Date: Thu, 9 Dec 2004 19:10:15 -0800 From: Timothy Stillman Subject: g/m y/f mild or no sex "The Haunted House of Love" The Haunted House of Love by Timothy Stillman (Dedicated in loving memory to William M. Gaines, brave defender of truth and freedom of the press--the guiding genius of the magnificent never to be equaled EC horror comics) No one had lived in the old Grimly house since anyone could remember. That included adults' memories. So, when Jimmy made me finally get up the nerve to take him there, we walked up on those rotted boards that comprised what was once porch flooring, as we had somehow been desperate enough to be alone with each other in this especial place, and then we both, his hand on mine, opened the warped paint scarred door, queasily, it and us, with the partly shattered glass handle, and thus ensconced ourselves in all that musty cold blackness, we were transported to our own boy heaven/nightmare. Jimmy was taller than me. He was stronger. One year older. Braver. Truer. I was his go-fer. And he loved me for it. He loved me cause he got to be the hero. And the hero had led me that first time across the crawling shades of the rambling old creaking house to the main bedroom up those treacherous old stairs, with those ancient ancestor paintings looking right out at us. That bedroom with the corpse cold clammy bed and its haphazard pile of crazy quilts and blankets and its sense of ancient forebodings there wet and deep and full of nightshade secretions. He had lowered me in his arms to the bed that had not been slept in for centuries it seemed. And he had lay on top of me. Vast numbers of years floated up in the motes and dust we evoked there. And certain deeds done once in this place. The murders that had happened here. And now, where we made our own unique indentations. The need, the creakiness, the creeps of the surroundings, the daring, the call of a magpie in the distance, and some rats rustling in the attic directly over our head, all of that made it different for us. Unique. Unexplainable. Made it a kind of counterpane of possible terrors we lay on, as we found salvation only in each other. Who else here, after all, could we count on? I talked like that even then. My tongue was a pen dipped in purple prose. I dwelled in words, or so I thought, until Jimmy moved next door to me. And bested me in that department. We both loved words. He taught me so much more about them. Words on paper. Words spoken in movies and on TV. They were enormously important to us They were things we could hide behind. Jimmy took all that one step farther; he enveloped me in the poetry and the flourishes that I could mutely read in his tall gangly body, his eyelashes that would have made Bambi blush, his silken sweet laughter like cooling showers after a hot summer day, in the joyous way he had of making me laugh and sing. He came with himself, to visit me, that first day after he and his parents moved in, and with him, he brought his collection of EC Horror Comics. I had been an afraid child all that time. I had turned from such things. But somehow, Jimmy made me open up a certain, dare I say it?, vault inside myself that allowed me to be intrigued. First, because my mind was not on the comic books. Secondly, because my mind was most definitely not on the comic books he held in his lap. I was looking at his legs descending from his summer shorts, and I was looking at his hands and his face. I took a huge chance, and did not pretend it was the comics that interested me. I was faint and my heart beat fast. And he smiled at me, as we sat close, in the cool of my air conditioned living room. And I knew it would be okay. So, I smiled back. I had not done a lot of that before him. Gradually, though, in the first warmth of him that summer that grew warmer still as autumn flamed into being and had its day with us and the world around us, I started really reading those comic books. Because, I thought, they would tell me about him. And I was desperate to know absolutely everything about Jimmy. We talked over the stories and we thought it great fun to read about boys like us who went to Mars or were deformed and with magical powers given by radiation poisoning at the end of the world when man got stupid enough to wipe himself out; or adults who got revenge in mostly sadistic, but satisfying ways in their little corners of the world We loved to sit on my gray nubby couch in the afternoons of green summer or the brown brisk Fall afternoons after school, and just pour through these comics, our bare legs deliciously touching, more and more, back away, then there again; thinking it so rich that adults in these magical books could lose control of their emotions, kill their husbands and wives in really neat ways, and of course, the corpses were always granted their measure of revenge. This wasn't DC stuff. Or even Marvel. This stuff could somehow really happen. It was set in the real world, and then the real world was turned into a bloodbath. Just like the real world often is, though we didn't know that then. Something about boys and horror. We couldn't get our fill. The comic books