Teeth Grinding in the Dark

I. Beneath the Skin of the Earth

There are hideous creatures lurking far below, in the bowels of the earth, waiting, hungry, crouched low in the darkness. Their heavy, strange breathing is a weird counterpoint to the incessant dripping of water; but, in the caverns, in the caves that twist and snake below the surface of things, there is the ominous drone of empty space, the filtering of air, carrying the noxious vibratory hum of flesh curdling like cheese in vast darkness. Below, here, in this space below the surface, these subterranean vaults and crypts, are the bones of the Elders, the burying ground of a suppressed yesteryear; brooded over by hideous, white things, fur-bearing fungoids in the deep, black pools of the tunneled night.

This is the place where the denizens of Midnight meet. Or, perhaps a better pun might be made as where they “meat.”

Our mind is a multi-tiered labyrinth of intersecting, grid-like egresses, strange winding tunnels leading from the sane, workaday reality we convince ourselves will always wrap us, lovingly, in benevolent arms, to a dark, sinister, and unseen place where the black is thick enough to conceal the white flashes of nightmare that are our buried, primal thoughts and desires.

II. The Midnight Meat Train

In Clive Barker's “The Midnight Meat Train,” these ancestral strains of the mad are given flesh and sickening bone by Mahogany, The Butcher, a serial killer who feeds them as a vague, obscure duty handed down to him, for unknown reasons, from the time before Kaufman's (the protagonist’s) beloved New York was settled by white men. A conspiracy of silence exists around these strange, shambling, rail-thin ancients, who seem to have been kept alive by their diet of man flesh and the powers of an arcane, ghastly, hideous, undefinable “other” of alien or unknown origin, a thing that takes the mad and mind-benumbed accountant Kaufman, who has witnessed and managed to slay Mahogany, The Butcher, and so now is tasked with taking up his duty, in hand or claw, plucking out his tongue—rendering him to silence. The dark and tunneled realm of the buried, primitive, atavistic urge that prolongs life in a sickening or vampiric sense—that reveals one to be a flesh-devouring hideous of mutant aspect, a thing that lurks below in our darkest, most fear- and aggression-driven basement longings of forbidden desire—is suppressed under the ripped tongue of eternal silence. Instead, Kaufman will take up the dual role of man, ego, basking about in the silent, and killer Id, the feeder of his personal symbiotic shuffling masterful horde of cannibalistic freaks.

Barker writes:

.... "We are the City fathers," the thing said. "And mothers, and daughters and sons. The builders, the law-makers. We made this city."

"New York?" said Kaufman. The Palace of Delights? "Before you were born, before anyone living was born." As it spoke the creature's fingernails were running up under the skin of the split body, and were peeling the thin elastic layer off the luscious brawn. Behind Kaufman, the other creatures had begun to unhook the bodies from the straps, their hands laid in that same delighting manner on the smooth breasts and flanks of flesh. These too had begun skinning the meat.

"You will bring us more," the father said. "More meat for us. The other one was weak."

Kaufman stared in disbelief.

"Me?" he said. "Feed you? What do you think I am?"

"You must do it for us, and for those older than us. For those born before the city was thought of, when America was a timberland and desert."

III. Far Below and the Forgotten Fathers

The concept of the story is older than Barker's adaptation—first appearing as a story by H.P. Lovecraft protégé Robert Barbour Johnson, in “Far Below,” in the June 7th, 1939 issue of Weird Tales, a pulp horror magazine made famous by being one of the primary literary outlets of H.P. Lovecraft. “Far Below” and “Midnight Meat” share similarities, but also differences. The thematic content—the buried, lurking fears and anthropophagous desires brought forth as killing, devouring monsters hungry for man-flesh, a symbol of our buried self that is beyond the socialization of workaday conventional, bourgeois society—that thing that wishes to peel back the face, like Ed Gein, and create for itself a “mask,” a way to conceal the Beast Within; i.e., that eternal thing below, the atavistic self, whose hunger is brutal, grotesque, and never sated.

In “Far Below,” which was adapted excellently for an episode of the cult horror TV show anthology series “Monsters” in 1990 (Season 2, Episode 19), we encounter, as the narrator, Professor Craig, who leads a special detachment or retinue of NYPD officers underground, in the subway system, where a derailment or accident of some time before brought about a cannibalistic feast, and in the darkness, created a burial ground of bone, hidden and obscured beneath the tracks, the moving train cars, subway system, like flashes of evil thought in the black, rolling over the remains of yesteryear.

In the television adaptation, we are greeted by the vision of a corpse, a common man, who has been bound and killed, being ejected by the train of living thought that emerges upward, from primal black—a refutation of the sunlit world of workaday man, the common John Q. Goodcitizen belched up as wanting by that hideous animal self below. In the end, we find that the mad overseer of this realm of hairy, white, ape-like mutants is actually the husband of one of the eternally-hungry creatures; a nod to perverse, buried, occluded sexual desires being merged with the most forbidden of primal lusts. It is a shocking finale to the television show. Barker assures us that the illusory ego of the cityscape as it is revealed—violent and brooding, yes, full of the boulevard dwellers in the realm of broken dreams—but, otherwise “sane”—must be maintained as the illusion, the masquerade ball that prevents the self from accessing that primal level wherein the white ape, the bleached bones of the hideous truth, shamble and lurk in the black. It is revealing that the television show "Monsters" begins with an accountant—i.e., someone taking into account the situation, both literal and figurative, as it is manifest.

