Category: Horror fiction

Analysis of ‘The Fly’

I: Introduction

The Fly is a 1958 horror/science fiction film produced and directed by Kurt Neumann. It stars Vincent Price, Patricia Owens, David Hedison, and Herbert Marshall. The screenplay was written by James Clavell, based on the 1957 George Langelaan short story of the same name.

The Fly had a mixed-to-positive critical reception on release, and it was a commercial success, boosting Price into a major star of horror films. Now, criticism of the movie is more uniformly positive. Two black-and-white sequels followed: Return of the Fly (1959), and Curse of the Fly (1965). A superb remake, starring Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis, was directed by David Cronenberg in 1986, with its own sequel in 1989.

Here is a link to quotes from the 1958 film, here’s a link to the complete script, and here is a link to the short story.

II: My Radical Reinterpretation

What ought to be emphasized about the story isn’t the notion of scientist André Delambre (Hedison) bring transformed into a fly-human hybrid, the result of a freak accident in his attempt to teleport himself (and, without his knowing, a housefly that got into his “disintegration-reintegration” machine), but rather what such a notion could be seen to symbolize.

What is far more apparent in the short story, if its contents are not naïvely taken at face value, is that its narration–by André’s brother François (played by Price in the film) in the outer frame, then in the middle by André’s wife Hélène (played by Owens in the film) as she tells it in a handwritten manuscript–is given by traumatized people whose reliability is in question.

The film relates the story in a manner implying that everything happened just as told, though, by the end, no proof survives of the more fantastic elements of the story. Still, there are subtle indicators, in the behaviour of François and Hélène, that suggest that affairs aren’t as they look on the screen, implying that the narrative unreliability of the short story has been translated to the cinematic medium.

In the film, François admits to having romantic feelings for beautiful Hélène; though she denies ever having paramours (or André having had them) to Inspector Charas (Marshall), we can easily regard her words as dishonest. Could there have been an affair between her and François, a result of workaholic André’s neglect of his family? Claims of a husband and wife being perfectly happy together can easily be dismissed as a façade.

III: Unconscious Guilt

It is insisted throughout the story that Hélène could have killed André only out of madness. Where could such a madness have originated? Guilt feelings over an affair? Families in France (where the short story is set), or in Montréal (where the film is set), in the 1950s would have been Roman Catholic ones, in which adultery would have been regarded as a serious sin (a sin compounded by a man betraying his brother and, as her son’s uncle, committing incest of a Hamlet-like sort). The mind tries to repress guilt as best it can, but the repressed returns to consciousness in unrecognizable forms.

In the case of this story, the return of the repressed has come in the form of imagining André as having his head and arm traded with the head and leg of a housefly. Such a hybrid symbolizes the bestial side of human nature. His experiments are done in the basement, symbol of the unconscious. In contrast, the ground floor of the house, the upstairs, and outside can be seen to correspond to the conscious mind and the world of superficiality, appearance, what only seems to be true.

IV: Appearance vs Reality

There is much to note in the contrast between the illusory surface and hidden reality in The Fly. The marriage of the Delambres only seems perfectly happy. Similarly, André seems to be the kind, gentle husband who’d never hurt an animal. Yet his workaholic obsession with his basement experiments means neglecting his wife and son, Henri in the short story, or Philippe (played by Charles Herbert) in the film. Furthermore, this supposed animal lover overconfidently and recklessly puts the family cat, Dandelo, in the teleportation machine and disintegrates it.

Hélène, after killing her husband, confesses to the killing with perfect calmness, though François and Charas conclude that she must be mad; indeed, in the short story, she even kills herself in despair. And when François answers the phone at the beginning of the film to learn that she has just killed his brother, he’s quite calm; whereas at the beginning of the short story, he speaks of being “uneasy” from telephones, having to restrain his agitation when answering them.

In fact, in Cronenberg’s remake, this theme of appearance versus reality is revisited in how Seth Brundle (Goldblum), upon emerging from the teleportation machine as “Brundle-fly”–far from being the shocking monstrosity André is with his fly’s head and leg for an arm–looks exactly the same as before on the outside–in fact, he’s also physically superior. It’s only later that we realize that Seth is a monster hiding inside, that inside showing itself more and more to the end of the remake.

V: Implausible Science

Now, this difference between the 1958 and 1986 movies brings me to a point that I hope will help explain the particular angle at which I’m interpreting the original movie and the short story. I don’t believe André has actually had his head and arm swapped with the head and leg of a housefly–I believe this transformation really is a fabrication of his wife’s mad imagination, just as Charas does. The reason for my disbelief should be obvious: the science behind the transformation is preposterous. Hardly anyone apart from Hélène even believes it!

How do a fly’s head and leg grow to the comparable sizes of a man’s head and arm, while the latter two shrink to the sizes of a fly’s equivalent body parts? How is the man’s intelligence maintained in the giant fly’s head, even if only temporarily? And how is there a comparable intelligence, enough to squeak “Help me!” because of an approaching spider, in the miniature head of the fly caught in the web?

Small wonder that in the 1986 remake, the writers wisely spread the fly’s DNA equally throughout Brundle’s body. Surely even Langelaan and Clavell realized that the swapping of heads and limbs, as given in their respective versions of the story, is unbelievable scientifically. Hence my contention that Hélène is genuinely insane, an insanity brought on by the trauma of her husband’s violent death, a suicide with her assistance (as she describes it). François is similarly addled by this trauma. I believe his confession of love for her provides the vital clue to the reason for their narratives’ unreliability, something easily maintained in prose writing, but not so easily translated onto the big screen, since we, the watchers of the movie, tend to have credulous eyes.

VI: Unreliable Narration, in the Text, and Onscreen

Though his confession of love for Hélène isn’t found in the short story, I believe there are plenty of subtle hints of an affair between him and her in Langelaan’s words, however carefully the two guilty ones try to tiptoe around any mention of their guilt. Such tiptoeing is also evident in the film, in their innocent conversations throughout.

I see the visuals of the film as representing their unreliable narrations, and since the film is largely faithful to the short story (except for such–mostly minor–changes as the setting, Henri’s name becoming Philippe, which of André’s arms is switched with the fly’s leg, his head being revealed as all housefly or as a mix of fly and the cat, whether or not Hélène kills herself, and whether it’s François or Charas who kills the fly in the spider web), I feel it isn’t too far out of place to assume that François is (unreliably) telling the outer frame of the story through visuals, and her telling of the inner narration, instead of writing it in a manuscript, is unreliable.

VII: The Telephone

I’ll come to those subtle hints of an affair later, as they arrive in the sequence of the plot. For now, I’ll start with François’s answering of the phone. In the film, he’s calm enough, though in the short story, this calmness disguises a terrible agitation from hearing the phone ring, especially in the middle of the night, as happens at the beginning.

The reason for his unease comes from a feeling that the caller is coming into the room, intruding on his private space, breaking into his home to talk right into his ear. It seems odd that the short story should begin this way, yet if one compares this transmission of a voice–instantaneously from one place, far away, to another–to the teleportation of whatever (or whoever) is in André’s “disintegration-reintegration” machine, such a beginning of the story, along with François’s agitation, becomes explicable. The one instantaneous transmission is associated in his mind with the other.

Recall that I don’t take the human/fly hybrid story literally; also, François is beginning a narration–one after the events of Hélène’s story have been made known to him–with a discussion of the, if you will, ‘teleportation’ of the human voice. This aural teleportation feels like a frightening intruder to him, like the intrusive fly in André’s machine, and like the human/fly monster he becomes, which is an intrusion into the lives of François and Hélène.

VIII: Nothingness

The pertinent thing about teleportation, like the instant movement of the human voice from here to far away, or vice versa, is the sense of no intermediate area for teleportation to move through. The displaced entity–be it a voice on the phone, or a plate, a newspaper, a cat, a guinea pig, or a man (mixed with a fly)–disappears, vanishes in the place of origin and reappears in the destination. That lack of an in-between route to travel through, that gap, feels uncanny, a land of nothingness. This gap, I believe, is what frightens François so much.

Similarly, when André’s body is discovered in the Delambre brothers’ factory, his head and arm crushed under the steam hammer, it isn’t so much the blood that is horrifying, but how the head and arm are so thoroughly flattened as to have been reduced to nothing. The hammer’s impact has been set at zero, a setting the drop is never given. François notes in the film that zero “means level with the bed”; such a setting “would squeeze the metal to nothing,” as has been done to André’s head and arm.

The purpose of this extreme setting is ostensibly to annihilate even the slightest hint of a fly’s head and leg, instead of André’s head and arm; I’d say, though, that it’s that very nothingness, revealed when the hammer is raised, in “the ghastly mess bared by the hammer,” that causes François (in the short story) to be “violently sick.”

IX: Resistance

When Charas questions Hélène about the killing of André, she is fully cooperative about explaining what she did, and in detail (except for her odd forgetting about having dropped the steam hammer twice, to crush his fly-leg/arm). She adamantly refuses, however, to explain why she killed him.

In the short story, François describes Charas as being “more than just an intelligent police official. He was a keen psychologist and had an amazing way of smelling out a fib or an erroneous statement even before it was uttered.” So his questioning of her puts him in the role of psychoanalyst, and her in the role of analysand. Her insistence that she cannot explain why she killed André can be seen as a form of resistance.

Of course, she eventually does explain why, but in the form of a bizarre monster story that hardly anyone can believe; certainly the science behind the story is so ludicrous that even Langelaan and Clavell must have had their own doubts about it, as I’ve explained above. This fly-human hybrid story must be a case of the return of the repressed in an unrecognizable form…but what could the fly-hybrid monster symbolize for mad Hélène? I’ll come to this soon enough.

X: The Gap In-between

It is insisted that her marriage with André was a perfectly happy one…but we are suddenly ‘teleported,’ if you will, from perfect marital bliss to her killing of him, and with the refusal of a proper explanation, except for this bizarre fly-monster story. Just as there’s a gap between the caller’s voice at one end of a phone call, and his voice heard by the receiver on the other end; and just as there’s the gap of the disintegration of what’s teleported at one end, and its reintegration at the other end; so is there a gap between the couple’s marital bliss and the killing…that dreaded, uncanny nothingness in the middle.

Above, I wrote of André’s basement laboratory as symbolic of the unconscious, where the “disintegration/reintegration” machine causes that in-between gap of nothingness. In the short story, the laboratory isn’t in his basement, but in a separate building right by the factory with the steam hammer. Now, the laboratory doesn’t have to be underground to represent the unconscious…or the “subconscious,” where Charas imagines the fly to have meaning for Hélène. Psychoanalysts don’t speak of the repressed as being ‘beneath’ consciousness, but as being unknown to consciousness, for the repressed comes right back to the surface and hides in plain sight, as it were. A fly is buzzing around, in the air, much of the time in the movie.

