F. P. Dorchak

Speculative Fiction Author

fpdorchak

Where’s Mummy?

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English: A screenshot from The Mummy Italiano:...
Who’s your daddy. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ok, I’ve been having fun this month with all-things Hallowe’en (man, next month I’m really gonna have to get back to my mss work…), but all this talk about the undead got my juices dessicating! So…I’m going to put myself to a test.

Next week I’m going to post a prose poem about my favorite monster. Now, I’m not saying this is going to be another Ozymandias, or anything, but I’m going to give it my best shot and come up with something I’ve wanted to pen for a little bit. I’ve actually already started it and hope to post soon.

Now, as a kid I had several monster interests. Though I was interested in the Bram Stoker version of Dracula in vampyres, werewolves were a pretty strong interest. One of my favorites stories was The Werewolf of Ponkert, by H. Warner Munn, which was actually two stories. It’s interesting looking at some prices of this book today—geesh!
I also got into some of the Dr. Phibes, work (books and movies: “Love means never having to say you’re ugly”; I know, très unPC, but check out the man’s visage), like Dr. Phibes Rises Again! I was a huge Vincent Price fan. And who could forget “Vulnavia,” played by Virginia North? I mean, whata cool name! The Dr. Anton Phibes movies were so campy, over the top, and full of dark humor, I loved them!

(in case the above doesn’t work, try this link: http://youtu.be/yBo0H3oYSoo)
What’s not to like, right?
Vulnaaaviaaaa….
I was also, as you may have guessed, into your basic “undeads,” rising from the deads, clawing out from grounds, ghosts, that kind of thing. I was, basically, a fan of all kinds of Hammer Films movies about anything supernatural, and it looks like they’re still around, which is interesting, since I haven’t heard anything more out of them, since I left home for adulthood.
But, when it really came down to it, I became quite interested in one monster in particular, and it was my last teenage dress-up for Hallowe’en. Even as a teen, I had an eye for authenticity, and I pulled out the needed sheet and begged and pleaded to my mom to do the unthinkable: rip a perfectly good bedsheet into shreds. Well, to this day, I’m always amazed that she let me do that, but, hey, that’s what mom’s do, right?
So, on my last teenage Hallowe’en, I wrapped up and went out horrorizing the neighborhood, and painted “Denn die Todten reiten schnell”  (“For the dead travel fast,” from Dracula) on rocks all along the railroad tracks from which I lived across (yeah, literally), in green flourescent paint.
Mummy Me, c. late 1970s
Mummy Me, c. late 1970s
So, if you haven’t figured out my favorite monster, stay tuned! I hope to have something. ummm, unwrapped, next week….

Zombies v. The Undead

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Tales from the Crypt (book)
Tales from the Crypt (book) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Okay, there’s this big craze over zombies (you know they’re big when they’re used in public service announcements and have their own “Zombie 5K“), and while I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing—I personally have nothing against zombies, like I do the overworked, beslutted, and “reimagined” vampire craze—I feel I need to make a differentiation, here, between “zombies” and…the “undead.”

Really, you ask?

Yes. There is a difference. At least to me, and I’m sure some will take opposition to it, but I assure you, I am only sticking to the “facts” as they prove my argument.

Cause, I am a fan of…The Great Undead.

You see, zombies…are alive…but are rendered monster-like through some sort of introduced agent, like a really really bad flu, a government-generated virus, voo doo whoop-de-doo, or cubicle-office work. Of course, many ignore the original zombie, as characterized in, say, the 1932 movie, White Zombie, where there is an Evil VooDoo Master pulling the puppet strings (there are other origins, see this link). I find that link interestingly tagged with “(fictional),” though know of the evils of tetrodotoxin and and The Serpent and the Rainbow discussion of “zombies.” Anyway, today’s versions are independent and hungry. They hunger for flesh, especially the much-prized delicacy of brains.

Zombies can be stopped: a simple penetration of their brains, brings their reign of horror to a quick, ignoble, end.

Now, the “undead,” on the other hand, are supernaturally reawakened corpses that crawl out from their graves and stumble around with no particular need for flesh, brains, or anything else, short of scaring and killing. Real spooky stuff. The undead can’t really be stopped (not in and of themselves, anyway)…unless you terminate whatever it is that reanimated them, or they completed their deed. You may decapitate them, but they just keep on coming. Incinerating them would take them out, I suppose, because of the near-total destruction, but still, I wonder….

And they don’t eat anything.

You see, the dead can’t eat.

Just like real vampires (and I prefer “vampyre” but these are not real vampyres…) have no frigging SEX DRIVE. No EMOTION.

Why?

BECAUSE THEY’RE DEAD.

Yes, dead, people. Did that fact escape everybody but me?

