Category: short story

Publication of ‘They’re Conspiring Against The Alien Buddha Too!,’ by Alien Buddha Press, on July 4th

This is to announce the publication of a new anthology of short stories about conspiracies, called They’re Conspiring Against The Alien Buddha Too! It’s being published by Alien Buddha Press, the same people who published–in a poetry collection–a few poems of mine, namely ‘Gaza’ and ‘Stomping,’ and who will publish my novella, The Targeter, in a few weeks, too.

In this particular anthology of short stories, I have one included, called ‘The Harvest.’ Other writers in the anthology are Aishwariya Laxmi, E.W. Farnsworth, Lynn White, L.B. Sedlacek, James Schwartz, Zachary Kocanda, Mark Heathcote, Tulpa Fedrodianna-McAngophora, Robert J.W., (my story comes next in this order), Joan McNerney, Andrew K. Arnett, Brian Simmons, Cliff McNish, D. Rudd-Mitchell, Robert Walton, J. Rocky Colavito, Joseph Farley, Bryan Franco, Nick Romeo, Buck Weiss, James Dorr, Mark Lipman, Brendan Jesus, Roberta Beach Jacobson, Shannon O’Connor, and Collin J. Rae.

I want to thank Red, Dave, and any- and everybody else involved in Alien Buddha Press for including ‘The Harvest’ in this publication. Remember, Dear Readers, to check out this book on Amazon on the 4th of July, a date so easy to remember!

‘Primal Scream,’ a Sci-fi Short Story

When the loud, rumbling thud came just a while away from the house where ten-year-old Ted lived on his parents’ farm, he shook even more than the ground did. He turned off the TV, rose from the living room sofa, and ran out the front door to see where the thud had come from.

He ran across a field of wheat, a rolling hill just by the house. At the far end of the field he saw a huge rock that hadn’t been there before.

That must’ve been what made that shaking, and that noise, he thought as he kept running towards it.

When he finally reached the rock, he tumbled and fell right on it, smacking his hands and knees against it. He looked down at his knees, which hurt; his jeans were cut there, with bloody cuts on both knees.

“Ow!” he grunted. “Mom and Dad are gonna kill me when they see these holes in my pants.”

Suddenly, he felt a stinging burn on his left hand, making him wince and pull his arm off the rock. It felt like a spark that had flown out of a campfire and hit him on the hand; but he looked at his hand and saw no mark. Whatever it was, it had to have been too small to be visible, or it had left as quickly as it got there.

He looked back at the rock. His eyes could barely make out something on it, thousands of things that, each taken individually, would have been as invisible as whatever had come onto his hand, but all together, looked like a kind of mist, or many wisps of hair. They seemed to be making a buzzing sound, as if they were insects.

He found the sound disturbing, and he began to worry that he might have caught germs and would get sick from the rock, so he let himself fall back onto the grass to distance himself from the rock, then he got up and ran back in the direction of the house.

He saw his mom’s and dad’s pickup truck coming in on the driveway. They’d just come back from shopping in town.

They got out of the truck and saw him running across the field, stomping on the wheat.

“Look at that dumb kid!” his dad shouted. “He’s running on my wheat again! Get outta there!“

He turned to his left and ran off the field to the gravel road and went along that to get to the house. “Mom! Dad!” he shouted in excitement. “Did you see the big rock in the field?”

“What nonsense are you blabbering about now?” his mom said while taking two bags of groceries out of the truck. Then she and his dad took a look far out across the field. Her eyes widened. “Oh, my God. What do you think that is, John?”

“A meteor?” John said. “Fell from out in space, do you think, Jean?”

“Looks that way,” Jean said. “You didn’t go up and touch it, did you, Ted?”

He looked down at his feet. “Yes, I did.”

“You stupid kid,” she said. “And look at what you did to your jeans! And those cuts on your knees! You’re all filthy dirty. You’re gonna need a bath. Oh, you’ve always gotta find more work for me to do, don’t you?”

“I’m sorry,” the boy said softly.

“Get in the house, boy,” John said.

Ted went with his mother straight to the bathroom. She got his bath ready as he got out of his clothes. Both of them were frowning the whole time.

With the bathtub full of sudsy water and Ted naked and ready to go in, she turned around to look at him. “OK, Ted, get in the w…oh, my God!”

His skin was all a yellowish-green.

His eyeballs were yellow.

His blond hair had all turned grey.

“What the hell did you do, boy, getting so close to that meteor?” she shouted. “Such a stupid kid, always doing the wrong thing! What the hell is wrong with you?”

His father heard his mom’s shouting, then he ran from the living room and over to the bathroom. He saw his immobile, naked son…with that yellowish-green skin.

His eyes widened, and his jaw dropped.

“Oh, my God!” John said. “You stupid kid!”

“Normally, I’d beat your ass for doing such a stupid thing, but I’m afraid I’ll catch whatever disease you’ve got,” she said. “I’m scared to bathe you, as you are. I’m afraid to be near you. We’ve got to get you to a hospital. Get your clothes back on. There you go again, boy, giving me more work to do!”

Ted just stood there, still and morose.

“Well, hurry up, boy!” John shouted. “You heard her.”

He walked around to look his son in the face.

He saw that sullen expression on the boy, his eyes looking up at his father as if he’d like to kill him.

“Don’t you be lookin’ at me like that, boy!” his father shouted. “I got a good mind to smack you!”

“Don’t touch him, John,” Jean said. “You might catch whatever he got from that meteor.”

Then Ted looked at her in the same, threatening way.

“Hey, don’t you be looking at your mother that way,” she said. “You’re lucky I don’t smack you.”

He continued looking at both of them hatefully.

“I told you to stop it, boy!” she shouted.

“Stop looking at us that way, you little brat!” John said.

Ted kept the scowl on his face. It was even meaner now.

“Stop it!” his parents shouted.

“NO, YOU STOP IT!” he screamed. “YOU TWO ARE ALWAYS MEAN TO ME! YELLING AT ME, CALLING ME STUPID, SAYING I MAKE MORE WORK FOR YOU! YOU DON’T LOVE ME! I HATE YOU! I HATE YOU! I HATE YOUUUUUUU!!!“

As he was screaming, a kind of toxic energy was emanating from his body and penetrating theirs. They couldn’t react in any way except to shake and tilt back with their eyes wide open and their jaws dropped in horror.

Ted kept screaming, but with no more words. He was just letting out unmitigated rage and pain.

John’s and Jean’s bodies were changing now, hardening. They were both petrified as physically as they were emotionally. They soon stood as still as glass statues.

Ted looked at them and smiled.

He let out one last, long scream.

Those statues fragmented and crumbled to the floor in two piles of rock-like pieces.

He smiled an even wider smile.

Then he got in the tub of water and bathed himself. After finishing his bath and drying himself off with a large towel, he left the bathroom, went into his bedroom, and put on a clean set of clothes.

He made himself a sandwich and ate it while watching the TV in peace. When the sun went down, he went to bed, thinking about how he could use his new power on the bullies at school.

He slept like a baby.

When he left for school the next morning after fixing himself a bowl of cereal, he’d never once looked at himself in the mirror. He didn’t care how he looked.

Walking on the gravel road all the way to school, he didn’t care how tired he was or how sore his legs were. He didn’t miss getting a ride to school in his parents’ truck at all. His eyes were looking around everywhere on that road, watching out for bullies. This wasn’t out of fear, of course; on the contrary, he couldn’t wait to run into some of them.

About two-thirds of the way there, and having walked for about twenty tiring minutes, Ted saw two bigger boys, Rod and Barry, walking on the road on the way to his school. He smiled at the sight of them, but not because he considered them friends.

The two boys look one look at Ted and froze.

“Holy shit!” Rod said. “What the fuck happened to you, Ted?”

“What a freak!” Barry said. Both of them started laughing at Ted.

Smiling, Ted walked closer to them.

“Hey, stay away from us, you freak!” Rod said. “We don’t want your germs.”

Ted kept coming closer, the smile never leaving his yellow-green face.

“I mean it, you frog-boy, stay away!” Rod said. Both boys picked up rocks.

Ted kept coming at them.

“Stay the fuck away!” Barry said, and both of them started throwing the rocks at Ted.

Barry’s rock hit Ted on the shoulder, and Rod’s hit him on the forehead. Ted’s smile turned into a frown.

“Aww, look,” Barry said. “He lost his smart-ass smirk. I’ll bet he’s gonna start cryin’ for his mommy.”

The boys picked up some more rocks, choosing bigger ones.

Ted stayed where he was, only a few feet away from the boys.

“You’d better start runnin’, freak,” Rod said. Both boys, with rocks in their hands, raised their arms up, ready to throw.

As soon as their arms were backed up to throw the rocks at Ted, he opened his mouth wide.

“AAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!” he screamed.

The boys dropped their rocks and plugged their fingers in their ears, though it did them little good. They were shaking all over. Who would have thought that the little twerp could have been so terrifying all of a sudden?

“WHY DON’T YOU PICK ON SOMEONE YOUR OWN SIZE, YOU BULLYING BASTAAAARDS!!!“

The two boys looked down at themselves in horror and disbelief as they saw their bodies hardening. The screaming was so ear-splitting that their whole heads were stinging with the sharpest pain, yet they had no hope of going deaf.

“YOU THINK YOU’RE SO TOUGH, YOU ASSHOLES?!” Ted continued. “YOU’RE A COUPLE O’ COWARDS, PICKING ON LITTLE KIDS! I HATE YOUUUUUU!!!“

The statues that the two boys had become now shattered into hundreds of tiny pieces that scattered all along the road. With a little wind blowing them about, they’d become indistinguishable from the rest of the gravel. The boys’ clothes and schoolbags fell to the ground.

Ted looked at their remains and grinned.

“I’m so powerful,” he said, then continued toward school.

When he got to the gate surrounding the play area beside the small, one-storey school, where all the kids were out playing, some of them noticed him, shuddered, and pointed him out to their friends. Within a few seconds, all the kids started screaming.

“TED’S A MONSTER!!!”

“HE’S SO UGLY!!! DISGUSTING!!!”

“HELP US, SOMEBODY!!!”

Since Ted had never bothered to get a good look at himself in a mirror at home, he didn’t understand why everyone was calling him ‘freak’ and ‘ugly.’ All he knew was that those words hurt.

So he decided to do some screaming of his own.

“WHY DOES EVERYONE HAVE TO BE SO MEAN TO ME? WHY CAN’T I HAVE ANY FRIENDS? NO ONE LOVES ME! NO ONE ACCEPTS ME AS I AM, AND I’M SICK AND TIRED OF IT!!!“

Every child in that playing area, and every teacher there or coming out there to hear what all the screaming was about, froze in his or her tracks, trembled at the deafening noise and the toxic energy radiating from the boy, and became emotionally and physically petrified.

He let out one more scream, and all those glass-like statues shattered all over the grass.

Ted himself was shaking with rage and poisonous hatred. He walked with stomping feet into the school. The remaining staff of the school, who were still alive but terrified by the superhuman volume of Ted’s screaming outside, just stood still where they were, shaking as they heard his approaching, stomping feet.

A few of them in the main hall saw him and gasped at how inhumanly green he looked.

He looked in their horrified eyes with a scowl.

“SO, YOU ALL HATE ME TOO, EEEEEEHHHHH!!!“

With that long scream, they all froze and hardened.

He took a deep breath, then, “AAAAHHHH!!!”

Their bodies all blew up, the pieces spread all over the floor.

Now burning with hate, he went through room after room, checking to see if anyone at all was still alive. All he saw of humanity were scattered fragments of petrified pieces of former people.

“Good,” he grunted. “They’re all dead.”

Then he walked by a mirror and saw himself.

Not only did he have that yellow-green skin, the yellow eyes, and the greyed hair; his teeth, bared in his rage, were blood red, as if he’d just eaten an animal. He had green, wart-like spots all over his skin. Worst of all, he knew why he looked this way.

It wasn’t so much his exposure to the meteor.

It was all of his built-up rage and hate.

He couldn’t stand to see how he looked.

He hated all the more the person he’d become.

No better than John or Jean.

No better than the school bullies.

Much worse, in fact.

“AAAAAHHHH!!! I’M A MONSTER!!!”

He froze into a statue.

Ten minutes later, a six-year-old girl walked into the hallway, crying.

“Everybody’s dead,” she sobbed. “My teachers, my friends, all my classmates. They’re all just…broken little pieces. Why?”

Then she saw Ted’s green, deformed statue. She got up close to it. She saw his agape, red mouth and widened, yellow eyes. Her own mouth and eyes widened.

“AAAAAHHHH!!!” she screamed.

His statue shattered.

She trembled at the reaction, but stayed where she was.

“Oww!” she yelped at a slight burning feeling on her arm.

‘The Face,’ a Horror Short Story

Stella, a pretty young brunette, looked around at the other university students surrounding the campfire with her that night and asked, “So, does anybody know any good ghost stories?”

Cory, a blond, clean-shaven young man in a T-shirt and jean shorts, said, “Well, I once heard a claim some of the people living near here insist is true.”

“And what claim is that?” she asked.

“That a witch lives in the woods surrounding this camp,” he said.

Everyone other than him let out a big “Ooh!”

One of them said, imitating Burt Ward, “Holy Blair Witch Project, Batman!”

The others laughed.

“Allegedly, a witch has haunted these woods for many decades,” he went on. “She pulls her victims into a deathtrap slowly, insidiously, the victims being people who have come here for camping.”

His listeners let out another “Ooh!”

“If this story is true,” Stella asked, “then why hasn’t anybody heard any reports of missing persons leading to this camp, with police investigating? If people have spoken about a witch here, why haven’t any of us, or anyone else, for all we know, heard about it?”

“Because,” he said, “the witch uses her magic to throw off the scent anyone trying to find the missing people, so no one suspects that there’s any evil in these woods. Police and anyone else investigating are led to believe the victims went missing somewhere else, and only the locals here know about the witch.”

“Oh, what a cheap cop-out!” one of the listeners said, amid a chorus of boos and groans from the others. 

“I suppose so, but that’s the story I heard,” Cory went on. “Anyway, they say that the witch gets you, actually, right when you hear a story about another group going missing here. The listeners get sucked right up into the story and join its victims in the same fate.”

The listeners let out a third “Ooh!”

“If that’s so,” Stella asked, “then how did you come to know this story about a group of the witch’s victims?”

“How do you know I’m about to tell such a story?” Cory asked.

“I just assumed you were about to,” she said.

“Look, I just told you a fact that the locals here believe in,” he said. “I wasn’t about to tell an actual ghost story. Anyway, do you all remember the Daltons? That family, all of them blonds, remember? They went on vacation in Europe three years ago.”

“Oh, yeah, I remember them,” Manny said, a man with short black hair. All the other listeners nodded, having remembered the Dalton family. “What happened to them? I haven’t heard from them since they left.”

“Well,” Cory began, “they were going in their car on the way to the airport, and their car broke down on the highway not too far from here.”

“Not too far from here?” Manny said with a sneer.

“Well, yeah,” Cory said. “As you’ll recall, we’re all not too far from here, in our hometown just a mile or so from this forest, as the Daltons were, and as the airport is, too, so it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to you.”

“Very well,” Stella said. “Go on.”

“Anyway, they tried calling someone for help, but they must have had a bad connection, so they eventually gave up trying. Looking around there on the side of the road, Mr. Dalton found the trees and the scenery really beautiful, really charming, and since the family had packed tents and stuff like that, and it was getting late, he thought they could pitch their tents for the night and try to get help the next morning.”

“Why?” Manny asked, sneering again in disbelief. “They’d have missed their flight by then, wouldn’t they have?”

“Wasn’t anybody else driving up that road at the time, someone who could have helped them?” Stella asked. “Surely there was somebody driving around there.”

