. Cyrus was kind enough to offer me breakfast, but he was obviously in no mood for conversation. He held a large meaty hand to his forehead and kept his gaze directed straight down at the table, eating small bites of scrambled egg and drinking cup after cup of steaming black coffee. Having been in his position before, I knew that his archival gift would be of no use to me until noon at the very earliest.
I, on the other hand, was feeling surprisingly unaffected by the previous nights’ libations. My plan was to hike out to the lighthouse on foot with only a notebook, flashlight, and camera and find some way inside. Given how close the overgrown woods were to the lighthouse, I guessed that if the door would not avail me, I could try climbing a tree and getting in through a window. I couldn’t have explained why I felt that there was something that wasn’t being told about the lighthouse, but I had an odd sense of certainty about it. I felt sure that after only a few minutes of searching I would uncover some piece of this riddle that would either answer all my questions or send more and more swarming my way– either way, the story would grow from this search.
It was raining again, a bleak kind of mist coming down from a bleak kind of sky. The lighthouse was about twenty minutes away on foot, the last five or ten of which wound through the ruts and puddles of the overgrown path leading up to the clearing by the sea. Before I had arrived at the lighthouse my clothes were soaked and my shoes covered in mud and grime. I was having second thoughts about the whole operation. Why was I suspicious of Cyrus’ explanation? Kids make stupid mistakes like that all the time, and it certainly wouldn’t have been the first time things got out of control and something like this had happened. What made this situation seem so out of the ordinary? There was the mixup with the bulletins, but Cyrus had corrected me on that.
Just as I escaped the forest’s clutches and was again confronted by the mammoth structure towering over me, it hit. I was suspicious simply because I had still not found a record of the second burning. Peterson had told me his story and everything seemed to fit– his son’s confusion over the date, the first article’s picture with the lighthouse intact, everything seemed to make sense with the information that Cyrus had given me, but the box that should have logically contained a mention of even the relatively small news of the burning of an abandoned lighthouse by some careless kids had not mentioned the lighthouse at all. I had not gotten the full story, at least not in print.
My inquisitiveness now renewed, I gazed upward at the enigmatic tower. Two small starlings zipped into the clearing and spiraled up through the broken glass at the lighthouse’s spire, making their home out of what man had forgotten. In a strange moment of poetic lunacy I suddenly saw the lighthouse as a grand prison tower, not a guardian to the wayfaring sailor so much as an asylum for those who embrace their own insanity. It towered over me, silent and inscrutable, daring me to challenge its blackened heart.
I sloshed up to the door. It had taken some damage from the fire, the paint that appeared to have once been a lustrous red now a sickened brownish-black. The edges were charred and scorched. There was a heavy padlock hanging from the door, itself smoke-blackened although apparently not broken. I grabbed it and gave it a good shake and found, to my surprise, that it had rusted through. The entire latch snapped off, leaving me with the rusty lock itself, which I absently shoved into my bag beside the flashlight and the camera. I picked the latch off of the hinge which held the door closed and kicked the door in with one go. Strangely, it opened easily, and the excess force caused it to swing around and bang off the inside of the tower, a noisy clang that rang hauntingly through the darkened depths of the lighthouse. I saw a rusty chunk of an old deadbolt, previously mounted inside the door, fly off into the darkness.
My heart fell as I shined the flashlight into the lighthouse, because the damage was even more substantial than I had thought. Broken rafters and pieces of the stairs lay all over the ground; it appeared that the fire had started near the bottom, for the stairs high above my head were still securely fastened to the wall, though they looked just as charred and demolished as those that now lay crumpled before me. I had a vision of those blackened things coming loose somehow, crashing to the ground, pinning me under them. I shuddered involuntarily but stepped inside.
My feet sank into wet ashes. The rain must have come in through the broken windows and stagnated because a rancid smell immediately rose to sting my nostrils. I trod forward resolutely and even had the courage to lift and flip over a large piece of charred wood. A mass of tiny white insects of some kind or another fled this destruction of their decades-silent abode. I recoiled from their escape. There was nothing to be seen under the object I had moved, only more charred, soggy ashes.
I looked around for another ten minutes or so, dodging all manner of entombed vermin who had decided to take up residence in the abandoned lighthouse, and found nothing. I had begun to accept that what little in this place had survived the maelstrom that engulfed it had surrendered to the elements long ago, working its way back into the earth in the bellies of worms, getting ready for another go-around.
