I used to dream up stories, vibrant, weird, and free.
Bound up in all the wonder that poured itself from me.
The stars still held their mysteries - The moon had someone’s face
our world was full of magic - No horror bound to grace
At some point we forgot this – our truth and obelisk
Reality wrecked fiction - and joy became a risk
The callouses grew thicker – my strength built up inside
The girl who saw forever – learned how to close her eyes
Take me to the castle in the sky
Remember that our heart still waits inside
I know it'll be alright – it’ll be alright in time
Recall all the feathered worlds I know
And how they teach a world that’s carved in stone
My friends it'll be alright – it’ll be alright in time
I’ve never dreamed in colour my nights are black and white
But stars I used to run to – still shimmer in the night
Sometimes it’s oscillation – the shifting years go by
But I was born of coal dust – and I’m not born to die
Slipped into a future - I don’t know when I changed
But my forgotten wonder – still clawed up from the grave
My armour helped me reach out - the world increased in scope,
This girl who saw forever - remembered how to hope
Travel to the castles of this earth
Where we can find the life we all deserve
I know it’ll be alright – it’ll be alright in time
Remember the world I used to know –
One made as much of light and love as stone
You know it’ll be alright – we will be alright in time
That girl who saw forever's long gone now
But still, I can hear her calling out from the deepest truths I know
We can see, we’re still learning who we are
Through the hope and fear and loss and pain,
this amber came from tar
Don’t waste it all my dear – we are not controlled by all our constant fear
Just stand up tall - raise that shield you hold with pride
I won’t stay numb - or let our spirits die
I promise it’s okay to feel again
Don’t feel shame if you need armour just to stand
Take me to the wonders of the stars
Where we can find the stories unlike ours
Dear one it’ll be alright we will be alright in time
Remember the world we used to know –
One as much of light and love as stone
Tell me it’ll be alright - Won’t it be alright this time
Something I feel unnecessarily guilty about is when I don’t share my friends’ interests even though I want to share their glee and joy about things they love.
The good side of this is that is I really enjoy letting people ramble at me about their hyperfixations, like they’re the old storyteller of the village and I’m the bored little kid on a weekday afternoon who is too young to go on the hunt.
But…it’s not the same you know?
I think at least one reason this is so hard for me is that I sometimes avoid watching things my friends suggest, not because I think I’ll hate It, but because I fear I won’t.
Because as stupid as this sounds, sometimes when I KNOW I will like a thing, I will avoid observing it so as to not risk my own hyperfixations. Because when I get into something I GET INTO IT, I have no such thing as a mild interest it’s obsession or bust. I have often avoided things I know I’d like because I also know that I would inevitably have my entire waking world consumed by them instead of like… you know. Working. And eating. And sleeping, and such.
I want to be able to share interests instead of just observing and nodding and while I’m sure my friends would also allow me to do that to them too, and enjoy it, there’s still that nervous part of me that’s convinced she’s too much and not enough at the same time.
When I was a child, not more than seven or so, I woke to the sound of something crawling down the alley behind our house.
We didn’t have a garden, just a small yard attached to out back –part of a row of identical, old coal-houses.
The buildings are all attached together, and our yard led into a small street, and on the other side of that were another series of yards and equally identical, attached houses. There’s a lot of buildings like that around here, built as one-on-one-down housing for mine workers back in the late 1800s. They’ve been modernised and divided up in the decades since, but from the outside they still look the same. Right down to the stains on the lower brick walls, from the time when all the world was made of coke and coaldust. That stuff is engrained.
I’d gone to bed early, without dinner. Not sure why now, but I think I was probably being a spiteful little brat for some reason and ran upstairs to hide. When I woke, still fully clothed right down to my training shoes, curled up in my blankets and clutching my pillow, it had long gone dark and my stomach was roiling.
Not from hunger. From something else.
I remember focussing on my gut for a second. Dad always said to trust it, but I never knew what he meant by that until then. It felt like a jar of marbles was jammed between my ribs, occasionally turning over and over in a rhythm that even my sleepy brain could figure out.
It was footsteps. Or something like them. The sort of footsteps you’d expect if an entire stampede of creatures were somehow walking in synch.
There were footsteps in the alleyway outside.
Dead silent footsteps, sure. But they were there.
My bed was below the window, directly looking out into the alley. I heard the clatter of a plastic wastebin, but otherwise it was silent.
