Author: MKW Publishing

In The Closet

~ MKW Publishing ~ 3 Comments

A Door, or to be more precise, the door of a wardrobe or cupboard. With a fantastic story or magical adventure, if you go through and follow the lure that led you there. However, there was usually a price or penalty for straying into lands unknown, often with a dark undertone.

Narnia – a serious adventure ensues from this tale, and is one of the first ones I think of when it comes to crazy wardrobe lands.

Time Bandits – this is the second one I think of, again a thrill ride of events, with a demon like supreme being overshadowing the fun.

Poltergeist – not such a fun adventure on the other side of that door, and gives reason to wonder what might just be on the ‘other side’.

Monsters Inc – Doors to children’s bedrooms through their wardrobes, creepy as hell as a storyline. But because it’s animated and colourful, the weird under and overtones don’t seem to get discussed much.

Coraline – not quite a wardrobe or cupboard, but A Portal through a tiny bricked up door, not a wardrobe, but still the face of the portal to an alternate ‘reality’.

Alice in Wonderland – no door, but she fell through a rather long and strange tunnel. As with a few other tales of tunnels, the Woolpit Green Children and the origin of the cabbage patch kids. Although they are often said to be caves and tunnels, so the story widens once you start factoring in caves.

Winchester House (California) – a very strange house and one I was fortunate enough to visit many years ago. It has lots of features that don’t make sense, but one of them are doorways that open to solid brick walls – like the above in Coraline. And wardrobes that are doors to the next room. Weird on the face of it, but maybe not if it was perhaps for others to use, if you catch my drift.

But it seems there is definitely a theme of something lurking and using doorways as a gateway from somewhere else. And as I always say, it could just be imagination and good storytelling. Or it could be, something does have access through those portals, and is indeed, lurking…

(c) K Wicks

Stone Cold Mystery

~ MKW Publishing ~ 2 Comments

We have some rather compelling stone mysteries around the world, buildings, sculptures and remnants of a time past that we can barely get our head around these days. And if we didn’t have so much of it just lying around and still in situ, I doubt we would believe it to be true and would consign it to myth and fiction. But they are there – Baalbek in Lebanon, the Moai on Easter Island, Gobleki Tepi in Turkey, Petra in Jordan, Churches in Ethiopia, Angkor Wat temple complex in Cambodia and many others – the African Pyramids, South American Pyramids, vast quarries and evidence of activity and grand projects across the globe. And some things are a bit further along in the weathering and aging process, showing only a hint of what once was, and imagination seems to fill in the gaps for the archaeologists and historians sometimes. Like Stonehenge and the multitude of other stone circles all throughout Europe and the world, Dolmens in Spain and Portugal, Menirs and Carnac stones in France. Various sites in the Americas, Russia, China, Japan and so on.

And people speculate on things that appear to be left overs from something, that isn’t quite recognisable anymore, but something about it catches our eye. And whether we create patterns as they say people are prone to, or we are actually just good at spotting patterns. The Richat structure in Africa for example with its concentric circles, was put forward as a possible candidate for the elusive and legendary Atlantis, and I can see why. But I recently read an excerpt from a 1747 journal, which described a petrified city of round form in Africa, with the usual strange direction of that time period. Two days south of Ouguela, and seventeen days south-east of Tripoli. Make of that what you will, but depending on the mode of transport, you could find yourself perhaps near the Richat Structure. Although there are a number of places named Tripoli, and as things are renamed and moved, who can say for sure.

There is another twist to the story of stone though, as we also have rumours and legends of abilities, and of curses, magic and of people and places being turned to stone in an instant.

Medusa – one of three sisters, all Gorgon’s who could turn people to stone if they looked at them.

Return to Oz – in the sequel to the original, Dorothy found all the inhabitants of the emerald city had been turned to stone by the villain.

Willow – acorns that can turn things to stone when it touches them, but there was also a scene near the end where the ‘abandoned’ castle showed the people encased in what looked like crystal stone. Obviously, they all get saved at the end, but almost as if they were in a cryo stasis. Which then makes me think of the Superman scene, when Zod and other two are trapped in the 2D crystal spinning off into space.

So, could it be that there is a type of process that can petrify an entire city? Well, if you look at Pompeii, it seems there is a known process that can capture a place and people in time, solidified to then be buried or face the ages and elements as part of the landscape. Could it have happened in other conditions we aren’t quite aware of yet? Where we see ‘old stone’, could be much newer than we give it credit for and have a more human origin than we would care to believe. We do however, like to build and record things in stone by way of statues, sculptures, carvings and architecture, using it to shape the world around us, and leave a record behind us. Even if as time goes by, we aren’t exactly sure what those records are trying to tell us. But that is where it becomes a mystery, and based on what we have to hand in these modern times, the game is definitely afoot…

(c) K Wicks