Fiction: The Adventures of Princess Sarah demo!

 As I write this, I've been trying to work up a weekend post while it is still the weekend. After trying to build on other stuff, I finally admitted I wasn't going to do better than yet another demo I worked up as a spinoff of my retro gaming novel. It actually is an idea I've had for quite a while (see my Troll review), fleshed out with a couple characters I already had a lot of fun with. It also crossed my mind that just about everything good I've ever done has been on the fantasy/ mythology vein. So, here goes...

Princess Sarah and Prince Robert were the children of High King Hector and Queen Daffodil of the Aquamarine Isles and the united Kingdoms of the sea. Sarah was the second oldest of three little Princesses, and Robert was the youngest and the only Prince. Sarah was frustrated and suspicious that the King and Queen would not say if there would be another Prince or Princess. In the summer, when the High King liked to take his Queen on a tour of the Isles and the eldest Princess Lily was away at camp, Sarah and Robert and their sister Bell went to stay with their Grandmother, a Dowager with a great palace on the sea to the east. They loved spending time with Mummy. When they were not with her, they went on long adventures through the Palace grounds, which were full of all manner of wonders. A day came when Sarah announced that they would explore a more secluded part of the Palace.

She held up an old book with a map of the Palace. “Look,” she said, pointing at a turret on the far end of the grounds. “This is the Old Royal Bedroom. Grandma says it’s just a storeroom now. But the location is all wrong. I think there’s something interesting. Anyway, we covered the west wing already. Did you gather our provisions?”

“Frog,” Prince Robert said. He was still just beginning to talk, at an age when Sarah had already had an extensive vocabulary. He held out a purse shaped like a frog, which their mother had fitted with straps to wear on his back. Sarah sorted through the contents. The first was his favorite story book. Next were an umbrella, a tin of soup crackers and a tiny jar of pomegranate jam.  Then there was a smaller frog-shaped coin purse that had been his beloved toy before he inherited the larger one. It rattled with his Collection, a shifting assortment of objects he picked up. It held about a dozen small rocks, three marbles and a pretty seed pod. She opened a compartment in the roof of its mouth with a key Mummy had entrusted to her. It held three candies. Sarah sighed.

“Robert,” she said, “I told you, we need food, not treats….” She relented when she pulled out a sack on the bottom. It held a large roll, a lemon, two peaches, an eighth of a cheese wheel and half a sausage. Robert held out another item. It looked like another toy, shaped like a saurian with a stubby tail and a large, round head. In fact, it was a pitcher, with a lid that formed the saurian’s upper jaw. In the purse were two cups.

“Dink,” Robert said.

“Okay,” Sarah said. She shouldered her own bag, shaped like a Water Cow. “This is good. Now, let’s go.”

 

She led the way. She wore a simple checkered dress, because only little girls wore overalls like boys did. On her feet, she wore perfectly sized and entirely functional hiking boots that clomped loudly on the palace floor. Robert wore her old pair, which were dyed a salmon pink that had worn and faded down to white spots. As they proceeded, the Palace attendants discretely stepped aside. They paused when they found Mummy in their path, innocently playing with her pet ferret. “Hello, children,” she said. “Are you exploring today?”

“Yes,” Sarah said. “We’re going to survey the West Tower.”

“I see,” Mummy said. “Are you sure you want to? It hasn’t been used in a long time, it must be awfully dusty.”

“Yes,” Sarah said. “I bet the catalog is out of date. We can clean up.”

“If you say so,” Mummy said. She gestured to an attendant, who brought her a comb to groom the ferret. “Do be careful. Be sure to be back by tea time.” She waved as they entered the tower stairway.

“Bye bye,” Prince Robert called back.

The stairway proved to be a long climb. They paused at a chamber a third of the way up. It was configured as a sitting room, with a small table that held a chess board complete with pieces. Sarah measured out half the crackers, and filled their cups from Dink. While Robert munched his share, she examined the table. “I knew it,” she said, lifting the red king. “There’s no dust. Someone has been using this section recently.”

“Dink?” Robert said, holding out his cup.

“We need to conserve our water,” Sarah said, then relented and filled his tumbler halfway.

They were winded as they reached the top. It was a high-ceilinged octagonal chamber that echoed with the sound of their boots. The better part was filled by a great bed ringed by curtains. Facing it was a painting of a woman who looked like their mother. Sarah frowned as she looked up. It showed her from behind, in the act of emerging from her bath. Her head was turned back, throwing a sly smile over her shoulder. When the Princess saw Robert at her side, she said, “Go play play. Over there.” She redirected him from the bed to a celestial globe to one side. He giggled as he spun the concentric brass rings.

“Wait,” Sarah said. Her brother froze with a puzzled expression. “You weren’t being bad,” she assured him quickly. She showed him how to turn the knobs and dials properly. She frowned again. “This was tuned, recently.”

She went out onto the balcony. She opened the main compartment of her bag, which formed the belly of the Water Cow. The buckles of the strap were anchored on the tip of the tail and between its horns. She brought out her field glasses and her favorite book, the Royal Explorers’ Guidebook. “`First, survey the area from an elevated position,’” she read. She looked out with the glasses. It was, of course, all familiar landscape, though she discovered that she could see the Royal Flamingo Preserve. She helped Robert up and held the glasses for him.

“Birds,” he said.

“`Next, sketch a chart of the terrain,’” she read. She set down the glasses and took out a drawing pad. She scribbled an outline of the lagoon. “`Make particular note of usable caves and shelters, navigable waterways, and any structures of artificial origin.’” She put an X on a canal that ran back to the Palace. “`Catalog the birds and game…’” She watched the flamingos as they milled about the lagoon.