I wasn’t exactly the brightest child. Or adult, for that matter, but when I was a kid, I didn’t have the good sense god gave a rat. If it weren’t for the feeling of rattling marbles in my gut, maybe I wouldn’t have known to look out of the window.
Fuck those marbles, to be honest. Fuck them for making me crawl up, past the pillows and the glass of orange juice mam had left on my bedside table. Through the curtains, to gaze out into the street.
You didn’t get a lot of light in my room, which looked right out into the alleyway, no streetlights. One curtain was already open for me to peer through. I remember that I looked out into a pitch-black sky with nothing beyond. Nothing in sight, not a sound except for the rhythmic marble-rumble in my chest. The world was empty for the several long moments it took my eyes to adjust and realise what was making the silent footsteps.
All of them.
All of their hundreds and hundreds of bodies.
They moved the way I always imagined ghosts would. Or maybe I imagine ghosts that way now because of them. There might’ve been a rough shape of a humanoid somewhere in the middle of all that darkness, and you could see that shape, if you focussed on one of them for long enough. Everything else about them was just… branches.
Even now I don’t have the words for it. Branches isn’t right really, nor is filaments or cords or spiders’ webs. But they were many, and they were slow and careful, crawling their way across the walls and fences that made up people’s backyards, like Well’s Red-Weed in the colour of ink. A crowd of not-quite-people filling the alleyway like a slow, dark tide of molasses.
Every now and then they found a rubbish bin and rummaged around inside of it with their countless thready fingers. Then they’d leave. They crawled across the walls and cobbled slabs, absorbing the tattered rubbish people poured into the streets. It was still silent, except for the way in which it wasn’t. I felt, rather than heard, something almost like faint laughter and muffled words, the sort of banter I’d hear coming from people returning from the pub late at night.
Like the ghost-creatures were speaking to one another in words I wasn’t supposed to know.
They were passing my house, a silent procession of movement and endless hands, the rattling marble sensation in my chest ever constant, when I saw what was behind them.
The lumpy shape that followed seemed to suck the light from the world. Imagine tar and dirt given form, a golem-like construct of endless, rolling earth, subsumed in smoke. Colossally huge, filling the whole alley and seeping over into people’s yards, knocking over plant pots. A cat yowled somewhere and was cut off, like someone had plunged it into water. I gelt me breath until I heard it hissing, escaping into the night.
And somehow, that comforted me. The neighbours wouldn’t be looking for their cat tomorrow.
The hugest form had no face… no body, really. No form of propulsion but the spindly threads underneath, like those coming from its followers, seeming to drag it silently forward. It was the source of the marble-rattling, I know, but I couldn’t see feet. I could barely make out anything but the blackness, like my eyes didn’t want to see what it might be beneath the dark.
You know, looking back, it reminds me, weirdly, of the rubbish collectors? I know that sounds laughable. It does to me, too. But that’s what it reminded me of: the deep disruption of the people who would drive their huge vehicles down that very alleyway at ungodly hours. Right down to the sound it finally did make, the loud, gut piercing shriek that turned the gut-marbles into fine dust inside of me. Like a sound designed specifically to break bone. Or to wake up people that needed to be awoken.
Nobody did. So far as I’m aware I was the only person who looked out my window that night.
The followers reacted to the sound the way the dustbin men would, too, scattering forward into the alley, bodies crawling across fences and signposts, dipping into drains, like insects trying to escape a downpour.
I got a clue to what they were doing when they reached the older parts of the street.
Some of the houses, you see, still had the old walls. Most of them had been replaced with newer painted brick of wooden slats, but some people still had the bones of the world before: The walls from a century back which had small, wooden slatted doors in them. Coal hatches. From back when we actually used our chimneys. The source of the stains around the bottom of every wall in the street, even now, fifty years later. I remember my dad telling me about helping his grandmother shovel coal that the company left on the ground into the hatch. These were the same hatches some of the… creatures crawled into and never came out. Like birds finding their nests.
The windows were closed, but I could still smell something. Like the burning coke in my nanna’s old fireplace. And even though their not-faces turned towards me frequently, I don’t think they saw me.
And then it was gone.
I woke up to daylight, with a glass of orange juice soaked into my carpet, and the feeling of a long-gone history aching in my bones.
AKA The reasons a person with Depression and Generalised Anxiety Disorder keeps finding meaning in the place where hope meets horror.
One of the first television programs I ever saw and loved, as a child in the early 90's, was My Little Pony.
I promise this is relevant.
