Encounters With Johnston

The six years I spent in Westphalia Germany, was in an old fortified medieval town called Soest. A great circular maze of old cobbled streets, alleys, and houses so ancient, their walls of clay and straw were seldom straight. There were plenty of strange old spirits. You could even hear them joking and playing cards in the old guard house of the town's main gate on warm full moon nights. Thus when we moved into an old colonial Victorian house in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, I was already well accustomed to these things. It would happen late at night, just as I was drifting into sleep, something relentlessly pacing throught the attic above. The mutterings would escalate into somekind of philosophical perplexity, as whoever it was, was obviously trying to figure something out. Whenever I sat in deep thought at the window or on the door step, it would empathically intervene, in cynical agreement of my insights. Despite my young age I already had quite enough of society's rediculous gestalt games. He agreed that humanity had obviously missed the big picture somewhere down the line. Then he would ramble on and on about some strange mystical formula, that I later learned was Rosicrucian. He was looking for the key to some higher realm of existance. It was right there under his nose, but he just couldn't see it for all his mystical precepts. It was futile. He just wouldn't let go of any of it, eternally trapped in his own quasi-temporality until hell knows what for the sake of immortality. Thus these late night haunts became tediously annoying, to say the least. Then the news came from Germany of my grandfather's stroke after a low flying fighter jet had shattered all the windows in his neighbourhood. It was barely a week later, I was tossing in my sleep with the most nagging feeling of his imminent death, when the pacing suddenly stopped with a loud crash. The phone rang and it was my father calling to tell us that Opa had just died.

For my brother, it was a different story. He actually saw the man one morning at sunrise, hovering cross legged before the window, leering at him. I think what shocked him was the fact of something so alter-real actually blocking the sunlight as a solid form. My friends, however, were a foolish lot, often dabbling in things they just didn't have the guts for. One night they tried to hold a seance in my bedroom. I only laughed and said "heh, I hope you realize what you're getting yourselves into". Needless to say, our resident spook did not approve, and a cold hand on the shoulder soon sent them fleeing out of the house.

The large house had been divided into a duplex, and our side of it had no access to the attic. In the basement there was a door to the other side, but it was locked. Of its "living" residents was a divorced woman who worked at the bus terminal and her elderly bed ridden father. She had a terrible reputation as a nattering gossip, so I did my best to avoid her. At first I wondered if the pacing at night was the old man, that maybe he wasn't so bed ridden. She was always giving him hell, which was very disturbing indeed. I felt for the poor man. Then one day he died, and the house was up for sale. We were not yet required to move, pending the decision of the new owners. Nonetheless the pacings and mutterings did not relent.

With the other side now vacant, I took the liberty of picking the lock of that basement entrance. Reaching the ground floor, I found myself in a beautiful spiral stairwell with a stained glass skylight. I ascended into the attic but all was empty and silent as it should be, still there was a feel to that whole side of the house, of something lurking on the temporal borderline. A well educated quaker friend, upon learning where I lived, told me it was the "Johnston House", the summer residence of one of Nova Scotia's first premiers. An extremely eccentric chap who despite his public Christian standing, was a notorious Rosicrucian. My brother went down to the Dartmouth Heritage Museum to check this out. Not surprisingly the face in the picture matched the one he saw leering at him that one morning. When we finally moved out, I could feel the man watching from his attic retreat as he said "You'll be back", but I knew deep down it was only his wishful thinking and turned away.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_W._Johnston