William Allison (December 13, 1999)It seems there's been a number of mentions of "The Visiting Star" recently. Seeing as some of our number have recently received their copies of the COLLECTED AICKMAN, and others may have the story in Mazzeo's HAUNTINGS or Dalby's MISTLETOE AND MAYHEM (aka HORRORS FOR CHRISTMAS in the UK) I thought we might want to consider giving this one the old a.b.g-f treatment like we did "The Trains" and "The Same Dog" a while back... Certainly the time of year is appropriate...Bill A.
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Robert Kunath (December 14, 1999)
An inspired choice, Bill. Forgive me if I rush in where the angels have feared to tread, but I just re-read "The Visiting Star" a few nights ago (abashed to discover that I couldn't remember it from my first reading some years ago). I certainly haven't given it enough thought yet, but my sense is that VS is not top-drawer Aickman. Every one of his stories is worth reading, but (at least for me) some gel while others do not, and VS just did not seem to come together for me. The strengths of the story are--as always--exquisite nuance and characterization, yet, for me, the story is too weighed down by the prosaic detail that Aickman piles on so lavishly (lead and plumbago mining, indeed!). I am a firm believer in the quote from Sacheverell Sitwell that Aickman used as the epigraph to *Cold Hand in Mine*: "In the end it is the mystery that lasts and not the explanation." But there has to *be* a mystery for that to work, and VS strikes me, at least, as insufficiently mysterious.Receiving the collected Aickman has in part convinced me of the wisdom of the anthologists who put together *Painted Devils* (did Aickman pick those stories?) and *The Wine-Dark Sea*. Most of those stories *are* top-drawer Aickman. Of the previously inaccessible Aickman that I have had a chance to look at (well, just two stories, so far), the one that has most impressed me is "The Insufficient Answer." I find myself mulling that one over in a way that I never did (or have) with "Visiting Star." In the "Visiting Star" category is the other unknown Aickman that I read, "A Roman Question": it too seems to have the mystery overwhelmed by the prosaic.
I look forward to having my eyes opened during the discussion!
Robert
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rbadac (December 14, 1999)
You can count me in. Like I need an invitation.What is it, Monday? Two days’ reading and meditating time enough for everybody?
rbadac
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William Allison (December 14, 1999
Robert Kunath wrote:
> An inspired choice, Bill.Not much inspiration I'm afraid (perspiration perhaps) in my choice. I thought it worth a look given the number of favorable comments made about it, and the Christmas tie-in...
> Receiving the collected Aickman has in part convinced me of the wisdom
> of the anthologists who put together *Painted Devils* (did Aickman pick
> those stories?) and *The Wine-Dark Sea*.I'm pretty sure Aickman chose the stories for PAINTED DEVILS, though I have no hard evidence of this. COLD HAND IN MINE was published over here to tie-in to the World Fantasy Award for "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal", and I suspect a second book was sold as part of that deal. It would make sense for the follow-up book to present the best of the non-COLD HAND material. I would not be surprised if Kirby McCauley was involved in the story selections, seeing as he was an advisor to Aickman on the selections for the Fontana Great Ghost Stories series.
> I look forward to having my eyes opened during the discussion!
Hopefully it will all be more fun than a poke in the eye...
Bill A.
oOo
Not many people are aware of this, but just before Robert Aickman's collection POWERS OF DARKNESS (Collins; London, 1966) went to press, the collator had gotten drunk and misplaced the last three pages of 'The Visiting Star.' Pressed by a deadline, he sent what he had, and the story was printed in truncated form there and in all succeeding editions thereafter. No one ever noticed except Aickman himself, who was secretly amused, and considered the lopped version superior to the original; he and the collator became great friends, and he often treated the fellow to a few pints after work, calling him 'the best editor I ever had,' and cackling with glee at the additional ambiguity produced.After Aickman's death, the collator (whose name was Hiram Monseignor) unfortunately suffered a decline, and was eventually fired from Collins; now a raging alcoholic, he moved to America and stumbled through a succession of ever more humiliating occupations (census taker, computer year dating program installer, statistician for tobacco companies, spell-checker for Dan Quayle), until finally landing a job at White Wolf Publishing.