made us verge on poetry. Me, for the first time, really knowing what it was begun to be about. That and Jimmy of course. They taught us our hands. They taught us our eyes. And our imaginations. And that late summer day with the sky all red and sad because it was the ending of the green season, I told Jimmy about the Grimly place. And the murders that had been committed there long ago. I wanted to impress him. I did not tell him I had never had the courage to even go close to the house. His eyes lit up. He asked if the murders involved acid or fire or knives or poisonings or what? He wanted a full compendium of all of it. And I told him what I knew. He reveled in it, and it frightened me. He did everything but roll off to the floor, hold his sides, and roar. He was a very polite boy. Watch out for those very polite boys. You never know what they're really up to. A very nice boy to everyone. And that second day we were together, in my mother's house, alone, he kissed me, and the aloneness went away. Never, I thought, to return again. And he said, let's go take a look at that house. So, one afternoon, after he had asked and asked, and then, threatened me with his going away from me, as I took a great gulp in me, we did. We lay in that bed of death, made it a bed of life, boy life, but unlike the magazine thus titled, and we felt so damn brave and reckless, and we talked and we held each other and we imagined all the dark October midnights calling out to us, and only us. We came to be children when we were not fighting anything in particular. Not a war. Not a depression. Not other children or adults making trouble for us specifically. These haunted house terrors we thought controllable. Manageable. We needed them to push ourselves against and to grow. Maybe. We lived in a small Midwestern town. Everything went on economically and peacefully. So we had to have something to spice things up. We had not discovered Spicy Detective just yet. We had spicy each other, and we needed something past the crypt keeper and the old witch, and all those horrible puns leading into and out of those involvingly designed drawn and painted panels on the pages of our darkest dreams. We needed us first time, all the way, in that old dark house. To humanize it. To demonize it all the more. We needed it to be a real house. Not like Miss Havesham's. But like the soft droppy cake bed we found and in the midst of the mustiness where we giggled and squirmed and held to, as we tried to hear other doors opening to other wheres. We had lay there the first time we went to the house, which was two days after the end of Halloween. My knees had been jelly. My bowels had done cartwheels as we approached the house. Jimmy was strong. I could lean on him. I'd be okay. We had not celebrated Halloween with the other children. We were by ourselves mostly. Because, hard as it was to believe, we had fallen for each other. And we needed some history to prop us up. And boys and haunted houses and ghost stories to be made visible, touchable, in this ancient bloody red murder house--well, how could we resist? Would we see the past, the murders, happen again? Jimmy wanted to, so much. I leaned more toward not wanting to. A corpse ground head on a newel post. A villain placed on a plaque like a fish caught on the water (blood?) stained gray torn slices of wallpapered walls. A closet door opening slowly and from the darkness within, the unthinkable steps out and greets us. Monsters rising from the asphalt directly outside the horror house, and causing all sorts of bloodiness to follow. Big, gloppy and deadly. To die and not to die at all, we, at that age. The comic book pictures showed us things we had not seen before. They were creepy and gory and fine. We had managed to divorce ourselves, without thinking about it, from any kind of reality of it. At least I did, needing the safety of that. There was the need to know certain things, and if Don Quixote tilted at windmills on whose bloody blades rested sausage links taken from a most unappetizing place, then so be it. I had begun to want to know too. We were ghouls and we went to Sunday School almost of our own accord most of the time. And we saw no schism there at all. And if you've really read the Bible, you know there isn't. Jimmy knew things. He played a game with me he called our Fourth Dimension, gotten from some of the EC stories. Like we were in that dimension when we were in that old smelly house with its moths and its rolly torn and brooding floorings awash with blood, as we saw it. And, there, somehow, we could see far rounder and far wider than anyone else in the third dimension could ever hope to. They, the ones outside, became, to us, like the far inferior second dimension and were stopped, as in one of the EC comics, by the drawing of a circle around them they could not hop over, even if they had thought of it. The house, which we explored, after we explored each other, seemed like an old sailor from an uncharted sea far distant, with the mists and the fogs and strangly seaweed from ocean bottoms, and severed tentacles and tendrils, and the moons of dreams of