Thursday, December 20, 2012

The Brothers Grimm


Today marks the 200th anniversary of the Grimm Brothers' Children's and Household Tales, commonly known as Grimm's Fairy Tales. It's a little foolish for me to recap their life and work on this blog, when the narrative is available in so many other places, but I think it's a perfect day to celebrate their tremendous contribution to the world of storytelling, and to consider the current state of the fairy tale as well.

The great news is that the form is still thriving. One can find a plethora of websites and zines devoted to the form, from Enchanted Conversation to World Weaver Press to Cabinet des Fees, where criticism and study live alongside new iterations and creations. I personally take a great deal of inspiration from fairy tales, and my short story The General Slocum combines a tragic incident in New York City history with a sort of re-telling of the Pied Piper. In it, I imagine how spirits of the "old world" may find their way into the new world, even if uninvited.

Today also marks what is, for many, likely the next-to-last work day before a little holiday, and so perhaps it wouldn't be so terrible to take a moment to lose yourself in your imagination for a while. To that end, I suggest checking out the aforementioned fairy tale blogs and stories, or taking a brief pretend holiday to your own fairy tale land, or reading this insightful analysis of what exactly about the Grimms keep us so enthralled. Here's to fairy tales, and another two hundred years of stories... 

Monday, December 17, 2012

A Christmas Carol


Just a quick one today, as I'm feeling a bit "meh" but still wanted to point out a splendid anniversary in literary history.

Today in 1843, A CHRISTMAS CAROL was first published in London by Chapman and Hall. The novella was greeted with fairly instant acclaim, and has never been out of print.

Naturally, it’s one of my favorite Christmas ghost stories, and has even been credited with reviving the English interest in the tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas. Dickens even comes up on my New York City walking tours, since he actually gave a reading of A Christmas Carol at Cooper Union’s Great Hall on his last American tour in 1865.

What I find most interesting about the story is how actually frightening it is. I was having a conversation about it the other day in which the subject came up, and I defy you to find me anyone who hasn’t been genuinely terrified by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. Despite its joyful finale, there is genuine fear to be found in A Christmas Carol, so let’s take today to celebrate Dickens’ mastery of the classic ghost story, as well as his canny marketing: capitalizing on the novella’s success, the author published a Christmas annual every year thereafter.

Excerpts of this post have been cross posted on Boroughs of the Dead, where you can find plenty of my musings on Christmas and ghost stories. Incidentally, it's not too late to buy the book for a ghost story lover this Christmas!

See what I just did there? (Why do I have the feeling my own personal Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come would show me a horrible vision of a world where I just work at marketing self-published books all day? Note to self: avoid that fate.)

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Ghost Stories Live! Christmas Edition


'Tis the season to be WARY...!

Especially on Thursday Dec. 20th when we present our special holiday spooktacular!

Featuring TRADITIONAL ghost story fare from the master of the genre: M. R. James. On this fabulous, festive, and fearsome one-night-only event, we'll be screening (along with some ghostly cartoons) a digest-version of the black & white classic horror film
THE CURSE OF THE DEMON, adapted from James' "Casting the Runes" and then presenting a full-cast dramatization of James' short story: "There Was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard" with a brand-new puppet from the chapped & bloody hands of SidMarty Lovecraft!!!
And your very own Spinster Aunt will be reading both a NEW ghost story and moderating our TRUE ghost story segment, including our new OPEN MIC ghost story FEATURE. If you have a haunted holiday tale to tell, please do come!

All this and creepy holiday decorations, moody viola music played LIVE! and of course, presided over by your host PUGSLEY THE FIENDLY GHOST, will delight your eyes, ears, and livers! So come for the grog, stay for the ghosts, and join us at Bar 82 on Dec. 20th, for Ghost Stories Live!

Must be 21 or older to attend. Admission: $5

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

In Honor of the Library of America's Pictureless Little House Box Set

"A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest. - C.S. Lewis*

I'm sort of thrilled that the Library of America release of the Little House box set has spurred an interest in Laura Ingalls Wilder and, what's more, that people seem to be taking her seriously as a writer (well, her and Rose, I guess), even if I am a little appalled at the idea of reading the books without the Garth Williams illustrations. Still, if that gets a new audience to approach the books, I'm fine with it. (I know the people over at LofA are overjoyed to hear it. I'm sure they've been waiting on me to weigh in.) Anyway, there's been a lot of chatter about the books online lately, and a great post over at The Millions, and frankly, I want in on this conversation.

So I'm re-posting my readings of two books in the series that normally don't get a lot of attention: On The Banks of Plum Creek and By The Shores of Silver Lake. Little House on the Prairie and The Long Winter get the most attention, for being the best-known and the most devastating respectively, though The Long Winter may be tied with Little House in the Big Woods for the way they both seem to stick in readers' memories (say it with me now: pig bladder). But Plum Creek and Silver Lake are both really interesting in their own right, especially, in my view, Silver Lake, since there seems to be a whole lotta subtext happening that I certainly missed the first time around.



Reading On The Banks of Plum Creek as a child, all I thought was, "Neat, they live in a sod house! Just like a hobbit hole!" Now all I see is an opening sequence riddled with regret and dark foreshadowing as the family rolls their covered wagon into Minnesota. When Pa trades the mustangs, Pet and Patty, for two stout oxen, he tells Laura, "Pet and Patty like to travel. They are little Indian ponies, Laura, and plowing is too hard work for them. They will be much happier, traveling out west. You wouldn't want to keep them here, breaking their hearts on a plow." Of course anyone but a dunderhead could see those two little ponies are Pa and Laura.

Not only does the series get darker at this point, but the writing becomes more self-consciously literary, like Laura's warming up with practice (she really loves foreshadowing, and perfects it in The Long Winter). Incidentally, the first two books were rather fictional -- recollections mixed with historical research, muddled dates -- whereas from this point on it becomes more accurate, with fixed dates that line up with actual events.

