Nightmare Fuel, Day the Eighteenth - The End

A sweet little deal with the devil story.

Inspiration slightly from Goethe, but mostly from the Simpsons. 

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"The End"

It's near the end now, now question. And I'd have had a good run were it not for the constant fear.

I thought I was smart. I hadn't asked for incomparable wealth, to be king of the world, anything like that. Just a full life, health for my wife and children, comfort. What we had didn't seem like much out of the ordinary; the house with the white picket fence, two kids who grew into healthy adults themselves, jobs that were fulfilling and challenging enough without being a grind.

A few years after work ended to enjoy ourselves and eachother, living out the rest of our years as empty nesters, still always learning, exploring hobbies, still engaged. The one thing I'd failed to wish for was health for our pets, but they did OK; we always had cats living in the house and the heartache as they passed on always healed. I wish they'd lived forever, but they, too, had full lives.

And now it's almost over. 

I read a great deal in my later years, and took solace in the number who tricked the devil himself, who left with their souls intact. Even Faust himself ascended to heaven at the end. 

And now it's ended. 

My modern trip to hell is like a long elevator ride, far past the sub-sub-sub basement. As it travels I feel younger, feel the years and decades fading as I recede from the world.

I wrack my brain for a loophole, but can't think of one. Ah well... at least my family enjoyed the comforts I wished for them.

Soon it will be over.

At long last the door opens. 

I see dark shapes moving in the halflight, at knee level. Demons? Devils? The crawl about on all fours, their motions smooth and predatory.

Cats. Sleek, healthy, young housecats.

Ever pet I've ever lost and buried.

They languorously wander about, rubbing against eachother. One enters the elevator, rubs against my leg. 

Now I feel claws on my back as one jumpclimbs up by spectral body, leaving deep scratches before it alights on my shoulder. The elevator fills with small furry bodies. My soul now intact, the elevator door closes and heads back upward.

Nightmare Fuel, Day the Seventeenth - The Girl in the Lake

T

No commentary on this one; I much like this image, and might return to this with some more detail. 

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"The Girl in the Lake"

You don't know to use the word ritual, but that's what your trip to the lake is.

Every day you endure the words.

You're ugly.

You're stupid.

You're worthless.

So every afternoon in what you don't know to call a ritual but most certainly is you walk to the river.

The other you is waiting there, on the otherside of the water, looking sadly up at you, tears welling up in her eyes.

You turn your head, not able to look directly at her, but you see her there, watching you through the corner of her eyes which are yours. 

And there at the river, in what you don't know to call a ritual, you pass along all the small cruelties. After all, there's not meant for you, not for meek, quiet, calm you. They're meant for the girl in the river.

You half-whisper:

"Why can't you be more like your brother?"

"You're useless."

"You're just like your mother."

She always does her part, in what you don't know to call a ritual, staying the whole time, as meek as you are, until you walk slowly away from the river. 

You wonder where she goes when you're gone, what the world is like across the river, but you don't wonder for long. After all, you can return from the lake, quietly, to gather another day's worth of petty hatreds for the girl in the lake. 

Until one day, in what you never knew to be a ritual, you blink and find yourself looking up, looking through the calm water,  up at her face backlit by the sun and unreadable.

You feel the weight of all the petty cruelties you've cast into the water dragging you down and away, as she turns and walks away, looking as meek as you but hardened by years underwater. 

You tell yourself that you'll meet her eyes when she returns, but you never get the chance.

You fade, reflecting nothing but the angry-red sun, pain wearing smooth like a river-stone, 

Nightmare Fuel, Day the Sixteenth - At Sea

Again, the sea-witch. I adore the sea-witch. I'd like to do more with this, and with her. It's an interesting topic.

This one is just a fragment, and I don't much care for it. I'll perhaps return to the image later.

"Fragments of a Dialog At Sea"

There was a surge of interest, about 25 years ago now, but that faded. It was the wrong kind of interest anyway; men (almost all men) thinking they'd slay the big bad monster of the deep.

Oh, not much interest. After all, it was told as a children's story and who takes them seriously? Nobody but the children.

The children are a bit older now and some of them have looked out to the sea. It's the sensitive ones, the dreaming ones, the ones who never learned to stop taking stories seriously. Some of you started lookat the older tellings of the tales, to try to drink in the truth. 

Some of you don't bother.

You talk about duress and trickery and unholy power, but you don't really believe that, do you? 

Do you?

No, you think I'm a monster because I'm fat, because I have tentacles instead of legs, because I've found comfort and a home in the dark places far from where you live, in the places you fear.

Anyway, it isn't that lonely out here. After all, I still have her voice. I sometimes use it to whisper into the pulsingbright veins of light your people have stretched across the seabed. It's how I lure men here still, now that ships have gone all automatic.

Oh, you didn't think I still had it? That's what you get for reading the children's version of the story.

I gave her something much, much better. I could give you the same.

Or not.

