Falling into a brown study.
It's not quite prescience, you see. But it's pretty close, and uncanny when it happens.
I shouldn't be surprised, not after multiple experiences with the psychic jukebox at The Grass Roots Tavern at Saint Mark's Place in the 1980's.
The bookshelves in my partner's and my "library", a room sandwiched between the master bedroom and one of our home offices, seem to know better than I do what I need to read. Not necessarily what I want to read, but what my mind needs for fuel. Magical manifestation, you might call it.
This year thus far has truly been a winter of discontent, and this week my unruly soul sought the sustenance of a well-mannered memoir, rather than the shocks and gasps wrought by my collegial purveyors of terror. Not that the latter were not and are not entertaining, but they just weren't... enough, somehow.
I pick up David Niven's BRING ON THE EMPTY HORSES, and then remember that tragic passage, in the midst of Golden-Age-Of-Hollywood gaiety, describing the emptiness of his soul after his wife died. She was playing a party game of hide-and-seek at a movie star's house, opened what she thought was a closet door, and shattered her skull on the stone floor of an unfinished cellar.
I put the book down.
Next I pick up Peter Cushing's PAST FORGETTING, part two of his autobiography, which opens with the passage describing how he tried to kill himself by running up and down flights of stairs in his house, hoping to have a heart attack or to break his neck after his wife died.
I put that one down too.
I experience sympathy pains for these elegant and heartbroken gentlemen of film.
I raise a metaphorical glass to them in a silent toast.
I continue to look for something to read.
My bookshelves know what's best for me. I accept that real-life horror is beyond what my soul can endure right now, and choose to slide into the ease and comfort of fictional fear.
I decide to go with an old favourite - GHOST STORY by Peter Straub - and settle into my familiar pattern of talking back to the book, begging the indomitable, unflappable character Sears James not to investigate that basement.
I read the sentence, "Come down and play in the dark, Sears."
I shiver.
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This is my entry for therealljidol, Season 9, Week 2 - The Missing Stair.