Tag: Horror fiction

Analysis of ‘The Birds’

The Birds is a 1963 natural horror film produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock and written by Evan Hunter, based on the horror short story by Daphne du Maurier. The film stars Tippi Hedren and Rod Taylor, and costars Jessica Tandy, Veronica Cartwright, and Suzanne Pleshette.

The film is so completely different from the short story that the only two things they have in common are the title and the premise of birds violently attacking people, the attacks being interrupted by pauses, rests of several hours each. Everything else–the setting, characters, and the incidents–is completely reworked to the point of the film being an utterly different story from du Maurier’s version.

In 2016, The Birds was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the United States Library of Congress, and selected for preservation in its National Film Registry.

Here are some quotes:

Melanie: Have you ever seen so many seagulls? What do you suppose it is?
Mrs. MacGruder: Well, there must be a storm at sea. That can drive them inland, you know.

Mitch: [deliberately mistaking Melanie for a sales clerk] I wonder if you could help me?
Melanie: Just what is it you’re looking for, sir?
Mitch: Lovebirds.
Melanie: Lovebirds, sir?
Mitch: Yes, I understand there are different varieties. Is that true?
Melanie: Oh yes, there are.
Mitch: Well, these are for my sister, for her birthday, see, and uh, as she’s only going to be eleven, I, I wouldn’t want a pair of birds that were too demonstrative.
Melanie: I understand completely.
Mitch: At the same time, I wouldn’t want them to be too aloof either.
Melanie: No, of course not.
Mitch: Do you happen to have a pair of birds that are just friendly?

Mitch: Doesn’t this make you feel awful… having all these poor little innocent creatures caged up like this?
Melanie: Well, we can’t just let them fly around the shop, you know.

Mitch: We met in court… I’ll rephrase it. I saw you in court… Don’t you remember one of your practical jokes that resulted in the smashing of a plate-glass window?
Melanie: I didn’t break that window. What are you, a policeman?
Mitch: No, but your little prank did. The judge should have put you behind bars. I merely believe in the law, Miss Daniels… I just thought you might like to know what it’s like to be on the other end of a gag. What do ya think of that?
Melanie: I think you’re a louse.
Mitch: I am.

Mitch: Well, small world…How do you know Annie?
Melanie: We went to school together – college…
Mitch: So you came up to see Annie, huh?
Melanie: Yes.
Mitch: I think you came up to see me.
Melanie: Now why would I want to see you of all people?
Mitch: I don’t know. You must have gone to a lot of trouble to find out who I was and where I lived.
Melanie: No, it was no trouble at all. I simply called my father’s newspaper. Besides, I was coming up anyway. I’ve already told you that.
Mitch: You really like me, huh?
Melanie: I loathe you. You have no manners, you’re arrogant, and conceited, and I wrote you a letter about it, in fact. But I tore it up.

“I’m neither poor nor innocent.” –Melanie

Annie: [after birds attack the children at a party] That makes three times.
Melanie: Mitch, this isn’t usual, is it? The gull when I was in the boat yesterday. The one at Annie’s last night, and now…
Mitch: Last night? What do you mean?
Melanie: A gull smashed into Annie’s front door. Mitch – what’s happening?

“I wish I were a stronger person. I lost my husband four years ago, you know. It’s terrible how you, you depend on someone else for strength and then suddenly all the strength is gone and you’re alone. I’d love to be able to relax sometime.” –Lydia

“Oh Daddy, there were hundreds of them… Just now, not fifteen minutes ago… at the school… the birds didn’t attack until the children were outside the school… crows, I think… Oh, I don’t know, Daddy, is there a difference between crows and blackbirds?… I think these were crows, hundreds of them… Yes, they attacked the children. Attacked them!” –Melanie, on the phone

“Birds have been on this planet, Miss Daniels, since Archaeopteryx, a hundred and forty million years ago. Doesn’t it seem odd that they’d wait all that time to start a…a war against humanity.” –Mrs. Bundy

