All Hallow's Eve

I admit it, when it comes to this time of year, I'm twelve years old. I love all the decorations, the cool costumes, and the hundreds of different sources of myth that get dredged up and mixed together into a rich, spicy soup that feeds every fear of the dark and the unknown that has crawled around in the back of mankind's collective heads since we started banging the rocks together. Does it hurt that down here the temperature finally takes a bit of a dip this lovely time of year, and that it gets dark sooner? No, not at all.

Problem is, these last couple of Halloweens have not been as epic as I had hoped they would be. Something always seemed to pop up at the last minute that would wreck my plans. Or, and this is the shitty part about real life, that really awesome idea I had come up with that looked so perfect in my head turned out to be something off the set of the original Doctor Who series when I translated it into worldly matter. That's how it goes sometimes.

This year, it looked like the same thing was going to happen. There's still leftover problems from Harvey to deal with, I left renewing the registration on my car until the last minute, and I've made three trips to the dentist in the last month to take care of a problem that's been causing me enough pain to keep me from sleeping at night. This morning I got up early, headed in there again, and got a set of stitches taken out that I've been feeling inside my mouth for a week. Then I came home and let the pain killers kick in.

Then, I got off my butt and got to work. I hit Home Depot and picked up a couple of poles and some jute twine. Then I slapped together a pair of Saint Andrew's crosses, dressed up a dummy I had lying around, (go ahead and ask) and with the addition of some lights and the plastic, pre-carved pumpkins Claudia and I have been collecting over the years, my house was ready. A few days ago I stopped by one of the Halloween mega-stores that I've mentioned in a previous post, and picked up a mask that wasn't half bad. Add that to some black ren faire garb, and I was in business.

There was rain, but it stopped often enough to let the kids get out. I was up and down most of the evening answering the ringing of the doorbell, and I got another taste of that lovely moment when small children don't get to finish saying 'Trick or Treat.' One little girl came right out and said that she was scared of me, but that she loved my costume. She left smiling.

Let me know what you think. B-movie material?

Still writing.

Where the vampires come from, part two

  Okay, this is part two of a post that I started last week. We're connecting whatever dots we can find to figure out a way (not THE way) that people might have come up with the vampire myth. If you're just joining us, go back one entry. We'll wait for you.

So that person lying there in the dark is going to be thinking in terms of what they already know. Maybe I'm cynical, but I do think a lot of us look down on the folks who lived back then, judging them to be ignorant and superstitious. After all, they didn't know about germs, or electricity, and most of them couldn't read. How smart could they have been? Well, smart enough to grow their own food, know how to deliver their own children, and the poorer ones even had to build their own homes. Could you do that? For that matter, can you say that you would know about bacteria and viruses if multiple people hadn't told you about them? Have you ever seen either? (Here's a hint. You can't see viruses, not even with a microscope. They're too small)

So that's you and me lying there in the dark, feeling the cold night air where ever it gets in through the covers. We're hoping that Aunty Em won't die, but we're hoping even harder that whatever is slowly killing her won't come after us. Then we hear something. Sure, it's probably just the house settling, like it has a thousand times before. But now we're afraid, and we've had lots of time to wonder just what is making Aunty Em sick. Is it an animal? A man? Something that only looks like a man?

We might also think about Aunt Bea, who died not too long ago. She and Aunty Em were so close. Remember that one of the original legends about vampires was that they were people who came back from the dead and preyed on members of their former families. But how is it getting to Aunty Em? Everyone keeps an eye on her during the day, so it must be something that comes out at night, when everyone is asleep. Her door is kept closed, and the front door is kept closed and bolted. Can it become a mist, and just seep in through the gaps in the windowpane? Can it change its shape and so that it's narrow enough to slide between the door and the jamb? It has to be able to do something, right?

But just what is it doing? How is it weakening her? Our family member has probably seen people die from blood loss before, either in an accident or by violence (remember the time period that we're dealing with). Some of the similarities would probably stand out: turning pale, sluggishness, delirium, falling unconscious, then dying. Is that what's happening to Aunty Em, they might wonder? But if whatever is attacking her is bleeding her, where does the blood go? What is it doing, swallowing it?

Now here I'm going to take a bit of a jump. Because I work with fiction, I'm allowed to take reasonable jumps, especially if they get me someplace interesting.

A while back I picked up the King James version of the bible, determined to go through it from Genesis to Revelation. While I was trying to get through the old testament, one thing stuck out. Blood is important. I don't mean blood in terms of being related, I mean blood that is spilled. When the details and the procedures for the sacrifices are lain out, we see over and over that the blood belongs to God. The people might get some of the meat, and the priests usually got their cut, but the blood was sprinkled on the horns of the altar. The symbolism of the blood of Christ is important, but it's human blood we're thinking about. How many makes and remakes of 'Dracula' have used the 'blood is the life' line? That goes back to Leviticus 17:11.

