Duct Work: Real Adventures in Body Horror

The ultrasound technicians laughed at me. Laying down on the examining room table, in the half-light apparently required for such a procedure and with my chin covered in the infamously cold imaging gel, I was ridiculed by technicians. The look underneath the skin of my jaw was turning up nothing, and so I pushed my tongue against the roof of my mouth to expand the region where one could clearly see the it - a small round anomaly in the flesh under my jaw - without a fancy schmancy college education. I even had a name for it, given to me by the doctor who sent me on this trial of humiliation.

It was a duct. When I was a foetus, like we all once were, my tongue was attached to my skeleton for support, like yours was too. The connecting tube, which is supposed to dissolve in utero, didn’t completely go away like yours all probably did, and the doctor was worried that he might need to surgically remove it lest my larynx become consumed by this mistake in God’s blueprint as repeated infections rotted my living face.

With inconclusive ultrasound results I had no tangible reason to have my throat cut open and therefore I drove home embarassed and more than a little unsettled. My duct problem first became an issue the summer before this failed attempt at medical imaging, when a little bump under my chin began to grow to the size of a pimple, then a marble and eventually a golf ball. The liberal application of antibiotics (to which I later became allergic) brought the swelling down and the blinding pain of it dissipated too, but a little round node remained, threatening to grow again but never quite becoming enough of a problem to call for invasive surgery despite my doctor’s concerns.

I have never really lived down the embarrassment of being laughed at in that dim ultrasound room. Part of the reason was that I was 17 and in a compromised (read: shirtless and prone) position in front of members of the opposite sex who were barely older than me laughing at a physical problem of mine, but mostly my social trauma has to do with the sequel to my first adventure in body horror.

Years after being told that my tongue duct problem was benign enough to ignore, the spectre of the angry red bump reappeared elsewhere. My encounter with the laughing technicians had made me wary of seeking medical advice when it came to body abnormalities, so when I found a bump on my upper, inner, upper thigh while showering I paid it no attention. But the horrors of the body don’t need your permission to grow, and so it did.

I also entertained the theory that it was a twin I consumed in the womb.

As the bump grew and memories of medial humiliation began to haunt my daydreams, I confided in my friend Katie about my plight by way of MSN Instant Messanger. She was, like all best friends, not supportive of my plan to just wait and see how this mysterious growth near my genitals situation panned out on its own. Her pleas with me to go to our university clinic went ignored though, because the social nightmare memories of past embarrassments, when combined with the fear of bodily metamorphosis, is a powerful force.

When we talk about fear of the unknown, which is cosmic horror, our gazes turn outward to the abyss in which we float, but that classic inclination ignores a terrifying truth about what lies within. Our bodies are fleshy vectors of the occult in its truest sense: filled with mysteries that have taken millennia to unlock. It’s the key to the body horror subgenre, the fact that inside each of our own bodies lies an intimate element of the unknown as strange as the darkness between stars

Eventually after neglecting my own intimate abyss for over a week I developed a limp. The new affliction had swelled to a familiar angry red vector of pain. School was out and I needed a job, so Katie and I had planned to hand out resumes at the mall on the contingency that I first go to our school’s clinic before hand.

Entering the office I asserted myself as a master of my own obscured condition. “I know what it is,” I told the receptionist. “I just need some antibiotics.”

Parenthetically I was trying to express a desire to not have to remove my pants. As the master of my own occult I wanted to keep it all hidden. I knew my body, didn’t I? Even if it was betraying me in a strangely familiar way. When the doctor met me in the room and I explained to her what I was asking for, she asked to see the abyssal pain point.

It took her only an instant to figure out what to do as I explained for the third time that antibiotics were the tried and tested solution for this kind of thing. “I have this duct,” I said.

“Our day surgeon is on lunch, but if you wait in the room across the hall he’ll be there shortly.”