The missing text was discovered in the left of a pair of his discarded shoes, where it had been used to patch a hole; 33 years after the initial appearance of the story, it is here reproduced for the first time anywhere.
The Visiting Star (append)
Further performances of *As You Like It* were announced the next day as being postponed indefinitely, and after a week of furtive, frenzied activity at the Hippodrome, Malnik was forced to reveal that the entire program had been canceled. The papers' outcry was immediate; they appeared to revel in this new betrayal, and there were calls for the Arts Council to suspend Malnik's tenure at the theatre.
It proved to be a moot issue, however. As it happened, the Tabard Players left town soon after and went on the road with a rather lackluster version of *A Scrap Of Paper*, which did badly, and was soon abandoned. At Tetherbarrow Dean, Malnik was rumoured to have had an altercation with the town fathers over the play's preview advertising; though it was not strictly his fault, they had been under the impression that Arabella Rokeby would be with the cast, which in fact she wasn't, not having been seen since the night of her performance Christmas Eve.
That had apparently been the last performance of Miss Rokeby there or anywhere else. No one saw her return to the hotel afterwards, or witnessed her depart by any known conveyance, nor did anyone call for the body of her companion, which lay at the undertaker's for an indecent period before finally being interred beneath an uninscribed marker in the town's own cemetery. The funeral was not attended, and very few were even aware it had taken place. The hired Irish pallbearers were heard to remark rather rudely on the lightness of the little casket, which was a cheap affair; when it was over, they repaired to a public house near the business district, where all that was ever ascertained of Myrrha's fate was what was overheard of their drunken conversation by the other patrons.
Colvin was unaware of any of this. He'd checked out of the Emancipation Hotel on Boxing Day, and had gotten rooms across town at a boarding- house run by a pair of spinster sisters named Potts, who catered to some of the older, less rowdy coal miners of the district, and served the same tea each day, salt pork and biscuits. He threw himself back into his book with a severity that in casual moments surprised him, and endeavored not to think about the events of the past month, or of Miss Rokeby. It was almost successful. Out on the fells one afternoon, he found himself again in the vicinity of that same disused mine he and the visiting star had explored on a Sunday that seemed eons ago.
He found himself scrambling up the hillside without the slightest idea why. The emotion that propelled him was as unreasonable as the task; if he felt anything of which he was truly cognizant, it was only an impotent species of dread that failed to stay him from his course. Rocks skittered from beneath his feet, and he was obliged to continue on all fours, but he soon reached the entrance and plunged in.
Murky as before, and the air even more close than it had been, the cavern was an unwelcoming place. Colvin had not even his flashlight with him, the new one he'd purchased to replace the one Miss Rokeby had dropped down the limestone fault. Inexplicably he proceeded, his heart hammering, down the passage until, just before where he suspected the end lay, he stopped and sat down, breathing heavily, his eyes wide open in absolute dark.
Putting out his hand, his fingers closed around something-- for an awful moment he believed it was his old flashlight, thrown back up from the abyss, or worse, the slim wrist of a certain pale woman whose enigmatic, gazelle-like face might immediately be thrust into his own. The prospect brought a low moan of terror to his lips, but he could not release his hold. The texture of what was in his hand was coarse and without the rigidity of metal, or, thankfully, of bone; whatever spell that had motivated him thus far was broken, and he scrambled back out of the mine, hauling it out with him.
When he emerged in the fading afternoon light, he discovered that he was holding a length of rope, the end of which was tied in a noose, the remainder of which ran back into the black orifice from which he had come.
He left town the same night, not bothering to pack; on the train he avoided the other passengers, eventually finding for himself an empty compartment where he sat and gazed dully out the window at the rushing, punctuated stream of night and stars that swept past, and thought of nothing and the promise of nothing, unable even to rouse himself when the train pulled into a crowded station en route to disgorge and redevour still more travelers.
Faces as blank as his own moved past his window, boarding or in retreat, neither cheerless nor cheerful, preoccupied with destinations as varied as their noses. 'Artists don't have souls,' she had said. 'Personality's the word...' These people were practically interchangeable, yet they couldn't be as formless as they seemed. How many of *them* were mirrors, passing along in the midst of the rest, making the crowd seem larger than it was; and shelterless, forlorn, unrequited and obscured?
