29 February 2008
13. The First ‘Fool’ Encounter
My arms flailed, my legs kicked out, my head buckled painfully as the image of the dead astronaut disappeared from my eyes and I realised that the ground had disappeared from beneath my feet.
Before I knew it, I had come to rest again at the bottom of another embankment, a hard rock against the side of my head. Aware of the abrasion from this second fall, I was however more concerned about the astronaut, and my eyes darted feverishly around me to see where he lay. Then I knew that light again, this time from the other side of a group of wavering trees. I screamed, I know. I know also that I hunched up my legs and looked about for a way to escape. I know also that I suddenly heard a voice saying: “Come over here, quickly, quickly to take shelter, hurry, come on, yes you’re nearly there, now come inside.”
I moved without thinking. This was the voice of safety and I needn’t think about it or question it. It was not dead hands. It was not a dead face inside a visor that was like a great hole. It seemed seconds before I was inside the car, its headlamps appearing to dispel the astronaut’s light.
The speaker was an elderly woman. She handed me a towel and looked at my dishevelled and bedraggled form as if I had been the one who had fallen from space. As she looked at me, I glanced at myself. I saw that I was caked with mud and as soaked as if I had been thrown into a lake. I felt a throbbing at the back of my head from the second fall. I felt the cold and ruined clothes around me like a horrible and infected skin, and I felt my lungs heaving up and down as I tried to soothe my breathing.
The woman beside me was in her fifties. That was the next thing that I noticed after the soothing quality of her voice as I’d heard it coaxing me towards her. She had two distinct eyebrows: one that was down and close to her eye that looked at me tenderly and with concern; the other one was raised in awe, dazed by my appearance. This dual quality was also present in her words:
“Well, that was a wee downpour. Don’t you think? Something nice for the flowers. You look as if you had a downpour all to yourself!” You see what I mean? The first part of the sentence consoling and gentle, the second part barbed - and with no real transition between the two parts!
I found it hard to conceive an answer. Instead I breathed out a kind of exhalation of agreement and confusion. I wriggled, feeling sticky and uncomfortable. Underneath me, I realised, was an open newspaper and it rustled as I moved.
“That will help absorb the wetness for you.” Soothing. “No point in destroying nice upholstery when there’s protection at hand.” Barbed.
Yes, I was dirty. No, filthy. And I was starting to smell the rainwater and mud. Even I was a little disgusted by me.
I could now see that the woman wore an expensive waterproof coat. If she’d been caught in the storm then she looked as if each drop had swerved away from her respectfully. I could see a couple of drops here and there but that was about it. She started to unscrew the top of a flask as I finally found some words.
“I’m sorry. I fell. Something frightened me and I fell. Goodness, just look at me.” My final words trailed off, embarrassed. I was looking down at myself and I was ashamed. My hand went up to touch my hair and I felt it hanging limp even as drops of water kept dripping down my face.
“Oh, it sounds as if you’re a bonnie tourist come to visit these shores from across the great pond, am I right?” I smiled. She said the line with such sweet surprise and fondness. All lower eyebrow stuff. “What a shame you left your intelligence back home, eh! But, in your country, you fair spread the cleverness out pretty thin, so I hear!” Raised eyebrow bitch, I thought.
She had the upper hand as well as the upper eyebrow. What could a stinking, soaked, mud-caked American say in her defence to a woman in a flashy rain-mac with a warm car and a flask of something hot! All I could do was take a good eyebrow lashing!
Suddenly she looked at me more quizzically than before as if something had just occurred to her.
“Oh!” she exclaimed. “Aren’t you the homeless girl who lives in a car! I’ve seen you park and sleep outside of my house before! Better not let the police see you doing that they’ll arrest you or something. You should hunch down a bit more when you’re bedding down. Sometimes I can see your feet, dearie!” Then she kind of giggled to take the edge off her warning.
Now it was my turn to raise an eyebrow. Twitching curtains. This was the woman in the neighbouring town with the twitching curtains. It had been about three times that I had slept in my car on her street. She must have twitched those curtains each and every time!
I tried to explain. “No, no, I don’t live in my car …”
“You know,” she continued, laying a gentle hand on my arm, “feel free to knock my door if you want like some water to brush your teeth, or something. Do you brush your teeth? Not often I suppose! But there’s always mountain streams - they’ll suit you nicely! You can even stand inside the door, I’ll just put a bit of old newspaper down. Doesn’t bother me!”
“Really, I do have a place to …” I should have been putting up a robust defence, I know. But I hadn’t the energy and the different eyebrows were hypnotising me into submission and silence.
“Oh, poor, poor you! My heart just so completely goes out to you!” she said, eyebrow crestfallen and conciliatory. “I suppose you have to wear such masculine clothes for practical reasons! What’s the point in heels and nice little tops when you’re constantly elbow-deep in bins looking for scraps, I suppose!” I think the term ‘arched, pointed, foolish eyebrow-raising whore’ went through my head. Can’t quite recall word for word.
My house was close-by though. It suddenly occurred to me that I was near to Mordan House. Why was I sitting here? I didn’t need to be! I’m sure she was still talking as she poured tea into a plastic beaker. Something about getting a nice warm wash at her place. Lovely, delightful ageing little woman! Then something about how surprised the garden hose would be when she put warm soapy water through it as I stood naked on her patio. Stupid old crinkle-arsed, grave-grabbing hooker, I thought. She was like more rain, bombarding me without respite! And eyebrowing me without let-up.
“Thank you,” I mumbled aloofly, not sure what I was thanking her for. I grabbed the car handle and I felt the outside blow on my coldness all over.
As I stepped out of the car I heard the woman say something like: “Richer pickings here I guess than in the drug-infested, gang-ridden neighbourhoods of Detroit! Not much crack here though. Ah, shame! You must really miss the crack!”
As I swung the door shut I heard her words fade: “Ring the bell anytime. I’m Mrs Ormsley. Come in for a cuddle. I’ll just put old paper round me first, it’ll be no bother.”
What a disastrous day! How deadly, how despicable it had all been! There was one thing I could do though. Get that blasted hat out of the bin! I crudely threw the plastic lid of the wheelie bin back and peered inside. Nothing obvious. Damn it! No, I thought, not another failure! So I pushed up my wet sleeves and began to pick my way through the little tied bags of old food on the surface. Then I pushed them a little higher and started to delve around frantically to feel the hat’s fabric. I was frustrated. Close to tears. Desperate for a meagre little ribbon of success to adorn the day.
Then the sound of wheels on gravel. Mrs Ormsley’s car slowed as she drove past the masculine-dressed female vagrant hunting through another bin! She put one hand up to her mouth and motioned as if brushing her teeth - she was reminding me. I softened towards her slightly and that considerate brow. Then she screwed-up her face and stuck her tongue over her front teeth as if they were rotten, and she shook her head at me warning me of the dangers of not brushing. ‘Dirty old rancid deflowered prostitute cow’, I thought. Or something of that ilk. And my face took on a petulant and condescending sneer in her direction. As she drove away I felt the scanty, pathetic, little flimsy hat arrive under my fingers. Having lost interest, I let go and left it where it lay.
Back inside Mordan House, I was too stunned to cry. Too cold. Too wet. I applied some care and attention to the graze beneath my hair and bathed for over an hour. All the time I endeavoured not to think. Not to think. About anything. Nothing at all. Just to keep it all back. All my foolishness. All far away from my mind. As far as possible. Far enough that I might sleep well all through the night. Right through until morning.
I did. Although it was a very small victory indeed.
Want to read more? Read the whole story by clicking on the first blog called Prelude and start clicking forwards using the tabs above the title.
22:15 Posted in Part One: The Story So Far | Permalink | Comments (2) | Email this | Tags: haunted house, ghost story, horror story, astronaut, space, nicole kidman, journal
28 February 2008
12. The First Full Encounter
“Tomorrow I'll relate my first full encounter with the astronaut. Am I looking forward to that? Truth? Don't know.”
