This is Halloween: Running the Dogs

Given that I love Halloween, I want to contribute a bit of spookiness of my own to the mix. Digging deep in the voluminous files of Stately Black Manor, I have blown the dust off an oldie of my own, a little vignette of a couple of raccoon hunters and their hounds. Enjoy.

 

Running the Dogs

The elk was a silent shadow under the moon, staring at us with a cold malice I would never have thought possible in an animal.  Its eyes were pits of darkness that sucked in the thin silver moonlight, looking in and beyond us, freezing us more thoroughly than the sharp late November air.  The huge bull stood as still as the stars, his evil flowing through the tall fence that bound him, an evil that cowed our dogs and jellied our knees. 

      “He can’t get through that fence,” Frank shivered backward, his old Mossberg twelve-gauge his only comfort, “he can’t get through that fence.” 

      The dogs wrapped around our legs, too frightened to whine.  All except Rounder, the wise blue-tick stalking closer to the elk, hate-filled and stiff-legged, tense as a spring-trap, his growl a distant thunder.  He was a climber, and the fence wouldn’t stop him.  The elk shifted his black gaze to the hound, both animals continuing a war old before man walked the Earth.  The moon stopped; the air grew breathless.

      Somewhere there was a distant shout, a yell like no other, a deep wordless bellow that seemed to speak of dead secrets and frustrated revenge.  Rounder jerked back as if kicked; Frank stumbled back a step with a strangled yelp; the elk turned and melted back into the woods from which he came.  I dropped to one knee, dazed and sick, my Remington dropped beside me, forgotten. 

      We grabbed the dogs, Rounder moaning and fussing, and headed for the truck.  Silence stood between Frank and me, neither of us willing to speak for fear of making what had happened become real.  I glanced back continuously as we drew away from the fence, terror slowly building as I expected at any moment to see pieces of the darkness that was the tree-line pull away and glide across the moonlit field towards us.  We were almost in a full run when we got to the truck, the dogs having torn away from us and already huddled near the tailgate. 

      Frank floored the pick-up away from the field, bouncing crazily down the gravel road, the dogs in their boxes, us in the cab.  Frank struggled to light a cigarette, the rutted road defeating him as I switched on the radio, the classic-rock thump a welcome relief to us both.  We banged along in the truck for what seemed like half the night before either of us spoke.

      “God-damn that was a big elk,” Frank hugged the steering wheel, his cigarette nervous in his fingers.

      “Big ain’t the word for it.”  I looked out the door window of the truck at the dark farmhouses sliding by, the moon keeping pace with us.

      “I mean, I seen them elk out there before, but God-damn...”

      “Who keeps elk anyway?  It’s gotta be expensive to bring ‘em in from out west.”

      “Raises ‘em for meat; elk’s pretty expensive, I hear.  Makes a lotta money, man.”  He shook his head like somebody might when they wake up with a headache.  “It was so big...”

      “It wasn’t that it was all that big...it just looked...I don’t know...”

      “Hateful.  That was just one hateful-assed elk.” 

      A small town was passing us, one of those tiny Ohio towns down around Amish country that seem to loom off the backroads, tired and forlorn since the farmers left so long ago.  The town seemed oddly familiar, looking like the small town near the elk-farm we had just left, yet hastily rearranged and placed along the road to intercept us once again.  A worn out gas station - not one of those all-purpose gas station/grocery store/lottery dealer places, but an honest-to-God gas station, with analog readout pumps, rusted 7-Up sign, and sagging garage - was all that seemed to be open.  Frank pulled in, balled up his empty cigarette pack, and hopped out.

      I looked around us.  “Where are we?”

      Frank shrugged.  “I dunno.  I lost track back around Wellington.  Down on three-oh-one, maybe, south of Homerville?” 

      I shook my head.  “No.  This looks like the place we left back there.”   I jerked my head back down the road towards that place, dreading to look. 

      “You’re crazy.  We been drivin’ twenty minutes.”  He turned and went into the station, snorting.  I walked out towards the road away from the lights, looking out at the moon-blued soybean fields across the way.  The sound of laughter came in on the chill breeze, the strange hysterical laughter of children fighting off sleep, but with a harsh tone to it, an almost angry sound.  There was movement in the soybean field, dark shapes twisting and gyrating, seeming to beckon to me.  I hopped the ditch along the road and headed out to the shadows under the moon.

