When I was about 12 or 13 I had this obsession with dry ice. I loved Halloween and generally all things spooky and gothic –– it wasn’t part of my identity or anything, I wasn’t a “goth” at school (those kids wouldn’t look at me thrice) but the sensation of scary fun was the first place I would go to when I wanted to escape into the realm of fantasy. This included movies, sleepovers, slumber parties, in short, of the things I liked it was my favourite. My friends and I, it was our thing. We were neither popular nor unpopular, we were “cool” (at least we thought ourselves so), we were smart. But our thing was this obsession with the paranormal, that’s what distinguished us from the other kids that liked whatever was on their fones or fablets or plexicons. This gothic, romantic, spooky temperament was what made us unique. It coloured everything we did –– our humour, our silliness, our inherently anti-authoritarian intellects. This dorksided inclination had nothing to do with morality. It wasn’t about good and evil, per se. It was our secret weapon. We knew instantly what had it and what didn’t, in art, music, life, etc. so if our teacher or pastor or president tried to tell us something different we instantly knew they were lying, it was effortless to write these supposed learned elders off straightaway, and we showed them no respect at all, no deference. It was that simple. Dry Ice was part of all that. When I was a kid we could only stream movies on our TV, we didn’t have all of the various ways of digesting entertainment that we have today, but looking back now at that apparent lack of options it is clear to me that such restraint is a clear advantage. There was a certain look movies and shows had when all you had to do was click an app and click the show you wanted –– without all of the personal control you have over platforms today, which only amounts to having to do so much more work it seems –– the small waxing sliver of a thumbnail, a picture and a title only, esp. with horror movies (which I wasn’t allowed to watch and therefore could only steal viewings in quick unchronological moments when my parents weren’t looking or had gone to sleep) offered stolen glances into worlds that were forbidden, that offered just enough to tempt, and terrify. There was one movie in particular, called The Threshold that was particularly noteworthy. That one really made an impression, and has since stuck with me through the ages and eras of my personal history and growth. Despite new experiences, more knowledge, a higher tolerance for fear, it still manages to haunt like few other things ever could. I knew it then in my tender and inexperienced youth that what I was viewing existed in a place outside of our dimension, in a world of shifting space & time, a realm of heightened awareness and precision. “HD World” I called it because it was like our world only better, higher definition, higher quality, a battery charged to 101%. My friends and I had all been there, to this place, although the same things didn’t always take us there. Still, the knowledge of having walked even for a second in this thrilling and terrible land bonded us closer together. The trailer for The Threshold consisted of a man, a creature really, some preternatural banshee or skinwalker, staring malignantly at the camera, through the camera, at you, the viewer. It was a face of unending terror. How else can I describe it? It was so unknown, so impossible looking, and its malice so defined and complete, so unfeeling towards you, so utterly incognizant of the fundamental value of your existence that the pure dread I felt upon looking at the face was not merely a fear for my own personal safety but for my entire consciousness as well. Just looking at it seemed to be enough. The man could hurt you with just a look. I remember whispering to myself one night sitting on the couch in the complete dark, the bluish glow of the TV screen a light from an opening portal, that “I had seen the Devil.” The man with the glowing power donut and the long hail showers of ice-silver hair hanging about his shoulders in curtains of gleaming crystal… the freak brightness of those vivid locks seemed connected to –– one with –– the gothic fog that hovered about him in thick transparent plumes. This unholy mist captivated me.