Do know.
Now that I’m sitting down to do it, I’m keen to be doing it. The purpose of this blog was to get things straight, to clarify and question. Right? To stay sane by letting stuff out. Even more right? And, when it’s out, it should feel better for being out. Ultra-right! Well, I’ve certainly found that to be the case over the course of the week and a half that I’ve been doing this. Well, that’s something, eh! Isn’t it? Isn’t it something? Am I right or am I ultra-right?
Also, since I’ve started doing this, nothing has happened around me. Now that really is something! You gotta admit – that’s a right real big something right there! No apparitions, no sounds, no bad dreams.
Oops a freekin’ daisy! Most of that stuff you’ll not really know about yet! Sounds and dreams, you’ll not know anything about, for sure. But I will cover it all. I will, I will, I will! Damn it, I’m pretty darn sure I just kinda will/might!
So to my first full encounter. Here goes nothing.
Let me ask you. Do you ever get that sense that life’s fantastic, that the land that surrounds you is opulent and its air is spiced and its very sensual feel is like slightly-scorched marshmallows, underfoot and under fingers, and well and truly understood by every part of your sweet being? No? Ah, problem.
This country of Scotland can certainly give you that sense. There are days when the temperature is just right, the wind is low level, and every hint of purple, of dark green, of bright blue rises proudly from all other colours and something just scintillates. Everything gathers in agreement to say that they will be in balance, in accord, and collectively they will express the underlying nature, history and potential of this land. I’ve known days like this in Utah, and at the Grand Canyon in Arizona - when the flies aren’t crawling into your ears on muggy days - and in the Mojave desert when you see a mini sand twister coasting across an empty cracked flat-bed of desert. But my first day experiencing the oaky scent and muscular sense of this country, since quitting the city’s ‘rut’ race, was also the day of my first full encounter with the entity haunting my home and my life!
I mentioned earlier that there is a high hill to one side of Mordan House. I’d walked, run and scampered around the perimeter of this hill and other smaller hills around it since moving in, but never attempted to climb to the top of that big old clansman in the middle. High hill? Clansman? It probably has a name – I don’t feel I can really call it something perfunctory like Big Hill. Ach, Clansman - that’ll do. So, my energy levels were building, my lungs were feeling slightly stronger, more open to the air, and I decided to pack a lunch, get some sturdy unfeminine shoes on, some loose-fitting clothes, something warm for my head and make a good hearty attempt at climbing the Clansman! As I was putting the final touches to my well-insulated and practical attire, I recalled putting a cloth hat into the bin outside of Mordan House. I did this because I remembered that I’d brought another hat that was sturdier and more ‘me’! Sure enough, I soon began to realise that it was another one of those things that had miraculously ended-up back at my old flat in Glasgow.
So, hatless, I set off. As I passed the house’s refuse wheelie-bin I considered looking in it for the discarded hat, but then I looked at the bright day around me and continued on my way, feeling demagnetised to mishaps – both around me and ahead of me - and thus confident about being leaving my curly red locks open to the elements! I think I even smiled. I think I even supplanted a frown with a little laugh-line.
On the way to the base of the Clansman I passed a parked car that I thought probably had to pass my Mordan House in order to get to where it was. I started to think back, to wonder if I’d heard any noise that could have been a vehicle passing over the gravel outside. And I started to peer around to see if there was another road or dirt-track that I’d missed that would have got the car to where it was parked. I could see nothing. I’d nipped into town to get groceries before this day so it wasn’t as if I never saw people – and, of course, there was the King of Smells - but it was curious to see a car situated here when I was becoming used to the emptiness of the landscape around me.
Ahead of me was the hill; a gentle gradient for the first half of the climb but then growing much steeper towards the peak. Brazenness growing in me I decided to take these little hot coals of glowing confidence and nurture them – the best way I could think of to do that was to take steps. So I took long, actual, physical steps, and drew in deep and luxurious breaths that stretched their own great legs inside, unhesitating airiness strode through me. Although working my way through cold air, inhaling cold breaths, stepping on cold ground, I moved into ever greater warmth inside as my self-belief gradually began to smoulder.
The main thing that I continued to be enthralled by was the brightness of the day. In fact, the day was so bright that I regularly pinched my eyes against the glare. The sky was a conclusive, dizzying shade of blue, while the odd cloud ornamented the richness of its colour with scrubbed and sparkling whiteness. It was an unique day. Cold and warmth, beauty and sharpness balanced as perhaps nothing else has ever been. Occasionally I stopped to take it all in and to see Mordan House growing smaller, or absent behind small lines of trees or small hills. When I stopped and contemplated it all I was captivated by the splendour. Captivated! Every breath stole a little of the day for myself, every swallow digested some of its essence, every blink imprinted in me something of its nature. At one point, I can recall looking up at the rest of the hill. I amazed myself. I was half-way to the top of the Clansman and my breathing felt magnificent. All of me felt like a great lung moving in and out, finally having figured out how breathing ought to work. I could have giggled out real tears, but I was conscious of the desire to push-on and get higher.
Then, something different. A change of mood. I recall actually seeing the cursed cloud that was soon to blight my mood almost as it entered the sky and began to move towards me and the Clansman. It was huge, sprawling, almost like a city in the air. Its blackness was also colossal. It moved with imperceptible movements, stealthlike. It was clear to me that it contained a torrential downpour of rain and I had no doubt that it would fall on me and this hill. There would be no ghosting overhead, no retaining of secrets – this apparition would unburden, divulge and, if I wasn’t quick to take cover or get off this hill, pummel the new me out of existence with some formidable deluge.
I decided to try and get down as quickly as humanly possible. If I saw a place where I could take shelter then I’d use it – if not, then, well, I didn’t dare think! So I tumbled over rocks, banks of grass, and avoided patches of old dry mud with deft and quick steps, and slid with great speed down gravely stretches of well-worn path. Nope, never moved so fast, that’s for sure! Yep! Never fallen down a high hill so fast before either, that’s also
true!
At the same time as seeing the storm cloud I felt a sharp increase in the level of the wind. The change was so sudden that the currents seemed like strong shoves coming from all around me, trying hard and skilfully to knock me off balance.
The first spots of rain were more like the second spots should have been. The second spots were more like that point when you know that you’re in for a real soaking. While the third spots were cold, unnatural, almost painful on my cheeks and the backs of my hands with a landing that was incisive like snapping scissors. The fourth drops I could feel icily touching the skin beneath some of my clothes – and I think you’ll agree that it’s usually only the fifth or sixth spots that should have that kind of ability!
I looked up at the cloud that I had spied heading towards me, to see if it was passing overhead, to see if there was any indication as to when respite from the rain might come. What I saw shocked me. The cloud was a vicious black swirl right above my head, almost churning with dark vapours, almost poisonously brooding, and the whole thing more enormous than I had first thought. Then rumbles came from it, or came from somewhere - deathly rumbles that also seemed to pour down on me.
All of a sudden, it was as if great doors opened up at the base of the cloud and everything it had to give tumbled down in an instant. The thrash of the water through my hair and my clothes, down into my shoes, made me sharply draw in my breath and then let it out in a scream. I kept moving but soon I could see rivulets of rain coursing down the sides of the hill and I began to think it too treacherous to continue. But still I could see no place for shelter.
In fact, I could barely see anything. My eyes stung with wind and water. More than that, however, the elements around me were so whipped up, so feverish, that they also impeded my vision. Curiously, though the cloud above was dark like night, daylight was still present as if it held out beneath the onslaught in a ghostly fashion - dead, remembered light that cast a misty sheen through the particles of wind and rain.
