Tag: fiction

Analysis of ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’

Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a 1958 novella by Truman Capote. It was adapted into a film by Blake Edwards in 1961, starring Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard, with Patricia Neal, Martin Balsam, Buddy Ebsen, and Mickey Rooney. The film differs from the novella in many significant ways, as will be discussed below.

The novella is so short, not even a hundred pages, to go by the edition I have, that ‘novella’ seems to describe a story too long for BAT, and ‘short story’ is too short for it. Since, as is the case with my copy, the story is often published with three short stories–“House of Flowers,” “A Diamond Guitar,” and “A Christmas Memory“–I’ll make a number of references to these stories whenever they share comparable or contrasting themes with BAT.

The novella is as short as it is, but the film is almost two hours long, suggesting a much longer story. Neal’s character, Mrs. Emily Eustache “2E” Failenson, is nowhere to be found in Capote’s story.

The unnamed narrator of the novella is named Paul Varjak (Peppard) in the film. He and Holly Golightly (Hepburn) develop a love relationship that is absent in Capote’s story (in fact, true to the writer’s own sexuality, the unnamed narrator–it is implied–is gay, therefore making his story at least somewhat autobiographical, since the narrator is as much a writer as Capote was).

The regrettably racist caricature of a Japanese, in the klutzy Mr. Yunioshi–played by Rooney in yellowface–isn’t in Capote’s story, either, though Yunioshi is referred to with a racial slur–a “Jap”–by Joe Bell, a bartender near the beginning of the story.

The film ends with a typical Hollywood rom-com cliché, with Varjak getting the girl and kissing her in the rain; while in Capote’s story, there is a far more ambiguous and uncertain ending, with Holly leaving the narrator and going off, out of New York City and into the world.

As for the casting of Holly for the film adaptation, Capote was hoping for Marilyn Monroe to play the part, and he was angry that the part ended up going to Hepburn (though he came to like her performance, all the same). Given that Holly is a romantic dreamer of a girl, chasing wealthy men, I find Capote’s preference of Monroe to play her strange and ironic, when Monroe, having married Arthur Miller at one point, demonstrated left-wing sympathies that may have contributed to her having been murdered, as opposed to the official suicide story of her death. The only thing Monroe had in common with Holly was the blonde hair (well, bleach-blonde, in Monroe’s case), and so brunette Hepburn had blonde streaks added to her hair.

The opening scene in the novella is nowhere to be found in the film, which during the credits shows Holly window-shopping outside a Tiffany’s store. We come to understand that Holly loves being in Tiffany’s because the luxury jewelry store is the only place where she can feel a sense of safety, peace, and calm in her turbulent world. She imagines that nothing bad can ever happen there.

She denies that she likes Tiffany’s for the jewelry (Capote, page 35). While it may not literally be the jewelry that she likes so much about the store, surely it’s the sense of a luxurious life that Tiffany’s represents that gives her that safe, serene feeling.

Holly is a socialite who, as a kind of “American geisha,” dates wealthy men and accepts cash gifts from them; she also aspires to marry such a man. If it isn’t about the wealth that makes Tiffany’s so appealing to her, then why is it that store, of all stores, that gives her that feeling of peace and security?

Material abundance, of the sort that a luxury jewelry store can easily represent, can give one a great and obvious sense of security, of safety and therefore of calm, peace, and serenity, that nothing bad can happen. Thus, Tiffany’s is a capitalist paradise. After all, money isn’t everything, but having one’s basic material needs taken care of certainly gives a sense of peace of mind, so material abundance ensures that peace of mind all the more.

Why does Holly want to “wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany’s” (page 35)? Why breakfast at Tiffany’s, which at the time sold only jewelry, and not food (the Blue Box Café first opened in 2017)? Consider the origin of the word ‘breakfast’–a breaking of a fast. So it’s the ending of a period of going without food.

The implication here, symbolically understood, is that one is going from rags to riches, from fasting or starving to abundance, all in one fell swoop. Such has always been Holly’s ambition: to go from her humble beginnings as Lulamae Barnes, married in her teens to a veterinarian named Doc Golightly (Ebsen) in Texas, to her now glamorous life in New York City, renamed Holly Golightly and chasing rich men to subsidize her now high-maintenance lifestyle, and thence, she hopes, to marriage and solid security with such a rich man, who would be Tiffany’s personified.

What we have here is a traditional woman’s version of the American Dream: social mobility through marrying up. The story takes place before the Sexual Revolution, and so women were still chained to the fetters of traditional sex roles, meaning they had to get their access to wealth through successful men…if they were young, pretty, and desirable enough…which Holly assuredly is, at the age of about eighteen or nineteen.

Beyond this dream of chasing wealth, though, is the pursuit of what Lacan would have called an ultimately unfulfillable desire. Tiffany’s symbolizes a nirvana one can never attain, though Holly will never stop trying, romantic dreamer that she is. She can never settle for an ordinary life, and that’s why she leaves New York City and the unnamed narrator for the unknown at the end of Capote’s novella. She may not have married José Ybarra-Jaeger (José da Silva Pereira in the film, played by José Luis de Vilallonga), the rich Brazilian diplomat, but she does go to Brazil in search of a similar dream.

This endless seeking out of more and more to satisfy a desire that can never be satisfied, is not only the essence of what drives Holly to do what she does (symbolically, what Lacan would have called jouissance), but also her unfulfillable desire can be paralleled to capitalism’s endless pursuit of profit (i.e., the Marxist notion of surplus value and Lacan’s plus-de-jouir, or “surplus enjoyment”). Hence, Tiffany’s can be seen as a capitalist paradise.

It is common for people to dream about striking it rich rather than doing the hard work of fighting for workers’ rights and reducing income inequality. Hence, even in today’s world of the obscenely wealthy few vs the impoverished many, we still have all this simping for billionaires going on. Holly can be seen to represent such people, on at least some level.

We can contrast her lifestyle among the affluent in New York City with the uniformly poor in “House of Flowers,” set in Third World Haiti, “A Diamond Guitar,” set in the austerity of an American prison, and “A Christmas Memory,” about a family so poor that the narrator, when a boy and close to his older female cousin, had to save up every penny they could get over the year to pay for the ingredients they needed to make Christmas fruitcakes (page 144). While Holly dreams of the security that comes from wealth, so many others just struggle to survive.

Capote’s novella begins with bar owner Joe Bell telling the narrator about photos of a black man holding a wooden sculpture of a woman’s head, and the woman looks exactly like Holly. Yunioshi is the one who found the wooden head while traveling in Africa, and he informed Bell of it.

It seems that Holly’s been to Africa some time since the end of the narrator’s story about her. Bell imagines she’s “got to be rich to go mucking around in Africa.” (page 8) In this incident, we see again the contrast between being a girl from the First World Who aspires to wealth, and people in poverty with much more humble dreams, as those in Capote’s aforementioned three stories.

The story about her in Africa causes the narrator to recall his story about her from years before, back in the 1940s. Though she had dreams of wealth, she lived in a modest brownstone apartment building in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Yunioshi, in an apartment on the top floor, complains about Holly ringing his bell and waking him up to open the door for her.

This scene corresponds with the beginning of the film after the opening credits, though as I said above, the novella doesn’t portray Yunioshi as a spastic racist Asian stereotype, bumping into things, and having buck teeth sticking out of his face. Blake Edwards films are full of slapstick, but it’s sad that he stooped to this low for cheap laughs. In all fairness to Rooney, though, when he realized how offensive his performance was, he expressed the deepest remorse and publicly apologized to Asian communities. Edwards was similarly contrite.

Anyway, the narrator has seen her for the first time during this altercation with Yunioshi (page 11). He describes her as having “an almost breakfast-cereal air of health” (page 12). In this context, we note that a man who’s just “pick[ed] up the check” for her, one of those male pursuers of hers who pay for things for her in the hopes of getting…something…back from her. This picking up the check is the so-to-speak breakfast–the end of her poverty–that she hopes will one day lead to Tiffany’s.

From then on, she isn’t ringing Yunioshi’s bell, but the narrator’s, and they haven’t met yet (page 13). He learns more about her nonetheless, such as her cat (which is never named) and her playing the guitar, something she sometimes does sitting out on the fire escape as her hair dries (page 15). We’re reminded of the scene in the film when Hepburn is there, strumming and singing “Moon River,” with music by Henry Mancini.

When the narrator finally does meet her, it’s out by his window. Coming into his room, she explains that she’s trying to get away from another suitor. She notes the narrator’s resemblance to her brother, Fred, and so, feeling a brother transference, she wants to call him Fred. Note how she doesn’t go by her real name (Lulamae), she doesn’t call the narrator by his real name (which we never learn in the novella, and as I mentioned above, is given as Paul Varjak in the film), and the cat is never given a name (except “Cat” in the film).

At the end of the film, Holly contemplates their no-name status when justifying to Varjak why nobody belongs to anybody, and saying that she doesn’t know who she is. Namelessness, thus, represents social alienation, between people and in one’s own species-essence.

Linked with this alienation from within and without is how OJ Berman (Balsam) characterizes Holly: “She is a phony,” and “She isn’t a phony because she’s a real phony.” (page 27) Berman is a Hollywood talent agent who has groomed Holly in the hopes of making her into a movie star. She believes all the nonsense she says about herself, and his grooming of her, which has included French lessons to help her get rid of her original hillbilly accent from Texas, has been part of the process of creating her phony personality as a café society girl. (page 29)

To get back to her meeting of the narrator, he tells her he’s a writer. He also tells her that it is Thursday, which reminds her that she has to go to Sing Sing and meet a mafia man incarcerated there named Salvatore “Sally” Tomato. She’ll get the “weather report” from him: a coded message to transmit information about such criminal activities as the narcotics smuggling that she’ll get entangled in and arrested for towards the end of the story. She’ll give that “weather report” to Sally’s lawyer, Oliver O’Shaughnessy, every week.

As I’ve pointed out in many other posts, I regard mafia men in movies and fiction as representative of capitalists in general, since as a Marxist I regard capitalism’s accumulation of surplus value to be a theft of the value that workers put into the production of commodities; therefore, capitalism in general is criminal activity, whether legalized or not.

