The Cursed Novel

I’ve written a book. You can’t get published in this country unless you’re already a published author.

It’s about a group seeking to stay alive and fight the worst evil that exists: demons.

Filled with episodic storylines that double-cross the reader every time they think that they know what to expect, it’s epic.

There are lots of colorful characters with backstories that are comical but ultimately tragic, it has historical fiction, science fiction, fantasy, romance and horror. It is a story that, if I saw the cover, I would buy it.

But it’s more than a story. I wrote the lead character for Johnny Depp, one character for Kate Beckinsale, and the rest would be a cast I would be part of selecting.

I want a miniseries or a limited series. I originally wanted HBO, still do, but I also have Amazon and Netflix and CBS-Paramount in mind. It has to be accessible to the widest audience possible. Whoever got it would rake in money. Subscriptions would increase because at perhaps 3 or 4 seasons it would hook viewers.

I could easily collaborate with a screenwriter. I know it would become a great hit. I know it.

There’s only one problem.

Every test reader I used loved it.

They all lost their jobs.

Or suffered some other misfortune.

Had breakdowns.

Or died.

I could say that’s all coincidence.

But what if it isn’t?

The filmed version, like the book, would be shot entirely in Maryland except for indoor set shooting which could be anywhere. Plus, a couple of tropical scenes which would require an actual tropical location and some naval vessels. Three, really. One is a museum.

CGI would need heavy use. But it can be done and still turn a hell of a profit if properly promoted.

My question is, where do I go from here? What should I do?

Comments are open.

The Lone Ghost Hunter

It’s one thing to have people call you an asshole. It’s quite another to turn around and prove it. On the 24th of July 1994, I went out of my way to do just that. If you like the ghost hunting shows on TV, you need to know, the real thing isn’t something I recommend. Because I’ve been there. And it’s awful.

In studying the behavioral tendencies in people with PTSD, I discovered something heartbreaking. Well, all of it’s heartbreaking, but one thing in particular stands out, and that is best expressed by the word “extremes.” Often, there’s no fine line, but a wide gap in types of behavior. At one end, you have those who guard their lives and isolate. They become antisocial, forced behind a wall where they’re safe. It can affect everything from social to professional performance and ensure a long term lonely existence in which the victim suffers in silence. It’s no way to live, believe me.

And then, there are the reckless, the risk takers, the suicide jockeys. And I’ve been both. The isolated tend to have limited relationships and while some are rewarding and satisfying, I contend that satisfaction is rare. We all need human companionship, or at least contact. I’ve also been at the other end. This never did fit my personality; I grew up scared of just about everything. I was shy, quiet, and kept to only a few friends, and after a time, fewer still. Seemed I was better at making enemies, and had a knack for attracting the wrong people, especially women. But for a time, I went the outgoing, reckless asshole route. I drove fast, and with PTSD, that’s plain dangerous. The condition leads to dissociative thinking. It’s almost like texting and driving, but worse. I’d be fine one minute, and the next, something had triggered me—a song, an odor, a flash of light—and I was somewhere else, reliving some moment of hell I had gone through, numb and unaware to the world around me. I felt and heard and saw things that had happened to me. Next thing I knew, I was biting the rear end of the car in front of me. In all, before I decided to let my license expire for good, I’d been involved in 35 accidents. That’s like what a race car driver experiences in a whole career, and some don’t even get close to that number.

But recklessness, like refusing to use condoms, which is also pretty much an asshole thing to do, can have results that end up causing even more trauma than the ones already in your head. Serious accidents are, yeah. Traumatic.

I did not know much about PTSD in the summer of 1994. I was only recently diagnosed, and never given any substantial explanation of what it was. I also didn’t know much about the supernatural other than what I had experienced when I was young. So when a girlfriend I was seeing while I was separated from my wife told me about a place called “Ghost Road”, I was half skeptic and half intrigued. I loved to write, and being down on my luck, I devised a plan wherein I would debunk this haunted location and write a story about it. I wanted to submit it to Baltimore Magazine, and see if they would publish it.