Mr. Johnson writes:

Oh, yes; I learned a lot from Lovecraft—and he got a lot from me, too! That’s where the—well, what you might call the authenticity came from in some of his yarns that attracted the most attention! Oh, of course he had to soft-pedal the strongest parts of it—just as you're going to have to do if you ever mention this in your own writings! But even with the worst played down, there’s still enough horror and nightmare in it to blast a man’s soul, if he lets himself think on what goes on down there, below the blessed sanity of the earth’s mercifully concealing crust. Far below...."

Lovecraft's little-known vignette, "The Beast in the Cave," ALSO details a hideous, white, seeming ape-thing encountered by a tourist in a cavern system. In Lovecraft's miniature fiction, the thing lurks, white and unseen, tittering evilly in the darkness, before revealing itself to be “...a MAN!” as Lovecraft dramatically ends his tale. Johnson no doubt drew his greatest inspiration for “Far Below” from “The Beast in the Cave.” Being down in that darkness, having got lost in the recessive black of selfhood, the animal emerged in a panicked moment of fright, reborn to the atavistic urge to survive, borne of the hideous knowledge of Death, the unseen Father of Fathers in Barker's tale, who plucks the tongue from Kaufman's mouth...and devours it.

In “Far Below,” our narrator, Professor Craig, informs us:

"....I flatter myself that it's been rather a socially useful career at that; perhaps more so than stuffing animals for dusty museum cases, or writing monstrous textbooks that no one ever bothers to read. For I've a science of my own down here, you know: the science of keeping millions of dollars' worth of subway tunnels swept clean of horror, and of safeguarding the lives of half the population of the world's largest city.

"And then, too, I've opportunities for research here which most of my colleagues above ground would give their right arms for, the opportunity to study an absolutely unknown form of life; a grotesquerie so monstrous that even after all these years of contact with it I sometimes doubt my own senses even now, although the horror is authentic enough, if you come right down to it. It's been attested in every country in the world, and by every people. Why, even the Bible has references to the 'ghouls that burrow in the earth', and even today in modern Persia they hunt down with dogs and guns, like beasts, strange tomb-dwelling creatures neither quite human nor quite beast; and in Syria and Palestine and parts of Russia …

He continues:

"But as for this particular place—well, you'd be surprised how many records we've found, how many actual evidences of the Things we've uncovered from Manhattan Island's earliest history, even before the white men settled here. Ask the curator of the Aborigines Museum out on Riverside Drive about the burial customs of Island Indians a thousand years ago—customs perfectly inexplicable unless you take into consideration what they were guarding against. And ask him to show you that skull, half human and half canine, that came out of an Indian mound as far away as Albany, and those ceremonial robes of aboriginal shamans plainly traced with drawings of whitish spidery Things burrowing through conventionalized tunnels; and doing other things, too, that show the Indian artists must have known Them and Their habits. Oh yes, it's all down there in black and white, once we had the sense to read it!

"And even after white men came—what about the early writings of the old Dutch settlers, what about Jan Van der Rhees and Woulter Van Twiller? Even some of Washington Irving's writings have a nasty twist to them, if you once realize it! And there are some mighty queer passages in 'The History of the City of New York'—mention of guard patrols kept for no rational purpose in early streets at night, particularly in the region of cemeteries; of forays and excursions in the lightless dark, and flintlocks popping, and graves hastily dug and filled in before dawn woke the city to life …

"And then the modern writers—Lord! There's a whole library of them on the subject. One of them, a great student of the subject, had almost as much data on Them from his reading as I'd gleaned from my years of study down here. Oh, yes; I learned a lot from Lovecraft—and he got a lot from me, too! That's where the—well, what you might call the authenticity came from in some of his yarns that attracted the most attention! Oh, of course he had to soft-pedal the strongest parts of it—just as you're going to have to do if you ever mention this in your own writings! But even with the worst played down, there's still enough horror and nightmare in it to blast a man's soul, if he lets himself think on what goes on down there, below the blessed sanity of the earth's mercifully concealing crust. Far below..."

IV. The White Apes and the Cannibal City

It is interesting to note the “whiteness” of the ape-men in both Johnson and Lovecraft's stories—in Barker's the initial or original “feeder” of The Fathers is named “Mahogany”—a reference, perhaps, to dark skin. The racial dynamic or undercurrent in all of these stories is murky, but reference is made to the era before Manhattan Island was settled by whites—the “white apes” so to speak, the primitives who bring cannibalism, pain and death to the feeder of them—Mahogany. (Note: the racial references in Johnson's story reflect the insensitivities and prejudices of his time, but the reversed subtext is just that—subtext.)

Lovecraft was known for his racial animus (although this is often overstated for a man who married a liberal Jewish woman and moved to New York where his inner circle of friends were mostly Jews. HPL was never accused of any cruelty or malice personally toward anyone.) These subterranean stories lurk with a fear of degeneracy and miscegenation (actually amplified, curiously, in the "Monsters" episode, for shock effect).

A feature film, the cult movie C.H.U.D. (1984), which curiously, we have yet to watch fully and review (this author has personally reviewed hundreds of cult films), operates on the same theme of submerged horror lurking, like alligators in the sewer, beneath the walking feet of unsuspecting men—who, unknowingly, live in a world adjacent to a vast plain of horrors, the world beneath their feet or even at their shoulder—they may cast their glance backward, unaware of what takes a deceptive shape just behind them. Breathing, like death and the Fathers, or Poe's “Conqueror Worm” to take the shape of our most hideous fear—inevitable death.

V. Always Hungry

Worms and other serpents travel train-like in the black, cavernous spaces where thoughts surface, and fears and nightmares are forever buried, but hungry. Always hungry.

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

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My book: Theater of the Worm: Essays on Poe, Lovecraft, Bierce, and the Machinery of Dread