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| Stephen Vincent Benét |
The north and the west and the south are good hunting ground, but it is forbidden to go east. It is forbidden to go to any of the Dead Places except to search for metal and then he who touches the metal must be a priest or the son of a priest. Afterwards, both the man and the metal must be purified. These are the rules and the laws; they are well made. It is forbidden to cross the great river and look upon the place that was the Place of the Gods —this is most strictly forbidden. We do not even say its name though we know its name. It is there that spirits live, and demons —it is there that there are the ashes of the Great Burning. These things are forbidden—they have been forbidden since the beginning of time.
My father is a priest; I am the son of a priest. I have been in the Dead Places near us, with my father —at first, I was afraid. When my father went into the house to search for the metal, I stood by the door and my heart felt small and weak. It was a dead man's house, a spirit house. It did not have the smell of man, though there were old bones in a corner. But it is not fitting that a priest's son should show fear. I looked at the bones in the shadow and kept my voice still.
Then my father came out with the metal—a good, strong piece. He looked at me with both eyes but I had not run away. He gave me the metal to hold—I took it and did not die. So he knew that I was truly his son and would be a priest in my time. That was when I was very young—nevertheless, my brothers would not have done it, though they are good hunters. After that, they gave me the good piece of meat and the warm corner by the fire. My father watched over me —he was glad that I should be a priest. But when I boasted or wept without a reason, he punished me more strictly than my brothers. That was right.
...
From the Journal of Paul Marder
(Boom!)
That’s a little scientist joke, and the proper way to begin this. As for the purpose of my notebook, I’m uncertain. Perhaps to organize my thoughts and not to go insane.
No. Probably so I can read it and feel as if I’m being spoken to. Maybe neither of those reasons. It doesn’t matter. I just want to do it, and that is enough.
What’s new?
Well, Mr. Journal, after all these years I’ve taken up martial arts again—or at least the forms and calisthenics of Tae Kwon Do. There is no one to spar with here in the lighthouse, so the forms have to do.
There is Mary, of course, but she keeps all her sparring verbal. And as of late, there is not even that.
...
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| image from Wikipedia |
On Timothy Clary's ninth birthday he got no cake. He spent all of it in a bay of the TWA terminal at John F. Kennedy airport in New York, sleeping fitfully, crying now and then from exhaustion or fear. All he had to eat was stale Danish pastries from the buffet wagon and not many of them, and he was fearfully embarrassed because he had wet his pants. Three times. Getting to the toilets over the packed refugee bodies was just about impossible. There were twenty-eight hundred people in a space designed for a fraction that many, and all of them with the same idea. Get away! Climb the highest mountain! Drop yourself splat, spang, right in the middle of the widest desert! Run! Hide! —
And pray. Pray as hard as you can, because even the occasional planeload of refugees that managed to fight their way aboard and even take off had no sure hope of refuge when they got wherever the plane was going. Families parted. Mothers pushed their screaming children aboard a jet and melted back into the crowd before screaming, more quietly, themselves.
Because there had been no launch order yet, or none that the public had heard about anyway, there might still be time for escape. A little time. Time enough for the TWA terminal, and every other airport terminal everywhere, to jam up with terrified lemmings. There was no doubt that the missiles were poised to fly. The attempted Cuban coup had escalated wildly, and one nuclear sub had attacked another with a nuclear charge. That, everyone agreed, was the signal. The next event would be the final one.
Timothy knew little of this, but there would have been nothing he could have done about it—except perhaps cry, or have nightmares, or wet himself, and young Timothy was doing all of those anyway. He did not know where his father was. He didn't know where his mother was, either, except that she had gone somewhere to try to call his father; but then there had been a surge that could not be resisted when three 747s at once had announced boarding, and Timothy had been carried far from where he had been left. Worse than that. Wet as he was, with a cold already, he was beginning to be very sick. The young woman who had brought him the Danish pastries put a worried hand to his forehead and drew it away helplessly. The boy needed a doctor. But so did a hundred others, elderly heart patients and hungry babies and at least two women close to childbirth.
If the terror had passed and the frantic negotiations had succeeded, Timothy might have found his parents again in time to grow up and marry and give them grandchildren. If one side or the other had been able to preempt, and destroy the other, and save itself, Timothy forty years later might have been a graying, cynical colonel in the American military government of Leningrad. (Or body servant to a Russian one in Detroit.) Or if his mother had pushed just a little harder earlier on, he might have wound up in the plane of refugees that reached Pittsburgh just in time to become plasma. Or if the girl who was watching him had become just a little more scared, and a little more brave, and somehow managed to get him through the throng to the improvised clinics in the main terminal, he might have been given medicine, and found somebody to protect him, and take him to a refuge, and live. . . .