The story went like this. There was a lonely road in the area of Bowley’s Quarters near Essex, Maryland. It had a railroad crossing that was haunted. The ghost was that of a newlywed woman who died with her husband when their car stalled on the tracks and a train struck them. The woman walked up and down the tracks with a lantern, searching for the only part of her husband she never found after death: his head. A lurid tale, even if mild by today’s standards. It sounded fishy to me. She took me there, and it turned out that the road had a development of townhomes on the right near the beginning, with older houses on the left. These gave way to woods on either side, leading to a lazy curve which, as we got closer, revealed a streetlight, a wooden railroad crossing sign and a single track crossing the narrow road. Further on, a sharper turn led to a farm, some old homes, and a gated dirt road that led to shore homes. There was nothing remarkable at all about the crossing or the road itself, except for one thing. At first, I didn’t pay any attention to it. I would go back almost every night from April to July, hoping to prove that nothing was there.

I contacted the Baltimore County Police Department. No reports of fatal traffic accidents had ever been filed anywhere on that road. There were no incidents of cars and trains involved in accidents. I contacted the offices of Conrail, which owned the track right-of-way. Again, there had never been any reports of incidents on that section of track; it was explained that it was merely a spur, which is to say, a dead-end track that led to a delivery or pickup site. No trains traveled fast enough on that section where it crossed the road for anyone to screw up bad enough to be hit by it, much less run right into it. I once estimated the speed to be ten miles per hour, maybe fifteen at the most. Because the rail cars being hauled in were hoppers full of coal. They would come back out empty. At the end, roughly to the west, was the Carroll Island Power Plant. A coal-burning power plant, and it wasn’t far from the crossing. So far, the debunking process was going very well. I had the statements by Conrail and the police that nothing described in the ghost story had taken place. And common sense told me that a train moving that slowly was never likely hit anyway. I went into the real research phase, finding out almost right away that the same ghost story was told about virtually every railroad crossing in America where the setting was remote or heavily wooded. This may have become an urban legend, but before that, it had been a folk tale for about a century, and nobody could put pins in a map and cover every “haunted” crossing. It would be impossible.

At the time, I had an eyewitness. I only knew her in a business sense, so there was no reason for her to embellish. She said that she and her husband had, several years before, gone to the crossing and pulled off the road. They would sit in the back of his pickup truck and ghost-watch. And nothing really happened.

Until one night, very late, while they lay on sleeping bags, they began to hear noises at the treeline. They sat up. Nothing happened at first. But then, more and more, they heard things dropping from the trees to the ground, then moving through dead leaves and weeds. They had their night vision from having been there for hours, and they soon saw what was causing the noise: long, black shadows. Shadows. Snake-like, and just shadows. Moving toward them. They bugged out and never went to the place again. Their marriage broke up. When she found out I was investigating the location, she begged me not to proceed further. After what she told me, she grew concerned and her professionalism was gone for a brief second. “You’ll die. Why are you doing this?” Strangely, I never saw her again. But…I didn’t believe her.

Yet there was something about that place. Every time I made the turn onto the road, I felt my blood run cold. At first I counted this as a reaction of fear borne of some sort of expectation, but as I debunked the story, I ruled that out. No, I was sensing something, and it was powerful, though not on a level as what I had experienced as a kid. And that had been bad enough. So, whether I was alone or had my illicit girlfriend with me, I would often stake out the crossing later at night. I couldn’t shake the feeling of danger, but much more powerful was the sense of evil. Just plain evil down there. In April, after a violent thunderstorm, after the rain had stopped and the air was humid but still chilly, I parked on the side of the road with the crossing in sight, but not too close. I began to hear a voice, a woman’s voice, calling someone’s name. It sounded like “Karl” and it continued for hours, just the name, but never swerving in tone or volume. As the sky greyed with approaching dawn, it stopped. Could it be that the story of the widow was true?

I had already debunked that part, so what did this cry mean? I ruled out animals; this was a human voice, no doubt. Now, I had to find out what it was about that road that chilled my blood so, and why a woman had called all night for someone who never answered. I’d thought to look for her, but she would have been difficult to find through dense woods, and besides, I trusted my gut. It told me not to try. I sensed things then that years later, on medication for PTSD and bipolar 2 disorder, I can no longer register. I remember though, how sensitive I was, and that was a curse.

One night, not daring to stakeout the crossing any closer, I parked near the same place as the night I heard the woman. Something stepped out of the woods on the right, backlit by the street light at the crossing. It clearly was walking my way, but there was something immediately terrifying about it. It was no teen who had been toking in the woods. I remembered a scene from “A Nightmare On Elm Street” in which Freddie had very long arms. Although a silhouette, this thing looked similar, long arms stretched to each side. I beat it out of there.