“Apparently, next to nobody else was driving around at the time, or else they would have simply gotten the help, gone to the airport on time, flown off to Europe, and come back to tell us all what happened to them.”

“Why aren’t they back home?” Manny asked. “Since they’d disappeared, how do you know what happened to them?”

“I met someone recently who found out, and she told me the whole story,” Cory said. “Don’t worry. I’ll get back to who she was later. Anyway, the Daltons felt really enamoured of the beauty of the place, so they went in among the trees, pitched their tents, and went to sleep.”

“And what happened the next morning?” Stella asked.

“Oh, we haven’t finished with what happened that night,” he said.

“We all know,” she said with a sneer of her own. “The witch got them, right?”

Everyone laughed, even Cory.

“Yeah, and the witch is gonna get us, too, for hearing this story here,” Manny said. “Ooh!”

Everyone, including Cory, laughed even louder.

“C’mon, no,” he said with continued laughing. “This isn’t that kind of story, really. This is a normal one, nothing supernatural, but still interesting—just what really happened to them, according to what this woman told me a little while back.”

“I’m guessing they made it to Europe, found they liked it there, and decided to stay there,” she said.

“And they were such jerks, they never said goodbye to any of their neighbours in town,” Manny said.

More laughs.

“Well, anyway, let me carry on with what happened that night,” Cory said. “They were all lying there in their tents—Mr. and Mrs. Dalton, and their three kids, two boys and a girl around their pre-teen years—just dozing off, and the grating, rasping noise of some bird just outside was heard, rousing all five of them.”

“Oh, how annoying,” Anna, a woman with long, wavy red hair, said.

“Yeah,” Cory went on. “Mr. Dalton was really angry. All of the family got out of their tents to see what was making the noise. It was pitch black out, but they got out their flashlights, and Mr. Dalton had a baseball bat to swat at the bird with.”

“Silly thing to do,” Trevor, a man with long, dark brown hair, said.

“Oww!” Stella grunted. Everybody looked at her. “Some horsefly or something bit me.”

“Will you be OK?” Anna asked.

“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” Stella said. “Carry one with your story, Cory.”

“Anyway, yeah, sure, Mr. Dalton was being silly, but he was mad, and angry people do foolish things, don’t they? The family pointed their flashlights at the animal to get a decent look at it, which was hard, since it was flying about and dodging the light. Mr. Dalton was swinging his bat in a fury. What they did see of the bird, though, was that it was one they couldn’t recognize as being one they, or anyone else, had ever seen before.”

“What did it look like?” Anna asked. 

Stella looked over at her and saw blonde hair in the flickering light of the campfire. Her eyes widened. Isn’t she a redhead? she asked herself.

“Oww!” Anna groaned. “That horsefly just got me.” Like Stella, she was rubbing the bite mark. The other listeners looked around, but couldn’t see any insect.

“The bird was brightly feathered, a bit like a toucan,” Cory went on. “A lot of blue, purple, and yellow feathers. It had a long, sharp beak. It flew around really fast, darting here and there, back and forth, up and down. Mr. Dalton was getting really frustrated, and his family was telling him to stop swinging the bat, because of course what he was doing was pointless. Still, he wouldn’t stop trying to hit the bird; he was getting obsessive about it, like a madman.”

“Wow, you seem to know this story in the most minute detail,” Trevor said. Anna looked over at him and saw short blond hair on him. 

Surprised, she thought, Blond now? When did he get a haircut?

“Yeah, I really know a lot of detail,” Cory said with a chuckle. “The woman who told me the story remembered all the details so well, and I found the story so compelling that I managed to remember all of them. Anyway, at one point, after Mr. Dalton had been swinging that bat for a while, I guess the bird got tired of dodging it, and it swooped down and pecked him hard on the head. He groaned in pain, dropped the bat, and fell on the ground. His wife and kids went over to see if he was OK. He had blood coming out of his head. Mrs. Dalton put a flashlight to it to see it better, and she saw a mix of red and green pouring out of the wound.”

Now his listeners gave an “Ooh” that was serious. Stella and Anna also noticed something strange about Cory: no longer in a T-shirt and jean shorts, he was now wearing a dark brown robe, like that of a monk. The women shook their heads and looked again: yes, a robe was on him.

He continued: “As the family was looking with alarm at the red and green liquid, assuming the bird put the green there, it swooped down and pecked the wife and kids on the head, too, in one fell swoop. They all screamed in pain and fell to the ground beside Mr. Dalton.”

“I’m guessing they all had a mix of blood and green coming out of their heads, too,” Manny said. Stella looked at him and saw blond hair; her eyes and mouth widened at the sight.

“Yeah, presumably,” Cory said, “because I’ll tell you another thing: all of the family started to feel woozy. It was as if that green stuff was a drug injected into their bloodstreams, for the five of them were now getting up and staggering about, bumping into each other and into trees. They’d dropped all their flashlights, and they were wandering into the forest aimlessly.”

“Oww!” Manny said, then rubbed his neck.

“That horsefly seems to be getting us all,” Trevor said. “Oww! I got that right.”

Everyone except Cory looked around to try to find the ‘horsefly,’ but instead they saw a little glowing ball of changing colours—yellow, blue, and purple. 

“Strange colours for a firefly,”Manny said. “Is that what bit us?”

“I don’t see anything,” Cory said, looking away and frowning in annoyance at all these interruptions. “Shall I continue with my story? You don’t want to miss the ending.”

“Sure, of course,” Trevor said in a slurred voice. “Carry on.”

“As I was saying,” Cory said, “the Daltons were stumbling about in the dark, bumping into each other and into trees, falling down, getting back up, and stumbling about further into the forest.”

“Am I high?” Stella asked, looking about and seeing a blur.

“I feel stoned, too,” Manny slurred.

“My head is swimming,” Anna said.

All three of them, as well as Trevor, looked at Cory, who not only looked even more annoyed at their continued interrupting of his story, but who also had brown hair and a mustache and goatee connected in a circle around his mouth. Everything was getting blurrier and blurrier for them after that moment. The flames of the campfire were moving like ocean waves.

The four bitten listeners looked around at each other, straining to see detail. Instead of seeing, apart from Cory, the original people they’d come to camp with, they saw what seemed to be a blond family: a father, a mother, and three pre-teen kids—two boys, and a girl. Yes, one campfire member, a bald man, had been there but said nothing the whole time…or had he been there? Were the four hallucinating him before? None of them could remember for sure. In any case, he, if he’d been there originally, was one of this new family now…or a family member just appeared out of thin air.

“I’ll continue,” Cory said after a sigh of annoyance. “The Daltons continued blundering their way through the woods until they came close to a cliff.”

Stella looked up to her right and saw what looked like two black holes in the sky, just above the forest trees behind the campers’ tents. The holes seemed vaguely like eyes. 

“The Daltons all looked out of a clearing in the woods, past the cliff and out into the night sky,” Cory went on. “They looked out at the glowing stars. They were all mesmerized by the glow, staring stupidly at it.”

His listeners could hear the raspy squawking of some bird flying in circles over their heads. They felt compelled to stand up, watching the brightly coloured bird. It started flying away from the campfire, and they all followed it mindlessly.

“All right,” Cory said with a scowl. “I guess I’ll just have to get up and go along with all of you, if this is the only way I’ll be able to finish telling this story.” He got up and walked behind them.

As they were walking, following the bird and heading towards the trees behind their tents, Stella looked up and noticed those eye-like black holes following them, too, hovering up high in the air, darker than the shadows all around them.

She and the other listeners also looked at each other at one point, finding each other’s inexplicable change of appearance the oddest of blond. There was something vaguely familiar about how all five of them looked, but they at first couldn’t put their fingers on it.

They had come into the woods by now, going up a hill. They could hear Cory behind them, continuing to tell his story.

“Anyway,” he said, “as the family continued staring up at the stars in their state of rapt hypnotism, they began to see, in the blackness between the stars, what looked like the eyes, nostrils, and mouth of a face. These were all just holes, though each a distinct, darker black than that of the night sky.”

Stella looked down at herself and saw what she was wearing. What? she thought. I wasn’t wearing this! How and when did I change my clothes? Then she looked out at the blond others. The ‘father’ of the group…she remembered his face from somewhere. Is that Mr. Dalton? No, it couldn’t be!

That bird could still be heard making that grating call from up above them, obscured among the leaves in the trees. None of them could see its blue, yellow, and purple feathers at all.

“The face in the night sky began to talk to the Daltons,” Cory said from behind the group. He could have stopped talking, though, for his would-be listeners were too disoriented from the bites they’d gotten to be paying attention. They just kept walking up the incline in the woods, following the squawking of the hiding bird. He continued his story, all the same, though: “The face said, in the scratchy voice of an old crone, ‘You are mine. Come into my mouth.’”

Stella, feeling as if she were on a bad drug trip, got a mirror out of her purse as well as a flashlight. She turned it on with a shaky hand, and with her other shaky hand, she put the mirror up to her face. 

She didn’t see herself.

She saw Mrs. Dalton.

She looked to her right and saw Mr. Dalton.

The would-be listeners stopped walking, for they’d come to a clearing in the forest, and a cliff looking down to a lake. They weren’t interested in it, though: they looked instead up at the starry sky.

Stella was the first to notice those black hole eyes among the stars. A mouth-like hole was beginning to form below the eyes, as she could make out with her own eyes squinted. She looked around at all the others: all Daltons, the father, herself as the mother, and the two sons and daughter instead of her adult friends.

Cory, in his dark robe and looking more like a sorcerer’s apprentice than a monk, concluded his story with these words: “And so, the Daltons fell, not off the cliff and into the lake below, but into the mouth in the sky, which flew right at them and ate them up.”

“And that’s the end of the story?” Stella asked him in a trembling, slurred voice. 

She looked back at him and saw him nodding with a malevolent smirk. 

“And who is the woman who told you this story?” she asked.

“She is my master,” he said. “Look in front of you, if you’d like to meet her.”

Stella turned her head back to her front with the slowest of reluctance. Her eyes turned away from Cory, then past the three kids, then past Mr. Dalton, and finally up to the night sky, dreading what was there. 

There she saw the blackest of eyes, nostrils, and a mouth. The other Daltons were staring at the face, too, but in a euphoric daze.

The face was moving at them all faster and faster.

“You are mine,” it said in that scratchy voice. “Come into my MOUTH!!!”

Before they knew it, they were already inside.

“Marble,” a Modern Myth to Encourage the Discouraged

My name is Casey. I have been trapped in a huge block of marble for as long as I can remember; and I have been struggling to break out of it for what must be years, even decades.

A conspiracy of sorcerers put me in this prison. How did they construct the marble in which they encased me? They performed repeated rituals, ceremonies of shame. They made me believe that I deserved to be held forever in this cell of marble, that I am ugly, repellant, of no worth at all. I believed it, and wept in my petrified confinement.

A while back, however, I began to doubt the cruel beliefs my captors put in my head. In my first doubts, I found myself able to do something I hadn’t been able to do in years, decades, even.

I budged.

Just a bit, at first.

Then I doubted a little more, and I could move a bit more.

I’ve continued doubting, and since this growth of doubting has slowly but steadily bloomed, I’ve become able not only of more and more movement inside this casing, but I’ve also been able to make this large block of marble shake on the ground where it’s sat all this time.

How do I doubt? I just keep thinking to myself that it isn’t I who am ugly, repellant, and worthless, but rather that it’s the marble I’ve been encased in that is ugly, repellant, and unworthy.

It seems that everyone outside, looking at this huge block of marble I’m incarcerated in, thinks the marble is beautiful, protecting the world from my hideousness.

But more and more, I know better.

Attempts are made, all the same, by those outside, to make me believe that there’s nothing good in me to make it worthwhile to break free. Once I come out of my fetter of engulfing rock, I’ll realize that I can’t do anything useful for the world, or so they’d have me believe. It’s best that I stay inside, apparently…

No! I must never believe those lies!

You may be wondering how I’ve been able to live and breathe while immobilized in this marble for so long, with no oxygen, food, or even an ability to relieve myself. The explanation is simple: the sorcerers who put me in this predicament used their magic to ensure that I’d never need to breathe, eat, or do any of the normal things that people outside do all the time and take for granted.

The fact that my tormentors are keeping me alive is part of how I know that I must have a secret worth that they don’t want to be known to the world. I have special abilities that they feel threatened by; if I were free to use those abilities, my enemies would be reduced to nothing.

Still, why not just kill me? Perhaps my abilities include a defying of death: maybe they can’t kill me, so encasing me was the best they could do. Perhaps they get pleasure from the idea of so capable a man as I being convinced I’m worthless that my powers would never be used, because I don’t believe in them. They laugh at how I’m so close to greatness, yet so far away, too.

Hence all those voices outside trying so hard to discourage me from trying to break free, all deliberately made audible to me, in spite of my confinement, through the sorcerers’ magic. But I’ll show them all!

Umph! I’ve…got…to break…out!

I can feel the marble block moving, wobbling a bit from side to side. Gradually, as I push left, then right…forward, then backward, I can feel the wobbles get slightly bigger over time. I am making progress!

The space between my body and the surrounding marble was originally so tight that it was pressing into me. With my years of struggling, the tightness is gone, and now there are a few millimetres of space all around between my body and the marble. Tiny pieces of it have broken off and fallen to my feet, erosion from my struggles!

Grains of marble from the outside must be breaking off, too, hence my ability to move the block more and more, and hence the voices of the people trying to discourage me, their voices louder and louder, and more and more agitated at my progress and determination.

I am an angel trapped in this marble, and it must be carved, as it were, until I set myself free! I must become the angel that I already am!

Ungh! I…must…keep…rocking…this…block!

CRACK!

What was that sound?

How big of a crack did I just make?

Instead of small, slow bits of progress, am I about to start making large ones?

I can hear the voices outside, moaning in surprise and…apprehension? Do they fear the coming of my success?

I…must…push…harder! Oof!

CRACK!

That one sounded much bigger. I’ll be free soon!

Hey, there’s a big crack in front of my eyes now. I can see outside, and I can hear the people out there much better. Quite a crowd is gathering, making a lot of noise.

Unh! I’m…gonna…keep…on…shaking…this…thing–Oh! Until…I’m…free!…Aah!

CRACK!

“Don’t do it, Casey!” I hear a male voice warning me. “If you come out of there, you’ll only realize, without any doubt, just how worthless you really are! Just stay in there, and spare us all the irritation of your presence!”

No! I mustn’t listen to voices like that! They’re lying!

Angh! I’m…getting…closer…to…breaking…free!

CRACK!

A huge chunk of the marble just broke off! I can see all the people to my front! There are at least a dozen men and women watching me break out. Some, with worried looks on their faces, are shouting at me to give up. Others, with hopeful looks, are cheering for me!

(In fact, I remember when I had my very first doubt, I heard the voice of a woman trying to encourage me to break out. That might be her voice that I’m hearing now.)

“Come on, Casey!” a woman is shouting. “You can get out of there!”

“Shut up!” a woman beside her is saying. “Don’t encourage the imbecile. He’s dangerous. The coven warned us about him!”

Speak of the coven, and they appear.

Indeed, I can see the group of cloaked sorcerers approaching the crowd; these were the six men and women who encased me in this marble I’m almost out of.

Under their hoods, their shadowy faces are showing great fear. I find this most encouraging!

Nnhk! Gotta…shake…this…thing, and…get…out!

CRACK!

What’s this? A big piece of marble just broke off from behind me! I can turn my head, and I see the crowd from back there now!

The coven is chanting in their ancient, mystic language. I don’t know the meaning of the words, but I know the intention: to cover me in a new, hardened prison, and to make me feel unworthy of ever trying to free myself again.

I must…resist them…Urgh! I must…break out…

CRACK!

