Closet Detectives

Just finished watching "1408". Interesting concept: Hell in a Hotel. Not bad. Not bad at all. Based on a Stephen King short story. That's why I rented it, even though I know that almost every time Hollywood tries to do a King tale it winds up sucking. I haven't read this particular one, so I don't know how the movie stacks up against the original story.

I don't know why but it brought back this memory:

I can't be much older than 9 or 10. My parents have befriended a couple. I have no idea who they are or how (or why) my folks have made their acquaintance. It didn't last for very long. Maybe not even a month. It began and ended so fast, I have no idea what their names where.

They had a son. Might have been a couple of sons, not too much older than I was. Maybe even a little younger. The family stayed in a two story house on the northwest side of town. Typical small town home.

One time, and only once, we visited them in their house. Dinner? I don't think so. I have no idea what the occassion was, if there was an occassion at all. All I know is that once the grown-ups got settled in to visit, their son (one of them, at least, if they had more) took me and my brother upstairs.

It didn't look like a furnished room, the part that I remember. There may have been other sections to the upstairs area, but the one I saw was more like a bare attic, with a window or two.

A stack of magazines. Old pulp magazines. Did the kid show them to me? Or was I just being nosey? Either way, I found my way to those magazines and had me a look-see. All of them were of the "True Crime"/"Official Detective" stripe. I looked through a few of them. Page upon page of black and white photographs. Real crime scenes. Dead bodies, lying in pools of blood, black blood on grey floors. Grey skin. Black pupils in off-white eyes, eyes that bulged, seeing nothing. Black gashes slithering across necks in some of them. In others, small bullet holes in foreheads or hearts, anywhere lethal. Knife wounds, multiple knife wounds, scattered across the voodoo doll bodies, real bodies, real enough if not. Dead bodies, on display like some kind of carnival freak show on paper, grainy photographs on grainy paper, the kind of paper that feels like sand to the touch, worse than chalkboard to the fingernails. Black and white pictures with captions describing who, why, what, where, how...pages and pages, maybe 30-40 pages with these images before the next section crowded with text (and who knows how many of the people who liked this stuff even read the words, right? Maybe this part of the rag was ignored by...what? Most of 'em?). Then, letters, words and paragraphs that describe, in morbid detail, all the carnage. All the motives. All the clues and the cops who followed all the leads. All the leads that led nowhere, mixed (in what proportions?) with the ones that led to killers and killers and killers and killers...but then agian, oh my God, all the ones that led nowhere. All the killers who got away. The ones who escaped the grip of justice. Killers whose consciences either haunted them the rest of their days or whose concsciences have themselves been killed, either in the same deadly stroke of the murderers act or long before at the hands of another, a different kind of killer, the kind that kills the soul, the kind that kills the soul and sleeps soundly at night, perhaps not even realizing the damage done. Or not caring, their own conscience nothing but a vague memory stolen by someone else without a conscience. Where do all those dead consciences wind up, anyway?

Surely no one with a conscience could have done the things I saw done to the people in those pages. Those sandy, gritty pages of those "detective" magazines, those grotesque periodicals that sold for less than a dollar at the grocery store. It seemed as if every cover showed some buxom female in trouble. Headlines like "The Rope Killer With 'Honorable Intentions'", "Does a Bride's Incest Justify Murder?", "Gang Rapes Were Fun-Until They Tried Murder", "Girl Buried Alive After Sex Session", "Wanton Murder Climaxed the Orgy at Gunpoint", "Murder Ended the Wife Swappers' Party"...these are actual titles, each one in large, bold print on the covers of these magazines. There was a whole row of the things on the magazine racks, right there where anyone could look at them.

But I didn't look at them after that day in the upstairs loft where I first saw them. They creeped me out big time. I thought, "Who would read this stuff? Who would want to look at these pictures?" It didn't occur to me then that everyone has a dark side and some folks placate it by looking at magazines like these. But at the time I was a little concerned, and frightened, as to why these people had these.