      I could not tell how many there were.  They seemed to slip and whirl around a still form on the ground, a form that bleated in pain, not animal, not human.  With each yelp the shadows laughed and drew closer to the form, beating it noiselessly with arms or clubs-I couldn’t tell.

      “Hey you kids...” I began to call, the words strongly begun but catching in my throat.  The shadows stopped their brutal dance, twisting to face me, featureless in the dark.  I moved forward, the first step the bravest I’ve ever taken.  With a noise like wind in the treetops the shadow kids raced past me, giggling.  I walked to the form on the ground.

      The form lurched up, leaning drunkenly towards me.  A hand that could not be lit by the moon reached out, grabbing my coat.  A face I could not see drew near mine, cold, cold breath washing over me, words without meaning scraping my ears.  I pulled away, twisting from the rubbery grasp, tripping backwards only to recover just as the form gripped me again.  I pushed at its face, my hand slipping across a burning cold surface.  It gobbled meaningful gibberish in my ear as I punched it, once, twice, again.  It moved away, like smoke on a strong breeze, recovered, moved to me again.  Then I ran.

      The gas station was impossibly far away, glaring across the field like a beaten face.  The truck gleamed by the pumps, the only piece of sanity left in this dark town.  The laughing children swirled around me, a flock of crows after roadkill.  The form behind me was fast, too fast, staggering insanely at my elbow.  I jumped the ditch, pain shooting from my left ankle, a moment on the road, a rush and a roar as I saw the semi hurtling at me, a desperate spurt, the wind of the semi’s passing pulling me after and then down, somewhere in the tempest Rounder baying from his box.  I scrambled up and spun, ready to make a stand.

      There was nothing in the road except the flattened corpse of a rabbit, weeks old.  Beyond was the empty soybean field, the stars twinkling madly.  Suddenly I could feel how ragged my breathing was, how much my ankle hurt, how soaked with sweat I was.  I walked to the truck, fighting to get my trembling under control.  The truck was running, doors flung wide.  The lights of the gas station reached out to it, and to me, luminous fingers groping into the dark.  Frank was nowhere in sight. 

      I walked into the station, looking for an attendant that wasn’t there.  Ancient Valvoline cans and stacks of antique Firestone tires patiently waited within the garage bays.  A greasy, worn Chilton’s manual lay open on a shelf, schematics of a ‘51 Chevy transmission seeming to form some arcane formula in the fluorescent light.  A faint hum of static came from a roughly-handled radio sitting on a work bench. It all seemed fake somehow, like a mock-up of a gas station made by an intelligence familiar with the main items but clueless on the details: woodcarving tools stored in socket set boxes; cans of yeast mixed with cans of motor oil; a pneumatic wrench too strangely shaped to have ever been used.  The place felt alive, a thrumming coming from below that was felt through one’s bones rather than heard.

      “Help you?” I jumped at the sound.  He was an old, old man, his eyes hidden by wrinkles, his bent frame belied by the impression of a hidden tautness, like a dog ready to jump on someone coming through the door.

      “The guy I was with.”  I braced myself, as though waiting for a punch to be thrown.  He slowly turned, thumbing towards the truck.

      “I expect that’s him there.”  The faintest trace of hatred was a ghost in his graveled voice.  “Reckon you boys oughta be off home now.”  He turned back to me, and I saw the glitter of black eyes peer out through the wrinkled brow.  I tried to defy those old eyes, but I could not.  I could only hold them for a moment before I had to look down, down at his twisted and mottled hands that wrung a shop rag with barely hidden violence.

      I walked from the garage, my tongue thick with fear as I passed the old man.  He smelled of rot and freshly turned earth.  Something deep and instinctual urged me to hit him, to force him back to the ground from which he sprang, and then to run; but I resisted, the truck my only focus, the dogs rattling in their boxes, Rounder moaning a primal warning.