Though another piece broke off, a big one to my left, just under my cheek, I can feel a soft, liquid form building up to fill in these holes. I…must…push through them…before…they harden…and become…new marble! I’m…so tired…I don’t have…much strength left…

The coven’s chanting is getting louder and more intense. More of that liquid is filling in all the spaces. I won’t be able…to get out…before it hardens…

“Stop it!” a woman’s voice cries. “Leave him alone! Let him break free! Stop hurting him!”

“Shut up!” a second female voice shouts. “Let him be sealed up! He’s no good to us! He’s a danger! Can’t you see that?”

“No, he’s not!” the first woman shouts. “Free him!”

“The coven says he’s a danger to us all!” the second says.

“He’s a danger only to the coven!” the first says. Out of my half-open right eye, I see her running off. In my exhaustion, I’m barely conscious. She’s come back…with a pick-axe! She’s chipping away at the marble with it! She’s helping me! She’s freeing me!

With her help, I feel valued for the first time in my life. Hers must have been that first encouraging voice I heard so many years ago. Now I have the courage to keep trying. She’s given me new strength. Nnmph! Now…I…can…break…out!

SMASH!

Fiery light is flashing out of me in all directions, now that I’m finally free. My light is burning the coven to a crisp. They are screaming in agony as they slowly die. Their blind supporters are weeping to see my enemies destroyed.

They are but ash now, blown away by the wind.

I’m free, my helper is free…we’re all free.

Free of the coven’s power over us, as their supporters are beginning to realize.

My light is shining for everyone.

Even the coven’s supporters are realizing that I’m not without value.

I am the good that the coven tried to hide in marble. I am the beauty that they called ugliness, because it was they were were truly ugly.

All the people who were lied to about me are no longer ugly. They’re beautiful, too.

We’re all beautiful, and valuable.

We’re free.

‘Cassandra,’ a Short Story

Everybody’s gonna die, and very soon.

And there’s nothing I can do about it.

It’s not that I didn’t try—Oh, God, how I tried!

But no one would listen to me, no matter what I said, no matter what proof I presented, it all fell on deaf ears.

What can I do, except wait, and die?

I’m just sitting here in my bedroom, lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling, knowing that the nuclear missiles are getting closer and closer to our town on the west coast. One in particular is heading straight our way.

My name is Cassandra, and I’m sixteen years old. I’m a clairvoyant, but no one believes me when I predict something, or know that something from far away is coming, like those missiles. Even when my predictions come true, which they always have, people still refuse to believe in my ability to predict them; it’s said that I was lucky, a fluke.

I was aptly named.

But I didn’t need the gift of clairvoyance to know that a nuclear World War Three was coming. All anyone had to do was watch the news. Tensions between the US on our side, and Russia and China on their side, have been going on for years; but few people have bothered to pay attention. Few people care.

My family is particularly ignorant, being blinded by American patriotism. When I tell them the missiles are coming, they imagine that our defense system can “easily” intercept them all! Idiots! To this day, they continue to believe in American invincibility.

I can feel that one missile in particular coming closer and closer to our area.

It will be here within minutes.

I hear some people making noise outside. It must have dawned on them what danger we’re all in.

What’s that? My brother’s voice? I’ll take a look through the window and find out. Here, I’ll open the window so I can hear better.

“Oh, don’t worry, Margaret,” I can hear my brother, Phil, saying to our next-door neighbor. “Do you actually think a bunch o’ Russkies and Chinks are gonna outdo the good ol’ US of A? You’re really overestimating their chances!”

He is such a fucking moron.

And sadly, the rest of the family think just like him.

We’re doomed.

I’m closing the window and going back on my bed.

It’ll make no difference what we do, Margaret, whether we drive away or stay at home: those missiles will hit us, at least a great many of them, and that’s bad enough.

The lucky ones among us will be killed immediately by the nuclear blasts. The not-so-lucky ones will die of ionizing radiation in a period of ten to twelve weeks, as happened to the Japanese. Then there are things like nuclear winter and the extinction of the human race through societal and economic collapse, and slow death by starvation. That’s what I read online.

And this is all coming very soon.

I tried to warn people. No one would listen.

Months ago, I tried to assemble a group of protestors to raise awareness of the danger. I couldn’t get even one person to join me.

The fact that this ultraconservative town deems me a freak in my black, goth fashions doesn’t help.

The neighbors think I’m a dyke (I’m not.). My family tends to wonder if I am. I could tell them I’m not, but they wouldn’t believe me.

They never listen to me, anyway.

I feel so alone now.

So helpless.

I can feel that missile getting really close now.

I don’t need to look out the window and see it in the sky. I know it’s coming. Soon.

What else is there to do, but sit and wait?

When it hits, what is Phil gonna say then?

“Oh, the Chinks got one lucky shot in,” he’d probably say. “So what?”

He’s such an idiot.

The funny thing is…I’m not even scared.

I’m not shaking. I feel no nausea, my heart isn’t pounding. I just feel…nothing.

Fear implies the hope, however faint, of being saved. I’m beyond that now.

It’s much too late for hope now.

There was a bit of hope when I began trying to gather that group of protestors, but even that hope dwindled away very soon.

Just like that missile is coming soon.

I can feel it approaching. It’s almost touching.

What’s that? Screams from outside? The neighbors must be seeing the missile in the sky now.

That’s about right. I feel it so close now.

I hear a noise out there; it sounds like an airplane flying over the house. It’s the missile.

We’re dead.

Wait: am I hearing cheering out there? Yes, I can hear my neighbors cheering and clapping! They think that just because the missile didn’t hit us here, that we’re safe? It’ll just hit a nearby area further beyond, and that’ll be bad enough!

Why did I have to be born and raised in a town with such stupid people?

“Those commie Chinks couldn’t hit the side of a barn with a brick!” Phill just yelled, loud enough for me to hear through my closed window. “Ha-haaa!”

He is such a jackass.

I can feel the missile lowering to the earth.

It’s too far off for Phil and my neighbors to see, but I can feel that missile getting lower and lower, closer and closer to making contact with the earth.

I’m just sitting on my bed here, staring at the wall with a frown of resignation. I feel dead already.

The moment of truth is just about upon us.

…and those idiots outside are celebrating.

I can feel it…the missile is just above the blades of grass, just about touching them.

Touching the tips of them now.

This is it.

BOOM!

The ground is shaking.

The legs of my bed are rattling against the wooden floor.

The only reason my body’s moving is because of this shaking. I’m not shaking from fear.

As I said, I’ve felt dead this whole time.

The laughter outside has changed to screaming. Phil and my neighbors must be looking at the mushroom cloud in the distance.

‘Murica ain’t as strong as you thought, huh, Phil?

We weren’t among the lucky ones.

The future of our short-ass lives is to wait for the radiation to get us, or to die slowly of hunger.

I feel my empty stomach growling already.

Why go to the fridge for anything?

Why prolong the inevitable?

I’ll just sit here on my bed, unmoving.

I’m dead already.

Analysis of ‘Duel’

Duel is a 1971 thriller directed by Steven Spielberg originally for TV, then extended for theatrical release. It was written by Richard Matheson, his screenplay based on his short story of the same name. The film stars Dennis Weaver.

Duel received generally positive reviews, with especial praise for Spielberg’s direction. It’s now considered a cult classic and one of the best made-for-TV movies of all time.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to the short story.

Matheson’s story was based on an incident while driving home from a golfing match with a friend, the very same day as the Kennedy assassination: November 22nd, 1963. He was tailgated by a trucker, and wrote the idea down soon after.

The juxtaposition of events leading to his inspiration is interesting in itself: a golf game, the assassination, and the aggression of the truck driver. In a sense, we can see in these three things a common theme–competition, and a particularly aggressive form of it in two of them.

The whole point of an assassination, whatever the political reasons may be for it, is competition over who will lead the country: kill the president, and replace him with someone more desirable, or at least less threatening to the current system. Driving can lead to a kind of competition over who ‘owns the road,’ with the frustrations of that leading to road rage.

Obviously, the man driving the tanker truck in the film, he who is terrorizing and endangering the life of David Mann (Weaver), has an aggravated case of road rage. In the short story, it’s discovered that the trucker’s name is Keller, a pun on killer that’s so obvious, it’s mentioned as such in the story. Just as obvious is Mann’s name as a pun on man, since he’s an everyman, nobody special, just an ordinary salesman who is forced into being his own hero.

…and why is Keller trying to kill Mann? For the unpardonable sin of passing him on the road, or so it would seem. Actually, we really don’t know for sure what really is Keller’s problem with Mann. Sometimes not knowing a killer’s motives, as with Michael Myers, can make a movie all that scarier…fear of the unknown, and that kind of thing. Never seeing Keller’s face (or even knowing his name, as far as the film is concerned) adds to the tension. We see only his arms and brown, snakeskin boots.

Because we never learn who the truck driver is or what his full motives are, it’s been said that the truck itself is the real antagonist, not the driver. Spielberg himself went along with such an interpretation, seeing his film as an indictment of the mechanization of life. Though it’s his film, I must respectfully disagree with his interpretation.

Machines and technology aren’t in themselves the problem; it’s how we use them, for good or ill, that must be focused on. Even today, with AI technology, it isn’t AI per se that we should worry about, but rather its application. AI, as well as automation in general, could be a most liberating thing, freeing us from our work so we can maximize our potential and enjoy life…provided that the production of commodities is to serve universal human need. In a society that produces commodities to maximize profit, though, as we have now, that very AI and automation will only result in plunging millions of people into joblessness.

So if it isn’t the tanker truck itself, as a symbol of the apparent evil of machines and technology in general, that is the source of hostility in the film, as I would insist, then what is that source? I’d go back to what I said towards the beginning of this analysis, and say that the source of this hostility is aggressive competition, fueled by alienation.

Marx described alienation as manifesting in many forms, but the form that matters in this film is alienation from other workers. Now, Mann being a salesman and Keller being a trucker means, of course, that they aren’t directly competing with each other for higher wages from the same boss; but one can see a broader, more general kind of competition between the two, symbolized by Mann’s attempts to get past the slow-moving truck up ahead, and to get safe from the attacks of Keller’s truck when it’s fast-moving.

The tanker truck is old and dilapidated, as opposed to Mann’s red Plymouth Valiant. The vehicle one drives typically gives one a sense of one’s social status, hence the great pride people often have in their cars. Keller must envy other men for driving much nicer-looking vehicles that his beaten-down truck. Small wonder that he wants to dominate the road with his truck, which at least is so much bigger and more powerful than Mann’s car, as ugly as his truck is. He needs to compensate for his feelings of social inferiority by bullying the drivers of nicer-looking cars.

In the short story, the truck is full of gas, so it explodes when it falls off the cliff at the end. In the film, though, the truck is empty, so there’s no explosion after it falls. Keller driving an empty truck on the highway (recall how old and dilapidated it is), unless he’s driving home from having delivered the gas, suggests that maybe he’s angry because he’s out of work. Mann, in contrast, is driving through the Mojave Desert on a business trip…not that Keller knows anything about that, of course, but he has every reason to believe that Mann has it a lot better than he. In the short story, Mann imagines Keller must have a police record, having harassed other drivers as a habit.

Mann is the only substantial character in the story, Keller being faceless, mysterious, and without any dialogue. Though it’s called Duel, the story might as well be called Solo, since Mann is so lonely throughout most, if not all, of it. His feeling friendless just adds to the film’s sense of alienation, since his cries for help fall largely on deaf ears.

The film begins with Mann driving out of the city, the camera looking out of his windshield from his POV, thus establishing our sympathy for him. He’s playing the car radio, and we hear a married man on a talk show explaining how, because he hates work, he’s become a househusband while his wife is the breadwinner. Because of this arrangement, he feels emasculated, his working wife seeming to be the true head of the house, the ‘man’ of the house.

In the man’s shift from a pro-feminist career choice to an anti-feminist resentment over feeling ruled over by his wife, we can see how the humiliation he feels reflects already the themes of competition and alienation in the film. He feels that, as the husband, he should be above his wife. We will soon also see how this man, who does’t appear in the short story, is a double for Mann, who in his own way also feels dominated by his wife, a housewife played by Jacqueline Scott.

Mann stops at a gas station where the attendant tries to sell him a new radiator hose, which Mann suspects is just the attendant trying to get some more money out of him for something he doesn’t really need. This is yet another example, however small, of capitalism engendering alienation: one is far more interested in making money than in helping people. (As we’ll later learn, though, the attendant’s warning about the radiator hose is justified, so the alienation is really manifested in Mann’s refusal to listen to him.)

Mann, by the way, has by this point already passed the truck and been mildly annoyed by Keller. Mann uses the gas station telephone to call his wife, who as I said above, seems far more the boss of his home than he is. He calls her to apologize to her for something that happened the night before. A man at a party made unwanted sexual advances on Mann’s wife, and she’s mad at him for not standing up to the aggressor. This is yet another example of the theme of aggressive competition, in this case, of who gets to have Mann’s wife.

She also gripes at him to finish his business trip as soon as possible so he’ll return home as soon as he’s promised to. This means that he’s also going to have to compete with the time. Of course, we know by the end of the film how that competition will turn out for him.

Keller is at the gas station, too, honking his horn again and again. The attendant thinks Keller is pressuring him to hurry up and fill up his truck with gas, but we should already have an inkling that the honking of the horn is meant to irritate Mann.

Mann is out of the city by now and entering the loneliness of the Mojave Desert. He has only Keller to keep him company.

Being tailgated by Keller, Mann puts his hand out the window and waves to have the truck pass him. This is an act of goodwill by Mann, since he doesn’t want any conflict or competition with Keller. Later, when Keller’s out front and driving slowly in a deliberate attempt to annoy Mann, he imitates Mann’s waving to have him pass, but as Mann is trying to pass in the lane for oncoming traffic, a car is approaching at that very moment, almost causing a collision. Keller’s ironic act of ‘goodwill’ is to have Mann killed!

One thing to keep in mind, as a side note, about this film is that the soundtrack–composed by Billy Goldenberg for strings, harp, keyboards, and lots of percussion, along with Moog synthesizer effects–is mostly not conventional music in the sense of having themes, melody, and harmony. It has a largely metallic, jarring sound, since nothing in this story is harmonious in terms of human relationships.

The short story begins by pointing out how Mann passed the truck at 11:32 a.m., as if this is focal to the plot. About twenty minutes into the film, Mann manages to pass the truck by finding a small dirt road to the side of the highway, racing through it, and coming around back to the original road to be in front of the truck. Mann is exultant to the point of gloating that he’s finally passed the truck. He’s briefly experiencing the joy of winning out in a competition.

We soon get a sense of Keller’s vindictive rage at this outsmarting of him, a kind of narcissistic rage, so Keller races up behind Mann, honking his horn and threatening to rear-end him. Mann’s car spins off the road, near a diner, and crashes into a fence. The truck passes by and continues down the road, and Keller seems no longer interested in terrorizing Mann.

A couple of old men have seen the crash, and one of them goes up to Mann to see if he’s OK. When Mann says that the truck driver was trying to kill him, the old man won’t even consider the possibility that he’s describing the situation as it actually was, and insists that Mann simply has a bit of whiplash. This lack of validating Mann’s experience is yet another example of alienation in the film. Mann feels so alone and friendless.

He crosses the road, enters the diner, and goes into the men’s room to put some water on his face and calm down. Imagining the nightmare to be over, he looks at himself in the mirror as he’s processing what just happened. Lacanian psychoanalysis can deepen our understanding of Mann’s mental state, particularly with the symbolism of the mirror he’s looking into.