XI: The Lacanian Unconscious, and the Gap as Lack

In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan speaks of how “the Freudian unconscious is situated at that point, where, between cause and that which it affects, there is always something wrong…what the unconscious does is to show us the gap through which neurosis recreates a harmony with a real–a real that may well not be determined…and what does [Freud] find in the hole, the split, in the gap so characteristic of cause? Something of the order of the non-realized.” (Lacan, page 22)

This gap is between cause and effect, like the gap between disintegration and reintegration, the empty space replacing a path on which something, otherwise not disintegrated and reintegrated, would travel, rather than be teleported, from A to B. This gap is also the Lacanian lack that gives rise to desire, and discovering what the desire is in this story is key to understanding the symbolic meaning of the fly.

XII: Freudian Slips

We must fill in this gap to determine what is being repressed, what is not being said or shown in the short story or the film, but what is rather hinted at through the occasional Freudian slip, or symbolic interpretation of whatever in the story is described as something otherwise mundane or in a matter-of-fact physical way.

One such a slip, as I see it, occurs when Henri/Philippe is not regarded by Hélène as her son. In the short story, François in his narration calls the six-year-old boy, his nephew, “the very image of his father”; but as I’ve said above, this narration is unreliable. Because of André’s death and Hélène’s declared madness, François has been made the boy’s guardian, in effect, his new father; yet any suggestion that he really is the boy’s father will be guiltily denied.

In the film, François even says to Charas, “She acts as if the boy were mine and not hers.” Charas speculates that Hélène is trying to protect her son, or that perhaps she fears or hates him, something François dismisses as an insane idea, and it is at this point in the film that Charas asks if François is in love with her, to which he immediately replies, “Yes.”

Why would a scriptwriter of Clavell’s obvious ability add this element to the story without developing it, if it didn’t serve much of any purpose? Note that François’s declaration of love comes immediately after a claim that Philippe is supposedly his son and not hers. Could he be her love-child by François in a love affair, one she feels so guilty about that, in her mad guilt, she denies her own maternity? The way the film ends–with François, in effect, as the boy’s new father, and Hélène having not committed suicide but being, also in effect, his new wife–looks suspiciously like wish-fulfillment. Such wish-fulfillment reinforces the visual presentation of the film as really being François’s unreliable narration.

XIII: Forbidden Desires and the Fly

Naturally, François rules out even the possibility of an affair with her by saying, “I don’t think she ever noticed me,” though a close look at Charles Herbert, the child actor chosen to play Philippe, looks more like he could be a son of Vincent Price than of David Hedison. Finally, during the scene when Philippe has caught the fly with the white head, and he sees his mother with his uncle, he is annoyed to be told by her to let the fly go; but as he is going outside and closing the front door, he looks back at her and his uncle with a split-second look of suspicion in his eyes, as if he sees the two adults acting a little too familiar at that particular moment.

That this suspicious moment happens on the very day when the heads and limbs of André and the fly are switched is significant. Here we come to the very symbolism of the fly. Male houseflies, during their short lives, have a voracious sexual appetite and are constantly on the lookout for females to mate with. In this we can see a symbolic link with my suspicions of a guilty sexual tryst between François and Hélène.

This guilt results in feelings of shame, disgust, and worthlessness, which can all be associated with houseflies. André’s constant preoccupation with his work, even to the point of writing out a new formula for teleportation on the program pamphlet to a ballet he’s supposed to be watching with his wife, means he’s emotionally neglecting her, which not only can drive her into the arms of his brother (who we already know is amorously infatuated with her), but which also makes André as worthless to her as a fly. So the exchanging of his head and arm with the head and leg of a fly is symbolic of this depreciation of his worth to her.

XIV: The Buzzing

With the guilt and shame that an adulteress feels, especially as one who, according to the short story, “had ever been a true Catholic, who believed in God and another, better life hereafter,” Hélène would have been desperately afraid of anyone finding out about her extramarital affair. Hence, her agitation whenever hearing the buzzing of a nearby fly.

Let’s recall the multiple meanings of the word buzz. Apart from the insect noise, buzz has been used to refer to the sound of telephones (remember in this connection the irritation François feels at the sound of a phone ringing), and also to refer to rumours. These additional meanings had existed long before the writing of the short story and the making of the movie. So her agitation at the sound of buzzing symbolically suggests her fear of gossip, or rumours from people knowing about her affair.

XV: Obsessions with Flies

Also, her nervous breakdown at the asylum after seeing a nurse swatting flies can be attributed to a triggering of her guilt over an affair that, in betraying André, reduced him to the worth of a fly, and so killing flies feels like a killing of him again. She also speaks of wanting François to destroy the white-headed fly if she tells him why she killed André; this contradiction suggests an emotional conflict in her–killing it kills evidence of her guilty affair, yet it also represents killing André again.

Now, she is not the only one to raise her eyebrows at the idea of houseflies. François, after hearing about her obsession with them, is curious to hear Henri/Philippe bring up the fly with the white head during lunch with the boy. Previously, Charas brought up her fly obsession immediately before he and François discuss her denial that the boy is her son, and François’s admitting he loves her. So we see here a significant juxtaposition of houseflies with the boy’s parentage and François’s love for Hélène: I don’t think this juxtaposition is coincidental.

XVI: Love Triangles, and the Remake

My speculation of a hidden, repressed love triangle between André, Hélène, and François can be seen overtly in the equivalent three main characters in the 1986 remake–respectively, Seth Brundle, Veronica “Ronnie” Quaife (played by Davis), and Stathis Borans (played by John Getz). Brundle, knowing Ronnie has had a relationship with Stathis prior to her current relationship with him, gets jealous when he suspects that her reason for leaving him early to meet Stathis, when she’s supposed to be celebrating the recent success of his teleportation pods, is to get back together with Stathis. (Actually, she’s meeting Stathis to confront him over a veiled threat he’s made out of a jealousy of his own, over her new relationship with Brundle.)

And right when all of this jealousy is building, Brundle gets drunk, a fly is buzzing around, and both of them go into one of the pods to be teleported…and fused. Again, we have the juxtaposition of a buzzing fly with a love triangle; it’s as if the scriptwriting of the remake subliminally picked up on the veiled rivalry between the Delambre brothers and Hélène.

Another theme picked up from the 1958 movie and put into the remake is the relationship between external, illusory appearance and inner, hidden reality. When Brundle first comes out of the second pod, we of course don’t see a fly’s head and leg replacing his head and arm, but he looks as perfectly human as before. It’s only later, as his body parts start corrupting and falling off, leading climactically to the outer human shell all coming off and he’s revealed to be a giant bug, that we see he isn’t human anymore.

When Hélène begins telling François and Charas her story, in the film we see a scene of what appears to be the perfectly happy family. André is seen tickling Philippe, playing like a loving father, and all seems well. The shot is so ideal that it looks a bit too perfect. A hint already as to how things are actually not so good is in how André tells the boy he can’t play with him at the moment. It will become increasingly apparent that he is so obsessed with his work that he’s spending more time in that basement laboratory than with his family.

Yet another element shared between the 1958 and 1986 movies is the narcissistic grandiosity the inventor feels on seeing the amazing success of his teleporting machine. André boasts of having made the greatest invention since the wheel; he imagines that his “disintegration-reintegration” machine will allow food to be sent anywhere immediately, at minimal cost, thus ending world hunger.

Brundle’s narcissism is a bit different. On having unwittingly fused himself with the fly, he mistakenly imagines his pods have given him superhuman abilities: increased strength, agility, stamina, and sexual potency (recall what I said above about the sexual symbolism of the eager-to-mate housefly). Yet both André and Brundle are about to see their pride fall and crash.

With André, this fall is immediate upon his reintegration: we see no intermediate, transitional process–only the gap in between is understood to be there. With Brundle, however, the transitional process is slowly, agonizingly shown to us, inch by inch. We see his physical fragmentation, as well as his corresponding psychological fragmentation (against which he had only his initial narcissism as a defence), a fragmentation that’s a direct result of jealousy–a result I also see in André.

XVII: Fall of Pride

Now, André’s fall of pride upon reintegration as a fly/human hybrid should be seen as symbolic of his pride as an obsessive scientist and neglectful husband/father, which has led to Hélène’s affair with François (the shame of which, being too intense to bear, causes it to be erased from memory, repressed, and therefore never shown on screen or in the pages of the short story), and which has in turn led to André (as I imagine it) finding out about the affair, making him feel humiliated, cuckolded, and reduced to feeling the worthlessness of a fly. He kills himself.

Recall my association of Hélène’s incestuous affair with her brother-in-law with that of Hamlet’s mother and uncle. The notion of a fly’s worthlessness can also be associated with Hamlet in how the Danish prince derisively refers to foppish, buffoonish Osric as a “water-fly” (V, ii, 83).

The trading of André’s head and arm with the head and leg of a housefly reinforces this sense of worthlessness in how the head houses the brain, and either of the hands (the switched arms, remember, are different from short story to film) represents the skillful manipulation of scientific instruments and equipment with the hands, thus making his wife’s devaluation of him based on her dislike of his obsessive work, which has left her feeling so neglected.

XVIII: Nothingness and the Real

The nothingness of the gap between disintegration and reintegration represents more than just the repression of the unconscious. That void also represents Lacan’s Real Order, a traumatic realm where experience cannot be symbolized or expressed in language, because the differentials of the Symbolic Order (the realm of language, society, culture, etc.) no longer exist. Lacan called the Real “impossible,” just as Hélène calls André’s disintegration and reintegration “impossible.” Disintegration leads to a world of undifferentiated atoms, the Real (as experienced psychologically), Bion‘s O, Milton‘s “void and formless infinite,” or the Brahman of the Hindus. It’s nothing, yet everything; it’s heaven and hell, nirvana and samsara… ineffable.

XIX: Monstrosity

The hellish aspect of the gap manifests itself especially for André, in the short story, when he goes through the teleportation device again and reappears not only with the fly’s head, but with a mix of fly and the head of their cat, Dandelo! He’s now more bestial than ever, an aggravating of monstrosity that is paralleled in the 1986 remake when Brundle reappears as part man, part fly, and part teleportation pod.

This sense of the fly as representing self-hating monstrosity and worthlessness is intensified in Brundle’s “Insect Politics” speech, as well as in André’s sense of his brain deteriorating towards the end of the story. Ultimately, André’s self-hate, as symbolized in his monstrous transformation, drives him to commit suicide–as I reimagine it, by putting a pistol to his head and blowing his brains out, right in front of Hélène who, his laboratory being near the factory in the short story, has only to move the body a short distance to the steam hammer.

XX: Destroying Evidence of Suicide

As I see it, she needs to crush his head and arm (i.e., with the pistol in his hand, in order to destroy it, too) to destroy all evidence of a suicide that, if investigated, will lead to a revelation of her affair with François. Since her guilt has driven her mad, her faulty reasoning will lead her to believe that it’s better to be thought mad from delusions of a human/fly monster than to be known an adulteress with her husband’s brother (adultery and incest), driving André to suicide.

Her needing to use the steam hammer twice, because she forgot to put the arm (in my interpretation, holding the pistol) under with André’s head, represents her psychological conflict: part of her wants to be punished for her guilt in the affair by being found out, while the other part of her wants still to conceal that guilt. Later, she forgets the second use of the steam hammer out of a Freudian parapraxis, again, an expression of her conflict between wanting to be found out and wanting to conceal the guilt.