From page one, Plum Creek stews in an atmosphere of sadness and dread. There are some amusing episodes, like fixing up the dugout house and swimming in the swimming hole and sliding down haystacks, but for the most part we're just bombarded with Pa's sense of regret at no longer living out west, Ma's dissatisfaction at living in the dugout, and the great deferred reward of the first wheat crop which we all know will never come as soon as we read this passage:

"I never saw weather like this. The old-timers call it grasshopper weather." "Whatever do they mean by that?" Ma asked him. Pa shook his head. "You can't prove it by me. 'Grasshopper weather' was what Nelson said. I couldn't make out what he meant by it." "Likely it's some old Norwegian saying," Ma said.

As if we weren't 100% sure disaster was coming, Pa builds a magnificent house for Ma, all with lumber he got on credit. Credit! He'll pay it back after the first wheat crop comes in. Everything will be all right after that first wheat crop comes in. Oh, Pa.

More in the continuing man-versus-nature metaphor series: When Laura is compelled to go into the rising creek during a flood -- she simply has to feel that strong, rushing water around her -- and nearly drowns, she develops a newfound appreciation for almighty, terrible nature:

"Laura knew now that there were things stronger than anybody. But the creek had not got her. It had not made her scream and it could not make her cry."


Life goes on by the Banks of Plum Creek. School. Nellie Oleson. Church. And then, two summers in a row, terrible plagues of grasshoppers. Grasshoppers everywhere, destroying everything. And drought, terrible drought. Laura couldn't get the creepy feeling off her skin. Pa had to walk 300 miles east in his old, patched boots and work on a farm for a dollar a day to feed the family. The girls are alone without him for weeks at a time. Devastating stuff. And I complained when I found one little old cockroach in my bed.

The book ends with Pa spending four days in a snowbank during a terrible blizzard and coming home just in time to spend Christmas with his family. He had gone to town to get Christmas candy and oyster crackers but had to eat them all to stay alive during the blizzard. (Ironically, the snow-bank shelter was mere feet from the house! Oh, Pa!) But none of it matters, because Pa comes back and the family is together again.

But, characteristically, the sweet ending is merely a brief reprieve from more devastation.

The first two chapters of By the Shores of Silver Lake reduced me to tears on the subway: Mary's gone blind from scarlet fever, and Jack the Bulldog dies. The family moves west to South Dakota, settling in a railroad camp, where Ma gets more uptight than ever. And who can blame her, with teams of rough men using rough language around her curious, pubescent daughter. More than once she and Pa warn Laura away from those rough men, and when they take in boarders, Ma gives Laura a sliver of wood to wedge beneath her bedroom door.

Silver Lake is all about Laura hitting puberty, from specific pronouncements of "being grown up now" (after Jack dies) to the horror she feels when she discovers a girl her age had been married, to this slightly mysterious passage wherein Laura is compelled to follow a path of moonlight late at night, and runs straight into a wolves' den:

"I had no idea you would go so far," Pa said. "We followed the moonpath, Laura told him. Pa looked at her strangely. "You would," he said. "Poor girl. You're as nervous as a witch and no wonder," Ma said softly.

Whoa, what's going on here? Is this just more of Laura's irrepressible spirit? Or is it something else that leads Ma and Pa to whisper earnestly once she's out of earshot? Is their wild daughter bursting at the seams with unbidden adolescent yearnings? Did she get her first period? Something is happening. The book is riddled with allusions to Laura's burgeoning maturity and sexuality, and it's no coincidence that it is here we finally see her life intersect with future husband Almanzo Wilder's (she first sees his strong, handsome team of horses and admires them, before she learns whom they belong to... wait, doesn't Freud have a thing about horses? Is that why there's a chapter about her wild older cousin teaching her to ride a horse? Oh my gosh! I never realized the Little House books were so sexually charged!).

Besides dealing with Laura's transition to adolescence/adulthood, the book is also unique for introducing, for the first time in the series, an impressionistic interior monologue. When baby Grace goes missing under Laura's watch and she's terrified that the child might have wandered into a slough, we get the following:

"Oh, Grace why didn't I watch you," she thought. "Sweet, pretty little helpless sister... Grace must have gone this way. Maybe she chased a butterfly. She didn't go into the Big Slough. She didn't climb the hill, she wasn't there. Oh, baby sister, I couldn't see you anywhere east or south on this hateful prairie."

This is the only instance I can find of first-person narration anywhere so far in the series.

Laura will be up to her old literary tricks again in The Long Winter, foreshadowing like crazy. I have to stop here for tonight, and probably won't re-read the book (having devoured it this winter, along with my weight in cheese curds) but if you just can't get enough Ingalls-ania, you might do worse than check out Lizzie Skurnick's compelling reading of it here. 

For the first half of this post, and my musings on Little House in the Big Woods, Farmer Boy, and Little House on the Prairie, click here. Literary critics will be stunned when I refer to LIW's plain-spoken style as sensuous and tactile! I'm provocative like that.

* Found this quote today over at The Marlowe Bookshelf, a blog devoted to children's lit, and thought it seemed apt.

Monday, December 10, 2012

Musings on Women and Beer

In addition to loving bourbon, as the title of this blog suggests, I who know me will attest that I am equally passionate about beer. Lately I've been pondering the relationship of beer and feminism, or at least beer and gender, and when I came across a blog post on the subject, well, I just had to talk about it! You can find the whole post over at Queen City Drinks, and I've cross-posted it here as well for those too lazy to click on stuff. And hey, I welcome the lazy reader! So make yourself at home and read up about beer, will ya?

