Jeffrey Kosh Spirits and

Thought FormsTales from Prosperity

Glades

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First EditionCopyright © 2012 Jeffrey Kosh

All rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-105-62047-8

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or

otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the

publisher’s prior consent. No part or parts of this publication may be copied, recorded

or otherwise reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted.This is a work of fiction. Names,

characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are

used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to

actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely

coincidental.

As this anthology contains strong language, violence scenes, and sexual themes it is suggested for a mature adult audience.

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ToMARY WOLLSTONECRAFT GODWIN SHELLEY

(30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851)

And to all Female Horror Authors continuing her tradition.

"'All men hate the wretched; how then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, they creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us.'"

Frankenstein or The Modern PrometheusChapter 10, pg. 83

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Table of Contents

INTRODUCTIONNIYOHONTEH (1647)

KAMP KOKO BY NIGHT (1984)I WILL GET HER (1996)

ROAD OFF (2010)SHE WAS WAITING (2012)

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INTRODUCTION

Masks.This book is about masks.Hey, wait a minute, that’s not

what’s on the cover! I’m sure you’re yelling that, right now. No, I didn’t cheat; I promise. This collection of short stories are all set in that creepy town of Prosperity Glades, and all of them are about spirits … and thought forms.

Yet, it is also about masks. The masks we wear each day, those that other employ to hide their true feelings, and most of all, those that spirits wear to lure us into their clutches.

Spirits, by their nature, are formless beings; in a way they are just memes. Each spirit represents something about human nature and human wishes. By the way, spirits are wishes made into flesh - or almost flesh. The term ‘spirit’ itself, refers to an entity that is incorporeal, not a being made of matter, although, in almost all cultural traditions and folklore, they are tied to the physical world and many are able to assume a material form.

Spirits appear in different forms and types, and all human culture has a belief system incorporating them. In a way they are already … thought forms.

In animistic cultures, spirits are present everywhere; in living and unliving matter. Items, constructions,

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even raw rock, are infused with spiritual or lifelike properties. Some Native American belief assign spirits only to living things; other believed that all of creation has a spiritual counterpart. As such, they can often inhabit totems, fetishes, and mostly charms and magical items. These kinds of spirits - also present in Shinto, Japan’s main religion - are thought as an ‘animating force’, akin to the human soul. Where Frankenstein’s creation life force did came from? Who is the individual settling in the mortal shell? It's the sum of all his parts; a mosaic of souls melting into an imperfect whole, like the Echo character in ‘Dollhouse’? Or it's the animating force of the brain; the mind of one of the deceased, in this case, like in Kenneth Branagh’s rendition, it must be Professor Krempe. Or is this something different: a being snatched out of its dimension, and infused inside a golem made of flesh. Yet, the creature has no clues about itself; it just exists and doesn’t seem to experience flashbacks as Echo does in many instances. It doesn’t remember a past life as a living being. Nope, it is rather like a Buddhist reincarnation; no memories, no regrets, just traits and déjà vu.

I like to think at the Creature as something which never lived, never experienced our reality, it was just snagged from its world and placed inside human flesh, and by effect, it acts as an infant, yet with a higher

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ability for understanding its surroundings.

Spirits are also thought as ‘Guiding Forces’, directing everything, from creation to destruction, from weather to the movement of the stars. Chinese ancestry worship claims that family heritage spirits protect and aid the descendants of each family with which they are associated, but can also hamper the family’s progresses if they become angry as result of perceived slights.

Or spirits can be thought as ‘Higher Powers’ or divinities, and I know this is a touchy argument. In many cultures - Judaic-Christian included - all noncorporeal beings are spirits, even the most omnipotent of gods. Angels, Demons, Valkyries, the Courtesans of Celestial Bureaucracy; they are all servants of a Higher Power, and that being is itself a spirit. They often behave like that. The Lord of Old Testament made a pact with Abraham’s people …

Plato, the Greek philosopher, envisioned a Realm of Ideals: a place containing the perfect archetype of everything existing in our physical world. Something like an infinite Universal Genetic Library, where archetypes are stored to be used as originals from where all copies belong. The same did Carl Jung, describing spirits from the Universal Unconscious.

Here comes the ‘Thought Form’.

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Modern occult scholars describe a "thought form" as a kind of "artificial spirit" created by the power of the human mind. A thought form can range in complexity from a simple emotional impression to a fully sentient and aware being, and in power from a minor servitor spirit to a deity. Some beliefs say all spirits are thought forms, created and sustained by human belief. This certainly fits with spirits drawing strength from mortal worship and veneration. And this is my vision of spiritual beings. They are ‘memoid’ creatures, like David Brin imagined them in his Uplift universe. Formless, archetypal creatures caused by emotions and beliefs. The haunted house becomes haunted if all people in town swap stories about its ghosts. The well becomes cursed if everyone in a range of a few miles believes it to be as such. They feed emotional essence to a spot, and it becomes that thing; holy or unholy.

And they wear masks.Yes, they do. They assume the guise

we want them to. They become the thing we worship … or dread.

The Veiled Queen, Nemesis, the Smiling Monster, the Dying Road, and the Cloaked Man.

They all wear masks. They use these masks to cloak their

true nature, often too ugly to behold. The Veiled Queen is just a big lump of unearthly matter. Nemesis hides inside a human host.

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These five tales are all about masks, and thought forms, too. And all take place in Prosperity Glades, because - as you should already know, if you have read my novel ‘Feeding the Urge’ - there’s a weak spot between our world and the spiritual one, right in the middle of Grassy Swamp. And spirits - and thought forms - do thrive here.

Each one of these stories happened in Prosperity’s bloody past: from 1647 to our times. As if visiting my beloved town with a time machine, you get the opportunity to meet old familiar faces (some before their eventual demise) and new acquaintances.

You’ve heard about the Breed Mother in ‘Feeding the Urge’. And you can bet you already know that ax-wielding maniac in ‘Kamp Koko by Night’. Dr. Henry Hart and his terrific t-shirt collection returns in ‘I Will Get Her’.

So, forgive my long rant and let’s return to Prosperity.

Yet beware, once there … avoid making wishes.

They can come true and take form.