      I got into the truck.  Frank was there, his face unreadable as he pulled us back onto the road.  I dreaded to speak, to voice the insanity of the night, for fear even Frank had become part of it.  The more I looked at him the more he became a figure from beyond madness, a hunched insect creature affecting the shape of man, almost hugging the steering wheel to his chest.  He did not look at me, staring at the humming road that rose to meet us in the night.  His cigarette burned evilly, a smoldering anger in its ember.  There was no comfort in the radio, the whispering hiss of static hiding some monologue of cosmic malignity.  We hurtled along the nightroads, the towns of man lost to us now, passing farm buildings that were grotesque humps on the back of the land.  I fought an urge to hit Frank, or what he had become, and jump from the truck. The urge became stronger, unbearable, and I felt like I was confined in a moving prison cell. Then a howl came from somewhere, everywhere, a pure, clean sound of redemption.

      The dogs.  Their calls were a chorus of primal good, led by the strong booming bay of Rounder.  The darkness seemed to lift a bit, the stars melting and reforming, the road blurring and becoming solid again.  The truck snarled and swayed, Frank convulsing in agony.  I shoved next to him, grabbing the wheel, locking the brakes.  He grabbed at me, punching and gouging.   I lit from the truck, with him just behind.  He doubled over, falling to his hands and knees.  I pulled down the tailgate, opening the dog boxes one by one.  The dogs spun and yowled in joy, like they did during the first snowfall.  Only Rounder was subdued, standing dignified and holy over Frank, guarding for and against. 

      I had no doubts now about Frank.  I lifted him from the road, clapping him on the back to assure both of us he was real and whole again.

      “Those cigarettes are gonna kill you.”

      A raspy sigh was his only reply.  We sat on the tailgate, letting the dogs sniff the ditches and fields around us, the star-filled bowl of the night bright above us.  The moon was low and feeble, obscured by a distant stand of trees.  The eyes of the dogs flashed in the starlight.  Frank finally stood, stamping his feet against the cold.  He softly called in the dogs, bundling them into their boxes. 

      “I reckon we ought not to run the dogs out here anymore.”  He clicked the tailgate shut quietly and carefully.  I straightened my hat and stuffed my hands in my coat pockets.  The horn of a diesel locomotive sounded somewhere far off.

      “No. I reckon not.”

This is Halloween: Val Lewton's Cat People and Curse of the Cat People

I return now to discuss the final two Val Lewton films I haven’t covered: Cat People (1942) and Curse of the Cat People (1943). Coincidentally, Cat People is the first of the films he produced on his own.

 

Cat People

Nautical engineer Oliver and fashion designer Irena meet cute at the zoo in New York’s Central Park. A whirlwind romance later and they’re married. This, despite the fact that Irena believes herself to be descended from devil-worshipping Serbs who fled from King John, and will turn into a great cat when her passion is aroused. Oliver’s patience inevitably begins to fray as the marriage remains unconsummated, and he demands Irena see a psychiatrist, who turns out to be a hypnotist and quite an unethical slimeball. Oliver soon begins to grow closer to his assistant Alice, and Irena becomes increasingly jealous. A cat-like shadow begins to prowl about, sheep end up slaughtered, and Alice begins to feel a constant hostile presence.

Many, if not most, of Lewton’s films are permeated with a dreamy atmosphere that shades over into nightmare gradually and irresistibly. Cat People begins the trend of his films being imbued with shadow, a darkness that looms about pools of light. Sometimes the shadow is merely an emptiness beyond the reach of lights; sometimes it comes alive and invades those luminous islands.

Irena becomes drawn to a black panther at the zoo, fascinated by its sleek menace. Is this cat the one that terrorizes the night, or is it Irena? Lewton always leaves the audience unsure if the threats in his films are natural or supernatural.

He was also a master of creating terror from the unseen; Alice finds herself trapped in her building’s swimming pool – but by what? The room is well-lit and no panther is evident, but the play of shadows and the growling and roaring of a great cat surround Alice, and the viewer…only to be dispelled when help arrives in answer to Alice’s screams. Irena appears, smugly polite…was she the panther? Was there a panther at all? Were the sounds Alice heard real, or her imagination? It’s impossible to really know, and that’s what’s unsettling about Lewton’s films.

