I’ve lived in this house for seven years as of today. That’s so… liturgical.

 

Spring is in the air, though it is cold air. I see that my son decided not to wear the green shirt to school. He must like to get pinched, or whatever it is they do. We didn’t do that in High School. Our uniforms were blue. Clothing is strewn here and there. He doesn’t know about closets and drawers yet.

 

Am I the crazy one? His mother tells me all kids are slobs. I wasn’t. She tells me I’m anal retentive. But I seem regular. She tells me she thought I was gay because I’m neat, once upon a time. She tells me a lot of things. But I ask you: without women would there be such a thing as alcoholism?

 

I went into a bar to find a couple of guys who would be willing to help me move. (I’m talking about seven years ago. Try to keep up.) And I found them, gave them a hundred bucks each – or, promised that I would anyway. I didn’t realize the next day was St. Patrick’s Day. It wouldn’t have mattered. I didn’t choose the day. I had to be out of where I was. Well, those lads were continuing to drink all night and all the next day, but they moved me in three or four hours without breaking anything, so I paid them and then took them out for a boiled dinner at the same pub where I’d found them the day before.

 

At this point, the White Tornado would give me a look I’ve come to recognize, and I’d just say, “Yes, I have dozens of stories just like that one. Aren’t you glad you know me?”

 

I had this electronic organ. I have it still. Big, heavy thing. It looks like a mellotron. When I first got Muzzlehatch III, when he was a kitten, he’d crawl inside it through the pedal – it’s just a volume pedal – and do whatever it is he would do in there. It hasn’t worked right since, and now the cat’s dead anyway, but there it is – in the foyer between bedrooms, just another horizontal surface for my son to leave his dirty drinking glasses on. And well, that day we moved one of the guys who helped me did a Jerry Lee Lewis impression with the thing. It was sitting outside atop a snow bank. The wind was blowing snow all around.

 

But, with that day being the exception, it was a warmer spring than we seem to be having now. I wonder how the lilacs will do this year. They’re budding. The little buggers must be cold.

 

Somebody knows. I have this lilac pattern around one of my big windows. They were die-cut wallpaper thingies. Pretty cool.

 

But, when I went looking for them on St. Patrick’s Day morning, seven years ago, they were nowhere to be found. (Those boys, I mean.) It was 10:30 in the morning, or so. Well, of course they were in another pub – one that serves breakfast. And they were eating, and drinking green beer, and they had written in green marker all over their arms things like “Yeah Baby.” The one was loud and boisterous, the other barely vertical. But I didn’t know the sort of people in those days who would be any other way at 10:30 in the morning. And, I didn’t know anybody that I didn’t have to pay to help me with this or that.

 

One of the guys offered me a beer and I said, “No!” a little too loudly.

 

Dude…

 

I hadn’t had a drink for the better part of a week. I had been to two AA meetings. More than one and you’re hopeless. There’s no going back. They mess with your head, you know?

 

That was what it was like seven years ago when I moved into this house. My son made a leprechaun trap. He was going to catch one, sure as anything. Cute. Whatever happened to cute? I miss cute. It seems like yesterday…

 

Business has been very slow, compared to last year and the year before. This place is bloody expensive, too. So, the WT has a brother who lives in one of the white houses with the red trim and shutters. All the white houses with the red trim and shutters are owned by the same guy in this town. There are six or seven of them, a bit disreputable but not too terribly shabby. What is it about them? They look… greasy. The apartments are pretty good, for the money. That’s the truth of it: they’re cheap. I guess you could call them low income housing. But they have this distinctive smell. They smell like a submarine has just passed through them.

 

But anyhooo, she says, (the WT, that is), “Why don’t you move into one of the white houses with the red trim and shutters?”

 

At first I didn’t remember, but then later in the day it all came back to me. And I said to her: You know, the fellow who owns those houses once told me to get out of town and never come back? He said I would never be able to live here again without just… dying of shame. I did live in one of those houses once. He asked me to leave. That’s where I moved from when I moved into the place where I am now. That was seven years ago – almost to the day. I almost forgot.

 

I’m a different person now.

 

She looked at me like I was her normal Uncle Jim who collects stamps and wears shorts in November, and she said, “Are you really?”

 

 

You know, loneliness wouldn’t be so bad except that it’s such a solitary occupation. No one can share it.

 

I blame the woman, of course, introducing her selfless interest. Challenging me: But why must it be so? Surely you are unhappy. And I protest (too late) that I am, I am. Or, that is to say, I used to be.

 

Was it happiness? No, I was merely content.