Holly’s regular involvement with Sally, therefore, is part of her own simping for the rich, which in turn is part of her dream of finding that peace and security that comes from wealth, as represented by Tiffany’s. The chaotic and troubling world from which she wishes to escape into a capitalist paradise is the capitalist hell of poverty, which she naturally fears. One is reminded of what Belle says to Scrooge in A Christmas Carol as an explanation for his own pursuit of wealth: she says to him, “You fear the world so much” (Dickens, page 50).

To get back to OJ Berman and whatnot, he first appears at one of Holly’s many parties, in which she hobnobs with rich and socially important people like him. In the film, you can spot a couple of Asians in the background, extras with no dialogue: they seem to be there as if to say, ‘Look, the filmmakers are not saying that all Asians are like Yunioshi.’ The inclusion of these two non-caricatured Asians hardly compensates for Rooney’s performance, though.

One presumably wealthy man that Holly shows interest in is Rusty Trawler. He’s thrice divorced, but he’ll end up marrying someone else (page 66). Rusty also seems to be a Nazi sympathizer, for according to a set of clippings from gossip columns about Holly and Rusty, “he attended rallies in Yorkville“, he’d “sent her a cable offering to marry her if Hitler didn’t” (recall that the narrator’s reminiscences about her take place during WWII, when her brother Fred is serving in the army), and Winchell always referred to [Rusty] as a Nazi (page 33).

Yes, Holly, in her pursuit of that capitalist paradise of peace, symbolized by Tiffany’s, is even willing to marry a fascist if he has money. Supporters of capitalism are willing to lean that far right, if need be.

Her wish to marry money runs deeper than mere gold-digging, though. The transactional relationship between men and women as a result of sex roles (he gives her money in exchange for at least the hope of sex) is, of course, profoundly alienating, exacerbated by modern capitalism. She opts for this transactional relationship with men (while also having something of a bisexual attraction to women, using the word “dyke” in a non-derogatory sense, and hinting at this sexuality in the stripper scene in the film) because, as I mentioned above, deep down, she cannot relate to people in a deep, meaningful way.

Her platonic friendship with the narrator, therefore, is an ideal escape from the usual ‘I give you something, so you give me something back’ trap between men and women, because recall, it is strongly implied, if you’re paying attention as you read, that the narrator is gay. Holly observes that if a man likes neither baseball nor horses, “he don’t like girls.” (page 34) The narrator likes neither; he’s even tried riding a horse with her in the park (pages 77-78), and he loses control of his mare and falls off. Also, when saying she’ll never rat out Sally Tomato in exchange for the cops dropping the charges against her in her connection with him, she addresses the narrator as “Maude,” slang at the time for a gay man or a male prostitute (page 91).

He has no sexual interest in her, a girl whom, recall, Capote wanted Marilyn Monroe to play, therefore Holly’s something of a sex goddess. He is, nonetheless, fascinated with her in the way a gay man might be with a beautiful woman or a talented female singer like Judy Garland, that is, adoring her for aesthetic reasons rather than sexual ones.

To get back to Rusty, when the narrator has learned that he’s married for the fifth time, according to a newspaper (page 66), he assumes that Holly is the bride, and he’s most unhappy to have learned of this. Later, he realizes that it isn’t Holly whom Rusty has married, but Mag Wildwood, a fellow socialite, friend and sometimes roommate of Holly’s, and a model with a stutter (page 67). He goes “limp with relief” to have learned of this.

On a Monday in October 1943, he is with Holly in Joe Bell’s bar drinking Manhattans (pages 47-48). Then, after lunch in a cafeteria in the park, they avoid the zoo, since Holly can’t stand to see anything in a cage; oddly, for Christmas she’ll buy him a beautiful bird cage and make him promise never to put a living thing in it. (page 53) She sees herself as a free bird.

On that Monday in October, they pass a Woolworth’s, and she wants him to go in with her and steal something (page 49). He goes in reluctantly, and she eyes some Halloween masks. The two of them put on masks and walk out of the store wearing them. After they’ve run off for a few blocks (they’ll wear the masks all the way home), she tells him how she used to steal things when she had to or wanted to, and she still does it every now and then. The scene is replicated in the movie.

That a young woman who attracts wealthy men in the hopes of one day marrying one, and who feels peace of mind only in a luxury jewelry store, would engage in shoplifting from time to time makes perfect sense to me. She embodies the self-centered materialism of capitalism; capitalists accumulate their wealth by stealing the fruits of workers’ labour.

In the film, the shoplifting scene comes right after a scene with the two in Tiffany’s, then in the public library. Note the contrast between the private property of the jewelry store and the 5 and 10 store where they steal the masks. Sandwiched in between in a place for the public, one she significantly doesn’t know about. As a lover of all things connected with capitalism, Holly is fully aware of those places that are private property, but she’s a bit of a fish out of water in public places.

Eventually, that dull, unromantic life she’s tried to run away from tries to find her and get her back. Such a life is personified in Doc Golightly (Ebsen), who’s been snooping around near the brownstone building and getting the narrator’s attention (pages 57-58). This is after the narrator has had a falling-out with her, over a slur he’s made about her way of getting money from men (page 56).

Doc is a personification of the cage she never wants to be trapped in. His appearance and the falling-out between her and the narrator sandwich her bird cage gift that he puts in front of her door: then she rejects it as much as he has, having put it “on a sidewalk ashcan waiting for the garbage collector.” (page 56), then it’s taken back by him into his room. She’ll reject Doc the cage again when he tries to take her back with him to Texas.

Oddly, her revulsion against animals in cages is disregarded by the moviemakers when we see a shot most deliberately taken of a bird in a cage in Holly’s apartment, early on in the film, during that party scene. We see Balsam as Berman looking at the bird. Is Holly supposed to be enigmatically contradicting herself here? Or is it a wish-fulfillment on the filmmakers’ part to put Holly in a cage, as we see when she decides to stay with Varjak at the end of the movie?

When the narrator first meets Doc, he imagines that the man, being so much older than Holly, is her father rather than her husband (page 59). Doc married her when she was just going on fourteen, making her the stepmother of kids he’s had from a previous marriage, kids older than she was! (page 60) Doc claims she had no reason to be unhappily married to him, as his daughters did all the housework and she didn’t have to lift a finger (pages 60-61).

As a horse doctor, he presumably has been able to provide a decent life for her. But the point is that, beyond how cringe we today would find such a marriage to a girl so young, Holly is a romantic who wants to rise up above the mediocre and the ordinary, to the heights that capitalism promises (but rarely delivers) and to those pleasures that jouissance wants (and never fully delivers). Hence, she left him, and despite his pleas for her to come back, she never will.

Still, when Madame Sapphia Spanella, another tenant in the brownstone, sees Holly and Doc embracing, she assumes he is another of Holly’s johns and is morally appalled. Holly thought she’d see her brother Fred before being surprised by Doc (page 64). Later, after Rusty’s married Mag, Holly learns of Fred’s having been killed in action, and she smashes everything in her apartment in a rage of grief. Spanella is as horrified now to know of this tantrum as she was scandalized before with her and Doc. As it turns out, not everyone in the past of otherwise self-centred Holly is contemptuously tossed aside. Elsewhere, now that Rusty is unavailable, she now has a new rich man: the Brazilian diplomat, José.

After Fred’s death and the arrival of José into her life, Holly is changed in many ways. She’s nowhere near as sociable as she once was, José has replaced Mag as her roommate, she generally never mentions Fred anymore, and she no longer calls the narrator “Fred” (page 71). The only times she ever leaves her apartment are on Thursdays to see Sally in Sing Sing.

Because she imagines she’ll soon marry José, she’s developed a “keen sudden un-Holly-like enthusiasm for homemaking,” thus making her buy a number of things that it doesn’t seem quite like her to buy. She’s bought two Gothic ‘easy’ chairs from the William Randolph Hearst estate, and given his tendency to have flirted with fascism around this time, though, perhaps this purchase in particular isn’t all that un-Holly-like (page 71). She’s also trying to learn Portuguese so she’ll be comfortable living in Rio when her husband-to-be takes her there (page 72).

Now, since Holly is taken to having rich men pay her way, whether they be husbands or not, it is apposite to point out that in the movie, Varjak also has someone paying his way. This is the wealthy Emily Eustache “2E” Failenson (Neal), his “decorator.” The inclusion of this character has a way of equalizing things between the sexes; it’s as if the filmmakers, in spite of preferring to put Holly in the ‘cage’ of a relationship with Varjak, don’t wish to leave the receiving of cash in exchange for sex to be stereotypically the exclusive domain of ‘gold digging women.’

After the fiasco with the horses, the narrator finds “photographs of Holly…front-paged by the late edition of the Journal-American and by the early editions of both the Daily News and the Daily Mirror.” (page 79) She’s been arrested in a narcotics bust connected with Sally Tomato (page 80).

The narrator imagines it must be Spanella who is to blame, given how she always complains to the authorities about Holly in a way we see Yunioshi do in the film (Yunioshi is also the one in the film who gets the cops on Holly for the drugs).

Joe Bell, who also likes Holly, wants the narrator to call her rich friends to help her out (page 83). The narrator tries Rusty and Mag, who turn on Holly, not wanting their names at all to be associated with her. Calling Doc in Texas is out of the question–Holly would never want that. Then the narrator tries Berman, who says she’ll be out on bail (pages 84-85).

When the narrator goes to find her in her apartment, though, she isn’t there. He does find a man in her home–José’s cousin, who has a message from José for her (pages 85-86). He wants to break off the marriage plans, because, like Rusty and Mag, José doesn’t want his name, family, and reputation to be stained by association with a girl mixed up with drugs. The narrator finds Holly in a hospital room, where she’s been since the arrest. There he reads her José’s letter (pages 87-88).

Now, she’s heartbroken to know that José has dumped her, that he’s just another “rat like Rusty” (page 88), but she’s not going to let that stop her from going to Brazil anyway. The narrator tries in all futility to stop her from jumping bail, for she won’t “waste a perfectly fine ticket” (page 90), and she won’t testify against Sally Tomato, even though she admits that she is “rotten to the core” (page 91).

