#Ghost of The Noonday Sun

[joespinell]

ok i KNOW joe 1970 was probably the reason peter boyle didn’t take up more lead roles but c’mon.. joe sequel …

[talonabraxas]

The Solar Trinity The sun, as supreme among the celestial bodies visible to the astronomers of antiquity, was assigned to the highest of the gods and became symbolic of the supreme authority of the Creator Himself. From a deep philosophic consideration of the powers and principles of the sun has come the concept of the Trinity as it is understood in the world today. The tenet of a Triune Divinity is not peculiar to Christian or Mosaic theology, but forms a conspicuous part of the dogma of the greatest religions of both ancient and modern times. The Persians, Hindus, Babylonians, and Egyptians had their Trinities. In every instance these represented the threefold form of one Supreme Intelligence. In modern Masonry, the Deity is symbolized by an equilateral triangle, its three sides representing the primary manifestations of the Eternal One who is Himself represented as a tiny flame, called by the Hebrews Yod (י). Jakob Böhme, the Teutonic mystic, calls the Trinity The Three Witnesses, by means of which the Invisible is made known to the visible, tangible universe.

The origin of the Trinity is obvious to anyone who will observe the daily manifestations of the sun. This orb, being the symbol of all Light, has three distinct phases: rising, midday, and setting. The philosophers therefore divided the life of all things into three distinct parts: growth, maturity, and decay. Between the twilight of dawn and the twilight of evening is the high noon of resplendent glory. God the Father, the Creator of the world, is symbolized by the dawn. His color is blue, because the sun rising in the morning is veiled in blue mist. God the Son he Illuminating One sent to bear witness of His Father before all the worlds, is the celestial globe at noonday, radiant and magnificent, the maned Lion of Judah, the Golden-haired Savior of the World. Yellow is His color and His power is without end. God the Holy Ghost is the sunset phase, when the orb of day, robed in flaming red, rests for a moment upon the horizon line and then vanishes into the darkness of the night to wandering the lower worlds and later rise again triumphant from the embrace of darkness.

To the Egyptians the sun was the symbol of immortality, for, while it died each night, it rose again with each ensuing dawn. Not only has the sun this diurnal activity, but it also has its annual pilgrimage, during which time it passes successively through the twelve celestial houses of the heavens, remaining in each for thirty days. Added to these it has a third path of travel, which is called the precession of the equinoxes, in which it retrogrades around the zodiac through the twelve signs at the rate of one degree every seventy-two years.

Concerning the annual passage of the sun through the twelve houses of the heavens, Robert Hewitt Brown, 32°, makes the following statement: "The Sun, as he pursued his way among these 'living creatures' of the zodiac, was said, in allegorical language, either to assume the nature of or to triumph over the sign he entered. The sun thus became a Bull in Taurus, and was worshipped as such by the Egyptians under the name of Apis, and by the Assyrians as Bel, Baal, or Bul. In Leo the sun became a Lion-slayer, Hercules, and an Archer in Sagittarius. In Pisces, the Fishes, he was a fish--Dagon, or Vishnu, the fish-god of the Philistines and Hindoos."

A careful analysis of the religious systems of pagandom uncovers much evidence of the fact that its priests served the solar energy and that their Supreme Deity was in every case this Divine Light personified. Godfrey Higgins, after thirty years of inquiry into the origin of religious beliefs, is of the opinion that "All the Gods of antiquity resolved themselves into the solar fire, sometimes itself as God, or sometimes an emblem or shekinah of that higher principle, known by the name of the creative Being or God."

The Egyptian priests in many of their ceremonies wore the skins of lions, which were symbols of the solar orb, owing to the fact that the sun is exalted, dignified, and most fortunately placed in the constellation of Leo, which he rules and which was at one time the keystone of the celestial arch. Again, Hercules is the Solar Deity, for as this mighty hunter performed his twelve labors, so the sun, in traversing the twelve houses of the zodiacal band, performs during his pilgrimage twelve essential and benevolent labors for the human race and for Nature in general, Hercules, like the Egyptian priests, wore the skin of a lion for a girdle. Samson, the Hebrew hero, as his name implies, is also a solar deity. His fight with the Nubian lion, his battles with the Philistines, who represent the Powers of Darkness, and his memorable feat of carrying off the gates of Gaza, all refer to aspects of solar activity. Many of the ancient peoples had more than one solar deity; in fact, all of the gods and goddesses were supposed to partake, in part at least, of the sun's effulgence.

The golden ornaments used by the priestcraft of the various world religions are again a subtle reference to the solar energy, as are also the crowns of kings. In ancient times, crowns had a number of points extending outward like the rays of the sun, but modern conventionalism has, in many cases, either removed the points or else bent: them inward, gathered them together, and placed an orb or cross upon the point where they meet. Many of the ancient prophets, philosophers, and dignitaries carried a scepter, the upper end of which bore a representation of the solar globe surrounded by emanating rays. All the kingdoms of earth were but copies of the kingdoms of Heaven, and the kingdoms of Heaven were best symbolized by the solar kingdom, in which the sun was the supreme ruler, the planets his privy council, and all Nature the subjects of his empire.

Many deities have been associated with the sun. The Greeks believed that Apollo, Bacchus, Dionysos, Sabazius, Hercules, Jason, Ulysses, Zeus, Uranus, and Vulcan partook of either the visible or invisible attributes of the sun. The Norwegians regarded Balder the Beautiful as a solar deity, and Odin is often connected with the celestial orb, especially because of his one eye. Among the Egyptians, Osiris, Ra, Anubis, Hermes, and even the mysterious Ammon himself had points of resemblance with the solar disc. Isis was the mother of the sun, and even Typhon, the Destroyer, was supposed to be a form of solar energy. The Egyptian sun myth finally centered around the person of a mysterious deity called Serapis. The two Central American deities, Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl, while often associated with the winds, were also undoubtedly solar gods.

In Masonry the sun has many symbols. One expression of the solar energy is Solomon, whose name SOL-OM-ON is the name for the Supreme Light in three different languages. Hiram Abiff, the CHiram (Hiram) of the Chaldees, is also a solar deity, and the story of his attack and murder by the Ruffians, with its solar interpretation, will be found in the chapter The Hiramic Legend. A striking example of the important part which the sun plays in the symbols and rituals of Freemasonry is given by George Oliver, D.D., in his Dictionary of Symbolical Masonry, as follows:

"The sun rises in the east, and in the east is the place for the Worshipful Master. As the sun is the source of all light and warmth, so should the Worshipful Master enliven and warm the brethren to their work. Among the ancient Egyptians the sun was the symbol of divine providence." The hierophants of the Mysteries were adorned with many. insignia emblematic of solar power. The sunbursts of gilt embroidery on the back of the vestments of the Catholic priesthood signify that the priest is also an emissary and representative of Sol Invictus. --Secret Teachings of All Ages: The Sun, A Universal Deity

[cattosclub]

chapter i, introduction

shed light upon absolute self-confidence bound to pull, whispers all amongst society who stumbled upon this page; manifold ways to address me, as it is fully written millicent rosenvale, either within mils, millie, milly, or as anything sweet suits your preference to be comfortable with! ★_★ one of the air sign zodiacs has charmed me, try to guess that. as recent mbti attests to my being infj, a designation that speaks volumes about the inner workings of my mind. for well, i'm not a minor anymore, composed me in a nonchalant persona, an easygoing demeanor that belies a depth of complexity beneath its surface. yet, despite this facade of casual indifference, there burns within me an ember of eagerness, a fervent desire to engage and converse with all who cross my path. for in the art of interaction lies a boundless joy, a symphony of words and ideas that sings to the very core of my being. cast aside the shackles of inhibition and embrace the boundless expanse of conversation. whether through whispered secrets exchanged in the dead of night or lively banter shared beneath the noonday sun, i propose we revel in the beauty of connection and the endless possibilities it presents.