Suddenly a loud sound which I could not identify echoed through the inside of the lighthouse and a small black object crashed to the ground in front of me. I dove for the door, knowing for sure that the stairs hanging over my head had finally taken this moment to come crashing down. I was outside, frantically peering around with my flashlight, when I saw that the noise had been made by several large seagulls suddenly deciding to take off from the top of the lighthouse and out to sea. I spent several seconds analyzing the stairs, trying to read their minds. Eventually I decided that they would probably remain there long enough for me to quickly dart inside and see what had fallen when the seagulls had abandoned their shelter. If it was only another charred piece of wood then I would close the door behind me and head back to the hotel. This lighthouse was not the treasure-trove of clues I had hoped it would be.
I stepped inside and trudged through the soggy ashes to the origin of my haphazard evacuation, passing my flashlight over the ground. At first I had a hard time recognizing it as anything other than a block of wood, but then I saw that the object on the ground in front of me was actually a small black book, what looked like a journal of some kind. I snatched it quickly, shoved it in my bag and stalked off back to the hotel. The rain was falling with a vengeance now, making the walk out even more miserable than the walk in, my shoes buried in mud, my lungs full of the sickeningly-sweet odor of a forest in a hot summer rain.
When I had gotten back to the hotel, dried off, and changed my clothes, I sat down at the desk and pulled out the notebook. It seemed to have fared only slightly better than the rest of the lighthouse. It was damp and moldy, most of its pages blurred to unintelligibility. The cover was of a soft leather; I imagined it would have been a very nice journal when it was new, but now the cover and binding were bent and cracked, warped with moisture, giving off a noxious odor.
The first twenty pages or so were completely useless to me. There was a page beyond that, however, that was somewhat more legible. Taking up a pencil and my own black notebook, I carefully transcribed what I found on these pages:
Nobody wants to talk about them. They call it dangerous. I think that’s foolish– as though simply learning about something causes you to become a part of it. There’s no harm in simply learning. Jameson and his mother were monsters, but that’s not to say there’s nothing that we can learn from their misdeeds. The work begun by Freud in this area could benefit greatly from such a dramatic case. For instance, the nature of their k-
The text faded away here, although indentations in the page hinted at the sinister word that would have followed. The bottom half of this page was covered in scribbles, as though the author’s pen had malfunctioned and he or she was trying to coax it back into life. I eagerly turned the page, but the next several pages were blank, and when the writing resumed again it was in a section that had suffered much water damage and was essentially illegible.
I flipped further into the book. Past more obliterated text there was another dry spot. The handwriting here had changed considerably. Where before it had been a graceful, petite script, it changed to a somewhat cracked, spidery hand, as though written in haste or with pen in shaking fingers. It read:
We say the insane are freaks of nature, we see them as half-animal. We do not understand them to be like us. They are mindless, we are rational. They are chaotic, we are predictable. They see a fragmented and nonsensical reality, we base our lives on fact.
What terrifies me is the idea that we characterize the insane this way because we are afraid of the obvious truth. The truth that confronts everyone and is silenced by such belief is that we are, really, all insane.
This world is not meant for us. There are those among us who have passed beyond the curtain between what we call sanity and what we call madness, but in the eyes of the world, we are all madmen. We think and write, we build massive monuments to our own selves, we love beyond our lives, we destroy ourselves by the thousands with weapons of unearthly power.
We have walked beyond the path of animal but here there is no road for us to travel, there is no guide for us because we are first, and so we simply act our desires, conforming our madness to the bonds set by our societies, driving down the one fact that we all know to be true, the fact of our own senselessness and chaotic lack of purpose.
All madness is my madness. There is no escaping this truth.
I put down my pencil and stared blankly at what I had written. I could not say what scared me more; the passage I had just transcribed, or the extent to which I could feel myself agreeing with it.
That night, after dinner, I fetched my bottle of whiskey and sat with Peterson in the hotel’s office. We drank and he told me more about the town’s furthest reaches of history, its settlement by Basque sailors, their battles with the colonial French and English before their final defeat. Again, when his tongue was suitably loosened by the bitter whiskey, I began to steer our conversation toward the matters with which I was presently concerned. I had decided earlier not to mention my trespass in the lighthouse, nor the notebook I had found in there. I wanted to know about these Jamesons, and the apparently nefarious deeds they had committed, these crimes about which it was dangerous to speak.
