This story was written back in October of 2016 and fronted the monsters-themed issue of Unwinnable Monthly, Issue #84. It isn’t about RPGs per se, but it is about monsters, rules and horror; the temperature dropped last night and it has been overcast and drizzling all day and I just couldn’t resist reprinting it in the spirit of October. I’ve tidied it up a bit and added a postscript that brings it up to the present and brings a bit of tabletop into the mix.

Stu

From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!

                                                       – Traditional Scottish Poem

When I was a kid, there was a monster in my basement. I never saw it, but I knew it lurked in the corner by the furnace and the water heater.

Once upon a time, when my mother was a little girl, my grandparents finished the basement. They installed a bar, lined the walls with wood paneling, civilized it. The years since had taken a toll, along with the occasional floods that came with the spring rain, but the space remained tamed despite the dampness and wear.

Not that corner, though. The tiles of the floor stopped short there, revealing rough concrete beneath. Pipes dripped. Near the wall was a hole. Sometimes, dark water filled it to the rim. Other times, it was empty, a chute to some impossible black abyss.

Of course there was a monster. And, like the victim in any good horror, I was ill-equipped to deal with it.

* * *

In my youth, I had a strange relationship with horror – it fascinated me, but also terrified me. Badly. Monsters in the context of Dungeons & Dragons, or cartoons, or mythology were fine, my bread and butter, until they weren’t. Those created with the intention to truly frighten had a terrible power over me.

A short list of things that gave me nightmares as a kid: a black and white car commercial featuring a couple fleeing from zombies, Dinosaurs Attack! trading cards, commercials for A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child, the librarian ghost from Ghostbusters, reading an abridged version of Dracula intended for children, the illustrations in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

Hell, I had nightmares that the Libyans were going to get me the night after I saw Back to the Future. I had to leave the theater a third of the way through Gremlins. I heard Toht’s screams as his face melted and the squeals of the gamorean guard as the rancor chowed down, but all I saw, for many years, was the blurry pink close-up of my fingers locked over my eyes.

Scaredy cat. The biggest. My pal Shawn claims his mother screened The Exorcist for him when he was four or five. I can’t imagine. I wouldn’t have survived.

Yet I still sought the stuff out. You could be kind and say I was slowly building up a tolerance, but really, I just kept grabbing the pan even after I knew it was hot.

* * *

I confess all this to impress upon you that, as a child, I did not know how horror worked. The Rules, as Scream taught us. I didn’t know that you’re safe from vampires so long as you don’t invite them in, that silver bullets can handle a werewolf, that you won’t have a gremlin problem if you don’t feed your mogwai after midnight. All that came later.

Despite this, rules bound the behavior of the monster in my basement.

It was unwise to turn your back on the corner. So long as you were looking, the monster wouldn’t appear.

Silence was bad, but music was also risky – I worried that songs in certain combinations or repetitions might summon the monster.

Most importantly, like the grue from Zork, my monster wasn’t fond of light. So long as one was on, you were safe.

* * *

Rules, of course, are ways to mitigate our vulnerability to the depredations of horror. If we eat lots of garlic, don’t wear a red shirt, always stay with the group and don’t sleep around, then the vampire slasher from outer space can’t possibly kill us. Right?

In fact, rules divide horror into two distinct camps. The stories that embrace them tend to ease our anxieties after all the blood gets mopped up. They reinforce the idea that the universe is ordered and rational. Rules inject a bit of fun into the proceedings.

In some cases, like the monster in my basement, the rules attempt to explain why the monster doesn’t exist in the first place.

Then there are the stories without rules. Compare Freddy and Jason to the remote and uncaring gods of Lovecraft. Or, if you’d like a less played out example, take the film Sauna, which follows a group of Russian and Swedish soldiers making a new map of the border between Russia and Finland in 1595. Along the way, they stumble upon the titular sauna that can potentially cleanse them of their sins. Instead of forgiveness, though, they find guilt, madness, death and a hollow creature that drips oil from its maw.

