At the Marketplace

The Calabar has pulled into port and we’ve disembarked to visit the local marketplace.   There were exotic goods, fine African foods, Aztec dancers, and crazy dragons!. I pulled out my camera and this is what I captured:

Video: L. Gloyd (c) 2008

Snack-time

 Most appropriate for our voyage, don’t you think?

Damned Vampires

A little tale to pass the time under the stars on deck.

Damned vampires. Always whining.

“Being immortal’s not all it’s cracked up to be – how would you like to live forever and watch all your loved ones dying off?”

Tell someone who cares.

I’m 400 years old, and still enjoying life. But these younger vampires – they always have to be the victim, always complaining about something or other.

Still, I wish it had worked out with Claudia. She was taken at the peak of perfection. Bitten between runway changes at a Paris fashion show. It was the hairdresser, of course. He nipped her as he was piling up those tumbling blonde curls. Irresistible.

When I met her, she was well past the use by date for a supermodel. The gossip mags endlessly speculated on how much expensive surgery it took to keep her looking like that, but all it took was the odd pint of blood, and there were any number of willing necks eager for those lovely fangs.

As soon as I saw her, propping up the bar with that fantastic body at my favorite hangout, The Coffin Club, I had to approach her. So I sidled up, and introduced myself.

“Gaylord Whimsey, at your service,” I said. That always gets a reaction. Names like that were very popular back in the 17th Century, but they cause quite a puzzled reaction now.

Claudia was very drunk on young French blood – I never cared for it myself, the bubbles get up my nose. Give me a fine old Scotch AB Positive any day.

“I’ve heard of you,” she said, focusing on me with difficulty, “You’re one of The Ancients. I’ve always wanted to meet one.”

“We tend to keep a low profile these days,” I said. “When you’ve been around for hundreds of years, people think you know everything.”

She gazed at me in horror. “Hundreds of years? How can you bear it? I’ve only been immortal for ten years and I can’t stand it any longer.”

I must admit, I was taken aback. One can’t be said to be immortal, exactly, until one has lived past the average age of death. A vampire who was sick of eternal life before the mortal life span had passed was a new one to me.

“Why?” I asked.

“It’s so boring!” she snapped. “On and on, day after day – you can’t even commit suicide! Aren’t you bored, after 400 years?”

“Certainly not,” I said. “I still pursue many interests.”

“Such as?”

“Cricket,” I said. “I’m a long standing member of the All Vampires 11, under the captainship of my dear friend, Hubert Montmorency.”

She glared at me through her French bubbly haze. “Cricket? Isn’t that a boring English game with men in hideous white clothes tossing a ball at each other?”

“It’s not boring at all, it’s the grandest game in the world. There is nothing nicer than a friendly afternoon match on the village green – or in my case, a friendly midnight match at my ancestral cemetery. I was planning to fly out tonight, actually, would you care to join me?”

She frowned. “Well, I suppose it would be a change of scene – you’ll have to give me a lift, I’m too drunk to steer.”

“My bat wings are quite strong enough for both of us,” I assured her. Within minutes we had left the club and were winging our way to my ancestral home.

All the way, she complained. She told me about her interminably unfortunate love life, how hard it was to find a good vampire who wouldn’t go sinking his teeth into any sexy young thing that crossed his path, and how she longed to find a soul mate. She whined about the meaninglessness of immortality and how hard it was to stay in shape when so much mortal blood was loaded with fat. She bitched incessantly that being immortal was supposed to be cool, and it wasn’t, not one little bit.

I was thankful when we arrived and I could put her down. She swayed on her stiletto heels and looked around my ancestral graveyard.

“Gloomy,” she said.

Hubert Montmorency and the team had already gathered for the match. Claudia gave a gasp when she saw our Montmorency carrying the stumps onto the pitch.

“What are you doing with those wooden stakes?”

“Those are the stumps,” Montmorency explained, “you drive them into the pitch, three at each end. The batsman has to defend them from the bowler.”

The game began and she perched herself on a headstone to watch. She got bored after five minutes and started treating the team to another long monologue on her wretched love life, weight problems and so on ad nauseum.

It quite disrupted the game. Finally, I threw down my bat and appealed to her.