chapter ii, things i like

as i stroll through my halls of favored things, k-pop makes its front-liner, which after surveying all that was good and all that was strifet bought me in eagerness mostly towards enhypen, ive, aespa, newjeans, boynextdoor, stayc, illit, etc : ] as they lend me peace between dark days loom. when it comes to silence, i’d summon up another preference song, which is worth massive o’ silent recital which catches ears easily to tune in daily, as i frequently listen to taylor swift, bruno mars, niki, my chemical romance, voilá, black sabbath, the weeknd, benson boone, henry moodie, james arthur, tate mcrae, new hope club, sabrina carpenter, grentperez, keshi, olivia rodrigo, lewis capaldi, anson seabra, mahalini, so7, tulus, awdella, bernadya, juicy luicy, etc (gosh.. that's a lot). in the meantime, i am fond of spending all day on any genre of movie and series, but the gore one is an exception. i savoring each sip of coffee, iced tea and spicy food, watching windah basudara and F1 (i'm a fwb and a tifosi XD), and relishing time spent on drawing, writing, cooking, editing, playing games on plato. but amongst all, being a cat lover is what i tend to love the most. i'm a pawrent who has one orange cat as my furry child! 🐈

chapter iii, before you follow

come take a sip within this note, as i forbid people who try to fit the basic dni criteria including arrogant people, being minors under the age of 16, enforcing strict grammar rules, homophobic, and zionist, should refrain from interacting with me. also, accounts that are inactive or have never been used for interact with me are generally soft-blocked by me with no hard feelings, and we all could do the same to foster a comfortable environment for all.

. . .

ⓘ since i have some things that can trigger me and make me anxious or uncomfortable, please use the CW / TW mark for the following content: gecko, lizard, animal abuse, gore, murder or accident scenes, heavy nsfw, jumpscares, and ghosts.

. . .

[eugene114]

The Cloud

BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,

From the seas and the streams;

I bear light shade for the leaves when laid

In their noonday dreams.

From my wings are shaken the dews that waken

The sweet buds every one,

When rocked to rest on their mother's breast,

As she dances about the sun.

I wield the flail of the lashing hail,

And whiten the green plains under,

And then again I dissolve it in rain,

And laugh as I pass in thunder.

I sift the snow on the mountains below,

And their great pines groan aghast;

And all the night 'tis my pillow white,

While I sleep in the arms of the blast.

Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers,

Lightning my pilot sits;

In a cavern under is fettered the thunder,

It struggles and howls at fits;

Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion,

This pilot is guiding me,

Lured by the love of the genii that move

In the depths of the purple sea;

Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills,

Over the lakes and the plains,

Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream,

The Spirit he loves remains;

And I all the while bask in Heaven's blue smile,

Whilst he is dissolving in rains.

The sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes,

And his burning plumes outspread,

Leaps on the back of my sailing rack,

When the morning star shines dead;

As on the jag of a mountain crag,

Which an earthquake rocks and swings,

An eagle alit one moment may sit

In the light of its golden wings.

And when Sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath,

Its ardours of rest and of love,

And the crimson pall of eve may fall

From the depth of Heaven above,

With wings folded I rest, on mine aëry nest,

As still as a brooding dove.

That orbèd maiden with white fire laden,

Whom mortals call the Moon,

Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor,

By the midnight breezes strewn;

And wherever the beat of her unseen feet,

Which only the angels hear,

May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof,

The stars peep behind her and peer;

And I laugh to see them whirl and flee,

Like a swarm of golden bees,

When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent,

Till calm the rivers, lakes, and seas,

Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high,

Are each paved with the moon and these.

I bind the Sun's throne with a burning zone,

And the Moon's with a girdle of pearl;

The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim,

When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl.

From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape,

Over a torrent sea,

Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof,

The mountains its columns be.

The triumphal arch through which I march

With hurricane, fire, and snow,

When the Powers of the air are chained to my chair,

Is the million-coloured bow;

The sphere-fire above its soft colours wove,

While the moist Earth was laughing below.

I am the daughter of Earth and Water,

And the nursling of the Sky;

I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;

I change, but I cannot die.

For after the rain when with never a stain

The pavilion of Heaven is bare,

And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams

Build up the blue dome of air,

I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,

And out of the caverns of rain,

Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,

I arise and unbuild it again.

[cljordan-imperium]

LINESHARE FRIDAY

@lineshare-friday

This Friday's word is: Discovery

The piece is coming from @bombsbodyguardsbroken

It was shortly after they had broken for lunch on their sixth day there when Alexander brought a curious artifact over to Mel, who was standing up at the top of the site cleaning off a piece of pottery in a basin of distilled water.   “Look at this piece Mel, it appears to be some sort of figurine.  Human it would look like.  Maybe a doll?”  He handed the small artifact to her.  

The small carved person was about 4 inches tall and about two inches from the end of one arm to the other.  Dirt was tighly packed into each of the carved lines and a crack that ran through the middle of it.  As Mel looked at it, she had to admit that it did in fact look like a little person.  From the amount of dirt on it though, it was hard to see the fine details.  “I’m not sure what it is Alexander.  As far as I know, there have been no other discoveries like this at the site.  Let’s clean it up and see what we’ve got.”

Turning back to the table that the water basin was sitting on, she removed the piece of pottery from it and set it on a rack that was off to the side so that it could dry.  There was a soft bristled brush that sat to the side of the basin.  Mel carefully used that to remove the dirt and debris that were stuck onto and into the details of the carving.  As the details emerged, Mel couldn’t help but agree that it did look more and more like a small person.  There were little holes that went through each “arm”, her initial thought being that the small carving had been a pendant or sewn onto something, but she would have to evaluate it further later to be sure.

Once she had cleaned it as best she could in the rudimentary facilities of the dig site, she picked up a small cloth near the basin and dried the item.  Turning back around she took a few steps and called for Erik and Klaus to come look at it.  Maybe one of them had seen something similar since they had done more excavations in Europe than she had.  As she waited for them to come up from the main dig, she examined the carving more closely and weighed it in her hand.  The others from her team also started coming over to see what Alexander had found, forming a loose semi-circle around Alexander and Mel as Erik and Klaus approached.

They could not have been more than three or four yards away when Mel started to close her fingers around the carving.  For some reason she could not determine, it seemed to be heating up.  At first she had assumed that it was her body heat making the stone feel warmer, but then she noted that when she turned it over, the side away from her almost seemed hotter than the side in her hand.  Could it be some stone that held properties she was not familiar with?  Again, she would have to research it more later to determine what it could be.  

When Mel’s eyes opened, she let out a startled gasp and backed up, away from all of them.   Her eyes scanned their faces as her heart raced like a thoroughbred just out of the gate.  “What…what the fuck is going on?”  Her eyes scanned all of their faces, only three now remaining looking human:  Nic, Donovan, and Case.  Klaus and Erik looked to be some sort of Elven creatures, their features finer and their eyes a bright blue that mimicked the Caribbean Sea with the noonday sun shining down on it.  Cam and Dez looked Lupine, their eyes glowing a darker blue, more the color of Lapis, with the same golden flecks in them as the stone held.  Gabriel had fangs like a Vampeer, so when he reached out and stepped towards her made her back up faster.   Caden was covered in white fur and had features strongly resembling the Irish Puca.  And then there was Alexander who had been standing next to her.  His skin was now an iridescent blue and he had what looked like gills on his neck.