But that is in fact what did happen!
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There are American flags on school windows, on cars, on porch swings; it is the year I bring Bob Dylan home for Thanksgiving.
We park in front of my mom’s house, my mom who has been waiting for us at the door, probably since dawn. Her hello carries over the lawn. Bob Dylan opens the car door, stretches one leg and then the other. He wears a black leather coat, and has spent the entire ride from New York trying to remember the name of a guitarist he played with in Memphis. I pull our bags from the trunk.
“You always pack too much,” I say.
He shrugs. His arms are small in his coat. His legs are small in his jeans.
“Hello hello,” my mother says as we amble toward her.
“This is Bob,” I say.
...
Best friends Wallace Bryton and Teddy Craft host the popular podcast The Not-See Party, where they find and mock humiliating viral videos. Wallace announces plans to fly to Canada to interview the Kill Bill Kid, an Internet celebrity famous for severing his leg with a samurai sword. Upon arriving in Manitoba, Wallace is surprised to learn that the Kill Bill Kid committed suicide. Upset that he flew to Canada for nothing, Wallace decides to stay an extra day and find another person to interview. He finds a handbill from someone offering a room in his home for free and the guarantee of hearing a lifetime of interesting stories. His interest piqued, Wallace arrives at the mansion of Howard Howe, a retired seaman in a wheelchair. Howard tells the story of how a walrus, whom he named "Mr. Tusk", rescued him after a shipwreck. Wallace then passes out from the secobarbital laced in the tea that Howard made for him. The next morning, Wallace wakes up...and the horror begins. I don't like films that feature torture and don't even begin watching if I know that's what the film is like. I also don't like slasher films in general but will watch them depending on what else is involved in the movie. I've never seen anything like Tusk, which seems to fall into a category called body horror. That sub-genre is now on my never-watch list right alongside torture movies.
When Marvin was ten years old, his father took him through the long, echoing corridors that led up through Administration and Power, until at last they came to the uppermost levels of all and were among the swiftly growing vegetation of the Farmlands. Marvin liked it here: it was fun watching the great, slender plants creeping with almost visible eagerness toward the sunlight as it filtered down through the plastic domes to meet them. The smell of life was everywhere, awakening inexpressible longings in his heart: no longer was he breathing the dry, cool air of the residential levels, purged of all smells but the faint tang of ozone. He wished he could stay here for a little while, but Father would not let him. They went onward until they had reached the entrance to the Observatory, which he had never visited: but they did not stop, and Marvin knew with a sense of rising excitement that there could be only one goal left. For the first time in his life, he was going Outside.
...
When I reached 427, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, I found Carnacki sitting alone. As I came into the room, he rose with a perceptibly stiff movement, and extended his left hand. His face seemed to be badly scarred and bruised, and his right hand was bandaged. He shook hands and offered me his paper, which I refused. Then he passed me a handful of photographs, and returned to his reading.It was adapted for the TV series The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes starring Donald Pleasance as the detective:
Now, that is just Carnacki. Not a word had come from him, and not a question from me. He would tell us all about it later. I spent about half an hour, looking at the photographs, which were chiefly "snaps" (some by flashlight) of an extraordinarily pretty girl; though in some of the photographs it was wonderful that her prettiness was so evident, for so frightened and startled was her expression, that it was difficult not to believe that she had been photographed in the presence of some imminent and overwhelming danger.
The bulk of the photographs were of interiors of different rooms and passages, and in every one the girl might be seen, either full length in the distance, or closer, with, perhaps, only a hand or arm, or portion of the head or dress included in the photograph. All of these had evidently been taken with some definite aim, that did not have for its first purpose the picturing of the girl, but obviously of her surroundings; and they made me very curious, as you can imagine.
Near the bottom of the pile, however, I came upon something definitely extraordinary. It was a photograph of the girl, standing abrupt and clear in the great blaze of a flashlight, as was plain to be seen. Her face was turned a little upward, as if she had been frightened suddenly by some noise. Directly above her, as though half-formed and coming down out of the shadows, was the shape of a single, enormous hoof.
I examined this photograph for a long time, without understanding it more than that it had probably to do with some queer Case in which Carnacki was interested.