Again, as before, I led him into the discussion by asking about similar events. I asked if there had ever been a murder in the town, to which he replied that once, as a child, he had heard of a man in town who had killed his wife when he found she was being unfaithful to him. Here I decided to speak to the point:
“Was that a Mr. Jameson?”
Cyrus was silent for several seconds. Finally, slowly and deliberately, he put his glass down on the table and leveled his gaze at me across the small table. When he spoke, his voice was quiet, calm. “Where did you hear that name?”
I had devised a somewhat suitable excuse before our conversation began. “I heard some of the kids talking about a Mr. Jameson, something about a murder.”
“That’s a lie,” Cyrus said flatly. I remained silent. After a few seconds, he spoke again. “We don’t talk about them here. The kids have never even heard the name. So where did you?”
I had no answer. If I told him the truth, then he would know I had broken into the lighthouse, and that was the last thing I needed. This town seemed like the kind of place where even someone like Cyrus would be enraged by the thought of an outsider snooping around, breaking into buildings.
“You’re clever, you.” he said eventually. The rain pounded down outside the window. “You keep your mouth shut. You think before you talk. That’s good. Well, it’s none of my business where you heard about those lunatics, I suppose.”
It seemed I may have gotten what I wanted. Cyrus took a long gulp of whiskey, which I had learned to identify as a signal of an oncoming story. But when he put his glass down, he kept a calculating stare on me, seldom breaking eye contact. His voice was quiet, barely audible over the torrent outside.
“I don’t want you mentioning this again in town, do you understand?” the tone of his voice made clear how serious he was, and I nodded nervously. “It’s bad for us to be talking about them,” he said, “It’s a story people shouldn’t hear. But you’re the expert, not me, so I’ll tell you. But once we’re done here, we’re not going to be bringing it up again.” Again, I nodded. He grunted his approval and began.
“A long time ago, I think it was sometime around 1850, there was a family here, named Jameson. A man and his wife, and two sons. They lived with his mother. She was feeble-minded and it was said she was demented somehow. She lived in their attic. None of this was out of the ordinary, you know, not for that time. It wasn’t like today, when people send their parents away when they get old and screws start coming loose. The idea of medicine for problems of the head barely even existed. So if granny cracked, you’d put her up somewhere in your house, and that’d be that.
“Anyway, things went fine for them for a long time. Jameson was a butcher and he made a good living. His family seemed to be happy. But then his wife, she got sick, pneumonia or something. She held on for a long time, but eventually she passed, and it hit Jameson hard. He stopped showing up for work. He wouldn’t answer the door when people came to visit. His boys stopped going to school. Everybody in town was worried sick about the poor guy.
“And then one day he locks the door on his shop, and he and his boys go off into the woods with saws and hammers. They come back a week or two later, and they’re packing up their stuff into a cart. None of them says anything to anybody. They take one cart-load of junk, bundle the old lady in, and off they go.
“For a long time, nobody saw them except for when Jameson or one of his boys would come in to town for essentials. They hunted and cured their own meat out there in the woods, living off deer and bear, whatever they could get. After a while everybody just sort of forgot about them.
“Then they got a real bad winter. Even the people in town were snowed in for a good part of it, not to mention the Jamesons, out in the middle of nowhere with nobody to help them out. Difference was people in town could stock up on food when the snow melted, get ready for the next snow-in. The way I heard it, the Jamesons didn’t have enough meat put away and couldn’t get out of their house until the spring.” Cyrus’ gaze was distant. He was looking down at his hands but there was no focus. He was quiet for a long time. He cleared his throat. I had the sudden, unbidden image of a rising tide. “Not to put too fine a point on it, his boys weren’t seen again after that winter.”
I shuddered at the implication. I considered asking for clarification, just so I could be completely sure of what I was being told, but the look I was getting from Cyrus told me all I needed to know. A chill passed over me. Cyrus took another sip of whiskey and stared out the window for a long time. I thought the story was over, but then he suddenly began again.
“Nobody asked questions,” he said. “Everybody knew, but nobody asked. The place became sort of a haunted house story around here. People avoided it like the plague. Kids dared each other to go out and sneak a look at it. On the rare occasion Jameson came to town, he looked dead inside, and people stayed out of his way. A thing like that happens to you, whether it’s guilt or something I don’t understand, it puts you off-kilter. And Jameson didn’t need any more of that, what with what he went through when his wife passed away, and being cooped up all the time with an old bat who had gone around the bend years before. Word spread that he was out of his head, but good. Them that lived closest to him said when the wind was right they could hear him screaming, just screaming and screaming.
