Chuck Buda
Chuck Buda is a horror author and podcast host from New Jersey. He is best known for his love of pizza and Black Metal. Chuck grew up a fan of the Universal Monster movies and Leonard Nimoy’s In Search Of... Smitten with all things monstrous and unexplained, Chuck began a lifelong journey of searching for new scares and thrills. Chuck Buda co-hosts The Mando Method Podcast on Project Entertainment Network with author, Armand Rosamilia. They talk about all aspects of writing.
The Visit
Danny Campbell
Part the First: Hope
The visit was supposed to be a chance to re-align my life. I mean, after suffering Sandy for two years, I was shot; my nerves were like tearing wrapping paper. Then I saw the ad on FB for ‘the retreat’. Now, usually, I wouldn’t have gone for that kind of thing, you know, cymbal clanging and whatnot, but something made me click on it. Alright, it was the smiling girl with the perfect teeth and curly hair, that and the picture of equally perfect sea, sand and sky, and an obligatory coconut tree bent at just the right angle to lie on and do nothing, just like the girl was. Except for smiling.
I’d saved up enough and had some leave from welcoming bemused visitors at the Guildhall Museum, and I could really do with a break from staring at that shitty statue of Margaret Thatcher all day. Did you know some guy walked in one day with a cricket bat underneath his coat and took her head off with it? I really wish I could have done that. Stupid, isn’t it, vandalism? I like art, but I’m sick of all those statues of people who were mostly bastards, yet some knuckle heads seem to love. Anyway, she’s encased in bullet proof glass now, the old harridan, and I digress.
No, the visit to the retreat was going to change my life for the better. I’d heard a lot about spirituality, but I can’t say that I ever felt any. In school they used to drone on about it, and I know what Jesus did and everything, but it always seemed like such a lot of bollocks. Sandy didn’t help. She, along with a load of ‘do gooder’ mates, was in church every Sunday when the night before she’d been drugged up to her eyeballs with a cock in each hand when we were supposed to be going steady. Of course, I was the last to find out, and boy, enough is enough.
The plane ride to Thailand took twelve hours and Bangkok is a shit hole. Sure, I spent several nights there banging two girls at a time like all the blokes there do—you should really see how disgusting some of the really fat, old men are there, it made me ashamed and really sorry for the girls—at least I was young and not at all that ugly, just, well, gullible, I supposed I’d call it now.
Anyhow, I took the overnight bus to Surat Thani hung over and feeling rotten and ashamed. Unable to sleep because of the sniffling and sneezing, coughing old Thais, and the guy and girl doing some heavy-duty fingering in the seats just opposite, that took twelve hours, but eventually, I was there.
Baan NokKhun Tong was a revelation. I mean, I’d never seen anything like it in my life, I mean, not even in pictures. When the funny bus/taxi thing with bored looking middle-aged Thai women on it deposited me outside the gates, I, and, judging by the look of the taxi driver, thought there must have been some mistake. All that here was a sign which read: Baan NokKhun Tong/Talking Man Bird House; home of nice, happy people. Shit, who wouldn’t go in, right? I could do with nice, happy people.
To get into the damn place you had to pull yourself across a short stretch of ocean on a barge with a rope. Not easy if you’ve spent the last five years saying hello to people and dreaming of pussy. To be honest, I was blinded by the scenery; it was just like the ad. Kept waiting for that pretty girl to come running up and fall in love with me.
The sun burned, and the sweat of my brow mixed in with the sun block and burned my eyes. The sea was shallow and blue and the aroma so briny. On the other side of the strait I tied the raft to a post next to another sign, but this one just had that squiggly Thai writing and I had no idea what it said. There was, though, an arrow, which pointed in the direct of a steep path which was surrounded by jungle which seemed to shake and flit with animals and birds. I felt some trepidation.
There wasn’t a gate—you could just wander in—just a big, wooden house with a traditional Thai roof. There didn’t seem to be anybody about, until I walked into what I presumed was the kitchen area where an old Thai woman with betel nut stained teeth sat cutting up vegetables and throwing them into a pan of water. There was an old dog at her feet, it looked up at me and growled before realizing it couldn’t be bothered and sank its head back to the floor. I tried to explain myself to the old woman.
‘Hi, retreat, ree-treeeet,’ I said. ‘Reeeeee-treeeeeeeet!’
‘Oh, you’re here for the retreat,’ she said, looking at me as if I was mentally defective.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, I thought...’
‘Yes, of course you thought. Don’t try it too often it might make your head hurt. They’re over in the big house, over there, across that bridge over the swamp.’ I ‘retreated’ with my tail between my legs
At the big house there was a hall where what must have been the bulk of the commune were sitting on the floor, their eyes closed, while a Caucasian man who, though he didn’t really look like a monk apart from the bald head, was making monk chanting noises. Though it all seemed very pacific, I noticed that the people sitting on the floor were a) all very young and b) seemingly emaciated with strained looking faces, as if they were trying very hard to take a shit.
I sat watching them from a distance until the leader said some gibberish which seemed to indicate that the session was over, then they all got their feet. The leader, quick as a flash, spied me first and cut through the group who seemed eager to engage him in conversation as he made a b-line for me.
‘Ah, hallo!’ he said, towering over me as he drew close, and fixing me with I can only describe as ‘magic eyes’, eyes that held you under their spell.
‘Hello,’ I said tentatively, while he boomed:
‘Welcome to The Retreat, your life changes here and now.’ Several of the rest of the devotees began to gather around me, some of them placing their hands on my shoulders and back. It’s like they were sniffing me, like animals in a troupe. I noticed that some of the others held back, observing from a distance, and one of them, I swear—her face was thinner, and the smile wasn’t there—was the girl I’d seen on the FB advert. ‘Please follow me to the induction room so I can take you through your initiation phase. I followed his broad shoulders and the back of that big, bald head, as he led me into a small office at the side of the main hall. He told me to sit down on a bamboo chair and as I began,
‘I’d like to...’ he stopped me mid-sentence with,
‘You must hand over your passport, your phone, your money, indeed, all association with the outside world. It is imperative in order that you get the most out of your stay here, there must be no distractions from ‘The Learning’.’
He said the words: “The Learning”, as if he was summoning them from somewhere not of this earth, with the kind of relish you see priests utilizing in their sermons in those funny ‘speaking in tongues’ churches in the US. He could see that I was hesitant about surrendering my entire identity and said, ‘Do not worry; they will be kept here in the safe until your time with us is over.’