It was a signifying attribute of the multidimensional atmosphere where the Mothman was from (I remember thinking to myself then that in the 4th dimension a wight doesn’t perceive events in terms of 3D chronology but rather in terms of their emotional potency) yet it wasn’t the monster itself, it was separate from him, and I found it extremely enticing to be so close to what I ultimately feared without having to embrace that black shadow. I mistakenly thought that I could have the mood without its darker inhabitants. If I could only possess the mist, in order to unleash it in my own safe environs, for myself only, then the energizing effects of the proximity to such a powerful force would be mine also. I was yet to learn how its effect was created –– the dry ice, that is. The brother of a friend of mine explained it to me one day. He worked one summer as an apprentice to a technical crew working on a low budget horror movie, The Long Interstate, I think it was, a cool movie, although for my friend’s brother the subject of the movie never mattered, he only considered its technical aspects from the viewpoint of mise-en-scene, he cared nothing for what it was about. In other words the mist meant nothing to him. I’d seen a similar kind of mist in the movie he worked on (although it didn’t glow like the mist in the trailer for The Threshold, didn’t have the same presence) and thus was so excited to talk to him about it, how they had created that effect. He told me it was made from a substance called “dry ice.” I was transfixed. Even the name –– “Dry Ice” –– sounds so cool. It was all I needed to create the world of my dark dreams in the comfort & safety of my home. The brother did not share my enthusiasm for such a rudimentary “prop” as he called it, but he told me I could order it on Daintree anytime and it would be shipped to my door in two days provided I was a Daintree Global Team Member®. I wasn’t but I knew my mom was so I begged and begged her and since it was dirt cheap my mother agreed and ordered me some without much delay. I remember waiting for the package, being so excited to open it up, to see the colorful packaging, the crazy logo, to see what the substance looked like in reality and of course to try it out for myself. Needless to say it was a disappointment.The stuff, despite its ostentatious packaging, was weak sauce, there was very little cloud plumage, and zero of the atmosphere that I so craved. I tried it a few times till the stuff ran out, first, absurdly, during the day, outside. That was never going to work. My final attempt was at night but it was so hard to orchestrate a time of the evening when I could have a room of the house, any room, completely to myself, without my mom or my brother or someone else walking in to see what I was doing, that it was a failure, too. Even if the circumstances would have been right the particular brand of dry ice I got was so tawdry and bad it could barely sputter out a few thin clouds, and it smelt like crap to boot. I didn’t give up though, and I even brought the package to my friend’s bro so he could appraise it. He showed me the back, where it gave the concentration of CO2, the only real ingredient in dry ice. My package had a pathetic 47%. The rest was freezer-package garbage. My friend’s brother made fun of me for messing around with such amateur props and instead told me about the kind they used on movie sets. Studio production units got it from industrial meatpacking plants. Slaughterhouses. It’s used in abattoirs to keep meat cold, “and they don’t fuck around with piddly amounts,” according to my friend’s bro. I asked him how to acquire such primo DI but he didn’t know. I kept looking. I eventually came across a website of dry ice afficionados (it’s amazing really, you can find a community of likeminded people to engage with about anything on the internet) who turned me on to a couple different brands, which I tried over the next few months, with mildly better results. I had not necessarily given up on the idea but moreso just forgotten about it when one day I got a notification. It was from the Dry Ice Society, the webforum I belonged to. From a screen name I didn’t recognize called “Die Sublimator.” I got a creepy feeling just looking at the name. It seemed overtly meant to frighten people. What was more was that the avatar was a .jpeg3500 of what appeared to be an 18th century oil portrait, something you’d expect to find hanging in an old Austro-Hungarian castle, a picture of an inbred aristocrat, someone with endless financial means and innate cognitive-empath limitations. What struck me most about the picture –– a man, or a woman, I couldn’t tell, it could have been the fact that men dressed like women back then, with stockings and high heels, etc. –– were the eyes. The eyes immediately reminded me of the creature from The Threshold. I sat there at my computer desk stunned for a while. It was weird because it seemed natural that the creature and the dry ice forum should be connected but something felt wrong, and when I thought about it the reason for this was that the connection between the two had only existed for me, that is, I never told anyone why I was interested in dry ice, not to the full extent, and so for this connection to occur in real life was somewhat disorienting. It was a clear example of cognitive dissonance –– it felt both natural and impossible. The connection was real however, as real as the goosepimples that had manifested all over my body. The fact that the picture wasn’t anything like the creature in appearance, not in any superficial way, and thinking about it deeper now it wasn’t even the eyes, they weren’t the same eyes, it was the overall impression looking at the portrait made, that same kind of multidimensional control (for in the 4th dimension emotions can be assumed and activated the same way we might use our motor skills). To convince myself that it was all in my head, part of our human need for connections & patterns, I looked up who played the character of the creature in The Threshold. It was an Austrian actor named Dietmar Unterwenger, or at least that was his stage name. From what I could find of him he only played that one role (which didn’t help to allay my growing apprehension) and from what I could gather online about him IRL he was apparently a very obtuse, frustrating personality. One actor who worked with him on the set of The Threshold said that they had gotten into several heated arguments over rehearsal times and that Mr Unterwenger had threatened him with physical violence. The actor said that at first he thought Unterwenger was a method actor and that it was all part of the act but he left the set feeling like it was the other way around –– Unterwenger was really like that IRL and was only playing himself. This made me really freaked out. Again, it wasn’t connected, I didn’t think that the person reaching out to me online was somehow Unterwenger, I didn’t believe then in the 4th dimension (and still it’s only a trope, a metaphor I guess) but it didn’t stop me from hesitating to re-read the message sent to me. I connected them in my mind. Unterwenger’s real life creepiness somehow confirmed my fears that Die Sublimator was truly darksided. Trying again, hopelessly, I looked up “sublimator dry ice” to see if I could sort out the allusion, for it struck me that the screen name was allusive in some way. I found out that when dry ice converts from a solid in to a gas it is called “sublimation.” Thus “Die Sublimator” could be “The [Dry Ice] Sublimator”, and that made enough sense to me to calm me down a little, that is until I realized that “Die” is the German word for “The” and that the use of German was yet another actual connection between Unterwenger and my fellow online dry ice enthusiast. I was starting to get lost in my own labyrinth. I knew I couldn’t tell this to anyone because from the very beginning, before I got to all of the weird connections & coincidences, they would either think I was “weird” and dismiss me entirely or they’d be instantly bored and not pay any attention. But here it was, this Cretan Labyrinth, with a clearly identifiable, if not actual real life, monster at its center.
