As I was saying...
I remember reading a couple of stories as a kid that I've never been able to track down. The embarrassing thing is that one of them I could probably find pretty easily. It was in
The Saturday Evening Post Reader of Sea Stories, which sat on a bookshelf in my aunt's house for many years and which is pretty readily available used via Amazon. Not sure how my aunt ended up with a copy, since she was really more into romance novels & mysteries. It may have belonged to my grown-up cousin (who unwittingly provided me with my intro to Stephen King, Anthony Burgess &
It Happened to Boston, see last post). Anyway, it figures that the two stories that grabbed me were fantasies. One was Ray Bradbury's "The Foghorn" which I loved because it was about a relict dinosaur that thinks a foghorn...well, you know the story. It's Bradbury, it's beautiful. Later I would read almost all of Bradbury in those cheap Bantam editions that were everywhere in the 70s.
The other story is the one that's haunted me since, a strange fantasy about a boy and girl, brother and sister, who meet a strange woman on the beach who claims to be a "sea witch." The "witch" was an oddly childlike woman who might or might not have actually been a supernatural being, but the whole story had a hallucinogenic, melancholy magic. Inevitably the kids grow up and have to leave her, but the witch kisses them each on the cheek, leaving behind marks that are shaped like...was it starfish? Sand dollars? As a kid I had recurrent dreams about a brother and sister, kids I never knew and whose appearance seemed to change from dream to dream. Maybe this story is partly why.
See, even though I could easily find a copy of the book and read the story again, I'd almost hate to. Even though I eagerly gobbled up
It Happened In Boston again once I found it...this one really does feel more like a dream, something from my personal history.
The other story--which I really can't find anywhere--is more problematic. I'm not likely to have the opportunity to find it again. It appeared in some generic spooky stories/haunted house anthology that a cousin of mine (not the grown-up cousin with the box of paperbacks) had borrowed from his school library and left lying aorund the house one night when I visited. The cover was a fairly benign, cartoonish picture of an old house morphing into an approximation of a human face (windows for eyes, door for mouth, etc.) and leaning forward menacingly. On the back cover was a kid in a hillbilly-type get-up, running away from the house, his dog close on his heels. At least, that's how I remember it. Maybe the house was in a graveyard or something. I have no idea what the title was; they started pumping out "scary stories" anthologies for kids as a staple for libraries ages before I was born, so it could have been anything.
The story I remember wasn't your usual quasi-contemporary ghost story. It was more like a fairy tale. Again, a brother and sister figured into it. The sister had been lost or kidnapped, and the boy went to find her. The setting was your stand
mitteleuropa folktale milieu. At some point the kid wanders into an enchanted forest and happens on a werewolf. Now, apparently in the other dimension this book floated in from, werewolves are sort of wolf-satyrs, because much was made of this fellow having hooves. And even though I believe he was always referred to as a werewolf ("'Of course,' the werewolf said,"--that kind of thing), and the kid certainly knew he was a werewolf, he was--get this--
disguised as a monk. A Franciscan, I guess. A Benedictine? What do I know from monks? He was a Thelonious Monk, there you go, now get outta here. Crazy duck.
Anyway, the monk with hooves who's really a werewolf takes up with the kid and they go walking through the enchanted forest. Tra-la-la. They wander through a patch of flowers that have cat-heads (that meow, I seem to remember, and no, thank god, the werewolf-monk does not make jokes about pussy-willows). There was an illustration of this scene that I can remember pretty clearly...black and white pen-and-ink. The wolf-monk looked nothing like either a wolf or a monk; he's a towering, bullet-headed thing, utterly terrifying, dressed in rags with an inked-in, solid-black face, except for a pair of white, mindlessly staring eyes, and a mouthful of white teeth. Hooves? I didn't see any. The boy is wearing a peasant shepherds-boy outfit and the two of them stroll past a patch of the kitty-flowers. Tra-la-la.
Turns out the wolf-monk is in cahoots with the people who stole the sister; these are (my memory gets really foggy here) a group of monsters of various kidney who all live in a big tumbledown house somewhere in the enchanted forest. The nominal leader is (I
think), a female vampire of (I
think) the Lilly Munster mold. That's how I remember it. Maybe they just said she was a vampire and my TV-soaked imagination did the rest. I doubt they said anything about her wearing tons of goth makeup or having straight black hair or whatever. The monsters are all going to have a party (and do the Monster Mash, no doubt) and I
think the girl is either going to be eaten or serve as a maid. Anyway, the wolf-monk and Vampirella don't let on to the kid, they stick him in a guest room and make out like it's nap-time. But the kid looks through a keyhole or something, and watches the two monsters talking.
There's a chilling scene I remember where the werewolf takes off his why'd-he-even-bother monk disguise (like pulling off his skin) and revealing the wolf underneath. I could
see him leaning over the table, panting, like a wolf morphed halfway into a human being. I can see it right now, telling you about it. Boy, I'm glad we'll be able to eat those damned kids soon, he says, or something. And the Vampire is like, yeah, rock on.
And then...what? The kids get away, I remember that. And there's some kind of...I guess the party starts at that point and the monsters are all dancing and whirling and capering around like the soldiers of the damned. Maybe the kids just slip away. Anyway, the scene with the monsters dancing is scary and spooktacular and kind of like something out of the Japanese
Yokai Monsters movies. Anyway, the end.
If ANYONE has ever read anything like this, please, please PLEASE get in touch and tell me.
That one I'd love to read again. Seriously.
Okay, now it's 7:42 and I have to write porn so I can pay my credit card bills. Go on, go to bed!
J