A Ghost Story

My son-in-law, Seeth, asked me for some inspirations the other day. “What do you think about a horror show? I mean, a slasher story vs. a thriller?” he burst out. He has this tendency to just drop into a topic like a lead balloon falling from the sky.

“Huh?” We were just talking about the new season of Rick and Morty.

“I mean, there are horror stories, but you need to make a good plot line from them.”

Um. OK, I thought, placing the rusting gears of my intellect in motion. “Well. I was never fond of really gory, slashy types of movies. You know. Gore. Guts. And more gore. I’m too squeamish. Being more of the Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney, Vincent Price, Christopher Lee kind of horror aficionado. I want my killers to be suave and well-mannered when they kill people. I’m more interested in psychological type thrillers of the Hitchcockian variety. Wait. Why are you asking me this?” I thought, suddenly suspiciously.

Of course, knowing my son as I do, he was plunging us into the middle of a conversation that was already in glorious progress inside his own head. I’ve learned just to roll with it.

“Are you asking for suggestions for your next game?” I asked, escalatingly suspicious.

Yes, he was. Seeth is an addict of those on-line, multi-player, role-playing, Internet-enabled, multi-hyphenated, games. He also tends to start a conversation in the middle. I guess he thinks it’s quicker that way. The rest of us will catch up.

“Yes,” he said, as if it was the most obvious thing in creation.

“OK, then,” I said, now knowing where the goal posts were. For now. “I gather that you are the game master, dungeon master-whatever, for a game coming up and you want a Halloween theme?”

“Right,” he said. As if I was finally catching up. Dullard that I am.

“OK. Let me see, let me see.”

I was invited to play one of Seeth’s D&D games in long times past. When he and Kristin lived in Albany, Oregon. That was a while ago. I was visiting on one of my many trips out west to see my more erudite and successful descendants. It was good for a meal or two. Plus it was legal there. Wink, wink.

“We’re having some friends over to play a game,“ he had said. “Do you want to join?”

“Sure,” I said. Wanting to be cool, or, something. “How do you play?” And so started my indoctrination into role playing, D&D style games. Apparently, you don’t just roll the dice and take that many moves across a board and buy that property, pay that rent, or take that (un)lucky card. Games today are much more-interactive.

“It sounds like a real-life situation where things happen and people respond as they can,” I said. “Sometimes tripping over each other.”

“Ya,” Duh, he said. “That’s how it works.”

“And this dice, this die. This multi-faceted, multi-sided, multi-dimensional, die-ing thing. It’s not like we role the dice-die every move and advance that many steps along the game board? Where is the game board, anyway?” I perplexed.

“It’s. Kind of. Fluid,” he said. Seriously doubting his decision to invite me.

“Fluid. Like a milk shake?”

“Sure. Like a milk shake.” Serious becoming adamant. Doubt becoming dismay.

“OK,” I assured. “Gotcha!” in no way assuaging his misgivings. I rolled the die. (I found out later that the word ‘dice’ is both plural and singular, but I think ‘die’ is much better, don’t you?)

It was a fun game, once I figured out what the rules were. Basically, the rules were-There are no rules. I just accept whatever everybody else says are the rules and make up shit as I go along. As long as it makes sense in some universe, not necessarily ours, and it advances the game. As they say, “I don’t make the rules. The dungeon master does.” Just like real life!

Like when Seeth told us, he was the dungeon master and therefore the god of the game, that,
“You are in a barn and it is on fire! What do you do now?” It was up to us to decide. You could roll the die and let it determine what firefighting properties your character has, or you could just make something up. I chose the latter. Actually, a ladder would have been nice, too, now that I think of it. Next game.

“Oh,” I said instead, inspirationally. “I put out the fire.” It wasn’t my turn. But, then again, there were no turns.

“How?” he dumbfounded at me.

“With the water,” more inspiration in return.

“Huh? What water?” you must be kidding.

“Well. It’s a barn, right?” “Yah…” “And barns have stalls, right?” “Uh, OK. Yah…” “And stalls are for animals…” “Not sure I’m following-“ “…and animals need lots of water…” “Uh…sure…OK…” “So, there must by troughs full of water in wherever we are at the moment-big stainless steel or wooden troughs gushing with gallons of firefighting goodness-so I push one of them over and put out the fire with the water and we all escape. See?” I was starting to get the notion that these games were just ad-libs with a backbone of storytelling and bullshit in their veins. I put the ‘Meth’ in ‘Method Acting!’ “I can do this,” I triumphed.

“Oh. Gee,” he said, a fair bit of perplexion in his complexion. “That makes sense. OK. You put out the fire and escape the burning, barn of death. Not so much death, I guess.” “Not today,” I gleed, glad to have scored a point. Do we score points in this game? I don’t think so. “So long, Sucker!” I snarked across my receding shoulder.