Much of this film, much of Lewton’s entire oeuvre, deals with belief and the power of the mind to warp our perception and create fear from nothing. The mind can be manipulated, either intentionally, as with the psychiatrist, or unintentionally, as Oliver and Alice begin to feed off Irena’s own belief in her supposed curse, beginning to believe it also. By extension, there is a meta portion of this equation, too, as Lewton’s films also manipulate the minds of the audience, creating fear from what is perceived yet not actually seen. These things would end up becoming foundation stones for future horror films and television shows, becoming second-nature to us in this culture.

This film would also see the advent of the Lewton Bus, 

which by now is so cliché as to have inspired many familiar versions of it. If you aren’t familiar with “it’s just a cat!,” one permutation of the Lewton Bus, then welcome to Earth and take a gander:

See? You've seen it a million times.

Curse of the Cat People

Lewton's idea of a sequel is a strange one, indeed. Oliver, Alice, and Irena return, but there the resemblance to the first film ends. 

Several years have passed since the events of Cat People. Oliver and Alice are married and living in a small town, with six-year-old daughter Amy. Amy is an introverted, daydreaming child, shy and retiring, unable and, apparently, unwilling to make friends. Her parents fret about her living such a solitary life, and her schoolwork suffers. Eventually the girl acquires an imaginary friend, one that looks exactly like her father's first wife, Irena. When she identifies her friend as the woman in a photo with her father, Oliver becomes alarmed and increasingly determined to force Amy to do away with her delusions.

This is a strange movie. It is unlike any of Lewton's other films, determinedly staying with the child's point of view. Again, the mind becomes the source of tension in Lewton's hands. Is she imagining her friend? That seems the obvious conclusion, but then...reality is always fluid in Lewton's universe. There is a "haunted" house, a "magic" ring, a "fairy princess" (for lack of a better term), a strange old woman and her bitter daughter (or is she?), a killer blizzard, and the border between sanity and insanity constantly shifting for a number of characters.

This is about as close to a David Lynch film as Lewton made. The plot here is almost completely irrelevant, simply there to set up a series of strange encounters between Amy and her imaginary friend, obnoxious neighborhood children, weird neighbors, and her parents. Oliver, Amy's father, played with all the charisma of a store mannequin by Kent Smith, is about as close to a villain as the film gets until near the very end. The story, such as it is, has the air of inevitability to it, of fate and destiny, and while it pays off at the end (I guess?), it's still tough to describe without it sounding like nonsense. The ever-present shadows of Lewton films are less pronounced here, but the murk remains in a subdued way, found in the sorrows of childhood.

Both films are now classics, Cat People in particular, but I feel Lewton would really hit his stride in other films. Regardless, both films make for unsettling viewing, bringing the viewer into a dark dimension.

Hemingway and the power of Midnight downpours

A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway's devastating tale of romance between an American volunteer in the Italian army and a British nurse, set during the First World War, is among my favorite books by one of my favorite authors. Hemingway's prose is terse and insightful, muscular yet somehow lyrical. Few writers have the ability to deliver an emotional gut-punch to me like Hemingway can.

Mired in a stalled Italian military column, Hemingway's ambulance-driver protagonist sits in his vehicle in the dark, a heavy rain pouring down, and slides into a dream. What follows is one of the loveliest passages Hemingway ever put down on paper, capturing the fey logic that exists between waking and dreaming, where the border between awake and asleep becomes porous. The ache of loneliness for an absent lover, the hypnotic drumming of night rain, a need to be up and away from where one is...Hemingway captures all this and more:

In bed I lay me down my head. Bed and board. Stiff as a board in bed. Catherine was in bed now between two sheets, over her and under her. Which side did she sleep on? Maybe she wasn't asleep. Maybe she was lying thinking about me. Blow, blow, ye western wind. Well, it blew and it wasn't the small rain but the big rain down that rained. It rained all night. You know it rained down that rained. Look at it. Christ, that my love were in my arms and I in my bed again. That my love Catherine. That my sweet love Catherine down might rain. Blow her again to me.

Just perfect.

This is Halloween(?): The Invisible Man

For my second horror read of the season, I chose another H.G. Wells classic I hadn't read before: The Invisible Man.