The terror of having almost been killed by Keller’s truck, of Mann’s body being mangled to pieces, is in a way symbolically comparable to the fragmented feeling an infant has of its own body prior to seeing itself for the first time in a mirror. The specular image gives the child a sense of his own self as a distinct ego, as opposed to his prior perception of himself as formless, divided, and fragmented. This establishment of self brings about the Imaginary Order, as opposed to the traumatizing, formless, ineffable state of the Real, caused in Mann’s case by Keller’s threat to his life, the threat of destroying Mann’s body.

Looking in the mirror calms Mann because it helps him re-establish his sense of self and a sense of order in the world he lost when Keller plunged him into the Real. Still, as any Lacanian knows, the ideal-I seen in the mirror reflection is self-alienating, because although Mann sees himself, that image is over there in the mirror, not in here in Mann’s body. Mann sees what seems like another person rather than himself, because he’s over there and not here. This Lacanian angle on alienation is just another example of the film’s theme of social estrangement in general.

What’s worse, the lack of sympathy for Mann from anyone in the diner just reinforces his estrangement. When the owner of the diner asks him what went wrong outside, Mann is so shaken up that he can’t put his trauma into words. This inability to verbalize an experience is the essence of the Real. To feel a connection with society, one must be able to use the commonly-shared form of language to communicate one’s feelings, to enter the social and cultural world of the Symbolic. Mann can only say that the incident with Keller was “just a slight complication,” to which the owner replies that it “looked like a big complication,” getting laughter from the diner’s patrons, and further alienating Mann.

Even worse than this, Mann looks out the window of the diner and sees Keller’s truck parked outside! No, his nightmare is by no means over. The calm he felt in the men’s room, symbolized by his seeing himself in the mirror and re-establishing his sense of self (the Imaginary) in the chaotic world of the Real, was an illusion. He sits at a table, all alone, knowing that no one in the diner is his friend.

Rather than even consider that Keller is the crazy one, everyone thinks Mann is the crazy one. What’s more, it seems that Keller has entered the diner, judging by the number of men who are wearing similar brown boots and jeans. Which one of these men is Keller, though?

Mann believes at one point that he has identified Keller in a scene not in the short story–he sees a man at a table eating a sandwich. In his nervous confrontation with the guy, who naturally denies even any knowledge of what Mann is talking about, he knocks the sandwich out of his hand, angering him and getting knocked to the floor. The man then storms out of the diner.

The patrons of the diner think Mann is all the crazier now, and he is, after all he’s been through. Significantly, he sees Keller’s truck being driven away, as well as the man he had the altercation with driving away…in a different vehicle. Keller has succeeded in passing on his craziness to Mann–what can be called an instance of projective identification–and so he can drive his truck away feeling some spiteful satisfaction.

Keller’s frustrations with life have led to his aggression against Mann, whose frustrations have in turn led to his aggression against the man eating the sandwich. Most people think that the frustrations of life are just that…life, as in “That’s life.” It doesn’t occur to most of us that our discontents and grievances are mostly caused by the capitalist class, who in the years since the making of this movie have not only been squeezing the poor harder and harder, but have tricked us into thinking that this squeezing harder–neoliberalism–is just ‘reality.’ As a result, we take our frustrations out on each other rather than on the ruling class.

This taking it out on each other–what the ‘duel’ between Mann and Keller represents–is often referred to as “punching down,” or at least punching horizontally, as opposed to what we should be doing, which is “punching up,” or critiquing the power structures that hurt us all…or even better, as I see it–organizing in solidarity to overthrow the ruling class.

“Punching down,” caused by alienation, only exacerbates alienation.

‘Punching down” comes in many forms, not just the kind of fighting we see in the diner, or between Mann and Keller on the road. The working class, often swayed by the demagoguery of the right, tend to blame their problems on immigrants, refugees, and illegal aliens, coming within their country’s borders, rather than blame the capitalist class for causing the economic problems and imperialist mayhem in other countries, which forces the afflicted in those countries to come into ours in the hopes of finding a better life.

If foreigners aren’t being blamed for society’s ills, then either those receiving welfare are, or LGBT people, POC, or people thought to be masterminding some evil, Satanic plot are (the Jews, Freemasons, etc.). Their scapegoating, or that of other ‘ne’er-do-wells,’ is the kind of reactionary nonsense we’ve been hearing in recent songs like “Try That In a Small Town,” or “Rich Men North of Richmond.”

Some people on the left may try to defend the message of this second song on the grounds that at least part of its lyric diagnoses our problems correctly (“I’ve been sellin’ my soul…for bullshit pay”); and while acknowledging the stupidity of the line, “if you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds/Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds,” defenders of the song insist that we need to blur over certain ideological differences in order to unite the people against the rich, and to have a dialogue with the right to persuade them to join the left. While, ideally, we on the left would much rather convince those on the right to abandon their reactionary views through rational argument, the rightists all too often regard us on the left as too “extremist” or “Satanic” to take our ideas seriously. Therefore, no reconciliation can be made, and alienation continues.

To get back to the movie, Mann leaves the diner and continues to drive. He comes to a school bus stuck on the side of the road because its engine is overheated (this scene isn’t in the short story). He stops to see if he can help the driver and the kids get the bus moving by pushing his car against the back of it.

Not only can he not make the bus budge, he gets his front bumper stuck under the bus’s rear bumper. The kids find his frustrations amusing, laughing and making faces at him. This moment demonstrates the absurd lengths to which alienation can take us: surely even little kids have enough sense to understand that this man is trying to help them; if he can’t, outside of anyone else’s help (coming soon, but they don’t know this yet) they’re all stuck in the middle of nowhere. These kids should be cheering him on, appreciating his efforts.

Mann gets out of his car and sees Keller’s truck in a tunnel down the road: naturally, he begins to panic and tries to persuade all of the kids, who are playing out by the side of the road, to get back in the bus for fear of crazy Keller driving at them and killing them in his attempt to kill Mann. The kids, however, and even the bus driver, think it’s frantic Mann who is the crazy one. Alienated Mann has no friends at all in this film.

He gets back in his car, manages to free his bumper, and hurries away as the truck comes over. Keller, with his big, powerful vehicle, gives the bus its needed push. By succeeding in helping the bus driver and kids where Mann has failed, Keller once again projects his craziness onto the victim who also failed to convince the bus driver that Keller has been trying to kill him. Psychopaths and narcissists are often very good at convincing you that it’s their victims who are the crazy ones.

Keller, of course, is and has always been the crazy one, and he demonstrates his craziness once again by coming up behind Mann, who’s stopped at a railroad crossing, and tries to push Mann’s car onto the railroad to make him crash into the oncoming train. Mann prevents this just barely by hitting the brake and putting his car into reverse.

Once the train is past, Mann floors the gas and crosses the tracks, then goes off the road. After Keller continues down the road, Mann follows slowly, hoping to distance himself from his enemy as much as possible. We can see another driver passing him at a more normal speed for a highway. Many of us can’t stand drivers who go so slowly (I sure don’t!), so Mann’s need to slow down to thirty mph, just to avoid a truck he’s about to meet up with again, isn’t going to make him any friends.

Indeed, Keller has pulled up on the side of the road and has been waiting for Mann to catch up. The antagonizing is about to continue.

Mann stops at a gas station whose owner also sells rattlesnakes, tarantulas, and lizards. As she’s taking care of his car, he uses a phone booth there to call the police and tell them about Keller, who’s pulled over on the side of the road and is then turning back to the gas station.

Mann can’t get any help from the seemingly lackadaisical police, especially since Keller races his truck at the phone booth, forcing Mann to rush out of it. The truck not only terrorizes Mann, smashing the booth, but it also smashes into a number of the gas station owner’s cages of animals. Keller’s punching down, as we can see, doesn’t only affect Mann, but potentially many other people. Mann’s gentle coaxing of a tarantula off of his leg is symbolic once again of how not only is Keller, but all of life on Earth, it seems, is against Mann.

He gets in his car and drives away to temporary safety, then decides not to move for at least an hour. He’d have Keller win the competition fully, just to be rid of him.

Finally, he starts driving again, but it isn’t too long before he sees Keller’s truck again, sitting by the side of the road, waiting for him. In his nervousness, Mann screeches to a halt with his car perpendicular to the road, unintentionally blocking it so other drivers can’t go straight through. Indeed, one approaching driver has to slam on the brakes to avoid ramming into Mann. His tires screech as he passes around Mann’s car, and as he’s driving away, we can see him raising a furious fist at Mann for leaving his car in such a foolish position on the road. Mann just can’t make any friends today.

Mann drives closer to the truck and stops. Keller starts his engine, Mann tries to drive past, but Keller blocks him, forcing him to turn around. Mann gets out of his car, and in exasperation, he walks toward the truck, meaning to confront Keller face to face; but the truck goes further away.

Keller’s distancing himself from Mann tells us two things: first, in a world of alienation, there can be no real communication, no human-to-human contact. Hence, we never see Keller, nor do we hear him say anything. His only words are in the animalistic honking of his horn.

The second thing this tells us about Keller is that he, like all bullies, when you get right down to it, is a coward. It’s easy to terrorize somebody when driving a big, powerful truck. It’s not so easy to do so man to man, without a shield of anonymity, as internet trolls have nowadays.

Mann flags down a car with an elderly couple in it. He begs them to drive to where there’s a phone, and call the police to tell them Keller is trying to kill him; but the couple is uncooperative, and they drive away at the sight of the approaching, threatening truck. Alienation is so extreme, no one helps anyone.

He gets back into his car and sees Keller with his hand out of the truck window, tauntingly offering to let him pass again. Mann races past, with Keller chasing behind.

Mann imagines that if he can go up the grade, that is, a slope leading up to a summit, Keller won’t be able to maintain the speed needed to continue chasing him. Keller manages to keep up fairly well, though, amazing Mann with his vicious determination.

Worse, Mann’s radiator hose breaks, causing his engine to overheat and forcing the car to slow down. He should have listened to that gas station attendant after all!

He reaches the summit and goes back down in neutral, but Keller is catching up. In his stress, Mann has bitten himself, and his mouth is bleeding. This self-inflicted wound of his is symbolic of how, as with his scoffing at the gas station attendant’s warning about the radiator hose, alienation and competition cause one to hurt not only others (as Keller is doing), but also oneself.

Eventually, Mann manages to pick up speed again, and he reaches the edge of a canyon where he’ll have his final showdown with Keller. As Matheson said of his story, this moment is really where the duel happens; previously, it was just Mann trying to avoid the competition Keller has been imposing on him. Mann has finally grown the guts to fight back, being so desperate and having no other way to deal with Keller.

Mann turns his car around to face the truck, he uses his briefcase to keep the accelerator down, and he steers his car right at the truck. He jumps out of the car at the last moment, and Keller smashes into it, the flames and smoke obscuring his vision, so he goes over the edge of the canyon, crashes below, and dies.

Mann rejoices over his final victory, but he’s also exhausted. The film ends with him sitting on the edge of the cliff, tossing pebbles into the canyon as the sun sets.

And so, with the end of the Duel, we go back to him, Solo.

Mann is all alone, in the middle of nowhere, with no car or any other means to get back to human society. He’s stuck in the undifferentiated, traumatizing Real, unable to get back to the Symbolic of culture, or even to the Imaginary, where he can see himself in a mirror and regain some sense of self and emotional stability. His pointless tossing of pebbles over the cliff is reflective of his loss of meaning, purpose, and–unless someone drives up, finds him, and offers him a ride back into town–hope.

His victory over Keller thus is a pyrrhic one, to say the least. He’s been left with nothing. These are the fruits of competition, so valued in the neoliberal years since the release of this film. Marx predicted that capitalist competition–in a way, something we could see as symbolized by Keller’s and Mann’s duel to the death–would end in its self-destruction under its own contradictions. We have seen such a self-destruction over the past fifteen years, with these two huge economic crises in 2008 and 2020.

The result of that destruction? We’re left with nothing, in the middle of nowhere, alienated…just like Mann, a personification of the ordinary man or woman in our lonely, desolate world.

This is why the common people should punch up, not down.

‘Fungus,’ a Horror Short Story

Gus Ripley, 21, known to his friends as ‘Fun Gus,” was driving home late one night after leaving a party full of drinking, dancing, and drugs. He was driving on a lonely road with hilly forests on either side; most of the drive between where the rave was and his home would be such a road—largely without other cars, so he figured he’d be safe, in spite of his driving under the influence.

Indeed, his car swayed left to right, but mostly he stayed in his lane. He was coming down from a half-pill of ecstasy and a line of ketamine, and feeling really good.

Early on in the party, before he’d drunk much or done any drugs, he was in a small room, alone with a twenty-year-old named Jenny Spelling. She was pretty, with long, wavy auburn hair, green eyes, a curvy figure and nice tits. He had a lot of fun, Fun Gus did, with her in that room. 

Without the roofie he’d put in her drink, though, she’d have realized he was the only one having any fun in that room. 

Suddenly, his car swerved unusually far to the right, and it went off the road and crashed into a tree. He wasn’t at all hurt, but he was still too stoned to make sense of what happened. He got out of his car, leaving his cellphone there, and staggered into the dark woods.

Did my high make me swerve like that? he wondered as he stumbled through the brush. It didn’t feel like it was me who did that. It felt as if someone else took control of the steering wheel, but that’s preposterous. I’m so wasted, I don’t know what I’m doing…or where I’m going…or why I’m going where I’m going.

He continued walking through the woods, between bushes, snapping twigs and tripping over rocks and branches lying on the ground, still too disoriented to know what he was doing. After another ten minutes or so of this aimless wandering, he was surprised to find himself hungry.

Well, I haven’t eaten since before I went to the party, which was hours ago, he thought. So it makes sense that I’d be hungry by now…but where am I?

He stopped and looked around in the dimness of trees and bushes, with only an ever-so-slight amount of morning sunlight peeking over the hills way up ahead. Though still a little stoned, he found his eyes adjusted to the dark; he looked down at the dirt by a tree trunk, and he saw a brightly-coloured mushroom.

Hey, I like mushrooms, he thought as he bent down to reach for it. I like them on pizza, at least. And who knows? Maybe I’ll revive my high with this one.

He ripped it out of the ground, wiped the dirt off the bottom as best he could, then bit off the cap and the upper half of the stem. It tasted awful, like the worst-tasting medicine, but he kept chewing—him wincing the whole time—and finally he swallowed it, hoping it would satisfy his hunger and give him a bit of a high. 

He got up and continued on his pointless trek through the woods and up the hill to where the light was peeking over the horizon. He was a little less hungry, but only a little less. He saw another brightly-coloured mushroom, ripped it out of the ground, wiped off the dirt, and ate it, wincing as he chewed.

Upon swallowing it, he saw everything around him glowing and vibrating.

“Whoa!” Gus said to himself as he felt the buzz kick in. This is going to be one hell of a trip, he thought.

He kept ascending the hill he was on. The trees all around him were getting blurrier as the morning light was increasing. Everywhere he saw waves, as if he were underwater, seeing a blurry forest above the watery surface.

Those blurry trees were getting brighter, glowing with the growing sunlight that surrounded each, and giving each vivid colours. He felt as if he were entering a cartoon.

I’ve never had a high this intense, he thought. Not on shrooms, not on E, not on K. This is beyond any drug.

He took a few more steps up the hill, blinked a few times, then opened his eyes wide. No longer did he see waves or vibrations of everything. The sky was yellow, the ground, a vivid green, and instead of trees, he saw…

Mushrooms.

Giant mushrooms. 

Instead of leaves on trees, he saw bell-shaped mushroom caps, all polka-dotted. The dots were either a bright yellow, or orange, or light green, against backgrounds of bright pink, purple, blue, or red. Under the caps, he saw thin gills of brown or gray against backgrounds of white. The stems of each giant mushroom were also white, instead of the brown tree trunks he’d seen up until now.