It made me feel even more vulnerable. How can you defend yourself against something that most people could never comprehend, let alone believe, let alone have any mental space whatsoever to devote to. The magnitude of the monster was such, too, that even if someone was completely on board they wouldn’t be able to help. No human anyway. I needed a superhero, and those definitely didn’t exist. I had this mantra I kept telling myself during all of this, that I needed to confront what was scaring me in order to see the attributes that would inevitably dispel any fear I had about whatever it was. I thought, back then, that if I met The Fear head on I could defeat it (I know now that it cannot be beaten, that it must instead be replaced, and I wouldn’t dare try and face it on its terms again). So I checked the message and to my horror & surprise I saw it contained only a phone number. ***-***-*768. Nothing else. So ominous. The perilous thing about engaging with fear is that it creates this cycle within you –– you make an effort to stand up to it but that alone doesn’t halt its nefarious progress, instead it keeps poking, which makes you have to respond, and before you know it you’re dancing to the drum of the damned. I didn’t know this yet back then so at every turn I refreshed my resolve, I followed the breadcrumbs right to the Oven. I called the number. A voice answered. A voice. I’ll always remember it. It had the strangest timbre. I was confused, I had the feeling that I was being tricked. That same impossible/natural paradox lived in the tone of voice, neither feminine nor masculine, but both and simultaneously more than both and different at the same time. None of these distinctions in themselves need be bad I thought, androgyne isn’t inherently evil, I tried to tell myself because that’s what I believe intellectually as well as (I hope) spiritually, too. But this was different, this was something else, something with its own sentience and its own mission. The objective of the voice was as certain –– and there indeed was an objective –– as its specifics were completely occult, alien, deliberately withheld from me. I would say now that this kind of retention when it comes to interpersonal communication is a sign of shadiness and disrespect. Nowadays I wouldn’t continue on with anyone who treated me this way no matter what they offered or who they proclaimed to be, but back then when I was a tender green thing I didn’t have that experience & knowledge, I didn’t even have the sense of self-respect required to be disciplined in that way (for that too must come the way callouses come, and scars –– from an initial trauma) so instead I not only listened to the voice but, I’m afraid to say, ashamed even, I followed the voice’s instructions. She told me to come to her house. That she made her own dry ice. She didn’t ask me why I was so interested in the substance to begin with, which I thought odd, cuz it normally came up in discussion on the boards, and if someone was going to invite you to their house you’d think they’d want some kind of reason or information beforehand. The lack of preparatory questioning on her part was disconcerting, bled into the feeling of it being some orchestrated stunt I was walking into, but still I didn’t heed my inner gut and instead agreed to go to her place. “Fabulous,” was all she said in reply. I could hear the pleasure in her voice. Then she hung up. At the exact same moment I got a notification on my plexiphone, from who else but Die Sublimator. The ding of the notif scared me half to death. I quickly read the message. An address. This started a sequence of events that caused me extreme anxiety from the start. First I had to make up some ploy, I had to lie, to my parents about going somewhere on my scooter so that I could instead go to DS’s house. Bear in mind I wasn’t quite so naïve and stupid as I’m making myself sound. I fully knew that going to a stranger’s house was a terrible idea, that it was dangerous, that I could very well end up kidnapped or worse, and still every disgusting & frightening outcome I could imagine only reinforced my need to see it through and confirm that the reality was nothing of the sort, that the reality of the situation was something innocuous, that every dark