The train lurched forward again. In his seat, facing backward in more ways than the obvious one, Colvin saw Mr Superbus on the platform. Unmistakeable, he was clad in ermine and white gloves and full Victorian finery, with a silver-knobbed cane and a silk topper, looking as if he had just come from the most successful show that had ever run for ages beyond memory, or that had never really closed.
Colvin shrank; he wanted to hide from the Levantine visage, but he could only stare helplessly and feel that poorly-defined something trickle out of his spirit. Mr Superbus' attention, anyhow, was elsewhere; while the throng passed him on all sides without heeding his presence, he was pirouetting slowly in some grand and awful dance that looked older than he did, smiling and solemnly waving his cane in benediction to the mass of people that surrounded him, a squat dark planet in an ocean of stars.
The End
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John Brower (December 17, 1999)
rbadac wrote:
(an inspired ending to "The Visiting Star")
Hoo Boy!
Why don’t you take a crack at the ending for HANNIBAL and send it off to Ridley Scott? I hear he’s in need of one!
Just pick it up after the dinner. I’d hate to lose that.
Thanks, rbadac.
John B.
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rbadac (December 18, 1999)
Hee, hee. Thanks, John, I’ll need an advance, of course. Personally, I can’t see why he doesn’t just end it WITH the dinner, a la "Tales From The Crypt"...rbadac, compone country cineaste
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Jim Rockhill (December 18, 1999)
Robert Kunath wrote:
> Of the previously inaccessible Aickman that I have had a chance to look at
> (well, just two stories, so far), the one that has most impressed me is "The
> Insufficient Answer." I find myself mulling that one over in a way that I never
> did (or have) with "Visiting Star." In the "Visiting Star" category is the other
> unknown Aickman that I read, "A Roman Question": it too seems to have
> the mystery overwhelmed by the prosaic.Chacun a son gout indeed. I would apply everything you said about "The Visiting Star" to "The Insufficient Answer", yet realize there was obviously something in the latter tale I had missed. I fail to see how you could say that "The Visiting Star" lacks mystery.
As to what you call the excessive amount of time devoted to the prosaic details of lead and plumbago mining, such is not the case. You make it sound as if Aickman goes into great detail about what this entails, as if he had adapted the chapters dealing with the mining of quap from H.G. Wells' TONO BUNGAY. Aickman mentions it just often enough to add to our perception of the narrator as a meticulous, dull fellow caught up in events he is not equipped to understand. Furthermore, ludicrous as this sounds, it adds a little to the resonance of the story. "What resonance?" I hear you ask in outrage. Aickman, it seems to me, uses latinate and archaic words throughout this and other tales to lend a certain sense of "otherness" to the events he describes. He does not simply refer to lead and lead ore, but to "lead and plumbago", the Latin word for lead ore. This lends a sense of antiquity, if only subconsciously, to the lead mine the narrator visits with Arabella Rokeby, the talented, seemingly soul-less shell of Myrrha. The significance of Myrrh as a gift to the Christ-child, we might recall, is a prefiguration of the Passion, since Myrrh was used by the ancients in the preparation of bodies for burial. And this journey into the mine, with its revelation in darkness before the pit "supposed to be bottomless", reads like a journey into the underworld straight out of Classical myth. Who or what is Mr. Superbos and what has he made of Arabella Rokeby that she does not age, charms, inspires and sometimes destroys those around her?
In this and several other stories, Aickman's work, in terms of how the tale develops not as much from what is said and done, as from what it alludes to, most resembles what James Joyce accomplishes in DUBLINERS. If read straight, many of the tales in DUBLINERS make little sense. Joyce demands that his readers understand the allusions to myth, religion and literature permeating the tales. Similarly, the metaphors, imagery and allusions in Aickman's tales often tell us more about what is happening than we might at first perceive.
