John Darnielle - Wolf in White Van

I set the stack of movies down in front of the TV when I got back, and I pulled the VCR out of the closet and wired everything together. I thought about Gor , but it still had some sort of prohibitive power over me, so I turned out the lights and sat in my recliner watching Krull. It took me back. The screen throbbed in its familiar way and the darkness around it spread out to the farthest corners of the room. When the movie was over I just sat there in my chair for a while. The sun was going down outside. I nodded off and caught one of those ten-minute naps that always feel like they last longer than they really do.

I dreamed of a ghost in a hallway; the ghost was holding his own head in his hands. I know where this image came from, and I knew in the dream, too, though that didn’t make it less real or frightening. The ghost holding his own head in his hands, coming down a hallway, was a neither-common-nor-rare card in the Monsters of the World series. These were bubble gum cards with a stiff stale powdery pink slab of gum included in every pack; I used to buy them at Rexall. Kids would joke about buying the cards and throwing the gum away, but nobody actually threw the gum away, because they had paid for it. It crunched when you chewed it.

Some people dream whole stories, but I get only fleeting images. A ghost in a hallway, an open hallway facing out onto some trees. Maybe an office building in California. Maybe an apartment complex. The ghost is holding his head in his hands, making a ghost sound. I’m not even sure how I know it’s a ghost; his flesh is solid. The face is held close against the ghost’s body, so from where I’m standing, I can see only the back of his head.

Sometimes I try to make my dreams mean something: to connect them to the accident, which seems like an obvious fit here, or to connect them to things going on in my life. But there’s so little to them, so little to pick apart in my dreams. A thing that’s a ghost because something tells me that’s what it is, coming toward me in a hallway of some building. No real details. Ghost, hallway, building. When I woke up, I thought about Kansas, cold Kansas where the hallways of the buildings would be tightly sealed against the weather, so unlike the open, exposed buildings of Southern California, which are the only buildings I can actually tell you anything about, because they’re the only ones I’ve ever seen with my own eyes.

Krull is a movie about a man on a quest, and it plays like something made by guileless people. Who knows the secrets of anybody’s heart, I guess: for all I know everyone involved with Krull has bodies under the floorboards and babies in the oven. But the evidence on the screen strongly suggests that these were people trying to make something fun for others to enjoy, something largely innocent, not trying to open up any windows on the abyss. For me, though, it was a hallway full of doors leading to dark places. The hearing at the courthouse had propped several of these doors ajar: bagged bits of evidence standing in for bigger questions that couldn’t be answered, timelines of meaningless afternoons that ended somewhere big and terrible. But whether they’d seen it coming or not, the abyss had eventually gotten around to claiming most of the people who made the movie, or starred in it, or underwrote its considerable budget. The abyss was general. Which I couldn’t help thinking, the whole time: I was twelve when I first saw ads for this movie running in the L.A. Times. How old does that make some of those young people on my screen now? Who’s left?

The plotline was fairly clear. This was given to me to know: that many worlds have been enslaved by the beast and his army the slayers. It aimed high; I could feel the old excited hopes, destined for disappointment but still game, rising up inside me. Everything came together: the potential letdown of the saccharine wedding at the outset suddenly ripped into vivid pieces by the electric-blue flashing doors and the slayers scaling the walls. Swords that gave off lightning when they clashed, full-screen flaring X’s in battles whose backstories hadn’t been filled in sufficiently yet, so that the central remaining image for me — then as now — was the crystal-clean desolation of the aftermath: Confusion. Sudden loss. Evaporating bodies in an emptied stone cathedral. One guy looked like somebody I used to hang out with, I thought, watching his face turn to steam. Was it JJ? Maybe. I couldn’t even get a clear picture of JJ in my mind anymore. It had been too long.

I drifted off into the sanctity of my earliest, angrier visions of the Trace Italian as the screen dimmed and flashed. A band of thieves led by the newly crowned king heading through mountains that looked identical to the ones a few miles north of my house. The quest to recover the kidnapped queen from the clutches of the beast. Distractions that killed people: kindly old wizards possessed by things that turned their eyes black and left their bodies empty shriveled husks atop the swamp. Calm marshlands from whose mists steel-clad killers rose suddenly, their muffled electronic screams grabbing hold of something inside me that was basic, primal, essential. The nearing of the goal. Dark caves. Lava streams that reminded me, and only me — but what was the difference — of the little fountain that used to flow at the center of Montclair Plaza. The battle of the king against the beast for his kingdom and its spoils. The worm left in the king’s brain, and in mine, by the few things the beast says before going down howling, felled by a magical throwing star that only the king could wield.

What the movie was really about was ambition, and what a fine thing it could come to seem, given the right light. It was about coming of age, and the rich reward waiting for those who went through it with courage. The brave and true of heart prevailed, and the usurpers got their due. One world escaped the slavemaster’s grasp. The wicked went down to perdition and the good folk prospered.

It was too high-minded to satisfy my seething adolescent brain, whose permanent thirst for blood I’d been hoping to feed, I now realized. And I wondered why I’d want to feed a monster I’d spent much of my adult life trying to bury; but I set that question off to one side. Because the story wasn’t the point, wasn’t what was troubling me. It was the little details, the stage on which it was set, the margins. The trappings of the greater story — the props, the scenery, the special effects — those were what held me, what spoke to me. In them I recognized the guessed-at originals of my crude early visions, the ones that would grow over time. The caves, the castle, the final battleground: these were all signposts on the road to the Trace.

But the Trace that Lance and Carrie’d found did not teem with lush growth or offer breathtaking vistas. There were no swamps to pass through en route to it, and it had not terminated in any final confrontation with some immense evil made flesh, towering arrogant and glowing in the sky above them. There had been at Lance and Carrie’s sides no parties of fellow travelers, noble thieves, or inevitable tragic figures, joined together in common or disparate cause toward one victorious end. The terminus of their dreams, whose architecture may or may not have originated in me, had been a burrowing into dead earth. Its conclusion was neither climax nor punch line; it wasn’t even a conclusion at all, except for Carrie. It was a headline in The Wichita Eagle. One Dead, One Critical in Sci-Fi Game Pact. The young king with his eyes toward the open mouth of the serpent, its voice cavernous: You have chosen a paltry kingdom on an insignificant planet.

The worst part of the hearing was I guess the presentation of the various artifacts, the unboxing of the bits and pieces that the prosecution had rounded up preparing for trial. Testimonials and letters, various receipts. Rough ideas in fabric. These were blueprints for a case no one would ever end up making, and their imagined barbs would go no further than the fat folders in which they’d been collated; they did find a home in me, though, and lodged there, like particles in a bedridden patient’s lungs.