Rosabelle, Believe: The Death of Houdini and After

“Today is the ninety-second year anniversary of the punch that ended the life of Harry Houdini. Houdini, a legendary historical figure whose name has become the literal byword for illusion, stage magic, and daredevil acts of escape, actually died on HALLOWEEN night of 1926, of peritonitis. He had lingered for eight days after being sucker punched in the gut by an exuberant fan. Houdini, who was known to be able to withstand massive amounts of bodily damage, had not been prepared for the assault—and it killed him.”

Read this article at VOCAL:
https://horror.media/rosabelle-believe

IF…

There was once a used bookstore just off of the Marion bypass. It was located in a little cul-de-sac, beyond a gravel parking lot, catty-corner with another shop I can’t quite remember. The bookstore was called Redbeard’s books. I didn’t know it at the time, but I would, thirty years later, use a digital publishing platform on something called the “Internet” to sell books by an author named Redbeard. But, I couldn’t have foreseen that at the time.

It was the typical, cramped little place, and very dim inside. Back then, my mother use to wait patiently while I combed video shops (those carried videocassette tapes, which are now essentially museum relics. Back in those days, there were specialty shops on every corner, catering to your particular taste in VHS.) and little junky bookshops. Often, she just sat in the car. Thank God for the patience of mothers.

All I remember of it, from thirty years on, is that the screen door opened up on to two rooms, one where a sort of fat hippie sat behind a desk or counter, surrounded by books…this room leading to two additional rooms, one with heaving shelves of books, and a smaller room with a sort of bin in the center, with books and comics stacked flat. At least, this is how I remember it.

My single purchase at this establishment was a graphic novel adaptation of the movie Bladerunner. A sequel has just been released the month I am writing this; which is a nice coincidence, but has nothing to do with this story.

The other book, Deviant by Harold Scechter, was a true crime biography of Ed Gein. I didn’t know it then, but I would go on to write about Ed Gein myself in three separate books. The Deviant book had grainy, black-and-white crime scene photos that made me feel rather sick. I put the book down as if the vibes from it could poison the soul. Maybe it could, and did. I turned to the comics because they cheered me. It was very dim in that store.

The store was the downstairs of a two-story house, bright white with a cracked pavement walkway around the side to the porch. Well-kept, which was what made the single, cryptic word of graffiti that had been spray painted on the side so perplexing. Around town, I, as many others, had seen such cryptic phrases as “eat shit,” and the even more utterly incomprehensible “1,2,3 CAT!” painted in dripping, horror movie letters on various alley walls and abandoned office buildings. But, “If”? If…what, pray tell? What the hell was the meaning behind this inscrutable expression? And, why was it allowed to drip there, day after day, on that clean white house wall, without anyone ever bothering to paint over it?

That it was the first thing you saw on the way to a bookstore, one brimming full of fantasy and science fiction books, comics, role playing games…maybe it was a challenge to wonder? To fantasize. To dream. It has always struck me that that might be what the mysterious “If” was meant to convey; a sense of plunging headlong into a world that challenged you to ask, “What…if?” What if dragons really slept on piles of gold, in lonely dungeons? What if spaceships flew through the galaxy, hopping from star to star, with alien minds aboard? What if? “Ask yourself,” it seemed to be saying.

“If” is the title of a poem by Rudyard Kipling. It ends with the line, “You’ll be a man, my son.” When I first saw the ambiguous “If” as it had been put upon the clean white wall by some rascally, unknown intellect, (trying to communicate, SOMETHING to the unwary observer), I was not yet, legally, a man. I was probably nine years away from that particular malady.

Rudyard Kipling is considered “politically incorrect” in the year 2017,BTW.

“If” was the name of a science fiction magazine edited by Frederick Pohl. That, in this context, seems appropriate.

“If” is the title of a British art house film, rather obscure, starring Malcolm McDowell, who played H.G. Wells in the movie Time After Time. The film “If…” concerns a British schoolboy who perpetrates a shooting massacre. Today, we live in a world that is rotten with massacres, both shooting and otherwise. Especially at schools. But, in 1987, not so much.

There are other “Ifs”. Silent films. Bad Novels. Forgotten popular songs.
***
IF I had known, in 1987, how much pain was in store for me in life, I might have decided to freeze time in that bookstore, like something from a bad sci fi paperback.

IF I had known what the world of 2017 would be like, what MY world would be like, thirty years ago, I would have chose to stop the clock. I’d be in that damn bookstore forever, and Mom would be waiting patiently out in the car, for eternity.

If wishes were fishes, boys and girls.

If…

Fox Met Cromwell

George Fox, the esteemed Quaker visionary, once met Cromwell while out riding. In a burst of vision, he exclaimed that, “I smell the stench of death about you!” As bizarre as this seemed to Cromwell, it turned out to be prescient, as Cromwell died a few weeks later, on Sept 3, 1658.

Certain death portents include the stopping of clocks, raps on the door whe no one is there, pictures falling mysteriously from the wall, and raps on the headboard.

The Hartford City CE-3

Color this one indelibly strange.

A young couple, the Donathans were driving the lonely highways of Indiana near Hartford City back from a visit with the in-laws, when suddenly, while rounding the bend on a desolate stretch of road, they encountered what they first took to be “two children playing, wrapped up in aluminum foil”.

Screeching to a halt in panic, the couple got a much better look at the two strange little beings they had encountered. They came to two startling realizations.

The first being that they were, most definitely, not children who had, somehow, somehow, been abandoned in the country to wander aimlessly and get themselves killed.

The second realization was that the two beings were, quite possibly, not even human.

