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Another walk down the Rue des Souvenirs!

FIELDS – So you’re walking along in the woods and suddenly there’s a small break in the land where electricity towers march off into the distance along a wide, anomalous grass path. I always liked these strange little tracks where you’re not supposed to walk, ‘cause hell, I’ll walk ‘em, what do I care? But one very cold day I was looking at those towers more carefully and their bulging grid shape struck me as kind of eerie. I imagined coming across one in the middle of nowhere, one that no taller than I was, but disconnected from the power lines above… just… standing there. The story came together with unusual speed after that. The electrical towers are not nearly as creepy as those giant wind turbines, but still.

For a while I wanted to create a podcast based slowly on… fields. Not ‘fields’ the story, but literally fields. Because I love them so much. I’m a field buff. I love a great field out in the country with a varying slope, different types of foliage, a barn in the distance, some scattered fauna, and of course a rock wall. You wanna throw in a few daffodils? Hey, I got no argument with that. 

LEGEND – This story came from the one time in my life when I thought I felt something truly wrong in the air around me, something invisible and unwelcome. The town where ‘legend’ takes place is really called Helvetia, and it’s in West Virginia. What I didn’t quite realize before I went out there was that there is no real town per se; it’s just a tiny collection of houses and cute rustic buildings nestled in the mountains, with a population that was basically nowhere in sight that weekend. There were a couple of inches of snow on the ground when I arrived, and there wasn’t a sound to be heard. 

I went walking in an old, dramatically sloping cemetery, and I just didn’t feel right. All the names on the tombstones were Swiss or German. I didn’t feel like I should be there. I thought I felt eyes watching me. The same was true almost anywhere I strolled. No one seemed to be in any of the houses; there were no cars, no signs of life. And all around, the presence of the mountains.

I went into a combination post office and gift shop, where a pleasant enough woman was running the counter. Human contact! In walked a fairly rough-looking character who was obviously drunk. The woman seemed to be familiar with him and humored him as he proceeded to invite me to stay the night nearby—more specifically, in an extension to his house, which he was turning into a boutique hotel. It had all the amenities, he claimed, and he proceeded to describe them all to me. He wanted me to get into the car right then and follow him back to the place, about five miles away.

I sidestepped this notion as delicately as possible, and he finally left. The woman behind the counter then told me that, in fact, there was no planned hotel. There were no amenities waiting for me. In fact, there was no house at all. She did not seem to think this was funny, and she did not elaborate. That’s all I needed to hear. I left the shop. The feeling that I was in a place where an undefined harm seemed to be waiting for me remained until I drove out of town. It was twenty miles before the road stopped winding and there was a place I could stop and eat dinner. Weird. That cemetery, built on such a dramatic slope, as if it was never meant to be… what was it that made the place feel so wrong, and me so defenseless and watched?

SCHOOL – This was originally done a few years before the podcast as a monologue for video, now long archived, and to complete it I remember spending an hour one winter afternoon attempting to draw the eerie portrait of Ladybird Odom as found by the police. And some fluke happenstance resulted, after ten tries or so, in a super-creepy representation of it--one which I somehow promptly lost. I remember looking down at it and thinking “Good lord, what have I done? This thing is nightmare-inducing!” The school itself is based on an abandoned junior high building that graced a small parcel of land in my hometown of Annapolis. I walked around it a couple of times as a teenager, looking at the graffiti and the broken windows, and I thought then that I had never seen anything sadder or more creepy. I did not know then that just three miles north, Crownsville State Hospital was soon to be closed for good, and boarded up in that same ominous way soon after. To this day, that tiny campus of old brick buildings stands alone and forgotten, and is naturally super-haunted, right? 

Every time I drive past an impressively abandoned collection of buildings, I immediately want to make a horror movie there. Just a month ago, a very nice apartment complex on the other side of my town was demolished little by little, and day by day it looked more and more otherworldly, tortured, stricken by some awful punishment, creating a neighborhood of rubble and shadows. The story ‘bargain’ is set in the most striking example of property abandonment I’ve ever seen: some corporation bought out an entire ten-block residential area near me and condemned all the houses as they prepared to build a hotel. Walking those deserted streets at dusk in late summer, with the weeds starting to poke everywhere through the roads, was quite trippy.