François’s own guilt over the same sin would have driven him over the edge, too, to the point of entertaining her fly delusion as true, to assuage his guilt. In this connection, it’s important to consider the ending of the story, especially in terms of how Clavell changed it from Langelaan’s short story. (Ironically, in the film François and Charas rationalize a conclusion to the case as, indeed, André’s suicide, freeing Hélène from guilt or commitment to an insane asylum. The reason for the suicide remains a mystery; she and François, thus, can privately entertain the fly-human hybrid story to help them forget the guilt of their affair.)

XXI: The Ending

The fly that is understood to be the one that got André’s head and arm is referred to as a fly with a white head. By “white head,” it’s assumed to be André’s head, though it’s never explicitly called such. In the film, we see a fly with a white spot on its head, and only in the scene with the spider’s web do we see a tiny human head and arm poking out of the web trapping the fly’s body, with the hybrid’s faint squeals for help.

Part of the reason for these differences, of course, is the limitations of the technology of the time; but I believe something else is going on. First, when François is sitting on the bench by the spider’s web, he doesn’t notice the squeals of the fly-human, begging anyone nearby to save it. They should be audible enough: after all, Charas later can hear them. François thus seems to be willingly deaf to its cries, part of his wish, symbolically speaking, to avoid responsibility for the consequences of his affair (in my speculation), and how it’s led to his brother’s suicide.

Later, when he and Charas see the fly about to be eaten by the spider, François can’t pretend it isn’t there. As a symbol of his guilt, the fly is something he cannot bear.

Now, an important distinction must be made: in the short story, it’s François who kills the fly, not Charas. As I’ve said above, I consider François’s narration to be as unreliable as Hélène’s, and that the film is their narration given in visuals. Having Charas kill the fly is thus, in my interpretation, François projecting his guilt onto Charas. Clavell’s changes to the presentation of the story are to give us an ambiguous way of thinking about it: is it an unreliable narration, or did the fly-human hybrid story really happen?

I believe François has hallucinated the fly with his brother’s head and arm, due to the stress of his guilt and what his beloved Hélène has gone through (and in his unreliable narration in movie visuals, Charas has shared his hallucination). Philippe/Henri, in this interpretation, has really only found a fly with a white head and leg, an ‘albino-like’ one, if you will, which his mother’s and uncle’s imaginations have turned into a fly/André hybrid.

Clavell’s changes to the short story included removing François’s opening narrative frame (and his dislike of ringing telephones); such an omission doesn’t prove he hasn’t been narrating, but only that we don’t see explicit proof of him telling the story. I believe that having Charas see the fly/André hybrid, thus opening up the possibility that outsiders have seen the proof of Hélène’s story–that what she has narrated is reliable after all–was Clavell’s way of making the story more intriguing: could this otherwise scientifically implausible story have happened, and should the audience just willingly suspend their disbelief?

I don’t think we should, or need to. The ending of the film, with François as Philippe’s new guardian, and with living Hélène present, comes off as wish-fulfillment for François. As with Claudius vis-à-vis King Hamlet and Gertrude, he got his brother’s wife, he can directly be a father to Philippe, and in his and her shared delusion, their folie-à-deux of the disastrous teleportation/fusion of André and the housefly, François can tell the boy that the lesson to be learned from his father’s death is how dangerous scientific experimentation, coupled with overweening pride, can be, rather than how dangerous incestuous adultery can be.

‘Furies,’ a Horror Novel, Part Two, Chapter 4

The ghosts of Alexa, Megan, and Tiffany grinned at having watched the destruction of their cruel parents. Furioso appeared before them.

“Have you enjoyed the first part of your revenge, girls?” he asked them with a smile of his own.

“Oh, yes, definitely,” Alexa said, still grinning. “It was so enjoyable punishing my mother and father with the same isolation and deprivation that they put me through in my time of need.”

“Same for me,” Megan said with a malevolent smirk. “It was fun revenge-raping my dad, stabbing his ass like that. He so deserved it. It was a long time coming to him.”

“And you, Tiffany?” Furioso asked.

“Yes,” she said. “What a thrill, scaring my mom in that park, then smashing her skull in with that sledgehammer.”

“Good,” Furioso said.

“I’m hot with enthusiasm for when we get to Part Two of our revenge,” Megan said.

“Yeah, I’m a little too hot, actually,” Alexa said. “My skin is starting to feel a little like lava.”

“Mine, too,” Tiffany said, her smile changing into a wince of discomfort.

“Yeah, now that you mention it, this heat is starting to get to me,” Megan said.

“Are we melting?” Tiffany asked. “It feels that way…like we’re slowly disintegrating.”

“It’s part of the reality of being in Hell, girls,” Furioso said with a sigh. “In Hell, we burn. Abandon all hope, you who enter. There’s nothing we can do about it. You’ll have to accept it. Even I must; I’ve been burning for centuries. Still, there is hope of one kind–getting the next part of your satisfaction, which is surely coming.”

“Good,” Alexa said. “I can’t wait to get Boyd McAulliffe and Denise Charlton.”

“You will,” Furioso said. “But it will be best to wait for a fitting time to get your revenge on your school bullies.”

“Wait how long?” Megan asked with a scowl. “I want to get that rapist and his bitch girlfriend now!“

“Don’t get too hot with rage, girls,” Furioso said. “You’ll melt faster, and the heat will get unbearably painful. It’s best to cool off for a while, be satisfied with the revenge you’ve achieved for now, and get them at a time, and in a situation, that will be unbearably painful for them. Be patient. The right time will come, years later, when they are particularly vulnerable. You’ll thank me for this advice…I promise you.”

“Very well,” Tiffany said with a frown. “I’ll wait.”

“If it will result in a better revenge, OK,” Megan said.

“…and Alexa?” Furioso asked. “Will you wait with the others?”

She, contemplating a future Boyd, and a future Denise, with children they cherish and adore, nodded and grinned.

“Good,” Furioso said, also grinning. “You won’t regret this, I assure you.”

The three ghosts looked down at their reddening, melting skin, tiny black pieces of which were flaking off, like breaking pieces of igneous rock among infernally hot magma.

‘Furies,’ a Horror Novel, Part Two, Chapter 3

“You’re not coming in here, Mr. Fournier!” the madam said at the door of the brothel, blocking John’s entry. “You’re always hurting the girls. Every time you’ve been here, one of them complains of how you treat them. Slapping them around, grabbing them too hard, biting, scratching. You have no respect for women. Now, get out of here!”

“These girls are wayward and wanton,” he rationalized. “If they were good, they’d deserve respect.”

“If you were good, you’d deserve respect!”

“Maybe I should inform the police about your establishment,” he said. “Tell someone you aren’t paying off.”

“Maybe I should get Dan on you!” she shouted, then snapped her fingers to summon her new bouncer to the door, a tall, musclebound hulk of a fellow who approached with his fists already balled up.

“Fine,” John said with a sneer as he turned around to walk away. “This brothel is going to hell, anyway.”

“No, hell is going away from here,” Dan said. “And if hell comes back, hell won’t go away in one piece!” He and the madam watched John to make sure that he really left.

John turned the corner, came out of the dark alley, and continued down the street. He checked his watch: 11:33 pm. He looked up at the stars and the full moon. Almost two weeks had gone by without Megan returning home, or even as much as a word from her.

Whatever boy she’s with, he thought, if he’s hurt or killed her, it’s all her fault. I warned her about boys.

As he walked down the street, he thought about his marriage to Megan’s mother, and what a disaster that turned out to be. Of course, he blamed the failed marriage all on her.

The thought never crossed his mind that any of the fault could have been his.

Or that all of the fault could have been his.

Which it was, actually.

John had frequented whorehouses the whole time he’d been married to Patricia. He felt not even the slightest prick of conscience for it because he imagined the fault to be entirely the prostitutes’ for having tempted him.

He called them his ‘Eves.’

Patricia never told him that she saw him walk into a brothel one night after being suspicious of his frequent disappearances from home at night. She grew cold and distant, which didn’t affect him at all, for he was content to enjoy her cooking and cleaning, her being the good Catholic wife.

She simply decided she’d had enough, had the good luck of receiving the advances of a charming and much better man, and ran off with him. If only she’d cared enough for Megan to take her along; the thing was, her daughter looked too much like John, and seeing Megan’s face every day would have reminded Patricia of John’s betrayal.

Now, even if John had known the real reason of her running off with another man, he’d have judged her the same way. She was a slut for not being an angel. It was as simple as that to him.

He took a few more steps, then a teenage girl came around the corner…a familiar one.

“Megan?” he said with a start. “Where have you been? And why are you…dressed like that? It must be the influence of the latest boy who used you and dumped you, isn’t it? You been doing drugs? It sure looks it; you look terrible. C’mon, let’s go home.”

“Yes, Daddy,” she said in an almost whispered echo, the voice of a spectre. She had the same look as the other two teen ghosts: the tattered black dress, the black rings around glowing red eyes, the messy hair, the pale skin, and the frown.

He took her by the hand and they started for home. He felt flesh, but it was corpse-cold. “This is what you get for wandering around at night in winter without a coat,” he said. “Don’t worry, though. When we get home, I’ll warm you good enough.”

“Whatever you say, Daddy,” she said.

“Hey, you’ve grown compliant,” he said, almost smiling. “This boy you were with must have messed you up so badly, you’ve finally seen the error of your ways. I’ll be gentler with you this time.”

They got home and immediately went upstairs to his bedroom. When they got naked, he was shocked to see how pale all of her skin was.

“That boy must have been feeding you drugs for you to be looking so pale and sickly,” he said.

“There was no boy, Daddy,” she said. “And I didn’t do any drugs, either.”

“Don’t you lie to me, girl,” he said, trying to control his anger. “Just get on the bed. I promised to be gentler this time. Don’t make me change my mind.”

She got on the bed on her back, and he got on top of her. Again, when he touched and entered her, all he felt was coldness.

“How could you…be this cold?” he grunted as he went in and out. “This feels like…necro…philia.”

Still, he managed to like it for its kinkiness. If he could be degenerate enough to commit incest with his daughter, raping her without any guilt feelings, he was degenerate enough to enjoy sex with a corpse.

He looked in those red embers that were her eyes.

“Are you wearing…some kind of…contact lenses?” he asked. “You look so…ungh!…Satanic.”

Her legs were spread open and lifted back so her tailbone was up, not pushed into the mattress. Out of her tailbone slithered…a tail.

A devil’s tail with a sharp arrow tip.

She looked up at him with those fiery red eyes and grinned. This was the first time she’d ever smiled while he was on top of her. He himself was surprised to see that.

He was so pleasantly surprised, in fact, that he never noticed the emergence or movement of that tail.

He was amazed at how hard he was. Normally, he needed to be rough with her, to exercise his sense of dominance, to get and maintain an erection. Yes, he was just that pathetic.