Cheers,

SA



A recent post on this blog caught my attention, since I’ve been thinking, reading, and writing a lot lately about women and beer. I’m a woman who genuinely loves beer, and I don’t do it to “be one of the lads,” or to show off, or to look cool in front of guys. I’ve loved the beverage ever since I can remember. As a kid, I begged for sips of my dad’s beer (he only ever let me have the tiniest sip of the foam); as a teenager, I visited the Czech Republic, where my mom is from, and reaffirmed my love of beer. Now, I trade feats of connoisseurship with my husband, who is only too happy to while away hours poring over the selection at our local emporium and spend entire holidays in Belgium with me. I love beer so much that when I meet someone who doesn’t care for it, I sort of want to convert them. So I understand the impulse behind “Women, Don’t Fear the Beer.” I believe it was a well-intentioned missive that came from a good place and had an honorable goal – to see more women get into craft beer. Still, there were a few missteps that rightfully irritated some of the commenters, and I wanted to address them here in a little more detail.

First off, The Brew Professor admits that his post contained “generous helpings of broad assumptions and stereotyping. Most of this is observational ‘fact’ that I have experienced personally.” This weakened his argument upfront, which is a shame, since literally two minutes of research would’ve yielded some statistics that might have strengthened his position. Let’s take a look at a recent Gallup poll for starters: the alcoholic beverage most consumed by men is, by a wide margin, beer (55%); for women, it’s wine (52%), followed by a fairly even split between liquor (22%) and beer (23%).
[Click to open a larger copy of chart]
[Click to open a larger copy of chart]
So instead of throwing out some nebulous anecdotal evidence, he could’ve started with something a little more concrete, and then maybe we could’ve had a real conversation about those numbers, and what they mean.

Secondly, he chose absolutely the wrong wording in the wrong forum. On this blog, you’re dealing with a constituency of beer drinkers, male and female. To speak to this audience from the position he took, e.g. that women need instruction on the ways of beer, was somewhat poorly thought out. Granted there are some spaces where this might be appropriate, but this blog wasn’t one of them. Furthermore, statements like “The problem with experimenting with real beer is that the selection process can be extremely intimidating” are in no way gender specific. It is no more intimidating to women just getting into craft beer than it is to men just getting into craft beer, which many commenters pointed out.

Finally, and this speaks again to the issue of research, The Brew Professor says:

“Okay, ladies. Why is the craft beer movement mostly driven by men? What is holding you back from trying more beer? In my experience, it is inexperience.”

Hmmm, wrong. The craft beer movement isn’t where the women aren’t (if you follow me). There are plenty of female brewers, sellers, journalists, and drinkers in this milieu. There is still a small imbalance to address, granted, but advocacy groups like the Barley’s Angels and Girl’s Pint Out are working to educate and empower women to buy, drink, and order beer with confidence. On the consumer side of things, it’s the macro brewers who have much, much more of a gender problem than the craft beer world.

But. (There’s always a But.) The idea that introducing gender into the conversation is inherently unnecessary or somehow offensive is a little off the mark. And this is where I have to stop taking issue with The Brew Professor’s post and see where he’s coming from....

The second half of this post will appear on Queen City Drinks tomorrow!

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

31 Days of Halloween: Talkin' About Sea Monsters with Amanda C. Davis

Happy Halloween everyone! Today's post brings my monthlong series of holiday-themed posts to a close with an appropriately awesome discussion of sea monsters, submarine ghosts, and writing in the bathtub.
 
Photo Credit: National Geographic

For this seasonal topper, I interviewed SF author Amanda C. Davis. Amanda is a combustion engineer who loves baking, gardening, and low-budget horror films. Her short fiction has appeared in Shock Totem, Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show, and others. I read her short tale, "My Rest a Stone," in the ghost story collection Specter Spectacular, and was impressed at its brevity and simplicity. It is a slender, wispy, wraithlike tale. And plus, it takes place at sea... so you know I was completely sucked in. Check it out in the anthology, and read more of Amanda's work on her website.

1. How did you come up with the idea for "My Rest a Stone"? What inspired you?
 
I wish I could tell you! But it's been three years since I wrote this piece. I can say with certainty that it was written 2) for a nautical-themed horror anthology and b) in the bathtub.

2. What inspires you in general? How does an idea come to you, and how does it transform from idea to finished story?
 
With short stories, I really don't get that mysterious glimmer of an idea and the "I have to write this!" urge. I'm motivated by deadlines, so I'm more likely to see a theme, toss it around until I know which way I want to approach it, and then go about making it as fun for myself as possible. These days I go out of my way to make sure the final piece has all the components of an actual story, which can be surprisingly easy to skip.

3. What got you started writing SF/F/Horror?
 
The morbidity of the childhood mind? I can remember writing stories as far back as first grade, and they've always been speculative fiction. Sorry, Mom.

4. What is your favorite book or story in the horror genre? What is your favorite horror movie?
 
I might pick Stephen King's The Long Walk as my favorite horror book. It's so sweet and traumatic. I have ten thousand favorite horror movies, but let's go with The Devil's Backbone.

5. When it comes to underwater ghosts, do you share my obsession with or interest in nautical things?
If not, is there any particular location that you find terrifying (e.g. the NYC subway, an underground cave a la The Descent, etc.)?
 
YES. Yes I do. I keep writing watery stories, even without meaning to (next coming up in Dagan Books' FISH anthology and Graveside Tales' Beast Within 3: Oceans Unleashed, in fact). You know what gives me actual skeeves? Sea monsters. I cannot look at a picture of a plesiosaur without recoiling. They're massive, they're under you, they're just unspeakably horrible. I could never go whale-watching.

The Descent was an incredible movie too, by the way. In my top five.

6. Is there one book/story/movie script you wish you had written?
 
Haha, I had to think about this. I wish I'd written "It was a dark and stormy night..." Not the book, just the line. It's been mimicked and parodied, it's got a contest named after it, it's a piece of language that well outlived its writer and its context. If anything I wrote came even close to that, I'd go to my grave happy. And use it as my epitaph, probably.