“Well,” she said with a sigh, “I guess we’ve surveyed this area.” She was mildly surprised to find that Robert was no longer at her side. She was momentarily alarmed when she did not see him behind her either. She circled the bed before she panicked, as Mother told her. Sure enough, her brother was on the other side, looking up at a large armoire.

“Leave it alone,” she said, walking to his side. “I’m sure it’s locked, anyway.” He pulled at a handle that was just within his reach. The left door came open. “Oh. Well, I’m sure there’s nothing interesting…” She opened the door, and then the other.

The armoire was in two parts. The right side was a set of drawers with a cabinet on top. They were locked, except for a pair of drawers just under the cabinet door. She pulled one out, and found it disappointingly small. The left side was an open space as large as her closet, where a suit, a fur wrap and a greatcoat still hung. Sarah tugged at the coat, and found it stiff with age. Robert pointed and whimpered. She followed his pointing finger to a curled up beetle at the back. “I see it,” she said. “Poor little bug.” He whined expectantly.

She sighed and climbed into the armoire. It seemed larger inside than outside, tall enough for Mummy or Mother or even Father to stand upright. She drew a handkerchief and carefully picked up the beetle. “There,” she said, holding up the kerchief. “We’ll give Mr. Beetle a funeral.” She shrieked at a buzzing from under the cloth. She shook out the kerchief, and the now-squirming beetle tumbled out. Before it hit the ground, it spread its wings and flew out through the open door.

“Well,” she said, smoothing her dress, “Mr. Beetle must have gotten stuck inside. It’s a good thing we opened the door, or he might never have gotten out. Let’s go back to the other room.” She climbed down, and started to push the right door shut. She paused, frowned, and opened the drawer again.

“This is too small,” she said. “It’s shallow, do you see? It can’t go all the way to the back. Not even halfway…” Robert looked intently, and nodded in seeming agreement. She opened the other drawer. From it, she pulled two keys. One was weathered brass, the other mirror-bright silver.

She went back inside the armoire. Robert followed, holding his little frog. She ran a hand along the wood paneling. The joining was artful, but could not be hidden. She knocked twice, producing a hollow rattle. She found a decorative panel that slid to one side. Behind it was a keyhole. Robert tugged at her sleeve. “No,” he said solemnly. “Frog Frog say so.” The eyes of his frog swiveled and blinked.

“Don’t worry,” Sarah said. “It’s just a trick door, like Mother’s magic drawer. Look.” She turned the brass key in the lock. The door swung open. It revealed a set of shelves. It was mostly books, most of them in strange languages and letters. On the top shelf were a bottle, a jar, a knife and a strange skull. “See? Just grown-up stuff.” She shut the door and locked it. Only when it clicked did she realize that she had used the silver key.

“Huh,” she said. “They both fit the same lock. I wonder why…” She turned the key again. The door opened…

“Sarah!” Robert called out. He grabbed for her skirt.

The hidden door clicked shut.

And slowly, the ponderous doors of the empty armoire swung shut.

Crypto Corner: The boy who really disappeared

 

As I write this, Halloween is approaching, and I’ve been getting enough Ideas that I might not even do that many movie reviews. Among other things, I had been planning an installment of my woefully intermittent features on short fiction, which in the process brought me to something on the Fortean vein. That provoked me enough to try filling out the lineup with another post in this feature. Last time, I covered the Mary Celeste, an actual unsolved historical mystery that just might come down to outright insurance fraud. This time, I’ll be talking about a case that was always fraud through and through. I speak of a horrifying tale that must have terrified countless impressionable kids, the disappearance of one Oliver Larch, whose real vanishing act was leaving no trace of his existence in the first place.

The tale, as I remember first reading it long, long ago, begins with a festive celebration by a family called the Larches at their farmhouse in South Bend, Indiana on Christmas Eve 1889. In the midst of the party, the young and instantly sympathetic Oliver, age 11, is sent out to fill a pail of water from their well, across a field covered in new-fallen snow. He leaves his popcorn behind (really, that’s repeatedly specified) to do his part for the family. Soon after, the family hears a commotion outside. They run out, to hear Oliver calling for help, and adding, “They’ve got me!” But his cries are fading, and they seem to come from overhead. Meanwhile, the family follows the trail of prints in the snow. At the end of it, perhaps halfway to the well, they find the bucket, but no trace of Oliver. And, invariably, it is affirmed that the police and other authorities investigated these facts and found them beyond dispute.

Except, of course, every remotely critical investigation found nothing of the kind. (See Kevin Randle's thorough, hilarious and pitiful rundown from 2008.) The South Bend police department stated only that they had not maintained or preserved records from the time of the incident. Newspapermen and other recordkeepers, evidently annoyed, reported no record of an individual named Oliver Larch or his family residing in the area at that or any other time, and openly opined that the tale of the disappearance was fantasy or fiction. On top of that, weather reports that were handed down recorded clear weather with little or no snow. But the smoking gun was that the tale was nearly identical to the plot of “Charles Ashmore’s Trail”, a work of fiction published by Ambrose Bierce in 1888. By the 1970s, after being repeated in such publications as Fate, the tale was repudiated in the Fortean community as either a legend or outright hoax. But was that the end of the story? I will be the first to say, yes, dammit, it was. Except, things still weren’t that simple.