“This is more than just a drug trip,” he whispered to himself, then thought, What drug trip ever gives off hallucinations like these? Didn’t Jenny say her older sister was a witch, or something? No, don’t be ridiculous, Gus. Her sister’s probably just a Wiccan or something. Besides, I don’t believe in God or magic. I’ve just never been this high before, that’s all.

He felt another hunger pang, and felt tempted to intensify his mushroom trip all the more; so he walked over to the nearest ‘mushroom tree,’ if you will, and reached up for its polka-dot cap. He pulled it down, opened his mouth wide, and bit off a great big chunk of the edge of the cap.

He chewed and chewed on it, hating the taste but waiting in hope for the heightened buzz. After swallowing it, he reeled and staggered a bit, closing his eyes in reaction to a brief dizzy spell. He opened his eyes to see more bright, glowing, and vividly colourful light, and more undulating of everything. A buzzing sensation went throughout his body.

“Oh, that feels good!” he sighed, smiling with closed eyes. Then he opened them and looked at his arms. “What the hell?…”

He saw three small mushrooms growing on his forearms, two on the left and one on the right. Then he saw five more growing on his arms, two on his left upper arm, and three on his right forearm. They were all the peach colour of his skin.

“Oh, my God!” he hissed, then grabbed at one of the ones on his right arm. He ripped it off with a forceful pull, causing his blood to spray everywhere, as well as a sharp, stinging pain. “Oww!” he screamed.

He fell on his knees to the vivid green ground, having cupped the wound with his hand in an attempt to control the bleeding. He winced and squeezed his eyes shut.

After a dozen seconds or so, he opened his eyes. The pain was gone. So was the bleeding. He seemed to be standing again. He didn’t see his arms anywhere. Strangest of all, he saw half a dozen naked young women, including Jenny, all kneeling in front of him, grinning. 

All of them have such nice bodies, he thought as he looked them all over. All except that fat one in the back. Eww! Get dressed, you pig!

Then he realized that the faces of all the girls, all except the overweight one, looked familiar.  Where had he known them? That was it! He had known them!

Hey, wait a minute, he thought. I put roofies in all their drinks over the past year, the five good-looking girls, that is. And now they’re in my drug trip? If this even is a drug trip. Are they mad at me for taking advantage of them? I should say something to them…

But he couldn’t.

He couldn’t even open his mouth.

Because he no longer had one.

What the hell? he thought. I can’t talk!

He looked down and all around himself. No arms, no legs.

Oh, my God! he thought. No!

All he saw below was a large…stem…instead of a torso.

No clothes. He was as naked as the girls were.

Except that he had no human body, except for his eyes.

The girls were talking and laughing, as he could see, but he couldn’t hear anything! Did he no longer have ears? He didn’t feel any on his head…if what he had even was a head. 

He did some lip-reading. They were saying, “Fun Gus,” over and over again, with those eerie grins.

His head felt strange, different. He felt no hair on it. And it felt…large, heavy.

He looked up and saw the underside of a huge mushroom cap, just like those giant, tree-like ones he’d seen before this scene with the girls. He saw light-brown gills radiating from the top of the stem, just above his eyes, out to the edge of the cap. He’d been turned into a human-sized mushroom!

The girls weren’t saying, “Fun Gus ,” they were saying, “fungus.”

He looked at Jenny’s face and that of the fat girl, noting the similarity. Jenny was chatting with…her sister? He looked down at the floor and saw a circle surrounding a pentacle. Candles were burning along the periphery of the circle. His eyes widened in terror. Now he knew.

This was no drug trip.

He felt his eyesight beginning to fade, but not before he saw all the girls coming up close to him, with wide-open mouths and bared teeth.

Everything went black.

His eyes had dissolved.

All that was left of Gus was his passive, dreamlike consciousness.

Rather like a young woman on roofies.

Then the biting began.

Six pairs of teeth were cutting into his head…his cap, rather. The pain was sharp and stinging. He could do nothing about it. He couldn’t fidget or struggle to get the girls off of him. He couldn’t even scream.

Rather like a young woman on roofies.

He started feeling bites on his lower body…his stem, rather. One large, particularly painful, bite came on the side of the stem where his eyes had been, level with where his genitals had once been. It seemed like a castration, but his having been turned into a man-sized mushroom meant he’d already lost his manhood.

The biting continued, all over, each bite hurting just as badly as those before.

His consciousness—his life—was fading, but not enough to mitigate the sharp sting of each new bite.

His only relief came from having less and less of a body to bite from. Finally, the top centre of the cap, where his brain once was, got torn into by a rampage of bites, and consciousness faded to black nothingness.

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

Police searching for the owner of the crashed car found a bloody corpse, little more than a skeleton, lying on the grassy, tree-covered hill. What little flesh was left showed bite marks.

Human bite marks.

“Who could have done this?” A cop asked with agape eyes. “Starving people living in the woods, resorting to cannibalism?”

‘Resurrecting Ptah,’ an Erotic Horror Short Story

I: Dedication

This short story is dedicated to my Facebook friend, she who goes by the intriguing pseudonym of Dorian Grey (I must do an analysis of that novel one of these days; in the meantime, there’s this one, which has lots of allusions to the novel.), and she whose AI art is full of black cats, witches, mushrooms, cat-women, nuns, etc., which have inspired this story as well as my other one, “Sister Sorceress.” This story is also dedicated to her “old familiar,” Peta, and a friend of hers, Cain Helsson. I hope they like what I wrote.

II: Loss

Clara Jefferson bawled as she held the dead body of Ptah, her beloved black cat named after an Egyptian god, in her arms. The loss of this pet, her only friend in this whole rotten, cruel, uncaring, stinking world, was unbearable to her.

The one thing that gave her the hope to carry on was that she had been practicing sorcery for so long. The shelves on her walls were filled with books on such topics as ceremonial magic, how to contact the spirit world, various spells, world mythologies and religions, and the like. At the age of forty-five, Clara had been studying these books for almost thirty years. She was a master, and now she was about to work out a master plan to resurrect her cat.

It was either resurrect Ptah, or kill herself, for she knew she could never live without him. She hadn’t become a master of the spiritual and magical arts just to commit suicide, though.

She already knew, from memory, a number of rituals and spells she could use in aid of bringing Ptah back to life; but this would be such a difficult and complex act of sorcery that she would have to study hard, in the minutest detail, to get this done right. She put the cat’s body on the floor and immediately reached for a few books on her shelves.

She spent hours perusing these and many other books, jotting down notes, ignoring her hunger and fatigue. After reading enough, for the moment, she decided it was time to summon the spirits to give her aid and counsel.

…and which spirits were those that she confided in?

Trusting few, if any, people in this world of liars, cheaters, abusers, rapists, and corrupt politicians and clergy, Clara had sought the rarest, most obscure religious traditions she could find, searching for one untainted by the lure of money and power. She learned of the ancient pagan traditions of the Liput, an old tribe living on a small island off the west coast of what is now Finland. Over two thousand years ago, the Liput practiced animism and a kind of polytheism that phased into pantheism, or a spiritual oneness of all things. Such ideas appealed to Clara.

III: Summoning Divine Aid

Deep in a state of meditation, she was beginning to hear the soft, inarticulate moans of Talas, the Liput goddess of the sea. Soon, those moans became intelligible speech, the ancient language of the tribe, in which Clara had become fluent after years of rigorous study.

I know what you want, the goddess said in Clara’s mind. Are you aware of the great price you will have to pay to get Ptah back?

Yes, I’m aware, Clara said in her thoughts to Talas. Tears were rolling down her cheeks. I still want my cat back.

It is not natural to move the energy, which has left your cat, back to its body, the goddess warned. All life comes and goes, Clara. You must accept that. You should allow the energy of Ptah to flow where it will in the universe, wherever that may be, as far away from you as it may be. Give up your attachment to your dead cat, and your suffering will end.

I want my cat back! Clara insisted in her thoughts. She was moaning and sobbing. I’ll do anything to get him back!

Very well, Talas answered. There is a way to bring Ptah back, but you will need the aid of Lechi, the Liput god of mischief. In your studies of us gods, you’ll know his ways. He can be outright evil if he wants to be. However you negotiate your way into getting his aid, you will have to be extremely watchful of his tricks. Ensuring that you have come the closest you can to having your genuine cat back, in body and spirit, while also ensuring that he can do as little wickedness to you, in body and spirit, as possible, will demand the subtlest and cleverest use of spells and ritual magic that you can possibly muster.

I’m aware of the complications and dangers, Clara told Talas. To work with Lechi, while making my ritual flawless, will be like navigating a mine field. Still, I want to do this.

I will summon Lechi for you tomorrow morning. For now, study your books thoroughly. Take no detail for granted. Think of every possible obstacle, for he will find ways to get through your protective walls. Good luck, Clara.

Thank you, Talas.

Remember that the cat you resurrect, even through the best and most careful of rituals, won’t be absolutely the same as Ptah was. It may be the most ingenious of facsimiles, but it can never be exactly the same cat, however close it may come to such sameness.

I’m prepared to accept that.

Also know that as tight as your security is against Lechi, he will find some way to get at you, however slight that way may be for him. What he does to you will be, at the very least, something unsettling, something disturbing. Your safety against him may be impressively close to perfect, but never absolutely perfect. He is a god, after all, and you are just a mortal. You will have to accept whatever he demands from you in return for his aid, however you may circumscribe it.

I understand, Clara told Talas before the goddess vanished.

IV: Fear of Violation

After reading through all of the relevant passages in her books, anticipating what to expect from Lechi, Clara got out all of her tools and magical weapons, laying them out all over the floor of the red room where the ritual was to be done. These weapons were all daggers and swords, and the tools included several wands. A large magic circle was drawn on the floor, with a pentacle inside.

So many daggers and swords were needed to repel Lechi’s advances, since Clara knew, from her extensive reading, of how lewd and lascivious the god was. His sexual proclivities, being often quite perverse, triggered the most sensitive of feelings in her, for Clara was first raped by her father when she was a teen. In fact, she got into magic in order to learn how to protect herself from his lust.

Her mother had ignored her cries for help when he was preying on her, conniving at it, even, so Clara would satisfy his desire so her mother wouldn’t have to. It was for reasons such as these that Clara eventually used her magic to kill both of them in a car accident, then collect their vast amount of money and property so she could live self-sufficiently without need of a job.

She’d feed herself through gardening and a vegetarian diet; her garden was also where she collected various magical properties and drugs from her herbs and many mushrooms. Having no job was a blessing: no need to deal with so may people in whom she had no trust.

She did her rituals in the nude, and sometimes peeping Toms would watch her through her windows at night. Though forty-five now, she used her magic to ensure she’d always have the shapely, buxom figure of a twenty-year-old. Nine lecherous men in her neighbourhood liked her for her beauty, though through her magic, she made sure they’d never get their filthy hands on her!

She shuddered every time she realized any of those nine men were looking in her window during her rituals, often feeling PTSD flashbacks of what her father had done to her. This was why she needed so many consecrated daggers and swords, all fanned out in a circle surrounding her: they were a crucial part of her magical, protective wall, ensuring that no one could ever get inside her house, already protected with an electronic security system to be extra sure, or get at her body.

In fact, she was so sure of the efficacy of her daggers and swords that she found it amusing to think that those voyeurs/potential rapists all wanted the lovely naked body they saw, but could never have it. Her tantalizing of those men was her torturous punishment for all rapists.

Still, dealing with Lechi would be far more difficult. She’d need more than her daggers and swords to keep him away from her. They would be necessary, but not sufficient; and sure enough, having her delicious body would be one of his demands in exchange for his help in resurrecting Ptah. Clara would have to be extra subtle in tricking him into thinking he’d get what he wanted, while ensuring he’d never actually get it.

V: Lechi

The next morning, nude and meditating in the red room, sitting in the middle of her magic circle and pentacle, she summoned Lechi.

You are lovely, he told her mentally, in what felt to her like a grunt of lust, as he studied every inch of her body. I already know what I will want in return for helping you get your cat back.

Talas told you? Clara asked him in her thoughts.

No, I read your mind just now, my pretty.

She shuddered, knowing how difficult it would be to stop a mind-reader from knowing of her plan to cheat him out of having her. She would have to bury her thoughts and feelings deep down in her unconscious if she was to have any hope of him not detecting them.

I know what you want from me, she told him. I know your reputation as an incubus. Please spare me the filthy details. Just tell me what I have to do to get Ptah back, and I’ll do whatever you want.

One detail I must share, he insisted. I want to have you in a physical form, not just as a spirit. I want to enjoy you sensually.

Very well, she told him while a tear ran down her cheek. What must I do in the ritual to bring my cat back from the dead?

One thing crucial to the success of your ritual will be the collection of nine human skulls, he said.

May I dig them up from a graveyard? she asked.

No! You must have nine people decapitated. Have someone else do it for you, to deflect the bad karma away from you. Your killing of your mother and father is already a bad enough karmic burden for you. Find a young, strong, but naïve man who is in love with you; such a man would be willing to do anything for your love, and your magic and mushroom drugs should make him all the more obedient to your will. Gordon Marsh, from your neighbourhood, would be a good choice.

She trembled again at the realization of how thorough Lechi’s knowledge was of her private thoughts–to know of her killing of her parents–and of her neighbours. He’d only just come here, and already he knew of Gordon, one of the peeping Toms! Outwitting this god would be a formidable task. Still, she wanted Ptah back, and would do anything to have him again.

Why must it be nine skulls, specifically? she asked Lechi.

Come, come, Clara! A sorceress who has practiced for as many years as you have should already know of the symbolism of nine. Three symbolizes completion, so three times three reinforces that completion. Also, cats have nine lives, don’t they? Not literally, of course, but my point is that not only can I help you get Ptah back, but I can also allow you two potentially to live forever together…would you not like that? That is what the ‘nine lives’ will symbolize. Finally, I am aware that there are nine people in this neighbourhood whom you would like to see dead, are there not?

Yes, there are, she answered, remembering not only the eight peeping Toms other than Gordon, but also the woman she suspected of poisoning her cat for always trespassing in her garden, Ms. Bellows…that bitch! Still, such killings would be dangerous to her in terms of karma, as desirable as they were to her, so her next question to Lechi (though she already knew the answer to it) was this: and why must I have nine people die so Ptah can live?

Oh, Clara, I am disappointed in you! You surely know the religion of the Liput better than that! You’ve read of the unity of opposites as a central feature of the tribe’s belief system. There is also the unity of life and death. To have the one, you must allow its opposite. To bring about Ptah’s life, you will have to bring about someone’s death.

Yes, I suppose so, she acknowledged.

And with my willingness not only to help you bring your cat back, but also to let you and him live potentially forever in love and happiness, surely you will be willing to let me enjoy you while I am in physical form? he asked. She could feel his lewd smirk. Not only do I assure you that I will not hurt you at all, but I will also make it most pleasurable for you, even more than for myself.

His promises reminded her of her father’s words before raping her: “Don’t worry, honey,” Dad would say while unzipping his fly. “I’ll be gentle. In fact, I’ll make it better for you than it is for me.”

She cringed at the recollection, but she couldn’t let on to Lechi that she was unwilling to indulge the god in his disgusting desires. Very well, she told him. As you wish.

Good, he replied. Go find that young man, Gordon Marsh. Get him to hack off the nine heads. He, as one of your peeping Toms, could be incited to do the violence with a combination of you promising him he can enjoy your charms with a spell you can put on him to make him more obedient.

Yes, Lechi, I’ll do all of these things. Just help me get my cat back, she begged.

I will keep my promises if you keep yours, Clara.

He vanished.

VI: Preparations

Resurrecting Ptah would test her skills at magic to the maximum. Could she outwit a god? Could she ensure that Lechi kept his promise to her while she failed to keep her promise to satisfy his lust? She would have to set up powerful spells to keep him bound to his promises, while also sufficiently augmenting her sword-and-dagger protection against his every attempt to ravish her.