7. What is the best piece of writing advice you ever received? (Or worst, if you feel like scaring people!)
 
Apart from the usual "read a lot, write a lot," maybe the most useful piece of advice for me, psychologically, came from a random somebody on the Internet who suggested that writing and publishing should be treated as two separate hobbies. I know this is infuriating to hear when you're still seeking that "published" label, but you have to be happy with your stories to be a happy writer. When you're happy with your story, when you enjoy it and you're proud of it, selling it is just icing on the cake. Really. It's so valuable if you can keep one of those two hobbies from spoiling your enjoyment of the other one.

8. What is your advice to writers just starting out?
 
Read a lot. Write a lot. More than you think you can.

9. Finally, on the subject of being a horror writer at Halloween: how do you feel about it? Amused indulgence at "amateur night?" Thrilled that other people are finally on your wavelength? Happiness at the chance to watch Simpsons Treehouse of Horror re-runs while consuming homemade Skittlebrau? (That last one might just be me)
 
I love it. I love that people spend a month being excited about things I'm excited about all the time. And, you know, horror movies all over the TV, plastic skulls all over Wal-Mart, everybody trying to be creepy--very briefly, I get to live in a world just crammed with stuff I enjoy. Halloween is great.

If you are an SF or horror author interested in guest blogging or being interviewed on Spinster Aunt, I'd love to hear from you. You can find me on Twtiter @SpinsterAunt. And if you're a Halloween fan disappointed by the season's imminent demise, fear not! I do horror pretty much year 'round. I am also obsessed with Christmas ghosts... so stay tuned. 

Happy Halloween everyone!

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Hurricane Sandy

Breezy Point, The Rockaways
As everyone who reads this blog knows, I love the ocean and the beach, especially Rockaway Beach. So I am deeply saddened to hear of the destruction at Breezy Point. At last count, between 80 and 100 houses have burned down as a result of Hurricane Sandy.

New York City will be slow to recover from this storm, especially the low-lying areas by the water: The Rockaways, Red Hook, Coney Island, Battery Park and the Financial District, and the East Village, have suffered extensive damage. Much of the subway is flooded and is estimated to take at least a week to start running even partially. The damage is unprecedented in the system's 100-plus year history.

In a press conference today, Governor Cuomo acknowledged the need to not only repair our infrastructure, but to plan for a new normal of weather patterns that includes hurricanes on what may likely be a regular basis. Unlike other coastal cities that suffer hurricanes, New York has a lot of underground infrastructure. We're going to have to plan for a future unlike anything we could've imagined. We're going to have to learn to prepare, to evacuate, to help each other when storms come, and to understand what living on an archipelago means.

This has been an historic storm. I am lucky to live in Park Slope, where the damage was minimal (we are on the highest point in Brooklyn). The rest of Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island was not so lucky. I send all my thoughts out to them now, especially to the residents of Breezy Point, and will be looking for ways to help in the coming days and weeks.

To everyone affected by this storm, you are in my thoughts. And to the first responders who always make New Yorkers proud during an emergency, thank you.
It is certainly an unusual way to end October, to put it mildly. With all my talk of ghosties and spooky things, there's nothing -- nothing -- more terrifying than nature, or more powerful than the forces of the moon, wind and sea. We are at their mercy, and we are very, very small.

Monday, October 29, 2012

31 Days of Halloween: Hurricane Season

In honor of the Frankenstorm, I am giving away another free short horror story. This one speculates on what might drive sailors mad who have been too long at sea.... 

Hurricane Season

By Andrea Janes


It couldn’t be a more perfect evening. The red sun is setting over the shimmering river and tingeing the sky with softness, the sky that, all day, has been perfectly blue and clear. And yet I can’t enjoy a moment of it because, from where I sit on the corrugated iron splendor of my fire escape, I can see it – the great white behemoth sitting there lazily in Red Hook harbor, listing gently from one huge bulk of its side to another. That massive marine monstrosity holds nothing but menace for me and as long as it’s within my line of vision it will go on spoiling every beautiful day. When I see it the gentle air creeps my skin with gooseflesh, I am overcome with sickness and nausea. I cannot look at it and feel anything but loathing and dread; though it may no longer induce the abject fright it once did in me, I’ll never be able to see it and feel anything but horror. Perhaps I should move to a house that does not directly overlook Upper New York Bay. It is very inconvenient to go into a cold sweat every time I spot a cruise ship in the harbor. 

You know what they say about night like this, don’t you? That’s right, sailor’s delight. It would be convenient for me to say the trouble all started on a night such as this, but it didn’t. It stared in the dull, grey, dog days of August, the time when all the cheap-asses come out for their discount cruises, right in the middle of hurricane season. Do you know where the phrase “dog days” came from? From the star Sirius, the dog-star.

You learn a lot about sailor’s lore and stars and shit when you’re on a boat. That shit is real to some people. Let’s separate the myths from the facts here, shall we? The myth says that all sailors are Greeks and all cabin boys are Filipino. The first half is true, but cabin boys come from all over the world – especially Asia, yes, but they include a wide variety of person. My bunkmate, for example, was Malay. But the Greek thing is true, and is important – we’re going to come back to that. Another myth about cruise ships is that they dump all their waste into the open sea – well, actually, that part’s true, too. We hold it in a tank in the ship’s hull all days and let it out at night when the guests are sleeping. Guess whose job that is? That’s right, the cleaning crew. That would be me, vile deck-swabber at your service.

Now most of the cleaning staff come from the very upper echelons of society: that is to say, prison. The criminal to non-criminal ratio of the service staff on your average Carnival Cruise is about seven to one. That’s on an average ship. On our ship it was about a hundred to zero. I’m exaggerating, of course, but never have I met a single deckhand who hadn’t done time in one way or another. With the Russians and Asians, you didn’t even need to ask; they all had scars and tattoos that spoke of where they’d been. I asked one tall, bull-like man from Belarus what he’d done time for. With his leathery skin and sinewy muscles, he had the cold, hard look of the murderer. “Credit card fraud,” he replied, only he pronounced it “Cred-jit card frawd.” I got used to the mix of languages and accents on our floating tower of Babel, got used to not asking about the shadowy secret pasts of my co-workers (there was none of the “what are you in for” camaraderie of the yard; each man was a well of secrets).