But there was something about her this time that was making it easy for him to get it up and keep it up. Was it her more than usual submissiveness? Was it her corpse-like kinkiness?…

…or was she helping him get hot, with her new supernatural powers, to distract him from what she was planning to do to him?

Indeed, as he was moving faster and faster, getting more and more excited, that tail of hers was rising between his legs, the arrow tip pointing at his ass. As he pumped back and forth, his buttocks would conveniently open and close, exposing his vulnerable anus.

Approaching orgasm, he panted, “After this, we’ll rest…then, I’ll go…for anal.”

“Ooh!” she purred between sighs. “I like that.”

“Really?” he moaned, his eyes wide open with delight.

That tail was aiming for his asshole, waiting for an opening of his crack and timing when to enter to the rhythm of his thrusts.

“Oh, yeah,” she sighed, looking in his eyes and smiling lewdly. “I’d love anal with you, Daddy.”

He was just about to come. “Wow…you never…wanted…”

Suddenly, he felt a stabbing deep in his ass.

“AAAHHH!!!” he screamed in pain. That tail cut into his rectum, intestines, and up into his stomach. He fell on her.

She shoved him off. She removed her bloody, faecal tail.

“It’s all your fault this happened,” she hissed in his ear as his consciousness and life faded away. “You shouldn’t have let yourself get mixed up with whores.”

‘Chet,’ a Horror Short Story

Poppy, 23, in her apartment living room watching The Omen on Netflix, suddenly felt an urge to take a shit.

She paused the movie, just after the nanny, during Damien’s fifth birthday party, had finished calling his name from the window ledge. Poppy hurried over to the bathroom.

It felt urgent.

In fact, what was presumably a long, thick turd felt as if it were fidgeting in her rectum.

Please, God, she thought as she entered and approached the toilet. Get me there on time. I don’t wanna shit myself.

She pulled down her track pants and panties, sat on the seat, and let it out.

A huge plop splashed toilet water all over her ass. She felt too relieved to care. She let out a huge sigh.

Then something in the toilet water jumped up at touched her right labium.

“Ah!” she screamed, then jumped up, pulled up her pants, and looked back in the toilet bowl.

That was no brown log.

It was a slightly bluish-skinned, four-month-old fetus.

“What the fuck?” she said in a trembling voice.

It was growing, too.

Within seconds, it looked like a five-month-old fetus, having grown from six to ten inches long. It was male, with what looked like an upwardly-curved spike for a penis, and he was looking up at her with…hungry…eyes.

It kept growing.

How is this even possible? she wondered.

And those eyes with which he stared up at her just got hungrier and hungrier.

“I’ve gotta call Peter,” she whispered, then ran out of the bathroom to get her cellphone. She dialled her 24-year-old boyfriend’s number as she rushed back into the bathroom.

When she returned, she saw what now looked like a newborn baby trying to crawl out of the toilet.

“Oh, my fucking God!” she gasped.

As her phone rang for Peter, she’d put it down and picked up her baby. She put him in the bathtub, set the water to a comfortable warm, and cleaned the bits of her shit off of him.

Then she remembered to wipe her own ass.

Why won’t that bluish colour come off of his skin? she wondered as she, looking at the baby, washed her hands.

“Poppy? Poppy!” Peter’s voice shouted from her phone.

“Oh, shit,” she said, reaching for a towel to dry her hands. “Just a minute, Peter!”

As she was drying her hands, the baby let out a piercingly shrill scream. It was so loud, and unnatural for a baby to make (it sounded more like the shriek of an alien bird, or something), she was amazed the windows didn’t break. Her ears were in pain from it; she dropped the towel and plugged them with her fingers.

“Just a minute, Chet,” she said to the baby. Wow, she thought. How quickly I came up with a name for him.

“Poppy, come on,” Peter shouted from her phone, loud enough for her to hear. “What’s going on over there? What was that scream?”

“Just a minute, Peter!” she shouted back.

“What was that noise?” a woman shouted from next door, her fist pounding on the wall.

“Sorry, Mrs. James,” she shouted to her landlady. She picked up her phone. “Hello, Peter?”

“Finally!” he said. “What’s going on?”

“Get over here, now!” she said.

“OK, but what’s wrong?” he asked.

“I can’t talk about it on the phone. Just get over here. Now!”

“OK, OK,” he said, then hung up.

He arrived at her apartment in ten minutes.

As soon as she heard the doorbell ring, Poppy, still in the bathroom and holding Chet in a towel swaddled around him, called out, “The door’s open. Come to the bathroom. I’ve got a big surprise for you.”

No sooner did he open the door than Mrs. James shouted, “Keep it quiet in there!” across Poppy’s bathroom wall from her apartment.

“Who was that shouting?” he asked as he approached the bathroom.

“My landlady,” Poppy said. “But check this out.”

When he reached the wide-open bathroom door, his jaw dropped open.

“So, this is the big surprise?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“Where’d the baby come from?”

“My ass.”

“C’mon, don’t joke around. And why is it…kinda blue?”

“I haven’t any less foggy an idea about that than I do that I gave birth to him by shitting him.”

He looked at her with a sneer. “Umm, Poppy…are losing your fucking mind?”

“Probably.” A tear ran down her cheek. “All of this is…just…too fucking much for me to handle.” She began sobbing.

“You aren’t on drugs, are you?”

“No, I’m not fucking on drugs!” she bawled.

“Hey, take it easy, Poppy. I’m just trying to understand…”

“Keep it down in there!” the landlady shouted.

“Seriously, where did this…bluish baby…come from?” Peter asked, looking down at his crotch as if he could anticipate the answer for some mysterious reason.

“I told you,” Poppy said in sobs. “Look, nobody’s more aware of how crazy this…anal birth…sounds than I am, but I swear, that’s what happened. I can’t explain it, but that’s what really happened. Speaking of anal, remember what we did three nights ago?”

“Yeah,” he said with a sigh and a smile. “What fun.”

“For you, not for me. I agreed to it ’cause I love you and I wanted to please you. Did anything out of the ordinary happen to you by chance, just before we did that?”

His smile turned into a frown. He looked down at his crotch again. She looked at her smiling baby and smiled back at him.

“Well?” she asked, looking back at him.

“I, uh,…” he began. “On the way here that night, I stopped to take a piss at a tree about half-way between your home and mine. I couldn’t wait. As I was pissing, some glowing…blue…gunk dropped on the tip of my dick. I looked up and saw more of the gunk hanging on a tree branch.”

“Blue gunk?” Almost all the whites of her eyes were showing.

“Uh, yeah,” he went on, still looking down at his crotch with shame. “It didn’t hurt, but I couldn’t get it off while I was pissing, so I had to wait ’til I was finished. When I was, I shook my dick and the gunk all fell off, but where it had touched my dick, there the skin was…bluish…like ‘Chet’ over there.”

She looked at her baby. They exchanged more smiles.

“I heard you say ‘Chet’ on the phone,” Peter said.

“Yeah, that’s his name,” she said, still looking at her baby with a loving smile.

“Why’d you name him ‘Chet’?” Peter asked.

“Well, he came out of my ass–and I suspect I now know why–and ‘Chet’ is the closest-sounding name to ‘shit’ that I could think of, without, you know, being mean.”

“I guess that makes sense.”

“Do you think that blue gunk was some kind of alien? Something from outer space, or something like that?”

“I guess that makes sense.”

“I guess that makes sense,” she mocked. “Then you decided you wanted to fuck my ass without a condom?”

“I didn’t want you to see the blue spot on my dick.”

“Of course not! Getting off is far more important than showing consideration for your woman, isn’t it?”

“Well, it’s just that…your asshole is so pretty-looking.”

“Aww, how sweet. Well, you’re a cute little asshole yourself, you know that? For fuck sakes, why do men have to be such perverts, wanting to stick it where I poop? Well, now you’re the proud anal father of a part human, part-alien baby!”

“How many times do I have to tell you to be quiet in there, Poppy?” Mrs. James shouted. “Maybe the threat of an eviction will do it! It’s past midnight!”

“Sorry, Mrs. James,” Poppy said. “What are we gonna do, Peter? We don’t make enough money, between the two of us, to raise a baby.”

“I don’t know. How can a baby gestate in a woman’s rectum?”

“Well, I guess glowing blue alien gunk can do that, Peter, especially after selfish guys fuck their girls in the ass when the blue gunk is on their unprotected dicks.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, still staring at his crotch. “I guess a screw tonight is out of the question, right?”

“Take a wild guess, Einstein!…Oops, gotta keep my voice down. What are we gonna do about Chet, though?”

“Well…I know this isn’t a very nice thing to do, but…couldn’t we just…expose him? I mean,…”

“What kind of a monster are you? I’m his mother…his anal mother, but still his mother. We’re Chet’s parents, whether you like it or not. His birth may have been…well…”

“Monstrous?”

She slapped him. “Peter, we should love him, in spite of how he came to be.” She looked down at smiling Chet, and smiled at him. “Look at his eyes. You love Mommy, don’t you?”

She saw his eager eyes looking up at her.

“Are they loving eyes…or hungry eyes?”

“Peter! He loves me.”

“I’m not sure of that, Poppy. Those eyes look creepy.”

“You’re just finding excuses not to take responsibility.”

“And you’re letting your maternal instinct blind you.”

“Blind me? To what?”

“To a danger,” Peter said, shuddering. “Something in his eyes.”

Now Chet was looking at him…hungrily.

“You’re imagining things, Peter. Just ’cause he’s part alien…”

Chet opened his mouth to reveal not only teeth with serrated, sharp edges, but also a long, snake-like tongue that flew out and wrapped itself around Peter’s neck.

Poppy screamed.

Chet’s tongue tightened around Peter’s neck with amazing strength. He choked and gasped for air, his fingers trying to get Chet’s tongue off of him with desperate futility. In fact, the tongue was so strong, it was pulling Peter’s head closer and closer to those sharp teeth.

“No, Chet, no!” his mom screamed. She had no way to deter or punish her son; hitting her baby was unthinkable…but what could she do?

Besides, Chet might attack her next.

She put the baby down and reached for Peter’s neck. As she tried helping Peter loosen the tongue on his neck, she looked back at Chet.

“Chet, stop it!” she said, remembering to keep her voice down. “This is Daddy. You mustn’t hurt Daddy.”

She couldn’t believe how strong Chet’s tongue was. It remained crushingly tight around Peter’s neck.

A few seconds later, it crushed his neck and snapped it.

Peter’s body fell to the floor.

Poppy gasped, then stopped herself from screaming just in time. Her hand was on her mouth; her eyes agape.

Chet’s tongue slithered off Peter’s neck and recoiled back into his mouth. Chet looked down at Peter’s bare left arm. He opened his mouth to bare those saw-like teeth again.

Poppy was frozen in the same position, except for her ceaseless shaking.

Chet took a big bite out of that arm. Blood sprayed in all directions.

Poppy yelped and ran out of the bathroom. She shut and locked the door. Sobbing, she put her ear to it. She winced as she heard his gluttonous chewing.

This isn’t happening! she thought. How could this be happening? Am I dreaming? When am I going to wake up from this?

