Specimen #2

In honor of the release of my collection THIRTEEN SPECIMENS from Delirium Books (see my post of July 4), in oh-so-affordable trade paperback form, I am posting thirteen entries that will each feature an excerpt from one of the thirteen pieces in the book. In addition, each post offers an odd little specimen from my personal life. I’ll leave it to you to decide which, fact or fiction, is more compellingly disturbing. Here’s the next item on our tour…

(1) From the poem TITLES OF POEMS NOT WRITTEN: 

God’s Jelly Mold

Protoplasmic Dreams

Hamsters Brave and Bold

Termite Invasion Schemes

A Fistful of Aphorisms

North is Really South

Unheard Cataclysms

I Ate My Mouth

(2) Frights real or imagined:

My wife and I recently moved into a new apartment, which is contained within a huge old Victorian house, and though I’ve been reluctant to approach the subject with our landlord (lest I frighten her, or at least make her fear for my sanity), the place might just be haunted. We’ve only been here about a month, but within that time, my wife says that on three consecutive nights — at the same time, around 2 AM, while I was at my job — she heard the screen door of our porch open, and then someone stand there sobbing on the other side of the door to our tiny apartment. As for myself, one afternoon while I sat at my computer listening to music a bit too loud, I heard a gentle little rapping on the back door just to my right, or perhaps on the other side of the wall. Worried that I’d upset my landlord with the music, I opened the back door but found no one in the hall. Later I casually asked my landlord if we’d been loud, thinking that she had knocked on her side of the wall about the music, but she said she hadn’t heard anything from us at all (and I can believe it, as the mountain of a house is amazingly quiet; I seldom if ever hear anything from the landlord, who occupies most of the house, or the woman who lives in an attic apartment with her young daughter). Since these episodes my wife and I have been jumpy, seen and heard other odd things, but then we may just be misinterpreting innocent happenings because of our earlier experiences. I believe my wife isn’t lying, and if what she heard had only occurred once I might think she’d been dozing and dreamed it (she stays up late watching TV, by the way, to more or less stay in a sleep pattern with me).

It doesn’t help matters that my wife has been away for a few days, and while on vacation from work I’ve stayed up at night alone watching eerie videos on YouTube, creeping myself out even more. The scariest one I’ve seen concerned the true life case of Anneliese Michel, who inspired the film “The Exorcism of Emily Rose,” which I’ve never seen but would like to. The photos of her wasted, bruised face and recordings of her distorted growlings make me feel as I did when I saw “The Exorcist” for the first time in the theater; brrr. Were her demons real or only in her head? I believe the latter, but…who knows? Another eerie video I’ve seen is called Sonee, which is basically just a stationary computer-wrought image of a beautiful Asian girl, but supposedly if you stare at it fixedly for five minutes you will see subtle changes or some other disturbing effect. I’m with the skeptics who comment that any perceived effects are merely psychological, based on one’s own nervous expectation, the spooky background music, and just plain eye strain (though there are some stupid, less subtle Sonee rip-offs that cut to a scary face at the end). I will say, though, that the eyes follow you unnervingly no matter what angle you view it from, whether far to the side or even looking down at the screen from above. It reminds me of a portrait of Jesus I saw on a religious pamphlet one time. Then, and with Sonee I believe, it has to do with a subtle blurring of the picture’s eyes. Anyway, I appreciate the subtlety of Sonee, and you can meet the mysterious lady for yourself here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTmwBhLMlFg

…and don’t forget THIRTEEN SPECIMENS: https://www.horror-mall.com/THIRTEEN-SPECIMENS-by-Jeffrey-Thomas-Trade-Paperback-p-18122.html