How I met Mr. Holmes

Hello there! I thought I'd dive into this blog with a little brain attic archaeology. I've endeavored to make interesting to someone who is not me, and hope I succeeded. I gratefully accept any notes and responses! ~ K

I'm six or seven years old, it's well past my bedtime , and I'm sitting on the lid of a clothes hamper, peeking through the crack in my bedroom door. Not the most glamourous meeting, but I wouldn't know it for many years anyway.

I was a pretty sheltered child, but I always wanted to see what my parents watched after I was put to bed at night, even if it gave me nightmares. My bedroom door was situated looking directly out into the living room and the TV screen, and if I was absolutely quiet, I could position myself and squint through the slightly open door at forbidden grown-up television. Now, their viewing habits were fairly tame by anyone's standards - Hallmark and Lifetime being their usual - and rural Upper Michigan, where I grew up, had pretty basic cable, so most of the time this was something like a true ghost stories show, Gothic horror movies from two decades ago, or reruns of the Twilight Zone - for better or worse, these things shaped me: my nightmares and my inspirations.

"A ghastly face staring in the window" grew into a fear of my young life. It possibly had something to do with the classic Twilight Zone episode "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," which is a little hokey by today's standards, but to an impressionable young girl, pulling back the curtain to reveal the grotesque, almost clownish face inches from your own was absolutely terrifying. I was always afraid of what might be lurking the dark on the other side of a pane of glass, not so much because it could hurt me, but the horrifying, unexpected visage that both terrified and obsessed me - as much as it scared me shitless, I couldn't resist the urge to look. So, no matter how much ice water shot through my veins, I always had to put my eye back to the crack in the door.

And so, I couldn't look away from the horrible rictus grin of the corpse, the blurry, monstrous face at the window, or get the death grimace of the tropical poison out of my head. I was too young to understand, but I was watching the Sign of [the] Four.