And that’s where I come in, in the course of rereading Bierce’s work for what would have been another post altogether. In the midst of it, I remembered the strange saga of Oliver Larch and reread the tale that supposedly started all this. What struck me was that, for a story with such an enduring impact, it was conspicuously unimpressive. Bierce was a master of modern minimalist horror while Gothic purple prose was still riding high (I will name-drop “A Fruitless Assignment” as the peak of his form), yet one would not guess it from the yarn under consideration. Even allowing for its short length, it is awkward and oddly unengaging. What is all the more striking is that it lacks a number of dramatic details and sympathetic hooks of the received legend. Rather than a lovable lad, Charles Ashmore is just a guy of 16 who would have been considered virtually an adult in the Victorian era. Instead of Christmas eve, the night of his disappearance is simply an evening in November. In place of a dramatic disturbance, his family find his trail after merely noticing that he has not returned, and only later hear his voice in the course of their ordinary doings. Given these discrepancies, how certain can we be that this was the source of the tale of Oliver Larch?

In fact, we can guardedly give the lore a certain benefit of a doubt. It is already clear that the tale as received is more like a legend or “myth” than an outright hoax, though the more brazen “true” retellings certainly cross the line into the latter category. If it did originate from Bierce’s yarn at all, it certainly had to have evolved greatly before it reached the form known to us. It follows that Bierce himself might likewise have drawn from much older sources, and it is no stretch to allow that the underlying lore persisted independent of or at least in parallel with his influence. We may finally consider that the quite vivid tale of young Oliver is indeed the earlier and more authentic form of the tale.

It is at this point that we can consider certain oddly modern features of the story, which the folklorist will find more akin to “urban legends” than the folklore of the elder world. First, while a supernatural element is explicit, there is no endorsed or implied “explanation” that would root it in established religion or mythology. There is no invocation of devils, witches or fairies. For all intents and purposes, the abductors of Oliver Larch represent nothing more or less than the unseen and unknown. On a closely related note, there is no moralizing element. There is no suggestion of young Oliver being punished for any wrongdoing. Indeed, we might take his tale as a child’s jeering mockery of such adult-sanctioned lore, except that he is never set up as an obnoxious do-gooder either (compare/ contrast with Saki’s astonishing “The Story-Teller”). Finally, there are the effortlessly confident appeals to authority which leave no doubt of its truth, a distinctly recent preoccupation. On this vein, it is consistently recounted that no balloons were in the air, as if anticipating this as a viable explanation. To anyone actually knowledgeable about lighter-than-air aviation, of course, it would be obvious that a balloon used in the manner described (at night!) would simply crash in a trail of burning wreckage, as would any known aircraft prior to Sikorsky’s development of a practical (but still very, very loud…) helicopter in the aftermath of World War 2.

With this frame of reference, we can outline the most probable path of the tale’s development. It undoubtedly began somewhere in the morass of 19^th-century oral tradition, if it did not somewhat predate the 1800s. It was then retold especially among children and teenagers, perhaps at some point to a still young Bierce. With or without his influence, the tale persisted into the 1890s and early 1900s, when we know it first began to circulate in print. From there, it was a small if delayed jump into early Fortean literature, where it was repeated with painful earnestness long after multiple debunkings.

So that brings us to the end of the trail. And you know something? I still like the story. It’s the Platonic archetype of a campfire tale, and it perfectly expresses the anxieties of young and old alike. There will always be things we don’t understand. There will also always be bad things happening to good people, sometimes not even outside your front door. If it takes a tale like this to teach that lesson to the young, then it would be a more than fair price. The only people who made it a problem were grownups who only remembered contrived terror for its own sake. For the rest, knowing the truth is only part of the balance of growing up. With that, I bring this short chapter to an end.

 

Crypto Corner Returns?! The ship with nobody on it

 

It’s almost time for Halloween, and I have been thinking about the future of my blogging. That brought me back to one of the things that got me here in the first place, my interest in Forteana. That, in turn, got me thinking about something that I had never really thought about trying my own hand at either way. It’s the most famous and iconic of mysteries, the one that is still hailed as “unsolved”… and the one that has the highest volume of absolute nonsense. I speak of the Mary Celeste, the greatest of maritime mysteries… and I will be presenting the explicit hypothesis that it was a scam.

The facts of the case are already so frequently retold as to be moot in serious discussion. In 1872, a ship named Dei Gratia sighted another ship near the Strait of Gibraltar, moving erratically. The captain, David Morehouse, gave orders to approach what was presumed to be a vessel in distress, only to find that it in fact had no crew aboard at all. Its name was the Mary Celeste, an already disreputable vessel commanded by one Benjamin Briggs, a well-regarded if undistinguished seaman who had set off from New England with a cargo of alcohol, a handpicked crew and his wife Sarah and young daughter sophy on board. Though the lifeboat was gone, the ship was still largely seaworthy. But what made it remarkable was that a logbook found aboard recorded the ship’s last position as hundreds of miles further west. Further investigations would raise allegations of mutiny, murder, conspiracies and outright insurance fraud. Yet, in the end, multiple inquests could give no explanation, and neither the captain nor the crew nor his missing family members were ever found. So, of course, decades of literature suggested that it was the work of mutineers, or murderous ex-slaves, or pirates, or giant squid, or aliens, or… Yeah, we all know, this was bunk.