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Please let me know if you would like +/- From the list

[spiritualityloves247]

MAITRE CARREFOUR

Carrefour, Maitre – Master of the Crossroads Maitre Carrefour, master and guardian of the crossroads, may be the alter ego of Eshu Elegbara, his mirror image, shadow side, or nocturnal counterpart. Eshu Elegbara (Leg ba; Elegba) is a solar spirit. Maitre Carrefour emerges with the moon. Papa Legba is a trickster: Maitre Carrefour is a trickster taken to exponential extremes. Crossroads are places of decisions; the road chosen (or not) can impact one’s entire life. Be careful: crossroads spirits are invoked to point you to the right road or direction. If Maitre Carrefour is feeling tricky, he may point you in the wrong direction or make you lose your way. Crossroads are favourite haunts of witches, spirits, and ghosts: those magical crossroads are under Maitre Carrefour’s jurisdiction. Maitre Carrefour walks the crossroads at night, in the company of malevolent spirits. He is their master and gatekeeper. Maitre Carrefour controls comings and goings of ghosts and malevolent spirits. Carrefour unleashes the secret spirits of the night: he may be petitioned to keep them far from you. He is, however, usually a spirit of last resort. Don’t invoke him until other avenues and attempts have failed. He is a great, powerful, and potentially dangerous spirit: never summon him for trifles. Don’t get too comfortable or familiar with him. He is the master. It is not necessarily to your benefit to attract his attention without very good reason. If you feel you need him, it may be advisable to request the services of a reputable Vodou priest or priestess (houngan; mambo) to intercede for you. Maitre Carrefour is an aggressive, effective spirit. He works quickly, and so devotees love him. There are no Demons that he cannot command. However, he also punishes quickly: he’s not a good-natured, patient spirit. Never promise him what you’re not absolutely certain you can deliver immediately. Maitre Carrefour is not a spirit for beginners. He doesn’t care whether you’re just learning. Pleas for mercy may have little effect. He has a cold nature; hence he can behave cruelly although he does possess a sense of justice. He is not an evil spirit per se but a hardened, tough one. He didn’t get to be master of evil spirits by being nice. He is a brilliant, quick-thinking, tricky spirit: don’t even think of outwitting him. Maitre Carrefour is petitioned to keep malignant spirits, ghosts, and people far from you. He can break hexes, curses, and spells. If sorcerers have set ghosts or spirits after you, Maitre Carrefour can redirect them and prevent them from drawing near. Maitre Carrefour owns the night: there’s little he can’t do. • Maitre Carrefour is the Bizango counterpart to Legba, the first invoked in rituals and ceremonies. • He is syncretized to Saint Andrew, the vampire saint. • Carrefour is sometimes classified among the Barons, in which context he is Baron Carrefour (French) or Bawon Kalfou (Kreyol).

ALSO KNOWN AS:

Kalfu; Mèt Kalfou

ORIGIN:

Haiti

CLASSIFICATION:

Lwa

ANIMAL:

Black pig

COLOUR:

Black

NUMBERS:

3, 7

TIME:

Night

PLANET:

Carrefour is the sun at midnight and the moon to Legba’s noonday sun.

ALTARS:

Maitre Carrefour typically has his own altars, not shared with other spirits.

OFFERINGS:

Rum set ablaze (be careful!); cigars; lace his food generously with hot sauce, cayenne, or habanero powder

[thebeatifulones]

[auteurstearoom]

Peter Sellers, Director Peter Medak and Spike Milligan on location during the making of Ghost in the Noonday Sun.

[letterboxd]

Ghosted Films: A Director’s Nightmare.

To mark a conversation with Peter Medak about his new documentary The Ghost of Peter Sellers, which details a particularly tumultuous early 1970s film shoot, Dominic Corry looks at how the inherently nightmarish pursuit that is filmmaking has informed other movies.

“Every frame you set up references yourself and your entire life, so bits and pieces indirectly of your life go into every movie.” —Peter Medak

On a certain level, filmmaking is an essentially traumatic experience. The extreme number of moving parts, umpteen tiers of variables—both creative and practical—and the cacophony of egos involved all amount to what in the best-case scenario could generously be considered organized chaos.

And for the most part, it all falls on the director’s shoulders. Although the long-prevailing auteur theory is regularly and healthily challenged these days, our default perception tends to be that whatever happens, good or bad, it’s the director’s fault. Some directors process their filmmaking nightmares by writing a review of the film on Letterboxd. But in the case of journeyman filmmaker Peter Medak (The Changeling, The Krays, Romeo Is Bleeding), he chose to process his filmmaking trauma by… making a film about it.

The Ghost of Peter Sellers revisits the making of the 1974 Peter Sellers-starring pirate comedy Ghost in the Noonday Sun, an infamous folly of a film that has long haunted Medak. It’s also one of those rare films on Letterboxd: at the time of writing it has just two reviews, and only 26 members in a community of two million have noted seeing it. Giving it one and a half stars, EWMasters writes: “Pretty awful. I mean talk about throwing it on the stoop and seeing if the cat’ll lick it up. There is one very good sequence where the crew goes to town on this big plate of fish and vegetables that’s really well done—but otherwise, this is really only worth the time of a Sellers completist”. (Perhaps the main character’s name—Dick Scratcher—should have sounded alarm bells.)

Medak is not the first filmmaker to spin non-fictional gold out of a director’s nightmare (in this case, his own). His movie follows in the footsteps of legendary documentaries such as Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper’s 1991 film Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, which revealed the full extent of the already infamous insanity that comprised the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 classic Apocalypse Now, and used extensive footage shot at the time by Coppola’s filmmaker wife Eleanor (filmmaker spouses are handy to have along for the ride, as Nicolas Winding Refn also knows). And there’s Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s 2002 work Lost in La Mancha, which detailed Terry Gilliam’s (ironically?) Sisyphean efforts to film an adaptation of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.

In both instances, the films in question were (eventually) made—and released to some acclaim (one considerably more than the other)—but as The Ghost of Peter Sellers shows, the shooting of Ghost in the Noonday Sun was such an epic boondoggle that the unfinished film sat unreleased for years and was much later released to no acclaim whatsoever.

The uphill battle to make his never-released horror movie Northwestern made indie filmmaker Mark Borshadt an unlikely filmmaking hero thanks to the breakout success of Chris Smith’s 1999 documentary American Movie. Like with Ghost in the Noonday Sun, the efforts to make a film proved more interesting than the film being made.

Jennifer Jason Leigh and Kevin Bacon in ‘The Big Picture’ (1989).

There are several narrative films of note that have successfully captured the specific pandemonium of filmmaking. Richard Rush’s 1980 cult classic The Stunt Man follows a fugitive who stumbles his way into the titular job on a big chaotic Hollywood production (Peter O’Toole plays the Machiavellian director), while Christopher Guest’s under-appreciated 1989 comedy The Big Picture stars Kevin Bacon as a hot young director who is roughed up by the Hollywood machine. It’s a notable and often overlooked antecedent to The Player, and like the Robert Altman classic, is more about ‘the business’ overall than the specifics of filmmaking, although in both cases Hollywood proves itself analogically appropriate.

Playwright, writer and director David Mamet’s own filmmaking experiences obviously inform his 2000 comedy State and Main, in which a Hollywood production takes over and smothers a small town with its singular thinking. It’s not hard to imagine Mamet processing his own filmmaking trauma in State and Main, just as the Coen brothers famously did in Barton Fink, their ode to writer’s block supposedly inspired by the difficulty they had penning the screenplay for Miller’s Crossing.

Charlie Kaufman channeled his own creative struggles into the screenplay for the 2002 masterpiece Adaptation, then built on those themes with his wildly ambitious 2008 directorial debut Synecdoche, New York, whose more maddening aspects arguably capture the irrational nightmare that is filmmaking better than any film directly ‘about’ filmmaking.

