Scary Creek

By

Thomas Cater

CHAPTER ONE

There was a time in my life when the word ‘supernatural’ would have elicited from me nothing but resentment and derisive laughter. But now, I’m not so sure. I’ve spent too many days and nights in the house on Scary Creek to say I know anything for certain.

I am not a student of the occult, not in the traditional sense. I have not spent my life on a university campus surrounded by ancient manuscripts and pieces of tattered papyri in search of the unknowable. My knowledge of the transcendent comes from the simple fact that as a photojournalist and an occasional contributor to news magazines and wire services, I travel.

I have lived in countries that leave indelible marks upon a person’s soul and subject one’s mind to subtle influences. Humble circumstances, nevertheless, conditions that have disposed my mind and heart to messages from the other side.

I am a photojournalist only by coincidence; a few noteworthy credits secured my professional fate years ago. I am by nature a repository of unassailable dreams, the most passionate of which include following in the footsteps of Marco Polo from Venice to China, sailing a canvas boat from Newfoundland in the legendary wake of Saint Brendan the Irish monk, rediscovering America, and circumnavigating Australia in an ultra-lite. I have spent years preparing psychologically to follow Sinbad the Arab sailor’s perilous voyage from Oman to China. And even now I long to raft down the 4,000-mile length of the Yangtze River.

There has always been fertile soil in my mind for the cultivation of even the most forbidden and sinister dreams. I have felt those dreams take root when I witnessed acts of self-mutilation by the ‘Abidji’ tribesmen in Africa’s Ivory Coast, acts prescribed by the spirits that possessed them. I felt those feelings bloom in India when I witnessed worshipers of Kali, Siva’s black and shining treacherous queen, mutilate themselves for her pleasure. I observed their power in a Chinese photo of a man dying the ‘death of a thousand cuts’. I have always felt compelled to seek out and rediscover the sacred ancient places where the blood of human sacrifice has sanctified the earth.

My return to Washington from Southeast Asia was precipitated by a rash of careless injuries: a fractured kneecap, broken fingers and scarred knuckles while exploring ruins in the ancient city of Angkor Thom, Cambodia, and traumatized feet from wearing the same boots and socks for days and nights on end. I’d become indifferent to my own personal safety and needed time to re-evaluate my life, my state of mind, and my dreams.

I was experiencing frequent trepidation about life ... mine in particular. The thought of dying on foreign soil and falling under the jurisdiction of alien deities, whose rituals and ceremonies I was only remotely familiar with, inspired too many anxious moments and interfered with the performance of my duties. It was not a significant consideration when viewed from ten thousand miles, but quite different when the icons glared down from every jungle ledge and temple.

“There are ghosts in the jungle about the waters of the Tonie Sap,” the village people murmured. “Ghosts of kings and queens and elephants, back there where the tigers howl and the gibbons swing from bough to bough, where trees grow from the roofs of ruined buildings that were once larger than mountains.”

While recuperating in Washington D.C., I spent a year compiling a book of ‘death camp’ photos, a bizarre concatenation of pictures juxtaposing fields of mangled bodies with religious bas-reliefs, statues and ancient temple ruins. Death and divinity sprawled in grand repose on every page.

It was a far cry from my early endeavors at “Wheels,” a truckers’ magazine, or my efforts to promote a small publication glamorizing the trials and tribulations of young female federal employees.

My coffee table documentary attracted the attention of one small publisher whose enthusiasm for my work outweighed monetary considerations. The advance was small, but sales were good and the book went into three printings the first two years. When a major book publisher offered to buy reprint rights with an advance that spelled financial independence, I jumped at the offer.

Things were going well. I was working part time, earning a few dollars taking pictures for AP, when I was advised that a distant relative--the brother of my great-grandmother--had died and left me a small trust and real estate in northwest Washington, D.C. It was a part of the family I knew very little about. Apparently, he was heirless, and died a horrible death. The executor of the estate was somewhat reluctant to speak about it, but eventually confided to me that my benefactor had been eaten by cats! A police investigation determined that he had fallen down his basement steps because of advanced age and died of a stroke. He was reportedly a recluse and occupied the entire house with at least a dozen cats. It was months before anyone realized he was missing. During that time, the cats consumed everything edible in the building and eventually began to eat each other. A few neighbors reportedly noticed foul odors, but no one complained. A curious door-to-door salesman sensed something peculiar about the disreputable condition of the front porch and convinced the authorities to investigate.

