~ gM4
* * *
From the bookstore forum:05.13.05
"haunted when the minutes drag".
So I'm in the can upstairs minding my own business, when the lights turn off. Fumbling about with my pants I get up and cross the room to discover the lightswitch has been moved down, yet the bathroom door is still locked, and of course I am alone. Or was I?
Hearsay has it that when Grant was but a humble grocery store a young lass named Rita tripped and snapped her neck at the bottom of the stairs. Since then Granties have felt her presence, found the phone music turned on in the empty conference room at the end of the hall, and a lucky handful have even seen her standing near the stairs only to vanish an instant later. And very few days go by where someone doesn't misstep on that same fatal staircase and barely avoids history repeating itself.
One staffer gives account of a Darke Man suited up 1940s style with a chilling aura appearing & disappearing in the Kids' room as well.
Would like to suggest that we take these two souls with us when the Grant store moves downtown. Transplanting a small chunk of kids' room concrete & our bottom stair should prove enough to rescue them from oblivion.
The living now number as many as the whole host of history's dead. Despite this, the dead still have the advantage. Anything could have happened to me during those moments in that darkened bathroom after all, but I think Rita likes me. May the Phoenix staffers find equal peace & respect with their hauntings. Otherwise I hear salt or spit sometimes work, but don't bet on it.
Memento Mori ~
Sñr Guillermo the IVth
"If you stay in the Center
& embrace Death
with your whole Heart
You will endure Forever."
~ Lao Tzu
Tao Te Ching
ch XXXIII
* * *
From the Dark Diary: 11/23/01 11:17 pm
It comes together while driving to my girlfriend's like Beethoven's roaring silencio at 29: the rabbi's tapes said that the dead are not to be feared (for the most part) unlike the horror movies would have us believe. Since they've passed into a state of permanence some of their characteristics become fixed. Rita can trip people on the stairs, turn on the music in the back room, and sometimes flick off the lights in the bathroom. The old tenant in my apartment can open cupboards. Angie's milkbottle presence can follow people down the hall and make its presence known. But they repeat these instances over and over again like other ghosts because that's all they can do -- it's the only way left they have to manifest, and it's also how they’re bound. That's why people who are at haunted sites see the same things. Their choice to do otherwise has been taken away, as the rabbi says only the living get free will and choices. This idea makes sense, but the reality's not as rigid as all that. The dead can be malign like Angie's winged hallway wraith, and can affect the living adversely even though their means of doing so might be limited. Your free will also might be the answer to the question "Why do the dead hate the living?" in some cases. They resent us because they can no longer choose, or they resent having to watch some of us make the same mistakes they made and they can no longer affect this, or they wish to thwart us in these choices and hate that they cannot.
Take these theorems and apply them to the vampire: a being has passed into a state beyond death into an immortal coil, but because it lasts forever it must perform a certain action -- feed on the living. That is the vampire's repeated manifestation. In this, the Strigoi has no choice.
* * *
 |
| [Not Rita, but some other ghost on some other staircase.] |
***
From email: Subject: the Seen & Unseen
Date: Mon, 01 Oct 2001 16:31:03 -0700
From: Guillermo the IVth
Organization: Club Golgotha
To: "A.G." <--@-----.com>
Bearer of the Spirits A---- ~
It's not just the ghosts; there are things above & below us, infernal & divine. It is written that a third of the angels, a rebellious 133,306,668 of them Fell, leaving their stations as intermediaries from us to god, to think for themselves, to serve and pursue their own desires -- & some still cater to ours but in a different fashion.
Also a balance has been struck in terms of population: the current living equal all the world's Dead, and so now for every one of us there is one of them.
"If the eye could see the demons that people the universe, existence would be impossible." -- Talmud, Berakhot, 6.
These and the ghosts and angels (or what we've culturally decided to name them) aren't agents of anything so ordered as karma or destiny, but more interested parties of the Blessed & Damned, either to aid or hinder or just watch. Mine provide protections over & under me, and I'm thankful to be within their aegis because I know they want me to be here, and my sense of permanence reflects their intentions.
Everyone at work trips on the stairs, teetering to repeat that moment where Rita lost her life at the bottom. Does Rita want company? Does she just want to know that someone can be as unlucky as she to suffer such an empty and stupid Death? Or is it not even her, just the echo of the moment reaching to the present? (The last is a theory proposed by some physicists who say places retain intense emotional energies [like alpha waves] that influence the now. But Rita's there -- she turned the bathroom lights off on me once, and every so often I'll go to the conference room and the background music will be on at full blast coming from the phone, but the lights will be off and nobody's there at all. She just wants something to listen to, or someone to come in back and be in the dark with her for a moment.)