My steps were becoming ever cautious and ever deadly. Worse, inside, my embers of self-love were soaked and not even old smoke recalled where it had burned.
This image was, however, all taken in with the quickest glimpse as the rain battered my eyes and my eyelids and the wind wielded little wet daggers all about me. A growing numbness caused by cold and rain-pricks was beginning to cover my face. Also, things were starting to look unfamiliar. I knew I was still heading down, but nothing was like anything I could remember passing on the way up. How far was I from the bottom? I had no idea. At some point I started to cough and I realised that the raspiness of my breathing must have been increasing for some time without me being aware of it.
By now I was so wet and disoriented that I could have dropped to my knees and given up. More thunderous claps sounded, more wind lashed me, more rain beat me. I recalled the car I had seen at the bottom of the hill and longed for someone to call out to me and tell me to come over here, quickly, quickly to take shelter, hurry, come on, you’re nearly there, yes, now come inside, here take this blanket.
No sooner had this thought come over me than I slipped.
I had no real idea that I was going to slip down the muddy embankment – I was sliding before I realised it. Even as the mud covered me I was more aware of how I might land than the fact that I was sliding. But when I did come to a stop I felt that I couldn’t move. A congealed mixture of fatigue, tightness of breath, heavy rain, thick and sticky mud, thick and sticky disappointment, welded me to the wet earth. The rain still cleaved into me, the sky still spluttered and groaned and the wind still lacerated my face.
But then I glimpsed relief, at last. It was a light and I realised that I was probably at the base of the Clansman, close to where the car had been parked. I could almost raise my hand to take hold of the help and assistance that was so close; the voice of someone calling out to me to tell me to come over here, quickly, quickly to take shelter, hurry, come on, yes you’re nearly there, now come inside, here take this blanket.
The crackle of a radio. Of course, a car radio. I looked towards it, as best I could through the endless rain and wind. Yet it was not a car, nor was the light from headlamps. The crackle was more like a death-rattle, although monophonic, dry, flat and distant. Just staccato bursts of static, precise yet guttural in feeling. My heart almost stopped, my lungs almost withered in an instant. I knew quickly that this was no natural sound. Liquid dread joined the icy cold water in my veins.
I tried to look at the source of the light. All I could see was that it hovered behind me and above the ground. It was much closer than before when I saw it above the treeline outside of Mordan House. Also, now I could make-out some of the horrible and lifeless detail, though my eyes ached and every blink stung them even more. I could see its unnatural glow of whiteness but I could also make out grey dirty patches of grime all over it. An oxygen tank was just visible rising up from its back and just above its shoulders. The most prominent aspect was the ghastly blackness of the visor on the helmet. It both reached out with a devouring emptiness, while also stretching down into itself and some demonic vacuum therein. As it hovered, it was also terrifyingly still. While the elements raged around us both and while I was bruised by its every twist and turn, this lifeless form of a spaceman hovered above the ground on Earth, impervious to it all. Too damned and too damning to be affected perhaps. Between us, sheets of rain descended as if dead themselves and lifelessly tumbling. I knew, however – and perhaps this was why I tried desperately to scramble to my feet, to get away, regardless of all the impediments that kept me back – I knew that it meant to take me.
All of a sudden, I felt my arms flailing, my legs kicking out, my head buckling painfully as the image of the dead astronaut disappeared from my eyes and I realised that the ground had disappeared from beneath my feet.
Want to read more? Read the whole story by clicking on the first blog called Prelude and start clicking forwards using the tabs above the title.
20:20 Posted in Part One: The Story So Far | Permalink | Comments (4) | Email this | Tags: haunted house, ghost story, horror story, astronaut, space, nicole kidman, journal
27 February 2008
11. Untitled 1
I mean, I’m just me. I’m just nothing very much. But I’m nothing bad. I shouldn’t get all of this. I don’t deserve any of it. Do I? I know what it feels like to be me and it doesn’t cause anyone any harm. It’s just stuff and nonsense and gobbledegook and mess, but that’s where it ends. There isn’t really anything much in me that gnarls and bites or lashes out or schemes or any of that horrid old stuff that people seem to be full of.
And I’m out of time and out of place and I shouldn’t be in any of these places, or any of these circumstances. Yet, damn it, here I am! This isn’t my home. I also know that that place over the sea isn’t my home. I don’t know where it is.
I suppose it’s in here, in these words – but this is all askew and screwed-up and nothing that anyone can relate to or understand. Even to me it seems confused and out of step with everything around me. It seems so right but so utterly wrong at the same time. Identity. God, life’s so much easier if you don’t want one, or have much of one! If you just want to fit-in and not stand-out. But if you want to be yourself then that’s all you’ll find. Find yourself and all you’ll find is you, and you’ll hear every thought echoing down through the great caverns inside of you. Once it’s there, you’ll never fill it in, never forget it or step away from it. The world will always look far away and people will always sound dim and distant, and every time they speak you’ll find yourself stretching to hear and to understand. And there will always be an echo to every thought and every feeling and every hope and every intention.
All I want is someone with some vision for me, some belief in me, and some desire at least for some belief in themselves. Damn this stinking 21st century world with its lack of anything! What does it have? Bits of this and that, all fragmented and unrelated, all distracting and bombarding but without any meaning.
So I’m here. And all I feel absolutely heightened is my loneliness.
Why would Philip do that to me? Why would he?
Look at those trees out there in the dark and the way they take everything that every climate has to throw at them. They stand firm, they waver but they don’t fall.
Stand firm, Stephanie, stand firm. The wind can’t blow forever, can it?
Want to read more? Read the whole story by clicking on the first blog called Prelude and start clicking forwards using the tabs above the title.
06:30 Posted in Part One: The Story So Far | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this | Tags: ghost story, horror story, haunted house, scotland, astronaut, space
26 February 2008
10. I Get Dizzy
Oh, sorry, I forgot to say that quite soon after I arrived, Dizzy wrote. Yes, a letter. That's how people communicate with me now. The way they communicated before body language and gossip columns were invented. You know, the old-fashioned way, like in the Dark Ages - circa middle to late, I think. Want to know what exactly’s involved, you young whippersnappers? Well, pen meets paper (yes, paper!), they do a literary mambo (that’s right, long-hand!), there’s a degree of spillage (ink, dearies, ink!) and it's over in a flash - words, thoughts, ideas, incidents dribbled and exhausted all over the page! It's a little like - ah yes, that's it, cooking! Then there’s a right palaver called ‘posting’ – but you’re all too young to know about such things and only medical students doing an advanced course in Anal Pain should have to be exposed to all the gory, snorey details!
I didn't even hear the sound of the postman on the gravel outside. I'd have liked to - it would have been tantamount to excitement, in some ways. And company, of course. Company, that is, that is not of the spectral, ethereal kind! Lizzy had left for a long holiday in Spain before I left Glasgow, so I didn't see her before I packed-up and swung my 1.2 litre wagon outta town. So what did she have to say for herself? In sentences so clipped that each word might have stood alone in a scrapbook, she said:
"Men everywhere, I'm going through them like hankies in winter; how is your breathing, positively yogic, I hope; will you be home for your birthday, or does it snow you in by around July where you are; Phillip keeps calling, I think he's trying to track you down - did you leave because of him, your mum winked at me when I suggested it; your old flat was broken into, just as well you left or your quality knicker collection would be on eBay right about now – even the ones in the wash; weather is wonderful here - not a white line or vague tonal shift on me; oh, and the man you're looking after the property for is looking for you too - I think he's going to write or journey down or something, strange man, he is the epitome of what excessive chugging at an impressionable age will do to you; and another 'oh', I can't see me coming down there, I haven't the shoes and I don't want the shoes. I love you and I miss you. You're a fool. Quit - yer no handy lady. Get a life. Get a new lung, asthma chick. I’m sure there’ll be people in places like Malaysia or Indonesia selling them for ha’pennies, darling, ha’pennies! Must dash, I have a man coming over later to play ‘Hunt the Clit’ – I anticipate a marathon session with many, many clues dotted liberally about and little chance of a podium finish! P.S. You’re a silly moo-moo.”