In their desperate search for food, investigators believed the cats had torn every pantry door and package in the house apart. Even cans and plastic jugs were found with tooth and claw perforations. Nearly every room was filled with garbage, and among the litter, they found the fragmented bones of cats, large and small, and some fragments they suspected may have once belonged to a man. No one could imagine how long the cats had survived by breeding and eating each other after his death. Their source of water, police concurred, was a sump in the basement for collecting rainwater. The horrific event posed an intriguing problem in quantum physics.

The house was eventually refurbished into apartments by the executor and leased to young and affluent professionals. Because of my work in Asia, several years passed before I was finally advised of the inheritance. Within twenty-four hours of receiving notice, however, I moved my meager collection of art and artifacts into one of the vacant townhouse apartments and spent a portion of the money on a recreation vehicle, a veritable land yacht. I thought of it as the kind of luxury vehicle Aristotle Onassis would have taken pride and pleasure in owning. The RV purchase was atypical of my usually parsimonious nature, but the sudden acquisition of expendable wealth had overwhelmed me. It was my descent into indulgence, my pleasure dome, my Xanadu on wheels.

The RV provided me with a new will and greater mobility. Tooling down the highway in $35,000 worth of decadence made me feel as if I were once again in control of my life, the master of my fate, the captain of the ship--or land yacht--and no longer subject to the whims of fortune, good or bad. I began to suspect that one’s destiny did not necessarily depend on whether one adhered to the traditional codes of charitable messiahs, bloodthirsty Asian gods, thieving warlords, dictators, or diabolical truckers.

On many occasions, I did reflect upon the fate of my unfortunate benefactor, Riley Case Dangerfield, but realized there was not much I could do to express my gratitude. The few bones that remained were insufficient to identify him, and no one knew with any certainty what had happened to him. I was unable to fathom how a man living in the midst of a bustling metropolis like DC could fall heir to such a fate. I, who had made every effort to seek out the darkest corners of the earth, to understand the mysteries of life and death, returned from the fleshpots and killing fields of Asia to discover that under the most civilized conditions there existed a dark psychic veil that could not be penetrated.

I often tried to imagine what it must have been like for those cats: unable to escape from the house that once served as their sanctuary but had become their prison, their living hell. They stalked each other night and day, waiting for the weakest to show the first signs of surrender, never knowing when it was going to be their turn to die, to be ripped apart by their brothers and sisters, all the while being driven mad by hunger.

. Sooner or later, it would come down to the last two cats, the biggest and strongest. If they didn’t kill each other, then one would survive to live alone for an indefinite period, while the ghosts of all the other cats drove him deeper into madness as hunger and desperation mounted minute by minute. If ever a house was ripe for a haunting. …

They were not comforting thoughts, and whenever they came over me, I opened a door or window to let in a fresh breeze … or to release the spirit of an errant cat. Still, it was unique having a relative in the family who had been devoured by cats driven mad from hunger.

For all intents and purposes, I was contending with the fear and trepidation I’d faced and photographed in Asia. It would have taken more than a glib-tongued evangelist or a movie on demon possession to convince me that life and death amounted to more than a series of random accidents. The after-life, I concluded, was only a waking hallucination. After all, what function could a spirit world serve? It was a situation so vague and temporal as to offer only the slimmest of hopes to those who were not prepared to ‘shuffle off’ the mortal coil. It offered only dubious rewards to those who could not concede that man was just another elaborate hoax of nature and destined to return to the dust from whence he came. Some egos were just too great to admit to such inevitable conclusions.

I, however, realized that I had few misgivings about death. I knew it amounted to no more than the corruption of flesh, a condition we were all predestined to endure.

Then I met Elinore.

I can hardly believe that what has come to pass has actually occurred. After moving into the DC townhouse on 16^th Street, I began to experience some unusual and inexplicable events. I learned that in the early 1900s, the house belonged to a famous theosophist and personal acquaintance of Madam Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Alice ... something or other. Occult gatherings, table-rappings, levitating tambourines and ghostly images were the order of the day.

Local histories suggest that many famous Washington personalities once gathered around the séance table in my dining room. Sometimes I am inclined to believe the trip wires are still in place waiting for someone to work them, because on several occasions I have heard the strangest sounds. ...