 

But what is the difference really? Is it happiness to be maniacal, to be giddy, to be always overflowing? I am a Stoic. I’ve worked for it. I’ve earned it.

 

At first I drove. I took long drives in the country. It was blissful. But a small, nagging sense of regret began to burrow like a vole into the back room which is full of broken chairs and discarded gas masks, and such. Everybody has one. There may be treasure in the attic, yes, but in the back room there is only junk.

 

Buy shares in E-Bay, by the way, devoted readers. The change in leadership is driving the stock below value. It’s a good opportunity.

 

Selfless interest: what is that? I have a friend – and there we ought to apply a dramatic chord – who is shaking my contentment with her selfless interest in me. Trying to pull me out of my shell, and ah, I didn’t know I was in one.

 

I’m wonderful, and I’m generous, and I’m weird, and I’m the smartest person she has ever met but only in the strangest ways, and rather dense in others. And now, I cannot stop thinking that where there was nothing missing before there is now something missing. I used to be able to call Mom. Her voice made me sane. My house could be burning down around me and she would talk about calling Dad up for lunch half an hour ago, and where was he? Under the car, no doubt.

 

I didn’t miss her when she died. Death had freed her to be with me always, and no longer separated by distance. This is just an example of the woman’s treachery: The other day she said, “You miss your mother” very simply – just like that, just observing guilelessly, not caring, or not caring overmuch.

 

Sometimes, for instance with religion, when people don’t understand a thing I know that it would do me little good to attempt to explain it to them, perhaps even do them a disservice. I do it anyway. I have to take that chance, and blow their minds away. You can’t know this – it may kill you. In any event, you will never be the same.

 

Knowing the truth will ruin your sin, and if your whole life is sinful it will ruin your life. It’s very simple. Sometimes I get a call from a nameless drunk in distress because I used to be involved in AA. The first thing I ask them is if they want to stop drinking. If they say no I tell them, then for God’s sake, don’t go to an AA meeting.

 

That’s conviction, avoiding conviction. We go to great lengths to avoid receiving convictions. How do we define it? Irving Berlin: “I used to be color blind, ‘Till I saw you, and now I find, There’s green in the grass, gold in the moon, blue in the sky…” He’s talking about falling in love. I am not. But I am talking about having your perspective changed when you don’t want to have it changed.

 

Fred Astaire sings that one best, so unaffected, so sincerely… himself, as though he were speaking.

 

I like the theory of sincerity, the idea of it, but just as there are practical atheists who say that they believe in God but live their lives as if they don’t, I am a practical liar.

 

Today the clock ticks out like a dripping faucet and I am doing what I am supposed to love doing most. I am reading, writing, pacing the floor, listening to music, pacing the floor, playing Solitaire, pacing the floor, eating – when I promised myself that I would not – and pacing the floor. The clock just keeps on ticking. And where did the day go? What did I do? What about rescuing children from a burning schoolhouse? What about feeding the poor? I somehow missed fitting those things into my busy schedule today. I somehow missed being courageously human, fully alive.

 

Yet, the things I did today six months ago I would have been in Heaven doing. And, what will I do in Heaven? In Heaven I will get stoned and listen to music for eternity. I can’t get any pleasure out of doing that here.

 

Yes, loneliness wouldn’t be so bad except that it is such a solitary occupation. True.

 

Spring is almost here. When it comes I will… I don’t know what I’ll do. I shall work wonders and shit cucumbers, no doubt.

 

I’m listening to King Crimson. I have Nag Champa burning. I’m thinking about the politician and the preacher who are in the news and trying to turn it into a joke about the General and the lady, the lady and the General.

 

This is the inside, the mind’s black back, the discarded chairs, the old gas masks. This is the White Lodge. Welcome.

 

   

This 1941 program opens with "What This Country Needs is More Love." There ya go.

Fibber tries to recovers from his crushing rejection of last week when he believed that he had been drafted.

Molly tells him his memory is too good. "You remember things that never happened," she quips.

Fibber's a man after my own heart. Remembering things that never happened is what I do here.

Gee, it’s a shame you can’t do a web search of “Gothic” without coming up with porn, but I’m sure the words “goth,” or “goth girls,” or variations thereof will yield many more results. The word “gothic” means French. Does that mean these girls are French? No, I don’t suppose it does.

 

Gothic has another meaning, in Literature. It’s a certain type of Romance Literature, and according to some people there isn’t a romance writer who cannot be also called Gothic. According to others, however, it is a small and rather exclusive group. Do you care? I don’t.

 

Mary Shelley is definitely a gothic writer. Nobody says otherwise. Nobody would dare.