You might find it surprising how much darkness seeped into the cracks of this pastel pony-filled landscape. Take the pilot from 1984, for example, wherein a bunch of chained ponies are turned into something that would fit a lot better in an episode of He-Man or in pages penned by H. P. Lovecraft.
Okay maybe the Lovecraft reference is going a bit far but honestly? Only a bit.
Next on the list of "things that would probably not fly today" we had the episode Return of Tambelon which started out a bit more subtle than the pilot. Picture ponies mysteriously vanishing when they perform a usually harmless magic trick (a spell unique to Unicorns, which the Ponies referred to as "blinking in and out". Basically, they teleport and based on that episode, mostly use it to be lazy buggers). Picture one vanishing, then another, then another, for no clear reason. Picture the creeping sense of something being wrong. Picture desperately trying to catch up to those who remain before they join the roster of the missing - and failing. Picture glimpses of the vanished ones in a dark, monster filled world that is growing steadily closer to the land they call home. Because they didn't just vanish - they ended up in Tambelon. A city and it's evil king, banished 1000 years previously to a land of darkness. The unicorns, you see, got caught in the pull of it: a dark castle of trapped souls, carrying an invasion force their way, intent on making them take it's place in the dark.
Honestly, sounds like the beginning of a fantasy horror, doesn't it? Well it ain't. It's a cheaply made, poorly animated, merchandise driven show, about cute little ponies made in the time before FlashTM and it both scared the heck out of, and enthralled me.
I kept looking for that kind of story. I kept searching for that series, that film, that book, that would show me something terrifying and then save the day. And as I got older, I started to look in places I probably shouldn't have been silly enough to go and that I didn't fully understand until I was older. Places like the late night horror-comedy films and twisted animations on channel 4. The pages of Goosebumps and flicking through a series of gruesome images in the pages of a War of the World's LP. The places Katsuhiro Otomo went with Akira.
In retrospect, that was probably the shattering point for me. The point at which I realised what horror was to me, and what would really make me cry.
These are parts of me that, looked at separately, don't seem to make a lot of sense together. But what I'm trying to say here is that... my entire childhood was a series of juxtapositions. Bright light alongside darkness. Anybody who grew up in the 90's will know that jarring juxtapositions of emotion and drama were nothing strange on TV, especially in kid's cartoons. But for me, they've made up my entire life. A bag of sugar sweetness with a few sour patch kids added for flavour, because without those sour patch kids it just wasn't a proper pix n' mix.
My cute fluffy animals were better if their teeth were sharp, and likewise, the things dragging our heroes down into the darkness had to end up stabbed with a bolt of pure love to the face. The day had to be saved. The broken pieces of characters had to be pieced back together. I was a lonely, self centred, abrasive child, and I always had a fascination with stories putting people back together after tearing them to shreds. One wasn't worth it without the other. Maybe it didn't make sense to others but I didn't care. I had stories that excited me. I enjoyed them.
And then I got f***ing depression.
Kind of stopped enjoying most things for a while after that.
I started showing signs of it, I think, sometime in early secondary school. And then in 2012 I was officially diagnosed with Generalised Anxiety Disorder. And without getting too overly dramatic, a few parts of me got broken and I've never really been able to put them back together. I went through periods of absolute stagnation where I might as well have been one of my little ponies, lost in a dark place far from home and with no idea how I got there, or how I was ever going to find my way back. And then other times I felt like Tetsuo: full of rage and angry terror, spilling out of me to destroy everything I cared about.
Thinking back on the kind of stories I've been drawn to throughout my life, the things I turned to when I had the nerve left and the energy for them... It was still those sour candy bowl tales. MLP came out again. Writing with friends edged towards the dark and the depressing. I stabbed a lot of my characters in those days. But I never killed them.
See, different things resonate with different people. You have those who need to look to the darkness, even if just to see what they're running from. I'm one of them. I need the darkness to be deep enough for me to know it's going to be a fight getting out of it.
And every time I have these thoughts, I remember my little ponies. I remember seven year old Scarab and her first real experiences of fear. Ever since then, in the aftermath of panic attacks (not during them, because like hell am I thinking of cute little ponies when my heartbeat t is trying to crush my sternum and I can't breathe properly) I remember the nervous knot in my stomach where it all began. The part of me that knew something was wrong and something was coming for me from the world of darkness, just like it came for those cute little saccharine sweet ponies. Take that feeling, multiply in by a thousand, and you're getting close to what a panic attack is.
