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 If ever you find yourself sitting at a roll-top desk, inside a gothic den filled with pipe smoke and moonlight, writing gloomy tales about how all your friends are lying dead beneath your blotter; and if at the same time you hear your cinnamon man, your alter inner demon, your dour doppelganger knocking eerie at the door, then for heaven's sake don't release the latch and venture out into the corridor. There are indeed ghosts who wander the halls of most respectable mansions. Vague memories of evil mothers, dreary portraits of stuffy ancestors and the moaning spirits of vengeful partners who found your technique lacking await your clumsy curiosity, hopeful for an opportunity to snuff out your last candle and then shove you down the stairs.I surrendered to impatience. I abandoned resignation. I assumed the dapper manner of the master of his castle. I left my pen and paper, crept the distance to the doorway, turned the key to free the tumblers, pulled the knob and felt the wind upon my face. I opened the damned door. I had to go to the bathroom. It wasn't so bad as it might seem at first glance. They chased me, yes -- had me pinned against the banister for a few groundless seconds of terror -- but I made it to the toilet in time. There's nothing more frightening to me than needing a toilet just at the moment when my demon pursues. There I am, riding inside my carriage, along a muddy road in the middle of a lightning storm, one minute feeling content to devise a way out from under the latest plot dilemma, and then the next moment my insides are shaken by a rowdy horse and a rut in the road, and then I really have to go. Just how am I supposed to tell the man who holds the reins that I'm in desperate need of a hole in the ground and a few dry leaves? Am I later to stroll past the maid with mud on the seat of my pants? But I digress. In the manner of all that is gothic I digress, because this time, dear reader, I made it. I closed yet another door behind me, groaned a prayer to the god to whom I'd promised allegiance as I sped my way down the gloomy corridor, yanked down my creased slacks, dropped my way to heaven and let go of my melodrama once and for all. The body owns a particular, urgent and convincing way of towing a gothic author back to earth. No harm done, and now I better understand why my other man would not give up his knocking. He anticipated my condition, realized my future, sought to warn me of impending disaster if I refused much longer to get off my ass and take care of the first scene before writing the second. Seems my cinnamon man isn't so sinister after all. As a matter of sheer coincidence, and perhaps nasty habit, I do some of my best writing while leaning on the latrine. There's something definite and dreamy about giving in to one's base depravity at the expense of all obligations to the outside world. Far better to be glued to the pot than to be chained to one's oak desk with only one candle to light your pipe and find your way through the dungeon. So once I caught my breath and renounced religion, I picked up a magazine, and there on page 22 of Wilkie Collin's latest claptrap chapter I found the solution to my problem. A case of mistaken identity. Some fool all these years had kept Lucinda drugged and sleeping in the tower. She was no phantom who keened at the stroke of midnight. True that she was a little worse for wear -- and what maiden wouldn't go just a wee bit mad, what with imprisonment and virginity forced upon her at one and the same time -- but she was no vengeful spirit, no doppelganger in a gown, no dour apparition pressed beneath a writer's blotter. Lucinda was a gallant girl whose evil master refused her the key just at the moment when she had to go to the bathroom. Now and forever she would suffer, at least until the butler dropped the cursed candle and burned the mansion down. So odd to consider that I might never have finished this book had I remained seated at my desk. *** Thanks for stopping by to visit us here at SpilledBeans.com. If you'd like to be notified whenever something new is posted to SpilledBeans.com, then please join the Spilled Beans notification list. -- Con affetto, Anthony V. Toscano, Editor SpilledBeans.com  |
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