But that just made everything worse. Now there were really sinister things apparent in a concentrated area. The investigation continued. I was terrified to find no other being with arms so long except in American mythology. It was a Wendigo, something reported being sighted just about everywhere except this area.

I wasn’t going to put that in any article. What was with this road?

I didn’t give up. Now I wanted answers. I kept on with my surveillance, but then came the night of 24 July. At two a.m. I approached the crossing. It would be my last pass before calling it a night. But the night was not over.

An oncoming car distracted me. The road was narrow so I had to cross and keep going. But to the immediate left, on the tracks, was a frightening sight. It was nine feet tall, mostly but not fully solid, its legs didn’t touch the tracks, and it had its back to us, going away down the tracks. As if it had just crossed the street. But we had not seen it. Not until we were in the crossing. Cursing, I rounded the curve and did a quick turnaround.

I parked at a gate beside the road that led to a dirt track which paralleled the train track. It was for rail and Baltimore Gas and Electric access, because overhead there were high tension power lines leading from the Carroll Island power plant. With me was the woman I was seeing, and her son. I looked down the track. The thing was still there, but further away than what my reason told me it could be. If I was going to get a look, I had to move. I said to her son, “Let’s go, dude.” I got out and started chasing the thing.

It was covered in a tan cloak like Sherlock Holmes wore. It came to knee length, but had no legs visible below the hem. It had a matching round hood, almost laughably big. And no matter how fast I ran, I couldn’t gain on it. Ahead of it was total darkness, and a lazy, long curve to the right. I was a quarter mile from the car when it suddenly pivoted as if on an axis and now it was coming toward me fast. Frozen in fear, I looked at it and saw that inside the hood there was nothing but darkness. It had no head. And the cloak parted at the waist, revealing two running legs from the knee to the groin; no sign of lower legs.

My lady friend yelled down the alley between the pines, “It’s coming back!”

Yeah, I saw that. I turned on my legs. They had turned into licorice strands. And I was alone. Dude had stayed in the car.

It was a helpless feeling. All I knew was that my life was in danger; I tried to run, but it wasn’t working. I felt the thing behind me, closing up the distance between us. I thought I was going to die.

Finally my legs moved. I ran back to the car and grabbed the door handle. They told me that the thing was close enough to grab me but vanished as I touched the door.

There has rarely been a time when I looked back and have not thought that I could have been hurt that night. I’ll never ghost hunt again. Because even an asshole has to have limits.

The Angel Of Death

There’s one thing I find terrifying. He, or she, is real.

The Angel of Death.

Back in 2008-09, I was on MySpace. I blogged there. I was not always well, or stable in mood. I did things that hurt people. I hate to say it, but secluded at a keyboard and free to type anything I wanted, I drew darkness toward myself. I was adrift in an ocean of free porn. I began to heighten my sensitivity to the supernatural. The group home I was staying in was built in 1900. Oldest place I ever lived in. And if you don’t believe in the supernatural, good for you. At least you’re less open to experiences that could change your mind. But I found that the age of the house had a bearing on what kind of environment it held within. In 1900, there was still an Ottoman Empire. The street I lived on was a dirt track. The property had a stable, perhaps even a carriage house. World War One hadn’t happened yet. Thinking about all the history of the world that had not been seen yet when the house was built staggered me. Soldiers who would fight at Normandy and Iwo Jima had not even been born. Wow.

But my medication list wasn’t dialed in quite right. PTSD w/Severe Depression was but one of my page-long list of maladies; I was sick. And I had already learned that when I wasn’t medicated properly, I was very much open to the supernatural. One part of this was that I would have premonitions and an uncontrollable curse of seeing into the thoughts or feeling the emotions of others. Always, without fail, these were negative; that is, I felt anger, lust, hatred, jealousy and more, and often I knew these weren’t my feelings. It usually happened when I was exhausted, had been dehydrated, and was depleted of everything that provided a healthy defense and strength. One very awful day in the summer of 2003, I got a taste of just how bad this curse really was.