How can dead things have any kind of appetite, and how can they have sex? How can they enter into frigging relationships and pine over humans?!

Oh, “magic,” you say, because, well, how can the dead come back to life, anyway? That’s magic, too!, you cry. It is!

It’s fake magic.

Yesss, there I said it. Fake. Magic. Call me old school on the matter, but the whole “Twilight” thing rolls off my back like blood off an undead duck’s coat. I just can’t get into the displaced Human drives and appetites on the undead and their strikingly good looks. I’m constantly distracted thinking, strike a pose!

Twilight and True Blood “vampires” are just people with fangs.

Where’s the scary in that?

The spooky?

From what I’ve seen, “those kinds” of “vampires (which are undead—did I mention that?) are there to emote, and exhibit graphic violence and sex. Which we get where…?

Anyone?

We get that in any ShowTime or HBO show.

Again (important digressive point, here): today’s vampires are just people with fangs.

Okay, reanimating my thrust, here, so…zombies. While I am a huge Night of the Living Dead fan, I have, however, been more into the rising-from-the-grave-undead-by-supernatural-means more (I’ve always been into the supernatural, not the gore, but the etherial, the elemental, that which comes from beyond)…like Tales From The Crypt creepy, and any mummy movie (a fan of the Karloff versions as well as the Fraser versions). That’s where my favorites, uh, lie (even if “lay” is the proper word, not gonna use it with the undead; I’m not interested in “laying” any undead…).

So, I just wanted to clear this little distinction up. You know, to give the undead their due.

Man, I feel so much better now. Been wanting to do that for years. I can now crawl back into my own grave….

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Cemetery Dance

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"Graves," Arlington National Cemetery, VA, 1990
“Graves,” Arlington National Cemetery, VA, 1990

What is it about cemeteries that draws us to their hallowed grounds?

Yeah, I know, “they just can’t stay away,” and are….

But, really, what is the allure?

Once you get past the well-manicured state of most cemeteries, the beautiful landscaping…what really draws our fascination?

I admit to visiting them. I find them calming. I also don’t believe that when we die, that’s it—in any sense of the word. I believe in quite the active “afterlife.” When I stroll through them I wonder about the all the lives that have been lived—and I’m excited for their souls. In my eyes they are now moving on to other things with the consciousnesses that had once inhabited those “vehicles of life.” Hopefully, I like to think, they have learned something useful from their lives to apply to other lives they’ll live, or move on beyond reincarnational existence (I actually believe in simultaneous lives, but let’s not go there now).

I’ve tried to explain my own curiosity around graveyards to myself, but, in the end (pardon the pun), I’m not quite sure what really got the interest going—maybe it is as simple as life’s “beginning and ending points,” which do fascinate me, or that death really isn’t the end, or how people die as well as how they live—I’m just not quite sure.

And when you get into the “atmosphere” of graveyards, especially the more established and older ones which I prefer to roam, their leafy trees and old, old buried dead, is it all the years of watching spooky movies? We all do seem to have some measure of inherent “joy of fear,” especially for fear that is removed and not really in our faces, as we watch from living rooms and theater seats. Read books we can put down. But where many cemeteries are built, they are usually at places I like to frequent—full of large, flowing deciduous trees tossing in the breezes, they’re quiet. Calm. Lawns are well-kept. Who wouldn’t one like to stroll through such an area, short of the realization you’re walking over, well, many, many, uh…dead bodies….

So, maybe it does have to do with a little or a lot of all of the above. But I do marvel at the lives lived and wonder how they fared…how they birthed…how they died. How they loved and strove. What kind of people were they? Were they kind? Giving? Hard working? Fun loving? Love the artistry in effort, whether a little or a lot, that went into making the headstones. Headstones say a lot about the dead over which they rest. How well liked they were, how affluent they or somebody who cared for them were. What material was available, what skills. “The sign of the times.”

Are they kept up?

Who’s keeping them up?

Some even show a sense of humor…irony:

“Quod tu es, ego fui, quod ego sum, tu eris”

The above phrase is said to go back to ancient Roman times, and is included in the more modern version most are probably more familiar with:

Remember me as you pass by

As you are now so once was I

As I am now so you will be

Prepare for death and follow me

And, in all my journeys, I’ve never (to my knowledge) seen any ghosts among the dead—and I’ve tried. Asked for some to present themselves. Never once. Now I have seen ghosts, but not of the human variety, so I know I’m capable of it.

One note: included in the pictures below is a “mummified” human forearm. That photo was taken in a small (at the time) museum in the back of local shop, on the road into Sharpsburg, MD. It was on the left side of the road, as driving up from Alexandria, VA. There was a small article attached to the glass, thought I’d taken a picture of it, but I didn’t find it. What I remember of the article was that the arm was thought to have come from the battle of Antietam, that it looked to have “flash fried” as it was blown off its owner. I forget the rest of the details, or where it was found, maybe when an building was being excavated? Just don’t remember. But it was creepy, and, once again, rammed home the horrors of war.