It was slightly overcast day, and the air was a tad warmer. I thought of Dizzy and the memories were loud and brash and frantic and soaked in perspiration, alcohol and all the odd fluids we've stepped in - in nearly two years - in bars, in clubs and on busy late-night streets. Also they are smudged - lipstick or mascara that has careered off the face around midnight is a watermark on every memory. Do I miss them? Those days? I don't know. I question them. I question how real they were. What I don't question is how I feel about my best friend, Dizzy Lizzie. But I would like to transport that feeling and watch the whole thing grow again but in different soil. This soil outside my window perhaps. How would we be then? Who would we be then? Hindsight, even you are out of your depth here.
I remember thinking how bizarre that Lizzie was communicating with my mother. She never had time for Lizzie. She would sigh in her presence and cock her head at her like a befuddled dog. When she left she would look down at her shoes and shake her head before taking out a cigarette, as if it had all been too much for her nerves or something. It was all very staged and contrived. She thought we were too similar, but I’ve always led Lizzie, I’ve always been the one to keep her as much on the path away from lions, angry goats, cyclopses and anything long-tongued and three-headed as possible!
For some reason I remember that my mother loved to call me ‘stilly Stephanie’ when she thought I was being particularly dim-witted (ironically, the name was usually brought out when I was being particularly bright and perceptive, and she had no response to what I was saying), then she’d give me a patronising smile, the kind most people reserve only for fish in a tank! In fact, I’m pretty sure the last words she said to me directly in my presence were: “You’re such a stilly Stephanie!” For being friends with Lizzie, I was very, very stilly indeed!
The astronaut had been quiet for about three days when the letter arrived. Of course, I didn't miss him. I loathed him. The way you loathe any man that you are attracted to because he holds a secret of some kind. And the way you loathe him even more when you know you'll never find out what that secret is. But I started to wonder if I could find out his secret. Maybe there was a clue somewhere in the house.
Night-night, Lizzie, whatever bar you are in. Kiss-kiss, crazy lady. Good-night, astronaut, send me a postcard from Venus.
My first full encounter with the ghost of the dead astronaut? Next time, okay, next time!
Want to read more? Read the whole story by clicking on the first blog called Prelude and start clicking forwards using the tabs above the title.
07:25 Posted in Part One: The Story So Far | Permalink | Comments (2) | Email this | Tags: haunted house, ghost story, horror story, astronaut, space, nicole kidman, journal
25 February 2008
9. I Remember Running
I remember running. Out in the woods around this house, the sunshine flashing and flickering through the trees, the breeze cooling me then stepping aside so that the sun could warm me. And, for the most part, after the sight of the astronaut's distant shape, that was the character of my first three weeks in this house. My lungs opened and the country air washed them clean of allergy and irritation. I wasn’t so much jogging as scampering childishly. I would just go out in my normal clothes, but then find myself running down hills, or running up hills desperate to see what the view was like from the top!
The remaining part of that time was taken up with getting settled into my three rooms within the house. My own slender bits of furniture and furnishings were mixed with the house's existing pieces dotted around and pulled together into those rooms. And a strange mix they are too! The grungy sidles up to the antiquarian, which leans against plain old kitsch, which, for its part, nestles against the threadbare, the utilitarian and the gauche! No wonder I'm cracking up! But here and there - more in the trinkets and the odd flourish - I see signs of me in this room. You might not. But you don't know me.
And so I started to feel at home. Or rather, 'homely' in this house. Whether it will ever be home or not lies in the gloved hands of a certain apparition!
I think if it hadn't been for those three weeks, I'd have been back in the city long before now. But I started to see glimpses of who and how I could be. Once vision sets in, you're in trouble. People can get through life quite happily if they have no vision, but once it appears on the horizon and there is any degree of clarity to what's seen, that's when the stakes are raised. What was I to do? Run from a ghost, only to then be haunted by my own ghost - the ghost of possibility, as opposed to the ghost of actuality? Yes, I remember running, but I hope in my own life I have stopped doing that. Running now will take me somewhere - closer to the vision on my own horizon. Writing about that time begins to bring it back - the negativity that I showed a couple of posts ago starts to disappear. Moses knew this feeling - waters stepping aside in order that a dream can be seen and realised. During those early weeks, I missed aspects of my old life, but more like a craving for a Mars bar - annoying and tempting, but you wouldn't change your life for it! And now I miss that old life like a Milky Way - quaint and vaguely familiar, but the thought of eating it makes you slightly nauseous!
Having set this scene, I now need to dispel it. Because of course the astronaut returned. At this point, with only a few indistinct and fleeting impressions, I had no sense of what I was dealing with. What I envisioned: the occasional frisson brought on by a rare and momentary impression, was something I could handle, mentally and emotionally. What I wasn't prepared for was the complete identity of my house-companion.
I can hear the words that came through the blackened visor still and when I think of them they make my fingers tsnes - sorry, it makes my fingers TENSE. I've dreamt of those words too, and when they are in my dreams the desperation in that mechanical, muffled, monophonic voice always induces me to wake with a shriek and with my flesh sticking to the bedsheets. And inside I’m running again, but this time I’m running to get away, running up an emotional hill to see if I can feel anything clearer and less claustrophobic at the top of it.
"Your turn now! It must be your turn now! Your turn!" his voice says, and I know that it is talking to me, that it wants something from me. And that desperation, that anguish, terrifies me. Somewhere deep down, I know that it will eventually get what it wants.
Tomorrow, I'll relate my first full encounter with the astronaut. Am I looking forward to that? Truth? Don't know.
The house tonight is quiet. The house is locked-up tight. My own doors and windows have been double-checked. I'm comfortable. I'm sleepy. I'm feeling secure. This feeling is beautiful. This is what I live for. This is what I moved for.
Good-night, everyone and no-one.
10:50 Posted in Part One: The Story So Far | Permalink | Comments (2) | Email this | Tags: hanuted house, ghost story, horror story, scotland, astronaut, space
24 February 2008
8. An Astronaut Dropped
You know, to be honest, 'secure' came round to visit me regularly. I'd been through too much back in Glasgow to allow small incidents to affect me too much. On the scale of things, the events thus far were miniscule, little discrepancies - but life's full of those! 'Secure' buddied up to me as if we went 'way back', and, from time to time, we'd crack open a bottle together!
The first time was when I finally decided that I would take the two solitary bottles of red wine - uh, that was just my initial supply! - from the kitchen cupboard and drink them before, during and after consuming my delicious sardine salad. That night, my evening meal seemed to stretch on and on: I ate then I drank, then I played music, then I picked at lettuce leaves, then I drank, then I ate chocolate bars and hand-cooked crisps while reading the odd sentence of a book and wiggling my leg and humming to the sounds of the stereo, all at the same time. Then, a slightly light-headed and slightly light-on-my-feet atmosphere got the better of me, and I found myself floating and wavering outside to the front of the house, glass in hand and glass twirling in the air like some elegant dance partner.
Above my head as I spun round, I could see star beside star beside star, stretching in every direction, dim then bright then dim then bright, and all turning as if I was being given a vision of the universe in motion, all speeded up and all making some blissful, beautiful sense. I know that I smiled, I know also that I made infantile whoop! and whee! noises and I felt light like an eyelash, self-assured like a simple sum, and as untroubled as a hare when he learns he is to race a tortoise. I felt like that nebulous, fleeting, shifting, disparate force that I like to call Me, but can never ever pin down for long!
