Hellhounds of the Wareham Woods, and Other Monsters and Ghosts

     Tonight I went over to Wareham Center to do my laundry at the laundromat by the CVS on South Main Street. So, I'm doing my laundry, and the lady who is running the place, she's very quiet, with a kind of wan, pale, snow-blenched quality, as though whatever fires of human warmth that kindled inside those eyes had to make a great effort, through layers of snow and ice, to get its mere candlelight out to a wintry world -- "Guess she's been in Starkfield too many winters."
      I put in my laundry. A divorced father and his teenage son are playing video games on -- their phones? I don't even know anymore -- while a surly and unhappy looking young man, with long reddish-brown hair, wearing a black pea-coat waited on the other side of the place. It is in a little strip mall, and with the kind of sad soviet glow of the fluorescent lights, and the big storefront windows looking out into the black of the February night, it was a sere and lonesome place -- mournful, most mournful.
      As I go in and out to the car through the hour I am there, I see an older man, a homeless man with the sad downturned mien of someone who, though living amongst humans, is completely forgotten by them: the infinitely sad slumped shoulders of someone who sees themselves as defeated. He wears a dirty, very dirty, white parka, and occasionally stands near to the window where my stuff is, though never so close to the skater-goth human warmth of the teenagers hanging around inside and outside the adjacent Dunkin' Donuts. He has a bunch of stuff, and a kind of tarp lined with a down blanket that he's turned into a sleeping bag. He is, of course, outside the Packie, that reliable institution of Massachusetts strip malls.
      I'm going in and out of my car, and for a little while I'm afraid of the guy as he smokes a cigarette in a possibly menacing way on my path between the laundromat and the car. But as I am in my car, preparing to make a cell phone call,  I see him huddled over on the cold concrete of the sidewalk outside the Packie, and something in my heart breaks a little and I get out of the car. I better get this guy somethin' to eat.
        "Excuse me, sir -- do you want something to eat?
        "Huh?"
         It's not a Sir, it's a Ma'am!
        "Have you eaten? You want a granola bar or something? I'll run into CVS --"
        "N'aaah, I had a peanut butter cup to settle down somethin' I drank earlier....."
        "Oh, ma'am, please let me go get you a granola bar and you know, a cup of, a cup of -- a bottle of water."
        A beat.
        "Don't worry ma'am, I'll be right out."
        I go into the CVS, where I have the same nice blonde clerk of near my age as I had twenty minutes before, when we had a nice flirt. They are closing up, and I go towards the back where the food is. I find some oats and honey granola. I say the hell with it, a whole box of granola bars is only $3.69, so I grab that and a big bottle of water for a buck something, buy them, and go over and give them to my fellow citizen as she lays huddled against the harrowing winds of the New England winter night.
         "Now, Ma'am, you should try to find some place warm to sleep if you can," I say. "It's pretty dangerous out here, you know, in this cold weather. You could even talk to the Cops, you know....."
         "Yeah, well sometimes I sleep up, they send me up, they take me up to that church, you know, behind the Tobey [ed. - the local hospital], you know, you take a left and then a right and then a left -- and, is it a left?"
        "Right," I say, but as an affirmation rather than a correction. She amends herself anyway.
        "Yeah, right, the San Simeon Brothers Church...."
        "Which church, Ma'am?"
        She says something that is somewhere between "Sattinian" "San Simeon" "Sanninnian"; perhaps, in light of what she says in a moment, she means Satanic. Given the appellation "Brothers" I assume it is Catholic.
        Now she pulls back her parka hood, and then her sweatshirt hoodie, and whereas her brown weathered face made her age hard to tell, now I see her hair, white and unkempt and tousled, and realize that she is probably just a couple of years older than my own mother.
         "Is that an okay place to sleep, that church?"
         "No, I don't sleep there anymore. That's a feeding grounds. There's some creature some horrible thing it comes up out of the ground and comes in at night through the window to eat you --"
         "A creature?"
         "Yeah, it comes up out of the ground and through the window and if you want to live you gotta' get outta' thaye'h, it's a feeding spot --"
         "It eats people?"
          "Yeah, you know, you never feel right up there, thai'ah's always kin'ah like'a presence or sumpthin', and these three guys were there and I hear 'em talkin' sayin' to wake each othuh' 'r'up at Three so they can attack me so I get up at Two and leave and that's when I seen it, gettin' ready, gettin' ready to come and eat everybody -- and the next day my friend she says ta' me: you wuh right about that church, it is evil."
          "Is it like a ghost, ma'am?"
          "No! No! It's like an evil sortah animal! A creature! It's got grey fuhwr a white belly and glowing red eyes. And it ain't a coyoat because I seen the way it eats and it eats just the soft spots of the deeah the way the koi dogs do, because they is trained by humans, the koi dogs, and they eat the soft spots but they don't eat no fuhwr, and the coyoats they eat it all, you know, everything, even little bits of fuhwr --"
         "Scavengers," I say.
         " -- But this ain't like a coyoat neithuh, 'r'it eats just the soft spots AND the fuhwr, and it goes into that church at night and it eats the people who ah' sleepin' thaiyuh. It's feedin' time."
         "Wow," I say. I am beginning to try to extricate myself.
          "And that church has a lot of hawrrible things happening up thaiyuh, sick, evil things, they'll attack you, the pervert gangs goin' after childrun, it's Disgusting! and all kinds of horrible bad things thaiyuh --"
         "Yahp."
         "And the weeahd sick shit and the Cops, the Cops! They say to me 'You should take yaw grandchildrun up thaiyah', and I say-" no she grows suddenly and increasingly enraged -- "What the fuck, what the fuck you say to me, I bring my grandkids thaiyah, you fuckin' -- I'll send the Scots Guard after ya ya' fuckin --"
        "Ma'am, I got to go back to my laundry. Try to stay warm, okay?"
        She mutters lowly and profanely.
        "And have some of those granola bars."
        She continues her private tirade, the outward manifestation of her inward suffering, of her terror and rage, of the Furies that taunt her from beyond the bourn of reason.