Now, to back this up, what’s really noteworthy are the two figures who gave the story its eventual form. One was none other than Arthur Conan Doyle, who turned out an early yarn with a fictionalized retelling of the vessel, subtly renamed Marie Celeste. In his telling, the tale became a racially charged tale of vengeance. Though it specifically lacked a supernatural element, he made a number of additions and omissions to present a scenario that was far more mysterious than the mundane facts, notably portraying the vessel with its lifeboat still in place and with a “hot meal” on the table. (The latter detail seems to have come from a slightly earlier retelling in the Los Angeles Times.) The other is the infamous Frederick Solly Flood, an attorney general who investigated the case. He was quite justifiably incredulous at the truthfulness of the received account of events, but could not come up with a better alternative than increasingly contrived speculations that the captain and the crew had either murdered each other or been killed by the crew of the Dei Gratia. It is worth further note that, prior to the rise of the Fortean community, his was the dominant “narrative” of the event, as further reflected in the multiple lurid hoaxes that made the worst school library Forteana look like naïve exuberance.

Now is the point where we can double back to the “savvy” version of events, represented by Ian Wilson’s frequently cited Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries and Brian Hendricks’ fine scholarly rundown Ghost Ship. These accounts have at least set a bar of discussion higher than the self-mystification of the “true mysteries” books. We intelligent anomalists and historical investigators all know now that the lifeboat was gone from the ship. It has long since been agreed that, while the Mary Celeste was reasonably intact at the time of discovery, it had suffered significant damage that would probably have claimed it if not for its seemingly happenstance encounter with another ship. Finally, while items of significant value were left aboard ship, as well as the ship’s log book, the captain and crew did take the time to bring navigational instruments. The upshot has been at least to place the “mystery” in the realm of psychology rather than the paranormal. Obviously, the captain and crew decided to leave the ship, without believing the situation so dire that they deserted without preparation. It is sensibly postulated that they believed they could either reach land or simply return to the ship once some temporary problem resolved itself. At some point, they miscalculated or had a further mishap, leaving the captain, crew and a woman and child to a fate that was, in Wilson’s words, “tragically obvious”.

What is most noteworthy in all this is that these revisionist takes have done very little to put Flood in a better light. If anything, he has been the foil of the debunkers as he was to the credulous lay Forteans. In their accounts, he becomes a kind of misguided extremist, trying mightily to refute the posited facts of the case only to see them affirmed again and again. What is undoubtedly true is that there was precious little that was reasonable in his conjectures. The one thing that can still put him in a sympathetic light is the desperation that must have driven to it. He becomes the epitome of the specifically Victorian brand of rationalism, determined to find a “reasonable” explanation even for what was by all appearances a series of irrational acts. As the centerpiece of my own scenario, I posit what I find closest to the truth: He was the kind of prosecutor who, given the opportunity, would overstate and distort his case to the point of irreparable harm even if the facts and evidence were already in favor of the accused being guilty. We can thus frame the question as, just how much did Flood set rational inquiries back?

On this vein, we can see that Flood fundamentally botched his case as soon as he arbitrarily fixated on the notion that the crew had mutinied after getting drunk on alcohol from the ship’s hold. In fact, even if the alcohol was not strictly toxic as usually reported (only Hicks seems to admit any uncertainty on that point), it was certainly never intended for recreational consumption in any quantity. Beyond that, an uprising of intoxicated and enraged sailors changes the scenario from a crime of passion rather than cold-blooded fraud, without any advantage in accounting for the evidence. It was notably unlikely that such a ragtag band could act without resistance from loyalists in the crew and/ or infighting in their own ranks, either of which would almost certainly have left clear signs of struggle. What should have ended the discussion is and if such a group had given any thought at all to covering their tracks, they would simply set fire to the ship and its flammable cargo. Then the most consequential and malign error was that Flood all but rejected the simplest solution of all, that Briggs decided to abandon, burn or flat-out explode his own ship to collect the insurance. On this point, it must be considered that even if Flood was right, his unwillingness to accuse a captain of wrongdoing surely reveals a cultural blind spot that could easily have cost us key facts and context.

Now, we get to the infamous details, and I freely maintain that if my scenario does not explain everything, it leaves no more plot holes than any other. For example, we know that a certain amount of alcohol had leaked into the hold, and that at least one hatch was secured open. This was in fact a reasonably favorable circumstance for the kind of fuel-air explosion already prominently discussed by revisionists, as much as a man of the 1800s could have understood the phenomenon. It is especially noteworthy that this would allow for multiple contingencies. If whatever igniting mechanism was set up failed to produce an explosion, the resulting blaze could still destroy the ship. If it had not, then the flames could still burn up the cargo along with any evidence of intentional sabotage. The one thing would-be arsonists might well have been unprepared for was for a carefully planned detonation to fail entirely. That would have left the crew in the position we already know, either paddling away from the ship in the lifeboat or watching from a calculated safe distance. In the latter scenario, we can envision an argument whether to go back to the ship, just possibly long enough to delay a decision that would have changed their fate.

Another detail this can account for is the abandoned logbook, and the further fact that the last entry was 9 days prior to the ship’s discovery. From what we know now, this was probably at least a day or two before the abandonment of the ship, and of course, the apparent gap in the nominally daily log is all the more strange if anything untoward had happened in the meantime. It has also been freely noted that several calculations of the ship’s position may have been incorrect. This is precisely where outright fraud becomes, at a minimum, more economical than any other solution. Perhaps Briggs discontinued the log when his real plan started. If he had cared enough to make the effort, he might have kept two separate logs, a fraud known to Christopher Columbus. Or, for simplicity, the logbook may have been abandoned because the captain realized it contained information that would contradict whatever story he planned to tell.