I’m not interested in the sentimentalized, rom-com Hollywood ending of the film, so I’ll stick with the novella’s ending. Holly really does leave New York and the gay narrator, and she even gets rid of the cat, putting it outside the car taking her to the airport and telling the cat to “f___ off!” when it won’t leave her. (page 95)

Some may think of Holly favourably as a feminist free spirit for leaving the narrator, as opposed to her choosing to stay in her ‘cage’ in a patriarchal relationship with straight Varjak. But when we read the ending of Capote’s version, in which she isn’t freeing herself from a relationship with a gay friend–who has no wish to dominate her as a husband might–and where she doesn’t want to take responsibility for her involvement in a mafia racket or even for her cat, we realize that the narrator is right when he says to her, “You are a bitch.” (page 95)

She tosses the cat aside because of her fear of commitment, her wish never to be chained to anyone or anything, not caring at all about who or what she’s hurting as a result of abandoning them–Doc, the cat, or her friend the narrator. She is just that self-centred, on an endless quest to satisfy her insatiable thirst for jouissance, that surplus-value plus-de-jouir that connects her desires with capitalism, hence her trip to Rio when she’s lost her José.

Still, the narrator will find the abandoned cat and take care of it (page 97). He gets a postcard from her, saying she’s been to Buenos Aires, liking it there far more than Brazil. She’s “joined at the hip with duhvine Señor. Love? Think so.” He’s married and with “7 brats,” though (page 97). In other words, she’ll use him for his money, for as long as the relationship lasts. Then, as we learned from the beginning of the novella, she’ll pursue her elusive jouissance somewhere in Africa. The narrator just hopes that Holly, like the cat that in many ways is a double of her, has found a place where she truly belongs (page 98).

As I said above, the three stories in my edition of the book that fallow BAT—“House of Flowers,” A Diamond Guitar,” and “A Christmas Memory”–all share certain themes with the main story, and I think they’re all worth mentioning before I end this analysis. These themes include: platonic relationships and/or friendships with implied homosexual elements, the breaking-away and ending of said friendships with the aim of attaining personal freedom, and whether or not marriage is a kind of prison.

In the first of these three stories, set in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Ottilie is a beautiful, strong-willed prostitute, parallel to Holly as an “American geisha.” But where Holly hopes to marry a rich man and experience the capitalist paradise of peace and freedom from the “mean reds,” a paradise symbolized by Tiffany’s, Ottllie’s marriage to the aptly-named Royal Bonaparte, a marriage in the Third World, a harsh contrast to the opulence of New York City, it is a nightmare in which she is tyrannized by her new grandmother-in-law, the also aptly-named Old Bonaparte…a witch. Her new home is the cage Ottilie is trapped in, “like a house of flowers” (page 109).

In such historically impoverished countries as India and China, it was common for women to be treated like abject slaves by their mothers-in-law, since in a patrilineal society, a married woman leaves the family of her flesh and blood to live with her husband’s family, who don’t regard her as their own flesh and blood. So, the contrast between the First World and the Third World is apparent in regard to a woman’s marriage: one as, on the one hand, at least a dream of marrying up into Tiffany’s heaven, vs on the other hand, marrying into patriarchal hell.

In “A Diamond Guitar,” it’s been said that Mr. Schaeffer is parallel to Holly for being, like her, a dreamer; but I must disagree and say that he corresponds to the narrator of BAT, and that it’s Tico Feo who corresponds to Holly, and for several reasons. Tico Feo is a young man with blond hair (like Holly, young and blonde); the boy tells a lot of lies (as Holly is a “phony”), he plays the guitar, as she does, and like her, he eventually frees himself from the Alabama prison he and Schaeffer are stuck in (and just as Holly jumps bail and leaves the narrator in NYC, so does Tico Feo abandon Schaeffer in the prison).

Schaeffer’s and Tico Feo’s relationship isn’t at all physical, but “they were as lovers” (page 130), just as Holly and the narrator of BAT have a platonic relationship, but he is so fascinated with her as almost to be in love with her. The narrator in BAT expresses himself artistically as a writer; Schaeffer does so by carving dolls.

In “A Christmas Memory,” there’s another platonic male-to-female relationship, but this time in the form of a boy and his much elder cousin. Both characters are unnamed, though she calls him “Buddy,” and he, the narrator, calls her simply “my friend.” This kind of naming and non-naming is similar to how the unnamed narrator of BAT is addressed as “Fred” by Holly (recall, not her real name, either), implying a transference of her brother-to-sister relationship with the real Fred that parallels the familial relationship of cousins “Buddy” and his “friend.”

So we can see a number of parallel themes and motifs in all these stories, including also Capote’s autobiographical elements in at least three of the four stories, through the implied homosexuality in the narrator of BAT, the platonic homosexuality of Schaeffer’s and Tico Feo’s relationship, and how “Buddy,” the boy in “A Christmas Memory,” dramatizes much of Capote’s childhood. We see the superiority of platonic relationships over transactional, sexual ones, and we also see the yearning to escape from one’s cages–literal ones, metaphorical ones, and ones made of flowers.

Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, London, Penguin Essentials, 1961

The Tanah–Beginnings, Chapter Eight

[The following is the ninth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, and here is the eighth–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

Though Rawmios found success as a teacher and performer, he was still haunted by the painful memories of his wicked family. It was obvious to him, from his reputation all over Nawaitos as a gifted teacher, that his mother’s description of him–as feeble-minded–was a perfidious lie. It was a big lie, an absurd lie.

Rawmios came to realize that much of what we know isn’t really the truth, but just a human construction that claims to represent reality (for what do we really know about anything?). Therefore, if the human representation is harmful, and has been proven invalid, then it must be replaced with a better, healthier construction that is closer to reality. Rawmios had to take all of the lies his family told him about himself, and wipe the slate clean.

He would take all of the family’s cruel misrepresentations of him and replace them with their honourable opposites. Since he had been deprived of these virtues, he now had the right to claim them as his own. If he had possessed all of the vices the family claimed he had, he had acquired those vices only by power of suggestion. Now he would use power of suggestion to acquire the opposite virtues.

Therefore, since his mother said he was feeble-minded, now he could believe himself to be gifted in intelligence. Since his father taught him to believe unquestioningly all of Lorenzos’s teachings, and to be intolerant of any heretical changes to them, now Rawmios would be free to change any of those teachings that were clearly wrong-headed. Since his brothers called him vile names, he would claim the sweetest of names for himself now. If he was once called selfish and absorbed in himself, now he was selfless and concerned more with others than with himself. If his sister called him weak and cowardly, he would now be brave and strong.

Fashioning a new identity for oneself is never easy, so Rawmios reinvented himself with the powerful aid of meditation. He would not stop meditating until he had fully remade himself.

During meditation, one is always assailed with distractions; so was Rawmios. The distractions came at him like an army of demons, assaulting him with his old painful memories. Rawmios was determined to conquer them all, and he did. He did so by looking at the demons, right in the eyes, and saying these words: “You demons are all liars.” At the sound of these words, the demons all fell.

The demons regrouped, and started a fresh assault. But this time, their weapon wasn’t pain: it was pleasure. They would distract Rawmios with images of naked women in lewd poses, with thoughts of Rawmios’ music and poetry–what he had yet to finish, and would eagerly finish–and with thoughts of how pleasurable it would be to tell his family, “You are liars.”

Rawmios was determined to reconquer the demons, and he did. He did so by looking at the demons, right in the eyes, and saying these words: “The pleasure of a clean slate is greater than the pleasure of naked, lewd women, greater than finishing my music and poetry, and greater than cursing my family.” At the sound of these words, the demons all fell.

Again the demons regrouped, and they started another assault. This final time, their weapon was neither pain nor pleasure: it was to alert Rawmios of his responsibilities. They reminded him of his work as a teacher, and of how his students lacked him. They reminded him of his responsibility to his wife, who lacked him. They reminded him of the listeners of his music and poetry, and of how his listeners lacked him.

Rawmios was determined to defeat the demons, and he did. He did so by looking the demons straight in the eyes, and saying these words: “My students won’t lack me for long, my wife won’t lack me for long, and my listeners won’t lack me for long. Patience is indispensable. When I return to them all, I will give my students a far greater teaching than ever before; I will give my wife a love far greater than ever before; and I will give my listeners music and poetry far greater than ever before. So well will I benefit them all that my brief absence will be quickly forgotten–so quickly forgotten that my absence will seem never to have been. You demons are all liars: be gone with you!” At the sound of these words, the demons all withered and died.

Rawmios had finally wiped the slate clean. All of the bad conceptions of who he was had vanished, exposed for the lies that they all were. His pain was gone, and he had a new vision of his life.

In his vision, he saw a spark of light coming from that Higher Reason, which underlies all things. That light entered Lizas’ womb on the night that Reynholdos Sr. impregnated her. The light added a weight to her pregnancy, such that she’d describe it as if she was about “to give birth to an elephant.” So painful was this pregnancy, which she’d never wanted, that Lizas found herself hating the unborn child. Giving birth to him was particularly painful, but when she looked in his eyes, she loved him.

It became clear to Lizas very early how gifted her new son was, but she didn’t want Reynholdos Jr., Gionos, and Catyas to envy the boy. Though the boy showed aptitudes in music and storytelling, she ignored them. The dark seed of an idea grew in her mind, one of mastering the boy by making him seem the opposite of what he was. When this unnatural urge took root in her mind, the mother in her died to the boy, replaced with a smiling witch.

Though the family was wealthy, Lizas didn’t want Nitramius, as he was called then, to be any better than a common worker. She delighted in how powerful she felt, an unextraordinary woman dominating an exceptional child. She misled Reynholdos Sr., telling him the boy seemed half-witted. They had doctors examine the boy. The doctors told Lizas of the talent they saw in him, and she lied to her husband, telling him the doctors said the opposite. She was afraid of her boy achieving greatness, while the children she preferred were seen as mediocre. He was educated with less intelligent classmates, and not allowed to go outside the city in which the family lived. Nitramius was lonely and miserable.

