Mr. Death

Somewhere out there he's waiting. Watching. Walking around the block and biding his time.

He (for, invariably in my mind, he is always a HE), has a deep, unsettling way of breathing and an easy, sprawling gait.

In. Out. Like Darth Vader, or a sex pervert calling you in the old days of landlines and rape whistle responses.

The heavy breather. The faceless man. The One Who Blends Into the Background.

The Stalker.

Grim and inexorable DEATH.

And eventually, you'll meet him.

He may waltz into your bedroom in the middle of the night, a heavy, stolid presence in the gloom, illuminated by the light of the screen you forgot to shut off. In the silence, you can hear his heavy, menacing breath.

In. Out. In. Out.

His hands are cold, piggy knuckles of wanton desire—desire to grasp your throat, and squeeze. Squeeze. Squeeze.

Until your face becomes the color of raw wine, and you begin to gasp out imprecations for mercy between impassioned squeals of intense pain.

You feel the lights go out, the darkness descend; the primal animal beast within emerges, realizing that it must fight or flee, but that—unmistakably—its end draws near.

Your death, it doesn't care.

Your death, it's always there.

Your death finds you unaware.

It could be cancer.

Most likely a heart attack at three a.m., your chest wracked with crushing, intense pain, as you wait in terror for the EMTs.

An EMT once told me, "Most don't even make it to the hospital."

Widowmaker. I personally had an eighty-five percent obstruction in the Left Anterior Descending artery.

Death grinned, his fat face (no, he is not a skull, he's a little round Buddha of Termination) cracking the smile that reveals his bad teeth.

He wants you, me, and everyone else.

He always gets what he wants.

In ancient times he came cloaked in the plague;

in modern times, he's a sniper, a spree killer in a shopping court,

a serial sex slayer roaming the highways, burying bodies in shallow graves in remote places, for discovery, later, by other, less eager predators.

The bones will be picked apart by scientific experts armed with the hard knowledge of textbook truths.

But there are no final truths.

Except, of course, the inevitability of your death.

When the Casket Looms

"The smiling bags," referred to in the original series of Twin Peaks, made famous as the cult television program created by late auteur David Lynch, were hanging body bags.

My last image of my grandmother was of her being zipped into such a bag.

Of course, she didn’t look anything like Laura Palmer, who was discovered in the pilot episode by Pete Martell, played by the tragic actor Jack "Eraserhead" Nance—who it is suspected was murdered—but it did call to mind the recursive loop of memory.

Did I know, as a child, as she sat beside me in the showering sunlight of the living room, playing the piano, that that would be the final image of her?

That her hands would become cold, stiff, and skeletal—not able any longer to manipulate piano keys, but only fit to decay beneath the moldering earth, while beetles raked the bones and worms nibbled at the rot.

I saw Grandma zipped into her own "Smiling Bag," and it is an image I cannot erase.

In Carnival of Souls, that poetic, buried, cinematic illusion and dive into subconscious, dreamlike spaces, Death is the Grinning Man that torments the detached but increasingly delirious and dreaming Candace Hilligoss, who is transported in a drowned vehicle, appearing on a sandbar after emerging from a river—in a split-second scene that seems to have later inspired David Lynch to film a similar image with both Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet (1986), and later, actress Phoebe Augustine as Ronette Pulaski in the pilot of Twin Peaks (1989).

All of them, including Hilligoss, look as if they have escaped the clutches of their own death, but only Hilligoss’s reprieve is shown to be a falsity, with echoes from Ambrose Bierce and Owl Creek Bridge.

The other two escaped death only momentarily, of course, but, once having been returned to life, come back with the slow, unsteady gait and vacant, hundred-mile gaze of a resurrected zombie.

His Face, Our Face, Their Face

Faces of Death (1978) gives us the hideous recreation of grisly, accidental deaths—and even executions and homicides—all to the steady, murmuring narration of actor Michael Carr ("Dr. Francis Gross"), and the incredible, often funeral-march-style music of Gene Kauer, who provided the very diverse score.

The producer and director, John Alan Schwartz ("Conan le Cilaire"), has since died.

His film, while it could be dismissed as sordid exploitation, documents unerringly the many facets of death around the world—capturing the universal trek of our so-mysterious eternal pursuer, and the possibly vain attempts to forestall and even cheat Him, in the form of cryonic suspension.

Some of the footage is file footage; some is grindhouse-level recreation.

But it is a bold cinematic essay nonetheless, and it drives home its point in one deeply poignant scene, in, of all places, the L.A. County Morgue.

A somber poem is read over Gene Kauer's deathlink lounge theme—a poem which denotes that, after death, the "Money one's earned, is not worth a rolled dime."

In other words, all earthly pursuits are rendered moot, meaningless, and of no value when weighed against the one undeniable fact of existence: it can and will end, "in the blink of an eye."

Horror films and literature prepare us for the coming of Mr. Death.

They serve, as Stephen King has noted, as "dress rehearsals" for an end none of us can quite conceive, all fear, and yet, are fascinated with regardless—feeling the thrilling sensation of that last gasp of undeniable pain, as the curtain closes, and the "lights go low," and "The Red Death holds illimitable sway over all."

And down the block somewhere, with a gun or a rope or a blade in his hand, waits grim Mr. Death.

He’s coming.

Can’t you hear him?

A rustle in the bushes.

A shadow on the lawn.

Growing closer.

Closer.

He rattles the doorknob.

He opens the shadow cast by the door.

Inside your bedroom.

Watching.

Waiting.

Grinning.

Can you see his teeth?

His hungry mouth?

Can you smell the blood on his breath, as he breathes?

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

In...

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