Dandy Darkly

Wicked Little Town (part four)

Peer into the astral plane, and still today you'll see two teetering infernos of spinning fire. The columns stretch from the blistered pavement up to the mocking cosmos. Shrieking harpies with bat wings and barbed whips ride the updrafts of scorching air, seeking helpless souls to pluck from the chaos and drop to the ground below. From beneath the fallen beams crawl demons the color of carnage, and a gentle, southwestern breeze supports a rotten-candy cloud of ash, burning jet fuel, and soot covered, contorted faces lost in the dark and gasping for air.

No trip to New York is complete without an obligatory visit. There's the construction pit, offerings of flowers and cards. Annual ceremonies remembering those we lost. Elaborate murals illustrating what's to be. Though it never shall be. The site is cursed. We all know it, but can't accept it.

Look into the past and remember that day. The bravest among us, fire fighters, police, ordinary men and women who dropped everything to help the injured or the fleeing. The wall of dust held razor sharp teeth and goring horns. They found monsters in the narrow canyons of Wall Street. That morning the Veil between worlds fell with the towers. Cowering behind that car. Clutching his briefcase. Everything covered in ash. Alarms and police sirens and explosions, but all he heard was the breathing. And the growling.

Reading a comic book under the covers. Mom and dad are arguing again, but just keep reading. The flashlight's translucent glow pours through the thin paper page and casts a prismatic spray of distorted images on to the insides of the blanket. The safe blanket. Rotate the flashlight, the image shifts. The monsters and heroes melt together beneath the blanket. Count backwards and study the image. 3. Mom screams. 2. Dad screams. 1. Pull back the blanket. There's a monster in the room. Scream.

"FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! DIE MOTHER FUCKER!" - "The fucking thing had two legs and four fucking arms and a fucking spikes here and and and a fucking mouth of giant fucking teeth!" - "fuck where did it fucking come from man!?!?!!?" - "FUCK ANOTHER ONE! THERE!" - "Keep smashing it with rock! SMASH IT'S FUCKING FACE IN!!!" - "FUCK WHAT IS GOING ON?!" - IT'S THE END OF THE FUCKING WORLD!!!!"

The matron has arrived, and she has the artifact. The older witches are exhausted. Many of the younger are dead or flying wounded out of the blast zone. The matron steps quickly, her focus absolute. Demons three times her size roar and sprint in her direction. They leap and instantly vaporize into sand. Her thin lips move silently. She manipulates something small swiftly and delicately within her withered, ancient hands. The women rise as she glides past. They follow in her wake. They know her sacrifice is imminent. Their most loved; their eldest. The Green Witches' tears hit the charred cement near where the drops of the matron's blood has fallen. She who was here when Manhattan was born. The matron bids them stop. There's so much more they must accomplish this dreadful day. She opens her tiny palm. To her hand she's painstakingly sewn a wooden button. The witches turn and flee from their loving mother, sister and friend. 

The conspiracy theorists say it's a government cover up for a secret radiation or nuclear testing facility beneath the World Trade Center Site. Think about it, the infected mutants in the Chelsea biohazard zone got loose and somehow busted a reactor core or something. Whatever. If you study the tapes you'll clearly see a green explosion happen at the base of the second tower a full hour and twenty minutes after the collapse. Pause it. Right there. See it? What is that green light? 

It's a sunny morning in the month of September before the September we know was. A gentle breeze blows to the southwest. Three regal women stand on the banks of a wild, untamed island. The natives claim the forests are cursed and want no ownership of it, but are willing to sell it in exchange for a few mystical trinkets. The witches confer and return with a handful of thirteen buttons. Supposedly these buttons have the power to close any door, seal any break and mend any tear. The natives refuse the thirteenth, as their shaman is highly suspicious of the number, and instead accept twelve of the magical fasteners as payment for the blighted land they call Manhattan. The matron puts the lucky thirteenth button in her pocket for safe keeping, and begins helping the sisters of the Green Witch Coven unload their tiny boat.

