More Stones!

I found the work on the Elvis gravestone wasn't as difficult as I thought. My neighbors kindly gave me some spare 2" foam they had lying around (they do diaramas of castles, etc) and I've begun work on converting a lot of my older stones into this newer style.

The oldest stones are also 2" foam, being the classical rounded-over gravestone style with my witty sayings painted on. These I am doing a recessed carving. On the new foam, I'm doing them in the style I did the King's, with the area around the lettering being recesses.

Tripping over stones...

The grapping branches of the dark trees release their fettering hold as wood gives way to a clearing in your flight. Thinking only of escape, notice is not given to the fixed stones at your feet, until the solid shock of impact is felt, and the ground rushes up to meet you.

Gasping for breath, you climb to your knees to examine the object that brought your exodus from this night to a halt. The rough feel of cut stone greets your hands as you search through the air. A light is risked to examine the object, and names and dates, rudely cut into the stone appear, indicating a gravestone.

Casting about with your dimming light, more and more cut stones reveal themselves all about. But the residents are not quiet in their repose. Indignant on this night from the intrustion of the living, they surrender their rest and begin to push their way up to pushing this interloper...

---

Years ago, before the kids, my wife and I bought a house in Dearborn, MI.

This monster is growing out of control...

Your skin tingled and the hairs of your arm stood erect as you beheld the sight from your hiding spot. The witch had returned to her seething cauldron and begun chanting in some foul tongue not meant for Man's ear nor should have ever been uttered in the light of the brightest day, let alone this cold dark eve.  The ground convulsed in agony and was rent asunder. Upwards from their dark prison spilt these ashen and phantasmal denizens of another, alien world. Escape seemed to be their goal, but they were soon transfixed by the uttering and swaying of the witch. Massing together, they were powerless against her trance and were compelled to serve her will...

---

It seemed like a simple project...

Through the Stygian Shadows...

Following the fetid stream meandering the dark wood, through the tangled, grabbing underbrush that urges you to proceed not further, you emerge upon a tableau that forever sears itself unto your immortal being. Between the tangled limbs and scratching branches, and through the stygian shadows dance the loathsome populace, both large and small, of this very night of nights.


Fear upwells within your breast as the beat, beat, beat of that damnable, unruly drum pounds in your ears, like your heart about to burst from fear, but there is nowhere to turn to, no where to run. The dancers gimble and gyre around you, twist and twirling, calling and beckoning. First one step, then another, until, you too, are caught up in the fray.


Dread and dismay, one by one, whirl you away through the dark of the night and through that rude wood, until the dawn, but there is no return. There is only the crazed drum, drum, drum in your ears as your very soul faces away into its grim recesses...