A Quick Look at the Dark

What do you fear? The endless dark, the cold so deep in everlasting death? Heights so great they scream to you until your faltering balance pulls you crashing down? An eight-legged beastie hanging from a thread just above you, perhaps? Look up. She's right there overhead. Perhaps your greatest fear is failure, a life unfulfilled, unloved, loneliness, childless, forgotten. Why? Why do we fear such things? Certainly death would be a release from tedium, a realm where we would have naught to fear. Nothing in the dark can hurt you any less by dawn's daybreak. What harm could a simple spider cause? It's still hanging above you, by the way. No, not the arachnid. The phobia, the mind-numbing, hair-prickling fear. It controls you. It controls us all. "Fear is the mind killer." Control the fear. Let it in, just a little, and you will be master over your destiny.

I'll come up with a title yesterday, or perhaps I did it tomorrow? A new poem, perchance?

To All Our Yesterdays To Come, Our Tomorrows Remembered

Yesterday I will have been but tomorrow I haven't yet

To say so long to days long gone, to days to be and those I've met

I was tomorrow to be a man but yesterday has yet to pass

So I sat through tomorrow just a boy and I'll watch yesterday through a looking glass

If yesterday was as tomorrow then soon I'll be what I need to be,

But if yesterday stays before tomorrow came then I'll not be the man I wish to see

To today's tomorrow, to tomorrow's yesterday, I will to be what I have been

That is to say to be what I was or not be that which I seem

So here I will sit yesterday as I look fondly back on tomorrow

Through tears and fears and constant doubts I think ahead to yester's sorrow.

The Shadow in the Corner

The man in the long white coat moved restlessly down the narrow corridors of stately old Arkham, hells font and hub for all manner of insanity in seaboard Massachusetts. Suddenly beckoned to the chambers of one waiting Simon Whately at such an ostentatious hour, he had scarcely wiped Morpheus from his shadowed eyes.  Mr. Whately's locked ward of padded white had drawn an unsightly shade of nether grays at this late stage.  Screaming for bloody Carcosa, Whately moaned sweet relief from the king of jaundiced tatters. 

The man in the long white coat, seeing nothing else for it, drew upon the folds of his pocket for a long syringe filled with a liquid of the most vile and sickliest shade of vermilion.  "It's all right, Simon.  We'll have you all better soon," he lied as his usual ritual to the screaming man.  An orderly who had accompanied the coated man held Simon down, an unnecessary yet practiced tradition as the man in the coat injected the liquid into the deepest veins of Simon's crimson streams.  The maddened man slowly began to ease his stress, the orderly lessened his grasp, and both came to state of calm.  The man in the long white coat sighed a long relief.  "Don't look at his eyes.  With any luck, he should remain this way until morning.  Come along, Ducat."

Shortly thereafter, reconstituted anew within the trappings of his dim lit office, the man in the long white coat graciously sipped his brandy.  Given the approaching dawn, foreshadowed by the twinkling red-grays on the horizon, he saw no need to take rest and recounted the file of Mr. Whately.  A resident of the Miskatonic region by right of blood, Simon was yet another inbred cousin of the notorious Whately family, known throughout the backwaters of the county as either devil worshipping witches or god-fearing and humble folks.  This all of course depended on who you spoke to.  Regardless, the Whatelys were amongst the first of old English stock to have settled the Miskatonic River Valley some four hundred years prior, having dispatched the red Indians from the land and founding one of the first Puritan colonies.  No one is truly certain as to what befell the Whately family; some local legends speak of an Indian curse on the land over unfair payment, some suggest a weirding over the lands far older and darker.  What can be verified is that a strain of madness runs through the progeny of Buford Whately, a likely product of the old patriarch's selective inbreeding of the family to ensure "pure Christian blood". 

The family, which once owned lands from the Kingsport to Dunwich and the swamps beyond, has met with severe misfortune over the centuries, losing much of their prominence, wealth, and respect in the community at large.  Only the old and dilapidated farmhouse, facetiously referred to as Whately Manor by the locals (at one time just a small annex of a larger property that did boast a splendid mansion house) is all that remains of the Whately's great wealth.

Simon, a member of a lesser (yet no less tainted) branch of the house, had been admitted to the Arkham Sanitarium no less than a year ago.  Prior to his incarceration, many who knew him described the man as a brilliant scholar and philanthropist who fought with every ounce of his being against the ascribed family curse that had brought ruin to so many of his kin.  A bright boy from early on, he was awarded scholarship by one of his wealthier relatives and prevailed in school.  Having left Massachusetts following the completion of his undergraduate studies at both Miskatonic University and Harvard, he traveled to New York City, where steady work as a banker and several well-placed investments in steel and automotives left Simon with a great deal of money after the War.  Simon continued to expand on his wealth for several years until at last he chose to return to the Arkham area seeking to settle down.