I am, after all, the sea.  And I can be fickle.

And you no longer amuse me.

Don't worry. You'll get another chance.

The stories don't say it, but I'm fair. I give people what they need. And what you need most of all now is to start over.

May the taste of saltwater remind you of your failings.

Nightmare Fuel, Day the Fifteenth - Girls' Armor.

We've reached the midpoint! Don your armor - boys' or girls' - and read on.



"Girls' Armor"

Girls's armor is different from boys' armor.

I  learned that at a very young age from the covers of the books Dad leaves on the coffee table, but also from the clothes Mom buys us. It's why parents with a boy/girl set of identical twins don't do the matchy-matchy game; boys have to learn to wear boy armor, girls to wear girl armor.

He got little miniature Timberland knock-offs. I got mary janes and white socks. Always the black Mary Janes, except the times they were purple. We don't talk about the white ones.

It was the black ones I wore the year of the fairy infestation.  My eyes were still young enough and innocent enough to see them, but still I towered over them; the fey are cruel and, in their way, powerful, but small. They hid under the forscythia bush, they hid in the wildtallgrass against the back fence, they hid in the privacy hedge between our yard and the neighbors' (old man Hiller and family, always the first to bring their trash cans to the curb, and always trimming those hedges with near-military precision. Still, there were always hiding spots beneath).

We couldn't always see them, but they'd whip us with brambles as we ran through the ragged weeds into the grassy area beneath the powerlines, they'd throw clouds of dirt and mud at us, pelt us with tiny rocks. And we'd run and brandish sticks and laugh, and our laughter would drive them off, back to whence they came.

And I fought wearing my girls' armor, he in his boys' armor.

Sometimes at the end of the day I'd roll my sock down just a bit, revealing the softwhite skin creased from the pressure of wearing socks all day, but unmarred by the dust and dirt and debris. That little ring of skin beneath the armor, unscratched and unharmed. He in his boys' armor never had that layer of dust and brambles and scratches go so far along his skin; the hardened faux-leather and tall athletic socks keeping his legs clean and pure. He wore boys armor, and it protected him, coddled him.

We beat the infestation, because kids always win. It's a rule. We didn't eliminate all the fairies, because battles never truly end. That's also a rule. 

When summer came, I swam in a belly-baring two piece suit, the bottom part of which covered little more than underwear. Girls' armor.

He wore mid-calf shorts and a swim-shirt. Boys' armor.

It was as if Thetis had chosen to swaddle her son first, before anointing him in that faithful river, and annointed her daughter completely nude, tossing the tiny body freely into the flowing rapids before snatching it out.

Because we love our boys more, they never grow a hardened skin.

Boys learn to wear boys armor, and grow up fragile and weak. They can't see the fey anymore, but we all know that they still linger, still throw barbs and darts from hidden corners. Those of us who'd worn boys' armor all our lives will feel the pricks on delicate pale skin, the prickles drawing them slowly to anger.

It's why men are so quick to rage. Now that we can't see the fey we can't really fight them anymore. So I put on my woman's armor, knowing that my bare ankles have been toughened by a lifetime as a girl.

An d someday, when my children grow to challenge the monsters I'd not slayed, I shall array them both in girls' armor.

Nightmare Fuel, Day the Fourteenth - A Lifetime Later

This is not really a prompt which spoke to me, but I managed to wrestle something out of it.

The stories appear to be getting darker as the month wears on. Enjoy!


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"A Lifetime Later"


Sometimes you go back.

It's not "back", not really. After all, they replaced most of the building. How could they not? Even if not the practical matter of damage, there's the memory.

There are ghosts.

So you go back to visit them. Never on open school nights, never when classes are in session. You visit as you did when you were a kid, when you could climb a tree overgrown too close to a fence, slip through a carelessly open window, and wander halls empty and deserted. It felt otherworldly at times like that. It felt like somethign from a dream, or a story.

So you slip through, into the past.

The new building rests on the same foundation.

You remember that you were mad that day. There had again been too much homework, you'd again not done it. It had been a bright autumn day, the kind for riding bikes and running through the yard. Not the kind for homework. It wasn't fair.

So, you were mad. Mike had shoved you on the way out at recess, and Stacy, she of the long black hair and bright blue eyes, Stacy had laughed. Your ears and face burned hot, your stomach tightened. You remember tears coming to your eyes, the chant of "baby". You remember that part. It's the last time you'd ever felt that.

You don't remember much more, but you remember that day.

You already had the trick of being places you shouldn't, of finding secret paths into the muskywet basement room behind the boiler, with the faint scent of oil and mildew.

You remember the smell.

You remember, because it sometimes helped you, whispering your hate into the cool cinderblock walls. Whispering your anger.

You hate Michael.
You hate Stacy.
You're not a baby.

Not a baby.

You don't know how they say the fire started,  but that doesn't matter. You know you called it. You know that whatever spirit lived in the building answered.