I was standing near the corner of the house where I rented a room from my ex and her husband. It was stressful but at least I could spend more time with my son. For the record, I wasn’t on any medicine. I was exhausted and definitely dehydrated, weak, and did not imagine that what was about to happen was even possible, because it’s movie or bad novel shit. I was looking up the street, for some reason staring at this red pickup truck. I zoned. Then I was in a trance-like state. Not thinking, no longer aware of what my eyes were seeing. Suddenly I was in a bedroom, and I saw the owner of the truck. He didn’t live there; he did handyman work for the widow who owned the house. She was on vacation with her son and would be away for the entire week. I saw him, saw that it was her bedroom. He had the top drawer of her dresser open, and his hands were in it. Before that could register and I could perhaps snap out of it, I was in his body! Not astral projection; I was just seeing through his eyes as he felt his way through her panties. His hands were my hands. I could feel it, then see the colors. Teal. Black. White. I felt a sickening thrill, a very dirty surge of some sexual appetite slowly being fed bits of satisfaction by that which was forbidden, violating. It only lasted a few seconds, then I was out of it, aware of my real surroundings. After that I was sick, for three days, with a migraine and exhaustion made worse by the awful depleting nature of the surge of emotions I had felt. When they got home, her son came down to visit. At the risk of putting myself in the cuckoo category, I had to tell him what I saw. What I knew. And it turned out, well, it went like this: I asked him, “Does your mom’s bedroom have beige carpet?” I had never been in that house.

“Yes.” He became uncomfortable.

“Does she have an upright dresser?”

“Yeah, go on.”

“And if I stood at her dresser, is her door on my right?”

“Go on.” He shifted on his feet. We were on the porch.

“And does she have teal underwear?”

“Stop!”

“Yeah. I saw this through Bacon’s eyes. I don’t know, Jerr, I zoned out staring at his truck, and I was suddenly looking through his eyes, staring at her underwear, and he was going through them, feeling–”

“Enough,” he said.

“I had to tell you. It’s not like I can knock on the door and tell her this.”

“Hell, Mike, I can’t tell her this. She’ll think you’ve been spying through her window.”

“Jerr, she has to know. She has to know he’s dangerous, he’s a hungry animal, the worst kind. Don’t let her get more involved with him. Tell her to break contact. He’s dangerous.”

Ever since her husband died, Bacon had been helping her, and his motive was to move in. I knew if he did, if she was lonely enough, she would be in danger. I had felt his hunger. It was primal, evil.

Her son finally did succeed, without mentioning me, in getting her to send the fucker down the road. This is the curse I bear. In the group home, a few years later, after three suicide attempts, I was in treatment. But in the house in Elkridge, I was off-kilter, and the problem with psychotropic drugs is, you gotta have them all just right. Drop to the low side, or worse, get to the upper tolerance limit, and bad shit happens. And I could see and feel and hear things I wish I didn’t. In that hundred-year-old house.

I would go downstairs in the middle of the night. I have always had trouble sleeping properly, so I’d go outside for a smoke. Descending the stairs, I could hear someone moving in the dining room. But when I turned the corner, no one was there. I heard it in the kitchen, the next room. Again, empty. Outside was just as unnatural at night. Sometimes there was an oppression, a suffocating feeling to the air. Sometimes, as when a possum was hunting ticks in the grass, I knew nothing bad was around; animals are very keen to the presence of spirit activity. Other times it was just too quiet, eerie, and honestly a bit frightening. I knew there were spirits, inside and outside of the place, and considering the age of it, why not?

One night, cold and sprinkling rain, very dark. I had my window open a crack. I was writing a blog on MySpace. I didn’t know how long it had been going on, but gradually I became aware that in the street below, a woman with high heels was walking around in a circle. And she was trying to get my attention. I raised the window and looked out, but in the gloom I saw nothing. That’s when she stopped walking in a circle, walked from my right to my left, right in front of and beneath me. I still saw nothing. I bounded down the stairs, out of the door that was right next to the street. Nothing.

I saw no one and the heel steps were gone. With a suddenness, I looked at the house across the street and one lot to the left. I’d always considered it creepy, and in the two years I’d lived in the old house, that one had gone through two owners. Not renters, owners. That’s a red flag. It now sat empty. And every time I was near a window that faced it, or went outside, my attention, my eyes, we’re always drawn to it. That house was the only place the woman in heels could possibly have gone. But… It was vacant. My blood ran cold. Although I sensed no threat, not to myself anyway, I was filled with the feeling that it was a bad experience. If I hadn’t had so many, perhaps I could have ignored it. But I knew there was a lot more to life than what met the casual eye, and I knew this was something that I was supposed to pay attention to.