When Jessop, Arkwright, and Taylor came in, Carnacki quietly held out his hand for the photographs, which I returned in the same spirit, and afterwards we all went in to dinner. When we had spent a quiet but profitable hour at the table, we pulled our chairs round, and made ourselves snug; and Carnacki began:-
"I've been North," he said, speaking slowly and painfully, between puffs at his pipe. "Up to Hisgins of East Lancashire. It has been a pretty strange business all round, as I fancy you chaps will think, when I have finished. I knew, before I went, something about the "horse story," as I have heard it called; but I never thought of it as coming my way, somehow. Also I know now that I never considered it seriously -- in spite of my rule always to keep an open mind. Funny creatures, we humans!
"Well, I got a wire, asking for an appointment, which of course told me that there was some trouble. On the date I fixed, old Captain Hisgins himself came up to see me. He told me a great many new details about the horse story; though, naturally, I had always known the main points, and understood that if the first child were a girl, that girl would be haunted by the Horse, during her courtship.
"It is, as you can see, an extraordinary story, and though I have always known about it, I have never thought it to be anything more than old-time legend, as I have already hinted. You see, for seven generations the Hisgins family have had men children for their first-born, and even the Hisgins themselves have long considered the tale to be little more than a myth.
"To come to the present, the eldest child of the reigning family, is a girl, and she has been often teased and warned in jest by her friends and relations that she is the first girl to be the eldest for seven generations, and that she would have to keep her men friends at arm's length, or go into a nunnery, if she hoped to escape the haunting. And this, I think, shows us how thoroughly the tale had grown to be considered as nothing worthy of the least serious thought. Don't you think so?
"Two months ago, Miss Hisgins became engaged to Beaumont, a young Naval Officer, and on the evening of the very day of the engagement, before it was even formally announced, a most extraordinary thing happened, which resulted in Captain Hisgins making the appointment, and my ultimately going down to their place to look into the thing.
The first word, I like to think, was “Ouch.” Some cave man, trying to knock a stone into better shape with another stone, slipped, hit his thumb – and there you are. Language.
I have an affection for these useless and unverifiable facts. Take the first dog. He, I feel sure, was an unusually clever but cowardly wolf, who managed to terrorise early man into throwing him a scrap. Early man himself was a terrible coward. Man and wolf discovered that they could hunt together, in their cowardly fashion, and there you are again. ‘Domesticated animals.’
I admit that I was lax during the first few thousand years. By the time I realised that Man needed closer supervision, many of the crucial events had already taken place. I was then a young – well, let us say a young fallen angel. Had I been older and more experienced, history would have turned out very differently.
...
Mrs. Brennen took snuff. She got it out of her grandson's store; going in and helping herself from the big tin on the second shelf. It was a habit her family deplored. Mrs. Brennen did not like snuff much. It was one of the things she had got over. It made her cough. But the fact that her family deplored her taking it prevented her from giving it up completely. She drank a little too. Not much; just enough to get "tiddly." That was what she called it, "I'm a little tiddly to-day," she'd say, and the family didn't like that either. Nor did she, save for the fun of shocking them and the interest outwitting them gave her.
An old woman did not have much fun, and she had her reputation as a character to keep up. Sometimes she wished she was not a character.
...
Four isolated astronauts in the lunar mining base Ark suffer a meteor storm. While inspecting the damage caused by the meteors, astronaut Ava Cameron discovers spores contained in one of the fragments and brings them back to the base for investigation. The medical officer discovers that these spores can grow rapidly, and in the process Ava is contaminated with them.I watched it on TubiTV. Watch Alien instead, and take a pass on this one.
The cast performs heroically considering how little they have to work with. The standout is Amy Matysio as Ava Cameron, the first astronaut to be affected, or infected. As the lone woman in an otherwise male cast, she's tasked with dramatizing much of the ick-and-boo material, and she's so ferociously committed that you'd think she's playing Joan of Arc. She belongs in a better movie. Or a movie.Horror Freak News calls it "an absolute stinker from start to finish". HorrorNews.net says it's "a typical sci-fi B-movie. Nothing too terribly great, nothing too terribly bad."
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| photo of the author from Wikipedia |
Dear Fox,
Hey. It’s Sahra. I’m tagging you from center M691, Black Hawk, South Dakota. It’s night and the lights are on in the center. It’s run by an old white guy with a hanging lip -he’s talking to my mom at the counter. Mom’s okay. We’ve barely mentioned you since we left the old group in the valley, just a few weeks after you disappeared. She said your name once, when I found one of your old slates covered with equations. “Well,” she said. “That was Fox.”
