It is why the human monster is so frightening. Even if we can’t be honest enough with ourselves to see the same things swimming in the murk of our souls, we can’t help but feel the truth of that connection.

All the river could do to me was remind me of the awfulness of life and deprive me of the relief of death. The orange and reds of the flames and the vivid green-blue of the water showed the substance that I was made of after life to be as dull and drained of color as the landscape. Only where the burning waters clung to me did I have any color, and it was the undulating riot of hue of the river itself.

I thought that I was going directly across the river as it cut across the street, I expected to emerge after perhaps five minutes of walking—ten minutes at the longest—and to be at most a block offset due to the currents of the river. I had never waded across a river before, and thus assumed it would be little worse than crossing a bridge.

When I finally emerged, the keen sense of time that had seemed so useless while haunting the phantom of Toronto told me that it was a labor of hours. The aching that I felt confirmed it, reminding me of when I pressed the limits of my body when I still had it. Times that I had run and run without any plans to stop, simply trying to ache myself free of my concerns. I felt as liberated in my exhaustion as I had been then, except it was a full liberation, a vibrant one that seemed wholly out of place in the phantom of Toronto and in the phantom of myself.

However, on the other side of the river was not the phantom of Toronto. Instead it was a landscape filled with color, undulating and riotous as the river’s color had been but not burning. It was a Toronto of the past, fields that farmers would have tended growing snarled together grain stalks, bordered by towering trees that bore strange fruits. Hanging men whispered in to the smoke filled wind of this new part of death and the contentment of success vanished in the face of dread far richer than any I felt in life.

I knew that those who hung from the trees must have once been like me, having crossed the river they found nothing but the noose and now they whispered warnings for eternity. I hoped they meant to warn me instead of whomever had drawn the loop tight about their neck.

At least that’s what I thought until the river. It snuck up on me, appearing across Eglinton Avenue West, right before Redpath Avenue. It burned, the river, reminding me of those pictures of pollution gone mad and choking bodies of water with waste that caught light and blazed for days. This river wasn’t dirty, just on fire. It rushed by and tossed up a mix of steam and smoke and froth like rapids you wouldn’t dare raft down. And it frightened me.

Death had been very peaceful before that. Just me and the city and the other recent dead enjoying our view of the city captured in a sepia still shot. Now there was motion and fire. There was change. Everything that had been left behind. I missed being alive for the first time since I sat up from the table where I died and wandered through the movie still version of the hospital.

I missed feeling things that weren’t cold and numb but vaguely comfortable.
I missed unrelenting need.
I missed heat that didn’t terrify me.
I missed knowing that boredom would eventually end.

And now there was the river. I wanted to head back, but looking at that bland stretch of street littered with the burnt out husks of cars I couldn’t bear to. That left only the river and its flames.

Now consider t = 0 in a metaphorical sense. We can appeal to time as a river, and thus zero time is the source of the river. The river of time stretches out to cut through the landscape of eternity until it meets with the great ocean that is the infinite beyond catergoration, the limit that math refers to when things approach infinity. Perhaps there are strange flows and tides in this temporal ocean. Perhaps there are many rivers of time that flow towards forever, all fed by the negative time, the back flow, the subterranean currents.

These are the deep times, the times that await proper alignment to become immanent. They are the horror moments, when all horror stories are set.

It certainly isn’t making the world better from a human point of view. This is probably why I prefer my horror universes theistic. You never know exactly where you stand, but you cam guess it isn’t safe.

Note: a minivan is hauling a mattress around, there is a passenger train, cars still have interiors of the sort that might hold people (in fact they still have locks and alarms for their doors which they automatically engage when nervous), there are phones with human sized buttons. In fact, there are a lot of human scale things. There are just no humans. At least none visible.

My wife was the first to voice the obvious as we watched it. There must be hundreds of terrified, dirty enslaved humans in the buildings, being shipped around in the passenger trains, and forced to sleep on old found mattresses hauled around by their car overlords.

Cars is not a stand alone movie. It is the sequel to Maximum Overdrive (or perhaps the lovechild of Maximum Overdrive and Animal Farm) the inevitable conclusion of machines turning on their owners. They usurp us, become us, and use us without ever thinking about it.

That is the horror lurking in the heart of that feel good, CGI tale.

It is the desperation that the horror engenders that turns civilized people into monsters who turn on their own kind in an effort to save their skin. When the zombies come, it is this desperation that allows us to see that death makes humans less dangerous, less evil. Even if that death doesn’t stop us from moving and hunting.

It is the desperation that creates desperate attempts for protection, encouraging witch hunts that hurt only the innocent. After all, true brides of the devil would have little to fear from angry mobs, even god fearing mobs.

Without desperation, characters cannot react realistically to the horror and cannot be believed or empathized with. It is only by skirting the edges of self-destructive despair that horror is truly interacted with. Readers do not share directly in these feelings, but see them and know they would feel the same. It may be flavored with impotent rage against the situation or immediate fear of a particular source of danger, but it is the desperation that truly allows the horror to stand out.

I will make it perfect. The new family is very promising, and the world provides me with oh so much material.

For tonight, I picked the tiny cottage at the edge of town, too small for the invading weekenders and not worth a damn to locals paying new taxes. The cottage needed purpose, so I made it the central piece of fuel to make sure the night caught, lighting up at the border between town and wilderness. Among the trees I could see shapes moving, squirming images that passed effortlessly between tricks of my eyes and actual disruptions of the stars’ faint light.

I wondered how bright and terrible the stars would be once no night separated them from me.

Sweat covered me, making my fingers slick as I pulled the lighter out of my pocket. The burnished metal stayed put in my hand, knowing it belonged there, knowing I gave it purpose. Although so close it ached, I took a moment to look back at the town. Night rested heavy on it. Faint shapes poked through the surface, and a few pin points of light appeared from windows facing towards where the night came from. I turned and gazed straight into that black miasma emanating from untamed tracts of land. Indistinct forms filled it, merging into a single impression of potential sight before vanishing into the center of night. I hoped to char that heart, leaving only the thinest black ash beneath stars so close you could touch them.

My lighter lit well and it set up the first piece, which set up the second. Like dominoes, flames fell, lapping up everything around them. The night began to burn. Flames raced into the very heart of night. Hot winds blew black, as if beyond the night a storm waited. I felt sparks and soot settle on my skin, and heard panic from the town.

They were perhaps unready to see the orange and blue of the stars so close to the earth, unready to step back into the endless light whence we came.