night had a morning and that no one was afraid of ghosts in the sunshine. I forgot in my muddled thoughts, caught as I was in the maze, that what I had initially been searching for was intimately wrapped up in Fear, thus hoping that going to the house, and all of the chicanery it would take to get there, would reduce my fear, was absurd. I went to the house. I remember feeling certain that my mom didn’t believe me when I told her was going to zoom over to my friend’s (incidentally I told her I was going to my friend’s house whose brother had spilled the beans on the dry ice in the first place). I actually did plan on going over to the friends house and had arranged it with him beforehand as an alibi, but no matter. I needed to do this and get it over with as fast as possible. The noose was tightening. (Why do we make these arbitrary demands of ourselves, when we know they will bother us so much? Why do we make ourselves do things? Is it the rush of having some stressful thing completed? Is it ever finished?) The house was located at the bottom of a hill in an old but decently affluent neighborhood built before they put gates around new complexes, of a generation you won’t find anymore newly built probably ever again, but were quite normal and upper middle class some time ago. The houses along the streets as I descended the hill were large but more than a few had fallen into a noticeable disrepair. Good bones, but dirty front yards, chipped paint, faded curtains, that sort of thing. When I had set out from home there was plenty of daylight outside but as I had approached the hill I noticed that the sky had permutated its color scheme noticeably and by the time I was at the bottom of the hill and had found the street that the house was on the sun had sunk behind the hilltop and only the trees at the horizon, and the rooftops, blazed with any light while above a new night had grown in considerable confidence. In my memory it is total night when I park my scooter by the large brick mailbox in front of the house. I had seen the whisps of fog on my way down the street and smelt the dry ice in the air but I... I guess I ignored it, strange as it sounds to say. Some things are just too unbelievable. That, or you can’t recognize them enough. At the mailbox I surveyed the front lawns. Copious, hilly, under the canopy of innumerable evergreen pines that must have been 40 or 50 years old, and healthy, so that the house looked like it belonged in some other city is how I thought of it, or that I’d come to a movie set. Over the various knolls in the lawn a steady thick stream of dry ice fog hung in the air, that seemed to dissipate once it reached the perimeter of the yard, as if enclosed by a magic circle. I set my scooter against the mailbox and took the concrete footpath toward the front door, which was itself in the darkened alcove of a stone portico. Along the path I looked side to side. The fog, just as I’d seen it in The Threshold lay all about, moving, undulating, glowing. It was definitely the stuff. I remember looking back down the path the way I’d come. The mailbox and my scooter looked miles away. I felt like I was being watched. I thought about what I would do and say, I thought about what the woman would look like. I inevitably pictured an attractive woman with dark hair and fair skin, but her features were nebulous and vague, the way one’s fantasies often are. I had all of these expectations and had been talking myself up as I made my way through the fog, the smell of the dry ice strong and sharp, sugar-sweet. Then I got to the stone archway that enclosed the porch. Clouds of dry ice fog were pouring from it. The substance I'd been searching for, and here it was in such abundance! Surely she’d set up a huge cauldron of the goodstuff right inside the alcove and had put a fan next to it to blow it my way, but I heard no whir of the fan and saw no such cauldron. Instead only pitch black. I hesitated. In the meanwhile my eyes adjusted somewhat. I saw, with a sinking of my heart, that the front door to the house was open. I called out. No answer. The door looked at me, the fog billowed around me, I turned back and couldn’t see the street anymore. I was in the jaws of the labyrinth. The open door was an invitation and a command.
