Hold, friend. I only have fifteen hundred words to save your life.
You and I are bound in a bargain spanning hundreds of years, across dozens of types of media and thousands of artists. There’s a monster hiding in these words, ripping through the sentences and syllables, trying to get to your soul. It wants a bargain, and I’ve got one thousand three hundred and eighty-two words to explain.
Ignore the tree I sit beneath, friend. Ignore the countless branches and the bleeding forms impaled on their tips. Don’t worry yourself about the soft blood-moss beneath your feet, or the rusty chains which bind me to the trunk. Forget the crow-calls echoing through the valley, or the perpetual dusk. I have a soul to save, after all. A bargain to explain.
I’d better get on with it.
It starts, of course, with fear.
Fear: the most basic human feeling, dare I even say the most primal. From a faint tingling like a whisper of cold wind across your skin to gut-wrenching panic forcing electricity to your limbs, humanity has long had an obsession with fear. The exhilaration that comes from dipping a toe into the shadow beyond, separating our world from that black and eerie world that lies just adjacent to ours. The introduction is oft the same—a young girl borrows a snaggletoothed story from her primary school teacher, or a boy asks a gaggle of his compatriots during a slumber party, “Does anyone want to watch a scary movie?”
Or a young, foolish child from the Kingdom of Hungary purchases a tale from a traveling peddler on the road between Trynau and Trentschin because his ass threw a shoe and he has to wait for his brother to arrive with a spare and needs to fill his time.
Just as a random example.
Regardless of our introduction to the spectral and ghoulish, each of us has spent a time steeped in the cold and creeping words penned by someone who set out to scare us. This tradition is the crux of our bargain, you and I. Because for the moment, you’ve become stuck here the same as I, tangled in the weavings, in the chains of words that drip from cold, dead fingers of writers long since gone to their graves. Can you smell their decayed forms, hanging from beneath this tree?
Sit with me a little longer, friend. Don’t go just yet.
This pact, of a writer setting a stage beneath a cold and uncaring sky and a reader turning a page with quivering fingers, has gone on for years and years before the first mention of Count Dracula or Dr. Frankenstein’s beast from that fated night between your Lord Byron and the Shelleys. Before even Vathek dabbled with his mother to give himself supernatural powers, or Manfred’s son Conrad was crushed by that helmet in the Castle of Otranto. Personally, I miss the days of gothic horror; there was something pure in the resourcefulness of beleaguered young women haunted throughout the castles of Europe.
Alas, time marches on and cannibalizes all things. You can see the filmmakers and screenwriters punctured on the upper branches of our tree where the moon shines through the ropes of film negatives dripping from their open necks.
Ah yes, you might have questions about our tree. Impressive, isn’t it? The branches are mighty, spanning the width of this nameless valley. Pierced at the end of each is a soul who whispered a fresh horror into our pages and screens and ears. You can see them trapped, hung by their words or reels. Gouged by their contributions, their ghastly ideas, and the sharp limbs of our tree.
As for what you are doing here, I understand your confusion. It will become clear in a moment. Much like the creators lanced on the branches of our tree, everything is connected. No, don’t mind the chains with shackles just your size, they will only tighten to your feet.
It all boils down to the stem, to the roots of the very thing.
Fear.
We’ve always loved it, you and I. From our first interaction with it to the subsequent nights lost beneath our covers, flipping through tales of dread horror and nightmares. Beasties long of tooth and claw, horrid creatures with faces resembling our loved ones, ghosts with blood on their lips and darkness in their eyes . . . I loved reading about them the same as you.
Why? Of all the human emotions to seek out and steep ourselves in, why fear? Why do we choose the darkness?
Two reasons. The first is fear isolates what truly matters to us. The second is the light.
Fear crystalizes, in a single gasp of horror and shock, what remains in our head when there is only the thought of our own survival. When we have sunk beneath the surface of the words and we exist with the monsters, fear whispers what counts to us. Love, or money, or memories, or animals. When the adrenaline hits and we are overwhelmed with the urge to run, the only things left are what we hold dear. It is a uniquely uncaring sensation, I might add, wholly ignorant of what you should choose to care for. Many would claim to have love at the center of their mind until they are face-to-face with the fearful Vodnici and suddenly all they care about is a glimmering coin and survival.
And of course, there is the light. Love is light. Laughter is light. The memory of walking beneath the summer sunshine east of Neutra with my sweetheart Smolnia is a beam of light that used to illuminate the dark constant-dusk of this valley, before I lost count of the days I’d been chained to this tree. Without darkness, there is no light. Without light, there is no darkness. Each exists only to contrast the other. To feel heat, you must experience cold. To feel grief, you must first experience a love so sweet it hurts your heart. We choose horror, because it is the shadow that makes us remember what the light feels like. It is the domain of the cold autumn days where gray clouds eat the tops of the Little Carpathian mountains, and there is no more wheat or corn to harvest.
Oh, this is . . . interesting. It has been so long since I remembered those fields and mountains.
The pieces are still coming together. Let me sit up and breathe.
I remember the day I ended up here. One of those too-short days in winter where the frost gnawed at the edges of my field and my Smolnia lay abed. I’d a new book, delivered by my brother-in-law Tvolst, a fellow horror lover. So scary, he claimed, that he had nightmares for three days. I sat in my rocking chair in front of the fire and started reading.
It was one of the best I’d ever experienced. Eerie, chilling, gasp-inducing. By the time I closed the last page the sun was setting on the hills, and Smolnia was calling me to supper. But I couldn’t eat, you see. I needed another tale. Another touch of the grave, to make me remember the warmth of summer. I read through the night. And before I knew it . . . I was here, in this valley.
Easy, friend. Don’t scream too loud—the chains will only wrap tighter, and your next inhale will be a fraction of the one before it.
I heard the creaking of the tree above us, first. The rattling of branches and the corpses impaled onto their ends. I saw a man, imprisoned at the base of the tree.
What have you done to earn this, I asked him. His eyes were black holes, digging deep into his skin. His toothless mouth gaped at me. His fingers twitched like centipedes, crawling over the blood-moss towards me.
Let me stand, and feel the wind for the first time in an eternity. Let me stretch.
Relax. Sit down. It will help with the pinch of the chains.
I’ve watched the tree for too long. Guarded over the forms of the horror writers and poets, the grim cinematographers and screenwriters, the criers of corpses. Paying for my love of fear—our love of fear. Humanity’s obsession with the cold touch of death.
I told you, I had only fifteen hundred words to save a soul.
I never said the soul was yours.
I must be going now. I can hear Smolnia calling me to dinner across the dead man’s river. Allow me in our last seconds together, to at least offer a hint of what you can do to escape your own chains here: it starts as it always has. The bargain struck, between storyteller and audience:
Do you want to hear a scary story?
***
