A long time ago -but not in a different galaxy, I used to live in a small community at the edge of a North-eastern town.
In fact I still do, but a different area of that town now.
It was nicknamed 'Apache Village' due to everyone knowing everyone and how children often looked like the father
of the family next-door.
Where the main road going north passed this closely-knit collection of working-class folk, a large abandoned house
stood in its own overgrown grounds and being a boy of eight or nine, I took it as the traditional haunted house that
everyone recalls from childhood.
The legend I was told was that there was a coffin in the cellar of this window-smashed wreck and under certain conditions,
this sarcophagus leaning against the wall would open and whatever horrors lay inside would shamble forth and shock
a trespassing kid into a coma.
The conditions that were solemnly explained to the little boy in the 'bobby-washables' jeans and who believed that the most
important thing in the world was where a song-thrush's nest was hidden, these rare conditions involved strange flashes in
the sky.
And one night, I saw those conditions.
As two of the braver youngsters decided to explore the cellar (which in reality, didn't exist!), a boy and girl moved forward
with I and many others watched as they carefully stepped from the cracked and weed-littered garden path and pushed open
the traditional creaking front-door.
A couple of minutes later, the bellies of the dark November clouds above lit-up in a series of dark-red bursts of light
and then the screaming began. Out they came, the wide-eyed juveniles bellowing about some-kind of monster lurching
from its stinking death-box. The small audience looked-on agog as the couple raced from the house's maw-of-a-door
with the look of someone that had witnessed Satan -himself, announcing his arrival.
Just like any other runt in a group of older youngsters, I copied their actions and ran like my life depended on it.
........................................
It was 1970 and I was laid in an hospital bed. A serious case of appendicitis had brought me -wax-faced and frightened,
to the place where masked men put you to sleep before they carved you up like a Christmas turkey.
But somehow, I'd survived and now I was performing an act I'd never heard of before, something called convalescence.
There were other boys of a similar age in the ward and over the weeks -that seemed like years to me at the time, we'd
become friends. When the lights went out and the nylon-swishing nurse was certain the heavy-eyelids of her boys were
closed, we'd softly whisper across the varnished herringbone floor to each other that when we were released from this
disinfectant-smelling Butcher's shop, we'd meet up and maintain this special accord.
One winter's evening, I turned my head on my pillow and looked out of the fourth-floor window towards the town I couldn't
imagine leaving. The silhouettes of the rooftops against the glow of the street-lights led away across a blackness of the
night and without knowing it, I was looking south.
Then the sky flashed... and then it flashed again. The haunted house had been demolished a year before in order to build
an old-peoples home and can even now, I can recall racing along the high scaffolding only days before the stomach pains
had started.
The darkness flashed once more and puzzled with the situation of how the coffin-abiding hellion could break free from the
newly-concreted foundations of the half-built care-home, one of the bed-bound boys murmured a question to anyone in the
gloom of the ward. "Did you see that?"
I and a couple more confirmed the sighting and just when I was about to explain in hushed-tones the horrifying reason why
the sky called out across the night, another boy gave a reason that left my supernatural definition flat.
Miles to the south of where I lay, is a military Garrison and somewhere north of where the ghost of the haunted house still
wailed and moaned amongst the piles of new bricks of the building site, another army outpost existed.
To make sure communications could continue in times of war, training and alternative ways of organising national defence
were practiced and refined as best as possible. If one thinks of a time before electronic communication existed, visual aids
were used like flags in the navy and other types of signalling were utilised to broadcast classified messages.
But what is faster than light...?
The voice in the hospital shadows explained the two sections called 'The Signal Corps' were talking to each other and unless
a watcher knew the code, the military chatter would remain unknown to the uninvited. The pulsating lights were flashing north
and calculating the geography of my little world, I begrudgingly realised the demon-imprisoned construction site lay in the direct
line of where the lights were aiming.
Reality sucks, but the magic of imagination is a sugar that I don't mind consuming at times.