I stepped into the house. It was dark inside but I could see, better than in the alcove. I stepped into a small tile foyer that looked onto a spacious living room lined with crimson carpet. Moonlight was coming in through large floor to ceiling windows at the far wall, enough that I could see where I was going. In the room was a couch on one wall, a table in the middle, a china cabinet on the other, all semi-lit by the moon and bathed in pineshadow. “Come in,” I heard a voice say. “Come here.” I stayed close to the wall, which curved, taking me in and out of shadow and moonlight as I passed under various skylights from the living room into another room, one whose windows were covered by drapes, making the room so dark I couldn’t judge its size. Looking back toward the door I saw it was closed now, and beyond that, down the hall past the wall with the couch, a corridor that struck fear into the marrow of my bones. (What is it about looking into a dark hallway that can do that?) “Come here,” the voice said again. It was closer now. But I couldn’t see who was speaking. It forced me to peer ever deeper into the pitch dark room, subtly drawing me in closer. You know how you can look into a dark space and trick yourself into seeing something? Or that feeling when you’re not sure if you see something or if it’s just your eyes playing tricks on you? It was like that, but I could feel a presence in the room and soon enough I had come close to the back wall where I could definitively make out that I saw a face. Again that paradox, the impossible spliced with the real, as I determined that the face was too low to the ground, in fact it was barely above the ground. Is she lying on the floor? I saw feet, too, one on either side of the face, and that didn’t make sense because if she was lying on the floor her feet wouldn’t be like that, facing me, pointing the same way as her face. She didn’t look like what I had expected, her nose was large and somewhat hooked, not extremely but it was that kind of nose (which I never would have imagined on a fantasy woman). She wasn’t ugly but not someone I would have immediately called attractive, and her feet seemed large at first, too large, only I saw later that she just had very articulated arches and the toes were painted red. But where was her body? I had this terror feeling that she was smushed, that she was dead, had been killed, but it didn’t make sense because she was looking right at me with those eyes, she was watching me, the face had life in it, she wasn’t dead. This isn’t right, this isn’t right, were the words that kept screaming in my head, something’s wrong, something bad is happening, get me away! But I stayed and at first I thought I was moving closer to her but then I realized, watching the feet, that she was moving closer to me. A slant of moonlight from the kitchen then illuminated the source of the strangeness, her legs and feet were pulled over her head, like an acrobat, into an inverse carnalpadasan. That’s why her head was close to the ground like that. I hadn’t seen her hands or arms because she dragged them behind her, under her, as she moved forward toward me. It wasn’t a human pose she was in, but more like an insect's. Her legs were like insect legs, I remember thinking, with the floating head like that, and I noticed too that a moaning sound was coming out of her even as she looked at me with her mouth closed, face still, it was as if her face had been painted on, like the hourglass on a black widow’s bulb. That wasn’t it either. The moaning sound was coming from above her head, where like an overlarge swollen third eye, a quivering vulva opened and closed. I turned back in terror and the rooms were filled with dry ice fog. I looked back, I wanted to look back, I was turned on by the vulva (I realize now, and must have then too but I didn’t admit it). I was so terrified but I had to keep looking and the face knew this, it never changed expression. Enrapt, I turned and took in the image of the contorted Dry Ice Queen one final time, and awoke.
Just a bad dream I thought, relieved, until I adjusted myself and found that I was covered in jizz. My own. It’d been a wet dream. I immediately felt guilty. Sighing, I moved to get out of bed and realized with a shudder of fear that I was not in my bed. I wanted to scream but the fear had taken my voice. Good thing, too, because as I frantically scurried in the bed I realized I was in my friend’s room, the friend I had told my mom I was going to see. I had told her I was going to spend the night, and here I was. My friend, over on his bed (he had two in his room) was passed out, had noticed nothing. Like a thief in the night I shifted about the room, found my overnight bag and took out the next day’s clothes, then crept down the hall to the bathroom to change. Once I’d cleaned myself and changed I snuck back to my friend’s room and stowed the soiled clothes away, then got back into the bed and forced myself to sleep, seeing the Witch’s face every time I closed my eyes, her vulvar third eye pulsing, the blackness around her riven with glowing fog.
I didn’t mention it the next morning. My mom came and picked me up, I put the scooter in her trunk, went home, end of story. Or so I thought. It was over with dry ice for me anyway. Still, I’d see her around town, at school, in a stranger’s glance, out the window while driving through the woods. The same thrilling, terrifying energy pulses through me every time I sense she’s near, and I try to breath it out, try to uncoil that energy with concerted effort, channeling all of my physical and mental faculties to disentangle myself from her spell. But I cannot deny feeling a certain allure, a temptation, I see now, that was always there. I think it was the surprise of it all, the particular and specific ways in which my expectations were eviscerated. I struggle at times with trying to get away from that feeling because there is a definite desire in me as well to embrace it. Somewhere inside, instinctively, I know I cannot give in to her, but I feel with equal certainty that sooner or later the driving urge to press the button won’t be able to be stopped.
