Another night, another Christmas essay and poem from Saint Marty.
Spooks of Christmas
by: Martin Achatz
I have always felt a particular
kinship to the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz. To be precise, when the Lion is in the
Haunted Forest, trooping to the Wicked Witch’s castle to get her broom, he
witnesses the Tin Man lifted by a ghostly force and thrown like a chew
toy. The Lion squeezes his eyes shut,
cowers, and chants over and over, “I do believe in spooks. I do believe in spooks. I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I
do believe in spooks.” I’m not as big a
coward as the Lion, although I do avoid walking past a house in my neighborhood
that’s supposedly haunted by the specter of a little boy. Like my furry, Oz counterpart, I have a
healthy respect for the power of the unseen.
I do, I do, I do, I do, I do.
As a child, my respect for all things
ghostly was more of an obsession.
Saturday afternoons would find me in front of the TV, watching the
latest offering from Sir Graves Ghastly, host of a local creature feature. Sir Graves was a middle-aged man with a
goatee who rose from a casket at the beginning of his show and spoke with a bad
Bela Lugosi accent. His movies ranged
from Boris Karloff courting Elsa Lanchester in Bride of Frankenstein to
the 1950s sci-fi flick Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. My favorite offerings were released in the 1960s
by the Hammer Film Studios of England.
These movies invariably featured a lot of blood, copious dismembered
body parts, and plenty of zaftig women in flowing white gowns who wanted to
attach their mouths to men’s necks. The
combination of horror and gore and sex was enough to drive my pre-pubescent
mind wild.
Eventually, I graduated to the
slasher movies of the ‘80s. Halloween,
Nightmare on Elm Street, and the Friday the 13ths. As a teen, these films had just the right
amount of thrill, spill, and kill to satisfy my cravings for a good scare, plus
there were always horny teens sneaking off to go skinny-dipping in Crystal Lake
together. By the beginning of the 1990s,
my taste for celluloid screams waned.
Now, as a father of a nine-year-old daughter and two-year-old son, I’m
appalled by the Goosebumps TV show.
I refuse to let my children view episodes simply because, to be quite
honest, they scare me. I’d like
to say that my tastes have matured, that I find vampires and werewolves,
zombies and ghosts childish. But when The
Exorcist was re-released in the year 2000, I went to see it with a
friend. I slept with lights on for two
weeks afterward. I’ve become Don Knotts
from The Ghost and Mr. Chicken.
I even find most of the current
movie versions of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol a bit too
much. Dickens, aside from creating the
stereotypical image of the white, Currier and Ives Christmas, also inaugurated
the tradition of telling ghost stories during the holidays. The tale of Ebenezer Scrooge is just one of
many Christmas ghost stories Dickens published.
For Dickens, if you heard a noise in the living room on Christmas Eve,
it was more likely to be long-dead Great Grandpa T paying a visit than a jolly,
fat elf in red fur. And Great Grandpa T wasn’t
usually having a great night.
The recent crop from Hollywood based
on A Christmas Carol takes full advantage of computer-generated
horrors. Marley’s ghost has a jaw that
falls open to gargoyle proportions. The
Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is a terrifying wraith in black with the hands
of a skeleton and hell-red eyes.
Watching these films, I slip into full Cowardly Lion mode, peering at
the TV through laced fingers, waiting for Marley to don Freddy Krueger gloves
and carve up Scrooge like a Christmas goose.
I much prefer Waldorf and Stadler as the heckling Marley brothers in A
Muppet Christmas Carol. That’s more
my speed now.
But it makes sense to me, this focus
on ghosts at Christmas time. Even in the
accounts of the birth of Christ in the Bible, there are moments of sheer
terror. Every time an angel appears to
someone, the first words out of the angel’s mouth are not, “Do these wings make
me look fat?” The first words, without
fail, are, “Fear not,” which leads me to believe that angels are pretty
scary-looking creatures, not like Connie Stevens, sporting dove wings and
singing “You Can Fly.” No, angels
inspire horror at first, not awe. So
Charles Dickens was just following the lead of the writers of the gospels when
he wrote Christmas ghost stories. Plus,
at Christmas time, people tend to put a little more stock in the possibility of
unseen powers. The veil between reality
and possibility is just a little more transparent. Angels and ghosts are not just figments of
fiction. They’re as real as snow, ice,
and i-Pads.
Kids, in particular, are more open
to such possibilities. In fact, I
believe young children have a vision for the unseen that adults either ignore
or completely lack. I’ve been creeped
out on more than one occasion by my daughter and toddler son suddenly going
still in the middle of play and staring into an empty room as if they’ve just
caught sight of Santa Claus. My
five-year-old nephew once told me, “You know, Uncle Marty, when I get older, I
won’t be able to see the angels any more, and that will make me sad.”