bejeweled times and lost passionate loves, coming with him, in our minds, at least. And doubloons in his pockets that were dropped out like Easter eggs in this ancient crumbling dwelling, and if we looked hard enough in the scary night that was always inside here, we would surely, one day, find one or two. I imagined Jimmy without his clothes. And thus he was. He imagined me the same. Like the house gave us to each other. Its needing of us. And it came true. We imagined each other and ourselves without our flesh and with our viscera exposed, or rather he did and I tried. Though it made me sad, I pretended for his sake. Because it meant we were mortal, if such were true, if we were really wearing those unhealthy icky sick looking things inside of us, that in some horrible way, kept us alive, that we could not exist without, but it made Jimmy laugh. He said it made him alive. And he would hold me and he said he would protect me from the bogeyman. And I told him he was the bogeyman and I needed no protection; indeed, he was the one who needed that. And we would cuddle on the bed where the "shocking double murders," which was how they were referred to in the old local newspapers in the newspaper morgue, had taken place. We would touch and wonder at the tears in old pillow cases and the long tear in the musty sheets. We would think who got it first? How did it feel? Was it quick? Or was it a long time dying? And these stains here on the bed--what could they be ? Blood and beyond blood. And us lying there, the dead's shadows in the same positions when it happened, maybe. And be amazed at our being there, in this place not the bravest of kids, big talk, would ever be, here, in the country of each other, and as much as amazed if not more so at the country of ourselves. We imagined hatchets in heads and mad feverish red runny veined eyeballs coming at us out of the bunched pinched darkness, like asteroids we had to duck from. We ducked and covered and held our arms over each other and protected and were protected, and laughed, my god, I have never laughed so much in my life, and I just gave way to every feeling I had. We were part of everything in that house. The edge of everything. Infinity. The worst deeds a man can do. Or have done. Everything on revenge. Everything on what can't even be thought about too much at all. It seemed to write us in so many ways, that house. All cold autumn and skittering cats and bear claws rubbing menacingly against the thin shaky walls of the house, or maybe it was just squirrels playing skittles to pass the time until a nut rush for winter to head out to again. But all the same, Jimmy and I had never taken all our clothes off in that house. So if we had to, we could pull up, pull down, and make a fast hearted break for the door. Though he was tough. And I was tough--kinda. And we had our own little infantile horrors to work through, that we thought were never as big as we could be. Maybe the house did it. To get back at us. To revenge itself on us smart boys with our little games and littler minds.. Like the fact the house sometimes seemed to breathe. After we were finished and lay still as though formless flesh into formless flesh, which was ourselves tightly as we could get to each other, and the shades all pulled down and the grit always on our hands and under our fingernails and the soles of our feet and bodies, as though caught up on the sandy shore of beyond, we could hear the house taking over our breathing for us. Push in. Push out. Sometimes we saw the walls expand and contract. And the horror murders that happened, happened like this: Mrs. Grimily had two timed her husband, for the sandy haired man. She had betrayed him just as scads of women betrayed their husbands who they had married for money and no other reason; husbands always older than they and lingering into total boredom and vapidity, in all those EC horror comics. Mr. Grimly had been an invalid. He had slept downstairs, which had left her to her upstairs bedroom, because he was in a wheelchair, and being put to rest each night on the couch in the living room was easier on him. And on her. But he knew exactly what was going on. And he bided his time wisely, before that cold dish of revenge was served. So of course, she let Mr. Brawny sleep with her in her room. Tricking up the stairs while Mr. Grimly, cuckolded, was beddy bye. Or they thought he was. Mr. Brawny, who had conveniently dropped by one day while her husband was away, to check on the heater in the basement that was acting up. But Mrs. Grimly, upon seeing the young man's heaven sent broad shoulders, had decided she was eager to be the one acting up, and Mr. Brawny soon joined her in that eagerness. And the whole thing played out like in the horror comics. It involved convoluted plotting, lots of flashbacks, sweaty brows, broken limbs, screaming, and blood freshly tossed just about everywhere, and more gore than young eyes could stand right below the comic book panel. Mr. Grimly did get his revenge indeed. Newspapers back then were so flowery worded that it took both the concentration of Jimmy and me to figure out what