by Corey Taylor
Then Henry was pulling me from the steps. He dragged me behind him, and I limped to keep up. We did not stop until we saw the lights of the streetlamps, shedding illumination and a bit of safety on our tiny bodies as we collapsed with the others next to the entrance to the woods. Nobody spoke. Someone was crying.
After a long time we all sort of stood as one and shambled quietly back toward the apartments. We were almost a walking funeral procession. As we came upon my building, Tina, Joe, and Brock silently peeled off to slip back into their own homes. Matt, Henry, and I crawled back into my room and, without another word, did our best to fall asleep. The next day we crawled out into the afternoon sunlight and sat against the wall of the complex, suddenly very vocal about what we had seen. Henry asked me if it had said anything to me, and I shook my head. Matt was convinced the thing had a hook for a hand, and nothing I said could change his mind. After a while Joe stopped over, and he was overly excited. He wanted to go back. I said I was in—so did Matt. Henry did not say anything. When we went to Tina’s house, she said she was not feeling well and did not want to go. Brock’s mother said he refused to even come to the door and asked us if we had been fighting. He never hung out with us again and avoided us around the complex.
As Matt, Joe, and I headed toward 14th, Henry suddenly had to go home. He said he would call me the next day after baseball practice. We were never very close after that day; I became more interested in music and comics, and he got more involved with sports. Tina still came around, but she flat-out refused to talk about Cold House. She even went as far as to say it never happened, that our imaginations had gotten the best of us.
The three of us who were left refused to pretend that it did not happen, and that afternoon we made our way back to the trails, leaping over the tripwires that now seemed pedestrian compared to what we had seen the night before. We came up on the house quickly and only really paused to take our time on the steps. As Matt and Joe bounded inside, I stopped for a second to look at the hole where my leg had broken through. I had cleaned up the gash without alerting my mother, who would have asked too many questions. I stood beside the hole, and immediately my mind went back to the moment when I was face to face with that supernatural spectacle, and I studied it a long time. So by the time I entered the house, the other two were already upstairs. I did not even notice that the front door was missing until I heard Matt and Joe shouting for me to “get up here NOW!” Moving to the bottom of the stairwell, I saw that there was nothing on the walls. No blood, but nothing that would have reminded me of blood in that ghostly light either. It was just gone.
As I came up the stairs—careful not to fall through anything again—I saw what they were going on and on about and could not believe it. The front door, which we had all smashed into in our haste to escape, eventually pulling it from the doorframe, was lying on the floor in an upstairs room. We recognized it from walking past it every day on our way to school. We recognized it from the split second we had seen it illuminated in the light of our torches before they had gone dead. It was the front door, and it was lying inexplicably in the middle of a room many feet away from where we had left it. However, we were not so interested in how it had gotten up the stairs into this room or who had put it up there in the first place. No, our attention was focused squarely on the word that was scrawled on its visage, almost scrubbed into the filth and grime that had built up on the door over the years:
“GO.”
We ran like hell.
After school started that fall, I kept taking the trails through South Side Woods. Occasionally Matt and Joe did as well. Tina avoided it altogether. Brock in turn avoided us everywhere else. Henry waved at me at school, but by the time I moved away, we just were not best friends anymore, and that really kind of broke my heart. I left Iowa for Florida a few months later. I never saw any of them again, even after I moved back to Des Moines when I was sixteen. They had really just disappeared. Over the years I have forgotten their last names. If you asked me to imagine what they looked like as adults, I would not be able to pick them out of a random police lineup.
But I remember that night. I eventually told new friends about that night, and some of them made faces like I am sure you are making faces right now as you read about this. And yet most had had experiences as wild as mine. It was wonderful having friends who had gone through circumstances so close to my own, and we talked about what had happened and what we believed in. We believed in ghosts: real deal, holy-shit ghosts. We explored other abandoned houses together, never really finding anything as extreme as the incidents we had gone through before on our own. But our belief was strong—mine has never been stronger, for over the years I have seen things and heard things that are not only insane but also very real. I have a few pieces of proof that I have gathered, but much of what I have experienced is really just eyewitness accounts, and I will share them all right here. Before we go anywhere, though, before I start telling you these ghost stories, let me hit you with why I am writing this book in the first place.