“And then the worst of it. Kids in town started to go missing. At first it was just one, and everybody figured she’d gone off into the woods and gotten lost, or else drowned in the ocean, something like that. Things like that happen sometimes, and you’ve got to get past it. But then there was another a couple months later, and then another. Eventually it got so parents kept their kids locked inside, too scared even to let them out for school.
“Everybody got together to talk about it, try to figure out what the hell was going on, as you’d expect. Nobody could figure out where these kids were going to, one after another like that. And then somebody says when Jameson’s been in town, that’s when the kids go missing. It wasn’t so hard for them to notice that, because everybody was so scared of Jameson, they knew when he was in town and when he wasn’t, they stayed away. But of course they hadn’t told their kids about what he’d done and what they thought he’d become out there in the woods, and every time Jameson comes into town, one of the kids goes missing.
“So a bunch of the men got together and headed out there. And I hear when they got to about fifty yards from the house, one of them trips, and they find this barbed wire, strung up about six inches off the ground. They follow it all the way around and it’s strung in a circle all around Jameson’s house.
“So they go in and it’s like something out of a bad dream. Jameson’s mother, that crazy old demon, she’s in the living room, she’s laughing, and she’s got this kid, and she’s just breaking her fingers, one by one. Kid’s not even screaming, just sitting there crying, not resisting at all. So the men come in and knock the old bitch down, and this poor girl, she doesn’t even understand what’s happening. She just stares at these guys, doesn’t say a word. And they’re hugging her and telling her it’s alright, they’re here now, she’s not gonna get hurt anymore, and she’s just standing there, blank-faced, like she’s not even a person inside anymore. So somebody grabs her up and heads back to town with her. I heard she never said a word for the rest of her life.
“They tie up the old lady where she fell down, and she’s hollering bloody murder and ranting and raving all kinds of nonsense. Next thing you know Jameson’s in the room and he’s screaming all kinds of madness and swinging at these guys with this butcher knife, catches one of them right in the arm. Somebody cracks him with the butt of a rifle and he goes down cold.
“The rest of the house seems fine, they can’t find any of the other kids. So they go down into the basement, and it’s a fuckin’ nightmare. The blacksmith’s boy is strung up and skinned, just like a deer. What’s worse, there’s a pile of bloody bones and clothes in one corner, no flesh to be seen. The crazy bastard was kidnaping these kids, and when his demented old crow of a mother was done playing with them, he was... dressing them out just as neat as you please, for dinner.”
Cyrus stopped talking, a haunted look on his face. I felt sick. I had come here for a story, and I had gotten it, and I wished that I had never even heard of Triumph. Cyrus poured us each a short-lived glass of bourbon. When we had taken a few seconds of silence, I asked in a shaky voice, “And Jameson? And his mother? What happened to them?”
Peterson leveled his eyes at me. “We take care of our own around here.” he said at length.
“You take care of your own?”
“That house was burned to the ground before those boys even started back to town. They stayed and watched it go to make sure nobody got out. It was the right thing to do and nobody ever had a problem with it.
“I said you were clever because you think before you speak. You keep your mouth shut when you think it’s the right move, which is the only reason I told you that story. If you’ve got any brains at all, you’d keep your mouth shut about this. That was the worst thing that ever happened in this town, but it’s finished. We don’t talk about it, and you shouldn’t either. Some stories are best left untold, for any number of reasons.”
That night I had a hard time getting to sleep. It wasn’t only the gruesome story I’d heard that kept me awake, although that in itself has caused me many sleepless nights in the years that have followed. It was that I had two halves of what I was convinced was one story. The lighthouse, the house in the woods, the house whose foundation I was sure I’d seen in my terrible dream. Jameson and the author of my anonymous notebook. 1850. 1911. 1928. And now, 1958. A drama that played itself out over a century of mysterious events.
Suddenly, I was struck by a memory of the notebook. It was a hunch, but at the same time, as I turned on my bedside light and leapt to the desk, I knew exactly what I would find. I frantically scanned the inside of the black diary’s cover with a magnifying glass. And then I found it: in a tiny script, a poem which I curiously remembered from an ancient McGuffey’s Reader I had somehow inherited, and the name that had been on my mind since my first night in Triumph:
Don’t touch this book if you value your life,
For the owner carries a leather knife.
This diary is the property of
Ellen Daress
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