“Claudia, dearest, we are trying to have a match here. Can’t you just forget your troubles, relax, and have a little fun?”

“Fun?” she shrieked. “If this is your idea of fun, I think I’d rather be jabbed with sharp sticks!”

As Montmorency said, anything to oblige.

She Will Never Give You Up

a.m.m. 

Once I was sitting on a beach, late at night when a man walked by me and said, “It’s  dark down there ” and as he walked away from me I realized he had been looking to his left as he spoke…and from his left I thought I heard an answer

only

nobody was to his left …

except for the Ocean.

All these years later I’m glad for one thing…that I never got a good look at his face.

Strange things happen at Sea…This true story is one of them.

Crewman’s disappearance during rescue in Alaska unexplained

Story Updated: Mar 29, 2008 at 10:02 AM PDT

By JEANNETTE J. LEE, Associated Press Writer

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) – As the fishing vessel Alaska Ranger sank to the bottom of the Bering Sea, crewman Byron Carrillo and 1st Assistant Engineer James Madruga struggled to stay afloat in the rough and frigid waves.With Carrillo drifting into hypothermic shock after nearly five hours, the arrival of a Coast Guard rescue helicopter was a blessing, Madruga said Friday. He told the rescue swimmer to “take Byron first” and watched the panicked crewman being loaded into a dangling basket.But when he reached the helicopter himself, Carrillo was nowhere to be seen

( full story HERE )

Drawer Dropping Good Time

I couldn’t resist — all the talk about undies. The photo is from the play “The Underpants”

Genece

The Dancing Tree

a.m.m.

Sometimes on  my way to Whopperville ( that’s what I say when I’m working on a story…I’m heading out to Whopperville ) I’ve run across some true stories that haunt me-  they give me nightmares or creep me out for days.

At the moment I’m working on a story about a Hanging Tree and in my research I found out that the slang name for these trees were ” Dancing Trees “

I’ll let that visual sort of sink in there.

At first blush some of my friends with more refined literary tastes thought I was making a poetic gesture when I floated the first draft for this story out to them.

You can stop laughing now.

The image that came to my mind about Dancing Trees came to me one night and woke me from a dead sleep.

And there was nothing poetic about it.

I saw a group of people sitting under a large shady tree on a hot day  having a picnic. They were dressed in their best summer clothes and as they laughed softly and admired the beauty around them I knew they are blissfully ignorant to the fact that

…many years ago someone danced…

for their lives

right above t their heads

And when I looked up I could see…

they still were.

 

I found this article at BBC

It’s about a Hang Man’s Tree

That’s located in…

  Kings Mills, Wrexham Wales

Let The Danse Begin…

Hang Man’s tree

Last updated: 31 December 2007

Bernie Griffiths shares her experiences and spooky encounters at a local beauty spot known as ‘Biniki’ at Kings Mills, Wrexham, and the Hang Man’s tree.

 There is a mill by the river but to get to the really spooky part you have to walk under a bridge. It belongs to the National Trust. Anyway, by the bridge in Biniki there is a tree where events have occurred for centuries.

We normally go there during the summer months and sit on the side by what is called Hang Man’s tree for obvious reasons. There has always been a presence there and I can sense paranormal activity quite easily. That’s why everyone comes with me.

This one night though it got very scary indeed, so much so I told everybody to get up and make for the road. My niece, myself and my husband got across the bridge in time but as we turned to scream for the others they had been blocked off with what can only be described as a distorted shape of mist. It was just floating there and when they moved, it moved.

We screamed for them to run but it followed. They ran through the river but it didn’t cross. As we ran nearly a mile to get out of there it was on the other side of the river along side of us every inch of the way back to the mill where it stayed in the woods. Quite an experience.

I spoke to someone many weeks after that and I asked them when they were younger did they ever experience anything there. They described the same shape even though I had not mentioned it. We have been back there and it has happened a few more times at the same time around about 2.25am.

We have only ever managed to stay there once through the night. This is only one area that has activity. Coming back from there another night we couldn’t stay because it was getting a bit uneasy there. We started to walk back though and got out safe and sound.