A few weeks passed. A friend of mine named John died suddenly, walking on the road near his house. Massive coronary. Dead before he hit the ground.

A couple of months passed. It was now summer. A hot day. I was in the bathroom. The window was open. The woman in heels walked past, one story below, and the window faced that house, still vacant. She came from the same direction, my room. Walked right below me. This time in bright sunshine, but I again saw no one. And her footsteps faded going up the driveway to that house.

I had researched the house in the intervening months. All I found was that it was built in 2000. One hundred years after the one I lived in. I saw the price the last owner settled on. Nothing else. No stories reported any crimes or deaths there. I looked at it on Google Earth. It had an in ground swimming pool. Something told me that there was an accidental drowning in it. Other than that, I couldn’t read the house; it defied my efforts to even concentrate long enough to see inside it or any residue from any unfortunate events. Yet my eyes we’re still drawn to that house every time I was outside. And not just to the house; to the large windows of an upstairs bedroom. Always with the feeling I was being watched.

A few weeks after hearing the invisible heels walk by, another friend, also named John, died of liver failure.

Someone I confided in suggested it had been the Angel of Death, come to warn me that I was about to lose someone I loved.

If the story ended there, I wouldn’t bother telling it.

But it doesn’t, no story so awful ever ends that simply.

In summer, 2012, the house was still vacant. People who did a walk-through never came back. I listened for the Angel of Death, but she never walked past again. Then something terrible happened.

My daughter had been abandoned by her husband. She’d lost her place. After living with her young son in her car, she finally came home. She visited me one day, and for some reason, I pointed out that house. I told her not to go near it. I don’t know why I did that. I told her it was a place of evil… And death…

To be honest with you, 2012 was a weird year here in Maryland. First there was a derecho, a storm uncommon in the east because it is characterized by powerful straight-line winds which rarely make the trip intact over the Appalachian mountains. The bloody thing nearly blew me over the railing of the deck.

Then there was a much more frightful day. 13 tornadoes hit the state and there would have been more, but some didn’t touch down. It was a weird, scary time.

And one night, after 23:00 hours, she showed up to visit. I couldn’t let them in because of rules, and the late hour. I went out to talk and saw to my horror that she had parked in the driveway of the vacant house. Almost against the garage door!

I warned her, “Beth, you can’t be on that property”, and we hugged and kissed and she went home. She had a party to go to on July 4th, but said she would visit me on the 5th.

I never saw her alive again.

My son called late in the day of the 4th. There had been an accident. My Elizabeth had drowned. She was at St. Agnes Hospital in Baltimore. Full life support. Next day I got a ride to see her. It was a heartbreaking sight. My ex-wife said “Beth, your daddy’s here”. A tear, just one, slid from an eye. I thought she might have heard her mom, but it wasn’t possible. To determine the amount of brain damage, they had her chilled. When they warmed her, they discovered that there was never any blood getting to her brain stem. She’d been dead a full day. They turned the machine off.

I was broken. I asked God why, why her?

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right!

WHY? WHY, ABBA?

Why couldn’t it be me? Hell, I didn’t even want to live. She had three children. My life served no purpose. Hers did.

I questioned everything I had ever believed about God. I still do.

But my children would not want me to. I’m still very much a Christian.

My faith is weak. And I see shadows in my room. I know my time is limited.

My children are dead and I cling to the hope that they are together in Heaven. But I can’t know that. I sometimes agonize over that question. I ask Abba, the Father, to have mercy on them and I tell him please, don’t punish them for having a father who was an asshole.

I wish I had done better. Every day they are with me in this shattered heart of mine. When the Angel of Death comes for me, I will not be afraid. Living, for me, is more terrible than death. What scares me about the Angel of Death is that she’s always coming for someone else; never for me. I beg you: hug and kiss your kids. Take a prime interest in all they do. You are the one who can save them. You are the one who can redeem me by making sure my plea counts. And in so doing, save yourself the heartache of regret and an empty hole where they used to be.