the hell had really happened. We, of course, made it all gorier and more grotesque than it was, though it had been a dilly all by itself. Mr. Brawny and Mrs. Grimly did get to be together, for all eternity, in a double plot at the cemetery. Mr. Grimly had treated them to pauper's graves. And Mr. Grimly was tried, was found innocent, because back then, adultery was considered a major device for the elocution of murder to be most definitely justified. He spent the little rest of his life in this house. After that, it sank into its own swamp. And became something for kids to throw cans and balls through the windows, and touch the front door, then run like hell, if you dared. And became a legend. Not Lizzie Borden style. But close to. For us at least. Looking back, I can't believe Jimmy and I weren't scared out of our minds to be in this place for a third of a second, much less hours. And almost naked. And thoroughly helpless. But boys get to be helpless either a lot in their lives or not often enough and it seems, whichever it is for them, they want more of it, not less. Go figure. We both had decided that the trick ending of those stories was what life should be lived toward. That the past should impinge. That we should get somebody's just deserts, if they didn't get them their own damn selves, and I think Jimmy had silently volunteered to take them on, if no one else would. We had learned from so much we read and saw, in our blessed fantasy world, outside of school, which we hated, especially the books we were forced to read that taught us nothing but stupefaction, and in that fantasy world, heroes had to be doomed, and lovers had to be star crossed. The last time Jimmy and I were there together, the last time we were together at all, it happened like this. Of course, it was in that bedroom where the murders had occurred some time warp link ago. I had fallen asleep, and found myself waking to dimly see Jimmy, with only his shirt on, standing by the window, and peeking out the drape and the shade, but in my gut it seemed he was a much farther distance away than that. It had become night early that time of year. We had brought a candle with us like always. Smearing reality and fantasy horror and release and escape and capture with us in that swaying golden yellow light so small and so dear, which held us to reality whether we wanted to admit it or not, and we did need it. I had gotten up. Had walked to the shadow boy by the window. I said his name easily, so I wouldn't surprise him when I put my hand a moment later on his shoulder. I rubbed the shoulder to be sure he was real. To be sure he was not some ghost glommed onto by this house in a moment of pain to make all of this a sad dream to be longed for my whole life to come. "They should have gotten theirs." Jimmy's voice was tony and flat at the same time. He saw things or tried to see things other kids couldn't or hadn't thought of trying. And that includes me. Jimmy was a dark boy, a shadow dreamer. He was serious. He believed in this hero stuff. He wasn't a mimic. I was. Of him. "No," I said, standing in back of him, pressing myself against him, feeling that goosebumpy coldness of his singular body against mine that had been warmed by the covering I had been under a moment ago, and now trying to warm his. "No," I said. "They got axed. They got what they deserved. He didn't do anything wrong." I was sleepy and wanted him to come back to bed with me. We had talked all this out before. The unbelievability of the murder weapon slashing downward right as they were making love, for it seemed that must have been how and when it happened. To have happened any other way just would not have been right. And also: The way cowardice will out at such times. Seeing one axed, the other one, caring not for that person, but rushing away to the other side of the room where he was nailed as well. We had gone at each other like in a movie because that way we could pretend we were not boys or girls or either but something more, something alien that others wouldn't understand and so we didn't have to feel guilty or ashamed or have the need to explain any of this to anyone. A curse, that need to do so, very prevalent back then. The cold winds were soughing. The night room seemed on a tilt. Jimmy was a man as boy and I was a boy as man. It didn't bear thinking about, but could have not worked any other way. He asked me if I would feel like Mr. Grimly, if he, Jimmy, betrayed me. Jimmy was handsome and had tender black eyes and he was a conjurer. His dreams were for us though. In our little four dimensional world. His dreams for the world out there, in the world he also fitted in perfectly, seemed, though I had not thought it before, had not dared, to me, already a betrayal. I surprised myself in thinking this exact thought, I expect you to betray me; I'm firming myself up for it. And that hurt, mostly because that was my expectation, unbeknownst certainly to me. "I keep thinking it," Jimmy was saying. "They were making love. And whoever Grimly had hired to do the murders, comes in and whacks `em. And there was that forbidden baby in a bottle