With her 2018 documentary Shirkers, writer Sandi Tan gained some measure of closure regarding an indie film she had starred in and written in her home country of Singapore, in 1992. The documentary (which shares its name with the original movie) has her revisiting the footage from the never-released film, which was stolen (!) 25 years previously by its director—and Tan’s filmmaking mentor—George Cardona.

Back to Peter Medak. In The Ghost of Peter Sellers, which premiered at Telluride Film Festival in 2018 and has just had its virtual screening release, we learn that Hungarian-born Medak was a rising directing star in the early 1970s in London, hot off the Oscar-nominated Peter O’Toole film The Ruling Class. Unable to resist an offer to work with Peter Sellers, then comedy’s reigning superstar—mostly thanks to Blake Edwards’ Pink Panther films—Medak set about shooting a treasure-hunting pirate film on the island nation of Cyprus in the Mediterranean.

In addition to the usual production problems associated with shooting on boats, Medak had to contend with the titanically and infamously fickle Sellers, who quickly turned on him and attempted to get him fired. Sellers also antagonized the other actors, then, after failing to get the production shut down, brought in his friend and longtime creative collaborator Spike Milligan to try and salvage the film, but things kept going wrong, leaving Ghost in the Noonday Sun unfinished and Medak with the blame for the production’s troubles.

Director Peter Medak with Peter Sellers (as Dick Scratcher) and Spike Milligan (as Bill Bombay) on the set of ‘Ghost in the Noonday Sun’, finally released in 1984.

Although Medak’s career recovered, he has clearly been carrying around a lot of hurt associated with the experience, and it’s remarkable watching him work through that on screen by revisiting Cyprus, telling the story of the shoot, and talking to some of the people involved. Sellers (who died in 1980) looms large over the film, but it also has interesting content surrounding the great Spike Milligan, who died in 2002.

Why did you decide to revisit this experience with a documentary? Peter Medak: Because it’s been haunting me for all these years. Because it should’ve been a really very successful film and I was blamed for everything going wrong, when in fact it had nothing to do with me. It was due to Peter’s changing mind and state of mind, and all kinds of things had physically gone wrong on the film. It was always easiest to blame the director for everything and my career at the time was very high up after [The] Ruling Class and this should’ve been the icing on the cake and it wasn’t.

It really bothered me for many years afterwards, even though I went on working. I was asked to do it by the producer of the documentary and I originally said “It’s the last thing I want to do”, because it would mean I would have to go back to Cyprus where I shot the original movie and go on the water, and I never want anything to do with water anymore because a lot of the disasters on the film, production-wise, were all connected with shooting at sea, which is totally impossible to do. Then I thought: well, you know, I should just do it and try to explain what happened on the film. And because some of the explanations were funnier scenes than the original film. So that’s why I did it.

Peter Medak fishing for answers in ‘The Ghost of Peter Sellers’.

In the documentary, you talk about needing to free yourself from the experience by making this film. Do you feel like you achieved that? Well, I think I did because I had a wonderful time doing it. A very sad time at the same time because when you go back to places where you shot 45 years before, it creates a very strange kind of illusion inside your mind, your heart and everything of the time. And having been there then and then being there again, it’s a very strange kind of a supernatural feeling in a way. It felt like you have died and your ghost is actually revisiting all these things you know. I called it The Ghost of Peter Sellers because it sounds good and also because the original film was called Ghost in the Noonday Sun, and this ghostly feeling of mine of revisiting that island after all these years, it’s a very, very strange feeling and somehow the film captures that emotionally.

Do you feel like the large distance from the shoot was necessary to be able to revisit it? It’s not that I thought about it every day of my life, but I talked about it to all the people who I worked with in my following career. When I was doing Romeo Is Bleeding with Gary Oldman, my darling Gary said to me one day, “You know, we are crazy, what we should do is make a movie about your movie, but I don’t want to play Peter Sellers, I want to play you, with your Hungarian, broken-English accent.” We had a script written but we never did it. That was a good 25 years ago.

Peter Medak in front of a promotional poster for ‘Zorro, The Gay Blade’, his 1981 film starring George Hamilton and Lauren Hutton.

So you had considered doing a scripted version of it? Yeah, but I don’t know quite what we would’ve done. I said to Gary at the time: “I never want to go on a boat again”, and so I thought in my mind that the scenes would start each day [with] the characters getting off the pirate ship and they come ashore—that’s where the scenes would begin. I’m sure we would’ve done something quite wonderful, and it would’ve maybe explained the things the [documentary is] trying to explain because I guess that’s what has unconsciously driven me. Because [for the documentary], we didn’t write one word of it, I just completely did it out of instinct. Where I want to shoot, what I want to shoot, and how we should go from here to there. I loved it, so going back on to it was quite easy. It did show me actually what a wonderful medium it is, documentary, because you can do anything with it. It’s a much freer form than scripted movies. Which is rigid. And this is liquid.

Did you have any other documentaries about filmmaking in mind when you went into this? Not really. I knew Terry Gilliam’s Lost in La Mancha, because I love Terry and I love his films and we know each other and knew each other. Terry was very fortunate, because he had so much trouble before on Baron Munchausen, that he decided to have a documentary film crew filming the whole process, so he had the material available, which allowed him to make his film. I said to him after [a screening], “You were lucky because you didn’t make the movie. I had to suffer through 90-something days of shooting with Peter [Sellers].” But of course since then, Terry made the film, and he made something slightly different than what he was originally gonna do.

Peter Medak retraces his steps in ‘The Ghost of Peter Sellers’.

Did any of your subsequent films feel nearly as difficult? Most movies are very difficult to make, and always when you anticipate problems, they never seem to happen. When I did The Changeling, everybody said “George C. Scott is very, very difficult to work with” and he was an absolute angel with me and [it was] the easiest thing to do. It was a wonderful ghost story. I’m very proud of that film. It will live forever. All movies are like your kids, your own children, because you put so much emotion, so much of your soul. That’s what I’m saying to [Ghost in the Noonday Sun executive producer] John Heyman [in The Ghost of Peter Sellers]: the director’s viewpoint is completely different from the producer’s because every frame you set up references yourself and your entire life, so bits and pieces indirectly of your life go into every movie. Because of that it becomes an incredibly personal journey when you put your absolute soul on the line. When it gets criticized or not accepted or whatever, one takes it very personally because the whole thing came from a very personal experience, even though the subject may be nothing to do with you.

Peter Sellers on the set of ‘Ghost in the Noonday Sun’.

Even within the canon of famously difficult performers, Peter Sellers is notorious. How would you describe him to a modern audience? Well he was a genius, there’s no question about it. But he was a manic-depressive person. And it’s a generalization, but most of the great comics are manic-depressive. And he changes his mind all the time. One minute, he loves you, next minute, he hates you. One minute he loves the subject, next minute he doesn’t wanna do it, he wants to get out and all that. So it is very up and down. When you’re running film with a crew of 150 people, and boats on the sea, and weather’s changing and everything, you can’t have that, because you fall behind the schedule and things go wrong.

At one point very early on, all he wanted to do was get off the movie. And then he did everything he [could] to sabotage the film so the film would close down and he wouldn’t have to finish it. But it didn’t just happen on my film, it happened with all his biggest successes, including the Pink Panther movies. Because if you look into Blake Edwards, each one was an absolute nightmare for the director and for the film company, United Artists. And I was gonna include that in the documentary but it had nothing to do with the Ghost in the Noonday Sun so I didn’t. I actually shot some scenes with one of the executives from United Artists at that time who had to deal with the insanity of Peter and also Blake Edwards. I say ‘insanity’; I didn’t want to say it too much in the documentary because I love Peter, even today. And it’s wrong for me to accuse him of those things because it sounds like I’m excusing myself. Peter was crazy. There’s no other way one can describe it. Touched by God. And so was Spike Milligan. But Spike had the love of goodness. Peter had kind of a nasty streak on him when he turned on people.