Perhaps it was the murky Innsmouth air, people wondered.  Perhaps the ancient curse was just waiting for good old Simon Whately to build himself up before knocking him down.  Whatever the circumstances, four months to the day of Simon Whately's return home he was admitted to the asylum in Arkham following a rather grotesque incident, gibbering nonsense and given to fits of screaming.  Arkham's staff remained entirely perplexed to the cause or any treatment to entirely abate his symptoms.  Heavy sedatives only quelled the screams temporarily but did little to nothing to remove the look of abject horror on his face.  He had also developed nyctophobia, or a severe fear of the dark.

Prior to his confinement to a padded cell, nurses observed a rather odd behavior Simon elicited in response to his sudden phobia.  By day, he always sat by the window, never looking outside but rather his eyes darted around ever inward to some distant inward umbral corner as if seeking some predatory foe only he knew to be hiding within the shadows.  As the day progressed, Simon would change his vantage point so to capture the most light around his person.  Should another patient interrupt the path between him and the light, Simon became agitated and violent.  As the dusky hours of evening approached, Whately would begin to suffer uncontrollably shivering fits.  The complete sunset brought the screams.

The man in the long white coat shivered to himself.  The screams were always disconcerting, but not so much as Simon's face.  It was always twisted into a frozen stare at something terrible.  His mouth never seemed to close as if he were screaming even when he was not.  And perhaps the worst were the eyes.  There was something indescribable about them.  While the rest of his face appeared to be paralyzed, the eyes never stopped moving, always darting here and there, seeking the darkest shadows.  Something was coming for Simon in slow motion and from all sides, an invisible adversary that was out for blood.

Perhaps strangest of all were the events which had brought Simon Whately to Arkham Sanitarium.  On the evening of February the fifth of the previous year, exactly four months to the day of Simon's return to Massachusetts, the police were dispatched to the Innsmouth home of Simon's father, Orville Whately, a fisherman within the local town.  According to neighbors, an argument between father and son got heated when gunfire was overheard.  When the local sheriff arrived at the scene, three were found dead with Simon, holding a knife in one hand and a tattered yellow book in the other, blood dripping generously from Simon, screaming his selfsame shrieks for which Whately has become best known.  The victims were Orville Whately himself, his daughter Annabelle Whately, and another young woman, Ms. Giselle Bennet.  Ms. Bennet was attributed to being Simon's fiancee by known associates and friends whom he had met in New York an intended to wed upon his return home.

If the triple homicide had not been damning enough, the case becomes even more strange in the wake of a forensic report which declared that only Annabelle had been stabbed, but not by Simon.  An old injury from his youth would have made it impossible for Simon to have garnered enough strength to have stabbed his sister, a large, slow woman who worked with her father on his fishing skiff.  Simon was, however, deemed responsible for the other deaths, his father having died of a wound to the chest by the previously alluded gunshot.  Giselle's death remains a mystery, appearing to have suffered a fatal heart attack at the moment that the Whatelys both met their end.  What began this heinous bout of murder?  A Mr. Julius Derleth, next-door neighbor to Orville Whately's modest apartment suggests that the matter of Simon's marriage to Giselle was the matter of contention.  Simon had returned to Innsmouth to receive his father's blessing but things became heated when his father refused the match and tried to convince his son to marry poor Annabelle or to match with another Whately as family custom.  Fellow fishermen down at local pub, Dagon's Wharf, a frequent haunt of Whately, refute Derleth's claim, citing that the Whately's of Innsmouth long shunned the tradition of their Dunwich counterparts and that Orville himself had wed a non-Whately woman.

When Simon was brought in for questioning, all he could mutter were strange, nonsensical words:

                                    Hastur wgah'n r'luh shogg ng'y'fhtagn fhalma

Beyond this, he could only shout, "Y'hah!" or scream.  It would be several weeks before Simon recalled any English and since, his vocabulary has become limited to only a select few single syllable words: black, shade, king, and ma.  He appears to recall none of the events that lead him through the asylum's doors nor the words he spoke after being aprehended by the police... beyond one.  The first word, 'Hastur', has been muttered from Mr. Whately's lips many times, often while under the influence of the prescribed sedatives which limit his ability to scream.

"Hastur," pondered that man in the long white coat.  The word brought to his mind a fleeting memory, a long forgotten shore of some sandy beachhead, alight with suns... no sun, singular, there is only one sun, he chuckled.  At long last, the man in the long white coat sat back in his chair to relax, took one last drag from his pipe and rested his weary eyes.  Soon, he would have to awaken for the day and make his daily rounds, but until then, he thought of Hastur and Whately and black stars upon a moonlit lake in far off Carcosa.

