BIOGRAPHICAL - THE REAL TITLE IS “THE CURATOR”
Early in January I started playing around with fiction. Even though I have been committed to a fiction-free writing career, once in a while, I’ll just sit down at this keyboard and write, and write and low and behold, one or two pieces each year are tiny, tidy works of fiction. The short piece below fits the ghosts of Muskoka blogsite, because this is exactly what inspired it.....the memories of living in an old house, with a resident ghost or seven, and starting out on a professional writing career......the battle between the non-fiction writer and the novelist. I have recurring dreams to this day about the mainstreet house, and while it’s true that the residence has become a composite of many old dwellings I’ve known in my life, most of the attributes are from the Bracebridge, Ontario house, that stood overlooking Memorial Park. The house is gone now but the memories are as fresh as when I was holed-up in that attic, watching the town come and go, throughout the rolling year. I loved that house, although it might not be reflected this way, in the tome to follow this introduction. It was a house that inspired me at a critical time. It still inspires me but it is all history now. The piece is entirely biographical. It is about starting out as a writer, carrying on in the profession, and the dilemma of biography we all think about in our declining years of productivity. What have I accomplished? Have I led an interesting life? Will any one remember my work? What does it matter anyway?
This is what matters to me, now, in my own retrospective, whether it is needed or not for validation. It is how I have felt for many years as a writer......who started off his career, penning stories from a haunted house. The baggage? What do you think?
A RESIDENT EVIL, THE WRITER’S MUSE
The beast.
The hunt, the kill.
As narrative, the pen runs dry.
Poison drips from needle fangs. A concoction of stirred fate. Brewed from sulphur and evil. Contempt. The scribe will not survive this intrusion. A cataclysmic fiction overwhelms.
Raging red eyes, set deep within its vapor, pierces the shield.
It makes a powerful, rabid lunge. I fall. There is no defense.
Courage drains from a gaping wound. A stench of evil fills the room. The slithering recoil of the viper, tightens to attack. No retreat. Surrender. Escape is death. It is understood. A final searing pain. Then mortal release from my resident evil, hungering for a still-warm soul.
Awaiting the fatal impact to sever this mortal coil. The wounded will suffer no longer. Anticipation, my lingering death knell. Left to quake without exclamation.
The death-blow is not delivered. There is no execution today. Nothing set free, except evil itself, laughing at my chagrin. Being spared is mercy denied! The audience of revellers is disappointed. It is my punishment. To know the antagonist has vaporized into the abyss of fiction, leaving reality to dust itself off, to begin anew. Another day. Another night. A fight to re-connect, an outcome of hell’s evocation.
The attic has suddenly become empty and silent. Only an eerie echo of literary anecdote. As if I had again, been the victim of a cruel prank. Not the honorable survivor, a wounded soldier, of a life and death struggle, as I preferred to write of this misadventure.
It passes over me as a cold, eroding wave of sea water, as it explodes a child’s sand castle. The beast is gone. I’ve survived. With clear recollection of the conflict, and heart pounding in the chest. Like a wretched, sour bile, that burns the throat, I lay there reliving the ordeal. The taste of a personal horror. The discomfort repeats without mercy, as new memories now etch upon the soul..
I open my eyes into the dark bedroom. I see the tracer blue lights of the clock, on the DVD player. The moonlight shines through the window, onto my blanket-rumpled, sweat soaked bedstead.
A therapist touches pen nib to tongue, as if ready to jot notes. But it all begins again before pen hits paper. Exhausted, battle-weary, I succumb. To dream once more.
On the ground floor, of the old house, I will become aware of a force field, undulating somewhere above. An out of place surge of power that all of a sudden shoves me toward the staircase. It doesn’t matter how much I resist. I will be forced to climb to the upper level, to confront the occupier. It won’t be a gentle encounter.
I know what dwells at the top. I’ve been here many times before. I prepare for battle. The mortal, paranormal struggle, between author and tormentor.
The attic lodger knows I’ve entered its domain. A battle of will-power. Good versus evil. I call it out, as a knight commands the dragon from its lair. I’m scared what will emerge. As the historian prostitutes to embrace the novelist’s whim of self-destruction.
The closer I get to that long, dark room, at the top of the stairs, the more chill in the air. The closer I get to smashing open the door, the more undaunted I become. Like a soldier climbing out of a deep trench, with bayonet fastened, prepared for the uphill charge. I know my foe will cut me down with a slicing blade of fire. But I do it anyway. Fear becomes the tempest within.