There’s a moment in the documentary where you suggest that Spike Milligan is more influential than he gets credit for. Do you think he’s under-appreciated? Totally. Totally. Totally. Because his talent was absolutely, monumentally genius. I always say this, but Spike basically created Peter Sellers through [legendary BBC radio programme] The Goon Show. And he also gave him all those various characters and developed those voices for him. It’s all in The Goon Show. The Monty Pythons, they were inspired by The Goon Show and they made it into television. Not story wise, but style wise. That kind of zany, insane humor. Spike was a total genius. Not that Peter wasn’t, but they stood together, completely overwhelmingly wonderfully insane. But Spike was quite something. He was incredibly human, he was incredibly gentle. And incredibly kind. Peter was incredibly combative. And he had that most incredible ego.

But all our lives come from our backgrounds and what our past was and where we come from, and Peter had a very sad upbringing and a very sad life and he was tremendously influenced by his mother. When his mother passed away, he kept on talking to her for ten years. When he came to Cyprus to make the movie, he arrived with big blow-up [photos] of Liza Minnelli—who he’d just broken up with a week before—and his mum. And it sounds terrible when one says it, but psychologically, some of the answers are there. But at the same time, both Peter and Spike, I can’t tell you what a gift it was… I mean the reason I did the film is: who could give up the chance of actually working with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan? It doesn’t matter what the fucking script is, you know? It was a wonderful thing and I would do it all over again tomorrow.

Related content

Our Showdown on films within films

‘The Ghost of Peter Sellers’ is screening in virtual theaters now. It will be available via video on demand services from June 23. A list of all the films mentioned in this article can be found here. Comments have been edited for clarity and length.

[joespinell]

the fact that peter sellers and peter boyle (celebrity favs) interacted on screen in ghost in the noonday sun (1973) for 2.5 seconds really means that nothing is impossible . if you care

[richardhenrysellers]

Peter Medak, centre, directs Peter Sellers, left, and Spike Milligan in the unreleased Ghost in the Noonday Sun in 1973 on location in Cyprus. Photograph: World Film Services.

[scattered-winter]

it was such a small thing.

the supple leather of his mask, the gummy glue that fixed it to his skin. such a small and little thing. he could cradle it between his fingers, watch the snowflakes land like dewdrops of sugared starlight, dust them away with a hand.

such a small thing.

such a precious thing.

it guarded him, in the long and tireless nights, the moon a spot of silver behind heavy-handed clouds. a blur of shadow, of air, a breath of space where no space had been.

it protected him, from prying eyes and grasping hands and flashing cameras and endless voices. from newspapers and photographs and word of mouth.

it transformed him, from boy to legend and orphan to partner and human to nature. without the mask he was nothing and everything and with it he was a ghost. faceless. voiceless. formless. an idea a dark whisper of fear a small spark of hope.

untouchable.

by blade and bullet and striking hand. nobody could touch robin, because robin was the whispering wind and the creeping shadow and the spears of golden sun burning away the night.

but take all that away and he was a boy with a torn out heart. a boy with jagged edges and ripped veins trailing out behind. a boy with fear. with rage. with grief.

take all that away and he was human and broken and vulnerable and open. scars and open wounds dripping onto the floor and seeping between the boards and into the cold earth below.

it was such a small thing.

but to him it was everything.

some wore armor, like knights of old with souls of men and hearts of lions. some carried power within them, a burning flame of different, an electric buzz of new. some carried shields, to shelter behind, to shelter others, against hails of bullets and clanging of swords.

he wore his mask, the shield the power the armor. the knight the hero the soldier. not the boy. not the broken. not the mourner. not the last of the fliers, the last of those who were born to the skies with lightness to their feet like air, the last of those with the faint ghostly glimmer of wings when they caught the light.

but wally…

so incredibly similar and yet so irreversibly different. heroes and apprentices and boys with hearts of iron, with the stone-faced stubbornness of windblown mountains that refuse to bow.

wally's shield was his power. crackling energy, like tongues of flame, like spears of lightning, in his every move, lighting behind his eyes, dancing through his words.

where robin was a breath of quiet night, still and silent, wally was the bold heat of noonday sun. crackling with life and joy and energy, lightning and life-giving fire.

opposites and reflections and two sides of a whole.

yin and yang, the sun and moon, the ocean and sky. opposite sides of a coin, linked by the hands, joined at the hip.

robin was mysterious, a smudge of shadow hidden behind curtains of dewdrop mist. wally peeled away his layers one by one, armor and shields and walls of thorn and stone, battlements and constructs, pulled back with gentle fingers and soft hands and quiet laughter and wally, wally, wally. only the mask remained. the linchpin, the capstone, the crown and the scepter.

such a little thing.

but robin's laughter was gentle drops of rain, blooming life wherever it touched, bringing with it the electric, heady scent of a storm. and where wally had first craned his neck to see the flash of eyes, he no longer fantasized about the chink in the armor, the final piece to the puzzle that was robin.

robin was his friend. he was brave and kind and good and that was everything.

he was everything.

and, sitting side by side at the top of the mountain, a galaxy of pinprick stars clouding above, a forest of silent pines standing guard below, the world and future and galaxy at their feet, the mask, the chink in the armor, fell away like a dropped curtain, like dust blown from a table and clouding in the air.

fingers rose, steady and sure, and robin peeled the mask away, layers and layers of armor and protection and battlements and walls coming undone with the glue.

his name was dick grayson. and he was just a boy.

but he was also robin. he was also everything and nothing and the endless expanse of stars wheeling above.

the final puzzle piece. the name, the eyes, the face. but even without it wally had had the full picture, strokes of paint and lines of charcoal stretching across canvas.

robin's eyes were blue. like the sky at high noon, like the ocean far across the horizon, like bolts of pure flame.

even when the mask returned to his face, armor reapplied and shield taken up once more, wally could feel the tangle of nerves and thoughts and knowledge. robin's eyes were blue.

he had been shown the chink in robin's armor. the weakness, the nerve, the scarred human boy beneath the mask, beneath the legend. beneath robin.

it frightened him.

one wrong move, one wrong word, and the arrows and blades and bullets would slice through the armor, through the legend, through the boy. it was a tremendous knowledge, possessing the key to robin's weakness.

but robin knew. even if the world came crashing down around them, even if a knife was put into wally's hands…he would not cut him. he would not touch the chink in robin's armor except to reverently brush it over with his fingers, like something precious, like something holy.

such a little thing, he mused, the blue of robin's eyes lost behind the expressionless white of his mask but never gone, no.

such a tiny, little thing.

sometimes I think about how Wally was the only person on the og team who knew Robin's secret identity in season one and sometimes I also think about the inherent intimate nature of masks and secret identities and sometimes I write about it. idk

[sparxwrites]

wearing thin

(i came up with this idea, and said to myself i’d just outline it, and then wrote most of this this like a woman possessed to the mitis remix of “cold skin”. the rest of it got written primarily to make the first bit of writing hurt more.)

cw for temporary character death/respawning, mentions of blood and sex and animal death, major angst

[ao3]

Grian kills Bdubs, and then comes after Scar with the fury of a man scorned. As he should. As is his right.

Scar does not begrudge him this. Scar kneels, waist deep in murky water, and bares his throat, and says, Kill me. And then he says, hot and desperate, We’ve won, Grian, we’ve won. Can’t we both win?