I understand the plot, but the supernatural elements don’t proceed along any known rubric. I don’t know what the sauna actually is (one character even wonders if the sauna only looks like a sauna because its true form is impossible to comprehend) and the way events unfold is bewildering.

Because I don’t have a clue what was going on, I am vulnerable. I don’t know how to protect myself from things the look like saunas or filth monsters spewing liquid sin. Sauna scares me because I am looking into a violent unknown. It suggests that rules, and our collective hope to be living in a neatly ordered universe, are delusions.

What is more frightening than utter meaninglessness?

* * *

Of course, arbitrary rules can be just as frightening as no rules at all. They can hint at inscrutable systems.

Or maybe your rules are just wrong. Maybe vampires don’t mind sunlight or stakes through the heart. Is it worse to face the zombie apocalypse with no plan, or to go in expecting slow zombies and getting fast ones instead?

My monster, the rule about the music, what was that one really about? I had a little portable tape player I would haul around the house so I could listen to Appetite for Destruction and Peter Gabriel’s So over and over again. Whatever could have given me the idea that the right songs in the right order could summon the monster?

* * *

Two weeks ago, my wife, Daisy, and I moved into the family home. I grew up here. It has changed a lot. It will change a lot more by the time we’re done with it.

That hole is still over in the corner by the hot water heater, but it isn’t bottomless anymore, if it ever was. The rest of the basement needs some work, but the furnace doesn’t give me the heebie jeebies, except maybe when I think about having to replace it someday.

But.

The other night, Daisy called me down to the basement and said, “Listen.”

Aside of the normal house noises, the sounds of the floor settling, the hum of the fridge, I didn’t hear anything.

Daisy swears she can hear lilting music, high pitched and distant. She’d been hearing it off and on for days, actually – this was the first time I was around to witness it. She’s since stopped me a couple other time, once in the kitchen, to point it out.

I can’t hear it, but every time she mentions it, I think about that corner, and the hole there, and my old rule about music summoning the monster.

And I wonder.

Postscript

Countless sessions of roleplaying games were played in that basement, starting around 1990 and as recently as around 2008. The GM, usually me, would sit behind the bar, and the players would gather around an old cast-off kitchen table. A lot of the time, we’d lay a dry erase board across some of the bar stools and use that to set the stage for miniatures. There was a shabby couch for folks to sack out on if they weren’t in on the action.

Gradually, though, neglect encroached. Junk piled up. A kind of dankness set it. By the time my wife and I moved back in, three years ago, it was, well, a regular old basement again. Last summer, I discovered termites. Shortly after that, the monster’s hole, our main line to the sewer, backed up – proof there are scarier things in homeownership than arcane creatures lurking in the shadows. We basically had to gut the place. And we did. But then we decided to restore it to its former glory.

We dragged the junk to the curb. We replaced the disintigrating linoleum tile with new linoleum tile. We pulled down the old wood paneling and put up new wood paneling. There’s a record player down there again (thought I keep my LPs of Appetite for Destruction and So upstairs) and a new old couch and the bar has never looked better in my lifetime. We even figured out how to hide the furnace and boiler, something my grandfather never did. The hole is now out of site behind a wall.

Before this, when we did work on the house, strange things would happen. This time? Nothing. Not a single disembodied voice or footstep. Maybe the ghosts don’t care about the basement. Maybe the monster in the hole keeps them away. This month, I am gearing up to christen our newly restored basement with a couple of D&D sessions to play through Witchburner. I hope the club house doesn’t get jealous.   

Funny thing: I can sometimes hear the strange music now. It is a distant sort of tinkling, bereft of tune, just beyond the edge of hearing (or, at least the hearing provided by my heavy metal-addled ears), when the house is perfectly still. I recently re-read Arthur Machen’s “The White People” and I can imagine this music in that world, luring children off the path and into the darkest part of the woods.

Maybe its is because we are in the basement a lot more now. Maybe some pressure is building up and the monster will finally appear when I play the wrong record. Or maybe there is just something wrong with the refrigerator’s compressor.