It wasn’t long before events in my life began to take a curious turn for the worse. I lost my job with the wire service, book sales began to decline, and the investments I’d made in Appalachian oil and gas stocks bottomed out. I couldn’t find the motivation to work no matter how hard I tried. I spent too much time lounging around my apartment listening to curious sounds; sounds that came from nowhere in particular, but everywhere in general. The sounds, not unlike voices, did not speak to me, but spoke around me. For several months I thought the voices were coming from neighboring houses or apartments, but my efforts to locate and understand them were fruitless.

I started having equally strange and repetitive dreams involving old stone houses choked with vines dripping from three hundred year-old rotting trees. Tangled within the snaking arbors were tiny naked babies with orange eyes as bright as tracer bullets and silent sucking mouths that had forgotten how to scream.

When I told Myra --the Polish poetess and artist I married while riding the ripple of success --about the dreams and the babies, she stopped caring whether or not I found another job, or even continued to look. An artist and an illustrator, she helped me scope out the book on Death Camps and eventually moved into the house. Not entirely overjoyed with sleeping and financial arrangements, she retreated to the basement apartment a few months later and started concocting excuses to avoid me. She was either meeting someone every day for lunch, visiting her parents, or spending the weekend with her artsy friends. And since I didn’t paint or sculpt, I was not entitled to meet them.

I knew she wasn’t cheating on me. She’d been married twice before and preferred etching and painting to sex. Both her previous husbands had left her for less talented, less attractive women. I knew she was bored with my lack of appreciation for her genius and was waiting for the right moment to break free.

It wasn’t long before my suspicions proved true. She informed me by postcard that we were through, the marriage was over. It is not possible for two artists to live together, she said, even though she did not approve of photographic art. She declined my requests to photograph her in the nude, and her portraits were disdainful and proud.

If she had not destroyed my spirit masks, including the ‘nank-schou,’ a ‘We’ wisdom mask capable of provoking primitive ferocity in the gentlest human soul, we may have had a chance at reconciliation. But when I discovered the entire collection had been trashed, I knew that nothing she said or did could make me forgive her. It was the final indignity in a brief history of indifference to my interests.

Claiming a financial interest in the town house and book, Myra proceeded to sue. She did help with some book engraving and illuminating, and did the art work for each section, even contributing a few rhyming lines. But the fact that I provided her with free room and board seemed like compensation enough at the time.

I have it on good authority that she has moved out of the town house now, though I don’t know where, probably in with one of her artsy friends. Until the case comes to court, I still own the DC property, even though I haven’t been there in months, not since I became an ‘occupant’ of the house at Scary Creek.

Which is where I met Elinore.

It wasn’t a planned meeting. I had barricaded myself in my Washington apartment to avoid being served a subpoena when I spotted Myra, her attorney, and a process server marching up the steps. I knew they had come to evict me, to take possession of my apartment and building, the furniture and my beloved RV, my only real joy in a world of transitory and fleeting pleasures. My only option was to run.

If I could beat them to the garage, I knew I could be on the road in minutes, and with a little luck they might never catch me. She would, I hoped, eventually tire of the suit. In the meantime, I could survive nicely on my trust and what I’d squirreled away in a personal checking and savings account. If worse came to worse, I could always find a job writing for a small daily or weekly newspaper.

But I’d underestimated Myra’s appetite for retribution, something I’d done on numerous occasions before. Her artistic talent was exceeded only by her egotistical desire to control the known universe and everything in it.

I ran down the back stairs and was climbing into the RV’s front seat when I heard her shout instructions to the process server to “lock the garage door!” I knew the order had caught him slightly off guard. At that point, I was no longer vulnerable to official intimidation, especially when it came to destroying my own property. I revved the engine on the RV, blew the diesel horn three times, and drove through the door, never thinking about what could have happened if the server had ignored the warning. Fortunately, it was Sunday. Traffic was light and the man was experienced enough to know you didn’t hang around a garage door when a disgruntled husband was trying to protect his most valued possession.

He vacated the driveway when he heard the engine turning over. I can still see her red, enraged face as the garage door splintered into a dozen pieces. She and her attorney were standing on the steps waving papers in their outstretched arms as the RV bounced over the curb and down the street.