of formaldehyde that was also a part of the story; the baby that was smothered to death and was exhibited in a carnival side show as a freak from Mars, cause the baby had only one arm and three legs, and it just all ended up in screams. No one learned anything." Jimmy was always one for learning things. He tried to find meaning everywhere. I mean, Mickey Mouse cartoons, he tried to find meanings in them. Honest. The thing about the freak baby though was something I remembered from several EC horror stories, not from what we had read happened here. "I bet they're out there, you know," Jimmy said, sort of creepily, which made me fancy him even more for some morbid reason I don't want to think about, "I bet they're out there with the dead werewolf and the pregnant dead vampire, celebrating their giving birth to their dead baby. I wish I was that baby." Then he paused, to great effect. And whispered, "Maybe I am." I backed away from him. My stomach getting sick. Who the hell was this guy? Where the hell did he come from? Hell? This was getting too much. I dared myself to be brave, not to think he had slipped his noodle off his plate of spaghetti grue, and walked to him again and I did the things we did, or tried to, but he pushed me away. In fact, he pushed me away so hard, I fell flat on my ass. I looked at him in shadows and grainy firefly imaginings like the grainy pages of the pulp comic books. As though he were receding into one of them, like drowning in crudely made papery quicksand. And there was nothing I could do about it. I expected a gleeful cackle of the keeper of the vault or something maybe out of him. I wanted to turn the page and find the ads for Charles Atlas and boys! grow spider monkeys and x-ray glasses, and all of that. But that was no go. Regardless of what is happening, it has its own way with you and there is nothing you can do to stop it. Horror had turned round its serpent head and had bitten us back. The poison pain felt just awful. The betrayal of the horror for us felt worse to me at least. We thought you could trust it. It's a laugh now, to think such an insane thing. But we did then. He was mad, my Jimmy. Mad as a hatter. He was in all that darkness and he was darker than any of it. He saw something that was beyond bearable, even though I could not see him seeing anything, or see him at all in the gloomy glow. He scared me. Me, master of the understatement. He crumbled my foundation. I would never find another place to stand. I had always felt safe with him. That was the thing of it with me. He always made me feel like he was protecting me. The world had cracked open for me. I did not want to see what was inside waiting. "I'm a freak in a freak show," he said. And he was gibbering to me. It made me laugh. It made me cry. It made me colder than Christmas. I thought my hair might have turned snow white. Now, keep in mind, boys like this sort of stuff. They live for it. I don't care what they tell you. It gives them, us, permission. We are all slammed in the gut with testosterone and orders and what we are supposed to be and what we are supposed to do, and if the chemicals don't affect our bodies like they should, or if we don't do what we are told, like a boy falling in love with another boy, then you have problems. We kidded ourselves all these months. The comic books did all they could to save us. They gave it their best shot. They truly did. But we had problems. Obviously, we did now. One whole helluva lot of problems. There was no going back. This was no corpse come for his late lamented birthday cake. This was no piranha revenge in a bathtub of death. This was no neatly summed up gotcha! that a boy could sink his teeth into and want to do that very thing to the most hated of all teachers, his own. This was real. And boys don't need reality all that much. It's a different kind of reality they need. One every bit as important. Or moreso. I wanted to put out the candle and just scare myself spitless and go stark staring mad. Then fumble for my clothes, dress, and get out of here and get away from Jimmy cause he was freaking me out biggest time. I wanted to be mad for the both of us, suck the madness out of him that way, I thought, scared, trembling, feeling about three years old. He cackled. He actually cackled , and he hurt in it, I've never heard such pain in my life, and I could imagine his eyeballs feverish and hot and grainy and red veined and wide and staring out at nothing at all, but, at the same time, at something from a dimension we had not been in yet and that he had not considered, that no one but he could come close to seeing. "I'm a freak in a side show. There's sawdust all around. The night is hot. The rubes stand there with their candy apples and their limeades and their icy Cokes and their bags of popcorn, and they stick their eyes into me and they are crucifying me as the calliope plays Ring Round the Rosie for the millionth time. It makes me sick. It makes me know that they KNOWWWWWW. I don't want to be this. I don't want those corpses to come after me. I DIDN'T DO ANYTHING." Then sweep down to a whisper, he added, " they