Something caught my eye. My twirling slowly stopped. I tried to focus on it but my mind was swimming and my vision was jagged and kaleidoscopic – it took a little time for my senses to settle and try to adjust. The thing that caught my eye was up in the sky. I wasn’t sure how high because I wasn’t sure what it was. It appeared to me to be tiny and completely still, but entirely white as if the sun had caught it the way it catches the moon. I stared and blinked voraciously, trying to see more detail in it, yet the light of it danced and flashed and made focusing on it almost impossible. My mind raced through options: a helicopter, a UFO, a light on top of a pylon that was itself in darkness, some night-sky phenomenon that was new to me – what else? what else? I couldn’t for the life of me think of any more options, but also I couldn’t eliminate or be entirely convinced by any of the options I’d already presented.
Then, between two flashes of light and within the intervening moment of comparative dullness, I thought for a second that I new exactly what I was looking at. As soon as the thought arrived, I discarded it. But it quickly reappeared and I realised that I had to question it. To me, the ‘thing’ appeared like a human figure suspended high in the sky and emanating some sumptuous white light, yet with some feeling at its core that was empty and black. The thought began to settle in my mind and, as it did so, I became increasingly disconcerted by it. I began to walk backwards towards the front door of the house, still keeping my eyes fixed upon the shape. Why didn’t it move? Why did it just hang there? All of a sudden, I came up against something hard, I stumbled and fell backwards onto the gravel and my hand rested on the thing that I had walked into – it was cold, dark and hard and slippery to the touch: it was my Fiat Punto!
In my inebriated state, and after having twirled for so long, I had lost my bearings and stumbled into my car and not the front of the house. I quickly looked around me, took in the lie of the land and climbed back to my feet. Only then did I look back above the tree-line to where the white figure had been. Bright light had been replaced by black void. The figure had disappeared.
A bird or a bat flew over the top of the house. There was a sudden wave of branches from the tree-line. A breeze rustled my hair and felt like fingers. The front door moved slightly and creaked as it did so. I looked quickly behind me and wondered if a shadow to one side of the house had moved. Then I wondered if I heard the selfsame shadow cough. Lastly, before I ran towards the front door, I realised that I couldn’t see what was on the other side of my car and the thought of what might be there terrified me. As I ran I clutched the top of my head for fear that something might swoop down from the sky and attack me. Even with the front door safely closed, my hands stayed firmly on my head and every few seconds I would look above me for reassurance that there was nothing hovering above me.
I’m not sure when – I think it was quite a nice moment actually, one with a cup of tea and a biscuit and my feet up on a stool – but at some point before bed that night, it struck me that a ghost had dropped out of the sky, and now it was walking the grounds of my house, peering in my windows, and looking for me. After that, my tea felt cold and my biscuit tasted stale.
20:45 Posted in Part One: The Story So Far | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this | Tags: haunted house, ghost story, horror story, astronaut, space, nicole kidman, journal
23 February 2008
7. Some Dirty Soup
Oh yes, I was foolish alright!
I supose it took a hold of me later than I should have expected. I woke up around 4.30 in the morning, unable to breathe.
I could feel it all inside of me. Dust. Dirt. Everything I'd scuffed and kicked-up in moving in and trying to get settled. All the twisted offshoots of the house's indolence gathered and swirled around in some dirty soup, right inside of me, and it all buzzed in my windpipe and my throat like grubby infected little flies!
It was a typical and well-known infiltration and I felt it powerfully. Asthma demanded that I eke out every particle from my system in its own concoction of spew and bile. I felt the sheer keen hatred I possessed for this great sticky net within my lungs, that drags in and traps every toxic grain and then endlessly churns up the great mess of it all. Yes, it heaves that net in a great storm inside, every muscle of my body gradually beginning to know the demands of the fight! I'd known the feel of this kind of obnoxious billowing since I was a little girl. So familiar and so entirely despised!
I sat in the dark watching all these unfamiliar shadows twist and turn, watching every object gradually give up something of its physical shape as morning approached vaguely and with great indifference. Or maybe it seemed to struggle just like me.
After a time, I got up and sat in a chair and tried to fall asleep with my head elevated to stop the bile spilling through me. I stayed in the dark though - my eyes were so tired and raw. As I sat there, dozing, rolling fragments of thought cascaded through my mind. Every thought and feeling rolled from side to side, the struggle driving me between optimism and pessimism and tired old thoughts of my past that I'd thought myself to be long done with.
This new life that I longed for would not be mine without a struggle - maybe countless struggles. But was I up to it?
This thought came over me like an intrusion of someone else's thinking and I raised my head with the sheer force of it. As I did so, something caught my eye in the direction of the closed curtains of my living-room. A blanch of light, gliding across the curtains' fabric but from outside my window. Round and large it coasted - no, ghosted - from one side of the window to the next. When in the centre of the window it stopped momentarily as if momentarily but deeply scrutinising the little moment that is me and my life. I dared not move - physically, I'm not sure I could move! After I watched it disappear, tears came into my eyes. I didn't need them to come out and down my face, because they dripped down inside, down into all the spew and bile in my lungs to join the struggle. I recall grabbing my knees as I sat there on that chair, grabbing and holding on, longing to be the smallest little inconsequential unnoticeable ball!
As fatigue began to take over, my senses too raw and frazzled to gather the strength even to monitor the to-ing and fro-ing of the inner fight, I doubted my own question even as I fell asleep for hours.
10:20 Posted in Part One: The Story So Far | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this | Tags: haunted house, ghost story, horror, story, astronaut, space, scotland
22 February 2008
6. Being Snugly Locked-In
Yes, I awoke that next morning somehow enlightened to how ridiculous I had been, how the tensions of the day had really got the better of me, and decided that the house and I should kiss, unpack, clean and make up.
But, appropriately enough, that next day it rained. And all bleedin’ well freekin’ day too! It was that straight-down kind of rain, with very little wind to give it any bluster or snarl so it just tumbles down without resistance. If it doesn’t wet you on the way down, then it gets you as it bounces hard off the ground and back up onto your ankles.
It reminded me that this was still Scotland in the winter. It reminded me also that it was my choice to make this life-change at the start of the year – I was fully aware that my own green shoots of recovery, my own spring-time, would be pushing against the frozen earth of the height of this country’s stark winter, trying desperately to flourish in the gnawing cold and the bitter elemental forces. Yep, no sun today. The sunlight had been a tilt all right, and I slid right back into a cold, drenched reality.
But it was not all doomy-gloomy! There was no way I could spend another night in my car. I had to make a change. I had to push through it all. And to act as the artillery to aid the battle plans promised in all the progressive verbs that went through my head, I played music. Blasted-well happy music at that!
And here are the songs I played really loudly when I returned to the house after the previous night's scare: Stacey Kent's 'Shall We Dance', The Beatles' 'Helter Skelter', Chic's 'Le Freak', Jane Siberry’s ‘Red High Heels’. Shake away the cobwebs? Well, that was what they were designed to do! With one of my best pair's of knickers on to make me feel extra special, and with a contrived dance and an affected pout to every bar and beat I told the house that I wasn't scared. No how, no way, no day!
As I made this boogie-woogie statement of defiance, I unpacked the contents of the car into one derelict room off the main hallway and made tentative steps to start putting my possessions into the three rooms that were self-contained on the ground floor, and that contained a sitting-room with a door that locked from the inside. I could have looked for other accommodation within the house, but there was no hesitation that this was where I would settle my things. I smiled. A smile of self-knowing. There was no way that you were going to get my arse to live/sleep/eat or live anywhere else in this house when there was a neat, tidy, enclosed location with a lock! No way, José Lopé! I am not the pheasant who flies towards the gamekeeper thinking, "Hell, what is that? Is that a gun?" Rather, I will eye the instrument of death from the safe vantage point of a tree, a fig-leaf to hide my face, and peer out at the admirable lengthy barrel while further hiding my identity by neighing as if I am a horse! Yep, that’s safety-conscious, sensible me alright!