At this point, the problem once again falls into the realm of psychology. Much has been said about Briggs’ piety and mild temperament, which is certainly a fair point against the broken-record guessing that he drove his crew to mutiny. But if the charge is premeditated fraud, the story of the scrupulous and reliable professional taking the money and run has long since become its own cliché. Of course, it can be further allowed that he objected to the plan only to be overruled by other conspirators, most obviously the ship’s frequently discussed owner, James Winchester. We might also reconsider a role for Morehouse, the one point where even Flood backed off. If Morehouse and any of his crew had been let in on a plot, they could have been induced by a chance to play hero by picking up the survivors as much as any share in an expected payout. If they were not, it could very well have been planned for the Mary Celeste to cross paths with his ship, notwithstanding the known discrepancies in their known and intended courses, and ideally give truthful witnesses to the destruction of the Mary Celeste in the process. Then we might wonder about a comment reported by his widow: “Poor Briggs! He and his wife and crew must have perished in that small, open yawl. There can be no other way out of it.” It is the same conclusion reached by others much further removed from the case, but wouldn’t the certainty and finality of his remark make all the more sense if that was what he expected to find on the fateful day?

The one obvious counterpoint is that Briggs would have to have embarked on the plot with not only his wife but the younger of their two children onboard. On consideration, this is no more or less than one more unknown, and another point where the lingering filters of Victorian morality have done us no favors. The later hoaxers were especially apt to push Sarah Briggs into the role of a passive damsel, which is in fact the one thing we can be sure she was not. In reality, she was  an intelligent and resourceful woman who had accompanied her husband often enough to be an seasoned mariner in her on right. From what can be known, Briggs in turn respected her as a partner in his ventures. If a plot to sink the Mary Celeste had been discussed between them, it is at least not preposterous that she might have approved. As usual, we can spin further motivations. She may have already wanted to return to a life on land and bring her wayfaring mate with her. Perhaps she would have seen a scheme as no more than a romantically piratical adventure. And of course, the only thing that needs to be added to this “what if” is, as usual, that something went very, very wrong.

And that brings us back around to the aftermath, as Dei Gratia’s crew surveyed the scene. We have already seen that it is not essential that they were party to a conspiracy, if one occurred, but it is all too easy to envision a spontaneous and organic “coverup”. If even the suspicious Flood was unwilling to sustain an accusation of wrongdoing against Briggs, his peers and friends would have been all the more reluctant to implicate him in a petty plot or for that matter a simple error that in all likelihood cost him, his crew and his wife and daughter their lives. Then, if the scenario laid out here is anywhere close to correct, there are plenty of things that would only have been “obvious” to experienced seaman, and many of those might only have been seen by a single person. It would have been easy to dispose of some crucial piece of evidence or remove it from context, easier still simply to omit it from the reports and subsequent testimony. The unavoidable irony is that if anyone had tried to come clean, it might only have further antagonized the likes of Flood.

Now as an epilogue, we might consider a deeper part of maritime lore, the supposedly “cursed” ship. As we all know, the Mary Celeste was the epitome of the legend even without the incident that made her infamous, from a maiden voyage with a captain who got sick and died to a wreck and costly rebuild that gave the ship its name to a final trip where she was in fact wrecked in what a court of law ruled to be deliberate insurance fraud. Through it all, we can see a bedrock of rational plausibility. The ship started as an undistinguished specimen of a type that would soon become both obsolete and unprofitable. In its rebuilt form, it became an awkward compromise, larger than it was meant to be yet only marginally improved, with a sunk cost that would weigh down its profitability. Along the way, it acquired a bad reputation that on objective scrutiny can be counted as nothing more or less than self-fulfilled prophecy. Captains and crew were increasingly unwilling to sail aboard the ship, especially after the disappearance of the Briggs and its crew. More tellingly, it passed through a series of increasingly indifferent or malicious owners, until it finally came to one who was willing to destroy it on purpose. The truth of the matter was that the ship was doomed not by any curse, but by economics that left it unprofitable yet too expensive to abandon until the very end.

And that ends this little rabbit trail. So, what do I think? I’m willing to say, I still don’t know. I have run with my scenario just to see how far it can go. Having come to the end, I will be the first to admit that it’s not a very likely solution. But I can also say, it certainly is not so unlikely that it can be dismissed out of hand. The real lesson of Mary Celeste research is that there will never be a perfect answer to every question. To believe otherwise is to enable the mystification that prevailed for so long, and also to overlook the true horror. If we cannot figure out why an experienced captain would take his wife and child as well as his crew onto the open ocean on a marginal lifeboat, does that not simply show us the limits of our reason? And who are we to say that any of us could not make an equally unfathomable decision, if we had to make it under the same limitations? That should terrify us more than any spooky yarn, and that is why the mystery will live on.

Fiction: Retro gaming parody novel publication announcement!

 

It's Labor Day, which means this is still technically the last weekend of a month when I've so far done only two posts and absolutely no movie reviews. I'm breaking the silence to announce that my Nintendo fan/ parody novel (see demos 1, 2,  and 3, the mythology appendix and extra) is up for sale, as linked to here.  In the meantime, I threw in some art on top of the cover I already spent too much on, resulting in the interior title page above from an artist named Carlos Miguel Garcia. My specific instructions were to make a "1980s futuristic" ship, and I will be the first to admit that really is what Eighties "kit-bashed" sci fi ships were like. Here's another piece of artwork I shelled out for. For context, the description in the book has the mother dragon monster using a chokehold. And they're both being held hostage by the empress of an evil magic-mirror dimension...