You see, I am fairly famous—or infamous in most circles—for being, if you can excuse the term, a “devout atheist,” which in a lot of ways can come off as a contradiction in terms. Cutting to the chase, I do not believe in god. Honestly, I really never have. I did not when I was too young to get out of going to church, and that continues right up until this moment, sitting in this chair, writing on this computer. I do not believe in God. I do not chastise or regard with disdain those who do, but my reaction to those who purportedly do terrible things disguised as “God’s work” is acidic and maligned, to put it politely. I am just quick to judge those who are quick to judge, really.
So here is the question: How can I believe in ghosts . . . and not in God? How can I mock the very existence of Jehovah and his creepy winged minions while straight-facedly maintaining that there are ghosts, spirits, poltergeists, and haunts among us? How can I go on record with a whole book for that matter, dedicated to my version of the various events of my life, knowing full well that I might be regarded as a hypocrite at best, a nutcase at worst?
As you will find in this book, the running theory is a case of knowing versus believing.
I do not believe in God for various reasons. One, there is no real proof of the existence of God other than the usual suspects that the clergy and the like point to, such as man and the universe and all that jazz. But that, to me, is horseshit. Science has given us so many more bits of proof than God has, and even though He is lauded, He has no track record in my eyes. Just because the universe exists and man exists in it, that is no reason and no proof for the existence of an invisible man in the sky. I would sooner believe that Santa Claus was our creator, seeing as I get my wishes answered with the same relative consistency. God never saved me and Santa never gave me a harpoon gun, so fuck my life.
Two, too many of humanity’s fingerprints are on God and his so-called achievements. Men wrote all of God’s books, fought all of His wars, and have been the first to point out all of His miracles since he first blamed snow on His Holy Frosty Breath. Now why humans, who are vainglorious to a fucking fault, would give credit where it is not due is a psychotic fucking mystery to me, and yet people adhere to doctrine because they have been indoctrinated. It has been hammered into their skulls that God exists, even though men were so busy swinging the hammers at the time, they never realized they were using them on each other.
Three, God is about as real to me as those who reside in Asgard or in Valhalla. He might as well be in comic books, which is actually a good idea if you want the younger generation to take the idea of Him seriously. At the end of the day, God is infallible because man is fallible, and a lot of people need someone to believe in who is better than ourselves. Fair enough . . . but then why not believe in the Tooth Fairy? The Tooth Fairy at least pays you for pieces of your face that you were going to throw away anyway. God makes you put those same quarters in His collection plate, even though the church is tax exempt. Well, b
ecause of inflation, my son gets dollars for those molars, so a lot of tooth money goes to them now. Sounds pretty fucked up to me, but then again, none of it is mine.
I am appalled at the hate that His followers pour into the world like factories spewing pollution into country streams. I laugh at the self-proclaimed prophets who are too busy selling their own side of His story to consider that because their prophecies do not jibe with everyone else’s accounts, there is no real continuity to His word. I abhor the fractious state of these worldwide Judeo-Christian and Islamic cults because they all think they are right. Religion has divided us more than it has brought us together, and normally anything that violent and dissenting would have been outlawed or driven from society if not for the fact that these pious pricks have their fingers in all the pies on Earth.
So yeah, I am not a God man, myself. But therein sits the fucked up rub: How can I be an atheist, a man who dismisses the grand conjectures of the righteous with no connection to religions and the like, and yet believe wholeheartedly in the existence of the paranormal? I do not pretend that one has anything to do with the other, but they have been intertwined since we were monkeys scrambling to make sense of anything that we could not eat, fuck, or excrete. Cynics will claim that my “eyewitness accounts” can easily be described as “flights of fancy,” or “the trappings of an overactive imagination.”