When the surgeon entered I was instructed to remove my pants. His surprise was not comforting. The other worldly colour of the neo duct anomaly, along with its close proximity to my fragile and threatened humanity, meant that he would not be able to anesthetize the area before making four incisions with a scalpel and then removing the strange node with his fingers.

With the dignity of a man wearing socks, a shirt and tie, but no pants I made one more appeal for antibiotics, having been betrayed by a body that I thought was mine but instead belongs to forces indifferent to my knowing self. He said no, and then the cutting began.

The House Of Flies

The telltale sign that you’re close to a dead body, according to the movies and TV, is the razor sharp hum of a fly buzzing just out of view. I’ve never seen a fresh corpse in my life, so I can’t attest to this phenomenon of insectine pathetic fallacy, but I can say that flies are deeply connected to my idea of death. They feast on our dead flesh, lay eggs on us and rear children in the pools that were once functioning tear ducts - they thrive on our expiry as a reflex. We die and a thoughtless process begins, birthing countless black dots with wings.

In the wake of my Oma’s passing, her four daughters converged on her remote house in the Lanark Highlands - a region of Ontario characterized by dynamite blasted roads and moths the size of Halloween masks. It was summer time, I was twenty-four, and my brother and I had joined my mother on one of these heirloom allocation expeditions. By the end of the day, I would come away with three items of various importance: a toolbox filled with my Opa’s wrenches and screwdrivers, an ornamental boomerang that I never got to work, and a Ouija Board from my mother’s childhood made before she was born.

Ouija is a lot like the boomerang I took from my Oma’s mantle. The designs printed on it are attractive, its status as a cultural symbol overshadows any practical use, and I can’t claim to have gotten either object to work in my favour. I stood on the lawn that day, surrounded by the rocky outcroppings that give Lanark such a unique atmosphere, and chucked that boomerang for what felt like hours, never getting it to curve through the air and return to me. It felt like using a piece of plastic and particle board to talk to the dead - something I can perfectly visualize in my minds eye, but can’t possibly achieve in real life.

For all the similarities, there is a key difference between the boomerang and the Ouija board. The hidden knowledge that can turn a curved stick into a boomerang is (I hear) learnable, but spirit boards run on things your mind will never share. The going theory on Oujia, as I touched on a couple of weeks ago when I wrote on the topic of evil board games, is that it exploits ideomotor response, which is essentially a reflex triggered by outside stimulus. Ouija conjures the illusion of conversation by allowing you to bypass your conscious mind. Wikipedia gives the example of a knee jerking when hit with a hammer (which is another item I had in my Opa’s tool box).

Having failed to discover the occult knowledge of the boomerang, I entered the house where my grandmother had died. Silver cutlery carpeted the floors, perfectly arranged by my aunts, and the many pendulum clocks the I had grown used to as part of the house’s architecture had, for the first time ever, become separate objects. When I would stay in my Oma’s home, I would sleep on the upper floor, with a door that opened up into the attic crawlspace that had always remained closed for reasons of scariness.

To access the stairs that lead to that room for visitors, I had to pass the room where my Oma had died. Prior to that moment, the chair room as I’d come to call it, was defined by two aspects. First, it was the room with the TV, so when we’d visit, my brother and I would hook up our Playstation in there. Second, it was the room with the sliding door that motivated my Oma to invest in a home security system.

She told my brother and I, at the same time that she told our mother (I think it was breakfast around the year 2000), that she had awoken in the middle of the night to the sound of loud banging. Exiting her bedroom, she followed the noise to the chair room, where a man stood in near complete darkness, opening and closing her sliding door. It's one of those heavy ones that makes a sucking noise when you open it.

That used to be the scary thing that happened in the chair room. Then my mother sat with my Oma as she died, exiting without using the historied sliding door or setting off an alarm.

I ascended the stairs with those ideas on my mind. My brother and mom were in the guest room looking through boxes with the door to the attic crawl space wide open. A single incandescent light was on, and it smelled like wood and maybe mothballs. I entered to see if I could find anything worth grabbing for myself that would rival the Jacques Cousteau Society sticker books by brother had found.