So, dancing, singing, spinning, jumping and booty-shaking for all I was worth, I hid well the growing realisation that I had screwed-up; that the house was a disaster, barely habitable, leaking and flayed and on its last legs and not even fit for a family of desperate termites. "La-la-la-hey-hey-doo-doo-whoop!"
Praise be for batteries in my CD player, as there was no electricity in the house. Having given the bang-sound of the night before a bit of thought - and the resulting absence of all mod-con power that it brought with it - I came to the conclusion that it was probably a ‘fuse-related electrical issue’ that I was encountering. Forgive me for using technical jargon, but some currenty wire-encompassed energy thing had gone pop and all the electrical fizzly bits had stopped doing what they do best i.e. making shit work! I took a trip back into the local town and found an electrician who came out and fixed the problem: 5 seconds of work for £35! I’m sure - his stubble and stink aside - he must bathe in goat’s milk nightly and wipe his anus using gold-leafed toilet-paper coated with a soothing eucalyptus and aloe vera balm – or else his wife Vera’s hand! What else could he do with the sizeable income that he’s generating daily? And how does this Smelly God procure each anointed sheet of paper into his calloused hands? That’s right, perceptive reader, just like he does with members of the public, he rips them off!
It was only around dinner-time - as I started to get a semblance of order within a downstairs kitchen and a short corridor, plus an adjoining room that could be a living-space and bedroom, and an old but not too horrendous bathroom - that I turned that smile upside down and let in a little of that maudlin, self-hating, self-pitying wind of feeling that had been concealed all day between high-kicks and teeth clenched for the high-notes. Rash, impetuous - they had never been me; but I had made them me, and this was where I had ended up.
Before getting too upset I breathed deeply, found that I could and that it felt good, and sat back in a chair, some of that wind dispelled in the process. At some point, sitting back and breathing turned into sleeping. I needed it; I deserved it. The last moment before slipping over into sleep felt like wine coasting into my veins and I sipped hard! Change, cold, fright, lack of sleep, the bewildering newness of everything, the bewildering discomfort of everything, brought about a deep, necessary but fretful sleep.
A dream that contained Phillip ended with the sudden realisation that Phillip was beside me and that his hand was on my arm. I jumped so hard that my head thumped and I felt my heart bruise. But there was no-one there. On my bare arm I felt the touch still on the little hairs and I felt that it had not been direct flesh that had touched me but some material, a glove perhaps. As I grabbed my arms and held myself tightly for a second, I took a deep breath and then rubbed my eyes a touch to wake myself up further. Of course the room was empty.
Outside, it was practically dark; inside, without any light in the room, it was dark and shadowy. In an instance, the desire to step outside came over me. I glanced out of the window and noticed that the rain had eased considerably to a light drizzle, although the wind had increased. I walked out of my little suite of rooms, along the corridor that led to the front door and opened the big old door. The cold struck me like pricking crystals and I took a deep breath that stayed in me as if frightened to come out.
All of a sudden, I noticed something small and curious above the treeline in front of me. It was a rectangle of hovering white light – ever so small, shining somewhat, barely distinct really, but against the darkening sky it stood out.
One moment I was ready to walk out, the next I hesitated. On reflection, it’s strange how certain anomalies can appear before you yet appear to have nothing to do with you – they are just odd within themselves. Then there are other curios that appear to be about you, that you are implicated in. This was just such a sight. The thing seemed empty, dead inside. Yet with something about it that was certainty of purpose. I had no idea what it was but I closed the door and returned to my rooms. A last glance out of the window at the same spot above the trees and I noticed that the phenomenon was gone.
These rooms of mine though, they made me feel secure. In here, I was almost protected. No matter what was outside. So I fell asleep like the proverbial swaddled and well-fed baby. The slumber of the foolish, you might say. Securely, snugly locked-in.
11:20 Posted in Part One: The Story So Far | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this | Tags: haunted house, ghost story, horror story, astronaut, space, nicole kidman, journal
21 February 2008
5. The Ambiguity of Twitching Curtains
I can still recall the cold of that night as I slept fitfully in my car. There was a frozenness inside and most definitely across and inside of my skin. I guess these two frozennesses touched, the inner and outer, across some divide - some sinewy divide like an ice bridge, if I can call it that, connecting those two different frozennesses that all our lives are capable of.
My first sense of oneness in ever so long and it had to be the oneness of different frozennesses! Such hardness, oh calloused little life, such cold brutalness!
Is this a true memory, the one I seem to have of the twitching curtain? I seem to recall glancing out of the car, perhaps trying to discern how far I was into the night and how far from morning, and seeing a curtain in the house I was parked outside of twitching.
Light. Thin envelope of yellow and white and orange energy. So far over there, but scorching my eyelids with promise. Not that the light melted anything across me or inside me. It just seemed to peer through the window of my car, contemplate the chill within and then the curtain closed over again. The merest blink of an electrical eye.
That's what I seem to remember. But did that actually happen? Or did I just long for it? And did it happen twice? Once with a downstairs window and once again with an upstairs window?
Oh, the ambiguity of a twitching curtain! A glimpse of light that gives nothing that is needed or necessary.
And, of course, I’ve spent a couple more nights asleep in my car outside of that house since that time. That was just me being silly though. Being in the house and thinking that I'd heard something. Spooking myself unecessarily and then finding myself in my car and tearing away from Mordan House as if banshees were on my tail!
Did the curtains twitch on those occasions too? I remember wondering this on several occasions.
In time I would have the answer.
10:25 Posted in Part One: The Story So Far | Permalink | Comments (3) | Email this | Tags: haunted house, ghost story, horror story, scotland, astronaut, space
20 February 2008
4. A Plea to Mr Hindsight
The first thing I remember is a loud bang almost as soon as I had entered the house.
But, wait, that’s leaping ahead. I need to go back earlier than that.
Everything that could go wrong on the way to the house did indeed go wrong, loud bang put to one side. It was a wrong-footed, inside-out, long-way-for-a-short-cut kind of day from beginning to end. Should I have taken the hint – reappraised the knowing wink of sunlight as something more ironic and mischievous?
Hindsight – timewise, you’re always in the wrong place! Nowhere when you’re needed and eternally present when you’re not required. Hindsight, dearies, is a man!
So what exactly went wrong? How about a map that bore no relation to any geographical location this side of Pluto; a ditch from out of nowhere that took an hour and every muscle my car’s 1.2 litre engine could muster to get extricated from; a migraine of thunderous proportions with an internal storm’s lightning flashing intermittently behind my eyes; and numerous things of great importance that I promised I’d take with me, all of which I could mentally locate back home but couldn’t physically locate anywhere in the car! That should do for a mere flavour of the day.
But, oh yes, the sun shone. Big sodding-well bleedin’ flamin’ deal! Now if the sun had been a torch that I could use when I got to the house at 10.00pm, I’d have seen it as providential and changed my downgrading of it from ‘Category Pointless’ up to ‘Category Practical’! Yet I didn’t anticipate the grounds of the house being so dark when I arrived, and, in my heart, I sang a torch song for all the absent torches of this world – especially the one I didn’t have right there in my hand right at that moment! I should have got to the house at 5pm at the very latest - time enough to get my bearings and get myself a little on the settled side. It really is one of those things that city people don’t quite appreciate: the sheer blackness that is possible out in the country. And that’s what I encountered.
