Last year a local newspaper had this writing and illustration contest for teams of two. They gave you a genre to write in and a author whose writing style you had to imitate. For illustrators, they just gave you an artist to imitate. Anyway, I had to write a horror story in the style of James Joyce. I came up with this cheesy little thing but had fun writing it. Illustration by Mercedes JG, who had to rip off Van Gogh or something.
Indeed, you sometimes find yourself in an odd placement in life so to speak, dabbling in this and that here and there and thereafter, you sometimes, as mother would say, end up wandering by mistake into whatever trouble lies past some grimy street corner or alley like the one time I was surreptitiously roughed up by some ruffians while walking home from school, my beloved Doc Martens stolen, I had to walk barefoot all the way home, whereupon I was greeted by mother's worst possible humor for the loss of the footwear that father had worked so hard at the mill to earn the money for, or like the one time a friendly officer decided to crack down on the head of the protester I was assumed to be while simply making my way down the block to buy some coffee and Spanish onions, and that's really how it usually goes on: you go ahead and mind your own and suddenly realize you're caught up in a veritable whirlpool of trouble, distress, and, generally, pain of the physical and moral kind, with no end in sight and the certainty that, as they shay, 'it ain't over 'till the fat lady sings', with the fat lady being a clever metaphor -of the kind I favor, being as I am an educated gent- for the sirens of the police cars and ambulances liable to appear at any such event like that one time some crowd started gathering outside of the school and it a brawl of considerate dimensions broke out for reasons still unbeknownst to anyone and..
Anyway.
The predicament I found myself now was, even with my penchant for mischief and what I’ve come to term 'vital irregularity', peculiarly different from the usual, being that I was locked up for the night in the house up on the hill on the outskirts of town which, I shouldn't need to add but will do anyway, was abandoned and supposedly haunted by ghosts and ghouls and creepy crawling creatures of all kinds known to man's fantasies and perhaps even some unknown, why you might even run into Chtulu himself if you were to believe what the local lore had been saying since any of us had any recollection of such things, and even despite the fact that no one had ever seen or heard anything coming from there besides the odd rat crawling out of the bushes out by the front yard, it was said, however, that the house was inhabited by the ghosts of Sir Henry Wagford and his life-long wife Wilhelmina, beloved early settlers of our town which did so back in the good old days of 1893, with all that it entailed, no running water, no electricity, tuberculosis running rampant on a seasonal basis, yet it seems that the Wagfords were wonderful people of culture, prone, like many other cultured souls of the time, to the infatuation with the occult, and are rumored to have hosted in their home the visit of none other than Aleister Crowley during an American tour by Mister Great Beast himself and I can certainly imagine Henry and Wilhelmina just sitting there enjoying their tea, minding their business and Oh dear, Crowley telegraphed, he's coming over for dinner tomorrow, I hope it's perfectly fine, and old Wilma would answer But Henry baby, the servants did a full spring cleaning just yesterday, I suppose and truly hope that Great Beast business has nothing to do with him being rude and dirty and unkempt and inconsiderate, and Henry would comfort Wilma and make her feel all better about having Crowley in for the day and how He (for, in the eyes of these occult aficionados, Aleister was a man of divine importance) would most surely be helpful in their reoccurring yet unsuccessful attempts at summoning the creatures from the other side of reality, the dark, brooding, mysterious multiverse where the shoggoths and the demons and the succubus and incubus and whatnot coexisted with the ghosts and spirits of persons past, something which particularly obsessed the Wagfords who seemed to have a peculiar fantasy of flooding their house with friendly spirits to keep them company to compensate for their horrible estranged relationship with pretty much every other living soul in town who actually suspected that Wilma was in fact a man and referred to the couple as 'those satanic sodomites' and also thought that they actually had managed to fill their house up with whatever beings and lived all together in some kind of non-stop satanic sodomite escapade.
But I digress.
One in the morning and my iPod battery runs out leaving me alone with the discomforting sounds of the house, these being the constant tiptaptiptaptiptaptiptap of a innumerable number of leaky ceilings, incessant scratching coupled with what seems to be small household items tumbling down and around above me which I attribute to rats in the cellar which is certainly not a comforting thought and screeeeeeeyyeeeach goes the fence door outside, to and fro to the rhythm of the wind while I'm sitting here hating my guts for being asinine enough to let myself get talked into this and oh darn, I could so very well be sitting at home right now instead of wasting time and risking getting bit by a rat and catching god-knows-what in the process and what the hell was that, I saw something move out there in the corner oh well probably some curtain or something that the wind moved and did some funny effect with the streetlights outside except there's no windows in that corner of the room and this is starting to get rather odd I must say and there's still a few hours left until morning and OH MY GOD I certainly have seen something there and it was a woman and she was blonde and was wearing something that looked blood-stained and WHAT WAS THAT NOW? I swear I saw something out by the kitchen door and OK, OK now, it's all right it's certainly normal to be led to believe you have seen a woman in a house you believe to be haunted but this is getting out of hand I swear I have just seen a second figure and this time it's a man I'm sure, so I better get on and make a dash for the door and to hell with this stupid bet as much as I need the money and hey....when exactly was this door locked?