LANDMARK – My friend Lawrence and I used to go driving at night around the Baltimore beltway. He’s never been a country drive man; he has an affinity for straight-up highway. (Weirdo!) There’s a stretch of the beltway’s northeast quadrant that goes past and over a river where the lights of some massive gruesome industrial this-and-that shine on the water, and it’s always rather pretty, while by day, it just looks sad and grimy. If you get off the beltway in that area and go driving deep into the heart of that economically challenged territory, you’ll eventually find other places on the water where old warehouses lie dormant and there are few lights to be had. Once I saw a tall building there with big scary holes in the brickwork, jutting out against a dark red sky at midnight, and I was reminded of the passage in Dracula where Bram Stoker describes the Count’s castle as seen by Johnathan Harker: “Suddenly, I became conscious of the fact that the driver was in the act of pulling up the horses in the courtyard of a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the sky.” This story came from that image.

I was not wholly down with ‘landmark’ until a day or so before it was recorded, when I realized who it needed to be who led that weird resurrection ceremony in the basement of the hideous old factory. 

ARMY – This is the one set in a long-ago time when a mass of soldiers prepares to mount an assault against enemies from hell. I had gotten to thinking about D-Day for some reason and started to read more about the preparations for it in the week leading up to it. Thousands upon thousands of men were shipped to England from all over the world, herded onto various forms of transportation and off them again, getting closer day by day to the moment when they knew they’d have no choice but to walk into a hail of death on the other side of the English Channel. What would it have been like to go to sleep each night knowing that it might happen the day after tomorrow, or maybe the day after that… I imagined a gut-gnawing sense of terror and despair that might settle in over the mind like a fog, causing some to simply collapse physically and mentally. So I thought, well, what if such soldiers were obligated to attack something even worse than a mortal enemy? What would that look, feel, and sound like—particularly the godawful waiting?

PRESENCE – Go ahead, ask me how much money you’d have to pay me to spend the night alone in an allegedly haunted house, with no true evidence that it really is (because come on, I don’t even believe in such things). Go ahead, ask me! The answer is NO FREAKING WAY-ILLION. Are you insane? I tell you I will NOT DO IT.

This origins of this story lay in a gimmicky thing I was trying to write at the time: it was a fictional waiver form that had to be signed before entering a house where ghosts had been seen and recorded many, many times. Lots of fun legalese and a very precise set of instructions that people absolutely had to follow to the letter to avoid a lawsuit in case someone went insane with fright. (The cost of entering this ‘real’ haunted house was like $5,000 for a ten-minute walk-through, with about a 2% chance of actually seeing something.) That particular bit of prose never really went anywhere, but it did slowly morph into ‘presence’.

PROOF – It doesn’t seem all that implausible a premise to me; after all, look at what’s happening right now: People ordered into their homes and wide swaths of society shut down because of a present physical threat. So how unlikely is it, really, that a serial killer running rampant could cause an entire town to simply evacuate in fear?

SOUNDS – I have to say I like the original short story I adapted this from better than the end result. In that first go, the two characters are on very opposing sides—one man goes to the other’s house in order to kill him. Just as the deaf assassin is about to get down to it, the sounds allegedly begin, and he finds himself completely baffled by his soon-to-be-victim’s claims, all mimed, that freaky noises have begun to emerge all around the house. Is he being played, or are the sounds real? To me that dynamic added a lot of tension. Do I even have that short story in my files anymore? I hope so; I’d like to revisit it someday. It led up to a fun ending. It’s one of those stories that would have made a very simple, extremely cheap short film—and a silent one at that, which is something I’ve always wanted to do just for the challenge.

A QUICK TRILOGY OF TERROR – The first story of these three, the semi-improvised tale of a guy terrified of what might be hanging out in his trunk, originally came about in a time of the greatest creative joy I’ve ever had, or ever will have. One summer long ago, a friend of mine named Buddy, between jobs at the time, was more or less living in my parents’ basement, which also happened to be my brother’s fledgling recording studio. I myself was severely underemployed back then, so the three of us spent a lot of time playing tennis, watching movies, and shooting terrible skits on video. Late at night we would sometimes tell each other spooky stories. I don’t know how it happened, but one day Buddy and I began to write a book of short stories, alternating sessions at the word processor (yes, a word processor!). He would write one day, finishing a whole tale in one sitting, and then I would add one the next day, never consulting or informing each other about what we were working on. Over the course of about three weeks, we produced a book of almost twenty horror tales, some of which were pretty good as I recall. I’ll never enjoy the simple process of writing as much as I did that summer, typing away with baseball always playing on the TV, never imagining that anyone would ever read a single word of that book. It could not have mattered less.

P.S. Those sounds from 'impound' I mentioned the other day are attached...