The main area was filled with old linens and clothes, but as I turned to exit I noticed a dark area that extended beyond the threshold of the door to its right, with a ball-chain indicating another light bulb. I pulled the chain and the dim light illuminated a familiar sight: a board with the words “yes” and “no” framing the letters of the alphabet and numbers zero through nine, underlined by a foreboding “goodbye”.

My moment of discovery was cut short with a hum coming from the light above my head. Looking up I saw it was covered with a swarm of large flies, all crawling and buzzing their wings; none were flying. I retrieved the spirit board and took it to show my brother and mom.

Things seemed darker. The light felt muted. My mother was excited to see her old game and I elected to keep it as part of my haul. The darkness felt tangible though, dampening my spirits, and I wondered if all my exploratory boomeranging had actually given me heat stroke, or maybe the grief of looting a dead woman’s house had tuckered me out. I returned to the main floor to grab a glass of water, intending to make my way to the kitchen via the chair room.

Turning right at the bottom of the stairs and entering the chair room - Playstation room, the crazy man room, the room where she had died - I saw the source of the darkness. The humming had followed me from that once closed door, now open. Countless fat flies blacked out the panel windows, buzzing and crawling, but never flying.

A Ghost, Shared

The First Incident

John William Counter died in 2004, in a hospital bed, having undergone surgery for a back injury and suffered multiple heart attacks while in recovery. He left behind the family of his only son, Dave, my father. The four of us survivors - Dave, my mother, my brother Nick and I - were watching a VHS copy of Tim Burton’s Big Fish when this happened, and the phone rang as the credits began to roll. It was nighttime.

Dave took the call in another room, and after thirty minutes of hushed talk, he approached me from behind while I was sitting at our family desktop computer, chatting with school friends on MSN. He hugged me, for the first time I can remember, and it was awkward.

One of us, or both of us, said, “Grandad died.”

I can still feel the quivering, arrhythmic shakes as he nodded against my back in affirmation. The green upholstered computer chair squeaked beneath me as my father offered assurance. Everything was going to be okay. But it wasn’t.

A month passed. Maybe two. I had been struggling with my teenage mental health, and was diagnosed with rapid cycling bipolar II disorder after a failed suicide attempt. I was in bed and couldn’t sleep. Insomnia was no stranger to me then, but there was something slightly different about the difficulty I was experiencing. A sort of dread hung over me as I lay on my back underneath a dinosaur patterned blanket that kind of embarrassed my sixteen year old self, and my eye gravitated to the far corner of my room, near my closet, where I kept my karate gear (I was a teenage martial arts instructor).

The shadows of my bow staves (Donny is my favourite Ninja Turtle) seemed more substantial that night, and I strained my eyes to see why. The shades of deep grey and black seemed fluid, as if to suggest motion at first, but as the moments passed in the green glow of my digital alarm clock, they became a darkness of weight and substance. The figure of an aged but able man, standing at that far corner of my room, upset and approaching me.

He closed the distance and grabbed my shoulders. He shook me and screamed in my face, the terrible wailing of an angry man. I joined him in screaming, before struggling out of my bed and escaping to the main floor of my parents' house. I spent the remainder of the night on the couch in the comforting blue glow of post 1 AM TV.

Illustration by Nick Counter

Variation

The above story is true. It is likely a nightmare manifestation of my Catholic guilt combined with my grieving over my grandfather. At the time I was a semi-serious Catholic, so the possibility of it being a ghost held a lot more weight for me at the time. Traumatic events would later shift my faith to an atheist standpoint and eventually to the nihilism through which I currently identify, but for three years the memory of that night fit into a specific narrative for me: John William Counter was haunting my room because shortly after his death I attempted to commit suicide with a belt.