In fact I still do, but a different area of that town now.
It was nicknamed 'Apache Village' due to everyone knowing everyone and how children often looked like the father
of the family next-door.
Where the main road going north passed this closely-knit collection of working-class folk, a large abandoned house
stood in its own overgrown grounds and being a boy of eight or nine, I took it as the traditional haunted house that
everyone recalls from childhood.
The legend I was told was that there was a coffin in the cellar of this window-smashed wreck and under certain conditions,
this sarcophagus leaning against the wall would open and whatever horrors lay inside would shamble forth and shock
a trespassing kid into a coma.
The conditions that were solemnly explained to the little boy in the 'bobby-washables' jeans and who believed that the most
important thing in the world was where a song-thrush's nest was hidden, these rare conditions involved strange flashes in
the sky.
And one night, I saw those conditions.
As two of the braver youngsters decided to explore the cellar (which in reality, didn't exist!), a boy and girl moved forward
with I and many others watched as they carefully stepped from the cracked and weed-littered garden path and pushed open
the traditional creaking front-door.
A couple of minutes later, the bellies of the dark November clouds above lit-up in a series of dark-red bursts of light
and then the screaming began. Out they came, the wide-eyed juveniles bellowing about some-kind of monster lurching
from its stinking death-box. The small audience looked-on agog as the couple raced from the house's maw-of-a-door
with the look of someone that had witnessed Satan -himself, announcing his arrival.
Just like any other runt in a group of older youngsters, I copied their actions and ran like my life depended on it.
........................................
It was 1970 and I was laid in an hospital bed. A serious case of appendicitis had brought me -wax-faced and frightened,
to the place where masked men put you to sleep before they carved you up like a Christmas turkey.
But somehow, I'd survived and now I was performing an act I'd never heard of before, something called convalescence.
There were other boys of a similar age in the ward and over the weeks -that seemed like years to me at the time, we'd
become friends. When the lights went out and the nylon-swishing nurse was certain the heavy-eyelids of her boys were
closed, we'd softly whisper across the varnished herringbone floor to each other that when we were released from this
disinfectant-smelling Butcher's shop, we'd meet up and maintain this special accord.
One winter's evening, I turned my head on my pillow and looked out of the fourth-floor window towards the town I couldn't
imagine leaving. The silhouettes of the rooftops against the glow of the street-lights led away across a blackness of the
night and without knowing it, I was looking south.
Then the sky flashed... and then it flashed again. The haunted house had been demolished a year before in order to build
an old-peoples home and can even now, I can recall racing along the high scaffolding only days before the stomach pains
had started.
The darkness flashed once more and puzzled with the situation of how the coffin-abiding hellion could break free from the
newly-concreted foundations of the half-built care-home, one of the bed-bound boys murmured a question to anyone in the
gloom of the ward. "Did you see that?"
I and a couple more confirmed the sighting and just when I was about to explain in hushed-tones the horrifying reason why
the sky called out across the night, another boy gave a reason that left my supernatural definition flat.
Miles to the south of where I lay, is a military Garrison and somewhere north of where the ghost of the haunted house still
wailed and moaned amongst the piles of new bricks of the building site, another army outpost existed.
To make sure communications could continue in times of war, training and alternative ways of organising national defence
were practiced and refined as best as possible. If one thinks of a time before electronic communication existed, visual aids
were used like flags in the navy and other types of signalling were utilised to broadcast classified messages.
But what is faster than light...?
The voice in the hospital shadows explained the two sections called 'The Signal Corps' were talking to each other and unless
a watcher knew the code, the military chatter would remain unknown to the uninvited. The pulsating lights were flashing north
and calculating the geography of my little world, I begrudgingly realised the demon-imprisoned construction site lay in the direct
line of where the lights were aiming.
Reality sucks, but the magic of imagination is a sugar that I don't mind consuming at times.
Edith Head Gives Good Wardrobe.