| Current mood: | contemplative |
| Current music: | Gorillaz - Feel Good Inc |
Heated
Been meaning to update for a few days now, but apathy and lethargy have been making too many demands. Also gnawing fear over my results never helps matters. I'm trying my best to live in a state of not giving a damn. I can work on caring about a PhD all over again in the intervening time between getting successful grades and actually starting it.
Cooling down now from the heat(and humidity)wave we had over the weekend, which resulted in sleepless nights, clammy skin, and me stepping outside to take part in Execémon and thinking "Fantastic! I'm going to spend all day running around in a sauna!". And when the sun shone it was even worse. Regardless, I managed to scrape a win, tying with Holly with two columns completed but winning on points (bonus 3pts for 3/5 Exec first finds). I congratulate her on giving me a run for my money. I fear, however, that my prize may in fact be a choice between vhs copies of Batman Forever and Batman and Robin. That's okay, I'd prefer to have my face eaten off.
Talking of face-eating, Mike was disturbing me the other day with his new house, specifically it's basement (the link will become apparent). On Saturday, after weighing me down with sausages left over from the bbq that he would have optherwise chucked, he showed me how he was getting along with cleaning up his basement. Apart from the darkened entrance to a chamber full of dirt and junk (which was clearly a ghoul-hole, which, if one were to stick one's head into to investigate, would clearly lead to having one's face eaten off) the rest of it seemed pretty servicable, and not at all creepy. As it is an old Victorian town house, the basement was probably some sort of work area or something for servants. Yeah, that sounds right. Looking at it in this frame of mind you can speculate about some of the fixtures: the ghoul-hole could sleep several people comfortably, or make a good larder, the stone table was probably used for food preparation, or, without it's top, as a base for a spit, and the hooks in the ceiling for hanging foodstuffs. The other bit of the basement has what looks like a kiln, which I'm sure had some kind of use.
It doesn't take much to see the same things in an entirely different light, however. Mike drew my attention to the strange holes that surround the room: bore-holes of some kind, 1-1.5cm in diametre, of indeterminate depth, every few centimetres along the line of the floorboards above, and 10-30cm below it, positions almost entirely without pattern. What could have caused them? They are surely to small to have acted as holes for any sort of floor-support, also far too random for even the most incapable house builder. Mike jokingly suggested that they would be the right size to allow the ingress of wasps, or some unfamiliar dangerous insect held captive inside the wall cavity until the time was right. Clearly, both Mike and myself have been playing in too many occult horror games, Kult, Unknown Armies and the like, but it does start the mind off looking at the rest of the room with a different perspective: the floor of the ghoul-hole is dirt, not stone. Things can be buried in dirt. The base of the stone table could not have been used as the base for a spit, as there is no 'fire pit' structure, or any sort of chimney. From the plinth, we look up and see the hooks. We now note that these are not open, as food hooks would be, but mostly closed, in a way that suggests that anything they hooked onto could only be easily taken off deliberately, ie. not knocked off by accident or by struggling. Further suspicions are arroused by their number and position - five of them, arranged so that, if one were to lie on the slab, legs and arms akimbo, there would be a hook over each leg, each arm, and one's neck. Even a perfectly innocent explanation for this arrangement will not explain the four sturdy loop-bolt things sticking out of the nearby wall, at approximately arm and leg positions. There is also the kiln. Why would such a household need a kiln? And why would it be hidden away in the cellar? It does not seem a sensible location for it, unless it's use required immediate and protected access to the activities of the other chamber...
Sorry to go all Lovecraft on people, but the upshot of all this is that I suggested that Mike not use the room as some kind of stoner den - the horrors the mind could produce if the room were hotboxed, as was his plan:
"Anyone want a drag of seeping paranioa?", asked Aki.
"Me please", says the face-eating ghoul.
Anyway, it's getting late, the upstairs is feeling uncomfortably warm again, my fridge is full of embezzled sausages, and I'm getting tired.
Night all,
Sweet dreams.
PS. Go see Batman Begins. It will rock your ass off. If it doesn't, I suggest you get yourself a new ass, as yours may well be defective.
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