And so we went on, for a while. Running from pillar to post and avoiding calamity and dodging catastrophe as we went, merrily on our way. Sometimes rolling the die, sometimes thinking our way out. Just like in real life! Except for the dice. Life has other dice.

The game ended some hour or so later, I had survived, along with a few of my compatriots-I couldn’t save them all. Apparently, they had died. That’s a thing, you know. But the last few of us were on a ship at a dock on the edge of a burning city surrounded by zombie warriors, which were impervious to flames, apparently, and were just about to break through the force field that kept us safe on the ship and send us all to kingdom come, but not without a forward view of their zombie stomachs first as they ate us to death! It was only fair.

“That’s it,” said Seeth. “That’s the end of my narration.” “Your what-now?” I asked. A new concept to me. God has a plan? Universes have endings? I should have known. Ours is long overdue. “If you can get out of this one situation, you’re the winner,” he continued.

“Wait,” I said, not sure I understood. There was a way to ‘win’ this game? Another new concept that doesn’t exist in life. I was starting to think of this game as an existential nightmare where the best you could hope for was death without too much fire. “You mean, if I can get us out of this current predicament, (I had started to look upon the other players as my people and I their leader, just say I’m not,) no matter what might happen next, then I won the game?”

“Yes, exactly.”

“Well, then,“ I said, like Paul Neuman in the Sting just as he was about to clean up in a rigged poker game. “We walk across the deck of the ship, get into a lifeboat. Drop it into the harbor. And paddle away. Game over.”

“What? Wait! You can do that?”

“Ya. Big boats have little boats on their sides. Called lifeboats. Just in case someone needs them in a role-playing game.” Duh!

“Well, I’ll be…”

Now Seeth was asking me for a narrative for his next game night, which, seeing as it’s October, he wished to be Halloween appropriate. And he asked me for some reason.

“Oh, I see,” I comprehended, finally. “I got it. Now, let me think… Let me see, let me see. Oh! Maybe a haunted house? Everybody loves a haunted house. But how do you find this house? It can’t be a part of the story. I mean, not to begin with. Not like in Hocus-Pocus, which takes place at Halloween and is a parody of the spook story. It’s supposed to be funny. No. This is supposed to be serious. But not gory or gooey serious. I hate that in a horror show. If you have to make someone throw up to scare them, you are seriously in need of therapy. And better story telling skills. Your players have to believe they are in a perfectly normal role-playing game. You know. Like real life! Then the walls can fall apart around them. They could be bleeding walls, I suppose. You never know!

“Let’s say you start in a normal, familiar place. Like a park. Say Central Park in Manhattan, for instance. Yes. That will do. Let’s say you start your story/game in Central Park and let your players explore the reservoir and the castle, the zoo and the fields and sidewalks therein. Like a typical, dreamy Sunday afternoon that happens every once in seven days every week of the year all the time in the city for now and forever. Perfectly and playfully ordinary. ‘Oh, look. Here’s a street vendor,’ one of you notices. ‘He’s selling candied peanuts. Sweet treats. Two dollars a bag. Let’s get some. Why, look here? At the bottom is a key. A key with a skull for its face. We’d better keep it. It may come in handy, some time. In the future.’ So you pass on.

“Until you find an odd monument-maybe a mausoleum? It’s right smack dab in the middle of everything. But none of the other people in the park seem to notice it. Everyone just passes it by, ignoring it. Except for your group. Odd.

“‘That wasn’t here before,’ one of you says. ‘Was it?’ says another. ‘I don’t think so.’ ‘It looks spooky.’ ‘I don’t remember it.’ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Maybe it was…?’ ‘No! It wasn’t! I’m positive!’

“So you muse and muster. And investigate the monument and discover an odd path behind it. ‘I’ve never seen this either-Wait! Where does it go? What happened to the Manhattan skyline?’

“The path leads down a brambled road. Beyond the manicured city park. Down a ditch. Across a creek. Up again. You scrape the mud from your feet onto the brown grass. And to a fence. An iron fence, the fence posts of which are shaped like human bones. On top of each post is a skull made of iron, with eyes glowing like red coals. There is a gate in the fence. The door of which is made of an iron rib cage and the lock is a skull with grinning teeth for a keyhole. “Look! I bet this key will fit!” one says, proffering the key from the peanut bag. It does. It opens. Once opened, the gate hinges go, ‘CreeeeeEEEEEY,’ but let you pass, anyway… And so you enter, expectantly...”

I suggested to Seeth that within the gate and the iron fence they find a Dutch mansion styled house, ala the Addam’s family. Only this one stands up on chicken legs, the windows in its tower glaring at you, their curtains blinking and the window shades squinting in menace. Inside, there can be any number of rooms, puzzles, traps, trap doors with stairs twisting down to spooky dungeons, and halls of mirrors, each mirror a nightmare in waking, each nightmare a dream without an awakening, each dream death. The story writes itself.

With a nod to Alexander Pushkin and Baba Yaga, I bid you a Happy Halloween.