So that's what I have to show for 4 and a half months of work and definitely more money than I'm remotely likely to get back. So was it worth it? Well, it probably helped keep me sane, which is something. And while I'm at it, here's my final version of the ship design everybody kept telling me not to use.

That's all for now, more to come... I'm still not saying when.

The Horrible Horror Vault: The one with tentacle zombies

 

 

Title: The Void

What Year?: 2016

Classification: Improbable Experiment/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: Ow, My Brain!!! (Unrated/ NR)

 

As I write this, I have once again gone until Monday without finishing a weekend post. This time, however, it was never in doubt what I was going to review, and this particular movie was in the lineup as soon as I revived this feature. It’s one that’s been on my radar for a long time as one of the strangest and quite possibly one of the worst movies I have viewed, yet always found that neither fully described the whole. (And I have Shanks, House and Death Bed as a baseline…) Now, I’m finally ready to take this one on, and needless to say, I’m not playing nice. I present The Void, and it is among other things the kind of film that could have been custom made to annoy me.

Our story begins at a house in the countryside, where a guy makes his escape from a group of rednecks. We then find the survivor at a rural hospital that’s about to close, under suspicion of multiple homicides. He’s watched over by a kindly doctor and a lawman who is already wary. Tensions rise when strange, shrouded figures surround the hospital, and a pair of vigilantes push their way in. In the midst of it, the patients and staff start to transform into Lovecraftian abominations, and the doc is picked off. The lawman is left to guard the survivors, including a mother-to-be who might be more than a sympathy hook, and it doesn’t help when he gets a call from the deceased and no longer so friendly doctor. It’s a long night of growing horror and quasi-religious imagery, where the only thing that’s sure is that none of this makes any sense!

The Void was a 2016 independent cosmic horror film written and directed by Canadian filmmakers Steven Kostanski and Jeremy Gillespie, known for horror and science fiction/ fantasy comedies including Manborg. The project was reportedly influenced by Guillermo Del Toro (see… Pinocchio?), who had been in casual contact with the filmmakers during work on an unproduced adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s novel At The Mountains Of Madness. The production was partly funded through Indiegogo. The film starred Aaron Poole as Sheriff Carter and the late Kenneth Welsh (see Of Unknown Origin) as the doctor. Gillespie was credited as supervisor for the film’s effects. The film was shown at Fantastic Fest in late 2016, and given a limited release in the United States, Canada and the UK in 2017. It received generally positive reviews. The film is available on digital platforms including the free Tubi platform.

For my experiences, I encountered this one through a casual viewing, after seeing it listed with some quite favorable reviews. As alluded, my immediate impression was unfavorable enough that I came back to it during the brutal countdown for No Good Very Bad Movies. In that maelstrom of kaka, it was inevitably sidelined by far more worthy contenders (see, again, High Tension, and for that matter Deadgirl). I thought of it again when I put together my capsule reviews for the Revenant Review ebook, but it was always “zombie adjacent” rather than a zombie movie, and again, there were others that were more deserving of attention for good or ill (compare, if anything, Contracted). Now, I’m finally back for a rematch, and I find it an oddly suitable companion to Wind Chill. On a certain level, this is an “evil twin” to it, except more like equal and opposite: Where that was a polished near-mainstream effort that would have benefited from pushing itself further, this is the kind of competent indie-horror effort that rarely declines to cross a line for its own sake, even when said lines are basic principles of coherent narrative. If it were my verdict to pass, I would send them both back for more work.

Moving forward, what’s front and center is that we have two concepts that could each have easily sustained the film on their own, which instead clash together. On one hand, there are the cultists, ruthless and genuinely cunning antagonists who are never presented as anything but human. On the other, there are the Lovecraftian abominations, done very well with an emphasis on their very corporeal nature. I have to say right here that the former are far more effective for the majority of the film. On that front, the first act is greatly aided by the cultists’ visually compelling costumes, which readily calls to mind the obvious real-life counterparts (and the darker elements of the underlying source material) without making this feel like a half-baked “message” story. My further editorial thought is that the abominations would have been more effective as a final-act reveal, which we do finally sort of get when the doc finally introduces a group of them in the subbasement. This is also where I have to make a further complaint: While the camerawork and storyboarding are linear enough that one can see where the creatures are and what they are doing within the environment, there’s still a trendy emphasis on poor lighting for its own sake. In this already late entry, the whole trend is conspicuously shown as what it was, an attempt by journeymen to revive an artform whose masters were long gone.

For the rest, what I decided was worth more detailed comment are the characters and story. This is precisely where actual quality becomes more frustrating than outright badness. The characters of Lovecraft himself  rarely rose above expendable exposition generators (the major exception being none other than Herbert West), which made for an acceptable conceit. Here, on the other hand, we see the bar raised to the standards of modern storytelling. These are characters we can like played by real actors, especially but not limited to Poole and Welsh. Their reactions are both rational and relatable from the outset, and we will see that they have plenty more pain behind them. Where things go off the rails is that far too many character and story points seem to come out of nowhere well into the final act. I may be bad at paying attention to these things, but this is egregious, to the point that I initially thought an entire scene was a “flashback” because I had not worked out that two characters were supposed to be married to each other. That, in turn, was all because a character is impregnated with an abomination without explanation before we know the actual pregnant lady’s real story. (I was going to go into her fate, but… just no.) My big rant, building on the last, is that these things could have been laid out in detail in the same running time as the first few monster attacks. The final testament to the outright redundancy is the doctor’s chilling introduction of his creations, which would have been there to do his bidding the whole time: “They want to die, but I won’t let them…” That is how a developed reveal works, so why did anyone think we needed to see anything but the creepy cultists before this?