Four times, though, he secretly left the city and found people who recognized his abilities. The first time, he sang before some people, and they loved his voice. The second time, he gave some poems to be published in a book, and they were loved by many. The third time, he acted in a short play, and he was praised. The fourth time, however, a man gave him a needed criticism: “Nitramius, you do not commit yourself to your art. You want to do everything, yet you achieve almost nothing. You need to learn how to focus, instead of dreaming.” This was very true.

He knew he needed to leave home to achieve his ambitions, but with so little confidence in himself, he was afraid to. Needing to improve his image as an artist, he bought the black silk jacket. What happened soon after has already been told, and this was the end of Rawmios’ vision.

Now that the slate was clean, he knew his mission in life, to use his talents to help others, not just to glorify himself. Rawmios had to teach others, who have also been hurt with demonic lies, how to remake themselves. Those taught to hate themselves had to remake themselves, as Rawmios had, so they could now love themselves.

In his vision, Rawmios also came to realize much in the ouroboros, the Ten Errors, and the Cycle of Decay–much that hadn’t been seen before. He saw Three Unities: the Unity of Space–that a Higher Reason permeates everything, that all is one; the Unity of Time–the only real time is now, for past and future are human constructions; and the Unity of Action–all actions and concepts exist with their opposites close by, and these opposites’ relation to each other are that of a circular continuum, like the serpent biting its tail. Head and tail are opposites, thus showing the relationship.

This last idea was the most exciting one for Rawmios, for now he could justify the remaking of bad self-images into good ones, for the sake of his followers. This was how he could help humanity. He left his place of meditation, and he went into the city to teach any who would listen.

Commentary

All spiritual growth comes from realizing the lies and illusions we have about ourselves and the outside world. In Christianity, the Devil would have us believe, in our lust, greed, pride, and anger, that we’re animals–unworthy of having God’s love. In Hinduism, we’re deceived into not seeing the atman that links us with Brahman. In Buddhism, we don’t see our Buddha-nature, because of illusory maya, and because of the lie of having a self.

Rawmios’ vision of a divine spark of light in himself, giving him all of his talents, is not egotism in him. It is another mythical expression of this same joy, found in all religions, when we sense our closeness to the Divine. The cruelty of the abusive family, lying to the boy about his capacities, giving him a pejorative name, and restricting his movement all symbolize how all of us, born into an illusory material world, fail to see the unities underneath all the differences perceived by the senses. Seeing these unities, we all find our spark of light, our inner greatness.

In reading this story, one must wonder if, again, there was a common mythical root from which it and the legendary life of the Buddha came. The poem below again expresses, in visual form, the erasing of illusions that cause sadness, to be replaced by truths that bring happiness.

Eyes^^^^^^^^^shut,
………….we do………….
…….not see what…….
…ails……………….us….

Erased,^^^^^^^^^^^

…………………………..ills
…..can be replaced…..

Souls^^^^^^^^^with
open^^^^^^^^^eyes
……………go to………….
what………………….lies
…….in lands joyous….

The Tanah–Beginnings, Chapter Seven

[The following is the eighth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, and here is the seventh–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

The ten precepts were indeed relaxed in the land of Spirus–too relaxed, in the opinion of a man named Lorenzos. He was a soldier in Spirus’ army, and he had a wife, Maryas, and two sons, Reynholdos and Ottos. The boys were born several years after their mother and father left Spirus to settle in the land of Canudos, which was north of Spirus.

Lorenzos left Spirus out of distaste for the country’s moral laxity, as he saw it. He was troubled by a need to have the highest ethical standards possible, without reaching the excesses of Puritos. In search of answers, Lorenzos meditated diligently. One day, he had a vision.

He saw a large serpent biting its own tail. Underneath was a sign that read:

THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD GOES

Then Lorenzos’ eyes followed the body of the serpent from its tail to its head. When the vision disappeared, he had an answer to his problem.

The Ten Errors would be interpreted no less severely than this: we journey to the serpent’s brain and eyes, but avoid its nose and teeth. This means that reason and vision are the ideal, but indulgence in appetite, sensual pleasure, and violence causes self-destruction. Thus, Mad Thinking is lustful, violent thinking; Being Dazed by Images is indulgence in spectacles of lewdness; Scurrilous Language is obscene language, but harsh words are necessary to correct a child’s wayward behaviour; and family harmony is maintained by strict loyalty to one’s parents.

Spirus would never accept the severity of Lorenzos’ interpretation, and his vision of the serpent inspired another idea: those who migrate grow stronger. That is, one leaves the old way of life to start a new one elsewhere, like passing beyond the serpent’s bitten tail to its biting head, passing from weakness to strength. Therefore, he and Maryas went to Canudos, and had their sons there, also.

Lorenzos applied his philosophy with especial strictness on Reynholdos, since he was the first-born son. Reynholdos, though, thought of his father as if he were a mad dog from all his fierceness; indeed, Reynholdos imagined himself almost sacrificed for his father’s philosophy. Still, he never complained, nor was he embittered. He admired his father’s ideals and vision so much that he carried on the same philosophy with his own children, not altering an article of it. Lorenzos had had the revelation of the serpent; Reynholdos had had none. Who was he to amend his father’s wisdom?

Believing Canudos to be the land in which his father’s wisdom would flourish, Reynholdos would stay there, teaching his father’s philosophy to all; and he married a woman, Lizas, who had migrated to Canudos from Angulos with her mother. He and Lizas had three children: two sons, Reynholdos II, and Gionos; and Catyas, a daughter. They were very happy together for nine years.

Then Reynholdos begot another son by Lizas.

His name was Nitramius. Lizas chose the name, for it means “alien.” Indeed, this is how she saw her new son, for she had not wanted any more children after her daughter, Catyas. Reynholdos was indifferently happy about a new son, for in his mind, the more children he had, the happier a father he was. Lizas, however, was irritated at having to suffer through nine months of discomfort, all to have a child she’d never wanted. Nitramius’ siblings were born the one close after the other, in yearly succession; but Nitramius himself came five years after Catyas.

Though Lizas was annoyed with this new son, she looked into the eyes of the newborn babe and felt a mother’s love. Thus she loved and hated him. Out of these conflicting feelings came an unnatural urge to dominate the boy. Having worked as a nurse for many years, she was acquainted with matters of illness (her mind was also haunted by these matters). Seeing mildly erratic behaviour in the boy, and ignoring his prodigious intelligence, she told the family that Nitramius was feeble-minded. His siblings, naturally jealous of the attention he was getting, eagerly believed their mother, and hated the boy all the more.

They were relentlessly cruel to the boy, and his mother indulged them, for she wanted Nitramius to be timid. He thought of his family, and most of the people of Canudos, as mad dogs, for the neighbours of his family were no less cruel when they saw his family’s cruelty.

Nitramius ws artistic and intellectual, but his family ridiculed his ideas, calling them childish fantasies. Though they despised him, he refused to despise himself. As a young man, he once bought himself a beautiful, long, black silk jacket. It was expensive, though, and his family was angry with him for buying what he could not afford. Creditors came after him, and his brothers beat him for his extravagance. They threw him in a ditch, and left him for dead.

Instead of returning home, Nitramius tended to his injuries himself, and when he was well enough to move about, he used what money he had to find transportation out of Canudos. His travels took him to the land of Nawaitos, to the east of Canudos. In Nawaitos, he became a teacher, and quickly paid off his creditors.

Though at first Nitramius had difficulty adapting to his new home, he soon found himself able to feel as though he was one of the locals, despite how obviously different he looked as a foreigner. He met a girl there, they fell in love, and got married. They would not have children, though, for Nitramius was afraid that he would be as bestial to them as his own family had been to him. He saw the evil in his family, and he wanted the line to end.

The notion of his family flourishing in a great nation was agreeable to him, though, and his reputation as a teacher, philosopher, and singer grew as well. When seen in his black silk jacket, he was always approached with questions. With a new family, a new country, and a new-found respect, he could fashion his identity anew. If his family thought he was dead, he could consider them dead, too.

With a new identity came a new name. Tiring of the feelings of loneliness and isolation he got from being called “Nitramius,” now he would call himself “Rawmios,” meaning “on a high hill.”

The memories of his cruel family–his distant father, his lying mother, and his violent siblings–still gave him pain, though; and when he wished to start artistic projects–music, plays, poetry–he had few resources. Still, Rawmios used these shortcomings to gain the sympathy of the people of Nawaitos and beyond; for he would use his example to show how others who suffer can escape and thrive. Thus, in helping others, he helped himself.

Commentary

The ouroboros, perhaps borrowed from the Midgard Serpent of Norse myth, is used here as a symbol of the dialectical relationship between all opposites. It’s expressed here so perfectly: one extreme, as it were, biting the other, and every point in between is part of a continuum coiled in a circle. Such is eternity, and the yin/yang-like relationship of all duality. Neither Lorenzos nor Reynholdos Sr. could see that symbolism, though Rawmios would.

People do get stronger from migrating. Lorenzos and Rawmios did. Lorenzos’ weakness was in thinking he could be severe and avoid violence, but he didn’t avoid it…nor did his son or grandsons. Reynholdos Sr. couldn’t see the harm in his father’s thinking. Rawmios could; he wisely left family and country, and he thrived.

His father’s error was seeing no error in parents. Rawmios could see parental error, and thus he shunned parenthood. The error of seeing faultlessness is an example of the relationship between opposites in the ouroboros–truth in paradox.

Rawmios’ wearing of a long, black, silk jacket suggests the possibility of a mythical ancestor of a myth as also expressed in the Biblical story of Joseph and his ‘coat of many colours.’ Below is another poem presented with visual cues to reinforce meaning.

People who stay
in their country, like grass,
with the wind sway together.
They grow very little
and move even less. But the…one

who won’t lay
himself down–like an ass
that leaves slack its short tether
and idly will whittle
away its few years–but will…………….run

far away
from his nation, its crass
souls, and familiar weather
–his patience grows brittle–
will elsewhere shine, bright as the………………………sun.

My Short Story, ‘Santa’s Elves,’ is Published in the ‘Last Christmas’ Horror Anthology

I have a horror short story, ‘Santa’s Elves,’ published in Last Christmas: A Holiday Horror Anthology, from Dark Moon Rising Publications, and edited by Rob Tannahill. The book is currently published in paperback on Amazon. It’s just $15.99. ($3.14 on Kindle.) It’s also available on Godless for $2.99.