Grian, his head full of whispers, bares his teeth beneath the rising full moon, and says, No. He says, The ghosts demand a fight.

And Scar, on his knees, smiling, says, Who cares what they have to say? It’s just us here now.

And Grian – a fool, always a fool – listens to him.

–

They go back to Monopoly Mountain, together. They fix the house. Their fortress returns to them, slow and painstaking, brick by sandstone brick. They build back better this time. Stronger. More comfortable. Meant to last.

It’s got to be a proper home for us, after all, Scar says, and Grian smiles at him, wide and wild, his teeth gleaming under the noonday sun.

So they build the house. They build a home. They build Pizza a better grave.

They build a farm, a proper one, tended to by Grian on his hands and knees in the dry soil. He gets dirt under his nails, and in the cracks of his knuckles, and sunburn across the bridge of his nose. The wheat sprouts slow, reluctant, and then blooms all at once, unfolding pale green to golden under the encouragement of the cloudless sky and hiss careful hands.

Scar goes fishing, and comes back with fat cod and pink salmon, and strange little water-beasts he found under the rocks. They keep the fish, for cooking and pickling and smoking. Grian crushes the little water-beasts beneath a rock, one by one, methodical, and watches them squirm as they die.

Together, they eke out a life for themselves, under the hot desert sun – snapping and snarling at each others’ throats by day, as their red lives demand, and sleeping curled close to one another at night on their single mattress. It’s to conserve heat. Night gets cold in the desert, bitter and vicious as a blade, and neither of them have made panes for the windows yet, despite the abundance of sand. The fire in the kitchen does not reach up to their bedroom, at the top of the fortress’s tower.

And, besides– there’s only one bed.

They could make another, but neither of them have.

They don’t talk about that. They don’t talk about the way Scar smiles as Grian guts the fish he brings back, turned red up to his wrists with gore. They don’t talk about the way Grian’s nose presses, cold, against Scar’s collarbone at night.

–

Scar talks to the ghosts, sometimes, by day. They linger still, voices on the wind; waiting for a fight, maybe, that they will never get. Sometimes they talk back. Not often, though. And as the days and weeks pass, fewer and fewer speak at all.

In the end, only Martyn remains, sullen in death and quiet with it, mourning the loss of his king.

Why don’t the others talk any more? asks Scar, one sun-drenched morning, as he fits panes of glass in the fortress’ windows. It is delicate work, methodical, but not laborious. He is slick with sweat, nonetheless, the desert temperatures climbing higher and higher with the rising of the sun.

They’re not here any more, says Martyn, a whisper on the breeze. They moved on.

And Scar asks, Moved on where?

And Martyn says, Home. And then he says, quieter, as though sharing a secret, back to H̴̭̬̿e̵̯̚ȑ̸͚͍̾m̶͕̪̿i̵̻̿́t̴̯̐̒c̶̜̬̋r̷̗͊a̶̧̋̄f̸̡͉̊t mostly. That’s where you should be.

One of those words makes no sense, to Scar. One of those words makes his head hurt, puts pressure on his eardrums, like a needle threatening to pierce.

But this is my home, Scar says, instead of thinking about that. He looks out at where Grian is stood amidst the waist-high wheat, harvesting it, pink-red with sunburn on the back of his neck and the tips of his ears, tanning nut-brown everywhere else. His hair’s gone close to dirty gold, after after days upon days of long hours in the hot sun. Freckles have risen across his nose, his cheeks, a scattered constellation of slowly-bronzing stars.

Scar counts them at night, sometimes, when he cannot sleep. They still share one bed.

He is my home, he says, and means it.

Martyn sighs, and says nothing, and Scar thinks of Dogwarts – gone up in flames and gunpowder, three weeks back, Grian whooping and giddy with the joy of destruction – and the red cloak that burnt along with it. Of the diamond axe that did not. He does not press, but he thinks, perhaps, that Martyn understands.

Except his curiosity gets the better of him, and he asks, Why are you still here, then?

And Martyn sighs, again, and says, I stayed to Watch. They made me.

And then he says nothing more, no matter how Scar pesters him.

–

Grian talks to the moon sometimes, by night.

He slips out of bed when he thinks Scar is asleep, and pads out of the room, down the stairs, out of their house. He walks across the sand, barefoot, his hair golden-wild and his eyes dark, bruised, sleepless. He stands right on the sheer-drop edge their mountain’s cliff, toes curled over the crumbling overhang of it, and he stares up at the moon full in the sky. And he speaks to it.

Scar watches him, sometimes, from the window – always pretends to be asleep when Grian returns. Does not flinch, when Grian’s night-cold nose presses into the hollow of his throat. Does not shiver, when Grian’s sand-chilled feet tangle with his own.

The moon, so far as Scar can tell, does not talk back.

–

Where do you go at night? asks Scar, one day, while they’re in the kitchen chopping vegetables for stew. There’s a new llama, Calzone, sticking its head through an open window to steal carrot-tops from the counter. There’s a cat sprawled lazily out on the kitchen table, catching the last patch of sun as it sets. It feels like home, the kitchen, with the two of them in it.

Grian doesn’t meet his eyes as he says, Nowhere. Sometimes you just gotta go pee! Or get a glass of water. Or– other stuff. Nothing important.

Scar doesn’t call him on the lie. The carrots beneath his kitchen knife take approximately the same amount of pressure to cut as bone does. His old sword hangs on the wall above the fireplace, just below Grian’s. Sometimes he imagines taking it down, and taking it to the back of Grian’s neck, or the front of his ribcage. Not for any particular reason. Just because.

His red heart beats hungry inside his chest, alongside his other one. His softer one. His weaker one.

Who do you talk to during the day, hmm? says Grian, and he says it as a tease but it sounds like an accusation. Grian carries his red heart in this throat, close behind his teeth. When you leave me to do all the farm work. Lazybones.

Scar cuts the carrots, methodical, practised, snick-snick-snick. Oh, no one, he says, no one at all. Just the wind.

–

Scar wakes one night to Grian sat across his hips, his eyes gleaming in the moonlight. They are dark, and sleepless, but not bruised the way they are when he talks to the moon – instead, they are wide, bright. Watching.

Can I–? asks Grian, and he sounds like a man lost in a desert begging for water. He licks his lips.

Scar does not need to ask him what he is asking for.

So he says, Yes, yes, Grian, of course, yes–, because there is nothing else to say. His voice is loud in the quiet of the night, sleep-rough, stunned and wanting.

And then he says nothing more, because he has no mouth with which to say it. Grian’s lips are sun-chapped, demanding, hiding teeth capable of drawing blood. His hair is soft when Scar threads a hand through it, and the noise he makes when Scar pulls him closer is sweeter than any birdsong. He tastes, inexplicably, of strawberries.

As always, Grian takes what he wants, with a gleeful abandon. He takes what he wants, and does not bother to ask permission again. He has it, now – and in truth has always had it – and that knowledge makes him dangerous in the best possible way.

Scar says no more words, that night. But he noises he makes–

The both of them say no words the next morning, either. The sun rises, and them with it, and they sit at their kitchen table and eat last night’s bread and stew cold for breakfast. They are silent, as the light filters through the windows, as Jellie rouses too and begins to beg for scraps – but when Scar presses his foot to Grian’s, beneath the table, Grian smiles. It looks, a little, like a sunrise.

The sensation of home tightens, like a noose, around the softness of Scar’s weaker heart.

–

They live. Together, two red lives in a world coloured yellow and green, they live.

Grian tends to the dirt, to the little growing things he plants there. He grows, too, strong and lean with the manual labour, wiry with muscle from hard work and plain food. His hair grows, down past his ears, until he is forced to tie it up to keep it out of his eyes. He tries to take shears to it; Scar stops him.