I got out of the car with the engine turned off and the headlamps off too, and it was only as I walked towards the house that it suddenly struck me that I was nearly totally blind. Darkness was like some uncompromising cloak right up at my nose and over my head, and with only the lightest wavering and flickering of texture detectable within it. Instantly it terrified me. Hard to imagine how quickly fear - so total and consuming - can rise-up so complete. Not fear for what the darkness might have contained as some childish imagination kicked in, but for the instantaneous and uncalled-for extinction of an entire sense. I felt an icy, non-city breeze feel me out, the way a blind person would feel a statue, and, with my hands outstretched, I felt it back. We knew each other for only a second and I think neither liked what it encountered: I must have stank of the city, all antibacterial and anxious; while the wind smelled of unperfumed nakedness, all stripped of artifice, almost like some thought placed within a test tube, with nowhere to hide and nothing at all to conceal itself with. Each, for our own reasons, was, I fear, immediately repelled by the other.
Fumbling back to the car I turned on the headlamps and left the car door open so that the cabin was illuminated too. Cabin? Is that what it’s called? The inside bit? With artificial light as my new-found friend and companion I could see the house better - although there was not much to see. It was a great solid rectangle of stone, bland and blinkered windows everywhere, only the main doorway ornamented in any way by a stone entranceway with the occasional chiselled flourish here and there and with several stairs up to a wooden door. The trees I could mostly just hear, purring and heaving gently as the wind teased and stroked their branches. Beneath my feet I heard the rapid crunch-crunch of shoes on gravel as I made my way, as quickly as possible, to the house’s front door. I fumbled the key into the lock like a baby cajoles a round peg into a square hole and eventually pushed the door open. In the same movement I was fumbling for a light switch. I found one! Ave Maria and hail to all the angels in God’s great and wondrous heavens! Pressure applied to the switch and alongside it a bang sounded somewhere far off in the house - and with no resulting light. As a domesticated animal, but not DIY-icated, I was, to keep the alliteration going, decimated. I remember putting my hand up to my red hair and giving a lock of it a sharp tug, my brow no doubt harshly clenched at the time – yanking my hair hard as I scowl is something that I am apt to do when life is pulling the pavement, turf and laminate out from under me.
But then there was light. But only a slither of it. At first I felt relieved, thinking it to be a light going on after an electrical delay of some kind – if such things exist! The light was half-way down the hallway that lay in front of me. It was like a bright blanch at skirting board level that surged and then moved away quite quickly. My chest tightened and my breath turned to frost in my lungs as I realised that the light was coming from behind me, from something moving in front of the car’s headlamps and causing the light before me to change. I didn’t move. Hell, for an instant I couldn’t move! My brain tried to make rapid calculations and assessments to determine what it was that could be there behind me but that made no sound on the gravel. Then I heard it. A breath. Forced, deep, regulated, impassive, almost automated and clinical. And loud. So loud that I jumped and looked around me in case it was beside me or on top of me or perhaps in my own mouth. In a split second – split, charred, splintered – I ran from the doorway without another thought except bathing myself in a light that I understood. As I climbed into the car, my senses all seemed to shudder and reverberate. The trees, the wind, the windows of the house, all seemed to bow down over me, almost trying to grab me as I slammed the car door shut.
I started the car, turned it around and drove away – in second gear, I think, for about two miles – making for the nearest town that I had passed through earlier en route to the house. When I got there, I found a quiet, lit street of bungalows and fell asleep on the backseat of the car. By morning - cramped, nauseous from the poor sleep and exertions of the previous day, stale and dishevelled too – I awoke somehow enlightened to how ridiculous I had been, how the tensions of the day had really got the better of me, and decided that the house and I should kiss, unpack, clean and make up. As for the play of light, it could have been anything or nothing. As for the sound, anything and nothing.
Oh Mr Hindsight, please take three steps back and give a woman a helping hand for a change, would you? Mr H, make a return journey to the present and tell me what my fate is, tell me one thing that’s true and that I can count on. Tell me what the astronaut wants with me. And, while you’re here, tell me why I still haven’t left this haunted, tormented, airless and lifeless house!
11:55 Posted in Part One: The Story So Far | Permalink | Comments (6) | Email this | Tags: haunted house, ghost story, horror story, astronaut, space, nicole kidman, journal
19 February 2008
3. A Sunny Day in January
That's what it was, a sunny day – and in January, for crying out loud! Ever so sunny, in fact. A trickling breeze, a silvery sheen over everything and, in the air, a vague intuition of warmth like the light touch of a stranger - or a stranger thinking about touching you, perhaps. In short, the day looked great and it felt great too. Out of place and out of season, but these are the times we live in. All disrupted, mangled, tilting gently down to destruction. But, in my mind, the day was pleased with me, happy for me and smiling down and all around. The day itself was like a great, approving, knowing wink in my direction.
Basically, the city of Glasgow had been killing me. A small city in many ways, certainly when you compare it with Phoenix in Arizona, where I grew up. But small can be snug, enveloping and friendly. But that smallness can turn to claustrophobia when your breathing apparatus is as faulty as mine. I’d lived in Glasgow for a year and a half, yet eventually the city seemed to have a pillow over my face and was trying to choke me out of existence. Noxious fumes, double-glazing, bed bugs and carpet bugs, dogs and cats and all other four-legged vermin - the whole caboodle was lining up like murderers on the Orient Express, each set to strike a knife into my lungs. Yes, this US of A girl had great friends in this adopted city, but all around me great enemies too. Asthma has always been a problem for me, but short forays into the countryside – into the sizzling empty deserts of Arizona when I was back home - have always left me feeling that there is space in the world where I’m allowed to breathe; where not every draw-in and draw-out need be a struggle, or taken with inhaled gases in my system to aid me. Cities were killing me; the countryside would save me and allow me to flourish.
So I, Stephanie Fey - born in little old Flagstaff, raised in sprawling Phoenix, then adopted by the Scottish city of Glasgow – took on this great crumbling, down-at-heel, decrepit building called Mordan House that has only three small rooms that are habitable and that lies a 40-minute drive from the nearest town.
Aside from the three useful, frequentable rooms, the rest of the building consists of a wide, dilapidated stairwell covering two upper floors and a couple of rooms in the basement. All the upstairs rooms are wide and high, mostly empty and echoing, even to my breathing it seems. It’s all just endless corridors that I still haven’t quite explored. I think there’s a handful of narrow stairs up on the top floor that lead to an attic – but I haven’t investigated that far, by any means. Also, the house shows all its layers; all its history, all its entrails, are exposed: generations of wallpaper occupy all the rooms, from dim and distant past to quite recent; floorboards and old carpets and scraps of underlay of various antiquity are a bizarre patchwork across the floors; objects covering hundreds of years randomly litter the place like the house has avidly collected memorabilia of its own long life.
But I haven’t really made it clear what I’m doing here at this particular house. I haven’t bought it, but I’m not renting it either. It’s a deal with the owner, Mr McKay. He leased it to the lefty-leaning hippies, and when they disintegrated as a group, he thought it the best time to level the place and build lavish homes. The building is probably unsalvageable in its entirety, but knocked down, levelled and with a new construction on the site of the old, then ramshackle hell could turn to regeneration heaven! So, while McKay gets the engineers and builders in place, I’m looking after it. I don’t have to do anything, just be here for 8 months and let him know if anything occurs that should concern him. Simple-wimple, easy-peasy!
Of course, at the news of my plans city-slicking friends giggled behind their hands and metropolitan family members were aghast behind hands that rubbed their brows. Screw them. They’re not part of me anyway. This is just a land that I frequent, and they’re just people that I sidle up to from time to time. None of it is really me. Same for America and all the cronies I know and am related to there. All of that’s no more a part of me. I feel alienated from that land as much as this one. It’s all just old dust on my shoes, and faces longer engrained in my memory, longer habituated, and therefore a bit longer forgotten. Yes, I’m quite cold that way, and none of that’s knew about me. Look, I knew it was a whacky decision. I knew it was a gamble. Especially for a lipstick-loving, shoe-embracing, shower-twice-a-day gal like me, well-known for her notable and much-admired collection of exotic and intricately-fashioned underwear! But when you feel you’re dying, you lash out in all sorts of ways. Isn’t that true of us all? And I’m only 30 – I should have years and years ahead of me. I think I want to have years and years ahead of me.
