Don’t turn out the lights
Otherworldliness writing is not my usual choice of genre, and yet I found myself unable to put Noreen Doyle’s collected stories aside, or go to sleep, reading it through one entire night.
“Turn off the light,” a friend said, calling at some very late hour. She forgot. I never turn off all the lights. I am terrified of the dark. At this very moment, late evening, just in my living room/kitchen/office-one not terribly large room, I count eight lamps aglow. At last count, 16 flashlights and three Coleman lamps are within reach, strategically placed in the event of an outage. I am terrified of the dark.
What aura ascends oft overtakes our senses, shoving aside our known of the real? It is when the power suddenly fails and I grasp feverishly for a flashlight that the very real ghost of Ira appears, a ghost from my childhood.
Henry David Thoreau expresses such traumatic moments precisely in the excerpt Doyle includes Thoreau’s notes on descending Katahdin, at a time when it was truly an untamed wildness: “Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful…This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night…It was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites-to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we…”
It is the eeriest, the unsettling awe, a mysteriousness, that holds readers as close to the pages of science fiction and fantasy as the writers writing their trenchant tales of the alienated whispery essences vividly imagined. We forget the moments of unreality we are suddenly falling into because of the present tense much of this writing adheres to.
Sentences jump up for attention for their complete wonderfulness – such as one in Lucy Holt’s story, “Trophy Seekins”: “…The moon had started up, but the woods were as dark as the inside of a pocket…” or Scott Thomas’s phrase in “The Autumn of Sorrows”: “…Gulls had left pieces of ruined crabs about … a hollow carapace, upside sown and holding water; teacup for a mermaid…”
We readers keep reminding our selves that emanations of the unexplained, dark stoic affirmations of the shadowing feared are mere imaginative steps impinged on melancholy minds-or just a writer’s drifting thoughts into the “what-ifs” that lurk beyond the realms of Earth.
Doyle’s 21 writers give us eclectic choices to dwell on. Who would expect to find the name Mark Twain among the contributors?
Doyle snuck this one in, so delightful is it, with casual drifts of the enigmatic and too the utterly ridiculous, yet instilling in the reader instant relief. “The loves of Alfonzo Fitz Clarence and Rossanah Ethelton” is a cross-country arranged affair, he in Eastport, Maine, the fair Rosannah in San Francisco. The telephone seems always to be open without dialing. They talk and talk, but the big bad wolf is at the door…or, the telephone, insidiously interfering, even as the wedding bells chime. The wretched intruder will of course meet an ignominious fate, while in Eastport, the lovers, having married by proxy via telephone, finally do meet. Entirely absurd and enchanting, even to the last sentence when Twain does away in horrifying glee with dastardly intruder.
The authors have all found inspiration in Maine’s oft-stark landscape, the loneliness of its vast sparsely inhabited northern regions leaving room from wonder and easy disbelief in creaking staircases, wispy shadows, a hastening skepticism overtaking the realistic.
For me, Ira was a very real ghost, a pedophile-although I was unfamiliar with the word at the time. He lived next door to us. I would scream to my mother, “He’s there!! Following me.” “Surely,” my mother would say, “your imagination can produce better stories than that!”
So I wrote my otherworldly story about Ira, killing him with a well-thrown rock in the woods we had to walk through to get to school. The writing of it freed me. And then my father saw my very graphic story. Shortly after, the ghost of Ira (for surely he was already beyond the living) was taken away. I need never fear his presence again, my father said.
But I know. I empathize with the man in Edgar Panghorn’s story, “Longtooth,” who muses, “I don’t talk about it because that only makes people more sorry for me, to think a man’s mind should fail so, and he not yet sixty. I cannot ask them: “What is truth?” They are kind. They will do anything for me, except think about it.”
Nevertheless, on that strange undefined cantilever between the surely known and the numisnousness of the Other-the rich essence of which captures us in an otherworldly trance-causes wonder and protects our personal paranormal.
At the entrance to both doors of my small house and in my car I have piles of rocks, carefully selected, just the right heft. Sometimes I practice in my back yard, up to the edge of trammeled messy woods.
And always I like to read about others, such as the silent sometimes scared heroes in Doyle’s collection, the walking, silent ones and the truth they know.