The emotional turmoil I was experiencing at the time of the first incident seems trivial in comparison to the experiences that shattered my faith - the experiences I will save for a much longer, more horrific post than this - but the important part is this: after I moved away from home to Toronto, I became a strong skeptic. I read Dawkins and Hitchens, and I got really excited about arguments over religion. I didn’t believe in the supernatural, and that extended beyond the existence of God to the legitimacy of the ghosts in my past.

My brother moved to Toronto and we became roommates. He would travel home on the weekends more often than I would and, on returning from one of these solo visits to our parents’ house, he recounted something that tested the steel of my realism.

Nick had been sleeping in the guest bedroom, which was my room in 2004. My single dinosaur themed bed had been replaced with two twin sized ones from my grandfather’s home, one with its headboard two feet away from the dark corner where the angry man had materialized. That was the one he slept in the night he was shaken by a screaming man.

He described his experience in uncomfortable detail, after which I told him that the same thing had happened to me when our granddad died. He remembered me telling him so. Sure enough, the next time I slept in that bed I was visited by that shadowy discontent too. These subsequent encounters inspired Nick and I to concoct the Memetic Ghost Hypothesis.

Our theory goes like this: My initial night terror, based on deep teenage angst, had passed to Nick when I told him about it in 2004. He forgot about it, then relived the experience, and through retelling the events to me, primed me to encounter our ghost the next time. It wasn’t the room that was haunted, it was us, and we were doing it to each other.

Evolution

Our shared ghost has become a frequent part of our lives. Nick and I live close to our home town, and visit with semi-regularity (I could stand to visit more to be honest, but you know: angry strangle man), and when we sleep in that guest room, we do so with the knowledge that there is a chance that we will suffer a very specific night terror.

Applying the Memetic Ghost Hypothesis to what we actually experience, it makes sense that our encounters with the angry man would evolve. With each sleep depriving incident we excitedly retell our run in with the man, feeding variation into our shared meme pool like a two person game of broken nightmare telephone. The following details remain, however, particularly consistent: it always begins with a palpable sense of dread, the man is always there and he always makes physical contact.

We are locked in a cycle of storytelling and torture, Nick and I, and it has escalated our haunting considerably.

The most recent encounter with our shared ghost was experienced by Nick in the summer of 2014. He had learned to sleep in the twin bed furthest from the shadowy corner, as it has proven to be the safer of the two places to dream. It is directly below a window, and on a moonlight night such as the one in question, the covers are brightly illuminated. The far bed is not a place for shadows. Or, at least it hadn’t been.

His retelling begins with that familiar sense of dread. Because Nick and I have mythologized this as the heralding of our shadow person, we have devised strategies to thwart the encounter. He covered his head in blankets and tried to sleep through the event. He awoke later, head uncovered, with the shadow of a man between him and the window. He shut his eyes, but it said his name. He managed to fall back to sleep, untouched.

He woke a third time that night, and though the shadow was gone and nothing whispered his name, he was uncovered and his right arm was pressed against the wall above the bed. He couldn’t move it and he couldn’t scream.

Nick told me about this encounter at our parents’ kitchen table the afternoon after it had happened and we explained it all away. This was our shared haunting and our storytelling has allowed it to evolve beyond its initial territory. Sleep paralysis has been a part of this phenomenon for a long time, which would explain the arm thing, and everything else can be written off as a nightmare or hypnagogic hallucination born from our shared mythology surrounding our grandfather’s death.

In that way it’s beautiful. Through a mutual love of the macabre, two brothers have managed to keep their grandfather alive with storytelling and dreams. Sure, those dreams are violent and terrifying, but it’s an adventure we share that commemorates a difficult time for our family. With every night that we experience the painful memories born from an awkward hug in a difficult time, we awake to a morning where we still have eachother.

We tell our mother this, taking turns to fill in details the other left out, giving the terrible nightmare man a chance to evolve yet again, but the nuance and beauty is lost on her. She’s not convinced. Forever the master of horror, she suggests that rather than some comforting pseudo pop scientific denial, we have actually, for the past decade, been haunted by our sleepwalking father possessed by some violent dream, of which he has many.