Home Sweet Home—A.T. Bennett
Mystery, thriller, and horror writers alike have considerable fun turning safe spaces topsy-turvy. Are you sure the backdoor is locked? What is that crash coming from the basement? Jeepers! Who on earth could be breaking down the door with an axe at this hour?There is a lot to be said about the external invasion of safe spaces, but what about the internal? When someone of sound mind and body experiences such a mental upheaval that home sweet home turns into a nightmare.
Let me set a scene:
Police find a clothed body of a music executive kneeling in a waterless tub after a welfare check. Burned out candles, books on the occult, and a dozen crucifixes fill the apartment. Soft religious music is playing in the background.
Then there is the salt.
A number of faiths, including Buddhism and Christianity, believe that blessed salt is good for keeping out evil. Lines of it were poured along the base of the apartment walls and neatly piled into the corners . The front door was locked. There are no signs of violence, robbery, or foul play.
Seven days previous, this apartment had been a home. As the investigation continues, friends talk about how grounded this man was, right until a recent work conference. He’d met a woman there (much older apparently) and when he rejected her advances, their light banter became bleak. She warned him he would regret his decision because she was a witch. The executive would die within seven days, and there was not a damn thing he could do about it.
At first, he didn’t believe that someone had cursed him. The very notion was ridiculous! Then he stopped being able to sleep through the night. The “whispers” kept him up, he said. As the days progressed, the man stopped going to work. It was after he started finding scratch marks on his body that he became pro-acdtive with protective iconography. This invisible evil, he came to believe, was coming for him…
Seven days was all it took for Christopher Case of Seattle, Washington, to essentially scare himself to death.
Yes, I’m afraid that this is an actual event involving an actual person who tragically died in 1991. Did I trick you into thinking it wasn’t? It’s important not to discount how fantastic the mind is at fooling itself. Even the most rational of human beings can become rattled and, like an infection, that disturbance can have consequences. It can throw a person completely off balance, or make them do the most nonsensical of actions. Can even kill them…or others.
Characters in a novel should not be perfect, especially not the key players. Give them a fault, a gaggle of superstitions, or maybe some sort of neuroses. As an experiment, throw your darlings a heck of a curve ball and see what that does to their safe “home” environments. The results will be certainly interesting and may in fact inspire a plot twist or two.
As for Christopher Case, while the circumstances leading up to his death were highly suspect, the medical examiner found he died from acute myocarditis, or heart failure. Myocardidtis is most commonly the result of a viral illness, but can also be becauseof fungi exposure or drug reaction. It can also cause extreme fatigue in the lead up to a heart attack.
It should go without saying that without proper rest, the mind becomes stressed…even fearful. As there was no evidence of foul play, the investigation in this matter was closed.
(If you would like to hear more about Christopher Case, then I would highly recommend the YouTube channel Under the Ash Tree, which features this event in the episode The Mysterious Death of Christopher Case.)