Some say our ship wasn’t top shelf, but I say you get what you pay for. Which brings me back to the cheap-asses. Nobody liked working a ship when the cheap-asses were aboard. When you’re working a job that basically amounts to indentured servitude, tips are pretty important to you. Folks on the late-August discount cruise are not known for being generous tippers. Maybe it serves them right, then, what happened.

So by now you’re thinking well, what the hell happened? I guess I’ve set the stage enough. But one more thing before I get to the meat of this gyro: that’s right, the Greeks. I said I’d get back to them, didn’t I?

The Greeks, the Greeks, what can I say about the stoic and manly captains of the sea? It’s hard to read the Greeks because they’ll rarely deign to talk to you and even if they did, their English isn’t perfect. They know how to order the deck-hands around but ask them for anything else and they go bivalve on you – shut up like a clam. There was one I liked, though, and who was friendly to me. He was the second officer’s second mate, which is about the equivalent in prestige to being a rag boy at a car wash – which would make us deck-hands the rag, I guess – but he was kind to all his underlings and smiled when he asked them to swab the deck. (Fact: the word “swab” on a ship is still in use.) He had an unpronounceable name full of Fs and Ss, so we all just called him by the surname embossed on the gleaming tag above his lapel: Avdis.

He was the only officer-class crewman who’d ever play cards with the rest of the CC – that’s cleaning crew; try to keep up. Avdis would seize the occasion to impress us with his wide range of bawdy tales. He was a true raconteur in the old style and could spin a yarn like Arachne spun a web. He was such a loquacious guy it took me by surprise one evening when he refused to talk. More accurately, he refused to answer a specific question. This I had never known him to do.

The question was a simple one: “Anyone else hear that banging in aft deck?”

It was spoken by Yeung “Charles” Lee, who we all referred to as “Chuck” Lee, a repairman from Kowloon. “You know,” he said. “The bang bang!” Bang bang! Some of us hit the table for emphasis. Avdis sat there trying to pretend he didn’t understand. “Are you trying to sit there and tell us that engine isn’t a little fucked?” That came from Pat, an Australian. “You siding with management, mate?” Avdis went pale at this – as pale as a Greek can get, anyway, which is like a sort of a shade less than the usual brilliant copper-penny sheen of their skin normally. “What is wrong, Avi?” asked Phoc, a mellow-tempered Vietnamese dude with one of the skinniest chests I’d ever seen. Now he was looking at Avdis with concern. “Avi, tell us something about the engine,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “When’s it going to blow sky-high? I mean, are we just sailing in a floating crypt here or what?” Avdis remained tight-lipped. “Chuck Lee,” I said to the Chinaman (sorry, person of the Asian persuasion), “You must have been able to diagnose something down there, no?”
“Diagnose?”
“Like what a doctor does – figure out what’s wrong.”
“Oh. Diagnose. No! That’s why I ask, stupid!”
“He’s right,” said Trang, my bunkmate. “Joe tells me same thing. He says no problem with engine. He knows.”

Joe was another engineman who played poker with us, though he was on duty that night. Joe was from Thailand and his real name was Apichatpong Natthakarn. The first time we met him and pronounced his unpronounceable name, he just looked at our faces, laughed good-naturedly, and said, “Just call me Joe.”

“Joe says there is nothing wrong with the engine.” Trang repeated.
“Look boys,” said Avi, “Officers don’t really talk much about that sort of thing.”

That was the first time he ever pulled rank on us. There was silence at the table, expect for the snap of cards as we dealt. Chuck looked at Trang. “It’s a xia.” Trang nodded. “What’s a xia?” asked Pat. Chuck shook his head. “Never mind. It’s not important.”

Avi sighed. “It’s not a ghost.”

Well now we were getting somewhere. At least I knew what “xia” meant.

“I want you to listen to me,” Avi said. “Listen very carefully. Do not ever mention this near where a passenger can hear. And don’t say anything to any officers. If you have a problem, come to me.”
“What kind of problem,” asked Phoc.
“If anything happens, you come tell me. I mean anything. To you, a passenger, anything.”

Come to me first. That’s what he said.

Back at our cabin, Trang filled me in.

“Xia is close to a Malay word,” Trang told me. “But it doesn’t mean ghost exactly.”
“Is it more like a spirit?” I’m not sure why I said that, really. I remember thinking at the time that my question was strange. I almost felt compelled to ask it and I couldn’t tell you why. I brushed the feeling aside. Stranger things have been thought or said upon the verge of sleep.

Trang didn’t seem to find the question odd. “Not so much like a spirit or ghost but it is a thing that is not human. It is of the gods – but it is a bad god. It does bad things.”

“Is it like a fallen angel?” I asked, thinking of Lucifer. “Like a god that used to be good but now he’s bad?”
“He was never a good god. He was always bad – he was born bad. He is very powerful – very strong.”
I though about it for a minute. A powerful god, one who was born bad. One who was very strong.

It took me a minute to realize he was talking about a demon.

#

I wandered through the darkened corridors of the massive floating mall. That’s all it is, a cruise ship – a mall at sea. I walked over the garishly patterned carpet of the atrium, dotted with potted palms at regular intervals. The shops were dark and shuttered for the night.

I padded softly by the duty-free liquor shop in the dim light. On one of the floors above me I saw a chambermaid walking along near the railing. She smiled at me over the stack of towels she was carrying and I nodded back. As I kept walking, I realized I didn’t know where I wanted to go, or even what I was doing. “Why am I prowling along the halls? What am I doing?”

