sabbatical (Patreon)

A snowy walk reveals the beginnings of a mystery that grows weirder with each passing hour.

Music: “Mercury” by Study of Sound / Doug Reed. All rights reserved.

Released everywhere else on Monday.

Ever more origin stories for those who like them:

Devils Everywhere You Turn– My social afternoon at the coffee shop had been going well, but then the conversation turned very dark indeed when the concept of the Peleton Influencer was explained to me: Yes, apparently there are Peleton celebrities, video screen trainers who yell out phrases like “It’s time to go GET it!” and “No one told you it was gonna be an easy day!” so effectively that they’ve developed insanely profitable cult followings within the Peleton universe—a universe that, for all I know, might even someday spawn a Hulu Original Series.

My head swiftly exploded from the pressure of such a thunderbolt of information. If this dumbfounding phenomenon were real, then truly, reality was cracking all around me. It felt like an ideal moment to absolutely wallow in the darkly funny foibles of humankind inside the framework of a single horror story. For many years, I wrote under the delusion that humor and horror should stay farrrrrrrrr from each other, but these days I think it’s just a matter of building the fence between them at the right height and thickness.

The original concept of this story followed an almost carbon copy of Jason from Friday the 13th as he hacked and slashed his way through a small town, inadvertently aided and abetted by people who were too busy pursuing their own agendas to take much notice. The villain was later changed a little to bring more marketing hucksters, corporate stooges, and corner-cutters into the fray.

Written in the first person, though, it all somehow didn’t feel weird or adventurous enough, and tonally it was a bit bland. When I then imagined it with more than a dozen different voices, without fully having control over the actors’ performances or how they might play off one another or shift the tone this way and that, I got enthused again over the strange and unpredictable directions it all might take. As usual, the actors provided me with many happy moments as I listened to the nuances they invented with virtually no direction from me.

(I’m not really sure why it was the Peleton thing that suddenly triggered me into wishing all of society would completely disappear, leaving only my apartment standing. How is it that I can watch constant cutaways to Taylor Swift during football games and not bat an eye, but the Peleton thing almost drove me insane? I think it was just the phrase: Peleton Influencer. Say it out loud ten times and see what happens. Then imagine someone stepping out of a time machine in 1776 and George Washington asks them what they do and they say, “Why, I’m a Peleton Influencer!” Does that make it more irritating? No? Then I guess we just need to move on.)

sideswipe – I find it tough to completely leave the werewolf motif alone; the more movies that have a go at it and kind of miss the mark and wind up a bit silly, the more interested I become in the riddle of how to make something really scary out of something so essentially implausible. There’s one aspect of the werewolf curse that’s really interesting to me: the afflicted person’s knowledge that there’s a specific day and time when their body and mind and soul are going to go dangerously haywire. They have to struggle through life with one eye on the calendar, always inching closer to the next fixed time of rage and horror and physical agony. Those interim days between full moons seem like they’d be more stressful than anything Frankenstein or Vampirella or Ghostface ever had to deal with.

SENSATIONALLY EDIFYING TRIVIA TIDBIT: Can you name the year which many people talk about as the best year ever for werewolf flicks? I’ve put the answer down below.

chains – One day I found myself in Cambridge, Maryland, a quiet old river town where a friend of mine was considering buying a house. We agreed to meet up there for lunch but I was early, so I strolled alone through the silent streets to kill some time.

I found myself staring at a dilapidated old house that presented a bit of a mystery. There were several things about it visually that made it seem long abandoned, but just a couple that made it seem inhabited. I stared and stared, but I couldn’t decide on a verdict.

I looked up at a high window. Nothing appeared there, but the broken shade made me imagine someone living inside and keeping a secret for years and years, hoping and praying no one will ever knock on the door. Not an illegal or violent secret, mind you—just something that should not be spoken of, because no one could ever possibly understand it. I pictured myself as seen through that high window, stepping off the lawn and moving away down the street, and whoever was inside the house finally adjusting the shade to peer out, relieved I was gone. My leaving meant there was one more day when that secret would thankfully not be revealed. By the time I got home that night, I had chains mostly worked out in my mind.

detour – It wasn’t especially the notion of pirates or vengeance-driven ghosts with a touch o’ mermaid to them that got me going on detour; it was the idea of one of these uneasy narrators being entrusted with someone else’s safety, and being wholly unequipped for it. I liked unspooling the yacht captain’s growing uneasiness with being responsible for so many things at once, but it was only when I imagined him being unexpectedly unable to communicate with the missionaries that I got a good case of the creeps. Going on a long eerie journey with people who can’t quite express to you why they’re getting more and more afraid too seems like it would be a unique kind of hell.

I have a theory that rivers are always scarier than the ocean, because rivers pullyou slowly and inexorably. They twist and have blind curves and reveal new sights with agonizing slowness. Every horror story is better on a river. Below, I have helpfully ranked the top ten bodies of water in terms of scare factor:

1) rivers

2) bogs

3) lochs

4) marshes

5) swamps

6) bayous

7) lagoons

8) bays

9) bights *

10) TIE: above-ground pools in suburban back yards / water slides

* Yeah, I don’t know what they are either.

endgame – Many times, these stories come about from a single central image that emerges out of the blue. This month’s tale, sabbatical, is like that—when you listen to it, you’ll probably identify that image pretty quickly.

For endgame, the initial image was, as usual, very cinematic: The camera is looking down a long dark hallway in an abandoned house in the middle of the night, graffiti marring the walls, broken planks protruding from the filthy floor… and then, as the story reads: A tiny fireglow appeared at the far end of the hall, unexpected and warm and inviting. That’s all I had in the beginning—imagining the way that light spread across the wall before whoever might be holding its source came around the corner. The image hung out in my mind for days before it became anything more. Details started to gel when I finally saw who it was coming around the corner with that candle. It was a woman. Not just any woman … it was… Actress X.

Actress X is, in the real world, quite famous and stunningly talented, and I have pictured her as many different characters in Knifepoint Horror stories. She’s so perfect somehow for the style and tone of these, I often like to drop her in there as I write, in order to bring the people to life.

I figure if I told you her name, it might ruin some of the imagery forever, so I won’t. She’s been the renowned psychiatrist in bots, the antagonist in staircase, and the tragic witch in elements. What range she has! What presence! I’m currently considering her for the lead role in a very long story that should be coming this summer, and I have literally thought as I’ve written notes for it: “Is this character as drawn worthy of Actress X? Why should she take this completely imaginary and unpaid part? Should you just consider someone from Night Court instead?”

Oh yeah, my mind’s a real healthy operation. Yes, yes indeed.

Talk to you in March, when another new story will come… if you like to take your dread completely straight, no ice, no lemon wedge, I think you'll like March's effort in particular.

-S  

SENSATIONALLY EDIFYING TRIVIA ANSWER: In 1981, we got An American Werewolf in London, The Howling, and Wolfen. (I only like two of these, but dang, that’s not a bad haul for one werewolf year!)