Free The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss by Dennis McKenna Page B

there are those who enjoy combining pharmacologically induced alterations with their favorite risky sports, though not me. In fact, when it came to really risky behaviors like downhill skiing, rock climbing, or auto racing, I’m a bit of a wimp. I was overcautious about engaging in behaviors that were likely to get my bones broken or my ass killed, and this may be one reason I eventually came to favor drug-induced novelty over extreme sports.
    This cautious streak probably stood me in good stead when it came to drugs, because as a rule I paid attention to those key variables of “set and setting” that Leary and the rest were always harping about. It made sense that one should explore altered states in a relatively safe environment. Not all my friends approached pharmacology with such common sense, and some lived to regret it; others never had that luxury, because they didn’t live. I dare say I learned a thing or two from the wondrous contraptions that showed up each summer with Happy Day Rides. My carnival experiences were formative for me, and gave me an early fondness for funny feelings that has persisted through out my life.
     
     

Chapter 6 - The Nobody People
     
    The campaign of brotherly terror that Terence waged on me from age four or five continued for many years. It was during the nights, of course, that it reached its zenith. We shared a bedroom and had separate beds. According to Terence, he would sometimes quietly slip out of his bed, tiptoe across to mine, and stand above my sleeping form, hands raised in the tickle-attack mode, ready to pounce. And in this position he’d stand for hours, savoring the psychological meltdown he’d trigger if he acted. But he never did. It was satisfying enough just knowing that he could. Looking back, I doubt he really did this. I think his story was just another way to maintain the climate of fear.
    A major element in that were the frightening stories he used to whisper as we cowered under the covers, long after lights-out. A scary TV show, a ghost story, or just some confabulation from his fertile and twisted mind, would serve as fodder for these nightly horrors. Once we watched a TV adaptation of H.H. Munro’s short story “Sredni Vashtar” presumably from a 1961 series, Great Ghost Tales , which first aired when I was ten. It’s a nasty little horror story about a young boy who keeps a polecat-ferret in a shed and worships the animal as a vicious, vengeful god, a secret he keeps at first from his overbearing guardian, to her ultimate misfortune. For months, Terry was able to strike the most abject fear into me by simply uttering the story’s title.
    But by far the most terrifying theme of Terry’s nocturnal campaign, revisited night after night, was the Nobody People, aka the No-Body People. In the language of nineteenth-century ghost stories, the entities would be known as wraiths. Terence gave them a name and turned them loose in my already overactive and hyper-suggestible imagination. The Nobody People lived in shadows; in fact, they were shadows, or they existed on some gloomy threshold between the insubstantial and the real. You could see them, or sense them, at night, lurking in the shadows of the closet, or under the bed, or in the hollow of the bathtub. Rarely, you could sense them during the day, in the corners of dimly lit rooms, in basements or cellars, in the crawl spaces under the house. But primarily they were creatures of the dark and the night. You were not likely to run into a Nobody Person outside on a bright, sunny day. No, they were denizens of a shadow world; they liked to hang out in graveyards (especially in open graves), and gloomy glens, and caves.
    Not that I was into hanging around such places, not on your life! I didn’t have to; the Nobody People were especially fond of the shadowy parts of our bedroom. It was Nobody People Central, our bedroom. You knew they were there, Terry said, because sometimes you’d walk into the dark room