I stared at my reflection in the dark glass of the t-shirt emporium. I found myself wanting to smash the glass and take that bright white XXL t-shirt with the nautical flags and “St. Lucia” on it. Now, although I have boosted a car or two in my day, I do not suffer from the condition that compulsively makes people steal stupid junk – that sickness known as kleptomania. But all I could think of was how I wanted to grab that wide swath of fabric and choke someone with it. “I really should go out on aft deck,” I thought to myself, which was odd, because what I meant to think – if you follow me – was, “I really think I ought to go back to my room.” And then I looked up.  The chambermaid was on the top floor of the atrium, about six stories above me. It didn’t take long for me to figure out what was going to happen next, but I was still too late. As I ran and tried to catch her, she smiled, put down her towels, and plunged from the balcony into a potted palm.

#

At first the officers assumed I had done it. I dragged her body to the security office right away because I knew better than to leave her there on the floor for anyone to see. They questioned me for the better part of an hour before I could convince anyone to go out and take a look at the tape. The security camera footage finally cleared me – I was visible down on Dolphin Deck while she was clearly seen jumping unassisted. I heard one of the security guys say to the other something about the ship Demeter. His colleague shushed him, gave me a look. I tried to look blank, tried to look like I was just a dumb American and I didn’t understand the Greek word for “ship.”

 Joe played poker with us that night; Chuck had taken the graveyard shift. Joe had not been privy to last night’s conversation. Still, he must have felt something was in the air. His hand hovered over the cards for a minute. Then he pulled it back, stared at us for a minute and said, “Something happened in the engine room today.” Avi and I looked at each other. Joe continued. “Today I saw a workman hold his hand up against a burning hot pipe – like so.” He demonstrated. “We all shouted at him to stop , stop, but he does not stop! I have to grab him, take his hands – so – and take it off the pipe!” We got quiet. “And I look into his eyes and they are empty.”
“Ngan,” whispered Phoc. Joe nodded.
“I thought I was xian.”
“It means the same thing,” he said.
“What in the hell are you all blathering about?” That was Pat.
“You Asians are always superstitious,” was Avdis’ reply. 
“Asshole.”
“You’re holding out Avi,” I said. 
He said nothing.
“Fine. I guess we’ll just wait til something bad happens, then call you. What should we be on the lookout for? Fire? Plague? Death?”
“Beware the man who thinks thoughts that are not his own. I can’t say any more.”
“Thoughts that are not his own. Like you’re thinking something and you don’t know how it got there? Or you say something and you don’t know why you said it?”

He turned slowly and looked at me, just like in the movies.

A long line of ash fell from my cigarette.

“It is the Thavelian.” Avi sighed. “Thavelian comes from the sea. He is the weed and the slime down below. All predatory fish are his special animals. Sirens fear him, all living creatures fear him, but for sailors, he presents the worst threat of all. For sailors, he creeps into their brains, seeps in like water. When they are too long at sea, they begin to grow mad and quarrelsome with isolation. Thavelian causes chaos, madness and mutiny. When he strikes, whole crews have murdered each other.”

Suddenly we were full of questions. How do you know when you’re around him? You know the demon is around when you lose dominion over your thoughts. How do you know when he’s got you? You lose control over your actions. Can you stop the process once it begins? It all depends. On what? Nobody knows.

“I do know one thing,” Avi said. “The crew always seems to know he is around before the officers.”

I said, “Avi, do you think he had anything to do with what happened last night?”

“Very possibly. Thavelian often pushes women to suicide. For some reason men do murder and women” – he drew a line across his throat.

As I pondered this, I realized I had spread all of my cards out in front of me and folded my hand. I don’t know why I did that. I had a straight flush.


#

Trang is missing.

I was tying off a Glad bag full of about seven dozen perfectly edible, barely eaten omelets when my supervisor came up to me and barked, “Where’s Trang?”
“I don’t know. Is this his shift?”
“You know it is.”
“I don’t keep track of my bunkmate’s schedule.”
My supervisor sniffed. “Tell him to report to me when you see him. Tell him he’s got demerits.”
“Why don’t you tell him? Isn’t that your job?”
“And that’s a demerit for you, too.”

He walked away, putting a sharp checkmark down on a clipboard.

We had four more days at sea. Every day, grey clouds would form and rain would burst from them. The cheap-asses complained about the weather and grumbled at mealtimes. I felt a weight on my chest as I mopped the deck. My eye twitched and I’d pray that I could outlast this thing and not run into the Starlight Lounge with a fork and stab someone in the eye. Inside my head it felt like there were ping-pong balls poinging off the hollow inside of my skull. They were me doing battle with Thavelian. If I just kept my thoughts racing and bouncing, maybe he couldn’t catch up with them long enough to enter in.

The last words I had said to Trang before he disappeared were, “Don’t let it take me over, man. Don’t let it get me.”

#

The engine room. Out of sheer curiosity, I took myself there. Joe was on watch. “You didn’t miss much of a card game,” I told him. The players were all pretty distracted.” He folded his newspaper. “It’s been mostly quiet here tonight. I almost feel like he is going in and out of the engine room. Most nights I can feel him right here.” He pointed to an electronic screen, the nerve center of the engine’s machinery. “And he moves. Tic, tic, tic, up through here.” Joe tapped on the hollow-sounding body of the motor, tapped as high as his arm could go. “And then I feel the thing – disperses.”
“Disperse?”
“Disperses.” Joe made a “poof” gesture with his fingers, like scattering dandelion fluff. When he says “disperses” it sounds like he’s saying “dispossess.”

He led me further along the side of the great engine. “Feel how hot the motor gets here. This is where we find him the other day with his hand pressed up hard.”
“But he isn’t here now you think?”
Joe shrugged. “I don’t feel anything. I don’t hear any tic-tic-tic.”
“Do you think he’s gone?” False hope, surely.
“I think he is out tonight,” said Joe. “I think he is wandering around the ship.”