“There is no possible way that could have happened.” “I do not believe you—you are a liar and a charlatan.” (Well, no one ever called me a “charlatan,” but, man, it would be great if they did). Oh, and the one that I hate even worse than those others: “You saw what you wanted to see and nothing more.”
Let me fucking tell you something: I did not want to see this shit, and I still do not want to see this shit. These things have haunted me for a very long time, and anyone who has had to wrestle with terrible memories will know they never go away. I can see them as clearly now as I did when they happened. So you can be as skeptical as you like. I believe in ghosts because I have seen ghosts, and I do not believe in God because I simply have never seen God. There is a huge difference between the unexplained and the unsubstantiated. And yet all over this blue-green planet there are monuments, churches, statues, great paintings, books, and fanfare for He Who Sits in Heaven. People everywhere weep and cherish his name like a good piece of ass they had when they were busy wasting their twenties. But these same organizations have mocked people like myself, who have experienced firsthand the amazing sight of paranormal activity. Are they kidding?
With this book I am going to attempt to come to terms with this. I am going to tell you true stories that have happened to me—and there are several—and I am going to take you with me as I go searching for some proof, joining various “ghost-hunting” groups who do their best to gather information about and evidence of the existence of spirits. I will tell you other people’s stories and get the other side of things—from nonbelievers in the unnatural and from the religious alike—so that I can make some sense out of all of this.
I am also going to do some things I have never attempted to do before, and if I fail miserably, I will certainly not attempt it again. I am going to try my hand at a version of “armchair science” and possibly formulate some sort of scientific reasoning for these mysterious things we call spooks. I have some pretty far-fetched tidbits percolating upstairs in the old Bank of Stuff and Nonsense, but the more I have gone seeking validation in certain arenas and schools of thought, the more I have found that some of these conjectures on my part are really not so out there as I had imagined, reinforcing my original hypothesis and bringing to an end my internal stalemate that would not allow me to say it out loud in the first place. So I am prepared to make a statement to the proper authorities on the matter and do my best to speak eloquently and persuasively about my bullet points and evidence. Unfortunately this does mean there will be a brief respite from my almost diabolic use of the word “fuck” for several pages. I know you are all expecting an unspecified amount, in addition to various demurrals about farts and dicks. But this must wait. I promise to circle back and regale you with these things at appropriate times, but it may mean that many pages will indeed be filled with ideas and forethought. You have my condolences, and I urge you to send angry letters to my editor—he loves those.
Fuck me, I am getting a bit bleak, right? This is not what you would expect from a Corey Taylor book. I know you have come to expect the odd pee pee story and ceiling fan scars. But I did not set out to write a sequel—I set out to write a continuation. People have the misconception that the first book was my life story. That is just completely false. This book and the previous tome are not autobiographies, and this is because I am not done living yet. Christ, I only turned thirty-nine while I was typing this tripe out—I am only halfway there! I do not even know what you would call these books technically, but they are not lifers just because I tell some assorted and sordid tales of woebegone days gone by. If they are anything, they are essays sprinkled with memoirs. But that looks a bit like crap on a plank of wood at your local W. H. Smith. So we will just shuffle this into the “nonfiction” section, although I am very confident various booksellers will shove these deep into the “music” section, much to my chagrin, of course. There is very little music discussed in these pages, so once again I am misunderstood. As the saying goes, however, shit happens. It seems like I always end up being the statue surrounded by rogue pigeons after a feast of berries and bugs. Bring it on, birds: if you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine . . . or so Lucas and Guinness would have you believe.