Nightmare after nightmare, I wake up terrified. Sweating profusely. Absolutely sure it wasn’t a dream. I can come within inches of this nebulous, powerful entity, but never see its true form. Just a moving, multi-layer of yellow vapor, hovering at the far end of the empty room. And its penetrating gaze, the flaming eyes, like two deep holes looking backwards into hell.
Several times each month, I meet the beast. I will feel on the brink of destruction, but be renewed in that cold disheveling of a spent nightmare. Broken but resolved, to soldier on. Spirituality hasn’t failed me. I fear it might. The waste basket overflows with strategies, for self preservation.
Upper Manitoba Street. An exciting place. A business neighborhood with a mix of old brick veneer residences. Estates with sentimental porches and well lit foyers, with cut-glass chandeliers, once belonging to prominent citizens of considerable means. A trail of people and cars pass in front all day, and well into the night. Some folks look in, as if watching for a ghost. Me staring out!
September 1977. A new place to call home. A recently refurbished estate, perfect for our newly launched antique business. There was an attic room with a view. A place to write. Looking down on my hometown. It was my portal of discovery. My muse, as architecture.
The attic room was cheerfully illuminated, from late October, until the full canopy of maple leaves by early June blocked the sun. The towering maples shaded the front of the old house, in the summer, and made this alcove pleasant but dark through those same months.
The window looked down over a small park, with a bandshell, and an iron-gated war memorial. The voyeur could see north and south along the main street, for about a block either way, and the protruding theatre marquis shone until midnight, well after movie goers had finally ambled away.
It was pleasant to sit by the window and watch the march of citizens, along the sidewalks and pathway, reaching through the park. The school kids trundling slowly in the morning, with a zip to their step at day’s end. A privileged vantage point for any town watcher, interested in curious comings and goings. Clandestine meetings and strange misadventures, alcohol induced domestics, and unrepentant vandals, who loved to spray-paint x-rated slogans, on the yellow bandshell pillars. Youngsters made snow angels in the December snow, and a few drunken teens, who got caught short, from party to home, frequently urinated on the snow laden shrubbery. Some collapsed on the way, and might have frozen to death. No angels. I made emergency calls.
My imagination was peaked, looking out from that portal onto the world. My senses were keen to the scent, and texture, in the march of days, season to season, drought to storm. As if I could feel the tingling of ice crystals on my outstretched hand, when flurries spiralled down through the venerable, guardian trees. Just as I could faintly smell the lilac blossoms in late May, catching, in sparkling crystals, the morning dew. Feel the warm spring rain that hit and streaked down this looking glass, and be soothed by the fragrant summer breeze, and then the romantic’s smoky autumn mist. A poetic remnant of a late harvest. The great bard’s would have celebrated this view, from here, with passionate verse and good theatre.
It was a place that nurtured imagination, and rewarded observation. I lived and worked as a voyeur. Just beyond this flawed old glass. It did, at times, seem an invasion of privacy. Yet I was compelled to watch. Sitting at the window from morning to late night. Most entertaining when the street offered up, both the rambunctious and strange.
I often felt a spiritual presence in the house. As did other residents living in smaller apartments, in the wings of the old estate. I couldn’t write anywhere else in the house, as poignantly, as in this office, shared with a supernatural taskmaster. Greedily I took the inspiration afforded me. I suppose, as repayment, I had bartered my soul.
My desk was positioned to the north side of the window, so that I could look south along the main street, and see the theatre marquis, as captivating as Gatsby’s, “Eyes of Eckleburg,” made famous by Fitzgerald. I had a beat-up paperback copy. The first book on that first desk, in that first writer’s den.
Not long after moving into the house, there were paranormal events. Rattling of door knobs, footsteps up the back steps, to voices calling out names. My name. A usual fare. Raps on the door, lights turning on and off by themselves. It was the character of all old houses. It didn’t bother me. Residents shared stories and encounters. It was a storied homestead.
The attic was calming. Outside noise was muffled, except for sirens, jack-hammers or loud yelling, when it occurred in front of the house. I would occasionally hear the old, clanging plumbing, when a toilet was flushed. When the heat came on, vents vibrated with air pressure. I could work undisturbed. Ever watchful of the world below. At times, this was the distraction.