Also, she’d have to ensure, through her own spells and the structure of her ritual, that the resurrected cat really was Ptah, in body and spirit. Though Talas was right to remind her that the resurrected cat could never be 100% Ptah, Clara had to try to bring him as close to that 100% as possible–97%, 98%, at least.

She certainly didn’t want the new cat to be anything like “Church,” from that old Stephen King novel. She wanted a cat to cuddle, not one to recoil from.

She immediately went to work at preparing her spells and ritual for defence, for restoring Ptah as faithfully as she could, for deflecting away from herself the bad karma for the killings, and for charming Gordon into committing them.

Her extensive study of the ancient Liput language, a ritually powerful one, allowed her to remember certain ambiguities of meaning that she could use to her advantage. She could remember them without need of consciously thinking about them, which mind-reading Lechi might pick up on and thus thwart her plans.

One such ambiguity was in the meaning of the Liput word zvarge, which could mean “container” or “cage.” She could use this word in her ritual when putting Lechi’s spirit in the body of her cat. Ptah’s body would contain his spirit, yet also cage it, that is, trap it. The nuances of zvarge could be used to trick him into thinking he’d be put into a body–pita in Liput–when really he’d be trapped in her cat…forever able only to see and hear her, and to receive Clara’s touch, but never able to control Ptah’s body.

Lechi would thus be like John Cusack’s character at the end of Being John Malkovich: trapped in a girl’s body, forced to see, hear, and sense only what the girl wants to, and never able to control her body. Clara planned to do the exact same thing to the souls of the nine decapitated people, as well as with Gordon when she was finished with him. She’d sense the longing of all of them in Ptah’s eyes, while only receiving the affection of her cat. She considered such a punishment–such an imprisonment–fitting for all those potential rapists, as she saw them.

She would be sure to say the words zvarge and pita (this second word with the accent on the second syllable, making its pronunciation identical with that of Ptah) nine times, to reinforce the completeness of the imprisonment of all those lechers, to ensure her safety…and revenge.

The nine skulls would be used to augment the protective power of her swords and daggers, making it sufficient to keep Lechi away. She’d have the spirits of the nine decapitated to act as eunuch guards, so to speak, of her body, to ensure no violation of her.

Another convenient ambiguity in meaning was that of the Liput word slivu, which literally meant “decapitated,” but which metaphorically meant “castrated,” “emasculated,” or “impotent.” Her saying of this word nine times in her ritual would also ensure no danger of rape.

Clara would say these words with no especial emphasis on them, to suggest no alternative meanings to the basic ones, while allowing the ambiguities to slip by, undetected by Lechi. She felt she was safe.

VII: Gordon

Now that everything was planned, she had to find Gordon. He seemed a rather simple soul, easily manipulated. He was easy to find, too, for all she had to do was look out her front window and there he was, standing before her house on the sidewalk, looking in, obsessively hoping to see her.

Trembling and reluctant, she nonetheless put on her best smile, went over to her front door, and opened it.

“Hi, Gordon,” she said. “Come here. I wanna talk to you.”

“Oh, hi, Clara,” he said, amazed that she finally noticed him. Smiling back, he hurried over to her. Now standing on her porch two feet in front of her, he was trembling and excited. “What can I do for you?”

“Actually, it’s what I can do for you,” she purred, “if you do something for me, that’s what matters.”

“Oh?” he asked stupidly, his erection pushing painfully against his pants.

“Yes,” she said, still smiling. “Did you know I’m a witch?”

“A witch?“

“Yes.” she dropped her black dress, revealing her frontal nakedness to his amazed eyes.

He was overcome with the sight of all of that lovely, creamy flesh. Unable to resist, he reached over with one had to grab one of her large breasts, and with the other to stroke her shaved vulva.

“Uksha leida binko!” she shouted at him, the Liput words shooting at him like bullets from a machine gun, and the magic causing an electric force field to form, protecting her body from his intrusive fingers, giving them a shock.

“Oww!” he shouted, sheepishly pulling his hands back.

“You may look, but not touch!” she said angrily. “Only when you have done what I want you to do will I let you touch me. For now, enjoy only looking, to motivate you to do my will.” She turned around to give him a view of her curves and her callipygian behind. He gazed at her milky skin, stunned at its flawlessness.

“W-what would you have me do, goddess?”

“Robaya kinestro koubra,” she said, making her dress rise up and go back on her body. “You’ve seen enough, and as you can see, I really am a witch. How old do you think I am?”

“I dunno. Early twenties?”

“I’m forty-five. I look so young because of my magic. That should be enough to convince you that my magic is real. Do you believe I’m a witch now?”

“Not the ugly kind, that’s for sure,” he said. “I’d say you’re a goddess, with your beauty.”

“Aww, you’re so sweet,” she said, smiling and caressing his cheek, which made him sigh and moan. “Are you ready to do what I need you to do, Gordon?”

“Yes, Goddess! I’ll do anything for your love!”

“Anything? Even decapitate nine people with one of my consecrated swords, remove all the flesh, hair, and innards, and give me the skulls for a ritual I need to do?”

He stood speechless and motionless for about ten seconds.

Finally, he asked, “H-how w-will I avoid jail?”

“My magic will protect you from the police,” she assured him.

“What if these people a-are too strong for m-me to overpower them?”

“My magic will give you the strength you need.”

“What if I can’t…I m-mean, what if I don’t have the…stomach to do a-all this bloody business? Cleaning o-off skulls, a-and everything?”

“My magic will give you the ability, physical and emotional, to do all of that.”

“L-look, I’m really crazy about you, Clara, but I-I don’t know if I’m u-up to killing a…”

“Shadzock abba ultika!” she said while looking dead straight into his eyes. He felt a line of energy go straight from her eyes into his.

He was shaking, his eyes and mouth wide open.

“You will do what I need you to do, Gordon. You will not flinch. You will not question it. You will obey me from the beginning to the end.” She kept her steely eyes fixed on his the whole time. “Do you understand, Gordon?”

“Yes, I understand, Clara. I will obey you.” He stood there in a trance.

“Good. I’ll go and get the sword you will use to kill the nine people.” She went back into the red room, got the sword, and returned to him. “Here it is. You will kill these nine people from our neighbourhood: Kurt Davies, Ron Sweeney, Bill Wynn, Shaun Holmes, Jim Fredricks, Phil Sulikowsky, Chris Culig, Jon Schmidt, and Ms. Adrianna Bellows. You know all of them, right?”

“Yes, I know them all. Those eight guys are all big and strong. Your magic will help me win in fights with them all? I hate them all for always watching you, knowing they’d probably have a better chance with you than I could ever have; so I’ll be glad to get rid of them…with your help, of course. But why Ms. Bellows? What did she do to you?”

“She killed my cat, which I want to bring back to life.”

“Oh, you have enough power to do that, eh?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then, you’ll have enough power to help me kill those guys?”

“Of course I will,” she said with perfect confidence.

He smiled.

“Those guys bully you a lot, don’t they?”

He sighed and frowned, then said, “Yes.”

“Then you have all the more motive to kill them. Go.“

VIII: The Killings

That night, Jon Schmidt was parking his car in his garage. After he got out and closed the door, he heard a shuffling noise in the shadowy corner behind a stack of boxes near the door into the house. He stepped forward.

“Is that you, Ginger?” he asked, thinking it was his cat.

As he got closer, he saw a human figure in the shadows.

“Hey, who are you?” he said defensively.

Gordon emerged from the boxes with the sword.

Jon laughed. “What? That’s you, Scrotum Breath? WIth a sword? You’re gonna kill me with that? You’re so weak, I bet you can’t even lift it.” He continued laughing.

Gordon felt a surge of magical energy buzzing in his arms. That warm tingling was his cue to action. He raised the sword effortlessly to the level of Jon’s neck.

Jon was impressed. “Wow, you can lift it.”

Gordon swung the blade in a graceful arc, cutting off Jon’s head in a smooth stroke.

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

About a half hour later, Jim Fredericks was sitting on a chair in his backyard patio enjoying a beer and listening to music on his iPod. He’d had his eyes closed for much of the time, so Gordon was able to sneak in with his sword and a large bag holding Jon’s head.

When Jim opened his eyes to reach for his beer, though, he saw a black silhouette moving in the bushes by his fence. “Who is that?” he whispered, then removed his earplugs and got up.

He stepped off the patio and walked across the grass with caution, as tipsy as he was. That human silhouette in the bushes remained unmoving.

“What are you doing on my property, whoever you are?” he said, squinting and failing to make out any details that might have identified the intruder.

Gordon remained silent and still as Jim came closer.

“This isn’t funny. Get off my property, or I’ll pick you up and throw you out.”

Jim was now right in front of the bushes.

“Come out of there!” He brushed a few leaves aside and saw a familiar face. “Scrotum Breath?”

The sword went through his gut before he could laugh his first “Ha.”

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

Twenty minutes after that, Gordon slipped through the unlocked back door of Jim’s next door neighbour, Ron Sweeney, whom Gordon saw lying fast asleep on the living room sofa. The TV was left on, at a low volume, but enough to mask any sounds of Gordon entering and approaching.

By the time Gordon was standing right in front of the sofa, though, with the sword raised up high and ready to come down, slicing into Ron’s neck, his eyes were half open, just making out the black outline of Gordon’s figure.

Ron whined and trembled at first, then switched on the nearby lamp. “Scrotum…?”

The sword had already sliced through before he could say “Breath.” His head fell on the floor and rolled a few times in the direction of the TV.

***********

Carrying a bag with three heads, our swordsman got to the house of Chris Culig about a half hour later. He was taking out the garbage, at the side of his house.

Chris reached for the lid of one of the garbage cans. Gordon was in it, his sword coming up and stabbing Chris in the chest before he could say that hateful nickname.

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

Shaun Holmes lived two doors down from Chris, so Gordon could get there and ready to kill in about ten minutes. Clara’s magic was working like a dream, for though he could hear the screams of neighbours and police car sirens, he felt a kind of force field surrounding him, assuring him that, no matter how sloppy and careless he was being with these killings, he was easily eluding the cops.

Again, the door was left unlocked, thanks to Clara’s magical influence, so Gordon was able to slip inside. Sensing, again, through her magical guidance, that Shaun was coming down from the bedroom to get a bite from the fridge, Gordon waited by the kitchen.

Shaun went in the kitchen with the light left off. He opened the fridge door and focused on all the food he saw there: chicken, a half-finished cherry pie, three quarters of a chocolate cake, etc. He licked his lips as he thought about which food to choose. Finally, after ten seconds of consideration, he chose the pie.

He took the plate of pie out, then looked up from the fridge. The light from the opened door alerted him to the presence of his killer, who hacked his head off after he gave a gasp.

The clanging of the sword against the freezer door, and the smashing of the plate on the floor, were noisy enough to rouse his wife from their bed; but Clara’s magic muted the sounds.

***********

Kurt Davies lived several blocks down the road from Shaun, but Gordon was able to get to him within about ten minutes, because he saw a drunken Kurt staggering on the sidewalk just a few houses from Shaun’s. Gordon tiptoed a few feet behind his next victim.

He particularly hated Kurt for, among many other reasons, inventing the “Scrotum Breath” nickname. Now that he had confidence in his skill at wielding the sword (with Clara’s magical guidance, of course, since normally Gordon was rather spastic), he wanted Kurt to see who his killer was.

“Hey, Kurt,” he whispered from just by Kurt’s right ear.

“Huh?” the drunk said while turning his head.

“This is for you, courtesy of Scrotum Breath,” Gordon said while swinging the sword. Kurt was only able to say the “Sc” before the blade slashed through his neck.

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

Killing a woman would be hard for Gordon to do, even with Clara’s magic pushing him to do it.

Ms. Bellows’s house was just a few houses down the street from where Gordon had put Kurt’s head in the bag. Though slowed down with reluctance, he knew he had to get it over with, and her house’s proximity made now the sensible time to do it.

He went up to her porch and put his hand on the doorknob. When he turned it, he was relieved to find it locked at first…then he heard a click, unlocking it. Clara’s magic, for sure.

He gulped and stepped inside. She had to be in bed asleep by now. He found the stairs and went up them, as slowly and quietly as he could.

Ms. Bellows was an unpleasant woman, to be sure: cranky, often crabbing at people for some petty reason or another. She once growled at Gordon for walking on her front lawn. But did she deserve to die, and in such a bloody way?

At the top of the stairs, he was now walking down the hall to where he could hear her snoring in her bedroom. At the door and about to turn the knob, he was hesitating: killing those guys for Clara was fine, even enjoyable, but decapitating Ms. Bellows was too much.

Just then, he heard Clara’s voice whispering in his ear: She killed my cat, whom I loved dearly and who deserves to be avenged. Kill Ms. Bellows, and you can have me forever, Gordon.

He turned the doorknob as carefully as he could, not that she’d hear it over her snoring. He walked over to the bed. He raised the sword over his head.

He heard police sirens outside. His hands were shaking. He felt that force field around himself, giving assurance that the cops wouldn’t get him, but he still felt pangs of guilt over killing a defenceless, middle-aged widow in her sleep, all just over a cat.

He looked back from the window and down at her.

Her eyes opened.

She saw his dark silhouette standing over her.

She gasped, shook, and clutched her weak heart.

He brought the sword down, silencing her forever.

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

As he lugged the heavy bag of heads out of Ms. Bellows’s house and back to the sidewalk, amazed that the cops taking Kurt’s headless body away on a stretcher found him invisible, Gordon was shaking and nauseous over this last killing. At least there were only two left to kill now, and they were guys he didn’t like at all.

Phil Sulikowsky’s house was on the other side of the block from Ms. Bellows’s, so Gordon had to lug that big, heavy bag all the way around. When he got there, he saw Phil walking his dog, returning from the park.

They were facing each other. “What’re you doing out with that bag, Scrotum Breath?” Phil asked, then chuckled. “Hey, I got some chocolate for you.” He gestured with the plastic bag of his dog’s shit.

Gordon was so angry that he raised the sword and rushed at Phil, even screaming, knowing Clara’s magic would make everyone else deaf to it.

“Hey, what are you…?” Phil said, eyes agape. “No!”

His head spun a few times in the air, blood spraying everywhere.

***********

One more man to kill: Bill Wynn, Phil’s neighbour from across the road.

Baggy-eyed, exhausted, and emotionally drained, Gordon plodded over to the house like one of the undead.

He stood by the porch, with the sword hidden behind him, looking through the front window and seeing Bill in his living room. Bill looked back, saw Gordon, and went over to his front door.

He opened the door and said, “What the fuck are you doing on my lawn, Scrotum Breath? Get out of here.”

“Come out here and make me,” Gordon hissed.

“You telling me what to do? Oh, you’re gonna get it now.”

Bill went out on the porch with a balled fist. He went down the steps and on the grass where Gordon was. Before he could swing, though, the sword suddenly appeared and went through Bill’s gut and out the other side. Gordon’s bloody work was finished.

IX: The Ritual

Everything was now ready. Gordon had brought the bag of heads to Clara’s house. She had him run bath water over all of them, and as the water poured from the shower nozzle onto each head, she said a magical formula in Liput and waved a magic wand in the shape of a pentacle, making all the skin, hair, eyes, ears, and everything inside each head dissolve and disintegrate, and leaving only nine skulls.

Since Gordon had blood all over him, she even used her magic to clean him and his clothes. She needed all traces of the violence removed from her ritual, to ensure that no bad karma would contaminate it.

Everything was laid out as planned in the red room, around the magic circle and pentacle. The swords and daggers were fanned out in all directions, with the nine skulls at the tips of the swords (including the one Gordon had used), all along the periphery of the circle and facing outwards, to keep out any unwelcome spirits, including Lechi’s, most especially, for the moment at least.