However as we passed through the gates on the opposite side of the old mill me and my brother saw a man walking straight at us, we moved apart so he could pass between us. We said ‘hello’ to him but he ignored us.

Anyway we turned to make sure my husband was OK because he was straggling behind. As we turned the man just walked straight through him. I looked at my brother and he looked at me. My husband was oblivious to it all and said he saw no-one there. All I can say is there are many discssions about Biniki but you have to be there at the right time and the spirits seem to love being there when I am. 

King’s Mill Wrexham, Wales

LINK

LINK

Underneath The Dancing Trees

by a.m. moscoso

When I was a girl I used to hear stories about a woman named Calabar Felonway who used to live in a town called Ninebones Cross and she used to travel to strange places and she collected strange things.

Once I heard that somewhere on her property, which was full of something called Dancing Trees, was a strange plant.

The plant that grew under the Dancing Trees was, I’m not kidding you, a plant that grew…

sheep

and the plant was called

The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary

I know, it sounds silly and hard to believe.

On the other hand Calabar Felonway, who lived and died outside of Seattle  was supposed to have been named for a Plague Ship.

The Story says that the Calabar Felonway washed up dead and corpseless two hundred years after she left London during the height of the Black Death in 1603.

The day they found her was also the day that Calabar Felonway was born in Ninebones Cross to a woman called Bartsia Butherbroom.

It’s true.

Every word.

amm

Wormbark Road

by anita marie moscoso

Bartsia Butcherbroom lives alone on Wormbark Road and even though Wormbark is sitting on some prime real estate up there in the Olympic Mountains of Washington state  no one wants to live out there and the reason for that isn’t the road with the funny name.

The reason is Bartsia Butcherbroom.

Bartsia lives in this little stone house with no windows and as far as anyone can tell it doesn’t have a door either- little details about Bartsia’s house are sketchy at best because in the 30 plus years she’s lived on Wormbark no one has ever went looking to knock on Bartsia’s door.

Catching a glimpse of Bartsia working herb garden that grows wild at the side of her is about all anyone wants to see of  her.

If you’re unlucky by nature  you might see her sitting on her porch rocking on her porch swing.

Bartsia sits there whittling little human shaped figures with a long knife with a bone white handle from the wood she collects from around her property .

When she’s done she stands them up along the railing that runs along her porch or she tosses them into the Riversleigh Creek that runs behind her property.

When the little figures wash up along the banks in the city of  Hedon the people that find them dig little holes and push the figures in with their feet. They try to use something else other then their hands and then they go home straight home and try to forget those tiny little figures with the rows of  “X”  marks running across their little eyes.

Maybe you’ll wonder how she makes such tiny cuts with such a big knife, but if I were you I wouldn’t spend a lot of time thinking about Bartsia Butcherbroom.

Especially if you were one of those people who touched one of those little figures with your hands before you buried it- or if as you passed by her sitting on her porch as she whittled and she caught your reflection in that long blade attached to the bone white handle she carves her figures with.

If you your unfortunate enough to be in either position more then likely you’re going to start to dream of her.

Having Bartsia show up in your dreams can only mean one thing.

It means that you’re going to be out one night and that you will hear the scariest sound anyone can imagine hearing.

Trust me, there are a lot of things out there in the black night that comes from the Cascades that sound bad. People with small “X” marks running across their closed eyes and pleading as they stumble through the woods ” Please wake me up, please wake me up “ is pretty bad in itself.

But the scariest sound you ‘ll ever hear are the words, ” What was that? “

You’ll be saying them-  and they will be the last words you’ll ever hear as you turn around and come face to face with Bartsia Butcherbroom who lives on Wormbark Road in a house with no windows or doors.

Where Ninebones Cross

 

by Anita Marie Moscoso

It’s a pale gray house set off a dusty road in a dead town called Ninebones Cross.

Nine Bones had a real name and of course it’s a real town, but I’ll bet a lot of people wish it wasn’t…

Ninebones used to be called Calaway and back in 1897 when Seattle became the Gateway to Gold some of the more adventurous Stampeders would take the dark roads out of Seattle and head into the town of Calaway to ‘ increase their odds ‘ of getting rich.

The person they all went to discuss this prospect with was a woman named Calabar Felonway.

