Spirits and Thought Forms: Tales from Prosperity Glades

Spirits and Thought Forms

Tales from Prosperity Glades

by

Jeffrey Kosh

Second Edition

Copyright © 2012 by Jeffrey Kosh

All rights reserved.

Second Smashwords Edition

ISBN: 9781476134581

Book cover design by Jeffrey Kosh Graphics

‘Kamp Koko by Night’ edited by Jaime Johnesee

‘Road Off: The Shadow Mile’ edited by Natalie G. Owens

‘FIVE; – first published by May December Publications on April 21, 2012 (republished under permission).

Warning: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 (five) years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

To

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT GODWIN SHELLEY

(30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851)

And to all female Horror authors continuing her tradition.

'All men hate the wretched; how then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, they creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us.'

Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus

Chapter 10, pg. 83

Table of Contents

TITLE

DEDICATION

INTRODUCTION

NIYOHONTEH (1647)

KAMP KOKO BY NIGHT (1984)

I WILL GET HER (1996)

ROAD OFF – The Shadow Mile (2010)

SHE WAS WAITING (2012)

FIVE (2012)

BIOGRAPHY

Introduction

Masks.

This book is about masks.

Hey, wait a minute, that’s not what’s on the cover!

I’m sure you’re yelling that, right now. No, I didn’t cheat, I promise. This collection of short stories are all set in that creepy town of Prosperity Glades, and all of them are about spirits … and thought forms.

However, it is also about masks. The masks we wear each day, those that other employ to hide their true feelings, and most of all, those that spirits wear to lure us into their clutches.

Spirits, by their nature, are formless beings; somehow, they are just memes. Each spirit represents something about the human nature and human wishes. Essentially, spirits are wishes made into flesh - or almost flesh. The term ‘spirit’ itself, refers to an entity that is incorporeal, not a being made of matter, although, in almost all cultural traditions and folklore, they are tied to the physical world and many are able to assume a material form.

Spirits appear in different forms and types, and every human culture has a belief system incorporating them. In a way they are already thought forms.

In animistic cultures, spirits are present everywhere; in living and unliving matter. Items, constructions, even raw rock, are infused with spiritual or lifelike properties. Some Native American belief assign spirits only to living things; other believe that all of creation has a spiritual counterpart. As such, they can often inhabit totems, fetishes, and mostly charms and magical items. These kinds of spirits - also present in Shinto, Japan’s main religion - are thought as an ‘animating force’, akin to the human soul. Moreover, they can also inhabit a dead body or replace a human soul, as is the case of the Plains Indians’ Manitou.

Where Frankenstein’s creation life force did came from? Who is the individual settling in the mortal shell? It's the sum of all his parts; a mosaic of souls melting into an imperfect whole, like the Echo character in ‘Dollhouse’? Or it's the animating force of the brain; the mind of one of the deceased, in this case, like in Kenneth Branagh’s rendition, so it had be Professor Krempe. Or is this something different: a being snatched out of its dimension, and infused inside a golem made of flesh. Yet, the creature has no clues about itself; it just exists and doesn’t seem to experience flashbacks as Echo does in many instances. It doesn’t remember a past life as a living being. Nope, it is rather like a Buddhist reincarnation; no memories, no regrets, just traits and déjà vu.

I like to think the Creature as something which never lived, never experienced our reality, something that was just snagged from its world and placed inside human flesh, and by effect, it acts as an infant, yet with a higher ability for understanding its surroundings.

Spirits are also thought as ‘Guiding Forces’, directing everything, from creation to destruction, from weather to the movement of the stars. Chinese ancestry worship claims that family heritage spirits protect and aid the descendants of each family with which they are associated, but can also hamper the family’s progresses if they become angry as result of perceived slights.

Or spirits can be thought as ‘Higher Powers’ or divinities, and I know this is a touchy argument. In many cultures - Judaic-Christian included - all non-corporeal beings are spirits, even the most omnipotent of gods. Angels, Demons, Valkyries, the Courtesans of Celestial Bureaucracy; they are all servants of a Higher Power, and that being is itself a spirit. In scriptures, they often behave like that. The Lord of Old Testament made a pact with Abraham’s people.

Plato, the Greek philosopher, envisioned a Realm of Ideals: a place containing the perfect archetype of everything existing in our physical world. Something like an infinite Universal Genetic Library, where archetypes are stored to be used as originals from where all copies belong. The same did Carl Jung, describing spirits from the Universal Unconscious.

Here comes the ‘Thought Form’.

Modern occult scholars describe a thought form as a kind of artificial spirit created by the power of the human mind. A thought form can range in complexity from a simple emotional impression to a fully sentient and aware being, and in power from a minor servitor spirit to a deity. Some beliefs say all spirits are thought forms, created and sustained by human faith. This certainly fits with spirits drawing strength from mortal worship and veneration. And this is my vision of spiritual beings. They are ‘memoid’ creatures, like David Brin imagined them in his Uplift universe. Formless, archetypal creatures caused by emotions and beliefs. The haunted house becomes haunted if all people in town swap stories about its ghosts. The well becomes cursed if everyone in a range of a few miles believes it to be as such. They feed emotional essence to a spot, and it becomes that thing; holy or unholy.

And they wear masks.

Yes, they do. They assume the guise we want them to. They become the thing we worship … or dread.

The Veiled Queen, Nemesis, the Smiling Monster, the Dying Road, and the Cloaked Man.