Now for the “one scene”, there is one that truly embodies my issues with this film. Partway through, the lawman ventures outside, after the first of the abominations is dispatched, accompanied by the very paranoid vigilantes. Of course, the cultists are waiting, and this is their finest hour. We first see them standing in their white sheets, lit by the flashing lights of a patrol car. They all draw weapons, but only one seems to rush in for the attack. We get one of our closest looks at the black triangle all of them have over the face. A shotgun blast takes him down, and the lawman retreats. The camera flashes back to the cultists, and we see them still standing there, with absolutely no reduction in the evident threat. To them, this is clearly just a skirmish which they have already won. But what brought me right out of it is that the lawman does nothing about the downed cultist. It’s reasonably obvious that he is already dead or going to be, but surely there would be something to learn from at least a glance under the sheet. In fact, given the assumed small-town setting, it’s very likely that all of these guys (???) are people the sheriff would already know, something the film will never acknowledge or explore the implications of. And that is how you lose even a reviewer as mild-mannered as me.

In closing, I come to the rating, and this is where I literally punted. On my regular rating scale (which I never updated from The Revenant Review), this would be either 1 or 2 out of 4, very much depending on my mood. (As I regularly point out, just being on the scale is enough to separate a film from the actual “worsts”.) What finally stayed my hand is that I have seen how well it resonates with a genre fandom I have never quite been a part of. Beyond that, there are certainly strengths that I cannot easily address in my review format. The bottom line is, if you like this movie, I’m not the one who will tell you that you are wrong. I gave it a chance, and that much was what it deserved. That’s enough to call it a day.

Fiction: Assumed mythology line-up!

 It's the start of the weekend, and I still don't have the second post of a three-post week. That left me without anything in particular outside my fairly massive and ridiculously quickly written novel that I already posted a spoiler for. I considered one particular chapter to post, because I keep revising it, with more spoilers and a whole lot of stuff without the introduction or buildup. Then I decided to do something different that was actually fun to do. I like to work mythology and folklore (see Chelsea the (bad) Social Worker, which has some overlap) into my stories, and for this project, I had the idea of a whole culture based on ancient Greek mythology but with such a skewed perspective that their take would be equivalent to theistic Satanism. (Yes, I've encountered that in the wild...) With that in mind, I went as far as writing out a list of the characters these guys would choose as their heroes. So, here goes...

These are the names of the 12 Heroes of the Myrmidons, who defied the gods who are not gods and brought the wrath of gods and men, and the accounts of their deeds as told among them and the Misthioi.

 

Aeacus the Ruler: He was a demigod king of the island of Aegina and founder of the Myrmidons. Seeing that he was loved by his father Zeus and his people, jealous Hera destroyed his kingdom with a plague. Finding himself among the bodies of his subjects, he beheld the ants and the brotherhood and good order with which they marched. In grief, he called on Zeus to make him a new people and a great army from the ants. Zeus granted his wish, and the ants became the first Hoplites of the Myrmidons. He lived long and well, and when he came to the shores of Tartarus, Kind Hades appointed him as a judge of the souls of the dead.

 

Aesclepius the Healer: He was the greatest of physicians and kindest of men. It was said that his medicine could cure all disease, and some even told that he could return the dead to life. Kind Hades pled that his power be drawn back, lest the living fill the Earth until there was no food to eat or land to grow it. Instead, Zeus slew him, fearing that one with the power to restore the dead to life might also learn the secret ways to slay the immortal gods. But the people revered him in death, even as a god himself, and Just Hades honored him with the sign of the serpent in the heavens.

 

Amphion the Defender: He was the founder and builder of great Thebes, the impenetrable city, and husband of rash Niobe. When the gods slew his sons for their mother’s insult, his daughters prevailed on their mother to come to the temple of the Sun and Moon in penitence by the promise of a false oracle. Guessing the gods’ trap, he breached the temple to find his daughters slain beside the bodies of their brothers, save Meliboia. He fought the Assassins of Olympus, one against two, and it is said that he wounded the arm of mighty Apollo, or else moved him to mercy by his show of valor. But the cold Lady of the Moon cast a dart he could only slow with his shield and his body. Then, knowing himself mortally wounded, he cast himself down from the temple mount so that the gods could not claim to have extinguished his line by their hands alone. But where he fell, only persephones were found, to show that Kind Hades and his Queen had favored him.

 

Arachne the Challenger: She was the greatest and proudest weaver of all mortal men, so great that she challenged Athena to prove herself better. They held a great contest, which only Zeus would judge. Arachne showed the sins of the gods, where Athena showed the fates of those who had defied them. And the gathered peoples said that Arachne was the better, save that Athena wove with finer thread that no mortal had seen from the wealth of the heavens and the depths of the Earth. But Zeus judged his daughter victor, and in spite, the goddess smashed Arachne’s weaving along with her loom. Then humiliated Arachne prepared to hang herself with her last measure of pride, but the gods or mysterious Fate transformed her to a spider, the first of her kind on the Earth. To this day, Athena curses the sign of her kind.

 

Cassandra the Counsellor: She was the greatest and wisest of all prophets and seers, moved to warn the kings and their people of disaster. Mighty Apollo wooed her, for he knew his own oracles could not match her vision. But when he offered to make her the very Queen of Heaven if she would foretell to him alone the dooms that might yet fall on the gods themselves, she spurned him. So the god laid on her the curse of Moira, that ever after, she would foresee every doom, but no mortal from outcast to king would believe her or heed her until the Fates she foretold had come had already come to pass. Worse, it would be her lot to fall in the path of every great calamity, to warn in vain and then suffer, yet never find death. And so she wandered the Earth, from land to land and age to age until east became west and tomorrow became ancient legend, and some say she wanders still, warning of the doom that will yet smite the very stars from the sky.