First, I was always under the wrong impression; this book is not a horror story. Honestly, I don't know what I expected. The Claude Rains film of 1933 is usually grouped with the other Universal Horror films, and while I never thought that film was scary, I figured the book was likely to be so. But nope.

A sizable chunk of the book reads much like a comedy. Wells spends a good portion of the book describing the provincial and silly folk among whom the titular character finds himself. These rather gentle bumpkins take a good bit of verbal abuse and other rude behavior from the Invisible Man, and there is some slapstick and general comedic mayhem as they try to figure out just what the oddly-dressed stranger among them has going on. It seems very meandering to me, as though Wells didn't quite know where to take the story.

Eventually, though, the narrative takes a turn to the sinister as the Invisible Man, whom we learn is named Griffin, has to flee the little town he was staying in. He chances upon and consequently terrorizes a hobo into doing his bidding. It starts out fairly light-hearted, with the two moving around the countryside and going back to the town to retrieve Griffin's notebooks. It goes downhill when the tramp decides (almost inexplicably, really) to steal the books and run off.

This leads to what passes for an antagonist to the Invisible Man, and the closest the reader gets to a hero in the story. Kemp, an old schoolmate of Griffin, just happens to live near where the tramp flees, and after a few coincidences that seem to me as though Wells wanted to hand-wave past some gaps in his narrative, Griffin holes up in Kemp's house.

We learn how Griffin came upon his discovery of the secret to invisibility in a sizable flashback to London of a few months earlier. We see him experimenting on wool, a cat, and himself, after which he mails off his notebooks to retrieve later, then sets fire to the boarding house he lives in to destroy all evidence of his experiments. Seems precipitous to me, seeing as how it's snowing out and he's stark naked. He tries to steal from a department store, fails, then robs a costume shop. There are some interesting moments interspersed throughout, with Wells dealing with some implications of being invisible - dirt and snow can reveal him, and an invisible person has to be constantly watching out for other people, animals, and vehicles when in a crowded area. It's interesting, but after a while the narrative seems to be meandering again.

In the present, Griffin begins laying out his plans for a reign of terror, with Kemp as his partner. It seems ludicrous, really, because even an invisible man is just one guy, and has to run around naked, to boot. Maybe that was Wells' point; all along, he has painted Griffin as hot-tempered, arrogant, and prone to acting before thinking. He's also a psychopath; he describes how he robbed from his father to pay for his experiments, and the money turns out not to be his father's. The old man commits suicide, and Griffin cold-bloodedly brushes the whole thing off. Along with a murder (possibly two; the costume shop owner he robbed he knocked out, and may well have killed him), it's pretty good evidence this guy is a jackass of the highest order. So while it's plausible that he would want to start a one-(invisible)-man reign of terror, it still seems kind of stupid that he thought that was any kind of plan.

Kemp, meanwhile, has been biding time. He let the law know the invisible man was in his house, but after a typically clumsy attempt at capturing the villain, he's back on the loose. Griffin besieges the house, shoots a cop, breaks out all the windows, and generally misbehaves until he actually makes it into the house. Kemp hot-foots it away, and after a general running brouhaha, Griffin is dogpiled and beaten to death.

Then we get an epilogue where the tramp, years later, is a successful innkeeper. Denying the invisible man's notebooks were still in his possession, we get a special moment where he drags them out of hiding to read at night. 

Well then.

All in all, while the book is readable, it seems very scatterbrained. I usually read with the intent of sussing out what deeper meaning the author was trying to convey, but to tell the truth, I couldn't really dredge up much of anything here besides obvious stuff like being a jackass can be exacerbated by having an advantage no one else has. If anyone else can point me to some subtext, I'm more than happy to read about it.

This Is Halloween: The War of the Worlds

Every year, I celebrate the Halloween season by reading classic works of horror throughout October. This year, I decided to write about some of them. First up: H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds.