You didn't see the bodies of the younger kids, kindergarten kids, carried out, but you'd learn later.

Learn that Michael and Stacy were near the door and among the first to escape.

And learn that your body, hidden behind the boiler, would be the last found. That your parents would pin sad, hopeful fliers to lampposts, that even after they found you your mother would secretly hold out hope that you'd gotten out, that it was a mistake, that it was some other dead kid that looked like you.

And so, you go back sometimes. More often once your parents finally cleared out your room, finally moved away.

It is, after all, the only place that feels familiar, even if it is rebuild and nothing but the foundation remains.

When you see the ghosts of the kindergarten kids you tell them you're sorry, but they don't seem to understand. They just cry and cry for mothers who have long since moved on with their lives.

So you leave them and lurk beneath the shiny new building, beside a new boiler not yet smelling of spilled oil and rust, whispering to whatever spirits live within the walls that they were wrong.

That you're still mad.

That you've not forgiven them.

Nightmare Fuel, Day the 13th. The Mourner

The idea of "stunt blogs" is a novel, digital form of performance art; it's turning a facet of ones life into a performance, it's audience interaction, it can be a statement.

Think Julia and Julia, The Year of Living Biblically, Zero Impact Man. The latter two especially sought to make a statement, while the former was, perhaps, more of an explanation.

The following tale is of a stunt-blogger, with a darker subject matter. 

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"The Mourner"

Some deaths I knew would be better than others.

When I had the idea for the blog, I'd not thought about that, but it seemed obvious. 

Really, it's a great idea for a stuntblog. 52 weeks of mourning. Every week I pick an obituary at random, attend the funeral, talk to the family if they'd let me. 

And I'd mourn.

Week 30 now, nearly six months dressed in black. Six months of open caskets and closed, of shiva calls, of weeping, red-eyed widows and widowers and children and parents.

The children's deaths are the best.

I know it sounds monstrous, but there are never more hits on the blog than after the funeral of a child. There've been five so far, two girls and three boys. The girls really brought my little community of internet mourners together in grief. It really is what I'd hoped for when I started this project; an English poet once said that the death of each man diminishes him, for he is involved in mankind. We should feel that way. We should. 

Their deaths are making the world a better place.

And, through my words, perhaps some of us do.

How much better and kinder would we be were we all like that, if we all mourned each death, each life lost?

Such are my thoughts as I drive home after another awkward-strange lunch at a stranger's home, talking about another human brother. That one won't be a good death; too old, too undistinguished, I know he'll not capture the audience's imagination, yet I'll still mourn.

Such are my thoughts as I navigate the suburban streets, far from my home. As headlights illuminate the young girl carelessly darting into the street, I see a flash of bright blond hair, of tiny tennis shoes, slender bare arms. Young, beautiful.

I gun the engine, turn the wheel a bit.

This one will be a much better death. Senseless, brutal and sudden, it will help bring the world together in love.

Flesh and bone crunches against steel, the sticky wet sound of brotherly love.

Nightmare Fuel, Day the Twelth - A Bug in the Code

It's an even dozen days! 

This is another quick sketch, and a riff on an interesting idea in modern physics: what if the universe as we know it is a simulation, created in another universe? What if that universe is in turn a simulation?

Is there even a "real world"? Does that phrase mean anything?

And if you learned for sure that the world wasn't as it seems, how would you act? Below lie, perhaps, a cautionary tale.

"A Bug in the Code"

They say the universe might be a simulation.

Because you're knowledgable, you realize that this could explain all those old stories about gods and goddesses, about the ages of miracles. Adjustments to the parameters, the implementers tinkering and, perhaps, playing.

Because you're clever, you now know weird happenings, feeling of deja-vu, and that moment you walked into a room and forgot why for what those moments are.

• Glitchy programing.
• Partial reboots when patches are installed
• A bug in the system.

Because you're not smart, it never occurred to you to wonder what this world could be other than a computer program, to wonder if this metaphor would seem naive to your grandchildren as the idea of gods and wizards appears to you.

Because you're cunning, you know that exploits can exist, they do in all code. No simulation is perfect, after all. There are always cheats, rough edges, loopholes.

Because you're ambitious, you go searching. Out in the world, looking for incongruities. Things that don't appear as they should. An ancient tree growing in the wrong climate. An inexplicable door in the very living rock, far from where hands could have built it. Glitches, oversights. Perhaps the hiding ground of secrets.

Because you're naive, you expect to find these in places a human can reach, you expect doorways and portals on your scale, not tiny as in insect or tall as a mythical giant.  You expect a simple wooden door you can open, and you expect something you can use on the other side of it.

Because you're self-centered you think the simulation is about us, about people. It never occurs to you that we could be an artifact, a bi-product, a mistake.

Because you're not wise, you don't think about what an implementer would do with a rogue element tinkering from inside at the edges of the code. You don't think to carry your metaphor far enough to think that, if we were a programmer, you might be a bug which the implementers might choose to del---