[UA] Dancing with the Dark

[John C]

I picked up an interesting book the other day: _Dancing With The Dark: True 
Encounters with the Paranormal by Master of the Macabre_.  Essentially, it’s 
a collection of true ghost stories, written by a number of horror and 
fantasy authors.

How seriously to take it is up to the individual reader, but if nothing else 
it’s a nice collection of strange little stories, well told by established 
writers.  Of particular note are the contributions of Neil Gaiman and 
Charles DeLint, both of which manage to be extremely spooky despite lack of 
any overtly supernatural phenomena.  Joe Haldeman’s is an excellent of 
example of something that appears to be supernatural, but has a good mundane 
explanation.  And Brian Lumley’s is just plain weird.

>From a UA standpoint, it’s a great source of ideas to slip into your games.  
The most UAable -- and far and away the most violent in the book -- is one 
called “Sharing With Strangers”, by Terry Dowling.  It’s a story told to him 
by a couple that he once had dinner with  -- it’s definitely a FOAF story, 
but it’s nicely chilling.

Family moves into a house with an attic bedroom.  The kids (two girls and a 
younger boy) fight over who gets the attic room, but the girls win the coin 
toss and share it.  One morning, the older girl mentions an odd dream: a 
“green man” had come in during the night and sat upon the end of her bed, 
watching her.  Her sister immediately spoke up, saying that she’d had the 
same dream.  A few weeks later, the girls had the same dream, and their 
parents found them sleeping in the living room the next morning.  They 
flatly refused to ever sleep in the attic room again.

The brother was delighted, and promptly took possession of the room himself. 
  A few weeks later, he came home from school early and found himself alone 
in the house.  Exiting the upstairs bathroom, he saw a green man running 
down the hallway towards him, taking impossibly long strides.  He ran back 
into the bathroom, slammed the door shut, and locked it.

He remained in the bathroom until after his parents came home, and refused 
to come out even then as he was afraid that the green man was impersonating 
them.  Not until the police arrived would he come out.  When he did emerge, 
it was discovered that he had gone blind in his right eye...the apparent 
result of his hysteria.

The boy moved out of the bedroom, and life went on.  The family started 
hearing strange footsteps, and items began to be broken without any apparent 
cause, but there were no more sightings of the green man.  However until one 
day, while she was home alone, someone picked up the mother and threw her 
down the stairs, breaking her back.

The couple moved shortly afterwards, and it was several years later that 
they told Dowling and his wife this story.  The couples parted ways at the 
end of the dinner, but Dowling and his wife decided to drive by the house 
that they had been told about.  It was an ordinary enough seeming house, but 
on the back seat of a car parked out front of the house were a dozen or so 
crucifixes.

I'm going to use this, somehow. What the Green Man might be, I haven't 
decided.  But the crucifixes on the car seat is a really nice touch, isn't 
it?

John Crimmins                     john1x at hotmail.com
     http://www.voicenet.com/~johncrim/index.html
   "Yes, I am acquainted with Mr. DePalma," Dr. Hsu said.  "He was
my pupil years ago.  A young man not without talent, but slapdash,
and huckle-muckle in his worksmanship."
   "What did you say?" the mayor asked.
   "He's a jerk," Dr. Hsu Ting Feng said.
           -- Daniel Pinkwater, _The Hoboken Chicken Emergency_

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