have to, for any of this to make any sense." I half way expected the down fall of a swooshing ax at that point. I curled up into a ball and didn't want to be half naked. I listened to him. And he was crying. I've never heard him cry before. I never heard any boy cry. It terrified me. It made me deeper in my core than I had been to that point. I hated him for it. Who was doing this to my friend? Who? He was telling someone, himself, the ghosts herein, not me though, that he had killed his kid sister, that he had been eight or seven or something and his sister was just a little girl, and she got all the attention and all the love and all the devotion from his parents that he had been getting until then, and she cooed and giggled and googled and his parents laughed and loved her to death, and forgot him, and he had one night late when everyone was asleep, taken his pillow and had gone to her crib. And he went on and on about it. I believed every word of it. Everything in me cringed. Like I always believed everything everyone told me. Especially what he told me. He had a Roderick Usher living in his head. Of course later on I found out he had never had a kid sister at all. That he had made it up. Or that he had believed it. Or it had all gotten so out of hand, that I didn't know what to believe. Or his parents had lied about it to protect him. Or to torment him all his days. All those squirmy squiggly thoughts adults in those comic books had. You can't trust anybody about anything. Not like in the real world--cough cough. Always trying to drive each other nuts. Or being nuts, trying to save themselves from the nuts out to harm them, when they were just innocent people in the wrong place at the wrong time, and it turns out the supposed victim trying to protect himself or herself from the possible maniacs is the real monster after all. Such things resulting in the final panel of someone quite loony tunes in a padded cell, looking out their craziness at you, saying desperately in big black ink, won't you help me,? please, won't you? So here is where I tell you I rushed to my lover (my lover? Christ, he was 14, I was 13) and I held him and I talked gently to him and I told him it was going to be all right, and we were after all just kids and this had all been a game and he hadn't meant it and I hadn't either; we were just good mimics of what we read and what movies we saw; that the whole thing had gotten crazy; that we weren't doomed brothers from the eighteen hundreds vowing purple prose love to each other. That we were just horny teenagers and we found each other for the meantime till something real came along. I wish I could tell you I calmed him down and we talked and we dressed and we walked down the crumbly stair case with the rickety banister and we did not pass a single decapitated skull along the way with eyes that followed us, as we went out the half off by this time front door and to the reviving cold winds, and the weed grown over fragmented sidewalk and then past the falling down picket fence, toward home, away for all time from the house with the deep dark secrets and the black insides so frightening they were like liquid imagination. Where Jimmy left his madness. And out here with me, was sane again. The imagination of the house that wrote us. Or re-wrote us. Or re-wrote Jimmy at least. He had come to find what he wanted. I think he did find that. As the comic books say, God help him. I was so creeped out by all of this, however, that I did none of these things. I did not want to take a chance on trying to run down the stairs in the night black, with Jimmy the Maniac loose from the asylum behind me with the Grimly ax missing me by a hair's breadth, or excepting all of that, just falling down the stairs or stepping on one of the rotten boards and falling and breaking my leg. And waiting for the dead werewolf all lugubrious and hairy and mouth drooling to plop on me and rip me open. So instead, not thinking, just getting the hell out of here, and I admit with such shame, getting the hell away from him, I ran to the window Jimmy had been musing at, threw myself out it, there was virtually no glass left, so I didn't cut myself much, and took a tumble and slammed onto the hard cold ground, twisted my stupid ankle and limped in a great deal of pain, and yes, I was bareassed, if you want the humiliation of all of that said straight out, and got home as fast as I could. Wincing all the way in a one horse open slay. Sorry, couldn't resist that. The old witch would expect at least one of those. My parents, of course, had a fit. But a mad boy in a mad house three blocks away, now that it had started to drizzle sleet on top of everything else, making it all worse somehow, their being woken by me and my rantings, their mostly naked son, who had forgotten he could have dressed before waking them, but I had other things on my mind, like the coils and box springs falling out of my friend's head right at that very second. After about an hour, they made some kind of sense of what I was saying. They had put a pair of trousers and a shirt on me, as I babbled. They thought I was