Jim
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Bill Barnett (December 18, 1999)
Jim Rockhill wrote:
> Aickman mentions it just often enough to add to our perception of the narrator
> as a meticulous, dull fellow caught up in events he is not equipped to understand.That's actually one of my favorite aspects of Aickman, the characters who have gotten caught up in minutiae and mundanities and thereby circumscribed their existence. I'm thinking also of the lobbyist for rural electricity in "My Poor Friend", the rental agent on a business trip to Finland in "The Houses of the Russians", the attendees of a conference on "Business and the Arts" in "A Roman Question", the dealer in incunabula caught up in a municipal bureaucracy in "Residents Only" (which I have finally gotten to read for the first time! And which, moreover, is an actual ghost story), to name a few. Being an Assistant Registrar, I can identify with these characters!
> Who or what is Mr. Superbos and what has he made of Arabella Rokeby that
> she does not age, charms, inspires and sometimes destroys those around her?Upon first encountering Mr. Superbus I read his name as "super-bus" before stressing the syllables correctly, but you can't unthink a thought, so I tripped over the name EVERY DAMN TIME*. In addition to the myrrh allusion, I assumed the name "Myrrha" was pronounced to sound like "mirror", which I thought a clever play on words, if indeed it is. ("Myrrha's me. That's why she's called Myrrha.") Pardon me if I'm just stating the obvious...
So what was in Mr. Superbus' suitcases, anyway? The photographs are pretty much a given; were Arabella and Myrrha in there too? (Which would hearken back to the theme of "Left Luggage", one of EJ Howard's stories in "We Are For the Dark"...)
Bill B.
* Likewise, upon reading David Case's "The End of the Line", the reports of sightings of a half-man, half-ape creature in the wilds of Patagonia brought to mind the episode of The Simpsons in which Homer was mistaken for Bigfoot, a vision which I could not shake by any amount of effort. Ah yes, Homer Simpson loping through one of David Case's gothic landscapes...
oOo
Jim Rockhill (December 19, 1999)
Bill Barnett wrote:
> In addition to the myrrh allusion, I assumed the name "Myrrha" was pronounced
> to sound like "mirror", which I thought a clever play on words, if indeed it is.
> ("Myrrha's me. That's why she's called Myrrha.")Very interesting. Myrrha/Mirror, I am ashamed to say, was so obvious I missed it. Was Aickman, who seems to poke fun at the dullness and limitations of his characters, prone to such awe-full puns?
> Ah yes, Homer Simpson loping through one of David Case's gothic landscapes...
I can sympathize, also having experienced this kind of mixed-media dissonance. My favorite example is trying to take Chaugnar Faugn in Long's THE HORROR FROM THE HILLS seriously while the nightmare sequence from Disney's DUMBO plays through my mind.
Jim
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William Allison (December 21, 1999)
Robert Kunath wrote:
> I am a firm believer in the quote from Sacheverell Sitwell that Aickman used as
> the epigraph to *Cold Hand in Mine*: "In the end it is the mystery that lasts
> and not the explanation."A good quote that. Here's the quote from W. B. Yeats that leads off POWERS OF DARKNESS (I happened across my $5 ex-lib while looking for something else):
"I am still of the opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mind---sex and the dead."The back DJ of PoD has some interesting review quotes which tie-in to the "prosaic detail" in VS (the reviews are of DARK ENTRIES):"Finely written atmospheric pieces, in which mundane backgrounds are used to make the horrors more horrible." -*Sun*The happenings in "The Visiting Star" are certainly lower-key than those in "Ringing the Changes" for instance, but I think there is still quite a mysterious air hanging over the proceedings. The Gorey illustrations for VS in Mazzeo's HAUNTINGS are well suited, as VS almost resembles one of Gorey's works- such as THE UNSTRUNG HARP or THE OBJECT-LESSON*. Again, as in "Wood", Aickman supplies small humorous touches, such as the landlady, Mrs Royd, always calling the evening meal 'tea'. The weird moments are subtle, but still quite fine:"They include acute observations of the mundane world and are written with a fastidiousness that adds an air of Jamesian (M. R. and/or Henry) authority." -*Northern Echo*
"Colvin passed the night almost without sleep, which was another new experience for him. A conflict of feelings about Miss Rokeby, all of them strong, was one reason for insomnia: another was the sequence of sounds from Number Twelve A. Mr Superbus seemed to spend the night in moving things about and talking to himself. At first it sounded as if he were rearranging all the furniture in his room. Then there was a period, which seemed to Colvin timeless, during which the only noise was of low and unintelligible muttering, by no means continuous, but broken by periods of silence and then resumed as before just as Colvin was beginning to hope that all was over. Colvin wondered whether Mr Superbus was saying his prayers. Ultimately the banging about recommenced. Presumably Mr Superbus was still dissatisfied with the arrangement of the furniture; or perhaps was returning it to its original dispositions. Then Colvin heard the sash-window thrown sharply open. He remembered the sound from the occasion when Mrs Royd had sharply shut it. After that silence continued. In the end Colvin turned on the light and looked at his watch. It had stopped."Despite his being off-stage much of the story, Mr Superbus has a way of dominating the action through his absence. And like Bill B, I kept on 'hearing' the name as Super-bus rather than Superb-us...One thing that's been worrying at me (beyond the Myrrha/Mirror deal, which Bill B confirmed for me), is the title itself: "The Visiting Star". With the Christmas setting of the story I kept finding myself thinking of a different kind of visiting star- one that led three wise men...
