Lost in Darkness and Distance

It's December -- guess I'll write a little tale for Christmas.


LOST IN DARKNESS AND DISTANCE

The Monster slogged tirelessly across the pack ice.

"I do not forget my vow to immolate myself, Victor Frankenstein," he muttered, "but firewood is scarce in this frozen clime."

He huffed a thundercloud of breath and marched on, hearing only the crunch of snow and the howl of wind. Here, at the top of the world, he could wander unchallenged and unfeared, but only because no one lived here to object.

"Perhaps it was you, not the Almighty, who made me, Victor," he said to the black sky, "but I prayed for so long that there might be a place for me somewhere in God's creation."

Ahead the jagged peaks of a small island rose over the ice. Tiny flames crackled on the shore. Intrigued, the Monster approached.

Small creatures huddled around the fire. Some resembled animals up on their hind legs. Some resembled children with malformed heads and limbs. Stitches lined their bodies as if each one had been sewn together -- badly.

"Oh!" exclaimed a girl with red yarn for hair. "You're the biggest dolly I've ever seen. You must be a misfit!"

A bear with the incongruous fan-tail of a peacock ambled up.

"If you're a misfit, you're welcome here."

A winged form passed overhead, backlit by the wavering aurorae. It was no bird, but a regal hunting beast.

The Monster smiled.

Another Death

Only three weeks after my father's passing, my uncle (Don's brother) Bruce Winkle died in Eldorado, Kansas, at the age of 73. Although Bruce had suffered a number of strokes, it was cancer that did him in. Ironically, the doctors only discovered he suffered from cancer two weeks before he succumbed.

These exposures to mortality drive home the fact that our time on this globe is finite. If I can glean anything positive out of the past few months, perhaps it will be the desire to work anew on the goals important to me, the projects that have stalled out during the past few years.

The new year is approaching. Perhaps, for 2011, you, too, should review your priorities -- before personal tragedies force them upon you.

Donald W. Winkle, 1930-2010

On October 21, 2010, after years of fighting cancer, congenital heart failure, and Alzheimer's, my father, Donald W. Winkle, passed away.

Don's health problems began nearly a decade ago, when it was determined that he needed triple bypass surgery. He has been in and out of hospitals ever since. Anesthesia and drugs never seemed to affect him as they were supposed to, and he learned to hate the doctors and hospitals stays -- I can't say I blame him. Don's increasing physical and mental problems were hard on everyone close to him, particularly so on his wife of 37 years, Sharon Stewart Winkle.

The end came with shocking swiftness. One weekend he was still quite active and talkative; two weeks later he all but stopped speaking, spending his time simply wandering around the house and yard. A week after that he collapsed, having literally (according to the hospice nurses) forgotten how to walk. A few days later, his pulse, blood pressure, and respiration simply grew weaker and weaker until they ceased altogether.

Donald Winkle was interred in Bixby Cemetery, Bixby, Oklahoma on Monday, October 25, 2010.

Reboot Part One

Today is -- or was, as I'm typing after midnight -- the 36th anniversary of the short-lived TV series, "Kolchak: The Night Stalker." Yep, on September 13, 1974, intrepid reporter Carl Kolchak began his weekly encounters with supernatural and sci-fi terrors.

I thought about watching the series from the beginning, seeing as I have it both on DVD and VHS (those great Columbia House videos), but I can't. I rebooted.

That is to say, I'm pretending I've never seen any movies or TV shows before, and I'm starting off as if from the beginning of things. I'll probably explain that more thoroughly in another post, but it does make old things seem fresh, if you can make yourself believe in the idea.

So what is at the beginning of things? TV-wise I started off with the two oldest genre shows I own, "Twilight Zone" and "One Step Beyond". I'm much too impatient to go through them all to get to later programs, so my idea is that after seeing a few episodes of each I have the "right" to see examples of later series. To me, "One Step Beyond" led to quasi-documentaries like "Unsolved Mysteries." "Zone", however, led to "Outer Limits", "Night Gallery", and even "Star Trek." After a few episodes of all those, I could snatch a couple of "Night Stalkers." Someday I'll even reach "The X-Files" and "Millennium".

But wait -- there are movies, also. Rebooting a lifetime of movies requires a multi-pronged attack: I have several areas I've started into: Classic Horror (Old Universals, serials, even way back to "Nosferatu" and the 1925 "Lost World"); 1950s (and other) SF films (starting with "The Thing" and "Day the Earth Stood Still"); Summer Blockbusters (an era that began with "Jaws", "Star Wars", "Close Encounters," and the like -- backing up to include James Bond); and "Other" (mostly non-genre films).

I just couldn't watch the Night Stalker series without watching the original TV movies, "The Night Stalker" and "The Night Strangler" . . . but the very first "Stalker" was something of an inversion of all previous vampire flicks, with the undead in the bustling metropolis of Las Vegas instead of a Transylvanian forest. So, at the very least, one ought to be familiar with the 1931 "Dracula", with the Lugosi accent and the opera cape and the rubber bats.