One of the most powerful horror movies to come out in recent years is The Babadook. Telling the story of a woman and her young son dealing with the loss of their husband and father respectively, the thing that makes the Babadook horrifying is not just the bizarre, twisted concept or the sounds. The Babadook is a creature that is created by pain and suffering. it feeds on their fear and keeps them in a holding pattern. 'If it's in a word, or in a look, you can't get rid of the Babadook.' And they never destroy it. In the end of the film, mother and son are keeping the creature in their basement, feeding it on worms to placate it and stop it from trying to destroy their lives.
That's the power of fear. It's the idea of what the Babadook represents. It's the fact that it's inside of you, it might ever go away, and you'll spend the rest of your days feeding it worms just to keep it under control.
It has come to my attention that I will always be waiting for Tambleon; and I'll always be trapped in its dungeons with the remnants of my childhood.
I found a poem I wrote for my friends last year...
This is for them.
For the girl with the wolf's heart and the writer's tongue,
For the place she carves herself in an ancient slab.
For they with gauges in their ears and their stomach,
and a heart held tightly together with raw nerve.
For the one with something sleeping in their heart that mirrors mine,
Dark as the night is long, but refracting light.
I will sing for the fox to dance to, for a laugh I've never heard
For all the sly names we granted and she took as hers titles.
For the song In the stars while they listen to Jupiter,
Words belted straight from the diaphragm,
as loud and unexpected as the water on Mars.
For the boy who will Never Feel This, if I have my way,
Except in the ways he already does - the ways as tired and heavy as a,
2 am speedrun, level 0, with an audience of one.
For the broken voice and the smashed chinaware,
The empty silence in the top half of a glass,
However it looks, and feels, he is always full.
For the certainty of him, made up out of Ink
The deep dark of his stories and the light that dots his i's, crosses t's
For the jokes wrapped around tragedy,
the hope hidden inside fear,
the left and the right the echo and the answer,
the clenched fist and the open hand,
The world never asked and the wall never fell
But it would be lesser if I didn't speak of them at least once.
- Scarab, 2017
Something I wrote about Kansas despite having never been to Kansas...
...And having literally no knowledge about it besides “it’s big, my favourite Librarian lives there, and it’s also in Tornado Alley”. But what I DO know... Is that I come from the North East of England. And if people* complain about our local dialect sounding like we aren’t talking English one. More. Time...
SO I’m guessing it goes something like this:
Jessica Prescott had worked in tourist information at the Visitors Centre for seven years come August, and at this point, she was pretty fed up of tourists making jokes about Tornadoes.
Because honestly? Tornadoes were the least funny thing imaginable for those who had to actually experience them. She breathed a sigh of relief whenever a tourist she was chatting to turned out to be from Oklahoma, or Denver, or basically anywhere that experienced the same thing as she did, and thus had more sense than to make light of it.
Really didn’t help that their work uniform included a light blue chequerboard pattern.
Not that she minded much when people around here did it because people from around here understood... Yet these days, whenever one happened, she almost considered it a relief. Nothing like telling a bunch of tourists who thought they were being funny that: "yes, sir, this is a threat we face on a semiregular basis and no there is absolutely no possibility of being dropped off at the start of the Yellow Brick Road. Yes it's very distantly slightly possible we might die if it comes this way, but we do have contingencies in place and that very rarely happens.
"Yes it is really scary isn't it, sir? Maybe you'll remember that the next time you feel like calling one of us Dorothy!? Asshole..."
Right now though.. Well. Right now.
In her defence, the Tornadoes were not
usually
purple.
*Except for those of you who come from Germany, Belgium and/or the Netherlands. You guys are still cool. Peace.
Inspired by Search and Rescue: Late Night. Read it here.
Welcome to the Alpha Program of the British Emergency Broadcasting Text and Audio Service (BEBTA) 2018. The Civil Contingencies Secretariat (CCS) are working in partnership with mobile industries around the UK to develop an emergency broadcast system available via all mobile devices. It is hoped this will eventually replace the existing televised system, however this system will continue operation for the immediate future.
You are receiving this message because you signed up to take part in the alpha stage of the program in your local area at some point between 2015-2017.
Please visit www. ccsorganization.co. uk/ upcoming-tech-faq for further information as to the purpose of the alert system and to opt out (please note: should you opt out you will be relisted upon the official launch of the Service. This number cannot be blocked. This is a countrywide initiative in the interests of national security. No personal details will be shared.)