It's tough to overstate just how important H.G. Wells is in the genesis of science fiction. His work established some of the most long-lasting and recognizable tropes in the genre. The War of the Worlds is almost certainly his best-known work, and its influence in popular culture is so pervasive that the basic premise of the story, and, perhaps, its plot as well, is familiar to most people in Western culture. Its only real rival would be The Time Machine, and I would be willing to bet that fewer people in our culture could rattle off the basic plot to it as they could that of The War of the Worlds. But my point remains: everyone has heard of these two books, and their basic elements continue to be used again and again in pop culture. And they aren't the only two books he wrote in the genre, not by a long shot. But The War of the Worlds towers above the rest.

So that's why even I'm surprised at how long it took me to finally sit down and read it.

The basic plot: meteors strike the Earth in various places near the city of London, and are soon revealed to be conveyances for an invading force from the planet Mars. The resulting "war" quickly proves to be a rout, with humanity finding itself almost completely helpless to turn back the invasion.

Similar to The Time Machine, the protagonist here is unnamed. Wells does a creditable job of making his narrator both a blank slate upon which the reader can project themselves, and an actual character with a definite personality. Through him, we witness the explosions on Mars, seen via telescope, that heralded the arrival of the Martians some time later, and their subsequent attempts to secure the Earth as their own.

Two things struck me immediately about Wells' tale: one, he makes his Martians ("alien" and "extraterrestrial" had not become common terms for creatures from other planets yet) truly alien, and two, they actually begin terraforming (or, really, "aresforming") Earth to be more easily habitable for them. Given the time period and almost complete lack of precedence for either at the time (1895), the fact that Wells included both concepts in the same book is stunning.

Wells' pacing and his narrator's viewpoints places the reader near the action and distant from it in turns, until there is almost a hypnotic tone to the story. Or, a better way to put it is there is a nightmarish quality, where events are beyond the reader's ability to change or comprehend, like the coming of a sudden violent storm.

So what was Wells getting at, specifically? Placing the book in context makes it obvious. The British Empire bestrode the world, dominant for centuries. Like the Martians, it could come and go as it would into any part of the world, its own agenda paramount. Wells was making some sharp societal observations about his nation.

The Martians are implacable and irresistible, their great metal tripodal machines striding the countryside and cities like colossi - not like; they are colossi. When humans prove troublesome, the Martians simply lay down clouds of killing gas, like an exterminator might fumigate a house for rats. There is an air of doom, in the sense of the word as fate, or judgment, here meted out by an uncaring universe rather than a divine hand. And what sins are being punished? One, above all: hubris. Man had come to see himself as the ruler of his planet, and, by assumption, the universe. The Martians were simply an instrument of the universe, sent to disabuse humans of their presumption.

Certainly the Martians were felled by simple organisms (I won't even SPOILER ALERT that; who doesn't know this about the story?), ones that Man himself could easily resist. Yet are not countless humans killed by diseases everyday, diseases that elude even our best science? In the end, Wells' conclusion was one that could apply to any empire, in any time: even the greatest of human powers is still subject to the world around it, helpless before the whims and onslaughts of time or chance or even the most humble forms of life on his own planet. Our greatest folly is to believe we control the destiny of everything around us; at best, we exert some control over our own actions.

I would have ended on that somber, high-falutin' note, but there was something else I wanted to add. Wells' story is a pretty good tale of terror. Like Godzilla some 60 years later, the giant Martian machines run over and through anything in their way, heat rays crisping any who don't flee. It isn't an adventure tale, by any means; no heroes show up to save the day. But for a glorious moment, Wells gives us a glimpse of a story that might have been just that heroic: the attack by the Royal Navy's torpedo ram ship, the Thunder Child. The Thunder Child charges into the fray, intercepting the Martians that have waded out into the English Channel to destroy the fleet of ships desperately carrying refugees to the continent. Ramming first one tripod and then another, the doomed ship  manages to evoke a bit of hope before it meets its fate. It's a thrilling sequence.

The War of the Worlds is a true classic. The power of the narrative makes it obvious to me why it has endured for well over a century. In its time, there couldn't have been anything else remotely like it. It's hard to imagine what science fiction, or even pop culture in general, would have looked like without it. It's also far ahead of its time; it would be decades before science fiction could match it again for its literary and intellectual quality. In fact, it reads better and more logically than a lot of science fiction I've read from the 1920s and 1930s. A great book I should have read years ago.