Once upon a time—of all the good
days in the year, on Christmas Eve—my wife and I came home from a midnight
candlelight church service. Our daughter
was sleeping the sleep of childhood Christmas, deep as a Robert Frost winter
woods. Our son was in his crib, for once
still and calm. We sent the babysitter
home and prepared for bed. Pajamas. Toilet.
Teeth brushing. I went through
the house, turning off lights. I paused
for a moment in front of the tree. The
living room glowed a muted red, green, white, and blue, full of the sort of
warmth you find in a hand-stitched quilt.
I reached down and unplugged the Christmas tree.
As I prepared to climb over my wife
into bed, I heard my son make a mewling sound, which usually meant he had lost
his pacifier. I sighed, craving the
comfort of pillow and blanket, but I turned and went to his crib in the next
room to avoid an all-out session of screams and tears from him. I was tired, but I still felt the peace of
the candlelit church, “Silent Night” fluting out of the pipe organ. I looked down at my son in his crib.
He was on his back, staring up at
the ceiling with eyes as big, round, and dark as tree ornaments. The pacifier was still between his lips, and,
behind it, he was smiling the way he did when I washed his feet during baths,
all gums and delight. He didn’t look at
me, didn’t seem to notice I was there.
His gaze never shifted from a place on the ceiling, directly above
him. His stare was focused, full of some
kind of knowledge.
I felt my Cowardly Lion self stir in
the depths of my chest. I imagined Linda
Blair levitating above her bed, the girl from Poltergeist standing in
front of a snowy TV screen, chiming, “They’re baaaaaaa-aaack.” I slowly looked up at the ceiling.
Nothing. Just empty, white ceiling. I was half-tempted to mutter, “Humbug,” but,
somehow, I knew the sound of my voice would violate the air, cause it to
fracture like ice on a mud puddle. I
looked down at my son.
He’d started to slowly suck on his
pacifier, as if he was working over some great, complicated calculus problem in
his head. His gaze remained fixed on the
ceiling above him.
After a few minutes of standing
beside him, waiting for an alien to burst from his chest or him to start
speaking fluent ancient Greek in a guttural drawl, I went back to my bed and
climbed in beside my wife.
In the dark, I listened to the still
house, half-expecting to hear the clink of chains or disembodied footsteps in
the attic. Instead, my son started to
make noises, soft, quiet, musical sounds, as if he were talking with some
unseen spook or singing with a distant angel choir.
Monster's Under Your Child's Bed Are Real
by: Martin Achatz
My
daughter’s gum looks raw
Where she
lost her first tooth,
A chip of
enamel tiny
As an
apple seed. She slept
With it
under her pillow,
Believed
the tooth fairy
Would come
in the night,
With pixie
wings, shining coins.
This
December, she talks of Santa
The way I
talk of an uncle
From
California flying in
For a
Christmas visit. She believes
Like she
believed in snow
Before she
touched it,
In frogs
before she heard them
Sing after
a rainstorm.
She
believes in the monster
Under her
bed, stitched from
Dark
bathrooms, doctor’s needles,
Bloody
knees, her fingers
Reaching
in sleep for me,
Finding
only a cold pillow.
Christ
took shadow
Nested in
wood shavings,
Goat offal
stinging His nose,
Joseph’s
hammer driving a nail,
Molded
them like wet clay
Into
something that crushed
His child
heart with terror.
He
breathed rabbit breaths on it,
And His
monster was born,
A monster
that blotted out
The light
of His birthstar,
Filled His
dreams with the wails
Of fathers
for sons split open
Like ripe
melons in cribs,
In
swaddling cloths soft
As the
down of dove.
When
Christ screamed, Joseph came
With words
cool as mountain ice,
The
creature washed into the black sea
Of night
by Joseph’s splintered
Caress, by
his arms strong as cedar.
Joseph
rocked Jesus, knowing,
Even as he
whispered Hush
Over and
over like a prayer,
The
monster waited for his child
On the
horizon of sleep, real
As the
myrrh of magi.
Tonight, I
will listen
For my
daughter’s cry,
For her
monster to grab
Her
dangling foot, pull her
Into the
dust under her bed.
I will go
to her, take her
In my
arms, feel her heart
Leaping
against my chest.
Like
Joseph, I will rock her, whisper
Daddy’s here. You’re safe,
Until,
like snow or Santa or frogs,
She believes.
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