Scar tends to their fortress, to the house they have made together, and makes it a home. He changes, too, he supposes. The grey of his skin bleaches pale, to the colour of the ash left in their kitchen-hearth each morning. The builder’s callouses fade from his fingers, and he loses some of the hard definition of his muscles, the sharp angles, the edges and corners. He softens. His soft heart grows softer, day by day. The red one beside it quiets, until the bloodlust is but a distant whisper in his ear.

Grian brings them food, each evening, with hands dirty from their farm and a smile white and bright as the moon. And each evening, Scar waits for him with gifts – fresh bread and fish, gunpowder, small creatures for him to kill.

Unlike him, Grian’s red has not abated.

The land outside their desert turns into a web of holes punched into the earth, some down to bedrock, some still burning. No structures survive. The other houses, castles, fortresses were gone within the first few weeks, blown up and burnt to the ground; the village went soon after. Nothing else remains but trees and grass and craters – and sand.

This is their world now. Grian takes dominion over it, shapes it to his will, sets his marks across it as he pleases and whoops with joy at each explosion. Scar, content to simply watch, inhabits it. This is their world, now, and theirs alone. This is their home.

–

One night, the moon speaks back.

Grian stands on the edge of the cliff, and Scar stands by the window of their bedroom and watches him. And when Grian calls out to the moon and says, Is this it? Is this all there is, now?, the moon speaks back.

The moon says, Y̷̫͎̓ǒ̶̰́u̷̠̓ ̷͈̈́h̸̯̭͂̚ą̷͙̀v̶͕̬́͆ȅ̸͓̝̿ ̸̫̇͌n̴̂ͅo̴͔͒̕ẗ̶̞ ̶͈̆̚ẅ̵̞͇o̶̢͗n̵̮̒̿ ̷͙̈t̶̻͉̅ĥ̴̤̞̆e̷̹͎̾͘ ̷͓̉ģ̷̰̀͐a̷̙̾m̴̲̓e̸̯̐ ̵͖̐̉ý̶̙ẹ̸̊t̸̼͐̒. The moon is no longer the moon. The moon has wings. The moon is made of eyes, and they all blink at different times, unharmonised. The moon speaks in a voice that makes the fine bones of Scar’s ears hurt, even from a distance.

The moon is no longer the moon, it is a person, and it is the moon, and it is eyes-wings-shapes-pain, and it hurts to look at. Scar cannot look away.

Grian stares at the moon, and says, What happens to the winner?

And the moon speaks back and says, T̵̳͊̄h̴̦̙̒å̵̯ţ̵͐͆ ̶͕̊́i̸͙͔̅͊ş̵̮͆͂ ̸̺͐a̵͚̖̅̚ ̶͓̾͘s̷̝̃u̵̪͒͠r̷̬̳̄́p̵̮͎̅r̴̲͔̓͝i̵̼̋̚s̷̼̣͝ë̵̪͋.

Grian stares at the moon, and does not flinch from its voice. Then what happens to the loser? he says.

And the moon says, T̶̠͒͝h̶̟̃̈́ė̸̼̻ỷ̴̠ ̵̯͆g̵̞͑o̸̟̕ ̵̖̐̿h̵͍̉̌ỏ̸͇͔͋ḿ̸̳͖è̵͚͖͋, and Scar thinks his ears are bleeding.

Grian says, So I’ve got to do it, then, and the moon is silent. He says, Because you can’t have him. He says, He’s mine.

The moon is silent. The eyes are gone, and the wings are gone, and once again the moon is just that – a full moon, hung heavy and quiet in the sky.

Grian stands there for another ten silent minutes, twenty. And then he turns, and leaves the cliff.

When he returns, Scar is back in their bed, and his eyes are closed. Grian’s feet, when they tangle with his, are colder even than the bite of the night air. Grian’s face, when he shoves it into the junction of Scar’s throat and shoulder, is wet with tears.

–

What did the moon say to you? asks Scar, as they eat fresh-baked bread and cold pickled fish for lunch, sat at the table in their sun-drenched kitchen. Their cat is sat on Scar’s lap, purring, purring. He has named her Jellie. He doesn’t know why.

Grian looks at Scar, and then down at his fish. Do you want to go home, Scar? he says, and Scar laughs.

What do you mean? he says, and smiles. This is my home! Right here. And yours, too.

And Grian smiles, too, but he says, No, but like… home-home.

And Scar frowns at him, and says, What do you mean? This is all there’s ever been.

And Grian looks at him again, no longer smiling, and then out the window at the moonless midday sky, and then back to him, and there is a look on his face that Scar cannot put words to. Horror, perhaps. But that misses the wideness of it, the weight of it, the way it opened up on Grian’s face like a yawning chasm between blinks.

Oh, says Grian, and then, The moon said nothing. Nothing important. What did your voices on the wind say to you?

Scar doesn’t ask how he knows, about the voices, about the wind. He says, They’re mostly gone, now. It’s just Martyn. He says they made him stay to watch.

And Grian says, Yeah. I bet they did. They like doing that. And then he says nothing more.

They eat their warm bread and cold fish in silence, and when Scar stands to accompany Grian for the day’s farming, Jellie mewls her displeasure at being displaced from his lap. There are dirty dishes in the sink, and half a loaf of bread left on the table, and an unclosed jar of pickled fish and vegetables on the counter. Outside, the bright sun catches on Grian’s golden hair, makes an afternoon halo of it as he pulls weeds out from between the budding wheat on his knees.

Scar watches, breathless, and cannot imagine ever wanting to be anywhere else.

–

Scar wakes one night to Grian sat across his hips, and a sword at his throat. There are tears in Grian’s eyes. There are too many of Grian’s eyes. His irises are red. He looks like the moon.

He looks like his red life is no longer in his throat.

I have to, he says, and he presses down, and the sword cuts through Scar’s throat like his knife had cut through the potatoes they’d prepared together for dinner. The mattress beneath him turns as red as Grian’s eyes.

Scar says nothing. He does not have to.

I have to, says Grian, and presses down harder. It’s the only way you can go home. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’ll see you again. I think. I hope. I’m sorry. I–

And Scar bleeds out into darkness.

–

Scar wakes up in his bed, at home. Sunlight streams in through the windows, and there is a cat called Jellie curled up beside him on the sheets, and there are trees outside instead of miles and miles of sand.

He cannot remember why there might be miles and miles of sand; he’s not even sure where the nearest desert is. He cannot think why his body might have been settled, sleeping, into a shape that made space for someone else to curl up close to his chest. He cannot think why the bed feels empty. He cannot think why he feels cold.

He decides to make bread for breakfast, and only realises his error when he has to wait for it to leaven on the warm windowsill. For something to do, he chops carrots, and then potatoes, for dinnertime stew. He cannot think why the action feels so easy, so automatic. He cannot think why it feels like there is something missing.

He cannot think why the name Grian is on his lips, when it is as unfamiliar to him as the desert landscape he sees behind his eyelids when he blinks.

He cannot think why the first thing he thought, upon waking, was I love you too.

[kinetic-elaboration]

September 6: Southern Gothic AU Scene

Bellamy-centric little thing from the universe of my (as yet untitled) Southern Gothic fic

This won’t be in the fic itself, at least as far as my plans for it are now, but it does relate to the events of the story.

~645 words

*

Nearly two decades of weeds have grown up wild around the house. In the faint sweep of the flashlight beam, Bellamy sees them, hanging heavy over themselves, sweet purple and faded yellow and green on top of green on top of green. A sick and heady scent rises from them, and the unceasing buzz of night insects, and the angry scream of the cicadas like heavy static in the air. Vines have started to climb up the house itself, curling over the banister that holds up the front porch, and around the windows, the dark glass of which picks up the roving light in sharp flashes skimming over black.