Bill A. (who hopes Big Bob is having a good laugh over all this...)
* - I would dearly love to see Old Earth go beyond just having a Gorey DJ on their edition of the Collected Stories; some interior illustrations would be superb(us)...
oOo
Jim Rockhill (December 21, 1999)
Bill Allison wrote:
> * - I would dearly love to see Old Earth go beyond just having a Gorey DJ...I would welcome someone reinstating the epigraphs that introduced each of the original collections. Aickman obviously chose these quotations carefully and Tartarus' omission of them is even more inexplicable than any of Aickman's own most abstruse fictions.
Jim
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John Brower (December 21, 1999)
Re: Robert Kunath’s post.I have to admit that while it has always intrigued me, "The Visiting Star" has always been one of those stories that I was sure missed my comprehension.
With Robert Aickman, when I didn't "get" a story, I have always assumed it was due to missing important details or obscure references that would lead to a deeper appreciation. I look forward to what others here have to say about the story.
Happily, I found a British paperback edition of POWERS OF DARKNESS at a Salvation Army store several decades ago for ten cents. Is that the sound of a Christmas bell klanging?
John B.
oOo
rbadac (December 23, 1999)
John Brower wrote:
> With Robert Aickman, when I didn't "get" a story, I have always assumed it was
> due to missing important details or obscure references that would lead to a deeper
> appreciation. I look forward to what others here have to say about the story.Spoilers. I think.
It's funny how the longer you stare at something, the more detailed it gets. Taking notes on 'The Visiting Star' and trying to see if there was anything in Baffling Bob's sea of abstruseness beyond just another strange story, I'd jot down the craziest things. Ahhh, I'd better not go into those; anyway, after coming up for air, I decided that 'The Visiting Star' seems to have connections with Virgil's *Aeneid*, specifically Aeneas' journey to Hades.
Certain elements of the poem kept resonating: Aeneas enters the underworld by entering a cave (traditionally said to be located at Lake Avernus, near Naples); he encounters, among other creatures, the three- headed dog Cerberus, various souls in limbo, foregoes Tartarus for Elysium, etc.; and of course Virgil himself is Dante's escort to Hell later in *The Inferno*.
*Superbus* is Latin for 'proud' or 'haughty,' and was the surname of Tarquinius Superbus, the tyrannical last king of Rome, who is indicated by Aeneas' father in Hades (Tarquinius' son raped Lucretia, by the way). There is another possibility: if you wrote Cerberus quasi- phonetically, you would get Surberus, which is a short leap indeed to Superbus; if you wrote *Napoli Averna* in a decorative script, it might at casual glance look like 'North Africa'; the bottomless limestone fault in the abandoned mine might allude to Tartarus, the mine itself the entrance Aeneas uses.
Myrrha, besides being a mirror, was also a temple-maiden who gave birth to Adonis *in a cave*, the same cave in fact that was later claimed by Christians as being Jesus' birthplace (Christmas story !). Little Jack Nethers might have shortened his name from Netherworld, Ludlow might be a play on 'lead low,' since the town ran out of it.