“It’s the end of the world.” –drunk

“I think we’re in real trouble. I don’t know how this started or why, but I know it’s here and we’d be crazy to ignore it… The bird war, the bird attack, plague – call it what you like. They’re amassing out there someplace and they’ll be back. You can count on it.” –Mitch

“Look at the gas, that man’s lighting a cigar!” –Melanie, as she sees a man lighting his cigar as gasoline is leaking around him

“Why are they doing this? Why are they doing this? They said when you got here, the whole thing started. Who are you? What are you? Where did you come from? I think you’re the cause of all this. I think you’re evil. EVIL!” –mother in diner, to Melanie

Cathy: Mitch, can I bring the lovebirds in here?
Lydia: No!
Cathy: But Mom, they’re in a cage!
Lydia: They’re birds, aren’t they?
Mitch: Let’s leave them in the kitchen, huh, honey?

Cathy: Mitch, why are they doing this, the birds?
Mitch: We don’t know, honey.
Cathy: Why are they trying to kill people?
Mitch: I wish I could say.
Cathy: I-I’m sick, Melanie.

There is no apparent reason for birds of all kinds to be suddenly swooping down on and attacking people, pecking and clawing at them. I find the best way to find meaning in these attacks is to see them as symbolic of something else…a different attacker from the skies.

To determine what, or who, this other attacker could be, I recommend a reading of du Maurier’s short story. Hints can be found in such things as the different setting. In her story, the bird attacks occur not in California, but in England; they also occur not in the early 1960s, but just after WWII.

When one considers the destruction Nazi Germany’s bombings of England caused, as well as the trauma they caused the survivors, we can see how du Maurier’s The Birds can be seen as a near pun on the Blitz, and therefore also be symbolic of it.

So the birds, in her story and–by extension–Hitchcock’s film, can be seen to symbolize bomber planes. Nat Hocken, the farmer and protagonist of the short story, believes it’s the colder weather that’s making the birds so aggressive. Later on in the story, a farmer claims it’s “the Russians” who have somehow incited the birds to attack by poisoning them (page 9 from the above link). Mrs. Trigg, the wife of his boss, wonders if the cold weather is coming from Russia (page 4).

Given that du Maurier’s story takes place shortly after the end of the Second World War, and therefore at the beginning of the Cold War, we can now see what the colder weather and reference to Russians are hinting at: the attacking birds represent a paranoid fear of a Soviet invasion.

A few bird attacks on Nat, a WWII veteran, would trigger PTSD responses in him, making him fantasize about bird attacks happening all over England, symbolic of airstrikes. Since the story is essentially–though not exclusively–from his point of view (even though it isn’t a first-person narration), we can easily view the story as a hallucinatory fantasy in his mind.

With these insights from the short story, we can gain an understanding of what’s going on in the film. Hitchcock spoke of how the birds are getting revenge on man for taking nature for granted; instead of birds being caged, they force people to cage themselves in houses, restaurants, telephone booths, etc.

The changing of the setting to California (in the coastal town of Bodega Bay, about an hour-and-25-minute drive from San Francisco) is instructive in this regard of birds’ revenge on man. If their attacks symbolize aerial bombardments (kamikaze-like in the short story, with birds dying upon hitting the ground), we could see this revenge as symbolizing that of those countries the US had so far bombed: Japan and North Korea; also, there was the US-supported coup in Guatemala in 1954, which included air bombings of Guatemala City and the threat of a US invasion. The birds’ attacks thus can be said to symbolize a fear of other nations bombing the US in revenge for having been bombed.

This theme of revenge first appears right at about the beginning of the movie, when Mitch Brenner (Taylor) enters a pet store where birds are sold on the second floor, and pretends that he thinks Melanie Daniels (Hedren)–who has played a practical joke leading to a broken window and a legal case that he, a lawyer, knows of–works in the store. He plays this trick on her in retaliation for her practical joke, which caused such annoyance to those affected by it.