After several more minutes of chewing, which sounded like a ghoulish mukbang, it stopped. Poppy listened more intently. Her heart was pounding.

Silence.

Her face was soaked in tears. She kept listening.

Silence.

Then she heard the pitter-patter…of big feet?

More like pounding than a pitter-patter.

Had he grown quickly again?

The powerful first banging on the door suggested a yes answer to that question.

She backed off as she saw the door shake with each hit the boy gave it.

How could a baby get so strong so quickly?

When it’s part-alien, turd-baby. That’s how, apparently.

Poppy moved a big chair from the living room over to the bathroom door to keep Chet from ramming it open. He kept bashing at it, though. He was relentless.

She ran over to the kitchen and got a big cleaver from one of the drawers. The bashing on the bathroom door continued. She was convinced that Chet was getting stronger. As she walked out of the kitchen, she heard a ramming that sounded unmistakably like the breaking of wood.

Had he broken through the door?

Was Chet outside of the bathroom now?

Poppy ran for the bedroom, hearing his thumping footsteps from…somewhere. She got in and locked the door. She stood at the door and waited in the darkness.

There was no banging on the door.

Was he there, or…

…in here with her?

She looked around the room slowly, dreading what she’d see. The light was off, but enough light from an outside street lamp, combined with her eyes’ adjustment to the dark, allowed her to see what was in the room.

She looked down behind her.

She saw a naked boy with the appearance of a one year old. Standing, and with his face soaked in Peter’s blood, he looked up at her…lovingly?

She screamed and ran into the closet, closing the doors behind her. She heard the approach of his thudding feet.

His hand pounded, again and again, on the left of the closet doors.

Stupid! she thought as the pounding continued. He broke through that strong bathroom door. He can break through these doors so much more easily. I should have run outside and called for help. But I’m freaking out so much that I can’t think straight.

He punched a hole through the closet door.

She screamed.

He reached in, searched for her, and found her left leg. He grabbed it, just under the knee.

“No, Chet!” she screamed. “Don’t hurt Mommy!”

His strong grip on her leg was tightening. His other hand grabbed the door he’d punched the hole in, his little fingers slipping through the crack between this door and the other, and yanked it open with amazing strength. The yanking back, however, meant he’d hit himself with the door, making him let go of her leg and knocking himself to the floor on his back.

The pull of his hand on her leg before letting her go made her lose her balance and fall on the floor beside him. Before she could get up and run, he grabbed her by the arm and held her with a bruising tightness. Then his serpentine tongue flew out, latched to her T-shirt, and pulled at it.

“Chet, no!”

Again, with that superhuman strength, the tongue tore the shirt open, revealing her bra-less breasts.

The baby pulled his tongue back in, stared hungrily at that pair of large, shaking beauties, and licked his lips.

She just looked at those carnivorous, sharp teeth and thought, and to think I was planning on breastfeeding him before Peter got here.

Chet pulled on her arm to draw her chest nearer to his hungry mouth. She resisted with all her strength.

“No…Chet…please…Don’t bite…Mommy’s…tits off.”

The infant’s tongue flew out again, wrapping itself around her other arm and pulling her closer.

That other arm had the knife, though.

Those serrated teeth were inching closer to her right nipple.

She knew what she had to do.

But she just couldn’t kill her baby.

Chet’s mouth was just a few millimetres from that nipple now. Those sharp teeth of steel were almost touching it. He took a few hard bites in the air, just barely missing it.

She raised the cleaver, ready to stab…

…but she sliced off the tongue instead.

Blue blood sprayed everywhere. Chet let go of her other arm and rolled back, smacking into the far wall by the window. The severed tongue still clung to her arm like Krazy Glue.

Chet let out another shrill scream; her eardrums felt as if they were being slashed open.

“Goddammit, Poppy!” her landlady shouted. “This is your last warning! Be quiet, or I’m kicking you out of this building!”

Poppy ignored the warning. All her attention was on the look of malice in Chet’s eyes. It was unmistakable.

He hated her.

He wanted to kill her…and she knew why.

She’d rejected him.

She’d hurt him.

She didn’t love him (or so he thought).

His tongue was still dripping blue blood.

His eyes were locked on hers.

“Baby,” she pleaded between sobs as she held that knife firmly in her hand. “Please, don’t make Mommy kill you.”

Chet ran at her, his mouth wide open to bite.

She raised the cleaver.

Using it on him was still the most hateful thing in the world to her.

Should I just let him kill me? she thought. Better than me killing him.

He was halfway at her now.

But if I’m dead, who’ll take care of him? she thought.

Close enough to her, he let fly what was left of his still-long tongue and wrapped it tightly around her neck. Her hand, on his torso, kept him from getting any closer…except for that amazing strength he had, forcing her to bend her elbow and let him inch closer and closer.

That tongue’s pressure on her throat was painful and bordering on crushing. The hand that held the cleaver made it impossible to hold the tongue and loosen its grip.

She had no choice.

Those teeth were getting closer and closer to her face.

He was taking bites at it, the teeth making a sound like clapping pliers.

She plunged the knife into his neck, spraying blue blood all over her and making his body loosen and slump. The tongue let go, too, falling limp on her chest.

She coughed for several seconds, needing a while to reorient herself and stop from shaking all over. When she did, her heart having slowed down and stopped pounding, she finally looked down at Chet, splattered with blue blood, lying sprawled on the floor between her legs, his tongue hanging out like a dead snake from his wide-open mouth, and his open eyes looking away from her, seeing nothing.

She picked up his lifeless body, cradled it in her arms, let a few tears roll down her cheeks, then took in a deep breath. Her bawling came out in scream after scream.

“That’s it!” the landlady shouted. “I’m coming over there!”

As Poppy continued bawling, her teary eyes squeezed shut, she never noticed the tiny, blue, insect-like things crawling out of Chet’s neck wound. Her grief made her oblivious to the tickling sensation of hundreds of those little aliens crawling up her arms and onto her exposed breasts. Only when she felt the sting of thousands of little bites did psychological pain change to physical.

Her screams were so loud that she couldn’t hear Mrs. James’s fist pounding on her front door. Yet even if she could have heard the pounding, it would have made no difference, for those bites had already cut deep into her chest and arms, annihilating her breasts and exposing her arm bones and rib cage.

The mixture of his and her blood poured a lake of purple all over and around their dead bodies.

The landlady stopped banging on the door. “So, the noise has finally stopped, eh?” she shouted, fumbling through her keys. “For the moment, anyway.” She found the key to Poppy’s room. “Well, I’m gonna find out what the hell’s going on in there…” As she fit the key in the keyhole, she turned the doorknob, only to find it unlocked. “Oh, I didn’t need the key at all.”

She opened the door to find no one in the living room area. She walked in and looked around.

“Poppy? Where are you?” She noticed the paused movie on the TV. The nanny had hanged herself, her body crashing against the window. “Oh, how horrible.”

Mrs. James walked through the living room area over to where the bathroom and bedroom were. She saw the chair pushed away from the bathroom door, where she naturally took notice of the hole punched through the bathroom door. She scowled at the sight.

“Poppy, you’re gonna pay for my door!”

Then, she looked through the hole and saw some blood on the floor.

“What the…? Poppy, what are you doing in…?”

She put her hand through the hole and unlocked the door, then after opening it, she saw Peter’s bloody body, with bites all along his arm and a few bites from his stomach.

“Oh, my God!” she screamed.

She listened for several seconds in the ensuing silence.

Did Poppy bring a wild animal in here? she wondered.

Now she heard faint shuffling noises from the bedroom.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered as she crept from the bathroom to the bedroom with the most reluctant dread.

She tried opening the bedroom door, but found it locked, too.

Good thing I have all the keys to the apartment with me here, she thought, fumbling around for a skeleton key on the keychain. Or is it a bad thing?

She couldn’t have unlocked that door with any more reluctance.

She looked around, hearing the shuffling noises. The light was off. The darkness hid Poppy…and whatever else was in the room. She saw only Poppy’s hand lying on the floor; only it wasn’t shrouded in shadow.

Mrs. James reached for the light switch, knowing she wouldn’t like what she was about to see.

CLICK.

The only flesh remaining on Poppy’s skeleton was on that hand.

A colony of hundreds of creeping, blue, ant-like things was all over the floor around Poppy’s skeleton and Chet’s corpse.

Mrs. James let out a scream so loud, it made all the noise Poppy and Chet had been making seem like whispers.

A few neighbours called out to tell Poppy to be quiet.

They got their wish soon enough, though.

The first of the bites were on the landlady’s throat.

‘Furies,’ a Horror Novel, Part Two, Chapter 2

Alice Ferry, all stressed out after a week and a half of trying to find Tiffany, and with no leads from the police, decided she needed to walk it off. She put on her coat and went outside.

The night air, though cold, was refreshing. As she walked down the neighbourhood to a nearby park, she reflected on the past two decades of her life.

Back in her early twenties and almost finished her undergraduate degree in business, Alice really thought that Barry Manfred loved her. But a few days after learning he’d gotten her pregnant, he proved his love false by disappearing from her life without a trace. She’d never hear from him again.

Alice was at least lucky enough to have parents supportive enough to help her take care of her baby while she worked on her MBA, but her heartbreak was so great that she never wanted to risk trusting another relationship with a man again. She had to protect herself from further hurt.

Besides, giving birth to Tiffany ruined her figure.

For these reasons, she could never look at her daughter, or hear her voice, without thinking of all the pain her birth, her very conception, was associated with. Her family’s Catholicism had been the only reason getting an abortion was out of the question. The pain of Tiffany’s very existence made feeling affection for her daughter seem next to impossible. She felt guilty about this lack of love, but the pain she felt was too great to rise above.

At least that’s how it seemed to Alice.

She wanted to direct her anger and bitterness at Barry, but he was nowhere to be found, much less to direct her toxic feelings at. So she directed them, right or wrong, at his spawn instead.

His spawn.

She had difficulty accepting that Tiffany was hers, too.

So, now that she was gone, why couldn’t Alice be happy about it?

Guilt?

She was walking among the trees in the park now, shrouded in the darkness. She looked around herself with wide eyes and saw only differing shades of black and grey. She almost liked it. Part of her wanted to escape from life.

Look, she thought, if I find her, I’ll try to be nicer to her, OK?

Will you? a familiar female voice echoed in her ear.

“Tiffany?” Alice said, spinning around and still seeing only black and dark grey. Stupid, she thought. I didn’t say my promise out loud; how could she have heard it?

She listened.

Still, she thought, I did hear something…didn’t I?

She waited several more seconds for any sound, such as approaching steps.

Nothing.

I’m imagining things, she thought, then turned around and continued walking.

An opening in the park trees further off showed a bit of light and an exit from the darkness of the park. She started going in that direction.

She heard the snapping of a twig not from her steps.

She looked around again. It was still too dark to see.

“Is someone there?” she said.

She listened for an answer.

Silence.

She walked faster towards that exit.

Now she heard loud steps behind her.

She began to run. The loud steps were running, too.