And if you really want to get offbeat and push the Latin connection to the point of absurdity, 'Rokeby' is practically pig-Latin for 'broke,' which Arabella certainly is, into her two parts, not only in the story, but also in her part as Rosalind/Ganymede in *As You Like It.*
Let's see...what else? Oh, yeah. What the hell was in those two trunks? The photos of Miss Rokeby, obviously, enough to be 'two whacking great parcels' at the theatre later that Malnik can barely move. Whether Arabella and Myrrha were in there too, 'flapping around like a bat in a box,' is a matter for interesting conjecture. Mr Superbus obviously flies out the window rather than bothering with the stairs, and the night he kept Colvin awake moving furniture about, muttering for a time, then moving furniture around again, he was probably clearing a space on the floor for his magic circle, then putting everything back where it was after.
Myrrha started the fire Christmas Eve to kill herself, and jumped out the window instead when the fire brigade contained it OR set it accidentally while attempting a flying spell of her own to escape that didn't work. That was Ludlow in the dress circle box throwing the dusty wreath, and it wouldn't surprise me if some of the other opening night patrons were dead as well.
Some of you might remember my three page addition to the story from the 17th; not being Classically trained, and doubtful that anyone would care, I took the Freudian route and treated the mine as a vagina, with the limestone fault as cervix; when Colvin scrambles out, he trails umbilical Death. You can figure out the lost flashlight part yourself. I kept Mr Superbus in Hell, though, but I thought he made a better Devil than dog-- his activities then embrace mankind as a whole. If Ludlow had indeed played the part of Jacques in *As You Like It* as Malnik had intended, he would have delivered the famous speech on the Seven Ages of Man ('All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players', etc.).
Or, as Sly and the Family Stone said, 'Everybody is a star.'
rbadac, demonstrating the critical synthesis that can be achieved with a dirty mind and a few Cliff's Notes.
oOo
Robert Kunath (January 13, 2000)
Sorry to be so belated in responding, Jim. I typed a response back around 12/15 or so, but I lost it when I was automatically logged out (why *do* they do that?). Anyway, the delay has been of some advantage to me, since I've had more of a chance to think over your comments (though I doubt anybody wants to resurrect this topic).I love your analysis of the symbolic dimension of "Visiting Star," and I think you're quite right to wonder how I could think that the story is insufficiently mysterious. There's mystery there a-plenty, and I think I expressed myself incorrectly: it's not so much that the story lacks mystery for me--what I find missing is *tension*. My flippant comment about lead and plumbago mining was really meant more as a jest, rather than a specific critique of that aspect of the story itself. Aickman does his usual wonderful job of conjuring a quotidian world (of which mining and tea-time fare are all a part). But I'd contrast the tea-time scene in "Visiting Star" with that in "The School Friend": in "The School Friend," the tea-time details are all made urgent by the sense that something is terribly, menacingly wrong in Sally's house. I just don't have that sense of menace in "The Visiting Star," and the result for me is that I find the prosaic overwhelming the mysterious. It may be that I betray my Jamesian roots by wanting more of a sense of threat, but here I stand, I can do no other. In "The Insufficient Answer," the general situation lent a sense of unease to the story that kept my interest at a high level from the very start. In general, my favorite Aickman stories are those where, however delicately and indirectly, something seems to be ominously wrong fairly early on.
Robert (as you will note, no shouts of outrage, to which I am temperamentally disinclined)
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Jim Rockhill (February 5, 2000)
Dear Robert,Life has been hectic to horrible here the last two months and this is the first time I have had a chance to review this message board since the week of Christmas. Thank you for the kind reply. I did not expect "shouts of outrage" and hope that my posting, in its passionate defense of this particular tale, did not resemble such. If it did, I apologize and thank you for not taking offense at this and my woefully belated response.
I see your point about the overall mood of "The Visiting Star" vs. the other tales you mention, though I, perhaps alone among the correspondents here, find the intrusion of the odd unnerving detail into the otherwise hum-drum activities of the characters in this tale eerily suggestive.
Thanks again,Jim
ooOoo