The Donathans described, incredibly, two small creatures, both of whom could measure little more than four feet tall, and both dressed in immaculate silver suits. Though they were vague on description of the face, it was suggested that the heads were ovoid, and the eyes abnormally large. The arms were described as abnormally long and thin, reaching well below the waist.

What’s even more bizarre is the way the creatures reportedly moved. It was a sort of slow-motion “hopping” movement, with the arms flapping up and down as if the two were, somehow, experiencing gravity in an entirely strange, new way. Additionally, Mrs. Donathan remembered the beings as having “boxlike” feet.

The strange little men hopped out of the headlights glow into the surrounding brush, and the Donathans quickly sped on, terrified. They stopped at a local café for a moment, trying to decide what on earth to do about the experience they just had, before deciding to report it to the Hartford City Sheriff.

Deputy Sheriff Ed Townsend, along with a State Patrolman and another fellow, a local named Gary Flatter, were all present at the station, and became privy to the Donothan’s strange report. Having no reason to suspect the couple of having confabulated the weird account, the three men took off to the particular section of road to investigate.

After driving for some time, the only phenomenon they could ascertain as being out of the ordinary was a bizarre, high-frequency “hum” or buzzing. Otherwise, they found nothing. Deputy Townsend decided to return to town, but the other two men decided to continue driving and searching for the two strange little individuals.

Since they had each, individually, taken their own vehicles, they split up, the state patrolman driving further east than the spot where the two beings had initially been seen, while Mr. Flatter (described as being a local who operated a filling station) continued to cruise the roads in the immediate vicinity, hoping for a glimpse of the mysterious critters.

He very soon got his wish.

Coming down a particular stretch of back road, he was forced to stop by what appeared to be a procession of fleeing animals, all “spooked” or terrified by the presence of something lurking in the woods. Mr. Flatter quickly drove to the side of the road, pulling over, and their, in the bright shine of his headlights, almost too glaringly brilliant to look at owing to the reflection of their strange costumes, were the two beings. Mr. Flatter added considerably to the description of the two visitors by noting the presence of a long hose coming down from the face, as if the two were wearing suits that amounted to diving suits or (perhaps more appropriately) “space suits”. He also noted the boxlike boots the frail, tiny figures wore, and the peculiar egg-shaped heads they possessed.

Mr. Flatter decided, at first, to hit the two beings with his spotlight, but that idea quickly proved to be the wrong one, as the tight-fitting, shiny suits they wore proved to make them too bright to be clearly visible. Mr. Flatter, was able to view them for awhile, apparently without a sense of fear or trepidation, and he noted that the arms seemed to end with no hands, and that they “hopped”, flapping their arms a bit while doing so. They reportedly could make terrific leaps.

After hopping for him several times, they strange beings hopped upward, disappearing into the darkness. Mr. Flatter then, reportedly, saw several brilliant flashes of red light in the night sky, but nothing else that was tangible. Whoever (or whatever) the two little beings had been, or where they had come from, remains a mystery to which, most probably, we may never know the answer.

The Oldest Trick in the Galaxy? (Midwest UFOs Excerpt)

Is it the oldest trick in the galaxy, to control Humankind and breed us out like cattle, for whatever purposes? Is it the machinations of sinister Grays and Reptilians? Is our government in cahoots with them at some secret level? Or are they the simple watchful denizens of another planet, simply keeping an eye on the store until the time is required of them, as in the channeled predictions from so many “Space Brothers,” to arrive in their fleet of ships and save us from catastrophic Earth changes and global upheavals? Or, as a third alternative, are they the denizens of some dimension close to our own, some alternate Earth that could be affected, just as surely as we are affected, by our propensity to wage war and destroy the ecosystem? Perhaps they are, as Jacques Vallee has posited, simply the agents of a control system we cannot, with our limited minds, yet grasp.

Or perhaps they are simply ONE mind, ONE consciousness, manifesting itself in bizarre and striking patterns (crop circles, cattle mutilations, weird lights in the sky), in a ceaseless attempt to communicate with its inferiors, in much the same way we must seem pretty bizarre to insects and lower life forms…John Keel believed this, and I can’t say he was entirely off the mark.

Perhaps it is all of them, some combination of things that is so unlikely, so mathematically improbable, that the sheer fact of its existence in our reality would blow our minds. Perhaps we have extraterrestrials, inner-terrestrials, ultra-terrestrials, ad infinitum…perhaps life exists in such strange, obscure forms, in so many weird crevices of what we consider to be “real,” that the sheer scope of it is enough to crash the finely-tuned computer we call the human brain. Just watching the excellent French documentary Microcosmos, which deals with insect life, should be enough to convince anyone that life is varied, strange, brilliant, breathtaking–not more bizarre than we imagine, but more bizarre than we can imagine.

So what have I learned?

Answer: Nothing.

There is no “final secret,” I think, to unraveling this mystery. The human mind is finite, but the UFO question touches on the Infinite, unseating our deepest, most cherished notions of what is real and unreal, possible and impossible, reality and myth.

There is a line from a song in the film Microcosmos, a high, haunting line sung by a child. “Open your eyes,” it says, “before you die.” That’s what I’ve been trying to do with this book, to open my eyes before it is too late, to come out of the closet of denial I’ve been in for over twenty years, and to finally, in much the same way that Whitley Strieber has, face the alien, “other” that has been with me, in one form or another, since I was a child.

Do UFOs come from other planets?

Are they from other dimensions?

Are they angels?

Are they demons?

I don’t know.

And, what’s more, I don’t think it really matters.

They’re here.

They’re real.

And they have their vision of the future, much as we have ours.

Now, the question is: Whose vision will it be?