 

 

Every horror story can be called gothic, apparently, but the tradition got started before there really was such a creature as a horror story per se. Honore de Balzac makes the list in a few places, for instance. (Well, I do suppose he’s French.) The works of Flannery O’Connor are considered “Southern Gothic.” H.P. Lovecraft wrote gothic stories, I hear. And, there are many stories which, though not really gothic, contain what some of us like to call gothic elements. What does that mean? Does it refer to imagery, theme, plot, setting? All of the above? There are several tributaries but no one to say which of them is the main river.

 

Joyce Carol Oates is a gothic writer, and like Dracula’s living slave Renfield she exists entirely on a diet of flies and spiders.

 

 

Joyce, eat something – anything.

 

I’m reading her Mysteries of Winterthurn at the moment. Great fun.

 

As far as “Goth girls” go, I’ll take actress Evelyn Venable who played Grazia, the girl who falls in love with Death (Fredric March) in the 1934 film, “Death Takes a Holiday.” At the movie’s climax she undergoes a transformation into an ethereal spirit-girl in a fetching black cape which may just be where the whole silly notion of “Goths” got started. Parents of some teenaged children witness a similar metamorphosis today, only without Fredric March.

 

 

Venables had pierced ears, I’m assuming (though I don’t know for sure), but in those days putting holes in oneself would normally be considered abnormal, and although Psychology was a rapidly developing field it wouldn’t have taken a psychologist to know that people don’t do such things unless they hate themselves.

 

The correct Goth girl attitude begins with a morbid preoccupation with death, ideally to the point of actually wanting to die. How that translates into, “I think I’ll do a nude photo shoot” I know not. Still less do I understand the connection between Japanese pre-Teens in black tights and puffy, layered tutus and the image below of the interior of a Gothic cathedral.

 

 

But this is old ground for me. I’ve covered it before. I’m thinking of it now because of my Rhubarb Valley posts. Perhaps that’s obvious. I have a postscript to the tale as follows:

 

I’ve been delving into the Rhubarb Valley story stream most of its residents would really prefer to forget – that is, if they are familiar with it at all. Our honorable Dr. Cadwalader, who had attended the Darkly family, would be our most likely source of information, in fact our only source on most of it, but he became disinclined to pursue the writing of their history after the cemetery incident. It is very likely that he, along with more able-bodied accomplices of course, is responsible for erasing all traces of the cemetery itself. (We) I assume that the ancestral remains are still intact but their position unmarked. There are stories of hidden passages in the hills – caves and the like, as well as mysterious burrows carved out by the clawed hands of the family off-spring, still living like wild beasts in and around the Darkly Ravine.

 

It’s ironic that Cadwalader’s efforts to erase the family history – if in fact he is the perpetrator of the cemetery vanishing act – (I don’t wish to make assumptions which may besmirch his memory) – had the probable effect of fanning the flames of morbid imaginings. The Darklys were referred to as “werewolves” whilst still living, this due to their tragic ugliness which struck, it would seem, capriciously and at random some of the children whilst leaving others unscathed. Moreover, their increasingly secretive lifestyle and outright hostility towards any neighbors who were so foolish as to approach the house provided “the perfect storm” for wild, irresponsible tales about them.

 

The family horrors fall into two categories, the widely-known and the wildly-rumored, the famous McGowan murder case and disappearance of Biff being in the first category, the cemetery discoveries being squarely in the second. Since these events were over forty years apart, you can imagine how twisted were the local accounts of the first for all that time, only to be given an extra “bump” of sensationalism by the second.

 

But, - but! – Enough of this outlandishly gothic tale. I shall write no more of it, for now. Rhubarb Valley is a happy place on the whole where such obscure histories have no affect at all on its residents. I am half sorry I climbed that hill to see the falls last Friday, getting me started on this line of research and speculation.

 

Let’s blame it on the French, OK?

 

   

Well, not only is there no picture of the Darkly house on-line but there is none of its sister house either. That surprises me, as the latter is far more accessible and in better shape. In fact, it’s still occupied. I can describe it in terms of its being really nothing more than a gigantic frame-built square box of four stories with a square tower at each corner, one of these leaning precipitously so that efforts have recently been made to prop it upright with a very large house jack. The Darkly house is – or was – every bit as grand, perhaps not as uniquely peculiar. It’s not quite like the one pictured below either, though in the same basic style.

 

I would bet money that the first homestead on the hilltop which was destroyed by fire looked almost exactly the same as the one here pictured, for it would have been built around the same time, 1780’s-90’s. But the second one, finished in 1804, was made specifically to rival the amazing and peculiar four-towers house down in the village proper, and there being preciously few trees on these hillsides in those days, the Darkly home would have cast its shadow across the entire valley, asserting landmark authority with its elevated location.