My story is about Chinese toy factory labourers who have to work extra hard in December to make toys for the children of rich families in the West. They already work long hours almost every day for barely enough pay to live and/or to send to their families, who live far away from them and so they rarely ever see them. A divine presence from the heavens senses their inner cries for help, and when they make their toys this year, something…lethal…will be added to them, to give those Western families quite a surprise.

There are lots of other great authors whose work is featured on these pages. Please check the back cover in the photo given above to see their names (I hope you can get the image big enough to read them all). Here’s a cool promotional video you can watch.

Please go and buy yourself a copy of this collection of cool Christmas horror stories. You’ll love it! Happy holidays! 🙂

The Alien Buddha’s Best of 2024 is Published!

The Alien Buddha’s Best of 2024, which includes Chapter Eight of my novella, The Targeter, is now published on Amazon.

Chapter Eight of my novella is a reverie of the titular character, ‘The Targeter,’ actually named Sid Arthur Gordimer, who is drunk and high on a combination of marijuana, ecstasy, and ketamine. His thoughts drift back and forth in his reverie of being a prince in a mansion watching half-naked strippers dancing to electronic music in a party, then of being in a royal palace with Indian music. 

His parents, the king and queen, are pressuring him into taking on the responsibilities of the crown…but of course, this is all just the reverie of a drunk, stoned man. Outside of Sid’s apartment, in the real world that he’s trying to escape with booze and drugs, a war is going on. Bombs and gunfire can be heard outside. The war has the potential of going nuclear, and he in his despair cannot face it sober.

He knows he’s no saint, and no prince. He’s a goner.

Please check out this collection of the work of so many talented writers (check the list of names on the back cover, if you can enlarge it sufficiently). And please check out my novella. If you like Chapter Eight, you’ll love the rest of it! 🙂

‘The Ancestors,’ a Horror Story, Chapter Thirteen (Final Chapter)

“Al, no! Please, tell me what’s happening?”

But when Hannah looked in Al’s face, she no longer saw him in there.

She saw Mei instead.

Mei’s cruel, malicious eyes were what was looking back at her.

In total control over Al’s body again, the evil spirit made him raise the knife and point it at Hannah. Mei made him grab her by the throat and shove her against the dining room wall.

Shaking, she gasped, “Al…Al…” through what little voice Mei allowed her to let out.

Mei had Al bare hateful teeth, like a wolf’s fangs, as the knife came slowly closer to Hannah’s chest. Though Al was trying desperately to keep the blade from getting any closer to the woman he loved, she saw only Mei in his eyes–her malevolence, her single-minded wish to stab Hannah to death.

“It’s your…turn…to die, Hannah,” Mei’s feminine voice said through Al’s mouth.

“This…isn’t you, Al,” Hannah gasped, her one hand on the wrist of Al’s knife-gripping hand, her other trying to loosen Mei’s grip on her neck. “Fight it.”

The hand holding the knife was shaking, but for the moment not getting any closer.

“Of course…this isn’t…Al,” Mei said. “It’s Mei.”

“You’re a…split…personality?”

“No. I’m…one of…Al’s…ancestors.”

“That’s…nonsense. Al, you’re ill. You need…help.”

“Al needs…to die. As soon…as I’m finished…with you.”

The shaking knife was getting closer to her chest.

Hannah kept searching for Al in his eyes.

She still saw only Mei in them.

Al was feeling a splitting headache in his efforts to regain control over his body.

No, Mei, he thought. I won’t let you kill Hannah.

The tip of the blade was now a millimetre or two away from Hannah’s skin, just above the top button of her dress. The knife shook a bit, and the blade cut off the button, exposing more of her skin to the sharp tip.

“Al…please!”

A slight scrape of the tip let out a little red.

She looked in his eyes…and she saw Al again.

He was pulling the shaking knife away from her, with all of his strength, his headache killing him, and the soreness in his arms–from Mei’s attempt to keep control–adding to his agony.

Finally, with the knife-gripping arm safely away from Hannah, he started regaining control of his other hand, which loosened its grip on her neck. She pulled free and got away from the wall.

He turned to face her, having most of his control back. He was bent over, panting.

“Al? Are you OK? Are you back?”

“Yeah, I’m back, for the moment. Mei just left me, completely.”

“As soon as we call the police and explain what happened, we’ll find a therapist for you, and you can tell them all about this ‘Mei.'”

“No, Hannah. This can’t go on. I have to die.”

He was looking at that knife in his hand.

“What do you mean, you ‘have to die’? You won’t go to jail, Al. You’ll be found not guilty by reason of…no offence…insanity. We’ll get you the psychiatric help you need. I won’t abandon you.”

“You don’t understand, Hannah. My problem isn’t mental illness, though I’m sure it must look that way to you. The spirit of Mei, one of the family ancestors, is still inside my body. She relinquished control…I don’t know why, but she’ll come back and take control of me again. Then she’ll try to kill you again. I can’t fight her off forever. She will succeed, sooner or later. I can’t let that happen. To save you, I must kill myself.” Sobbing, he pointed the sharp end of the blade at his chest.

“Al, no! What are you talking about? There’s no evil spirit inside you. Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of. We’ll get help for you. I still love you. I’m sorry I said we were through. I still want us to be together.” Now she was sobbing.

“Hannah, I’m not insane.” His arms were shaking as he brought the tip of the blade to his chest. “I know full well what I’m doing. I know now that we cannot be together. I’m doing this, though, because I love you. Either Mei makes me kill you, or I kill myself. There is no other way out of this.”

“Al! Please, no! It’s just a delusion you’re having. Don’t stab yourself! I love you!”

She reached forward to take the knife from him.

“I love you, Hannah. Never forget that.”

He held the knife with the tip of the blade firmly against his chest, ready to push it in.

“God, no! Al, don’t!“

“Oh, no, NO!“

She saw no more Al in his eyes. She saw Mei’s cruel grin.

“Al, no!“

He shook a bit, then raised the knife, as if to stab her.

“NOOOO!!!” he yelled.

Then the blade swung down in an arc…

…and it went deep in his gut.

“NOOOO!!!” she screamed.

He buckled and fell to the floor, his blood gushing out and staining his shirt.

She put her arms around him and kept screaming. She welcomed his blood on her dress, wanting the stains to stay there so she’d still have at least some of him with her.

I came to this house having everyone, she thought as she kept bawling. Now I have no one.

As she wept and wailed, holding his bloody body tightly against herself and practically bathing in the red, she’d had her eyes squeezed shut, as tight as her hold on his body. Then she opened them.

With her tears obstructing her vision, what she saw was blurry and distorted. In that blurry haze, she saw what at first seemed a hallucination.

She wiped away her tears for a clearer look.

No, it was still there.

And it made no sense.

A glowing vision of three old Chinese in traditional clothes–two women and a man.

In my grief, Hannah thought, I’m truly going crazy.

Thank you, Hannah, for helping us achieve our aim, Po said. You are free to go.

“I’m seeing things,” Hannah gasped. “This isn’t real.”

Oh, we are very real, Hannah, Meng said.

“Wait a minute: your voices sound familiar.”

That’s right, Mei said. You heard me from Al.

And me from Emily, Meng said.

And me from Freddie, Po said.

“I’m imagining this,” Hannah said. “There’s no such thing as ghosts. I’m going crazy.”

If you were going crazy, you wouldn’t think you were going crazy, Meng said. We’re real, we assure you.

Al wasn’t going crazy, either, Mei said. We really were possessing him and his family, and now that our work is done here, we can thank you and say goodbye.

“And what was ‘your work’ that had to be done?”

The destruction of the entire Dan family, Po said.

“Why did they, and the man I loved, have to be killed?”

For failing to pray to us, their ancestors, Mei said.

“I thought Al continued praying to you. He told me so. Why wasn’t that good enough for you?”

Because the snubbing of us by the rest of his family…our family…was already bad enough. We felt too dishonoured to forgive them, Meng said.

And when we aren’t sufficiently prayed to, we spirits turn into demons, Po said. The Dan family is almost an anomaly when it comes to Chinese culture. Most Chinese families are close and loving; this is because they pray to their ancestors. An impious attitude took hold of your boyfriend’s parents, in their adopting of Western secularism.

In rejecting belief in spiritual matters, like most of you in the West, their family unity broke down, and they came apart, Mei said. So many social and family problems that you see in Western society come from rejecting spirituality. This is why Chinese families, on average, hold together far better than your Western families.

“I call bullshit on all of that! My family wasn’t religious in any way, and we were always loving and happy. You destroyed Al’s whole family, and you murdered mine!” She was sobbing again.

She looked through her teary eyes and saw wicked grins on Po, Meng, and Mei.

“Why did you kill my family? Why did you make Al kill himself? What did they do to you?”

Oh, we did that for the sheer fun of it, Meng said. We even put the idea in your mind to have your family meet the Dans for dinner…we prodded you to insist on it, never taking ‘no’ for an answer.

The three spirits were still grinning malevolently at her. Her jaw dropped.

“You’re evil, pure evil, far worse than Al’s family!”

What do you expect? Po asked. We’re devils. Thank you for your help, and goodbye.

The three grinning spirits faded away before her eyes.

Hannah let out a loud, ear-splitting scream.

Her screaming and bawling continued over a period of several minutes. A patrol car was going by the house, and the two police in it heard her. They stopped, got out of their car, and ran up to the house.

They looked in a window that revealed the dining room and saw Hannah, still on her knees and holding Al’s bloody body, always sobbing and shaking. They also saw Freddie’s and Emily’s bodies.

“Holy shit!” the male cop said.

“What the hell happened here?” the female cop said.

They went in the house and ran over to Hannah.

“Officer Wong calling,” the male cop said on his cellphone to the local precinct. “We have…what looks like..a triple homicide in the house at…just a minute, I need to take a look…137 Washington Street. We need an ambulance and stretchers.”

The female cop took Hannah in her arms.

“It’s OK, it’s OK,” she said, trying to soothe Hannah.

“No! It’s not OK!” Hannah screamed.

“What happened here? Who killed these people?”