Calabar Felonway-  that’s what she was called, not Cally, not Miss Felonway, not Ma’am…she was called Calabar Felonway and she used to give advice, for a price, on how to find what your heart desired.

Of course the Stampeders all desired the same thing- and after awhile Calabar Felonway got a little short tempered with the men and women who showed up at her door by moonlight to ask for advice.” Gold ” they’d say there in Calabar Felonway’s Parlor, ” I want to find lots of gold. “

” Of course you do ” Calabar Felonway would say in her dusty voice in her dusty Parlor by the moonlight trying to make it’s way through her dusty windows.

“ You’ll  help me then. ” they’d all say.

” No, I won’t help you. What I provide here is a service, it’s a deal my friend, and there is a contract involved and a fee. So I ask you, shall we proceed? “

” Yes. ” they’d all say with the same desperate edge to their voice and the same empty look in their eyes.

” Fine, ” Calabar would say and she’d motion for them to follow her into her kitchen and then she’d tell them to take a seat at the table

.They never sat though, they’d just stand there and say, ” I don’t want to sit , just tell me what I have to do.”

They all did what they were told. It’s funny though how they were able to do that when none of them listened.

The cost for advice from Calabar Felonway was a bottle of rum, a fresh kill (as long as it was warm blooded and didn’t come from the Sea) and for that very small price she’d make you rich, she’d make someone fall in love with you, Calabar Felonway would give you what your heart desired.

That’s what she told Dyer Frost one late evening, and after he paid the fee she whispered into Dyer’s ear where he would find the gold and the future that was in store for him.

She threw that part in for free.

He got up and said, ” I’m going to be rich. I am going to be a very rich and happy man ”

” Yes you are. “

Then as Dyer went back over the words Calabar Felonway had hissed into his ear he found to his horror he couldn’t remember the specifics.

The directions to the vein of gold that would make him that man he saw in his head, the happy rich man, were gone.

Next he could feel the pictures of  his wonderful future framed in pure gold being pulled- thread by golden thread- from his head. 

Before they were gone he said in terror, ” It’s going…God help me I’m losing it all.”

” Now that I have your attention I”ll tell you  how this works,” she told him. “I have to draw you a map and you have to keep it with you at all times. If you lose sight of it even for a minute you’ll forget everything. You’ll even forgot you have a map and you’ll be just like the rest of those sad desperate fools scratching in those mines for gold like those mice scratching away in my pantry over there for food.

So that’s the deal Mr Frost, you can’t lose site of my map even for a second.”

” It’s a deal,” he said.

” It’s a burden, ” she told him.But of course he didn’t hear that.

They never did.

Dyer Frost went out to the edge of Calaway to get his map.

When Calabar Felonway had told him she’d  leave it for him hanging from the Dancing Tree where Ninebones Cross and the blood drained from his face she laughed- she laughed for a very long time and then she said ” Come now,  you didn’t think this was going to be pleasant did you?”

Dyer guessed not and as he turned to leave she said, ” Oh and by the way I’d get there before sunrise if I were you. “

He didn’t ask why, they never did.

He did make it too the Dancing Tree before sunrise- he ran all the way which was funny because he ran straight passed his horse that was tethered right outside of Calabar Felonway’s house.

There was his map, hanging as promised from the Dancing Tree where Ninebones Cross- the same Dancing Tree where men, women and children met their deaths at the end of a rope.

The same tree where everyone in town knows nine bones buried by betrayal and treachery are caught in the roots of that twisted oak tree.

When the wind blew through the leaves of the Dancing Tree you could hear whispering- that was the story and it was true. It was enough to age a person but during Dyer Frost’s day the only visitors to the Dancing Tree weren’t exactly empathetic to the sounds of Souls in Torment.

They were to busy being consumed by their own when they reached for that map.

Dyer’s Map like all the others

 were inked and illustrated by Calabar Felonway’s skilled hand

and

Dyer’s map like all of the others-

were tattooed onto the backs of the dead. 

Surfs Up

Hey guess what

Here’s something we can do that won’t get us into trouble..I think…

anyways..

Let’s do some

 SURFING at WAIKIKI

1940’s style

amm