 Rather than merely copying the four towers house, however, - which is beautiful in part because of its ghastly symmetry – the new Darkly house was given only one obelisk-like tower, as large itself as most whole houses in the area, which lorded over the entire region with an unprecedented fifth story which could have served no purpose except for observation. That tower was apparently allowed to fall down in the 1970’s, but an effort had been made by the property’s new owners, who were at that time trying in vain to resurrect the old farm, to keep the rest of the monstrous beauty intact. During this time the new roof was installed to replace the decaying wood shingle. It’s safe to say that without their heroic restoration efforts all four floors would have collapsed into the ground long ago.

 

But those would-be preservationists gave up any ideas of ever residing within the accursed structure. They quit Rhubarb Valley - in a great hurry at last, once making up their minds to do so, never to be heard from again. To make a long story short, the house was the very definition of money pit. But I hate making long stories short when the complete version is so much more interesting – and, in this case tinged with such liberal lashings of gothic horror.

 

You may choose to stop reading here if you prefer making long stories short, and I wouldn’t dream of condemning you for your good taste. Here my post officially ends, and you may sleep soundly tonight with pleasant dreams after having read it. But, if you are like me, and you hate to make long stories short, by all means read on, but with the warning that after doing so your dreams may not be as pleasant.

 

 

According to the most consistent – and therefore potentially accurate – version of the tale, the intrepid New Jersey couple, (“house flippers” as they might be called today), managed to arrange to visit Gar Darkly, who was coming very close to completing a life sentence for his part in the McGowan murder of 1933, in order to extract from his memory certain details about the house which they hoped would aid their restoration efforts. I’m sure a certain morbid curiosity also inspired them to make the trip to Attica, particularly on the husband’s part. Oh – I can just see it! A man after my own heart.

 

What happened in ’33? Edward Darkly had eight children – (or eight whose births were recorded, but we’ll come to that) – including the twins Biff and Gar. The youngest, a daughter – Dahlia – was born with a claw-like arm and a face so disfigured she was never seen without being heavily veiled, (except by her honorable and discreet doctor, of course, who would much later write the only complete account we have of the gruesome discoveries made by the New Jersey couple shortly before his own death).

 

There were many Rhubarbians who cruelly suggested that the twins really ought to have been veiled as well. That is to say, they were not boys most likely to get a nice-looking girl at the church dance. But anyhooo, the two of them together murdered a young boy named Bill McGowan when he got too close to the homestead one day – and more particularly it turns out, the family cemetery. His body was found in a mutilated state in the Darkly Ravine.

 

It was “open and shut.” Sentiment against the ghastly twins was already very high. Biff quit the scene, never to be discovered by anybody, despite his unique appearance. That’s the real mystery, of course, and that’s the element propelling this otherwise banal story of rural murder to greater prominence. Indeed, there was a manhunt which the papers followed for some time. I imagine that with such a legend to fire their imaginations the new owners of the Darkly house must have thought it was quite a lark to actually get the chance to meet one half of the Darkly twins.

 

It turns out that Gar had mellowed considerably with age, not only in appearance but overall demeanor, and was quite helpful to the would-be preservationists. As it happens, a little too helpful, for there was a great guilt he suddenly found it necessary to unburden in their presence towards the end of the interview, and it concerned the residents of the family cemetery – not only the manner in which they were interred but their number being somewhat higher than anyone might have expected.

 

That there were numerous infant burials you may have guessed, and those bodies put there years after the death of the twins’ mother, Constance, who, even if she were still alive would have been long past childbearing. Most of them were born dead, but according to our doctor friend, more than a few had aspirated in the earth. Horrific as that may be, the more gruesome discovery revealed another set of twins, each having a far more pronounced forehead proturbance than Dahlia, who were apparently permitted to mature to young adulthood before being sealed in the family tomb alive with their mother, the unfortunate middle daughter Emma, whom they had begun to devour.

 

Gar maintained that he would go virtuously to his own grave, and Biff as well, wherever he may be. It was the death of their father in 1930 that precipitated this outrage. The twins reasoned in their rather depraved way that the world would be better off if it were rid of such monstrosities as their secret brethren represented, and with Edward gone there was nothing to prevent them from carrying out this purgation. Gar insisted to the end that neither he nor Biff had fathered any of the new generation of Darklys out of Emma or any other sister, that it was their father Edward - dashing, handsome, though melancholy Edward – who was the real monster of the Darkly Ravine.