Quoth the Raven, “LOL.”

Associates of mine have berated me as of late for apparently losing my sense of humor. They say all the doom and gloom and portents of the spectral apocalypse have really been bumming them out.

Well, whatever!

Perhaps in another incarnation I had more of a jovial regard for what is comparably the fleeting fire of a match stick next to the eternal, frozen torment of undead existence. Being me isn’t exactly whoopee cushions and knock-knock jokes, but that doesn’t mean the world of spooks isn’t without a sense of humor.

Being from Georgia originally, I can attest that little of merit crawled its way over the state line from Alabama – unless you’re counting ghost stories. Alabama has a rich heritage of such tales – and one such legend is the many supernatural encounters of Alabama’s very own Arthur Dropsy.

Now Arthur Dropsy appears across several eras of Southern folk legend and across many states – pre and post War of Northern Aggression, colonial expansion, Trail of Tears, the 1996 Olympic Games. In some portrayals he’s African American. In most he’s white. In all of them he possesses a penchant for getting himself in trouble and being a bit of a scaredy cat. There are so many Arthur Dropsy tales, that I’m led to believe he was a dabbler in the occult himself. He was also what we’d consider today to be a homeless beggar and a pitiful drain on society.

But here I go taking the fun out of a simple story.

So one fine day our irascible tramp Arthur Dropsy was hanging out at the blacksmith’s begging for anything that could be spared, when the smithy offered a simple challenge:

“Arthur Dropsy, if you can spend the night up on Haunted Hill in that old witch woman’s abandoned house, I’ll give you the sweetest, biggest watermelon out of the patch behind my shop here.”

Well watermelon was Arthur Dropsy’s favorite food (again, Arthur Dropsy tales do retain a bit of that classic Southern charm) and when he peeked out back behind that shop, he just couldn’t help but let out a little squeak at the size and splendor of those green, ripe watermelons.

“I’ll do it! Ain’t nothing in this world that can scare Arthur Dropsy outta himself a delicious watermelon dinner!”

So that night Arthur Dropsy went a sneaking up Haunted Hill past crooked trees and hidden things in the dark until he found the battered shack from which he’d emerge victorious.

“They say this old witch’s shack is haunted. But I’m not afraid!”

You go, Arthur Dropsy!

And he did - right into that shack. At first he wasn’t afraid. Arthur sat boldly in that shack with broken windows and the wind whistling through the rafters. He even started a little fire in the oven. This was his mistake. Because that flickering flame cast shadows, and from those shadows Arthur Dropsy’s imagination began to work. And before he knew it, he’d done summoned the Devil himself.

Sitting right across from him, the Devil said, “Hello, Arthur Dropsy.”

This Devil was as red as the insides of the juiciest watermelon and his black eyes glittered like tiny seeds. His teeth were so long they cut through his rubbery lips, and his forked tail waved ever so lazily. A pair of long curved horns reached as high as the ceiling, and he patiently tapped the shack’s rotting floor with a pair of goat’s hooves as Arthur Dropsy stuttered out a weak reply.

“Hello, Mr. Devil.”

And then the Devil lunged at Arthur Dropsy to steal up the tramp’s soul and snatch him away to Hell. But old Arthur was too quick. He dashed out of that witch’s shack and hauled ass down Haunted Hill back towards the town. Wolves cried in the night. Bats screeched overhead. And the Devil himself came roaring down the path to catch the soul he’d chased now for years.

Arthur ran for what seemed like hours until he heard the tiny ringing of the blacksmith’s iron. He could feel the hot breath of the Devil right on his neck, but still he ran and ran and ran. As he ran, the clanging got louder and louder. And when the smithy came in view, Arthur Dropsy didn’t slow down one bit.

Instead he cried to the waving blacksmith, “You can forget them watermeloooooooooooooons!!!!”

And Arthur Dropsy kept on running right through the middle of town and out past the county line. And that was the last time they saw him (or the Devil) round those parts.

Hilarious, right?