Clara, nude, was sitting in the middle of the circle with Ptah’s body in her lap; she’d used magic to keep the corpse from decomposing and putrefying. Gordon was standing in the circle, facing her, but also in a magically-induced trance, to ensure that he couldn’t interfere with the ritual in any way.

Indeed, she was worried that the magic she had used on him wasn’t as effective as she’d hoped it would be. During the killings, he’d showed signs of reluctance and hesitation that shouldn’t have been there at all. She would have to use stronger formulas and incantations to keep him fully under her control.

After all, she had no intention whatsoever of keeping her promise to satisfy his desires in bed, any more than she did with Lechi. Their souls were to be trapped forever in Ptah’s body, able only to see, hear, and feel her passively; the cat alone would retain control of his body.

When Gordon and Lechi were to realize that they were being double-crossed, they were naturally going to try to get out of their prison in Ptah’s brain. Clara was going to have to ensure the prevention of such a danger. She knew some incantations that surely would work to stop these two would-be lovers.

Just before the ritual began, she gave Gordon a cup of hot tea she’d prepared. “Here, Gordon. Drink this.”

“Thank you,” he said, taking the cup and saucer from her. “What is it?”

“Just tea,” she said with a smile. “It’ll help you to relax during the ritual. Drink up.”

As he sipped it, she watched him, noting how he was–in spite of the trance she’d put him in–still shaken up after having killed those people. She needed him to be totally calm, relaxed, in a meditative, suggestible state of mind.

…and magic mushroom tea would do the trick.

He gulped it all down, suspecting nothing, even as he saw her lips moving, whispering a secret incantation to make the drugged tea take effect faster.

Within ten minutes of his having drunk all of it, she was ready to begin, for she could see that his trance-like state was now complete with the aid of the tea. She began the ritual by summoning Lechi, and having the god’s spirit enter Gordon’s body, feeling all of his physicality.

What is this? Lechi thought. Gordon is…under the influence…of mushroom tea. I can feel his…euphoria, and his dazedness. I told Clara…to have him…ingest her mushroom drugs…so she could better…control him…while he was killing…the nine people…not during…this ritual.

She then used this incantation–“Ud Lechi eek zvarge im atta dis Gordon”–to ensure Lechi’s caging, or containment, in Gordon’s soul, or self. There was yet another useful ambiguity in the Liput language: atta could mean self, or soul.

Lechi, already addled by the high from the mushroom tea, wouldn’t notice the ambiguous meaning of atta. The god would think that his spirit was being contained in Gordon’s self, his person, his body, rather than caged in Gordon’s soul. Lechi would think he was merely being put in Gordon’s body so he could enjoy sex with her, rather than being eternally imprisoned in Gordon’s soul. This spiritual incarceration would ensure her safety against ever being sexually assaulted.

To be sure of this safety, Clara of course said this incantation nine times, each time pointing herself in the direction of one of the nine protective swords. Her next incantation would be this: “Ud Lechi ed Gordon ed nuna hashan dis atta zvarge im pita sola chi!” That is, “May Lechi and Gordon and the nine victims’ souls be safely contained in the body [of Ptah]!” Again, she chanted this nine times in the direction of each sword.

Finally, she intoned the following: “Ud Lechi ed Gordon ed nuna hashan slivu its im pita atta zvarge solachi!” Or, “May Lechi and Gordon and the nine victims beheaded/castrated be, safely in the body/soul/self of Ptah!” Again, there was ambiguity in the meaning of these words, beyond the ambiguities already explained. Did her words mean, “the decapitated nine victims,” or did they mean, “May Lechi, Gordon, and the nine victims be emasculated, made impotent, in Ptah’s body”? Clara was hoping to slip this meaning by drugged Lechi without his suspecting; and she chanted this last incantation nine times, in the direction of each sword.

At the end of this chanting, she noticed, as expected, that Gordon was getting sluggish, enervated. He was having difficulty staying on his feet. Now Clara chanted, “Ptah, vivoka! Schlink bur ta tenki!” Or, “Ptah, come to life! Embrace the souls entering you!” And this was said nine times in the same way as before.

She looked down and saw Ptah’s body beginning to stir, ever so slightly. A tear of joy ran down her cheek. She was shaking with expectation.

Gordon fell to the floor, motionless, but with his eyes looking straight at hers, accusing her. She shuddered, knowing that not only was Gordon looking at his betrayer, but also Lechi was. Still, that same look of anger and heartbreak seemed to reassure her that those souls would truly be trapped in Ptah’s body forever.

Outside, there was the sound of the sirens of approaching police cars. Then, Gordon did something unexpected.

He got up.

With hate in his eyes, he plodded like a zombie towards her.

She gasped.

Lechi won’t be contained? she wondered.

Then, Gordon tripped, she used her magic to raise up a sword under him (the same one he’d used to kill the nine victims with, fortuitously), and he fell on it.

Now he would stay motionless.

She could hear the cops barging into her house, so she quickly wrapped a nearby black blanket around her nakedness.

“Oh, God, please help me!” she screamed as the cops came into the red room and saw Gordon lying on the floor in a widening pool of blood. “He just barged in here and tried to rape me and kill me with my sword!”

“Then why has he been stabbed with it?” a cop asked.

“He got clumsy, tripped, and fell on it,” Clara said in sobs. “Earlier today, he barged in here, stole my sword, and ran off with it. I normally use it with all these others for my rituals, but he had this crazy look in his eyes, always yelling, ‘Revenge!’.”

“That’s plausible,” a second cop said. “That’s Gordon Marsh lying there dead. I knew him. You should’ve seen how clumsy he was. All those guys whose heads were cut off, they used to pick on him. I don’t know why he killed Ms. Bellows, but the rest of the girl’s story makes sense to me.”

“Nine decapitated victims,” a policewoman said, “with one of her swords, and nine skulls lying here. The swords are for your rituals, are they? Satanic rituals, by chance?”

“Of course not,” Clara said, then lied, “they aren’t real skulls. They’re all made of plastic.”

“They sure look real to me,” the policewoman said, reaching down and about to pick up a skull.

“Ni tchah!” Clara shouted, suddenly making all the police oblivious to the skulls.

“Well, we’re going to need to borrow your sword for evidence,” the first cop said. “You’ll get it back when we’ve finished the investigation. Apart from that, I’d say the girl’s story fits in with everything else we’ve seen. We’ll need a full testimony from you as we put together the rest of our investigation here.”

“OK,” Clara said, thinking, I’ve finished the ritual. The cops’ taking away my sword shouldn’t negatively affect my magic. The souls are all safely trapped in Ptah’s body. Speaking of which…

She looked over at her cat. The body was stirring a little more. Her heart was beating faster with hopefulness.

X: The Cat Came Back

Clara had to get dressed and go to the police station to give her full testimony and help the cops finish their investigation. It took hours! Thankfully, they didn’t think any more about her magical practices than those of the harmlessly eccentric behaviour of a kook loner.

By the time she finally got back home, though, the sun was already up. She was exhausted, and just wanted to strip and fall down naked on her bed.

As she climbed the stairs to her bedroom, though, she heard something that gave her a sudden burst of adrenaline, making her run the rest of the way.

She heard a meow.

She ran into her bedroom and saw Ptah lying on the bed, licking himself and purring.

“Ptah!” she screamed with tears of joy running down her cheeks. “You’re back! I’ve got you back!” She got on the bed, picked him up, put him on her lap, and stroked him. She couldn’t stop weeping. She was shaking with happiness.

Then, just to make sure, she picked him up and looked all over his body to see if anything at all was different about him. She knew, as Talas had told her, that the cat wouldn’t be 100% the same as before, but he seemed amazingly close to that 100%, for she saw absolutely nothing different.

All of his fur was black, he had his claws, though he knew to keep them in whenever she held him, for she’d used her magic to teach him never to scratch her, even by accident. She abhorred declawing.

The only thing that seemed different, and even this, ever so slightly so, was the even greater love she saw in his eyes, obviously the result of the trapped souls of all of those in Ptah’s consciousness, those of the men–and Lechi–who lusted after her.

XI: Nodding Off

Looking into Ptah’s loving, longing eyes with soaking wet, teary eyes of her own, she whispered, “I love you so much.” Then she kissed him on the top of his head, put him at the foot of her bed, and began undressing.

She giggled as she saw the cat staring at her as she got naked, thinking, This is all you boys in there will ever have of me. When fully nude, she turned around for the cat and giggled some more. See me fulfilling my promise to you, Lechi and Gordon? The cat just sat there looking, with that caged desire in his eyes.

She lay on her back on the bed with her legs apart at about a forty-five-degree angle, with her right foot touching Ptah. She closed her eyes for a few seconds, taking a deep breath and relaxing.

When she opened them, she looked down and saw, of all the bizarre things, Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman licking her between her legs! It felt so good: Clara was getting wet, her labia were beginning to swell, and her clitoris was hardening. Oddly, Pfeiffer’s tongue felt much smaller than a human tongue, but it was still effective. Clara closed her eyes, sighed, and moaned softly.

She opened her eyes again and looked down, but now she saw Julie Newmar’s Catwoman licking her! The tongue’s size felt the same, but so was its deliciously tickling skill as good as ever. Clara was getting wetter, sighing more and more, and moaning louder.

Newmar put two fingers inside Clara, gently and slowly moving them back and forth while tickling her vaginal walls. A third finger was rubbing against her hardening clitoris. While she felt all of these thrills, Clara found that those fingers inside her felt more like one thick finger–in fact, it felt hairy, even fuzzy.

She closed her eyes again and decided not to wonder about the oddity of the sensations; she’d rather just have enjoyed them. She was fidgeting on the bed and letting out little yelps of pleasure.

She opened her eyes and looked down again. Instead of seeing another actress as Catwoman again, though, this time she saw Sister Rosalie Mason, her old grade ten teacher of religion class. This nun, with her pretty face and kindness to Clara (as she’d been enduring her father’s abuse), caused her to have a lesbian crush on her back then in her teen years; so seeing her in her habit, licking her, was just all the more enjoyable. She was soaking wet between her legs, her clitoris fully engorged, and her labia swelling.

She closed her eyes for a few seconds, anticipating an even better lover on opening them. When she did open them, though, she looked to her left and saw Ms. Bellows, standing by the foot of her bed and grinning maliciously.

Then she looked straight up and saw Gordon. He was also looking at her with a malevolent smile. Instead of tongues and fingers, she now felt a phallus moving in and out of her…a furry one, but nonetheless a phallus.

Gordon said, in the panting voice of Lechi, “You actually thought…that your feeble skills…at magic…would be a match…for my power? You did need…that ninth sword…to lie in position…with all the others…to ensure…the efficacy…of your spell. Now all of us..will enjoy you…every time you sleep!”

Clara now felt phalli entering her anus and her mouth. She sensed in them the presence of Bill Wynn and Ron Sweeney. Soon after, she felt a phallus between her breasts, with invisible hands pushing them together and wrapping them around the invisible phallus. This, she sensed, was Jon Schmidt.

The fact that these were all incubi is what kept if from being physically impossible. Next, she sensed the phalli of Kurt Davies and Shaun Holmes respectively in her left and right hands. After beginning to masturbate these invisible masses of meat, she felt two more, those of Phil Sulikowsky and Jim Fredericks, pushing against her left and right armpits respectively. Finally, the invisible hands of Chris Culig took her feet, put them on either side of his invisible phallus, and had them rub it.

None of this probing hurt; in fact, her arousal was soaring. She was sweating and moaning a high-pitched “Mmm!” with every thrust she received, them all being perfectly synchronized. Finally, after another minute, she climaxed with a scream, then they all sprayed bukkake, soaking her with come from head to toe.

The incubi all disappeared. Her eyes were closed, and her mouth wide open, the sides of her lips curled up in a smirk. She let out a long sigh. Then she opened her eyes.

Instead of seeing Gordon on top of her, she saw her father.

“I told you I’d make it good for you,” he said in Lechi’s voice.

Clara woke up screaming. Shaking all over, she needed a few minutes to calm down and feel her heart rate slow down to normal. She whispered over and over, “It was just a dream. It wasn’t real. They never had me.”

Finally calm, she looked down to the foot of the bed. A puddle of come had soaked the sheets between her legs. Ptah was sitting just behind it, with his tongue sticking out.

“A wet dream?” she whispered. “I haven’t had…one of those…since I was…in high school.”

Then she looked at Ptah again. His right front leg was soaked in her gushing. He was looking at her with those loving, longing eyes. He was purring.

“Oh, my God!” she yelled, then, “No, no. That could not have happened. Not my Ptah, no. H-he just…he dipped his leg in the puddle, that’s all! Yeah, I gushed quite a lot, and that’s how he g-got so much of his leg wet with it. That explains it! I just had a dream about those men. They’re all trapped in Ptah’s consciousness; my ritual was c-complete, perfect! There’s no way they could have got out of the mental prison I put ’em in.”

She picked up her cat and hugged him.

“I got you back, Ptah! That’s what matters. I’ve had bad dreams before. They just reflect my unconscious traumas, that’s all. I have you back, and that’s what’s important, even if you did put your foot in my–no, that couldn’t have happened! My life is complete again with you. I’m so happy to have you back, Ptah! I love you so much.”

She would spend her whole day petting, feeding, playing with, and cuddling her cat. That look of longing and love in his eyes never stopped, not even for a second. She was in an ecstasy with him right until sundown, when she would go to bed with him at the foot of it. She would fall asleep smiling from ear to ear.

To sleep, perchance to dream.

Ay, there’s the rub.

My Short Story, ‘Family Dies,’ Published in the Western Horror Anthology, ‘Shut Up and Bleed’

My Western horror short story, ‘Family Dies,’ has been published in Shut Up and Bleed, a new Western horror short story anthology soon to be found on Amazon (June 1st, to be exact). Other great horror short stories in the anthology are by Christine Morgan, Katie Berry, Tim Curran, C. Derick Miller, Chuck Buda, BL Blankenship, Megan Stockton, and Jon Steffen.

Here is a link to the Amazon page.

Many thanks to BL Blankenship, who set this up for all of us writers included in the project! He also set up the Book Without a Name Western horror short story anthology, in which I have two stories published, namely, “Ghost Town,” and “The Lake.”

So, come June 1st, please go over to Amazon and order yourself a copy of Shut Up and Bleed! 🙂

Analysis of ‘Un Homme Qui Dort’

Un homme qui dort (“The Man Who Sleeps,” or “A Man Asleep”) is a 1974 French film directed by Bernard Queysanne and Georges Perec, based on Perec’s story of the same name. It stars Jacques Spiesser.

The film’s script is taken completely from the text of Perec’s prose, though in a condensed form. The text is in the second person singular, as though the narrator (recited by Ludmila Mikaël in the original French, and by Shelley Duvall in English translation) were speaking to Spiesser’s character.

The black-and-white film was almost lost, but it was restored on DVD in 2007. It received some critical acclaim, winning the Prix Jean Vigo in 1974.

Here is a link to quotes from the film in English translation, here is a link to an English translation of Perec’s story (or is it the script for the film?), and here is a link to the film with English subtitles. Here is a link to the English language version.

A twenty-five-year-old Parisian university student (Spiesser), whose name is not given (thus making him a kind of everyman), lives in a one-room chambre de bonne. His feelings of alienation have risen to such a pitch that he no longer wishes to participate in social life. “…you discover, without surprise, that something is wrong, that you don’t know how to live and that you never will know.”

The notion that he is “a man asleep” is metaphorical. Actually, he wanders the streets of Paris instead of going to school and hanging out with friends. He’s living the life of an automaton, devoid of human interaction; it’s an attempt at indifference as a way of alleviating suffering. Self-isolation, he hopes, is a way to nirvana.