The windows were nailed shut. Even if they hadn’t been, the layers of paint would have required a huge amount of gouging to free up. It wasn’t of great consequence because even on the hottest day in July, the attic was surprisingly moderate. I didn’t write much at all through the summer season. I thrived on the bright attic that returned in mid October. Long after the leaves had blown clear of the outstretched maple boughs. The ones that snapped hard against the window pane, in November wind storms.
In that first full year, living in the doctor’s house, I was whacking out reams of copy. I got a start on my first novel, and was approved for a weekly newspaper column on antiques and collectibles. A sort of advertising trade-off with the weekly’s publisher, instead of any cash changing hands.
Only a few days following New Years, after our first full year in the house, I had my first significant attic incident. I was working late, half-watching a talk show on a small black and white portable. Typing during commercials. It was shortly after ten, when I decided to leave the balance of the copy, until the next morning. I flicked off the television, my desk lamp, and headed for the staircase, at the back of the cavernous room. There was one overhead light, positioned about ten feet from the door to the stairs. There was no illumination from that point, except a dim bathroom light on the second floor. I’d meant to fix that situation but hadn’t at this point. It was precarious coming down the rickety steps but there was guiding light enough for safe passage.
Once on the second floor landing, I’d reach, out of routine, into the adjacent bathroom, and turn off its light. The kitchen lamp on the first floor, offered enough glow so that I could safely navigate the remaining flights.
Shortly after turning off the last switch, and stepping slowly onto the first step down, I was suddenly consumed by a most startling white mist. I could see, feel, taste and smell its musty essence. I began to shiver, as if I’d come out of a freezer. It moved slowly, seemingly through my body. There was no doubt, on that dark staircase, that while I was going down, something of paranormal ilk had been coming up.
The attic door slammed shut. I felt the vibration run down the hand rail. I retreated with extreme prejudice. A quick distancing from a force, with intent unknown.
When I got to the bottom of the stairs, I sat down on the bottom step. An unsettled contemplation influenced by fear and trembling. Had I encountered a resident ghost? Of course I had! I knew I wasn’t the only occupant of the attic. That was clear the first night.. Was I in harm’s way? Collateral damage? I still think about this, when I wake up in a cold sweat, following an attic duel in dreamland.
From that point, I never walked up those creaking steps, or through the attic door, without expecting to meet the manifestly undead, or the helplessly transient, in that limbo known as our office space. This had been a doctor’s house and medical clinic, back in the 1920's. Possibly the doctor also retreated to the loft, after a busy day, to watch over the bustling mainstreet, as a sort of self-appointed guardian. As I also fancied myself, its historian.
It’s not just in dreams I re-visit this haunted place. I feel its subtle influences often. Sometimes on moonlit walks, on winter nights, I will remember what it looked like, all aglow, when I’d be hiking home through the snow. It’s lit windows making it look like a Hallowe’en pumpkin, fire-lit eyes, against a deep, consuming darkness. Think about it on stormy nights, when the wind rattles the raspberry canes and lilac branches, against the glass of my new home office. Just as it had rapped the maple boughs against the glass, so many winters ago, during those late night vigils. Storm and house groaning in a haunting harmony.
I can still see it so clearly, as the sun would penetrate its inner sanctum, in late April; the joy mixed with melancholy, as light fades to shadow, and nightfall intrudes in the cycle of existence. At times we even seemed to enjoy each other’s company. House and author in that strange embrace of ambitions and history.
Sometimes I wonder, after suddenly waking from this nightmare, if my departure from that house, had generated a sort of paranormal discontent. Like the ill fated pact that gave Dorian Gray, his eternal youth. Possibly my own portrait had been painted with an implied tithe? Could I have so foolishly, in a writer’s madness, made a pact with that house. To remain faithful forever? In return for its generous inspiration. A feeling of sudden abandonment, and hatred, that a broken partnership can conjure up. Maybe I denied it, in my haste, a proper farewell. A respectful acknowledgment that its kindnesses had afforded me a prosperous writer’s life. A deep well of creative ambition.
It gave me a place, a solitude, a spark. The reason to create. Just as I’m undoubtedly creating these manifestations of beast and battle, the bitter sweet reckoning of broken prophecies, and a path strewn with the shattered glass of all broken promises. I was being hunted by a perplexing guilt.
The nightmare, in all its complexity and contradiction, of battle, victory and defeat, was a stabbing reminder our partnership was never severed. We’ve still got much to write about......this haunting and me. Apparently, as fortune or misfortune may have it, partners to the end.
And I thought it was just a nice old house with a big attic. My biography. This narrative. Complete!
