It's perhaps a trite concept. Or at least, it's trite to talk about it, inured as we are to wanting to admit it, to bring it out.
It's the private, spider-web-light touch of dust and love.
The understanding of human pain, and the fears that birth that pain, is the understanding of life itself. The understanding of the human capability for the extreme is the grasping of the live wires underneath the living condition..
It is the groping for the few strings that hold us, the anchor stone that shocks us with the weight it holds us down under.
Fear encapsulates and underscores every major aspect of existence. Love, hatred, disgust, racism, sexism--every form of rage and joy there is, exists either because of or in spite of fear. Lust rides high with the terror of its discovery, of its potential embarrassment and mortification, its climax and depressing afterglow.
The dark and the light are nothing more than window dressings-the real display has no specific color, no particular shift..
Sometimes if it is struck, it mewls and pulls away, pulsing and dripping.
But other times, it grows fangs and bites, not releasing until the blood flows warm and rich.
It is as at-home in a chamber of the heart as it is under the floorboards of a child's bedroom, or the wet earth of a fresh grave. A mummy in a sarcophagus looms forward to dance with giant marionettes, grinning with seamed cheeks and jerky pirouettes. It is a smell of dry hay and the dance of rain on a windshield.
Every child is born with the capacity to fear as natural equipment, as an evolutionary necessity. We must fear in order to avoid danger long enough to survive and grow to bigger horrors.
There are wolves waiting out there, and they have the Cheshire smiles of carnival clowns.
Wolves with wings and talons, with cloaks about their flanks, the smell of cerement cloth and the dirt between their toes.
There is a taste of copper on the air amongst their steaming pelts.
The fear is the feeling.
And its evocation, the skill of the horrorist, is one of the great secret arts of the mortal soul. The skein that weaves us is the chain, the Fenris bond of silk and razorwire that holds us together. We bleed the same colors, but not all from the same wounds.
The horrorist knows that somewhere, grabbing hold of these bones and casting them in the air for the wolves to snatch and lunge at, to bite and snarl over, there is a secret to be learned.
Our minds are fissured not with gray matter, but blue and green matter. With squirming motion and dry, cautious stalking.
Our mind is the ferryman's boat, and the horrorist knows to check the waters, to see what shape is making those bubbles just at the horizon ahead, what heart is thumping in time with the water lapping at the hull.
Take off your jacket, relax.
A glass of wine?
Certainly.
Every vintage, every savory flavor available at our taps. There is truly only a few drinks for such as we to sip.
I have had opportunity to be the proprietor of this small meeting hall. I drape the cobwebs on the corners, I sweep up the flour dust on the furniture. I stoke the flames and occasionally rub an old, polish-stained rag across the teeth of the oak gargoyle that looks over the mantelpiece. There are clocks everywhere, and it is my hand that must tend them, keeping their hours all in a singular alignment.
And when the knocks began to come, when I made it known to the gray fogs and the dark, rain-wet heralds that others could make themselves known to me, I began to view them.
Some weren't quite ready to enter yet.
They had to still go out and see a few more sights to speak of.
Still others had found the wrong way, and I tried my best to give them directions down the right sunlit road.
But a few...ah, a few.
They smiled and shook my hand.
I welcome them readily. Their visage and their badge are upon their shoulder.
I step aside and bid them welcome. Seats are pulled out, the flames crack and snap like arthritic joints.
We are not old, but we feel as though we are. We are the children of a benighted age. Isn't every generation trapped in the crab-hold of its predecessors?
Atomic monsters and nuclear terrors, televised combatants upon a cybernetic stage. There are no holographic displays or stainless steel counters here. I keep my marble top free of dirt and I polish the brass railings at the bar.
Although if you press me, I'm sure there's a pulse-dial speakerphone hidden behind one of these panels....at least, I think that's what's been making those sounds like raised voices behind the walls....
The hour clicks, the moment is high, and we are all suspended, a colloidal fluid of time and mutual enjoyment.
The clocks start to chime, bong, whistle, howl.
The flames gutter for a moment as a draft comes down the flue.
Everyone's hands freeze. A game of poker is stopped, glasses of wine and amber ale might as well be frozen to ice for all their motion.
For just a second, every Sartre concept of Hell, of unblinking, unrelentingly sleepless eternity exists here.
Outside, there are thumps against the sides of the hall, but nothing is trying to get in.
Here is fear.
Here the boat has reached a temporary haven.
You must eventually leave, but you're always welcome to return.
After all, you've already been accepted.
You've reached the hall at the end of everything else.
Horrorists, all, we are known to each other, if only by the shape of the shadows we've cast across one another's eyes.
Here, then, are the children of the hour struck on the skull-gong of Eternity.
Here, then, is the Midnighters Club....
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