. . . But I've been slow in the Classic Horror area. I've seen "Nosferatu" (1922) and "Frankenstein" (1931), and that's about it.

I've got it! I'll do a crash course -- "Dracula", then "The Night Stalker", then "The Night Strangler", then "Kolchak: the Night Stalker"! I hope my nerves can take it.

Just to toot my own horn, my tale "The Curious Adventure of the Jersey Devil" is due to come out in September in Panverse Two, an anthology devoted to the nearly forgotten literary art of the novella (stories between about 15,000 and 50,000 words in length).

To continue publishing, however, Panverse needs your help:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/928299198/wonder-story-theyre-back

Meanwhile: I just re-read Ray Bradbury's R is for Rocket, the book that first opened my eyes to the amazing possibilities of language and words back in 3rd or 4th grade. R is for Rocket contains stories that first appeared in other Bradbury paperbacks; some of Ray's best, in my opinion, like "The Fog-Horn," "The Long Rain," "A Sound of Thunder," and the short-short, "The Dragon". The title story, along with four or five others including "The End of the Beginning," are true sense of wonder stories about humanity's need to explore, which must now turn to the universe as our little world is thoroughly mapped.

The strange thing, however . . . I've read or at least flipped through this slim paperback many times, but this time -- there's a story in it I swear I've never read before, "Here There Be Tygers." It's not something they slipped into a new edition; my paperback copy was published about 1967. Perhaps my little brain is turning to mush at last.

Oh, well, it's great to find a Bradburian jewel as if for the first time. In case you've never read it, I won't give away the plot, but it's sort of the opposite of another Bradbury classic, "Mars Is Heaven!"

Bradbury recently celebrated his 90th birthday. If only Mr. Electrico could wave his sparking wand of lightning and restore Ray's youth! But I'm not sure my mind and soul could absorb another near-century of poetic prose from the Master: such ambrosia may be too much for mortal senses.

YouTube is Five

As you can see by the dates, I haven't been able to post in a couple of months. Well, YouTube's recent anniversary gives me a nice excuse to fill space.

Favorites from YouTube:

"Premakes: Raiders of the Lost Ark" -- if the Spielberg/Lucas hit had been made in 1951:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUPDuQq9GsM

"Halloween" theme song -- lyrics that actually fit the music of John Carpenter's original:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8VfreZsuPg

"Iron Man vs. the Incredible Hulk": Best mixing of two movies I've seen yet, helped by the fact that Robert Downey, Jr., actually appeared briefly in HULK:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19Cm31h2NXI

"Dennis DePue Case" from "Unsolved Mysteries" -- I tried to describe this episode in one mof my first posts; at last I know its title. This video shows that the movie "Jeepers Creepers" was inspired by this segment. Guess I'll have to watch that soon:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycS_RHbW3o0

"How Terminator Should Have Ended" -- this is the pastiche I was trying to write years ago. Heck, I'd fight to write the novelization now!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBBw9E2Q_aY

The After-Image Ghost

Keeping to my project of vacuuming up all my writings lost in cyberspace, and hoping to keep "Fiction and Reality" interesting, here's the strange story of:

THE AFTER-IMAGE GHOST

One night when I was seven or eight, I went to bed – or was ordered to bed – as usual. As always, I clicked off the overhead light and dashed across the room before any “boogers” could get me. When I crouched to make this brief run, I sometimes glanced up at the light, which would momentarily blind me. This didn't really matter, as I jumped under the sheets in complete darkness.

That night the light blinded me just as I snapped off the switch. I jumped into bed and closed my eyes as I cocooned myself in the covers.

An after-image hung behind my eyelids, yellow and sharp with purple highlights. Rather than a simple blob of color, this image looked like a woman. The figure startled me, because I didn’t remember anything feminine-looking in my room – certainly not the overhead fixture, of which this was presumably an echo.

The after-image woman in yellow and purple had long, flowing hair and an oval, sallow face. She wore bell-shaped hoopskirts out of the mid-nineteenth century. Her arms seemed to be bare. In this quasi-photo image, she appeared to have just stepped into a room from a doorway on my left. The back of her dress was cut off vertically as if by a door frame, and her right arm stuck out as if she had opened a door wide and now let her hand hang on the knob. No background of wall or door was visible, however.

She had an air of looking for someone or something, though she did not move. Her eyes, mere purple blots in her yellow face, were turned intently upon me.

I opened my eyes in the darkness of my room. The after-image hung before me, only a shapeless mass now. I closed my eyes, and the image returned. Open, featureless blob; closed, ghostly woman in bell skirts.

The After-Image Ghost frightened me, but I did not run off to my parents’ room. It would have been difficult to explain, and, besides, how do you run from an after-image? Any direction you move, it’s already in front of you!

The After-Image Ghost took a long time to fade. I kept expecting it to move or speak, but it did nothing but shimmer and break up, finally becoming no more than those random sparks you see behind your eyelids.

Was the spectral woman just a trick of the light? Possibly, but it was some trick!