The man in the long white coat woke with a start.  Carcosa, Whately had spoken another word earlier that night.  He had cried out for Carcosa and a king, not in blacks but all in yellow.  The doctor poured over the report on Simon Whately once again.  The book, the book!  What was in that book?  The man groped through the file of Simon Whately, seeking out the damning information.  Deep within the arrest report, the officer made mention of a yellow tome clutched in Simon's left hand, a play entitled "The King in Yellow".  Before he could contemplate this fact further, a knock came at the doctor's chambers.

"Come in, please," the doctor beckoned. 

Entered the orderly, Mr. Ducat.  "Excusing me, monsieur," Ducat announced in his usual unsavory drawl.  "The man, Simon, he has..." he trailed off.

"Awake again?  So soon?  Very well then."  The man in the long white coat reached for a syringe and bottle of the usual scarlet drug.

"You won't be needing that, monsieur."

The man in the long white coat put down the bottle.  "He is... awake isn't he?  He isn't... has something happened to Mr. Whately?"

"You best be coming to look, monsieur."

The doctor rose from his desk chair and followed Mr. Ducat down the narrow corridors of stately old Arkham. Once again beckoned to the waiting chambers of Simon Whately in this early morning hour, he had refused Morpheus' touch upon his shadowed eyes.  Mr. Whately's locked ward of padded white had drawn a dreadful and appalling shade of crimson since last the doctor had visited.  Whately no longer screamed.  How could he?  Having managed to break free his restraints with uncanny strength, he had torn out his own larynx.  The eyes were no longer of any concern either.  It is far to horrifying to speak of what had become of them.

The man in the long white coat, knowing not what else to do nor what spectral force provoked him to do so, crept close to Simon and drew upon the folds of the lifeless man's jacket, drawing out a book the color of saffron in spring.  "What have we here, Simon?" the man wondered aloud to no one in particular.  He was already uncomfortably aware that he already knew the answer.  The stench of fear began to pervade the air as the doctor dusted off the cover to "The King in Yellow", turning to a page at random, he spoke aloud the text:

Cassilda:                   In Carcosa, you would do well to remain out of the shadows.

The Stranger:             My dear, I am the shadows and soon I will be you.  Then you will be                                                  in the shadows.

The man in the long white coat, eyes widened, continued to read.  As the fear in his eyes continued to build, the hot, wet damp of urine slid down his shaking legs.  Soon, it was as if he could not put down the book in hand, feverishly reading through the Act I for some hint or clue as to what had transpired.  He turned to Act II and began to scream.  In the shadows of the room, writing tendrils ripped their way toward the man in the long white coat, a coat which was no longer so white at all but yellowed by the sins around him, torn in tatters to match his breaking mind.  A tentacled arm, wriggling in shapes no man would ever describe, so help him, wrenched out what little remained of the doctor's soul.

Ducat broke down the asylum door, bursting into the room to force down the doctor with his impressive physique.  The man in yellow tatters remained inconsolable.  He turned to Ducat and uttered, "We are nothing to him.  Why did I not listen?  Stay out of the shadows or the shadows will creep into you."  He laughed with a maniacal shriek.  Ducat carried the doctor out of the room, strapping him into a jacket as another doctor came rushing toward the commotion.

"I am not knowing, monsieur.  He is mad!"

The attending physician looked down at his screaming companion and sighed, "It seems not one is safe, not even our Doctor Alistair Whately.  Take him away."

I purport to be no poet, but I thought I'd try my hand at one.

The following is untitled, or maybe it's titled "Lost & Found".  Or maybe I should just shut up and write.

My keys, my keys!

I've lost my keys.

Has anyone else lost their keys?

Always when I'm running late or early or even on time,

Those blasted jangling nightmares can never be found.

I search through couches, pouches, jackets & jeans.

Always the last place once would expect,

And obviously the last place looked.

In my pocket? Damn it all,

Ready to go? No!

My wallet, my wallet!

Again with the wallet.

Has it fallen out of my pocket?

All my cash and coupons, cards!

Credit, debit, ID, ARRRGH!!

Turn around and there it is

On my nightstand right where I left it.

My glasses, my glasses!

How can I see without my glasses?

How can I search without sight for something I need in order to seek?

I have misplaced them again and again.

"Where o where have my spectacles gone?

Where o where can they be?"

On my face you say?

I see.

A new blog with stuff I just make up as I go along.

It's 2015!  A new year!  Three months ago!  So I'm a little late to following through with life goals, or maybe not?  It's never too late, except when you die in which case, who cares?!  I started attending a creative writing class, so as promised, this blog will basically be my showcase to whatever I have written for the week, in class or out.

First up, an exercise in processing thoughts: when asked the question, "If you were anything in nature, what would you be and why?" I came up with something a bit outside the norm, or perhaps something essentially part of all the norm:

I am the atom, small and unassuming to the outside observer, a fundamental building block of all there is, was, and will be.  Packed with power and potential, without me there is nothing; I am infinitely important and infinitesimally insignificant.  Together with others of my ilk, we become a union of all life and matter, split from my basest structures, I release the rage of the sun.