They all wear masks.

They use these masks to cloak their true nature, often too ugly to behold. The Veiled Queen is just a big lump of unearthly matter. Nemesis hides inside a human host, and I’m not telling you what the Cloaked Man really looks like, but you can get a peek behind his mask in my novel ‘FIVE’ (published by May-December Publications and also set in Prosperity Glades).

These five tales are all about masks, and thought forms, too. And all take place in Prosperity Glades, because - as you should already know, if you have read my novel ‘Feeding the Urge’ - there’s a weak spot between our world and the spiritual one, right in the middle of Grassy Swamp. And spirits - and thought forms - do thrive here.

Each one of these stories happened in Prosperity’s bloody past: from 1647 to our times. As if visiting my beloved town with a time machine, you get the opportunity to meet old familiar faces (some before their eventual demise) and new acquaintances.

You’ve heard about the Breed Mother in ‘Feeding the Urge’. And I bet you already know that ax-wielding maniac in ‘Kamp Koko by Night’. Dr. Henry Hart and his terrific t-shirt collection returns in ‘I Will Get Her’.

So, forgive my long rant and let’s return to Prosperity.

Yet beware, once there … avoid making wishes.

They can come true and take form.

NIYOHONTEH

(1647)

Whiney Pete Randall swung his cutlass to the left, just in time to avoid the abominable clutches of one of the attackers. The beast roared its pain, while the blade’s powerful stroke cut all the way through the hand, separating fingers from bone. Pete didn't flinch, he kept running throughout the fetid swamp, as if the Devil itself was chasing him - and, in part, it was true: these wretched creatures were the Devil's spawn.

They looked like savages, yet were clearly not human; there was no true-life inside, just a spark of pure evil and iniquity keeping them going, as empty husks crawling with worms.

He spotted another one incoming from the right, moving faster as if he was in the clear, open streets of a town, not in the depths of that treacherous bog. A wicked, barbed, and crude dagger in hand, the monster jumped from fallen log to mangroves' roots with such a skill and dexterity that he would be on Randall on the blink of an eye. Whiney, still hindered by his knapsack - full of golden treasure beyond belief - tried to outrun him by jumping on a fallen tree's stump, to no avail. An instant later, the repulsive being was on him, charging, and then leaping like a panther, using his own momentum and weight to send the seaman aground. He thrashed and tried to avoid the savage's grasping hands, but failed. Defeated, he watched in horror the feral visage of his assailant.

Long - and filed - sharp teeth, glistening with drool, jutted out of his grinning mouth. Scars and bumps covered most of his face, adding evil to his already vile countenance. His skin had a reddish hue - also spotted with those weird and inhuman bumps - in addition, it showed signs of a greenish tint, slowly fading away under the humid hotness of the endless swamp. Nevertheless, the worst of all were his eyes: empty-looking, without sign of a Christian soul, dead white with a yellowish film.

The eyes of the Devil.

The orbs of the Ada'wehi, as the Turtle Tribe called them: the Moon-Eyed people.

He expected the being to kill him on the spot, raising the barbed knife high, and then thrusting it deeply inside Pete's fast-pumping heart. Instead, and to much of the sailor's surprise, the horrible creature set the blade aside and stood atop him, almost triumphantly, shaking his long scalping tuft from side to side.

An endless moment passed, before the fiend opted for something odd (which almost sounded comical to fear-stricken Pete). He hugged him like a long-lost friend, using his burly and wiry arms to grab the mariner in a firm grasp.

‘Blimey! Me be dead a'ready. Only... I've felt no pain. Th't must be Death 'erself, embracing me for t' final chase,’ he thought.

Suddenly, one of the brute's dirty and claw-like hands ran upward, forcing Pete's mouth wide open, and at the same time unhinging his own jaw like a snake. Whiney's eyes widened in terror when he saw what happened next. From the vicious jaws of the wildman something came out; a fleshy and wormlike vermin - similar to a large slimy maggot - slithered, wriggling, from the monster's orifice.

Behind the sailor, someone screamed in horror and pain (Pete recognized it as William Van Dyke's voice, quartermaster aboard the Ocean Queen), but he was far too worried about his own fate to worry about his mate's ending.

While the opaque, milky white obscenity continued to worm its way out of the monstrous native, the sailor realized his left hand was free. He frantically splashed in the low water - sending a silent prayer to the Almighty at the same time - in the remote hope of finding his cutlass.

‘Oh Ye Lord, help me just once, I don’t ask fer more.’

Whiney's left limb kept scuttling in the murky water, touching once a rock, then something squishy he had nor the will nor the time to recognize as the devilish maggot was almost halfway from his mouth.

‘I know I've been a debauched man in me life, but please, f'rgive this lad, ay? Me prefer t' be jerked into the Devil's Arms, rather than sufferin' this unholy fate.’

The worm touched his lips.

Again a rock, maybe the same one, then nothing, only filthy and smelly water.

The wriggling thing invaded Pete's mouth. He could clearly taste its salty and sickening flavor as the creature marched on, toward the sailor's parched throat. A fit of nausea clasped Pete's stomach in response to the revolting creature's touch.

‘Please, me Lord! Please! Deliver me o' this evil!’

The savage's eyes rolled upward, as if in ecstasy, revealing a series of bluish-pink tiny filaments stuck in each of the fiend's orbs.

Again the rock, then nothing.

The worm kept crawling inside the navigator's esophagus. It was sliding and wriggling at