-----
ALERT
21/02/2018: 11:35 pm
This is an alert from the British Emergency Broadcasting Text and Audio Service (Alpha). Please keep your phone line free and await further instructions. This is not a test.
--
21/02/2018: 11:48 pm
Please do not contact the emergency services unless absolutely necessary. We are aware of the situation.
Please do not use your phone. Further information can be obtained from televised broadcasts. Please turn on your television. This is not a test.
--
21/02/2018: 11:55 pm
Please do not contact friends or relatives via phone or utilise dial-up internet connections.
Please do not call the emergency services regarding any unusual experiences. Please keep phone lines free and open. Do not leave your homes. We are aware of current events.
--
22/02/2018: 12:10 pm
This is a continual alert from the British Emergency Broadcasting Text and Audio Service (Alpha). Please do not contact the emergency services unless absolutely necessary.
Keep your phone lines open for further information. Do not leave your homes. Televisions will broadcast this information on repeat.
--
22/02/2018: 12:12 pm
Please turn off your televisions IMMEDIATELY. This is not a test.
--
22/02/2018: 12:14 pm
This is a continual alert from the British Emergency Broadcasting Text and Audio Service (Alpha). There is NO known danger from nuclear facilities. There is NO known threat of a Missile Attack against the United Kingdom. There is NO known danger from adverse weather. We are aware of reports and experts are acting accordingly.
--
22/02/2018: 12:21 pm
Please remain indoors. Please do not utilise internet connection of any kind. Please do not open your doors. This is not a test.
--
22/02/2018: 12:25 pm
This is a continual alert from the British Emergency Broadcasting Text and Audio Service (Alpha).
Repeat: Please remain indoors. Please do not utilise internet connections of any kind.
Please do not open your doors. We are aware of the situation.
--
22/02/2018: 12:25 pm
Please do not open your doors for any reason. No one is there.
--
22/02/2018: 12:39 pm
The things you hear are not real. Emergency services are aware of the situation.
Do not use the internet.
Do not use your phones.
Do not stand in the frame of your windows. This is not a test.
--
22/02/2018: 12:41 pm
We are aware of all incoming reports. Please cease contacting emergency service numbers except as a matter of extreme urgency.
There are no answers online. There are no answers in books. There are no answers present as of yet regardless of where you believe they may be coming from. The police cannot assist you. Religious authorities cannot assist you. What you hear is a lie. We have not abandoned you.
--
22/02/2018: 01:10 pm
We are aware of the situation.
Do not contact the emergency services for ANY REASON.
We apologise.
--
22/02/2018: 01:11 pm
This is a continual alert from the British Emergency Broadcasting Text and Audio Service (Alpha).
To those located in the Silver Street Southbank area DH3 9FP thru DH7 QFL. There is no one on the bridge. Do not attempt to go and assist. Please keep away from the river. Please do not leave your homes.
--
22/02/2018: 01:11 pm
This is a continual alert from the British Emergency Broadcasting Text and Audio Service (Alpha).
To those located in the Westgate Riverside Area area NE3 4QG thru NE12 9XD. There is no one in the river. Do not leave your homes. Do not unlock your doors.
--
22/02/2018: 01:15 pm
THE CCS requests that all UK nationals and visitors please remain calm. Attempt to avoid windows. Do not open your doors. Do not read. Do not listen to music or audio books. Use earplugs. Do not attempt to wake others in your home. If pets are indoors do not allow them out. If they are outdoors, do not allow them in. This is not a test.
Please continue to behave as if all is normal.
Please keep your phone line free and await further instructions.
--
22/02/2018: 01:16 pm
Please use earplugs. Avoid windows. Do not approach your doors.
Please cease calling the emergency services. This is not a test.
--
22/02/2018: 01:18 pm
There is no singing. Please keep your phone line free and await further instructions.
This is not a test.
--
22/02/2018: 01:22 pm
Please ignore the singing. Utilise earplugs. Please keep your phone line free and await further instructions.
--
22/02/2018: 01:27pm
This is a continual alert from the British Emergency Broadcasting Text and Audio Service (Alpha).
Those with sleeping pills should take them and attempt to sleep. Please do so in a room with no windows. Do not wake others in your homes. It will not help them.
This is not a test.
22/02/2018: 01:38 pm
Please do not contact the emergency services unless absolutely necessary. We are aware of the situation.
--
22/02/2018: 01:42 pm
There is no singing. There will be no answers should you look for them. protect yourself and those around you by not doing so. Do not read. Do not listen.