She thought she heard Tiffany’s distinctive giggle.

I’m hearing things, she thought as she neared the exit and the light of the street lamps.

Though she was getting tired from running, something pushed her to run faster: a hand on her left shoulder.

She screamed, then ran out of the park. She stopped at the sidewalk, bent down, then took a moment to catch her breath. She turned her head, slowly and full of dread, to see who was behind her.

Only the trees of the park, and that black mouth she’d just run out of. Only she just remembered something.

That park had never had such a concentration of trees.

There shouldn’t have been a hole of darkness for her to run out of.

There should have been no blackness: the street lamps should have given enough light.

Indeed, just then, her hallucination dissolved before her eyes, and she saw the park as it had always been.

I’m going crazy, she thought with a shudder.

She continued walking. Within a minute, she was in the area of the neighbourhood where Tiffany had been hit with that block of ice.

She heard the giggle again.

She spun around and saw nobody. Eyes darting left and right, she checked everywhere behind which her daughter could have been hiding: bushes, cars on driveways, trees, houses.

Nobody.

She was tempted to shout at Tiffany to knock it off, but stopped herself for fear of making a fool out of herself. She continued walking.

She’d barely taken three steps when she thought she heard Tiffany’s voice again.

Mom?

She turned with a shaking body.

Tiffany was there, with the same ghostly appearance as Alexa’s: having pale skin, wearing a tattered black dress, with black rings around eyes of fiery red, unkempt hair, and a scowl.

Alice was so terrified of the apparition she saw that she hardly noticed the huge sledgehammer Tiffany was raising up, to bring it down on her mother’s skull.

CRACK!!!

Alice’s body hit the sidewalk, her blood flowing from her head and into the grass of a nearby lawn. As she slowly faded from the dark grey of unconsciousness to the black of death, she had a faint, dreamlike vision of four people looking down at her.

They were Tiffany, Alexa, Megan, and Furioso.

“Eww!” Tiffany’s ghost said, wincing at the bloody sight with the other three ghosts. “We have to clean up this mess? She always has to make things so difficult for us!”

‘Furies,’ a Horror Novel, Part Two, Chapter 1

Arlene and Jonas Frey gave up their search for Alexa after a week, leaving it to the police in exasperation.

One day, in the late afternoon when Alexa’s mother and father had both just got home from work and were hungry for supper, they felt a strange compulsion to go upstairs to their bedroom and close the door behind them. They sat side by side on the bed and stared at their reflection in the dresser mirror.

They just sat there and didn’t move, their stomachs growling.

It felt as if some outside force was controlling them.

After several minutes of doing nothing else, Arlene finally felt free to open her mouth.

“What…are we doing in here?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Jonas said. “We should be…cooking dinner.”

“It’s like…something is holding us here,” she said.

Something is holding you here, a hoarse voice said.

Arlene and Jonas yelped and jerked at the disembodied voice.

“What was that?” he said in a trembling voice.

Me, the voice said, revealing the speaker in the mirror reflection. It was a spectral version of Alexa, pale with disheveled hair and a menacing frown.

“Oh, my God!” Arlene said. “The stress of her disappearance is making me see things!”

“Alexa?” Jonas said.

“You see her, too?” Arlene asked.

You both see me because I’m really here, the ghostly apparition groaned. She wore a tattered black dress, and had dark rings around her eyes, the irises of which glowed red. Her parents no longer saw themselves or their bedroom in the mirror reflection: the background of Alexa’s ghost was a void of infinite black.

“What happened to you, honey?” her father asked.

“Did you kill yourself?” her mother sobbed, tears forming in her eyes.

I’m not your honey, the spirit said, scowling malevolently at both of them. You never gave me the love and support I needed when I was being tormented at school. Now, you two are receiving your punishment.

“Our punishment?” he asked, shaking.

You are to remain in your room without supper.

“What is this nonsense?” he said, then finally with all his freedom of movement returned to him, he got up and walked over to the bedroom door. “You don’t get to decide if we can–

On touching the doorknob, he got an electric shock so powerful it threw him across the room. He hit his head on the wall, just under the windowsill, so hard that it knocked him unconscious.

“Jonas!” Arlene screamed, shooting up on her feet like a rocket.

He isn’t dead, Alexa’s ghost said. But he will be.

“Alexa, you little bitch! You stop this now!“

You’ll be dead, too…’Mother.’

“Stop this nonsense, right now! I’m your mother!”

How will you make me stop it? You were never a real mother to me. He was never a real father to me. If you had been, if you’d shown me some compassion, I’d be with you at home now, eating supper together. Instead, you both will do without food…’til you die!

Arlene went over to Jonas, seeing the blood pouring from the wound on his head. She got an old T-shirt from his dresser, one he rarely, if ever, wore anymore, and wrapped it around his head to control the bleeding.

Then she looked up at the window above him.

When she reached up to open it, the whole room transformed into a surreal structure without windows or doors. She screamed and jumped at the sudden change.

“I am seeing things,” she whispered to herself. “I’m going out of my mind.”

Instead of the bedroom being a cubic rectangular shape, it was now ovoid. The furniture had all disappeared. No longer was there the room’s original light blue paint and blue-and-white striped wallpaper with flower motifs; now it was white with swirling light brown stripes everywhere…and the curved stripes were slithering like snakes!

“I’m going mad,” she whispered in sobs. “Jonas!”

She looked down at him and shook him. Her stomach was growling more and more, as if her hunger was being sped up to feel more like a few days’ hunger rather than that of a few hours. Jonas wouldn’t wake up…but his flesh was beginning to look…tasty.

“No!” she said, slapping herself. “I can’t let myself think that way. That bitch-ghost wants me to.”

You will want to think that way, Alexa’s ghost hissed.

“You little bitch!” Arlene shouted. “I wish I’d never given birth to you. My pregnancy was an accident, you know. I wish Jonas and I had decided to abort you! You’re lucky we’re Catholic!”

That unmotherly attitude is why you must die, the spirit said. If you’d loved me, the way parents are supposed to, we could have all been friends.

Her stomach growled even louder. “Oh, God!” she said. “I’ve got to eat something. I’m dying of hunger.”

There’s meat right next to you…Mother, Alexa said.

“You shut up, Alexa!” Arlene shouted. “How could Jonas and I have produced such a little beast?”

By being beasts yourselves, of course, the ghost growled.

Arlene looked down at still-unconscious Jonas, whose skin was looking sweeter and sweeter. Then she looked at her ever-growling stomach, which looked as if it were caving in from emptiness and malnutrition.

“What the–” she began in sobs. “I thought starvation causes a swollen belly…or is that just in kids? What’s happening to me? What…black magic…are you bringing on me, you bitch?”

You’ve done it to yourselves, Alexa said. You two are self-destructing. Now, enjoy your meal.

Arlene’s stomach was caving in even more. Soon, a huge empty black hole appeared where her stomach should have been. The pain and discomfort from having no food was overwhelming.

And Jonas’s body was looking delicious.

A large carving knife and carving fork appeared by her feet.

She picked them up.

She looked at her unconscious, scrumptious husband.

Her eyes widened, she salivated, and licked her lips.

“I’ve…gotta…eat,” she hissed, her energy beginning to be drained away.

His eyes opened a few millimetres.

“No,” she said hoarsely. “My dinner…must stay still.”

She stabbed the carving knife into his throat.

His lifeless body slumped on the floor, a red river flowing from his neck. Not that she, in her hallucinating state, noticed–she removed the shirt off his back, then stuck the fork in his right arm to hold it still. Then she used the knife to cut off thin slices of his flesh.

She looked at the slices as if they were Thanksgiving turkey. She put a piece in her mouth.

She moaned with pleasure as she chewed on it.

Alexa’s ghost grinned as she saw her mother continue slicing off her father’s arm flesh, stripping it right down to the bone, and eating it all…both arms, eventually.

Now fully sated, Arlene came out of her hallucination and back to her senses. Eyes agape, she gasped. Shaking, she screamed over and over again at the sight of all that blood, the gash in his throat, and his bare bones.

“Oh, my God!” she sobbed. “Oh, my God…What have I done?!” Now that the bedroom had returned to its original inner decor, she looked through teary eyes at the dresser mirror and saw her gloating ghost of a daughter.

Did you enjoy your meal…Mother?

“You!” her mother hissed at the mirror image. “You…little…b–no, ‘bitch’ is not nearly a strong enough word. You’re a demon. You’ve been ruining my life…and your father’s…ever since your misbegotten life began!”

If you hadn’t thought of it as ‘misbegotten,’ this would not have happened to you, Alexa’s ghost said. Good mothers are supposed to love their children, not despise them.

“So, I was a bad mother, is that it, Alexa? Fine! This should make you very happy!”

The knife was still there. Arlene plunged it into her guts and fell to the floor beside Jonas.

Alexa just kept on grinning.

‘Furies,’ a Horror Novel, Part One, Chapter 4

The Hamilton Spectator

Three St. Thomas More Schoolgirls Missing

by Tonya Mills

Alexa Frey, 17, Megan Fourier, 18, and Tiffany Ferry, 17, students of St. Thomas More Catholic Secondary School, went missing as of last Sunday night. It is assumed they all ran away from home as a result of constant bullying at school.

Don Murray, 51, principal of the high school, asked some of those accused of the bullying, in particular Denise Charlton and Boyd McAuliffe, both 18, what they had done lately that may have provoked Alexa, their victim, to have run away. Though on Friday afternoon when school was finished, they’d shoved her into a mud and slush puddle, kicked her several times and spat on her (according to eyewitnesses), they denied having done anything else to her since then.

Those who’d bullied Megan and Tiffany also denied having done anything to those girls since they’d been reprimanded the previous Friday morning.

The girls’ parents have shown nothing but dismay at what they deem their daughters’ “wayward” ways.

“That girl has been nothing but one problem after another,” said Alexa’s mother, Arlene Frey, 52. “First, she can’t keep from provoking her classmates to pick on her. Then, she trudges slush and mud all over my carpet on Friday afternoon, and now my husband and I have to search all over the place for her. I’m at my wits’ end here!”

“That wayward girl is always getting mixed up with boys,” John Fourier, 55, said of his daughter Megan. “I’ll bet she’s run off with some boy, who’ll mistreat her and dump her. Then she’ll be lost. With any luck, I’ll find her soon enough. But she’s always been trouble.”

Tiffany’s mother, Alice Ferry, 49, had this to say: “That girl has always been a burden. She gets her classmates mad at her, they break a chunk of ice on her head, and I have to clean up all the blood on her. Now she pulls this on me. When’s it going to end?”

Disturbingly, the only traces left of the three girls before their disappearances were: a razor blade on the side of a filled-up bathtub in Alexa’s home; a bottle filled with John’s sleeping pills on the bathroom sink in Megan’s home, when her father hadn’t touched them Sunday night; and a kitchen knife in Tiffany’s bedroom.

Yet the three girls never used these items.

The girls just disappeared instead.

‘Furies,’ a Horror Novel, Part One, Chapter 3

“You shouldn’t have antagonized them, Alexa,” her father said in their living room an hour after she’d gotten home. “They’d have left you alone if you’d kept quiet.”

