Large Fierce Mammal

“Tales abound with ingredients that torture the imagination of the susceptible, even long after the story has been read, heard, or watched. The effect is the same whether the tale comes from experience or fiction, for the imagination is a wondrous thing if taken in hand by someone who can play it like a harp.” ~ Dark Sentiments Season 8 — Day 25: Hags Assorted

Last night’s Dark Sentiment looked at things that come in the night to paralyze and mount you, for whatever reason. Not the fun kind of bondage experience, to be sure!

Just as the sense of smell is powerfully evocative of memory, so too can visual cues link directly with the most primal of urges. As promised, tonight we’re going to revisit another flavour of that kind of imagery that, for a time after exposure, becomes the ocular version of a musical “ear worm” that just won’t leave your head.

Locomotion. Just getting around, whatever the reason. A simple thing really, but even so it can arouse on the brightest and darkest of levels. An ancient silver coin with one bright side, and another face more darkly tarnished.

Here’s the brighter side of that coin. We’ve all had the experience of observing someone we at first thought to be quite physically attractive, only to find them far less so the instant we see them walk. For me, the two biggest examples are a pigeon toed gait — something that was relentlessly corrected in elementary school in my generation — and the second is an inability for a woman who decides to wear high heels to properly walk in them, so she ends up galumphing along like some awkward amalgam of a porn star and a Clydesdale. I see this as the ambulatory equivalent of someone who believes that qualifying for a driver’s license and a car loan automatically makes them a good driver.

When she does it right though, well as I said, ingredients to torture the imagination.

Some sage advice from Mrs. LFM.

Simple locomotion.

Flipping the coin to its darker side, here’s another locomotive trigger that carries a similar degree of sticking power — the malevolent thing that crawls up and down staircases, along floors, on walls and across ceilings, and out of the most unexpected of places and things. Something that crawls by nature won’t do. Oh no, this locomotion comes from a place of brokenness and deformity, and it has to be done in ways that contradict all that’s right and holy.

There is a website called Your Ghost Stories that encourages people to “Publish your paranormal experience!”, and there was a story titled Crawling Around My Ceiling posted there on 16 December 2015 by a user named “Chookie” that illustrates my point. Spoiler alert: It also contains reference to “shadow people” of which we will be speaking anon. I’ll post the relevant parts here in case, like shadow people, it all simply disappears one day.

“From the room that I was sleeping in, you could see the living room. In one of the corners, I used to see this shadow person that would always be trying to get my attention. Anyways I had seen it that night waving its shadow arms from side to side as if it was trying to get my attention. I was so used to seeing it I just ignored it.

“My daughters were already asleep and I was fixing to lay next to them when my dog came and laid down first. I flip the TV on and turned the volume down and was getting very sleepy. I could still see the shadow trying to get my attention when all of the sudden, I saw it stop waving its arms and I got this feeling of fear and dread. My dog starts barking and shaking and focusing on the ceiling in the living room but would not leave the bed. I laid there still as possible and with my peripheral vision, I could see this black thing crawling really fast on the ceiling. The other shadow was still there and was still too. All of the sudden, I saw it poke its head out and look at me, all I could see was black fog. But you could tell it had control of it.

“Anyways, it was running around the ceiling for like three minutes. The longest three minutes of my life. My dog would not take his eyes off this thing. Once the feeling of dread left the room, I knew it was gone. The other shadow started again with the waving.” ~ Crawling Around My Ceiling

We’ve all had that corner of the eye movement that’s nothing when you look at it, and will again. In this story it’s the protracted presence of the ceiling crawler combined with the reaction to it by all observers, most particularly the waving shadow person and the Dog, wherein the magic lies.

As a visual example, here’s a scene from the third part of The Grudge franchise.

That one had it all. And there’s this from Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Short, sweet, and effective.

I’ve also used the unorthodox crawling malevolence motif in my poem The Attic Room , specifically in these stanzas —

Nobody knows the demon’s mind,
Nor why it chose to spare
Two tender girls to focus on
The only boy child there.

But on its whim, that very night,
Downstairs without a sound,
It came unheeded, waking not
The Vicar’s sleeping hound.

And as it crawled along the wall
It seemed to change its mind.
It loomed a while above the girls,
Then left them both behind.

It fell upon the sleeping boy
And ripped his soul away.
Dead beside his mother’s where
She found him in the day.

Again, simple locomotion, all about getting from point A to point B, and even if it’s not about you, you’re going to make it about you, wherever the lady in heels or the thing on the ceiling is headed.

Think on this until next time, and as always, your comments are welcomed to season the sauce.