Hannah’s words came out like a frantic firing of machine gun bullets, much too fast for the cops to process. “The ancestors did it! Three demons, two old women and an old man! They killed all of my family, too, up in the attic! They lured us all into a trap! They…”

“What is she raving about?” Officer Wong asked, sneering. “Three demons? Ancestors? This Chinese family may have believed in ancestors and evil spirits, but why would a white woman believe in that nonsense? My family never believed in that old tradition, and I’m glad they didn’t.”

“I have no answers for your questions, Officer Wong,” his partner said, rocking Hannah back and forth gently. “But I guess we’d better check the attic, too.”

“Alright,” he said. “You stay here with her, and I’ll go up there.” He went searching for the stairs.

The three spirits were waiting in the attic.

I don’t like Officer Wong’s lack of faith in us spirits, Po said to Meng and Mei. Maybe we can go after his family, too…just for fun.

All three spirits were grinning.

THE END

‘The Ancestors,’ a Horror Story, Chapter Twelve

After several minutes of the most painful of efforts, Al was just beginning to feel a regaining of control over his body. Just a bit, at first: he could stir slightly, he could fidget and budge, all while suffering a terrible headache to deter him.

Freddie looked over at him and saw his face wincing in pain, the slight movements that suggested someone other than Mei was trying to control Al’s body. Freddie smirked at the amusing sight.

“What’s the matter, loser?” he asked Al. “You trying to hold in a fart? That was directed at Al, not at you, Mei. It looks like he’s trying to regain control.”

“He’s trying to,” Mei’s feminine voice said through Al’s mouth. “He won’t succeed…not for the moment, anyway.”

“Not ever, I’d say,” Emily said. “He’s never succeeded at anything in his life, except annoying people. I’m surprised he can make his body move at all, with you there, Mei.”

“I must say, Mei, that we were wrong to have stopped praying to you,” Freddie said.

“We’re both very sorry about that,” Emily said.

“Just aid us in what we wish to accomplish here, and all will be forgiven,” Mei said.

“He obviously sucked at praying to you all,” Freddie said, “since even his prayers weren’t enough to placate you. As Emily said, Al can’t do anything right.”

“That he actually killed our father, as Meng has told me in my thoughts…”

“And Po told me in mine,” Freddie added.

“…and he didn’t stop his bitch girlfriend sitting over there from killing our mother–that’s all the more reason for Freddie and me to hate Al. Feel free to kill him, too, Mei–we won’t mind.”

“Not at all,” Freddie said. “Kill that loser.”

“Oh, we’ll have him killed,” Mei said. “And we won’t stop with him.”

All three of them looked over at Hannah, bound and gagged in her chair at the other side of the table in the dining room. She was still unconscious.

They stared at her and grinned.

“She’ll make such a tasty dinner,” Freddie said, looking over at possessed Al, and knowing that he could see and hear everything said and done at their dining table…but he could do nothing about it. “Mmm!”

All three of them repeated “Mmm!” even louder while looking at Hannah. She stirred a bit.

Al gained a bit more control of his body, and he made it shake so the legs of his chair rattled against the tiles of the dining room floor.

This was enough to wake Hannah up.

Finding herself bound and gagged, with all three remaining Dan family members staring maliciously at her, she whined through her gag as loudly as she could to produce a scream, while shaking her chair and rattling its legs on the floor as much as Al was.

Assuming her crazy ex-boyfriend wanted her dead as much as his crazy brother and sister did, Hannah couldn’t understand why he was fidgeting in his chair as she was. Was this some pathetic, fake attempt to convince her he still loved her, to make her believe he was indeed possessed by the spirit of one of his ancestors? Did he really think she was stupid enough to believe that?

“You’re gonna taste so good when we’ve cooked your flesh, like a giant turkey,” Freddie said with a laugh, his taunting eyes going back and forth to look into Hannah’s and Al’s. “Yes, Hannah. We’re gonna make Al kill you, cut your body up into pieces, cook them, then eat them…that is, our ancestors will, and Al will. He’ll do it, ’cause he’s so weak! Isn’t that right, loser?”

Al was shaking the chair even more.

“What are you so upset about, loser? You’ve eaten her before, haven’t you?” Freddie laughed.

“Don’t be crude, Freddie,” Emily said.

Al’s shaking and rattling of the chair was getting more and more violent. He almost fell off of it, but he clasped his hand on the table, his fingers inches away from a large, Japanese deba bocho meat cleaver.

“Mei, you aren’t losing control of him, are you?” Meng’s deep, masculine voice said through Emily’s mouth.

“He’s…getting stronger, but I’m…managing,” Mei’s feminine voice said through Al’s mouth.

“If we beat him into submission, will you feel the hurt, or can you leave his body temporarily?” Po asked in that distinctly gravelly, grandmother’s voice, through Freddie’s mouth.

What? Hannah thought with eyes agape. How is Al’s sister talking with a man’s voice, and he and his brother are talking with women’s voices? Can crazy people really imitate voices so precisely, as unnatural as it would be for their biological voices to do? Or am I going crazy?

“Is that you speaking, Po, or is it Freddie?” Meng asked, as if she were as surprised as Hannah. “It sounds like something he’d like to do to Al.”

“It’s most likely a combination of Freddie and me,” Po said, putting a smirk on Freddie’s mouth. “You should be aware that, as we spirits continue possessing these bodies, our wills become more and more merged with those of the bodies.”

“Isn’t that true, Al?” Meng asked him, putting a smirk on Emily’s mouth now, to taunt Al as he continued to shake his body and take it back from Mei.

Meng and Po turned Emily’s and Freddie’s heads back to looking at Hannah as she continued to struggle, in as much futility as Al, to free herself. The two possessed bodies were licking their lips.

“She’s gonna taste so good, isn’t she, Al?” Freddie said in his own voice. “The ancestors are opening my mind to cannibalism; I never imagined I’d develop a taste for it.”

“Same here,” Emily said in her own voice. “Funny what a little demonic possession can do to your head.”

The two noticed that Al’s struggling was abating. He was sitting much more still now.

“Mei, if you have regained control over his body, why don’t you pick up that knife and start cutting her up?” Freddie said.

Al had completely stopped shaking now. Mei looked at Freddie calmly.

“Yes,” Mei said with a smile. “I have fully regained control of the body.”

“Good,” Freddie said in Po’s voice, then got up. “Let’s do this.”

Mei and Meng brought Al and Emily to their feet, Mei gripping that Japanese knife in Al’s hand.

The three of them walked toward Hannah.

She was whining in a shrill, raspy voice behind that gag, fidgeting frantically in her chair. Her tearful eyes looked up into Al’s, desperately looking for his expression rather than Mei’s. All she could see was the cold expression of a killer.

That’s not Al that I see, she thought as the three had almost reached her. It’s not Al at all. Not even a crazy version of him. Could it be a demon inside him?

They were at her chair now. Her ankles were tied to the front legs of her chair, so she couldn’t even kick at her tormentors. She could only squeal and shake.

Emily and Freddie held the chair still from the back, while Al stood before Hannah, Mei having him raise the knife high over his head, ready to come down on her with a stab in the chest.

Mei and Hannah looked in each other’s eyes, the latter’s full of pleading, and the former’s utterly empty of pity. Hannah kept looking for Al, somewhere deep inside those eyes. He had to be there. She searched and searched back there, but she still couldn’t find him.

Now, instead of squeals and whining from her gagged mouth, sobs of despair were coming from it.

I shouldn’t have told him I wanted to dump him, she thought. I want my Al back, crazy or not.

And then, she could finally see Al in those eyes.

And no, it wasn’t hallucinatory wish-fulfillment.

The knife came down in a slashing arc…

…and it dug deep in the middle of Emily’s chest.

“Emily!” Freddie screamed. “Al, you piece of shit!”

Her body fell to the floor, soaking it with blood.

“Mei, I thought you had him under your control!”

“She stepped aside for the moment, it seems,” Al said in his own voice with a grin, then he pointed the knife at Freddie. “And you’re next…loser!”

“Oh!” Freddie said with a chuckle. “You think you’re gonna take me on? C’mon, loser, try it!”

They stepped away from Hannah. They faced each other behind her. She kept whining and struggling.

“C’mon, loser, cut me! Let’s see what you got.”

Al slashed from right to left, aiming for Freddie’s chest; but Freddie grabbed Al’s arm by the wrist, squeezed it hard, and made him drop the knife. Then Freddie punched him hard in the gut.

“Ooh!” he grunted, then fell to the floor.

Freddie picked up the knife and smiled.

“I’ve always hated you, Al. You know that. But your killing Dad, letting your big-nosed, white whore kill our Mom, and killing Emily here give me all the justification I need to dice your guts into a million bloody pieces!”

As Al was getting back up, Freddie ran at him with the knife and threw him hard on the floor. Al banged his right shoulder on it; it hurt like hell.

Freddie started by slashing Al’s face several times.

“There,” he panted. “Now you’re even uglier. Think your bitch girlfriend’s gonna like that? If you do, you’re even stupider than I thought, loser.”

He slashed Al’s face again.

“It won’t matter if she doesn’t like it, though, ’cause I’m gonna kill you now.”

He sat up and raised the knife high over his head, ready to come stabbing down.

Hannah was going crazy not being able to see or help Al. Her only comfort was not watching him die.

Freddie brought the knife down, but Al’s left hand caught him by the wrist just in time. The tip of the blade was a few millimetres away from Al’s chest. Both arms shook as they debated over where the knife would go.

Freddie looked in Al’s eyes with much more than his usual non-fraternal malice. Al was at first looking back into his brother’s eyes with the same hate; then he turned his eyes away to look at Freddie’s hand.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Freddie panted, spit dripping from his mouth onto Al’s bloody face. “You’re weak. You always were weak.”

Hannah could only whine and shake in her chair in blind helplessness.

Al brought his mouth over to Freddie’s hand. He bit two of the fingers holding the knife. He sank his teeth in deep, bloodying Freddie’s hand and his own chest.

“Aaah, you fucker!” Freddie screamed, then he dropped the knife to suck on the cut.

Al pushed him off with a strength he never knew he had, then kicked him hard in the balls. As Freddie buckled, Al grabbed the knife and ran at him, knocking him to the floor.