“What?” Alexa shouted. “So, it was my fault? The principal made me tell him who did it, Dad!”

“Don’t you raise your voice at me, young lady,” he said.

“You side with my enemies, and you’re surprised at my shouting?” she yelled.

“Oh, go to your room, and without supper, if you’re gonna give me that attitude!” he shouted.

“Yes!” her mother shouted. “If you hadn’t provoked them, you wouldn’t have gotten slush all over my carpet! Go to your room and stay there–yes, without supper–’til you change your attitude!”

“You don’t love me at all!” Alexa shouted in sobs, then stomped up the stairs.

“Oh, listen to that melodrama,” he said.

“If your stamping of your feet makes marks on those stairs, you will be cleaning them, not me!” her mother shouted, just before the slamming of Alexa’s bedroom door.

She dropped on her bed, sobbing and sobbing. Then she looked up at her dresser mirror; but she got a shock when she saw, instead of her face in the reflection, a split-second flash of the red-skinned man.

***********

“You shouldn’t have finked on those kids,” Tiffany’s mom said in the bathroom, a half-hour after washing Tiffany’s clothes. Her mom took a wet cloth to the blood on Tiffany’s hair. “If you’d kept your mouth shut, I wouldn’t have to do all this cleaning away of your disgusting blood.”

“Your sympathy for my plight is touching, Mom,” Tiffany, sitting in the bathtub, hissed with a maximum of sarcasm.

“What did you say to me?” her mom said in a threatening tone. “Maybe I can leave you to clean yourself, you ungrateful little brat.”

Tiffany bit her tongue.

A tear ran down her cheek.

She looked over at the bathroom mirror. Instead of seeing her reflection, she saw a brief flash of the man with bright, devil-red skin looking back at her.

She yelped and jerked her head back.

“Tiffany!” her mom shouted. “Stay still! This is hard enough as it is!”

Another tear ran down Tiffany’s cheek.

*************

Megan had been lying on her bed, shaking and crying non-stop for almost an hour before her father knocked on her door.

“Supper’s almost ready,” he said. “Hurry up.”

“I don’t want any,” she sobbed.

He opened her door. “What’s this nonsense?” he said as he approached her bed. “I just cooked your dinner. Not get down there and eat it before it gets cold!”

“I’m not hungry,” she sobbed.

“Oh, I see,” he said. “You had some…meat…earlier today, and it…filled…you all up, didn’t it? Well, that serves you right for giving yourself up too easily.”

“Dad, I just got raped!” she screamed, getting up from her bed.

“Your punishment for being too easy. I warned you…”

“Oh, I wouldn’t expect my own father to sympathize, since you yourself raped me when I was twelve!“

He smacked her so hard, she flew over to the other side of her bed.

“You were punished today for being a little slut,” he said, playing with his zipper. “As you were when you were twelve. Now, get downstairs and eat your dinner before you get punished again!” He left her room.

I’m a ‘slut,’ she thought, because Mom ran off with another man. You, Dad, didn’t have her around to call a slut, so you took it out on me. You can get it up only if you have total power over a girl…like me.

Her face soaked with tears, she looked up at her bedroom mirror and saw a split-second flash of the red-skinned man in the reflection.

*************

WE’RE GONNA GET YOU.

This is what Alexa saw on her computer screen when checking her email on Saturday morning. The sender was anonymous. Her heart thumped; she twitched in her chair.

“Mom! Dad!” she called from her room, a tear running down her cheek. “Please, come here! I’m scared!”

“Oh, what’s your problem now?!” her mom yelled.

“Can’t I watch the game in peace?” her father yelled from the living room as he watched a video on his computer of a hockey game he hadn’t had time to watch on TV the night before.

I guess only I can solve this, she thought, with a thought of her dad’s razor blades; then she twitched again to see the red face in the monitor reflection.

*************

YOU’RE GONNA GET RAPED AGAIN.

Megan read this on her cellphone early on Saturday afternoon. As soon as she saw the anonymous message, she dropped her phone on her bedroom floor; luckily, it hit a soft rug and didn’t break. She let out a loud yelp as she let go of it.

Her dad heard her from his bedroom. “What’s your problem now?” he barked.

Knowing she’d get no sympathy from him, she kept her mouth shut.

Luckily, he didn’t inquire any further.

She began sobbing. She looked in the mirror, and gasped at the sight of the red man.

*************

WE’RE COMING AFTER YOU.

Tiffany jumped in her chair at the dining room table when she saw this anonymous message in her email on an iPad.

“Oh, my God!” she sighed, then began sobbing.

Her mother–on the sofa in the living room, which was next to the dining room and without a separating wall, so Tiffany was in earshot–said, “What are you blubbering about now?”

“I wouldn’t expect you to care, Mom,” Tiffany snapped.

“What did you say to me?” her mom hissed.

Tiffany got up and took her iPad to her bedroom.

“Yeah,” her mom said. “You get out of here if you’re gonna give me that attitude.” She heard Tiffany slam her bedroom door. “That’s it, slam the door, ya spoiled little brat!”

**************

WE’RE GONNA GET YOU.

YOU’RE GONNA GET RAPED AGAIN.

WE’RE COMING AFTER YOU.

Alexa, Megan, and Tiffany respectively got these anonymous email threats repeatedly over the weekend, an average of about one every three or four hours each day until bedtime. Their parents continued to show no sympathy.

By Sunday night at about 11:00, the three girls were ready to end it all. Alexa was filling her bathtub while getting a razor blade ready. Megan swiped a bottle of at least sixteen or so of her dad’s sleeping pills from the bathroom medicine cabinet. Tiffany took a kitchen knife to slash her wrists in her bedroom; she wanted to give her mother a pool of red to clean up.

About to get in the water, Alexa looked down in it and saw the red man’s face again.

Megan closed the door to the medicine cabinet and saw his red face in the mirror.

Tiffany’s teary eyes looked in her dresser mirror and saw his face.

“Who are you” all three girls said…at the same time.

“I am a chthonic spirit,” he said.

The confusion on the girls’ faces indicated that they didn’t know what chthonic means.

“I’m a spirit from the underworld, the land of the dead,” he said.

“You’re a devil?” all three girls said, at once again.

“Yes, but that shouldn’t bother you,” he said. “You’re about to kill yourselves, which you know as Catholics will send you straight to hell. I’d say you’re emotionally prepared to deal with devils, aren’t you?”

“What do you want?” all three asked together again. It was as if their identities were fused.

“I want to help you,” he said.

“How?” they asked.

“My name is Furioso,” he said. “Since all three of you are about to commit the sin of despair, and give up the hope of salvation, perhaps you’d like it if I helped you get revenge on all your tormentors, including your so unloving parents.”

The girls, now seeing not only Furioso, but also each other in the reflections, were…for the first time in a long time…grinning.

“I can help you make them all share your pain. I can drag them all down to Hell, where you three, as demons, can torment them for all eternity. You will be their bullies, for a change.”

The girls’ grins widened.

“What’s more,” he went on, “I can make your exit from this world far less painful than the exits you were planning. Join me, and as a trio of spirits, you can unleash your fury onto the world.”

Suddenly, a crimson vortex appeared before each of the three girls, a portal into Hell. Alexa saw her bathtub water transform into a red whirlpool. Megan and Tiffany saw such bloody whirlpools form on their bathroom and dresser mirrors.

They each felt a tugging, pulling their trembling bodies forward, which they at first resisted. A swarm of moaning voices from the whirlpools seemed to be warning them, “No!…Don’t!”

“Whose voices are those?” the girls asked in unison.

“Don’t worry about that,” Furioso said. “Just let yourselves be pulled in, and be the spirits of vengeance, punishing the guilty of the Earth. The wrongdoers of the world deserve to be punished, don’t they? Aren’t you tired of evildoers getting away with their crimes? When have you known God to intervene, even after your most fervent prayers? You were going to kill yourselves and go to Hell, anyway. Now, stop hesitating. Come in!”

The girls continued to tremble before the vortices and the moaning of No.

“Come in, and claim your rightful revenge!” he called out.

“OK,” the girls said in a synchronized, tremulous voice.

They leaned forward and let themselves get sucked into the red hole, screaming the whole way.

They landed in a pit of infinite darkness.

‘Furies,’ a Horror Novel, Part One, Chapter 2

There was no way Alexa could have hidden the bruises on her face, or for Megan to have hidden the green paint splattered all over her blouse. The teachers and principal were going to get an explanation, one way or another, and the girls’ reluctance to tell on their tormentors, for fear of reprisals, didn’t stop the school authorities from finding out who was responsible.

Tiffany, on the other hand, wanted to tell on her bullies. She wanted to share her pain with Fay and George, no matter what the consequences would be afterwards.

The teachers and principal paid lip service to how they’d protect the three girls from any revenge attacks from their bullies. The girls didn’t believe a word of these promises.

That’s because the promises of protection really were nothing more than promises.

The girls had never been protected before…why would they be protected now?

On the very day that Denise, Boyd, Lynne, Fay, and George were reprimanded–as well as given empty warnings of further punishments if any of them hurt the girls again, warnings so empty that not one bully even flinched–they all went to work on their revenge, each achieving it right at the end of school.

Alexa was walking outside when Denise and Boyd saw her from behind. It had just finished raining, melting away some of the snow on that late February afternoon, so slush puddles were everywhere, with mud and slush patches where students had trampled away the snow and grass on either side of the walkway outside the school entrance.

Denise and Boyd sneaked up behind Alexa. Just as she was passing a mud and slush puddle, they shoved her, making her fall into it and making it splash everywhere.

An eruption of laughter from students all around the area burned in Alexa’s ears. She hadn’t even had time to look up and see who’d pushed her before she felt a few kicks to her gut.

“That’s for splashing mud and slush on me, dyke!” Denise said after giving Alexa a third kick.

“And for getting it on me,” Boyd said, kicking her in the leg.

As Alexa was getting up, Denise aimed her fist at the muddy girl’s upper right arm. After punching it five times, Denise said, “Thank you. I feel so much better now!” She walked away.

Boyd spat on Alexa’s face before following Denise.

Alexa closed her eyes…and thought she saw a man with devil-red skin looking at her for a split second. First, I was hearing whispers, she thought. Now, I’m seeing things.

**************

Tiffany went out the way opposite where Alexa had left, for she was anticipating some nastiness from Fay and George, and hoping they’d go out one of the ways most everyone else went. The coast seemed clear: some teachers were walking about, too; so if those two were hiding out and planning a revenge, the teachers would be there to stop them…she hoped.

She went past where all the cars were parked, seeing no students (let alone bad ones) among any of them, so she assumed she was safe. She took a relaxed walk in the neighbourhood of houses nearby, dodging the piles of slush and ice that hadn’t yet been melted.

She couldn’t hear Fay and George behind her, for they were being so quiet and so good at hiding that they were able to make her hypervigilance useless. They found a block of ice on the sidewalk, where Tiffany had just walked by. They picked it up and followed closely behind her.