The weeds are reaching for the roadside too, but without the sustenance of soil they drape themselves instead around the rusted iron of the old fence: curls of cracked black metal twined with reaching, hoary plant limbs, the earth slowly reclaiming its own. The fence meets in an elaborate gate topped by a cursive G, which has been locked now for more than twenty years, for as long as anyone in town can remember, and that is a mighty long time. But the fence itself only extends ten feet in either direction, and then abruptly stops. Like maybe the Griffins were trying to keep something out, but they damn sure weren't trying too hard.

To the left, the street ends, the neighborhood ends, the town ends, and the road continues on to other towns. To the right, there is only a wasteland of tall grass and unrestrained, rancid growth, until the next house rises up, no more than a shadow, two long, wild, empty lots away. The lots next to the Griffin house are empty because the Griffin family owned them too. Never built on them nor sold them. And now as far as anyone in Arkadia's concerned, the neighborhood is better off that way.

Bellamy flicks his flashlight once more over the scene. There's a tire swing hanging by a rotten rope, from the largest branch of the tree in the front yard. He thinks he can see it moving, creaking in a thin breeze, though the heavy late-summer air is thick and still.

He looks away and up at the house again. That house. Silent and pale, with its glassy blank eyes, its empty widow's walk, its wide and empty porch. No one's been inside it since the cops hauled the body out, not even whoever owns it now, if anyone even does. He can only imagine the treasures he'll find there--hell, it hardly matters, anything will do. Jewelry in a lock box, silverware in a drawer. The gold frames of the portraits they probably hung of themselves in the drawing room, or the thick curtains they used to block out the high heat of the noonday sun. He's not picky. He'll take his time; he has all night.

Bellamy's never been a believer, in ghosts or anything else, and in the eerie stillness of the deep night, he hears only the raucous noise of the bugs, and beneath it an impenetrable quiet, and in that quiet he feels nothing at all.

Behind him, he hears Jasper shiver, an exaggerated, shaking sound. "Gives you the creeps a little, doesn't it?" he says.

Bellamy flicks the light to the door of the house again. "That's just those old superstitions talking," he answers. Knows it's more than that for Jasper, but it's not the time for a debate. Worst thing he might find in that old, stagnant, decaying place is someone else, as flesh and blood as he is, happening to have the same idea as him--and out for blood, as he is. But he's got his boys behind him, not just Jasper and Monty, but Miller and Dax, and John Murphy, the second best thief he knows, and Murphy's girlfriend, Emori, who is the first. Two knives on his person. Something hot like fire in his gut.

What some might say is the devil, the very devil himself, burning hellfire there.

[flowerflamestars]

Shoreless Sea snippet

Helion was not the only one waiting for Nesta’s return.   It said something about the dragging euphoria of her tiredness, of her skin still singing with Tarquin’s touch, that she managed to ignore so long what was outside her own front door.   A place sometimes an almond orchard, a Day meadow bursting with light, or days like this- white marble and Daystone, an orange tree shrouded courtyard that lived alongside Helion’s palace.   Pale stone, pale blossoms blooming enchanting, and blackened half-dry Illyrian blood smeared by the wings of the shadowsinger patient under the noonday sun.   Like dropping into icy water, a neat wound to run her straight through, Nesta froze. Nesta stopped- breathing, thinking, smiling.

All she could smell was blood, iron-rich taste a ghost on her lips.   Not Azriel’s- not all Azriel’s.   Who turned gutted black eyes on hers, three syllables ground between her teeth that Azriel had the grace not to wait for her to say. Ask. Unnecessary, and they both knew it.

[lailoken]

The Bwbachod

“The Bwbach, or Boobach [plural Bwbachod,] is the good-natured goblin which does good turns for the tidy Welsh maid who wins its favour by a certain course of behaviour recommended by long tradition. The maid having swept the kitchen, makes a good fire the last thing at night, and having put the churn, filled with cream, on the whitened hearth, with a basin of fresh cream for the Bwbach on the hob, goes to bed to await the event. In the morning she finds (if she is in luck) that the Bwbach has emptied the basin of cream, and plied the churn-dasher so well that the maid has but to give a thump or two to bring the butter in a great lump. Like the Ellyll which it so much resembles, the Bwbach does not approve of dissenters and their ways, and especially strong is its aversion to total abstainers.

There was a Bwbach belonging to a certain estate in Cardiganshire, which took great umbrage at a Baptist preacher who was a guest in the house, and who was much fonder of prayers than of good ale. Now the Bwbach had a weakness in favour of people who sat around the hearth with their mugs of cwrw da and their pipes, and it took to pestering the preacher. One night it jerked the stool from under the good man’s elbows, as he knelt pouring forth prayer, so that he fell down flat on his face. Another time it interrupted the devotions by jangling the fire-irons on the hearth; and it was continually making the dogs fall a-howling during prayers, or frightening the farm-boy by grinning at him through the window, or throwing the maid into fits. At last it had the audacity to attack the preacher as he was crossing a field. The minister told the story in this wise: “I was reading busily in my hymn-book as I walked on, when a sudden fear came over me and my legs began to tremble. A shadow crept upon me from behind, and when I turned round — it was myself! — my person, my dress, and even my hymn-book. I looked in its face a moment, and then fell insensible to the ground.” And there, insensible still, they found him. This encounter proved too much for the good man, who considered it a warning to him to leave those parts. He accordingly mounted his horse next day and rode away. A boy of the neighbourhood, whose veracity was, like that of all boys, unimpeachable, afterwards said that he saw the Bwbach jump up behind the preacher, on the horse’s back. And the horse went like lightning, with eyes like balls of fire, and the preacher looking back over his shoulder at the Bwbach, that grinned from ear to ear.

The same confusion in outlines which exists regarding our own Bogie and Hobgoblin gives the Bwbach a double character, as a household fairy and as a terrifying phantom. In both aspects it is ludicrous, but in the latter it has dangerous practices. To get into its clutches under certain circumstances is no trifling matter, for it has the power of whisking people off through the air. Its services are brought into requisition for this purpose by troubled ghosts who cannot sleep on account of hidden treasure they want removed; and if they can succeed in getting a mortal to help them in removing the treasure, they employ the Bwbach to transport the mortal through the air.

This ludicrous fairy is in France represented by the gobelin. Mothers threaten children with him. ‘Le gobelin vous mangera, le gobelin vous emportera.’ In the English ‘hobgoblin’ we have a word apparently derived from the Welsh hob, to hop, and coblyn, a goblin, which presents a hopping goblin to the mind, and suggests the Pwca (with which the Bwbach is also confused in the popular fancy at times), but should mean in English simply the goblin of the hob, or household fairy. In its bugbear aspect, the Bwbach, like the English bogie, is believed to be identical with the Slavonic ‘bog,’ and the ‘baga’ of the Cuneiform Inscriptions, both of which are names for the Supreme Being, according to Professor Fiske. ‘The ancestral form of these epithets is found in the old Aryan “Bhaga,” which reappears unchanged in the Sanskrit of the Vedas, and has left a memento of itself in the surname of the Phrygian Zeus “Bagaios.” It seems originally to have denoted either the unclouded sun, or the sky of noonday illuminated by the solar rays.

...Thus the same name which to the Vedic poet, to the Persian of the time of Xerxes, and to the modern Russian, suggests the supreme majesty of deity, is in English associated with an ugly and ludicrous fiend, closely akin to that grotesque Northern Devil of whom Southey was unable to think without laughing.”

—

British Goblins,

Wirt Sikes, 1881