The clear morning sky was overtaken by one very large storm cloud. It threatened and grumbled, but never let loose of any rain or real wind. It just hung there in the sky looking grumpy and still. It was a giant bruise adding a beautiful background contrast to the nearly violent green of the summer trees. I ventured out to enjoy the appearance of a storm without the somewhat wet and bothersome benefits of a real one.

As I was walking through the forest behind my house I heard strange giggling. It wasn’t really childlike, but neither did it belong to an adult. There was a metallic quality to it. I pulled back a gnarled juniper tree branch and was greeted by a collection of creatures I’d rather not describe. I had read about these creatures, in fairy tales meant more for adults in need of some type of morality lesson, but the descriptions could have been better as I sat looking at the real thing. One of the strangely hooded creatures, with terribly long horns, held a piece of paper and was reading from it.

Maliciousness and strife,
and all kinds of vice,
that’s what scary little girls are made of.

Dark clouds and thunder
and creeping bed monsters under
that’s what scary little girls are made of.

Dead teddy bear picnics
tainted places and broken doll faces
that’s what scary little girls are made of.

As I watched the other creatures in attendance giggle, that strange sound of theirs collectively echoing around the forest, I decided it was time to go. Artwork by Bethalynne Bajema, three of nine in the collection. Available here.

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In the late 1900’s at the height of the Spiritualist movement, Huxley Auspex took his place among the movement’s elite by creating and ushering into the world the Auspicmoriscope. The fantastic claims of this invention were simple: the user looked into the eyepiece and turned the handle and the spirit realm became visible within the instrument’s view finder.

The instrument caused a stir among even the most hardened in the community and Auspex became a quick celebrity, embraced by the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He followed this rise to celebrity by creating a variety of variations on his original device, each offering claims more brilliant and fabled than the next. The final version of the auspicmoriscope was a heavy contraption that came complete with a strange scrying board and typewriter like letter box that was meant to allow the user to type in messages or relay the names of those they wished to contact. Auspex claimed the additions to the device allowed for better locating and displaying of those the viewer desired to see.

Though Auspex was a darling of the spiritualist movement and the auspicmoriscope one of its most valued tools, these things only served to make him a vocal point for the debunkers of the movement’s claims. Auspex even came under the wraith and dedicated attention of the infamous Harry Houdini, the renowned skeptic and revealer of spiritualist trickery. Houdini was one of the first to step up and proclaim Auspex’s invention nothing more than a charlatan’s tool and he sought every method and means to prove this theory. The problem was that the auspicmoriscope was not so easy to debunk and expose for the hoax it was seen to be. When most any viewer put their eyes to the eye piece, the simple fact was they did see a vision of this world as it was not seen through normal eyes. The darker shades of the shadows were highlighted and brought into deeper detail. The bright blue skies no longer looked as simple as they did on a spring day. And all too often thick vaporous forms seemed to dominate the viewfinder with no reasonable explanation as to why. What was more disturbing was how these vaporous forms seem to show more definition the longer one viewed them. Faces emerged and bodies slowly became outlined. Even those who were dead set on not seeing anything within these forms came away from the auspicmoriscope with the unsettling feeling that they had indeed viewed something other worldly.

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“If I were to invent my biography, in my own words, I would begin it by suggesting I escaped the womb with haste as the person I was renting that space from was clinically insane. I would clarify this latter piece of information by explaining that I do not mean bat-shit crazy sort of insane. I mean more like quiet and menacing insanity of the sort that one feels tainted by breathing in the same air as it. This was my mother, and the beginning of my time in this plane. My only true regret is that I was not born with the ability to walk, so I could hit the pavement running. Perhaps this is harsh, but I would have every desire with this invented biography to allow the reader to know just how bizarre my childhood was, from the absolute beginning and how this has always influenced me as I’ve grown.” - Etta Diem (more…)

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