the one who was mad. Like those astronauts who went through all that time and effort and scientific mumbo jumbo to finally laboriously get to Jupiter, where they were put in a prison with all the other Jupiterians (who looked just like Earthlings, natch) who were insane and believed they were also from the third planet from the sun. Credit EC, yet again. They called Jimmy's parents. The police. The ambulance. And Jimmy, I was told, was lying comatose, almost dead, was taken to the emergency room. At the hospital, he woke up--boy, did he wake up--and he kept screaming, don't cremate me, I'm still alive. He was a wild ape at that point. Striking out. Decking a doctor. Having to be given an injection to make him sleep. The fact we had been having sex was brushed over by those who know best as just one of those silly initiation pranks boys go through--daring each other to take off some of their clothes in an old haunted house and being embarrassed and who would weaken first, make a break for it, etc., just all for laughs. Only no one was laughing. Jimmy went off to a nice safe sanitarium. Crazy house. I was left impotent for about a year and a half till I met someone else who was kind and sane and had no interest in haunted houses or boys who found some of their virility and sanity there, while losing their sanity at the same time, if that makes any sense at all. I still have those EC horror comics. I read them every now and then. They make me sad. They make me remember some good times. That hurts the most. The bad times remembered hurt less because there's never any expectation of them not hurting, so they can't disappoint you. So. Boys and haunted houses and scary comic books and scary movies and scary TV shows. I still enjoy being scared. I think Jimmy enjoyed it too, even when it was so terrible for him, and maybe he still does, wherever he is. He might be dead of course. He might be coming up behind me right this second as I write this, and he might have his trusty red blooded ax with him. Along with some other corpses. To give me the just desserts others should have gotten, but didn't. Horror is always a morality play somehow. Especially the kind that doesn't make sense a lot. The real horror that is. In fake horror, you stand a chance at least. Or he might be coming up behind you the same way. Boys can't divorce the horrors. They are real. They always have been. They go together. Some see the day darker than others though. Some see it as past midnight. I just wish Jimmy had gotten into the sunshine more. I wish I had too. I wish he could have tilted at happier windmills every now and then. Not that he was not happy. He was, a lot of the time. Till he got on the wrong end of the practical joke. Which was, I guess, it wasn't real and it didn't matter. Perhaps nothing is real and nothing matters. And just living, you have to pretend you don't see the practical joke of it, even if you do. But if you can't help it, what do you do then? Or perhaps you have to put on a DVD of some "Tales from the Crypt" episodes and just laugh at them. Or cry at them. And find in them what is not in them at all. But in the mind of my friend Jimmy who kept wanting to take the just desserts of people who never received them but should have. He was a hero to the end of time. Still is. To me. Maybe some night, late, I'll hear a whispering sound outside my bedroom window, and I'll think of Jimmy and Mrs. Grimly and Mr. Brawny coming along with graveyard dirt covering them, their bodies best not described, scratching on my bedroom window--let me in, little boy, let me in. I hope not. But maybe so. Everything's scary when you're a kid. Even back then. You could turn the next corner and suddenly be on Mars. You have no guarantees of anything especially when you're a child. The joys are greater. But the terrors are deeper. I guess maybe when we're afraid, we get to be children again. Maybe it's worth it, to be so for a time. Maybe now Jimmy is always a child. I almost envy him, at least that. Remember yourself as a boy, or go ask any former boy, what things do you remember most about your childhood? What things were the most important to you? I can almost guarantee somewhere in that laundry list of soggy memories, one or two or more will have to do with being scared in one way or another, and the way they say it, it will be among the sweetest, most treasured memories of all. Leading up to the final horror you can't choose not to ride. No one escapes that. Jimmy didn't. And won't. He just fell for the old dame harder than some people. He believed in her more than others did and do. And sometimes, I think, maybe he was protecting me all the time, making it not as horrible as it really way to him, even at the worst of it, to keep me from falling into that gibbering pit of demons in mental institutions who scream and cry and soil themselves and shout mad things, and are guarded and tormented and tortured by demons far worse than they. The demons who are paid to "help" them. I guess I'd like to imagine that, at least, one windmill my Don Quixote tilted at, he won. Timothy Stillman comewinter@earthlink.net