#


Three more nights at sea. I was getting edgy. Everybody on this ship was starting to look sinister to me. It was the second day in a row with no sun, and the cheap-asses were getting angry. I saw them lying on the recliners, shifting and squirming, goosefleshed from the cold, backs of their legs cross-hatched with the recliner cushions interlacing plastic patterns. They drank more when it was cloudy, and they seemed to be growing restive. The sky today was a pale yellow-white, like seagull dung.

I didn’t know if I could outlast it.

I confessed to Avdi, “My thoughts are getting more violent. I can feel him trying to get inside me.”
“You have to fight it. Tell yourself it’s just a ringing in your ears. Or – I can put you in handcuffs if you want. If you don’t trust yourself.”

Trust myself. Did I?

I pondered this as I mopped up after the dinner shift. As long as I kept my thoughts flowing, Thavelian couldn’t enter in. I thought about Trang. Where the hell could he be, on a ship of this size? The god-damn place was finite. Unless he’d hurled himself into the sea.  

“Penny for your thoughts.” Pat, dragging a sack of trash behind him.
“Please don’t say that.”
“Been visited by any sea-demons tonight?”
“Fuck off. I’m not in the mood.”
“Sorry mate.”

We were about twenty feet away from the holding room when its door burst open and there, of all people, was Trang. From the smell of him I could only conclude he’d been in there since I last saw him yesterday.

“Trang!”

Dragging a huge bag of trash from behind him, he brushed past us and into the main atrium area on Dolphin Deck.

“Trang, where are you going?”

And then I saw the body. It was a man whose face I didn’t recognize, but I certainly knew who he was. I could tell by the burned hand. His throat had been slashed.

“Christ,” said Pat.
“We’ve got to get Trang.”

 We hurtled down the hallway after him.

When we got out into the atrium we stopped dead.

“Jesus, Trang, what are you doing?!”

He had begun to spread garbage everywhere. In the middle of the blue and gold carpeting he dumped half-eaten dinners, napkins, Kleenexes, toilet paper, scraps of meat and old bones.

One of the passengers, a woman, noticed him. “Oh god,” she screamed in disgust, “What is he doing!?”

Pat and I looked at each other and grabbed Trang’s arms.

“Have you lost your shit?” Pat asked. 

We snuck him back through the service routes, through all the back corridors the passengers never see, using the freight elevator that always smelled like rotting refuse. We hauled him through crew quarters like a sack of spuds and didn’t stop ‘til we were in our cabin with the door locked.

Trang still seemed unresponsive, as though in a trance.

“Do you think he did it?” whispered Pat.

“Get him out of those clothes,” I snapped back, partly because of the smell, partly because I wanted to see if there was any blood on them. There wasn’t.

“Pat, there’s no blood. Trang might have lost his shit but he didn’t kill that guy.”

My second thought was that we should get Trang into the shower, try to clean him off a little but instead of saying that, when I opened my mouth all that came out was, “Pat, open the door. Now.”

He looked a little puzzled but he did it. Caught in the back of my throat was the warning I knew I couldn’t utter – No, Pat don’t listen to me! – but of course I didn’t say it.

He opened it.

And Chuck Lee got him with the knife.

I gaped as the blood in Pat’s jugular made a run for its life. Staring into the eyes of the murderer, I knew there would be no time for screaming.

I wanted to run, just me alone, but whatever hold on me the demon possessed had passed, and I was lucid enough to feel guilt. I’m glad I did, because without it I can’t honestly say whether or not I would have grabbed Trang the way I did and threw him over my shoulder as I ran past Chuck. I want to think I would have anyway, but I don’t want to spend too long thinking about it.

As I careened through the halls, a half-naked Vietnamese dude slung over my shoulder, I tried to control my own mind. “You are not inside me, demon,” I said to myself over and over. “You are not inside me.” I tried to picture my thoughts staying one step ahead of him, like I did before. I tried not to think about Pat. “Come on Trang,” I breathed stertorously, “We can do this.”

I was headed straight for the engine room.

It started getting hard to run. I noticed the ship was listing more heavily than usual. It was rocking back and forth as though a storm were coming. I wished I had a walkie and I could call for help. I prayed Joe would be in the engine room. Once I got there we could radio the captain and start heading immediately for shore.

He wasn’t. It was completely empty. The door swung open, and the monitor was smashed in a spider-web of broken glass right down the center. I squinted at the monitor, trying to make out the data. In the upper right-hand corner was a weather icon, a sun partially blocked by clouds. Humidity point, temperature, wind-speed. Only 26 knots. Impossible that there was a storm. Why was the ship rocking back and forth like that? I’d never felt anything like it, except in thunderstorms and high winds. I looked back at the monitor. There were three circular icons in the middle, like gas gauges in a car, and all their arrows pointed to empty. He’d shut the engine off.

I picked up the radio and called the captain’s control tower. “Bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo! This is engine room one. Engine is down, requesting help, over!”

Emptiness. An outer-space crackle. All was silent on the radio.

“Shit. Trang, wait here. Trang?”

That son of a bitch was gone. After I’d carried him, quasi-catatonic, all the way here, now he was gone.

I ran out of the engine room and back to the freight elevator. I could see from the buttons lighting up that Trang had gotten off on Starfish Deck. I lurched my way down there on the emergency stairwell, nearly falling two or three times. I’d never felt a boat move like this, ever.

Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw.

Trang, sweet, friendly Trang, always ready to help, was standing by the lifeboats. By the lifeboats whose cords he had cut and whose hulls he had tossed over the railings and out onto the water. Every single lifeboat, gone, and a sea of orange life jackets bobbing on the waves.

Trang smiled at me.
KILL HIM NOW. Shut up! I can’t hear you! I jammed both fingers into my ears, hard. All I could hear was ringing.