So if the thought of blood-stealing occurs to us while we're lying alone in the dark (and we are alone. Even if someone is sharing the room or the bed, they're probably asleep or too afraid of what's happening to talk about it. If you can't talk about what's scaring you, you're alone), that's going to scare us even more, isn't it? This thing, whatever it is, isn't just killing us. It's tampering with something sacred, something that may as well have 'Property of God' stamped on it. What happens to us if we let it take our blood? There's also a bit in the bible (Leviticus 19:28, among others) about mutilating ourselves, reminding us that we don't own this flesh and blood, we're just the caretakers. If we don't stop this intruder from stealing our blood, is God going to be upset, are we going to end up damned? End up becoming one of those things and coming back to the house to attack Uncle Owen? There's a dark sort of symmetry to that.

These are the kinds of thoughts that might occur to our family member if they have a sick relative. Now let's change it just a bit. Remember, these people live with all kinds of phenomenon that they have no understandable explanation for. Diseases, decay, and conditions like epilepsy. Again, where no one that we can trust provides an explanation, we make up our own. Some of the recorded explanations seem eerily similar to what we've been talking about here. Demons that posses people and make them fall on the ground, foaming at the mouth, or who sneak into your dreams night after night and distract you with naughty visions while stealing your other bodily fluids, and who even come in male and female varieties. We don't hear as much about incubi and succubi these days, partly because we've sort of blended them in with vampires due to their common characteristics, and partly because we've got a little more knowledge of human biology and psychology. The form is different, but the function is the same.

Like I said last week, just a train of thought. Follow it at your own peril.

I'm slowly slogging through the rewrite of In the Dark, as well as laying down the first chapter of Red Man Burning. The first chapter of the latter has our Protagonist as a young boy, and pulling up relevant chunks of my younger days feels odd, in a good but creepy at the same time way.

And I'm writing about it.

Genesis and evolution of the vampire, part one

Okay, this post is going to be in two parts. I came up with this last weekend, but the idea took a while to gel, and it ended up being pretty long. Some friends of mine got married last Sunday (congratulation Micky and Michelle!), and at the reception I overheard a brief bit of conversation, about vampires. Someone said that they had always understood that the vampire myth grew from the fear of death. Now that claim got a certain set of my brain cells humming, thinking that it wouldn't have been as simple as that. I didn't get into it at the reception, because when I get going on a subject that I like, I can go on and on for a while. That's good for a blog entry, but not so good for a gathering that's supposed to be for wishing the new couple a nice, happy life together. In addition, about half the people there did not seem like the sort that would enjoy a long, drawn out discussion about dying in a rather unpleasant way.

Now this is going to blend varying amounts of fact and speculation. It is not gospel, nor is it me saying 'this is the way it happened.' This might be the way it happened, or it might be similar to one of the ways it happened. Or it might just be me letting my brain go off on its own for a while. But it will at least try to follow a logical path, and by doing that we can learn something. Be warned, that path is going into some pretty dark territory.

Walk through this doorway with me. Careful where you step, because we're now back in medieval times. This is a typical city, and isn't the smell lovely? Yep, that's shit in the streets. Mainly human. Stay alert while you're walking around, because people dump their bedpans out of their windows. Also, try to not look weak. Even if this place has a city watch, they're not going to care what happens to a couple of strangers.

Let's choose a home at random. For our purposes, it could be a peasant's hut or a noble's manor, or anything in between. Here we go. We'll get to the rest of the family in a minute, but for now, look at this person. It's the middle of the day and they're in bed, and not because they felt like sleeping in. They're sick. They are a bit sicker today than they were yesterday, and tomorrow they'll be a bit sicker than they are today. I don't know if it's typhus, syphilis, tuberculosis, or one of those strange diseases that we're not familiar with in modern times. But no one thinks that this person is going to live through the month.

Now let's look at the rest of the family. All of them, the husband or wife, the children, and the uncles and aunts who live in this house, know the sick person well. They've worked with them, shared meals with them, and probably even had an occasion to sleep in the same room with them a few times. That person is part of their life, and everyday they see that person get weaker and weaker.

The kind of fear that type of environment produces settles into a person's head. It stays there, and it will pop up when things get quiet, like when a person is trying to get to sleep. Now imagine one of those family members, old or young, man or woman, lying there in the quiet, dark house. They can't stop thinking about Aunty Em (we'll borrow that name because it's convenient), about how pale she looks, and about how she sounds when she coughs. Given sanitary conditions and life expectancy in the period we're in, it's probably not the first person our sleepless subject has seen waste away, and it probably won't be the last.

One thing that people everywhere have in common, and I don't think we acquired it recently, is the need for answers. We have our inner view of the world, and when something unknown confronts us, we have a deep-seated need for who, what, when, where, how, and why. We need these labels so we can make this strange threat fit into our world. Ironically, all the reference points we use for the who, what, etc, are the cornerstones of our preexisting world. A traumatic event can expand people's worlds, but there's no guarantee that it will.

Take that setting, and think about it. I'll come back to it. Daylight savings time has struck, and I need to see if I can fall asleep without thinking about something horrible. But if I can't I'll at least have something to write about.