Date: Thu, 9 Dec 2004 19:10:15 -0800
From: Timothy Stillman <comewinter@earthlink.net>
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