Okay, originally, I was going to include more photos of other cemeteries, but once I scanned in the set, below, I thought, these look so cool on their own, give off such a great, creepy, atmosphere, I have to keep them by themselves. Like my previous post, all the shots in this post were taken with film, then scanned. I love how they came out. And these are just the ones I could find, I know I have more. I might do another post for other cemeteries, but for now, I’m keeping the “Cemetery Row” work (Alexandria, Virginia, back in 1990), below on its own, with a few from Sharpsburg, Maryland (Antietam Battlefield, same 1990 timeframe) as their own post.

So…what better time to revisit and share some of my favorite cemeteries than during the haunting month of October?

Enjoy.

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Etched in Stone

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NY Zouave Monument, Bull Run Battlefield (April 22, 1990)

In 1991, I wrote a short story that took until 2005 to get published, in Apollo’s Lyre (now defunct; here’s my meager-yet-humble list of credits, listing its publication), Nov 2005. It was about a displaced Civil War soldier’s spirit and involved cemeteries, the pissed-off dead, and the Second Battle of Bull Run (aka Second Manassas, to the South, fought August 28-30, 1862). Here are some monument images. I was inspired by visiting the Bull Run battlefields, in Manassas, Virginia. I’ve since been there three times, but it was that first time that was my own personal Twilight Zone experience. I’ve written about this experience once, before, on my website. What happened besides my childhood experiences was that the very first time I ever set foot on Bull Run battlefield soil, was that I immediately felt “torn in time.” I literally felt as if I were in two places at one time: one foot in the 1990-present, and the other in 1862. And it persisted the entire time I visited the battlefield. It wasn’t subtle, or “am I really feeling this?” kinda thing. It was powerful, creepy, and physically electrifying. Life jarring.

I knew I’d been here before, and not as a visitor to a battlefield memorial.

And in my visit there, I stopped by a small plot of gravestones. So, that cemetery plot, coupled with my Twilight Zone experience of literally feeling displaced in time and space, gave rise (pardon the pun…) to the story I wrote. Within that story I’d written “displaced” stanzas of a prose poem recited by the battlefield dead coming after my displaced soldier’s spirit. I’ve compiled them below, and worked on a more coherent, completed version.

I hope you don’t sleep well after reading it.

 

Etched in stone

Etched in stone…

Take your place

among the bone.

 

Etched in stone

Is writ the tome

To one whose life

Has left the bone.

 

To one who fought

To one who fled…

To one who denies

His place among the dead.

 

They call you back

You never go far

The grave of yours

Is the grave of all.

 

You try to run

You try to roam

But you must always, always

Always come home.

 

Etched in stone

Back with bone

Home is home

And bone is bone.

 

Etched in stone

Etched in stone

Take your place

among the bone.

 

Etched in stone

Etched in stone

Back to bone

You find yer home.

 

Etched in stone

Etched in stone…

Take your place among the bone.

© 1991/2012

Former Air Force Colonel Accuses U.S. Of UFO Cover-Up

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http://youtu.be/mtBrUVBehvQ

I’m a bit late in posting this, since it made the news on September 24th, but did want to post it anyway. A very interesting press conference—not to mention 1958 interview between Mike Wallace and Donald Keyhoe.

Click here for article.

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Fear

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You're Mine.... (@Doug88888)
You’re Mine…. (@Doug88888)

Since this is October, and I really love Hallowe’en, I’m going to try to get more into the, um, spirit of things more this year. For the rest of the month, I’m going to make a better attempt at posting all-things Hallowe’en and spooky. I love spooky. Not gory and graphic (though excuse my prose poem, below…), but “old-school spooky.” Atmospheric. If I get my way, I’ll post some cool cemetery shots I’ve taken (if I can get them scanned; see, I think I have some great shots from Alexandria, VA area, but they were before the advent of the digital camera….), some favorite spooky movies, reads, monsters. So, we’ll see how that goes. In the meantime, here’s a prose poem I penned years ago, and which had been published only once, in a now-defunct Canadian magazine, called Tyro. I changed one word in posting it this time: “of” to “for,” in the second line, second stanza.

Fear

It was the Devil’s own pitch,

a darkness utterly corrupt and vile.

 

I couldn’t see a thing, couldn’t hear a thing,

The silence absolute—except for that internal ringing sound.

 

I turned, slowly.

The only way I could know this,

was by the steps my feet made over each other.

 

That’s when I came face to face with it,

teeth ripping my face apart…

© 1989, Originally appeared in Tyro, issue #19.