And Who Paid Charon His Debts?

Let us move to a theme that is the center of what horror is to any man or woman, and that is the horror of death. I believe that I am terminally ill, but no doctor has ever told me so - not even once. I believe that I probably have leukemia, and another horror is to wonder when the diagnosis was made. I could be wrong, and that doubt is also quite horrifying.

I have no love of doctors, but I submit to the reality that my culture requires me to be some of a man whom I have no love for, and I have submitted to the treatment and minded my health, and I hope to be victorious without one suicide attempt over the age of 50 solar-years. If I get there - quite doubtful - I will make a new demarcation. Hades can be seductive, but I avoid keeping company with the bastard. We all do.

As Lovecraft the H.P. again discusses, it is the unknown that we fear. In good horror writing, a writer suggests without making too much fuss about the details, and that is the scariest kind of horror. Some splatter in horror is common, but that is gross-out appeal, and a reminder of our human bodies' physical corruptions - also quite horrifying.

Still, to read, "The Horla," where a man who has imbibed raw-ether to the point of utter madness - by his own admission in the story - yet believes that a predator of human beings will prey on him - with no splatter - and no sign of the visage of his predator - just the death of a man who knows nothing and has gained nothing - this tale is one of the most fearsome stories ever written. This tale by Maupaussant, a sort of French "O'Henry," popular short-story writer is also autobiographical. It is the last intelligible thing he wrote before dying of ether-toxicity.

In other words, all the tale tells us is what the author believes - which is that he is human prey by some predator - and that he is mad, and we now have a short-story that is one of the pinnacles of terror fiction ever written. We have no need for any more information to have night-terrors over the story. The story is almost a precis, of roughly 3 pages in length.

In other words, the horror of the story is what we can't know, not the words provided by a man who then died just as he describes in the story - believing himself to be being eaten alive by a being he called - the Horla. The word was a French slang in his period for, "whore."

There is another tale I have textualized for myself, a very short few sentences. Today, the face of Hades laughs in the shadows from the corner, when I am willing to look in the corner to see him at all. I am very rarely able to look into that corner. Yet when Hades' face is revealed in cruel and hideous strength, I will not conquer death - then I will die. To see death's face with clarity is to be dead, and that is the truth the dead know.

There is another tale, and that is that when the void of mother An arrives, even Hades will die at the lips of her kiss. This is not intended as apocalypticism, but to say - what I know of death will be void when void arrives. Death is a human concept, and what is annihilation will annihilate even my human conception of death.

I have paid for living to Charon so that I may die. The river Styx is being crossed, and I will drink Lethe from An in total annihilation, one of these days or nights of my crossing. I would hope - and we all do - for some ecstatic eternity - yet if there is a world past this crossing, it lies over a river that I must pay with destruction of all I know and have made in order to enter. Everyone hopes for immortality for what they are now, and my debt to Charon is paid again today by glimpsing Hades chuckling from his corner in the shadows.

It is time for a blood-draw and a podiatrist appointment in no more than 20 or 30 minutes, and I visit doctors who do not have my courage - however wicked this way I may come. They don't even have the courage to tell me of my impending doom, as if any man or woman doesn't die. I wait rather patiently for my ride to my doctor's visits.

I will then return home and meet the abyss of sleep, and a new afternoon or evening that I know nothing of lies across that river Styx. This blog will not meditate on death for many articles, but remember - every mystery I believe to be real is a mystery of death. Something wicked this way comes, it constricts like a python, and sniffs for prey with its tongues.