They raised the block of ice–almost brick-shaped and as big as their heads combined–inches above her head, then dropped it, hitting her on the top-back of her head. She didn’t hear them laughing or running away because she was unconscious, staying that way for about ten minutes, and lying on the slushy sidewalk with no one to help her.

In a brief dream, she saw the same red face watching her.

*************

Megan was late leaving school; in fact, she deliberately waited for Lynne and Herman to leave first. In gym class, she saw Lynne finish her shower, get dressed, and leave before Megan even began taking her own shower. While showering, Megan assumed that Lynne was hooking up with Herman and leaving school with him.

She was right about the first part.

No sooner had Megan, having finished her shower, wrapped a towel around herself, than she saw Lynne standing by the entrance to the shower area with a malicious smirk.

Megan let out a short, piercing yelp.

“Nobody’s here to hear you, bitch,” Lynne said.

“What d’you want?” Megan spat back in a shaky voice.

“To settle the score with you, of course,” Lynne said. “I don’t appreciate you getting me in trouble just because you’re jealous of me being with your crush…a guy who’d never want you in a million years.”

As Megan walked out of the shower area and into the changing area, she saw Herman standing in front of the locker where her clothes were.

She let out another yelp of terror, and held her towel tighter around her torso.

“Well…,” Lynne said, “maybe my boyfriend will want you…just this one time.” She grabbed at Megan’s towel, and after a struggle, she tore it off the dripping wet and shaking girl, leaving her naked and trying to cover her breasts and crotch with her hands.

“C’mon, Lynne!” Megan screamed in sobs as the other two laughed at her. “I don’t deserve this!”

“I don’t care whether you deserve it or not,” Lynne said smugly as Herman walked up to Megan. “I just wanna see him do it to you.”

“Lynne!” she screamed as he grabbed her and struggled to get her on the floor. “You’re a…fellow female! You can’t…sympathize…with a guy…doing this…to one…of us! Ugh! He’s your…boyfriend! You want him…cheating on you?”

“Oh, I won’t be jealous, like you,” Lynne said as Herman, now on top of supine Megan, unzipped his pants. “Your body is nowhere near as good-looking as mine.”

“It’s good enough for me, though,” he said, whipping it out. “Just this once. You wanted me, Megan? You got me. This is for getting my girlfriend in trouble.”

“I’ll indulge him this one time, Megan,” Lynne said, that malignant grin never leaving her face, “just to watch him traumatize you.”

Megan screamed from the sharp pain of his entry. She could hear Lynne laughing as he carried on inside her. She closed her eyes, seeing not Herman’s face, but a red one.

*************

Over the weekend, none of the three victims’ parents showed any interest in their daughters’ suffering.

The sight of Alexa covered in mud got one blunt comment from her mother as soon as the girl walked in the front door of the house: “What the hell happened to you? And now you’re getting that crap all over my carpet? Go take a bath!”

Tiffany’s mother was similarly annoyed to see her daughter’s clothes covered in slush. “Oh, look at what you did! Now I have to clean that all up! Get out of those clothes so I can wash ’em. Hurry!“

In her annoyance, Tiffany’s mother never bothered to notice the blood spot on the back of her head.

Megan was still shaking when she got home. Her father saw her pass the living room, where he’d been watching TV, and go upstairs to her bedroom. Though he got a clear look at her frowning face, he didn’t consider it worth his trouble to see how wet it was with tears.

I’ll bet she’s just having more boy troubles, he thought as he turned his head back to the TV. The little slut just keeps asking for it.

Alexa lay in the bathtub, stunned. Why doesn’t anybody care? she wondered.

Tiffany sat on her bed in her underwear, stunned. Why doesn’t anybody care?

Megan sat on her bed, stunned. Why doesn’t anybody care?

All three girls saw repeated flashes of the red-skinned man before their faces.

I care, he whispered in their ears.

‘Furies,’ a Horror Novel, Part One, Chapter 1

Boyd McAuliffe hated Alexa Frey so much.

Well, it isn’t that he hated her so much that he regarded her as not worth the tiniest bit of consideration or compassion.

Actually, if you were to trace his bad attitude to her right back to the beginning, you’d discover that he envied her for having gotten into the gifted students class back in Grade 8, when he hadn’t.

Sure, that was a good enough reason to hate her.

That was a great reason to regard her as non-human.

That was all the reason he needed.

That was the best reason in the world…

…wasn’t it?

Anyway, right now, in one of the science classrooms during lunch break, when Alexa was concentrating on a chess game with another, equally unpopular student named Sal Moon, Boyd was aiming a bottle-cap in his slingshot, right at her face.

And he had another excellent, perfectly honourable reason to be doing it.

He wanted to impress Denise Charlton, the pretty, shapely redhead who also happened to be one of the biggest troublemakers in St. Thomas More Catholic Secondary School, in Hamilton, Ontario.

Alexa was debating in her mind which move to make. Should she trade pawns? Doing so didn’t seem to serve any purpose, except that Sal was just going to trade with her anyway, and that would have opened up her castle and exposed her king. What to do?

Meanwhile, Boyd was taking aim from the other side of the room.

Alexa could have moved her white queen diagonally two spaces to the front and right to put Sal’s black king in check, but he could have just moved it one square to his left and out of danger. It would have been another useless move that wouldn’t have helped her at all.

Boyd was steadying his hands; his aim was just about perfect.

Her knights, side by side, to the left and behind the centre squares, and with three of her pawns in front of them, were also useless. Her rooks, on the back row, had nowhere to go, either.

Boyd’s aim was perfect. Ready to shoot. Take a few slow breaths in and out, and…

Alexa thought, I’ll bet Karpov could figure out a brilliant way to proceed. With my mediocre talents at the game, though, I–

The bottle cap smacked her just under the left eye. The sting burned.

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” she shouted.

“I didn’t do it,” Denise said with a smirk that showed she was nonetheless entertained by it.

“Oh, sure you didn’t, you fucking bitch!” Alexa spat back, remembering the many other times Denise had been the one who ‘did it.’

“What did you call me?” Denise said, getting up and approaching Alexa. “I’ll kick your ass.”

“You heard me,” Alexa said, though avoiding Denise’s eyes.

“C’mon, Alexa!” Denise said, saying the name with mocking contempt and balling her fists.

“Oh, don’t be such a suck! Miss Dish-it-out-but-can’t-take-it.”

“I didn’t do it, ya ugly dyke!”

“Then WHO DID?!”

Boyd looked back at her, smiled, and waved at her.

“You prick!” Alexa shouted. “What did I do to you to deserve that?”

“You stayed alive,” he said.

“And now, you can apologize to me!” Denise said.

“Alright,” Alexa said, “I’m sorry you’re alive.”

Denise stomped over to her, her fists ready to swing.

“You stay away from…!” Alexa began, before getting a fist on her chin, knocking her off her chair.

As Denise gave her kick after kick to the gut on the floor, Alexa lying in the foetal position, Boyd walked over to get a better look. As he saw Alexa writhing in pain, he smiled.

Sal, too scared to get involved and thus become their next victim, got up and left the room.

As Alexa continued receiving kicks from Denise, as well as getting her long, wavy blonde hair pulled by Denise, she looked up at that smiling prick who’d started it all. All she could think about was how badly she wanted to get revenge on the two of them.

She was sure that the stress was making her hear things, because she would otherwise have sworn she’d heard a voice whisper, I can help you get them.

****************

Later that afternoon, in the halls, Megan Fourier was walking to her locker when she saw Lynne Hendricks, a pretty, curvy, and buxom brunette, but also one of the head mean girls in St. Thomas More, holding hands with Herman Schubert, one of the most handsome football players in their school, and also a guy Megan had had a crush on for years, though she was too shy to tell him or even hint at it.

Lynne knew how Megan felt, though. Megan had once confided in her about this.

The couple kissed before walking into art class together. Megan, frowning, followed them in.

As Megan walked through the doorway, she saw Lynne look back at her and grin, gloatingly.

Megan went red with rage.

“You bitch,” she hissed at Lynne. “You wrapped your legs around him on purpose.”

Lynne saw a big can full of green paint on a table. The lid was off. She picked up the can and turned to Megan.

“I can fix that red face of yours,” she said.

She threw the green all over Megan’s face and blouse.

Her eyes squinted shut from the paint; she heard a tidal wave of laughter all around her.

“She’s green with envy,” Lynne said.

The laughter continued. Megan opened her eyes.

Herman was laughing, too.

I wanna get that bitch soooooo badly, she thought. But what can I do?

A male voice whispered in her ear, I can help you get her…and him.

She looked to her left in surprise.

No one was standing there.

****************

Tiffany Ferry was in math class at about the same time as when Megan’s misfortune had happened. A short, chubby brunette named Fay Oliphant was walking by Tiffany’s desk when she looked down and saw her calculator lying by the edge.

Fay brought her fist smashing down on the calculator; Tiffany was too shocked by the suddenness of Fay’s action to get mad. Knowing no one in class liked her, Tiffany felt she could do nothing other than cower in response.

Mocking an answer she’d heard Tiffany give, with what seemed far too much pride, in their previous physics class, Fay said, “Force equals mass times acceleration!”

Those half-dozen or so students who’d also been in that physics class laughed. Tiffany, of course, didn’t laugh at all.

She’d wanted…but didn’t have the guts…to say, And you have plenty of mass, don’t you, Fay?

George Kelly, a boy sitting in the row of seats in front of Tiffany’s, looked back at hers and said to the kids sitting by her, “I feel sorry for you guys, having to sit next to a wimp.”

The math teacher entered the classroom. After twenty minutes of teaching, and having given the students a set of math exercises to do, he walked out of the classroom: Tiffany’s protection was gone again.

Focused on writing her exercises, she never bothered to look up and see George aiming a triple-A battery with an elastic band at her face. He’d heard of Boyd’s glory with Alexa earlier that day, and had hoped to emulate it here; he got her in the shoulder.

“Oww!” Tiffany shouted.

“Shit,” George said. “I meant to get her in the face. Well, at least I hit her.”

She heard an explosion of laughter from all directions.

“I’ll get her,” Fay said from behind. She had her own elastic band, with a marble aimed at Tiffany. “Tiffany Ferry, which should be spelled F-A-I-R-Y, called me ‘Fay Elephant’ last week. She’s gonna get this upside the head.”

Having had enough, Tiffany looked back at Fay with a scowl. “You know,” she said, “I was wrong to have called you an elephant. You’re really a shithead.”

Fay scowled back and fired the marble, but Tiffany ducked out of the way.

“Oh, well,” Fay said, getting out of her seat. “I’ll just have to get you upside the head another way.”

Fay punched her hard in the shoulder several times, then gave her a punch in the back of the head, and then returned to her seat just in time before the teacher returned.

“Tiffany F-A-I-R-Y,” she said when she got to her seat, “if you squeal to the teacher, you’ll get it worse, I promise you.”

I can make it even worse for Fay and George, if you let me, that same voice whispered in Tiffany’s ear.

I’m going nuts, she thought. I’m hearing things.