But before you think me to be living entirely in a frozen, unlit tomb that creaks and wanes at every movement of mine, and where I mope and frown and indulge in heartless thoughts, think again. The three rooms are, if I say so myself, quite lovely and cosy. Even Philip would approve of them if he were here – if he knew where I was. The rooms are warm, sumptuous, silent - except for the times when I blast out music to my well-oxygenated heart’s content! – and a haven away from the coal-black, visored face that floats through these premises at night. And something in me is happy here. For the most part. It’s the rest of the house that feels the cold and, I suspect, generates the cold too.
And, of course, the sun is still there in the day. Most days. Praise God for that! Insanity would have drawn me into its dark hole long before now if it wasn’t for that. It’s only at night that things get cold – cold like space – and the dead heavens arise in my corridors and the gloved hands of the astronaut seek me out. So the world gets warmer as it tilts towards destruction. Consoling us and duping us.
So what of my first encounter with him? I should, I guess, say something about that.
22:10 Posted in Part One: The Story So Far | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this | Tags: ghost story, horror, space, astronaut, scotland, serial, haunted house
18 February 2008
2. Breaking a Promise - Part One
I shouldn’t be communicating with anyone at all - that was the promise I made to myself when I moved into this house two months ago. But everything has been changing – some experiences that I’ve had in this house have crept up on me, then at times others have blasted me, stunned me, pummelled me - and now I can’t keep it all to myself. I’m not quite the same person that I was when I entered this ramshackle, windswept wreck of a place. I’m strangely firm and resolved, yet I’m curiously unsettled and at war with myself. So my promise is discarded and I find myself communicating with you. Another personal value broken and trampled on in this modern day and age. But I’m besieged, and many things can come to be lost at such times, don’t you agree? To my mind right now, words are all I have to help me stay sane, to hold-on – to try and keep the astronaut at bay.
Oh, and an internet connection, of course! To capture the words and send them on their way in the world - digitally-speaking, you understand. Well, how else could I write this web log? Sorry, compound-word time: blog! I’ve no phone handset, no cell phone, no TV, no neighbours to turn to, just a slow dial-up account through this phone-line connected to a sluggish laptop computer. And, before anyone asks, no I don’t have a portable DVD player, in-car sat-nav or a PDA with me! Aside from this computer, a small CD player and Mr Dial-Up, I’m technologically naked, electronically native! But both slow and sluggish are in keeping with where I’m living: the Scottish countryside, and far into it too. A slow pace of life, a sluggish appearance to every day. For me, speedy, in any sense, is unnecessary. And unwanted.
To be honest, I never thought I would use this internet line. Really it was just here for emergencies - hearing a bang somewhere off in the distance and checking the BBC website to see if Armageddon had occurred, that kind of thing. But now I’m using it to try and keep focused, keep some degree of self, to prevent myself from being sucked into that space where the astronaut is intent on taking me.
In some ways, I need to escape from this place – and this is one way I can think of to do just that. To write this – to you, to nobody, to everyone. It’s a kind of real-life message placed in a virtual bottle. But I don’t want anyone to save me, or anything like that. Just to hear me. A voice in space. Space! Oh boy, how appropriate that metaphor is! A voice dragged out of me, or screamed out of me, and into the airless and empty darkness. Inevitably to end-up within absolute nothing? Time will tell.
How dark the symbolism! What words are these? Whose voice? I don't recognise any of this. I don't recognise me! But that’s what’s happened by degrees. Everything inside has steadily been chilled and darkness has grown in me like tight, clambering, unstoppable ivy, its leaves black and icy. He's happy to know this. The astronaut. I hear it in his breath through his visor, even when he’s not around.
But somehow this is good, this is interesting to me. I see on the screen of this laptop just how much I’ve changed and, therefore, what has been done to me. I notice how the house’s lifeless air has punctured a vein and slithered in. And it’s all his doing.
But how did he come to be here? How can the ghost of an astronaut haunt this partially-derelict building that, until a year ago, was just a dilapidated, under-financed, lefty-leaning hippy refuge? What kind of ghost is this? How is any of this possible on the ground?
But all of this is for later. I want to recount what has happened to me and, if I get that far, to bring you up-to-date and recount what is happening to me now.
I've set the scene. The next post will tell it all from the beginning: from that bright, sunny day in January when a west-coast American girl arrived in desolate Mordan House in a remote part of the west of Scotland.
03:25 Posted in Part One: The Story So Far | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this | Tags: haunted house, ghost story, horror story, astronaut, space, nicole kidman, journal
17 February 2008
1. Prelude
Philip would often tell me spooky stories late at night and I remember one in particular that he told me.
How we got into the position of relating scary stories was, of course, always my fault. I would ask him in the half-light of my bedroom to tell me something spooky, he would oblige, and before the end I would always tell him to stop, that I was spooked and didn’t want to hear anymore. Then we’d cuddle up in bed in the dark and I’d feel secure, safe, and that nothing could trouble me.
Ridiculous! Pathetic! I hate myself at the very memory of doing such things! Not the spooky stories, just the whole damn stupid scenario!
Anyway, this is how the story goes. There was a US space station floating above the Earth’s atmosphere. Not one of those recent ‘Fancy Dan’ jobs, I think – one of the earlier types, like an aerosol can with little port-holes. Well, the crew are doing all the usual stuff – experiments, checking instruments, long-range anti-gravitational peeing into a jar! The usual astronautical shenanigans! Then one of them looks out of a window. On one side of the space station is Earth, all detailed and shining and splendid and quiet. But on the other side, where he’s looking, there’s black void stretching on until the end of the universe. But there’s something else, something that shouldn’t be there. Another astronaut. Not one of his colleagues though – they’re all there inside the space station. And this astronaut is just hovering there, kind of small in the distance. He’s not moving, just appearing to look fixedly at the space station. His visor is completely black so any face inside is inscrutable. The astronaut calls to his colleagues and they all stare, wondering if they’re hallucinating. This is no Russian cosmonaut – at least, there’s nothing on his space suit to give the impression that he’s Russian. But also this is early space exploration, long before the heavens were littered with space dudes and their satellites, and reusable shuttles and space stations like floating hotels!
One of them says that they should radio Mission Control and tell them what they can see. The others agree. As they scurry about to make this radio-link happen, suddenly everything goes black – the lights in the space station cut out, everything cuts out, all the instrument panels are dead. For a second there’s panic, voices shouting out, shouting over each other, colliding around and scuttling about. Then one of the astronauts glances out of the window at where the mysterious astronaut figure should be, but space is empty again. No astronaut. Just nothing. He calls out to the others that the figure has disappeared. They stop what they’re doing, and, as the silence descends, there’s a slight sound of scraping on the outside of the space station, as if something is moving along the outside of it. Then the sound stops. One of the astronauts whispers: “What was that?” No sooner had he finished the question than a huge bang resounds through the station. It’s coming from the main airlock. Then another bang. Then another. The sounds can be felt reverberating through the metal, and the station almost seems to move slightly with every impact. And then after maybe the fourth or fifth impact, one of the astronauts is looking in the direction of the airlock door when …
It’s at that point that I told Philip to stop, that I was spooked and didn’t want to hear anymore. Then we cuddled up in bed in the dark and I felt secure, safe, and that nothing could trouble me.
Yuk! I disgust myself! I make myself feel sick!
Philip said that the story was true. I wonder about that now. Before I would have scoffed at such a claim. Now, I’m not so sure.
20:30 Posted in Part One: The Story So Far | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this | Tags: haunted house, ghost story, horror story, astronaut, space, nicole kidman, journal