          I come back into the laundromat. I ask the woman there, with her layers of winter, about the old woman outside.
          "Is she gonna' be okay? She's liable to freeze to death on a night like this."
          "Oh," she says with resignation, with a kind of frustrated exhaustion, a sigh of a sentence, "she's been there forever."
           "Well, I'm new 'round here, coming down from Kingston."
            "I'm not from around here either."
            "Oh -- where are you from?"
            "Vermont," she says, with all the famed laconicism of the Green Mountain State.
            "Oh, whereabouts?"
             She hesitates for a half an instant.
              "Whereabouts in Vermont?" I gently press, as if to let her know -- it's okay. I know and like Vermont. You can tell me.
              "Near Canada," she says quietly and without emotion.
              "The Northeast Kingdom?"
              "Close."
               I mention the names of a few northern Vermont hamlets. At one of them the dim candle behind her winter eyes jumps up, flickers.
              "Yes, I'm on the other side of Jay Peak from them."
               So this is it, I realize: she is from Zenobia Frome's country. Long months of dimly lit afternoons, staring from frosted windows at the weak pale sunlight, the bleeding heartbreaking winter sunsets.... Guess she's been in Enosburg too many winters.

                The moon is high and bright overhead. I have bid Mrs. Enosburg goodnight. I am the last one leaving the laundromat; it's ten past nine or so. I was going to make a call from the parking lot, calling my own Mum; but where I am parked, the Touched Woman, pursued by her Furies, she can see me in my car, and there is something in the way she grimly and wordlessly stares in my general direction and at nothing in particular that is spooky, unnerving. There's always something spooky and a little chilling talking with people who are far gone in madness; they exist in our world, our common world of sensorily-derived empirical reality; but they also inhabit a second world, a world of ghosts and monsters, of demonic canines springing up through the Earth from Hell to devour the unwary sleepers in a cursed and evil Church....
           But who knows, and who can say? The rationalist in me says that her brain chemistry is off, her sensory perceptions are off and she's thus misinterpreting reality, that there's almost dispositive evidence that there is not a Hellhound on the trail of St. Patrick's Church (Via google I discover this is the eglise she means). But what if this is what Jurgen Habermas has called "a flattening empiricism"? What if, as Prince Hamlet warned four centuries ago, "there are more things in the world than are dreamed of in all your philosophy....?" Though I am a Theist myself, it has ever seemed to that the agnostic's position is far more logically tenable than the athiest's; for how can we be certain of a negative any more than of a positive? Wasn't Hume onto something when he said that the only thing we can be certain of is our profound uncertainty? What particularly lofty purchase have I, that I might denounce out of hand ghosts and monsters and demon-dogs?
            It seems to me that I have none. And perhaps the Touched Woman has a special purchase of her own, along with other madwomen and schizophrenics. Perhaps she is keyed into a world above, beyond, outside, the world of observable Nature. Is it too much to suggest that she experiences in a kind of waking Dreamtime, the spiritual reality of our own "rational" world? For it occurred to me when I looked up which church she meant, that St. Patrick's, being a Catholic church, no doubt was the scene of some wicked, infamous, and horrible crimes of sexual violence and sadism in the years it has stood; and maybe that's what the Touched Woman was keyed into, in a way deeper, more profound, and more profoundly terrifying than anything imaginable by the Atlantic Monthly/TED Talks-business class wankers whom martyrs call the world. Perhaps the demonic creature, with its hungry devouring bloodthirsty maw, its glowing red eyes (each time I write of the creature I get chills; that is not nothing. But "Eight Days a Week" and the Sign of the Cross will dispel all wickedness!): maybe it is the evil that was done against children that has inhered in a place, and only the Touched Woman, and other touched people, can see it. Perhaps these Hellhounds of the Wareham Woods, visible only to the Touched, represent spiritual realities not directly sensible to us 'rational' people. In this, the Touched and Strolling Poor must be subject to a deeply frightening misfortune -- for if it was hard enough for Martin Luther himself to fight furies and demons, how much more difficult must it be for a person with not even a hundredth of his resources, in a society that ignores them, that has made them into modern-day lepers and American Untouchables?
           We owe our Touched People better than we give them, as a society. We need to do something different, because the current situation is intolerable. For while screaming unholy Furies do chase this poor woman through the New England night, it will be just and avenging Furies which do scourge our society as a whole -- so wealthy, so powerful, so morally stunted -- should we, who can do something for the Touched Woman, choose instead to do nothing.