Al held the knife with the handle down. He wanted to bash Freddie’s face in before stabbing him. The wooden handle smashed down on Freddie’s forehead once, on his nose twice, breaking it, on his left cheek three times, his right cheek once, his chin twice, and his mouth four times, knocking out two upper and two lower teeth and soaking his face in blood. His bruises would look like a black-and-blue mask.

“You’re still…a loser, Al,” Freddie gasped in toothless lisps.

Al flipped the knife around to point the blade down. “Yeah, Freddie,” he said. “You’re about to be stabbed to death…by a loser. Be proud of that.”

He plunged the blade deep into Freddie’s throat, shutting him up once and for all.

Al let out a big sigh, then got off of Freddie’s body. He went over to Hannah and cut her feet and hands loose.

She got up from the chair and got the gag off in an impatient hurry.

“Oh, thank God,” she sighed. “And thank you, Al, for stopping them.”

He just stood there–silent, unmoving, frowning, and looking down at the floor, his face dripping blood all over it and his shirt.

“Look, I realize now that…your family…had some serious…well, mental health issues,” she said, searching for the kindest way she could put it. “And it’s…obviously harmed you…emotionally, too. I think we can work this out. We’ll find…a professional…to help you through this.”

Still gripping the knife, he started shaking and twitching.

“Oh, no, NO!!! Hannah, get away…from me!”

‘The Ancestors,’ a Horror Story, Chapter Eleven

Hannah’s heart was beating even harder and faster now that she heard the door open and Freddie and Emily walk into their parents’ bedroom. It wouldn’t take long for them to deduce that she was hiding under their mom’s and dad’s bed.

Her mind was still racing, trying to make sense of all of the craziness that had been happening up until now, and especially now that she was next to be killed. Still, her priority was wondering what she’d do when Al’s brother and sister…and Al himself, once he was to come down from the attic after that kick she’d given him in the balls…found her. She had no time to process any of this.

She listened for Freddie and Emily.

Total silence.

No shuffling around, looking for her.

What were they doing? If they knew she was under the bed, why not just get down, look under, and grab her by the feet? Were they toying with her?

Yes, they were, actually.

The siblings were standing by the bed, looking down at it. There was nowhere else in the room for Hannah to have hidden, anyway–no closet big enough for her to fit into. Emily put her finger to her lips to tell Freddie to be quiet. They were smirking.

Hannah could hear light, unintelligible whispering.

“Let’s wait a while before getting her,” Emily said softly in Freddie’s ear. “Give her a moment to think through what’s happened…also drag out the terror for her, and the false hope.”

“Good idea,” he whispered back in Emily’s ear.

Hannah’s heart still pounding as hard and fast as ever, she began to think through everything that had happened to lead to this nightmare.

This was just supposed to be a pleasant dinner for both of our families to meet each other, she thought. Al was so resistant to me meeting his family, but I assumed it was just going to be some mundane problem. I never would have imagined, in a million years, that his family would be a bunch of murdering psychos…and that Al himself was one of them, too!

“Where is that loser, Al?” Freddie whispered.

“Shh!” Emily said, pointing at the bed.

All in one night, Hannah thought, I went from pleasantly anticipating meeting Al’s family, mine visiting them, and assuming I’d marry Al and unite our families in mutual love, to not only realizing that Al was being bullied by them, but also…having all of my immediate family…brutally murdered (She tried to hold back a sob), and worst of all, Al is one of the killers! I went from hopes of extending my family, to include his, to losing my family, Al’s family, and having to dump the man I love…loved! How could such extremes happen?

Now she let out an audible sob.

“Alright,” Emily whispered. “Let’s do this.”

She and Freddie squatted and looked under the bed.

Hannah at this moment was still far too absorbed in her thoughts to notice the siblings coming down to see her. This craziness has gotten so extreme, she continued thinking, that I have become a killer, too! I stabbed Al’s mom with that knife! It was self-defence, but I’d never in a million years see myself killing someone…wait…

She felt Freddie’s and Emily’s hands on her ankles, pulling her out from the bed.

“Ah!” she yelped, then grabbed onto the bedposts at the head of the bed to stop them from getting her out. The siblings kept yanking and yanking at her shaking legs, their grip irritating her skin and causing her shoulders and wrists to ache, but she kept a firm hold on those bedposts.

The siblings stopped yanking for a second, let out sighs of frustration at the same time, and in the voices of Po and Meng, they shouted, “Fang shou!”

Magic in those Chinese words forced Hannah to let go of the bedposts.

She screamed as Freddie and Emily pulled her out from the bed, her unable to conceive how mere words could force her to let go. Her screams were cut short by a blow from Emily’s fist on her head, smashing her face on the wooden floor, giving her a nosebleed and knocking her out. Meng’s spirit had given Emily’s fist extra strength.

“Let’s tie her up and take her downstairs,” she said in Meng’s deep, male voice.

“There’s rope in the room next door,” Freddie said in Po’s raspy, feminine voice. He left the room.

In the hall, he saw Al having just finished coming down the attic stairs.

“Where have you been, you loser?” Freddie asked in his own voice. “You’re fucking everything up again, aren’t you? Where are Mom and Dad? Emily and I are trying to take care of your girlfriend, and you’re wasting time in the–“

“Don’t talk to me that way, boy!” Al said in Mei’s authoritative, feminine voice. “I was stalled by Al’s determined efforts to regain control over his body. He killed your father, and Hannah killed your mother. I’ve finally subdued Al, so I can help you and Emily now.”

“Sorry, Mei,” Freddie said, bowing and gesturing to her with his hands clasped together. “I have to find some rope in the other room. Meng is with Emily in our parents’ bedroom. Hannah is knocked out. We have to tie her up and take her downstairs.” He went in the room to find the rope.

Mei took Al’s body into his parents’ bedroom.

Though Al’s soul, for the moment, was fully under Mei’s control, he was able to see, however passively, Hannah lying unconscious on the floor. He tried with all of his might to regain control over his body, but Mei was ensuring that he couldn’t make his body budge an inch.

Is Hannah dead? he wondered.

He couldn’t even weep for her.

Freddie returned with the rope, a bandana, and a small rubber ball to use as a gag for Hannah’s mouth. All three Dan family members, under the control of Po, Meng, and Mei, helped tie up and gag Hannah.

They carried her downstairs and into the dining room, and with some remaining rope, they tied her to a chair. They sat next to each other, Emily in the middle, at chairs on the other side of the table.

The whole time, Al had been trying, in all futility, to take control of his body and stop the other two. All he could do was watch helplessly, and be forced to help them through Mei’s possession of him.

“So,” Freddie said in Po’s voice. “What should we do with her, Al? We know you can see and hear us.”

“But you can’t do anything about it,” Emily said in Meng’s voice. “You broke our agreement, Al, so we’re under no obligation to do anything for you.”

“And doing things to upset you has always been much more amusing than doing things for you,” Po said. “What shall we do with her?”

“Kill her, of course,” Meng said.

“Of course, of course,” Po said. “But how?”

“In a way that Al will find the most upsetting. We should make him hold the knife that cuts into her chest.”

Al wanted to scream “NO!!!” at the top of his lungs…but he couldn’t even grunt.

“Then we can make him cut her body into pieces, cook them, and serve them as our dinner. The Dan family may have been sated at dinner, but we ancestral spirits haven’t had a bite to eat. We’ll let Al have the biggest share of Hannah’s cooked flesh.”

Mei curled Al’s lips upward in a smirk.

Al couldn’t even weep.

‘The Ancestors,’ a Horror Story, Chapter Ten

“Oh, my God!” Hannah screamed. “Al! What the fuck are you doing?”

Al dropped the baseball bat on the floor. It bounced a few times, rattling by his feet.

He was shaking and weeping.

“Oh, God, Hannah,” he sobbed. “I’m so sorry. It wasn’t me who killed your brother. It was–“

“Sorry?” she yelled. “What do you mean, it wasn’t you? I just saw you kill my brother, you crazy bastard! Why?“

“It wasn’t me. It’s…the ancestors. Their spirits are taking control of our bodies.”

“What on Earth are you talking about, Al?”

“This is why…I didn’t want you to come here…and meet my family. They’re worse than crazy. They’re cursed…by the spirits of our ancestors.”

“None of this is making any sense, Al,” she sobbed. “Why did you just bash my brother’s brains in with that baseball bat? What did he do to you? Why did your family kill my mom and dad? What did they do to you?”

“When we moved…from China to here, my family decided…they didn’t want to pray…to the family ancestors anymore. I knew that would bring bad luck to us. I continued praying to them, but it wasn’t enough. The spirits of our ancestors have been plaguing us with bad luck for not praying to them anymore, but it always looks like it’s my fault. Only I pray to them, but I’m blamed for our problems. No good deed goes unpunished, I guess.”

“Al, you’re trying to tell me that ‘spirits’ are why you helped your family murder my entire family?!“

“I killed my father, too…to stop him from killing your brother. I never stopped you from killing my mother, so you could save yourself.”

“And then you killed Doug yourself! Do you want a medal, or something?”

“Hannah, you don’t understand…the spirit of Mei, one of the family ancestors, took control of my body. She made me hit your brother with the bat. She killed him, not me.”

“You expect me to believe this nonsense?”

“When my mother tried to kill you, and she said, ‘Goodbye, Hannah,’ she spoke with a man’s voice, remember? Too low to be a woman’s voice. That’s because a man’s spirit, Meng’s, was controlling her body! The moans in the attic are also the voices of the spirits, luring you all up here. You gotta believe me, Hannah!”

“Oh, what does any of that prove, Al? Face the facts: your whole family is insane, including you. I’ve known lots of Chinese who were wonderfully nice people, and I thought you were one of them–the man I fell in love with was certainly one of them, but…” She looked down at the bodies of her family and resumed weeping. “Oh, my God!”

“The spirits tricked me into thinking that if…I gave them your family, they wouldn’t cause the two of us any bad luck, then…”

“There is no more ‘the two of us,’ Al.”