One time -I don’t think I told you this- we lost some stuff over a bridge. Back in California, before we met you. The wind was so strong that day, we were stupid to cross. We lost a box of my dad’s stuff, mostly books, and Mom said: “Well. There he goes.”
Like I said, the wind was strong. She probably thought I didn’t hear her.
I think she’s looking at me. Hard to tell through the glass, it’s all scratched and smeared with dead bugs. I guess I should go. We’re headed north—yeah, straight into winter. It’s Mom’s idea.
I’ve still got the bracelet you gave me. It’s turning my wrist red.
.......
In the eighth book in Donna Leon's internationally bestselling series, Commissario Guido Brunetti's career comes under threar as his professional and personal lives unexpectedly conflict.I've read the following from this series:
It all begins with an early morning phone call. In the chill of the Venetian dawn, a sudden act of vandalism shatters the quiet of the city, and Brunetti is shocked to find that the culprit waiting to be apprehended at the scene is his own wife, Paola. She has taken a stand against a travel agency known for a certain kind of shady tourism. Meanwhile, at work, Brunetti is under pressure from his superiors to solve a daring robbery with a link to a suspicious accidental death. Does it all lead back to the mafia? And how are his family's actions connected to these crimes?
#1 Death at La Fenice (1992)
#2 Death in a Strange Country (1993)
#3 Dressed for Death (1994)
#4 Death and Judgment (1995)
#5 Acqua Alta (1996)
#6 Quietly in Their Sleep
#13 Doctored Evidence (2004)
#18 About Face (2009)
#19 A Question of Belief
#20 Drawing Conclusions
#22 The Golden Egg
1) The Democratic Party does not want "far left socialism-communism" or to "change our constitution to their "agenda"".
2) That Joe Biden is our candidate oughta be ample proof that it's not true that "The far left and militant-terrorist groups such as antifa have taken over the Democratic Party."
3) This: "The far left has already silenced our free speech" is just not true for several reasons, the first of which is that our first amendment right to free speech doesn't give us the right to say whatever we want to on private platforms in violation of their terms of service.
4) I'm not even sure what you mean by the far left "no longer taught to love our country, flag and our history" as Democrats are every bit as patriotic as Republicans and just as interested in having us understand our history.
5) Churches aren't closed anywhere. Churches are not the buildings or the meetings but the Christians themselves. Even in states -both Republican and Democratic- where there are regulations about masks and gathering size, worship services continue. Zoom and FB Live are booming! Drive-in, open-air services were a thing some places in prettier weather. And outreach to the community in these difficult times continues. Food pantries are being stocked, aid to the sick and homeless and jobless continues. Donations for Christmas gifts for those less fortunate may well have increased. Churches are thriving in these days even as they look forward to the time when they can gather in more traditional ways.
6) The number of people across this country who want to repeal the 2nd amendment number [is] in the single digits. The Democratic party has never advanced this as a part of their platform or legislative agenda.
In conclusion I'd just like to say how much reactions like this remind me of my days campaigning for Obama during his first run when people screamed and cried in my face, tears running down their cheeks, honestly frightened, swearing we wouldn't even have a country if he were elected. They were wrong. And I'd like to encourage you that even if Biden does win, even if he's allowed to take office in a traditional and peaceful change of administration, Biden will be a president for everybody. He's encouraging us to leave aside the hate and fear and come together as the great nation we are. Know that I'm praying for you no matter which way this election goes. “All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”
I turned off the TV and looked out the window. Silvia’s car was parked in front of the house, with the emergency lights on. The bell rang again; she knew I was home. I went to the door and opened it.
“Hi,” she said. “We have to talk.”
She pointed to the sofa, and I obeyed because sometimes, when the past knocks on the door and treats me as it did four years ago, I continue to be an idiot.
“You’re not going to like it. It’s…it’s hard.” She looked at her watch. “It’s about Sara.”
“It’s always about Sara.”
“You’re going to say I’m exaggerating, I’m nuts, all that stuff. But there’s no time today. You’re coming home right now. This you have to see with your own eyes.”
“What’s going on?”
“Besides, I told Sara you were going to come, so she’s waiting for you.”
We remained silent for a moment. She frowned, got up, and went to the door. I grabbed my coat and went after her.
The house looked as it always did, with the lawn recently cut and Silvia’s azaleas hanging from the balconies on the second floor. We got out of our cars and went inside without speaking.
Sara was on the sofa. Although classes were over for the year, she was wearing her middle school uniform
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