Countin' Flowers

I sat at a long white table. At the head of it — dotted with dishes of food, all of them suspect. Was the stuff infected?

Beside me, my grandfather — cold and dead in his grave for a vast number of years — sat oily and unshaven, wearing the suit they buried him in. He sweated into his plate but grinned nonetheless at me, as I watched something squirm beneath, on the bone-white china.

I hadn’t wanted to sit so close to him. I was afraid even dead men might bolt their food. And it would be all over me.

A banquet of sickness. Was everyone else there alive?

Earlier I had been talking with the maintenance man about the ghosts: one suicide and her daughter (also suicided?) who still haunted the building. Seeking advice in the office, I handed an old photograph to the property manager. What was the woman’s name? It floated below in convenient titles, like a movie. I told the manager I was going in the hall to try and find the woman’s shade. Somewhere, I knew — past the door of one of these rooms — the dead were feasting without me, and I, an unwitting witness, watched their resurrection.

The Tale of Joachim Huebner

One can’t help, after considering this, the old apocryphal tale of Joachim Huebner: the young soldier from a Bavarian regiment who, stopping one rain-drenched evening at a moldering, lonely estate, was taken in by the servant. Upon seating him around the table with the others, the servant became alarmed. Another knocking at the door revealed a strange, withered old man who went round the table at the obviously terrified family.

Pointing a bony finger, he sat. He tried to place food in his mouth, but it kept falling back onto the plate. The rest of the family — a small coterie, we take it — sat in astonished terror. Soon the old man rose and, just as strangely as he had come, departed unmerrily and unheralded into the foul night.

That next morning Joachim Huebner learned that a family member — the one the old man had pointed at — had perished unaccountably in the night. A shrinking, whispering servant revealed the secret at the crux of the tale: the old man was the family patriarch, cold and dead in his own silent, cursed grave lo these many years.

And when he arose, he vomited prophecy onto the blithered scalp of an unlucky man, who time after time met death most decidedly, shortly after. It was the family omen: their dinner with the worms.

Counting flowers on the wall — it don’t bother me at all.

The story of Joachim Huebner was dramatized in Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath, with reverent midnight-movie legend Boris Karloff as the Old Man. The story is often accorded the semblance of truth as a legend of a true vampire (to borrow a term from Sondra London), and perhaps we could add a capstone wherein Huebner opens the grave and, to his horror, finds that the corpse of the Old Man — which should be dessicated bones and nothing else at this point — remains in the cursed earth like a giant white worm, fully engorged with living blood.

A stroke of the sword, the thing’s head rolls away, unleashing a torrent of crimson red. A brick in the jaws, a stake hammered through the heart. Sow the soil with salt. Ah, the thing is accomplished.

Counting flowers on the wall — it don’t bother me at all.

One hears that Statler Brothers song, appearing famously on the soundtrack to the old movie Pulp Fiction, and imagines an old-time outlaw in a cheap, dusty hotel: the window looking out along the dirt track of main street, ramshackle ghost-town buildings and saloons.

You could see a cheap room, buggy, with florid, bad wallpaper — flowers of yellow like little fish floating in the powdery blue — and a man with dusty boots kicked up, leaning back in a chair, aimlessly tossing cards into an old hat. Waiting, as somewhere outside, death or fortune, or both, spins its killing web in the circumstance that will stop the clock — which ticks mercilessly forward, like the beating of a baby’s heart.

Why a deck of fifty-one? Which card is missing? Is it the Ace of Spades? Or the joker?

“Flowers die… the caretaker or someone takes them away.” — Night of the Living Dead.

Sure. Always. In time. To stop that damnable ticking, at our last and lonely meal.

We’re all eating our Last Supper. Every day we die, bite by unsavory bite.

It’s a moment.

My book: Silent Scream!: Nosferatu. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis, and Edison's Frankenstein--Four Novels.