He wept louder. “Then I killed my father…to try to save your brother. The spirits saw that I broke my pact with them, and now they’re trying to ruin my life, to destroy our love! Mei came into me, and made me kill your brother. I’m so sorry, Hannah! I didn’t want any of this!”

“‘Sorry’ won’t fix this, Al. You and I are through.”

“Oh, no, NO!!! Hannah!” He was shaking and wincing.

“Bawling at me isn’t going to fix this either, Al. We shouldn’t see each other anymore.”

“No, you don’t understand. Mei…is coming into me…again. Go! Run! She’ll make me…kill you!”

He was fidgeting before her as if in pain.

All she saw was a crazy person.

He buckled to the floor, then reached for the bat.

“Run, Hannah! Get out…of the house!”

“Al, you need psychiatric help.”

In his pained voice, he said, “Mei will…” Then, with the bat in his hand, Mei hissed, “kill you!”

Hannah sneered at the creepy feminine voice coming out of his mouth.

With a crazed look in his eyes, and all of his teeth showing like bared fangs, Mei made him get up and raise the bat to his left, ready to crack it on Hannah’s head.

She screamed and ducked as Mei had him swing the bat from Hannah’s right to her left. The bat missed its mark, then she kicked him hard in the balls.

She ran for the pull-down attic stairs and got down to the third floor. Then she ran down the hall for the stairs to the second floor, but she heard two voices coming up from there.

“I’ll bet Al’s fucked this all up,” Freddie said to Emily as they were coming up from the stairs to the third floor.

“Without a doubt,” Emily said.

Hannah yelped, then ran back and found Mr. And Mrs. Dan’s bedroom. She looked around frantically for a place to hide as she could hear Freddie’s and Emily’s approaching steps, then she saw the bottom of the bed. She quickly slipped under it.

“Hannah,” Emily said with a smile as she and her brother reached their parents’ bedroom. “I know where she went.”

‘The Ancestors,’ a Horror Story, Chapter Nine

Hannah could no longer contain herself.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” she said, rising from her seat.

“What’s your problem now?” Freddie asked with another of his smug smirks.

“What’s my problem now?” she said, sneering at his attitude with incredulity. “I can’t believe this family of yours!”

“Excuse me?” Mrs. Dan said.

“Yes, I’m saying that without holding it back this time,” Hannah said, her face red, not with embarrassment from making the Dans lose face, but with anger. “Mrs. Dan, my entire family has been missing for the past…what, half-hour at least? Not even Al has returned! What is going on here? Since when is this even remotely how guests are treated?”

“Hanna, please, calm down,” Mrs. Dan said.

“Calm down? All my dad did was go to the upstairs bathroom! All my mom and brother did was go up to find out what happened to them. They should all be back by now! Why aren’t they?”

“I’m sure there’s a simple explanation for all of this,” Freddie said, then, with an unmistakeable tone of contempt, “Take it easy.”

“Don’t you tell me to take it easy, Mr. Brother-bully!” Hannah shouted. “You can’t even do a simple thing like treat Al with respect, and you expect me to be cool when my entire family and boyfriend have gone missing for no good reason? There’s a simple explanation for this? You’ll need an extraordinary explanation for all of this, which–if I get it, if I actually get it–will get an extraordinary apology from me. I don’t see any of my family coming back. I don’t see Emily, or your dad or your brother coming back. What secret are you hiding from us?” She glared at both of them.

Mrs. Dan was laughing nervously. “Let’s go upstairs together, my dear,” she said to Hannah as she rose from her seat.

Hannah frowned at her. “And it will be my turn to disappear, I suppose,” she hissed. “At least you won’t have anyone else to complain about your less-than-stellar hospitality, will you, Mrs. Dan? And I’ll finally know the truth…with a knife in my back, I suppose?”

Mrs. Dan laughed again. “I assure you, my dear, at my age, I lack the strength to harm you even if I wanted to. Let’s go up the stairs and find them.”

“Or is this some elaborate prank, and I’m going to find them all up in the attic or something, laughing and partying,” Hannah said with a scowl as she followed Mrs. Dan out of the living room.

You’ll find them all in the attic, all right, Freddie thought. But they won’t be doing anything but bleeding, as you soon will be, you crabby little bitch.

“Please don’t take it too personally if I stay behind you the whole way up, Mrs. Dan,” Hannah said coolly.

“As you wish, dear,” Mrs. Dan said, then thought, Not that staying behind me will do you any good, of course.

“Of course, you’re not the only one I need to worry about, as far as possibly getting a knife in my back is concerned.”

That’s right, Mrs. Dan thought as they reached the second floor. “Would you like to look around the rooms on this floor, my dear?”

“No, I wouldn’t. I’d like you to show me around, while I keep my eyes open for any…surprises.”

“Very well,” Mrs. Dan said with another giggle, then she opened the door to the nearest of the rooms. She went in first, then Hannah followed, her eyes darting around everywhere for possible attackers. Mrs. Dan turned on the light.

Hannah quickly scanned the room for her family, and of course she found nobody. Then she went back to looking out for any lurking dangers.

“Nothing here,” she said with her permanent pout. “Let’s carry on to the next room.”

They left the room, Hannah always behind her host and looking out for trouble. They approached the next room. There was a noise inside it, something having fallen over.

“What was that?” Hannah snapped, her back straight and rigid.

“Let’s find out,” Mrs. Dan said as she opened the door, then turned on the light. Some boxes lay on the floor in a mess. The women went in the room.

Again, after Mrs. Dan switched on the light, Hannah remained behind her, taking quick looks around the room while remembering to look behind her in case someone was sneaking up on her. She stepped in further.

Apart from the mess of boxes in the middle of the floor, there didn’t seem to be anything of concern going on there. Hannah took a deep breath.

Whatever’s going on up here, she thought, I’m pretty sure I won’t be going back downstairs.

She felt something brush against her calf.

“Oh!” she yelped, then looked behind her and saw nobody. She looked down.

It was the cat.

She smiled, sighed, bent down, and petted it.

“Aww, cute little kitty cat,” she said.

She felt a hand touch her shoulder.

She yelped again and looked up behind her. The cat ran away.

“Oh, I’m sorry, dear,” Mrs. Dan said, taking her hand away. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I just wanted to say that we seem to be finished in here, and so we can go on to the next room.”

“Oh, OK,” Hannah said with a nervous chuckle. She got up and followed Mrs. Dan out of the room.

As they went back into the hall, Hannah noticed something jutting out of the right front pocket of Mrs. Dan’s black pants. It hadn’t been there before. It looked like the handle of a knife.

Did she pocket it while I was distracted by the cat? she wondered. I don’t dare ask her about it, but I’m especially making sure she’s always within my field of vision now.

They went through the rest of the rooms on the second floor and found nothing, Hannah always checking to see if Emily or Mr. Dan was about to ambush her, while never taking her eyes off of Mrs. Dan. Then the two women went up the stairs, Mrs. Dan first, of course, to the third floor.

As they went through the rooms on the third floor, Hannah found it increasingly suspicious that there was still no trace of her parents or brother, nor of Mr. Dan, Emily, or Al.

“This doesn’t make any sense!” Hannah said in exasperation. “Where the hell is everyone?”

“I’m sure we’ll find them soon, d–“

“No, you tell me what you’ve done with them! Mrs. Dan, I’ll bet you and your family already know where they are, and you’re leading me into the same trap, aren’t you?”

“Oh, come, come, my d–“

“Don’t you ‘come, come’ me! Something screwy is–“

They heard a moan from up in the attic.

Hannah looked daggers at Mrs. Dan.

“Your plan is for me to be moaning like that, too, isn’t it?”

Mrs. Dan giggled again. “No, not at all, don’t be–“

“Let’s go up there. You first.”

As they went up the ladder to the attic, Hannah looked at that handle sticking out of Mrs. Dan’s pants pocket.

I’m no pickpocket, she thought, but maybe she’ll be too distracted from climbing the stairs to notice me pulling that knife out of her pocket, if that’s what it in fact is. She reached up slowly and carefully.

Another moan was heard from the stack of boxes.

“Over there,” Hannah said when both of them had reached the top of the stairs. She pointed to the boxes, then ran ahead.

Aren’t you worried about me being behind you? Mrs. Dan thought with a smirk.

Hannah went behind the boxes, near a window. A large, long blanket was covering whoever was moaning, or so it seemed. She threw the blanket off a bit and saw her father’s bifurcated, bloody face, and her mother’s bloody, slit throat.

She screamed out loud, then looked up, remembering Mrs. Dan. She could see her in the window reflection, raising the axe that had killed Brad, about to be buried in her back.

“Goodbye, Hannah,” Meng said through Mrs. Dan’s mouth.

Hannah spun around and lunged at the woman’s guts.

“Did you misplace this?” Hannah hissed at her.

Mrs. Dan dropped the axe behind her, looked down at her knife in her bloody belly, and said in Meng’s low voice,” So, it was…you who…took it. No…matter, another…will kill…you.”

She fell to the floor.

Shaking and panting, Hannah looked back at her parents’ corpses. “That psycho-bitch,” she gasped. “I knew something twisted was going on here. This whole family’s fucked up.” Then she turned around again, her eyes darting around frantically for that…other…who would kill her. She saw no one.

She looked back at the bodies, with teary eyes.

“Oh, Mom, Dad,” she sobbed.

Then she noticed the arm of another body beside her father’s. She saw the black shirt sleeve of Mr. Dan.

She threw the blanket further off, and indeed, it was his body, with a bloody gash in the chest.

“Oh, God!” she gasped, then retched. At least I don’t have to worry about him killing me, she thought, then she remembered to look around the attic again for any more attackers. “Freddie? Emily? No? Good.” Where’s Al?”

She heard another moan, from the far side of Mr. Dan’s body, under the blanket.

Where’s Doug? she wondered. “Oh, no.”

There was a slight movement under the blanket’s edge.

She went over, past the three revealed corpses, and dreaded what she was about to see, but held the hope that her brother was still alive…or was it Al?

She pulled the blanket away. Doug moaned again, his eyes half-open.

“Oh, God! Doug!” she said.

CRACK!!!

She gave a jolt, and screamed at the sight of his now-bloody, fractured skull.

Then she looked up.

The bat was in Al’s hands.