In my apartment cupboards slowly swing open without aid of my hand, the same shelf has fallen 3 times in the past couple months, and my sugar skull recently split apart for no apparent reason. Maybe the former tenant still doesn't know he had a heart attack here. Maybe he does and he's still angry about it, and this is all he can do. Maybe he just needs some attention from time to time so he can stay.
Poe (the singer) placed samples of her late father's last lectures from tapes that she found in his attic into her songs on her last album, "Haunted", and contrasts them with samples of a little girl's voice that is supposed to be hers. It's clever and creepy at times.
My mother's father, Cippriano, visits her. Alone in bed, she'll feel somebody come to sit down on the mattress but my father's not home. And she has a reoccurring dream that he was buried alive, and is still there in the ground trying to get out. She still dreams this dream after 30 years, and it's something she's learned to live with.
Existence is significantly different for the Dead, with differences in time, thought process, manifestation, need, and these factors as well as our own sensitivity and accessibility determine if and when we can perceive them.
Some metaphysical systems state that our souls suffer a second Astral Death. We stay lost here for a time as ghosts, but post-Death the "silver cord" that binds us to our physicality in life has been severed and in its absence the energy that makes up the Soul, which is now untethered, disperses and we meet a more final oblivion -- unless provisions or circumstances ensure otherwise.
Outside of Chicago there's a small town where lies the tomb of the Massochs, a trio of brothers who were butchers (professional not criminal) early last century. In the 1960s their rest was desecrated when someone broke in and took one of their heads. The culprit was caught and punished, the head returned, but since the event a woman and a decade later a girl were found near the crypt, alive but suffering huge blood loss. Other lesser incidents also occurred: a gang of camping bikers was scared away by someone, a dog was found dead, what appeared to be a gigantic "black worm" flew forth from the keyhole at a ghost hunter.
The property was made private.
In 1998 while visiting Chicago I drove out to Spring Valley near sundown and asked in the town until someone was kind enough to direct me there. Set 30 yards away from a bend in the road sits a group of graves in the wood, the mausoleum being the only above ground gravesite.
Waited two hours until I could barely see in the gloaming darkness.
Near the end of that vigil, the sound of scraping came from inside and for a few breathless seconds my heart stopped. A little later I went back to the car to get some paper and in a slot-like hole in the upper western face of the crypt placed a letter to the Brothers requesting audience, and bloodied the paper so I could later be found.
The pictures I took didn't come out.
These things, the daemons, ghosts, angels, Undead, are inhuman, either more absolute or abstract in existence as we know it, and some possess a supernature and qualities that are transferable. We sense this monstrousness & this is why it's horrifying when we brush up against such things.
Much of post-Death states has to do with power of will, and it is that force, how well one knows themselves and the resulting strength of id that may very well keep us here. Desire to remain lets us remain.
In many ways words, like component in occult ritual, and even as part of creative ritual, lock and capture and embalm the Soul, and the more artful we are in defining ourselves in the medium and Art, the more likely we can endure past Death not only in our works, but even in this life.
We are Touched by Our Dead ~
Guillermo
who courts & is courted
by the Seen & Unseen
* * *
Afterword:10.09.05
Two months ago my co-worker Peter, the man who witnessed the Darke Man in our kids' room so long ago, walked down the back stairs as he has for every workday, six times a day, for 18 years. But that afternoon he fell down from the landing, careening off the handrail, and somehow landed an improbable four feet away from the bottom of the stairs to smack his skull against the corner of a sharp baseboard. When he came to, he cried out for help, and we found him a bloody mess. Disoriented as he was, we called paramedics, but as he slowly collected himself, Peter seemed more embarrassed than anything, even apologizing to the men who came to help him. Something had gone amiss with his knee, and the gash was only superficial. "It was the ghost!" I wrote in his get well card, and after Peter got back a week later, he took a moment to ask me about that when we were alone in the breakroom.
"You really think it was the ghost?!?"
"Well, no -- I really don't think Rita's that kind of ghost."
Peter laughed, which was what I wanted him to do, but the question was still there for him, scarred into his forehead, marking two moments in time, a piece of misfortune shared, one dead and one spared.
# # #
 |
| [Still not Rita, just another haunted staircase.] |
# # #
While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.