He’s as passive as can practically be achieved: “…it’s not action at all, but an absence of action…”

He imagines that someone else, his twin, his double, will get out of bed, wash, shave, dress, go out, and attend school for him. This idea of a double is significant, for it is expressed in other forms: the narrator, addressing him as “you,” is the rambling of his own thoughts in a kind of unwritten diary; also, there’s his cracked, Lacanian mirror, the specular image of which he is alienated from, too.

Finally, there’s the reproduction of René Magritte‘s 1937 surrealist painting, La reproduction interdite, showing a man standing in front of a mirror, his back to us and facing it; but instead of seeing the man’s face reflected back to us, we see the back of his head just as we do of the actual man in front of the mirror. About fifteen minutes into the film, when the student has gone into a theatre to see a movie, we see a surreal variation of this picture, but it’s the student, and the images show him repeatedly facing away from his ‘reflection.’ More self-alienation.

All of these doublings of himself indicate his having left the social and cultural world of the Symbolic Order in order to regress into the narcissistic, dyadic world of the Imaginary. In time, the horrors of the Real will jolt him out of his isolation, and force him to reintegrate into the Symbolic.

It’s also significant that the movie is in black-and-white, when colour film was easily available, and when, by the early 70s, virtually all movies were in colour. I see the choice of black-and-white to be symbolic of black-and-white thinking, or psychological splitting, part of the cause of this young man’s psychological problems.

According to Melanie Klein, the paranoid-schizoid position causes us to split people into being perceived as all-good or all-bad, the bad ones being projected outward and split off from us. This is what the student is doing, though he seems to feel that virtually all elements of society are bad, so he splits them off, including his internal objects of them, and projects them outward, imagining himself to be safe without them.

But of course, he won’t be safe without them, because the internal objects are a part of himself; hence, towards the end of the film, when the tension is raised and he realizes he can’t just cut himself off from the world, we see the black-and-white film in negative images.

Still, for the time being, anyway, he feels a sense of peace and bliss from no longer engaging with the world. Wouldn’t we all love to break away like this?! To give up on all responsibilities, to let Freud‘s death drive kick in, and be at rest, no longer suffering with the rest of the world.

Pleasure, for Freud, consists in the relaxation of tension, which in the form of death, is the ultimate relaxation of it; hence, the death drive as being merely the other side of the same coin as that of the libido, part of Eros. We sense that the young student is aiming for just such a relaxation of tension, though, like Hamlet, he’s too chicken to go through with suicide.

So life as a passive, indifferent automaton seems a reasonable compromise. Indifference, in this regard, is like that of the Buddhist avoiding gratification of desire, or attachment to the world…but without the Buddhist’s hard discipline, of course. The non-existence of nirvana, no-thing-ness, the escape from existence as pain, dukkha, is the death-paradise the student seeks.

We’re reminded of Hamlet’s soliloquy:

“…to die, to sleep
No more; and by a sleep, to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That Flesh is heir to? ‘Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep…” (III, i)

It is in this sense that we should understand the young student to be “the man who sleeps.”

Recall that the narrator, his anima mirror-double, says, “You have no desire to carry on […] the fleeting and poignant desire to hear no more, to see no more, to remain silent and motionless. Crazy dreams of solitude.”

At one point, in the middle of this solitude, he imagines he has reached this point of nirvana, for the narrator says the following to him:

“As the hours, the days, the weeks, the seasons slip by, you detach yourself from everything.
You discover, with something that sometimes almost resembles exhilaration, that you are free, that nothing is weighing you down, nothing pleases or displeases you.
You find, in this life exempt from wear and tear and with no thrill in it other than these suspended moments, an almost perfect happiness, fascinating, occasionally swollen by new emotions.
You are living in a blessed parenthesis, in a vacuum full of promise, and from which you expect nothing.
You are invisible, limpid, transparent.
You no longer exist…”

His friends have stopped over to say hello, but he ignores the knocking on his door and the paper messages slipped under it. He wants no contact with others, for he has come to understand that hell is other people; he doesn’t want to bear their judgemental gaze…yet the narrator, his internalized Other, addressing him with a judgemental “you,” ensures that he will never escape the hell of judgemental others. Therefore, there is no exit for him, not even in indifferent solitude.

(We hear, almost an hour into the film, “Il n’y a pas d’issue,” that is, “There is no way out,” or “There is no exit”; now, Sartre‘s play is named Huis clos–“Closed Door”–in the original French, but English translations of the play with titles like No Way Out and No Exit would have been well known by the time Perec began writing his story. Besides, the student, when in his chambre de bonne, typically has his door closed, anyway.)

When we see him wandering the streets of Paris, we usually see few if any other people there. This can be seen in the middle of the day, when the streets presumably would be far busier: could he be dreaming during these moments, experiencing wish-fulfillment?

Alone, in his chambre, he smokes, drinks Nescafé, looks up at the cracks on his ceiling (easily associated with the cracks in his mirror, all symbols of his fragmented self), and plays a game of cards similar to solitaire. This escape from the social world, into one of solitary play and contemplation, is not too far removed from the maladaptive daydreaming of traumatized people, or the self-isolation of sufferers of stress from Adverse Childhood Experiences.

His room–small, hot, claustrophobic, and with those cracks in the ceiling and on the mirror–is nonetheless “the centre of the world” for him. The room thus in many ways represents himself: fragmented, narcissistic, a place to hide himself in sleep, and a place to escape from when he can no longer stand himself. He’s as passive as that dripping tap, or those six socks soaking in the pink plastic bowl–sharks as indolent as he is.

With his loss of interest in social life comes also his loss of interest in time, whose passing he barely notices. Similarly, when during his wandering of the Parisian streets, two twin boys in identical clothes are running past him from behind while rattling a ruler against the palings of a fence he’s walking beside, he isn’t at all irritated by the noise. The boys’ duality parallels his duality as against his alienated self, his image in the mirror, the man twice seen in the Magritte picture with his back to us, his imaginary double replacing him in going about his normal daily routine, and his anima narrator…except that the boys are, in their energetic, enthusiastic participation in life, his dialectical opposite–what he still could be if he weren’t so alienated from everything and everyone.

In the Luxembourg Garden, he watches the pensioners playing cards, comparable to his own playing of his solitaire-esque game in his room. Such a comparison suggests a unity of self and other vis-à-vis him and the pensioners…also a dialectical unity between the elderly and his young self.

In a development of this theme of self and other, young vs. old, we see him watching an old man sitting on a bench staring into space “for hours on end,” as if mummified, “gazing into emptiness.” The young man, admiring the elder, would like to know his secrets, for the latter seems to have attained the ideal of detached indifference for which the former has been striving. (One is reminded of Prince Siddhartha seeing a holy man, and thus being inspired to find enlightenment himself.) He looks at the old man as if staring into a mirror, gazing at his ideal-I…so much better than his reflection in his cracked mirror in his room.

At one point, while reading the business news in Le Monde, he imagines himself to be some important businessman or politician smoking a cigar and getting out of a car. Ending the narcissistic fantasy of him identifying himself with important men, he is seen as his ordinary self, playing pinball.

When playing his solitaire-like card game, he removes the aces, so he has no ‘ace in the hole,’ or ‘ace up his sleeve.’ Accordingly, he rarely succeeds at the game, yet winning doesn’t matter to him, for what would winning mean to him, anyway? The card game, after all, is like life: if he’s indifferent to life, why would he care any more about winning at some card game? He goes through the motions like an automaton, all meaninglessly, just as he does through life.

We’ve noticed, by now, that he’s been biting his nails.

As I mentioned above, he reaches a point when his ‘mastery,’ as it were, of the indifferent life has allowed him to attain a kind of bliss. He seems as indifferent as the dripping tap, as the six socks soaking in the plastic pink bowl, as a fly, as a tree, as a rat.

He speaks no more than is absolutely necessary: in this disengagement with language, and therefore with society, he is leaving the Symbolic. “Indifference dissolves language and scrambles the signs.” Though he’d seem to be blissfully regressing to the narcissism of the Imaginary, before long, he’ll experience the trauma of the undifferentiated Real.

In this sense of non-differentiation, he finds himself with a series of choices of ‘you do, or you don’t do.’ These include:

You walk or you do not walk.
You sleep or you do not sleep.
You buy Le Monde or you do not buy it.
You eat or you do not eat.

A little later, the narrator says, “You play pinball or you don’t.” All of these ‘do or not do’ expressions remind us of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy. Just as Hamlet suffered from an inability to act, whether in killing his uncle Claudius or in killing himself, so does the young Parisian student feel incapable of acting, hence his automaton-like passivity and indifference. Still, in the end, like Hamlet, he must act.

Tense music can be heard playing in the background, suggesting that he is reaching the limit of how long he can continue to live the ‘indifferent’ life. Though I mentioned above the black-and-white film as representing his black-and-white psychological splitting, there’s also the preponderance of grey, for he is “a grey man with no connotation of dullness.” Indeed, his life has grown so dull that he’s forgotten what excitement is.

In his narcissism, in his imagined mastery of the indifferent life, he fancies himself “the nameless master of the world.” Buddha-like, he has seen that motionless old man the way Prince Siddhartha saw the impressive holy man (after having seen the old, sick, and dead men, as you’ll recall from his legendary life story), and now he imagines he has attained enlightenment. “All you are is all you know.” Total, narcissistic solipsism…nirvana? I think not.

So in his ‘mastery’ of the indifferent, he’s “inaccessible, like a tree, like a shop window, like a rat.” We again see a shot of him watching the motionless old man, as if he were looking in a mirror at his ideal-I, or like the Buddha seeing the holy man. We see a shot of that indifferent dripping tap, too, as well as shots of a walkway with trees, benches, and fences on either side, yet devoid of any people…the misanthropic young man’s ideal world.

But he soon comes to realize all of the ways that he is not at all like the ‘enlightened’ and ‘indifferent’ rat; for rats don’t have sleepless nights, they don’t bite their fingernails, they don’t wake up bathed in sweat, they don’t dream, against which the young man has no protection.

We come back to Hamlet: “to sleep, perchance to dream.”

Just as Hamlet couldn’t use the “sleep of death” as an escape from his problems, for he’d then have the nightmare of hell to deal with after having committed the sin of suicide, so can’t this young student use the sleep of indifference as an escape from his alienating world, for his nightmares are the return of repressed pain that he’ll never be able to project onto the world and be rid of.

Such an understanding “makes us rather bear those ills we have, than fly to others that we know not of”.

To get back to the biting of his fingernails, we learn that he bites them so violently that they bleed and are in unbearable pain. This violent biting is an example of his excessive attempts at splitting off and projecting those ‘black’ parts of himself that he doesn’t accept. The biting represents his alienation from himself, his refusal to integrate his Shadow.

Rats don’t play pinball, either, and when he plays, for hours on end, he’s in a rage…hardly indifferent. No, he isn’t much of a Buddha. But like Hamlet, he “can play or not play.” He can’t start up a conversation with the pinball machine, though, and this incidentally would seem to be his reason for preferring pinball to people. At the same time, a pinball machine cannot give him the human response, the love, that he so obviously needs.

It is in this very retreat from human company, replacing it with things that will never satisfy, that we can all relate to the young man; for don’t we all, in our own way, attempt a sleep of indifference to the world?

The narrator says repeatedly that he drifts around the streets, an odd behaviour for someone who has supposedly ‘found the answer’ to his problems. He goes back to his room and tries to go to sleep, but he can’t; instead, he would “calmly measure the sticky extent of [his] unhappiness,” and he goes out again and wanders the streets at night.

It is around this point that we start noticing a switch to negative film, back and forth between this and regular black-and-white film. We also hear the first of a series of references to “monstrous” things, or to “monsters”–in this case, “the monstrous factory gates.” We also hear of “impatient crowds,” which I believe are the “monsters” he’s been trying so hard to rid himself of.

Now, unhappiness hasn’t come to him all of a sudden: it’s gradually appeared to him, as if without his knowing until it was fully formed. Unhappiness has been in the cracks on his ceiling, and on his mirror, in the dripping tap, in those things in which he saw blissful indifference. All of his wandering has been meaningless.

As we see him biting his fingernails again, there’s a rapping, percussive sound in the background, reinforcing the sense of his agitation. He keeps playing his absurd card game, having removed the aces, but it offers no way out of his malaise…the same as with his wandering.

By now, an hour into the film, the narrator is speaking faster, with more urgency in her voice. We see negative film again, with crowds of people on the street. That rapping noise is still being heard. “The monsters have come into your life,” the narrator says, “the rats, your fellow creatures, your brothers. The monsters in their tens, their hundreds, their thousands.” These crowds of people are the ones he’s been trying to get away from…but can’t. This is also one of the first references to “rats” that is negative…interesting that this is happening now.

As we see more of the negative film, we hear the narrator say, “You follow their shadows [i.e., those of the “monsters,” the crowds of people], you are their shadow [i.e., you are the very thing you see in them that you won’t accept].” As the rapping sound continues, we also hear the narrator speaking faster, and we hear a dissonant chord played on a keyboard.

We see more shots of crowds of people walking on the streets, we hear more rapping, and the dissonant keyboard chord. Images of condemned, torn-down buildings, too. More references to “monsters,” all those people he hates. The juxtaposition of all these jarring images, sounds, and words is, of course, deliberate. The narrator’s voice is getting more and more agitated. The film alternates between normal black and white and negative film during this climactic moment.

The narrator mentions “…all the others who are even worse, the smug, the smart-Alecs, the self-satisfied…” These people seem suspiciously like projections of himself as the would-be indifferent Buddha. Again, he’s trying to split off and throw away what it is inside himself that he doesn’t like–the Shadow he needs to integrate.

After more repetitions of “monster,” the wanderer in his ongoing bitter meditation starts tossing around the word “sad” through his narrator mouthpiece: “sad city, sad lights in the sad streets, sad clowns in sad music-halls, sad queues outside the sad cinemas, sad furniture in the sad stores.”

His heavenly bliss of indifference has become the hell of a most non-gay Paris.

He feels like a prisoner in his cell, like a rat trying to escape its maze. Again, how odd it is that only now is a rat being used as a simile for something negative. He’s starting to realize that his retreat from the world has never been anything good.

The narrator has finally calmed down. Among the shots of rubble, we see a surrealist image of a sink standing alone; instead of containing water, though, we see a flame on it. Should we interpret this rubble of torn-down buildings, and his flaming sink, as representative of his chambre de bonne, in turn representative of himself, torn apart, fragmented, burning, in a psychotic break with reality, in the traumatic agony of Lacan’s Real Order?

“You are afraid,” the narrator says as he looks at all of the rubble, the home he meant to return to. We see a shot of his cracked mirror again, in between the shots of him looking at the rubble. He runs away, another attempt to run away from himself and his problems. We see the burning sink collapse.

Next is a shot of him calmly walking down a street between parked cars. He is calm, and it seems that he has come to accept the necessity of returning to a life in the real world. We hear an eerie tune played on an organ: a repetition of D to G on the right hand (and variations thereof), a descent in the bass from G to F, then to E-flat and to D-flat. A female voice accompanies the organ by singing a high G.

The young man is no wiser from his detachment from the world. “Indifference has not made you any different.” The nirvana of indifference has led back to the samsara of involvement with the world. Still, he won’t be judged for his failed experiment, for he has done nothing wrong. “No, [he is] not the nameless master of the world.” He’s no Buddha. He is afraid, waiting for the rain to stop…as we all are.

The film ends with the same shot of the buildings of the city that we saw at the beginning. The film has come full circle; he’s back where he began. He’s woken up from his metaphorical sleep, ready to go back into the world with the rest of us. We must all wake from our sleep of death, of indifference, and be involved in life again.