 

Chloris the Accuser: She was the daughter of Amphion and last princess of Thebes, wounded by the gods themselves but not destroyed. It is said that she was first named Meliboia, meaning Honey And Milk, but when men beheld her risen from the tomb of her family, they called her Pale One. Ever after, it was appointed to her to testify to the evil deeds of gods and men, whether in the courts of Olympus or the halls of Kind Hades. From of old, the rescue of Chloris and the love and valor of her mother was portrayed in song and in stone. Yet, many of the ignorant and unknowing instead tell that the daughters of Niobe fell nameless beside their brothers.

 

Hephaestus the Armorer: He was an Olympian, the god of the forge and of arms and armor, and the only one besides Kind Hades to earn the veneration of the Mymidons. He was born to Zeus and Hera, so ugly and deformed that his mother cast him from the Heavens. Yet he returned, and proved himself by casting the most beautiful ornaments and most cunning weapons of the gods. A day came when he defended his mother after his father wronged her, and his father cast him down again. Then he taught his arts to mortal men, and the Myrmidons say it was he rather than Prometheus the First Benefactor who first revealed the secret of fire. At last, Zeus restored him in fear that he would arm the men of Earth as the gods themselves. And so he crafts his father’s mighty thunderbolts, yet it is said that he keeps the deadliest bolt of all for himself, in case a time should come when the gods plot to expel him again.

 

Idas the Redeemer: He was the faithful lover of Marpessa, whom Apollo sought as a trifle. He alone prevailed against the gods. His lady was not tempted, for she loved Idas and was wise enough to know that gods were rarely true or kind to mortal women, but they both feared that the god would not leave them in peace. So great was his love and bravery that Idas dared to challenge mighty Apollo to combat for honor, and Zeus feared the disgrace of all the gods if the mortal man prevailed or if the god resorted to treachery to best him. For the first and only time, the King of Heaven pledged to honor the choice of a mortal woman between god or man. The true mortal rightly received his bride, and Zeus was forced to swear that the gods would trouble them no more.

 

Mestra the Maiden: She was the daughter of Erysichthon the Hungry, whom even the Myrmidons count most justly accursed, yet the punishment of the gods caused more woe to her than the sinful King. Consumed from within by Limos, the Demon of Famine, her father became a deathless ghoul who devoured the harvest of his kingdom, and all the food his wealth would buy, and finally his own servants. He at last threatened to consume Mestra if she did not bring him food. To escape him, she agreed to be sold as bride to six master even crueler in exchange for a ship full of food. Her suitors thought to cheat the king with moldering bread, diseased livestock, putrid meat, poisonous fruit, bitter herbs and ancient bones. Each time, her father consumed the offering in a day, while she escaped with her power to change shape and returned to be sold again, and when her husbands pursued her, the ghoul devoured them as well. Her seventh suitor was Autolycos, master of thieves. To him, she revealed that her father could not look upon his own reflection. Mestra lured the ghoul into a chamber lined with mirrors, and the gallant thief sealed him in. Trapped, the wicked king consumed himself, and the Maiden became Autolycos’ lady and partner. She is held up as an example of the virtue of fulfilling all oaths and the bonds of family, even to the unworthy, but her marriage is a byword for a bargain made in desperation and bad faith, to no benefit.

 

Orestes the Avenger: He was the heir and avenger of Agamemnon, whom Aegisthus slew for his throne and the favor of his faithless queen Clytemenstra. Orestes slew the usurper, but for presuming to slay his king, the gods sent visions of the Furies to torment him to madness. Against the specters he alone could see, he raged and flailed, until he dealt a mortal wound to his sister Electra, believing her a Fury in a mortal guise. He then prepared to murder his mother, who confessed that his father was not Agamemnon but Aegisthus whom he had killed, and then slew herself instead. At the last, he swore that the gods were not gods if they would drive men to greater evil for a sin made in ignorance and madness. Only then did the Furies disappear from his sight, never to return.

 

Palamedes the Diviner: He was a wise king and commander in the war against Troy. Of the great heroes, he alone was wronged by men and not by the gods. Among his many deeds, he invented the dice, and in so doing learned much of the ways of Fortune and Fate, which are greater than the so-called gods. It is said those who rolled against him came to mistrust him and resent the debts they owed. It was perhaps for this reason that he came to be accused of treason and spying, and finally charged based on a letter many held to be forged by his chief enemy, the famed Odysseus. He submitted his doom, proclaiming that his own fortune had been cast, and some say it was this injustice that led to the disastrous voyage of Odysseus.

 

Sisyphus the Truth-Teller: He was the founder and king of Corinth, and judged the most cunning of all men. He brought riches to his city by his dealings, which some said were gained by murder and treachery against his guests. But others told that he could tell no lie nor break any promise, but could by omission and incomplete truths deceive more completely than the most brazen liar. It was even said that he escaped Death and Hades by his trickery. The greatest test came when an enemy of Zeus sought a hiding place where the god had taken a damsel, and Sisyphus gave witness against the King of Heaven, revealing what he knew of a secret place he had seen the god enter. Some say that for this, he was punished to an eternity of hard and futile labor, others that he defied the gods in the knowledge of the doom that already awaited him.