I shook my head. Trang, you fuck-up. The demon seemed to have turned him into a poltergeist of sorts. Chuck was a serial killer, Tang was a poltergeist, so what did that make me?

I hoped there were still life boats on the port side. Passengers were starting to come out onto the decks, looking for guidance. Shit! Who told them to do that? Had Avi made an announcement? Where was he?

Even with my ears ringing, I could hear the shrieks. People were becoming hysterical. They parted like the Nile and then I saw what they were screaming about: Chuck, walking slowly toward me, carried Avi’s dripping head in his hands.

So that’s what the demon decided to do to me. I was to be the bad-luck charm. The curse. The one who brought death to all his friends. I began to weep, I’m not ashamed to say it, and grabbed Trang close to me. Fucked if I was going to let it happen again. Avi’s eyes stared at me, they stared. Fuck you, Chuck Lee, you are not getting Trang. You will have to kill me first.

Then the boat gave such a lurch and heave it felt, for all the world, like the White Whale below us, nudging and tumbling us all around. Not a breath of wind, not a drop of rain in the sky, and here we were roiling like a tugboat on a boiling sea. I remembered Avi’s words: “It can take over anything it wants.” The ship’s motions threw me so that I tumbled head over heels, landing flat on my back on the deck. I still had one hand grasped around Trang’s wrist. Where was Chuck? I had lost him in the chaos of the crowd.

What happened next isn’t 100% clear. I couldn’t hear so well, so I wasn’t sure what stopped the screaming and the roaring of the crowd. But the seemed to be one last surge of symphonic screaming, in stereo, and then silence. Silence, and a ringing sound. It was the sound of a bell. Phoc and Joe were standing on Stingray deck, looking down over us. Joe’s hand held a gun. I followed his sightline and saw Chuck facefirst on deck. Blood pooled out of his back, under his belly. Phoc was ringing the captain’s bell, and both were reciting. I couldn’t make out the words, just the ringing of the bell echoing over and over again in my ears.

Later I found out it was a Buddhist chant designed for driving away evil spirits. I don’t know how or why it worked. What made the demon leave them be? How did they stop it when it had gotten so strong? I can’t tell you that. I have seen everything, but I do not know everything.

It was early morning when the Polestar came out to rescue us. Her shocked crew helped clean up Chuck’s rampage as best they could.

My hearing never recovered. Seems I really stuck my fingers in my ears harder than you’re ever supposed to, and I’ve got some permanent scarring.  I wear two hearing aids now, at all times.  I got off easy, though. Trang was never really the same. He went home to live with his mother and never sailed again.

Phoc and Joe still keep in touch, with little postcards now and then. They are still sailing all around the world, safe in the assurance that they can best any demon of the deep. But they both work commercial fishing ships now, Icelandic and Japanese, I think, and stay away from the cruise circuit. I hear Joe was promoted to head engineer but Phoc still works with the kitchen crew. He’s happy at it though. “All my soul needs is a really good bowl of fish stew,” he told me once. I would like to be as happy as those two one day.

And me, I obviously still live in Brooklyn. I live on the highest point of land on all Long Island, and like I say, maybe I should move some place where I can’t see the ships in the harbor. But I like being up high. If there’s ever a flood, I’ll be far away from the water.


The End
 


Sunday, October 28, 2012

31 Days of Halloween: Favorite Ghost Stories by Eileen Wiedbrauk





Today's Halloween guest-post is brought to you by Eileen Wiedbrauk, Editor-in-Chief of World Weaver Press as well as a writer, collegiate English instructor, blogger, coffee addict, cat herder, MFA graduate, fantasist-turned-fabalist-turned-urban-fantasy-junkie, Odyssey Workshop alumna, photographer, designer, tech geek, entrepreneur, avid reader, and a somewhat decent cook. She wears many hats, as the saying goes. Which is an odd saying in this case, as she rarely looks good in hats. Find her at eileenwiedbrauk.com.

I have to admit, I’m the kind of person who hates scary stories until I love them. I swore I’d never see The Exorcist or Silence of the Lambs or The Omen, but as soon as I did, I was enthralled. I can’t stomach the thought of reading a truly scary tale until I’m there on the page, sucked in and captive, and by then my stomach has nothing to do with my decision making: I need to finish the story. I need to know what happens next. The pleasure of knowing overwhelms the pleasure of feeling unruffled and composed. These thrilling, fear-filled stories provide one of the greatest pleasures fiction can: transporting you to a place that scares you senseless while you remain in your perfectly safe, unscary reading chair.

And yet my favorite ghost story of all time isn’t terribly scary. But what can I say? I’m fascinated by the ghosts of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.  Although the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is pretty damn creepy, if I do say so myself.

I’ve rarely seen an adaptation of A Christmas Carol that I didn’t like, from Patrick Stewart to the Muppets, from Scrooged to that musical version where they sing something like, “Thank ya very much, that’s the nicest thing anyone’s every done for me” when Scrooge dies. I’ll watch as many of them as I can every Christmas season. But the ghosts—now that’s what’s fascinating.

We generally think of ghosts as the spirits of the dead. That is, they were once human. But the ghosts of A Christmas Carol never were human. Their precise origins aren’t terribly important but we understand that the Ghost of Christmas Present is born the morning of Christmas Day and dies that night, that each year there is a new one. This is the idea that intrigues me. The notion that there are spirits out there frolicking about (or at least frolicking in fiction) such as boggarts and wil-o’-the-wisps, who’ve never been human but are always, always ghosts.
Perhaps this fascination started as a child when I read Susan Cooper’s The Boggart, whose titular character is a grumpy if loveable spirit who spends some decades accidentally trapped inside a roll top desk.

While editing Specter Spectacular: 13 Ghostly Tales (available now), I searched for a range of ghost stories. Many are tales of humans who’ve crossed the grave, but not all of them are. Some are funny, some even have musical elements, and some scared the pants right off me.