This book is more in line with The Empire Strikes Back than The Wrath of Khan. Star Trek 2 was a proper sequel, while Episode 5 was the next chapter in the story. Before you get all weird and bombard poor innocent folk who have no access to me and mine, there is a difference. So take it up with your solicitors. Better yet, I will see if I can build this specific debate into my Comic-Con panel entitled, “Shit or Split: A Pointless Argument Based Around an Innocuous Conundrum Only Three Hundred People in the World Will Lose Sleep Over.” It will be a star-studded cast: the guy who played Biggs, the man who provides the arm for the puppet formerly known as Alf, one of the Jonas Brothers (they will appreciate the work), and Jonathan Frakes, if he is not too busy directing wonderfully bad movies on the Syfy Channel. I will be the asshole in the middle, because there is always an asshole in the middle. It is true: check your taint. What did Gandhi say? “Between the crack and the sack lies a friend you have to deal with your whole life.” Wait—was that Gandhi or my Uncle Bill?
It looks like I went off on another tangent. I will never get that time back. Let’s get back on track before I start talking about Benedict Cumberbatch. I agree: he is wonderful! Fuck—sorry . . . back to the book.
It has been a conundrum I have wrestled with for so long that it has actually made me question what I have seen, and yet with every replay in my mind, I know these things have happened. I know it. I know it as sure as I know that if I flip a switch, the lights will go on, or if there is gas in my car, it will start on the first turn of the key. Maybe that is not the same as believing—knowing always has a benefit of being there. Believing is more for the folks on the other side of the fence who are trying desperately to get me to come on over and join their holy hoedown. But in a way I believe as well. I believe when people tell me their stories. I believe when someone tells me that a place is haunted. I believe when I hear an EVP or see a video with something so bizarre that I have to watch it again to figure it out, then when I cannot figure it out, I stew over it for a very long time. I do all of this because I believe. But I have a reason to believe. I have been in those situations myself. I have no past experience with the Lord; I have no videos or sound bites to pull out to prove He is out there. And do not even get me started with the Muffin People, the ones who see His face in the side of a tortilla or a grilled cheese sandwich. What is it about the Almighty and grains, anyway? App
arently, Jehovah has a hard-on for complex carbohydrates.
So if you are like me—or even kind of like me—keep flipping the pages and we will see what we can see together. Sometimes there is an advantage to knowing the script before you have seen the movie. We all struggle with the known and unknown alike. It curbs our enthusiasm and keeps some of us moral. But it also keeps all of us looking, searching—hoping to see the other side of the metaphysical gymnasium, where all the kooks are bounding around, flinging giant red dodge balls at one another. You just know that at some point their attention is going to turn toward your side of things and all hell is going to break loose. By then you will not even know which direction the barrage is coming from, but you will know that something is coming. At least you will know, and that is all we really want. We just want to know. There are inconceivable mysteries beyond our horizons, out into the nether of space, millions upon millions upon millions of miles and lifetimes away that most of us neither have the capacity nor the patience to venture toward. Fuck, there are still places on this planet that man has not explored and there are species that we have not discovered, not to mention the rapid advances in technology on a regular basis. So for skeptics to tell me there is no way these things can exist or that what I am saying herein cannot be true is a pile of obstructive dick snot.
Let’s face it: at the end of the day, aren’t you glad there are still some fantastic things to figure out down here?
Leave math to the spacemen. Leave theory to the wish masters. Leave condemnation to hypocrites and bastards. Take one more deep breath, savor it, and plunge forward without thinking. Do not allow yourself hesitation. Do not allow yourself a moment of doubt. Follow your instincts and go where you never would have considered possible. The pale fabric of reality has so many hidden pockets that we can find some change in here somewhere—you just have to dig a little deeper to avoid the chewing gum and past mistakes. But if you give it time, we can find something wonderful, something to believe in. It is far better to explore and come back sated, albeit with more questions, than to stay behind and bitch because you are terrified of the answers that lie in the unknown. Sometimes the reward is richer when the journey was yours from the start. Sure, you enjoy the stories the truly brave bring back and share, but what really builds us all are the ones we share as one. Of course, that first step is the scariest. Do not worry—I am right here with you. No one here is going to scoff or judge or fuck with you. I will not allow it. That right there is the beautiful thing about new knowledge, really.