He asks her about buying a pair of lovebirds as a gift for his younger sister, eleven-year-old Cathy Brenner (Cartwright). Annoyed at the comeuppance she’s received, yet also finding him attractive, Melanie wants to spite Mitch by, on the one hand, delivering a pair of green lovebirds to his home personally, and on the other, writing a note to him that she hopes the birds would “help [his] personality”…though she tears up the letter.

It’s interesting in this connection to note that, for pretty much the remainder of the film, she is dressed in a distinctive green outfit. A green ‘bird’ is giving Mitch green birds. This ‘bird’ also played a practical joke resulting in a broken window, just like the many broken windows caused by the bird attacks, which have begun since her arrival, in that green outfit, in Bodega Bay. Indeed, a hysterical mother in a diner blames Melanie for bringing the bird attacks to the town.

So we shift from lovebirds to violent ones, suggesting a dialectical relationship between love and hostility. This dialectical tension is sublated in how Mitch and Melanie are themselves two lovebirds who, in spite of how annoyed they are with each other at first, are attracted to each other.

Film critic and historian Andrew Sarris noted how complacent and self-absorbed the main characters are: Mitch, Melanie, Annie, and Lydia. Such self-absorption and egotism suggest the effects of alienation in a capitalist society, one about to be attacked in symbolic revenge for the attacks of imperialism on other countries. One manifestation of contradiction in dialectics is that of attack vs. counterattack, or revenge; another such manifestation is action vs. passivity, or resting. In the short story, Nat speculates that the birds attack at high tide (thesis), and at low tide (antithesis), the birds rest (page 12 of the above link).

The first major bird attack and the climactic last one are on Melanie (the bird nips at Mitch’s fingers and ankle at the very end are so brief as not to count for much). This is her karma–birds attacking a bird, the dialectic of attack vs. counterattack.

Another thing to remember about Melanie is that she is a bourgeois. Her father owns a newspaper, and she drives into Bodega Bay wearing a luxurious fur coat over that green outfit. So as the deliverer of the green lovebirds to Mitch and Cathy, Melanie–as an embodiment of capitalism and a personification of the birds–is symbolically bringing the avian aerial bombardment on the town. This linking of capitalism with aerial bombing is brought to you courtesy of imperialism. The hysterical mother in the diner is right to blame Melanie for all the mayhem.

The US bombed Japan and North Korea. Due to racist immigration policies, only limited numbers of Asians had been allowed to live in California by the time of the filming of The Birds. Melanie tells Mitch her family is sponsoring a Korean boy, but her charity won’t come near to compensating for the imperialist destruction she personifies, or the racism of the government that supports her class interests: those bird attacks are symbolic of, in part, an Asian, avian revenge.

This 1963 film came out at the height of the Cold War, just a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world came inches close to nuclear war. During the previous decade, there had been the McCarthyist Red Scare, the fear of which I dealt with in my analysis of The Manchurian Candidate.

The bird attacks can thus be seen to represent a repressed fear of a communist invasion, a revenge bombing for all the American imperialist bombings and coups that went on between the end of WWII and the early 60s. Now, what is repressed will return to consciousness, though in a new, unrecognizable form: thus, bomber planes resurface in the conscious mind in the form of birds.

This is the fear of a socialist revenge on capitalism, a repressed fear, since bourgeois Hitchcock would never have seen it as such in his own film; he’d instead speak of caged birds getting revenge on man, their cagers and polluters of the air. Recall the amateur orinthologist, Mrs. Bundy (played by Ethel Griffies), speaking of how peaceful birds usually are, and that it’s man who makes life unliveable for all. Those who have a historical materialist understanding of the world can easily translate “man” as ‘the capitalist.’

Now, just as capitalism (personified here in rich bitch Melanie Daniels) destroys everything around it (symbolized in her arrival in Bodega Bay with the lovebirds, followed soon after by the bird attacks), so will capitalism ultimately crumble under its own contradictions, as Marx predicted in Capital, Vol. 3, in his discussion of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (in the film, symbolized by the birds attacking Melanie, ‘the bird,’ at the end, almost killing her).

Another issue capitalism raises is alienation, shown symbolically in the film through the love/hate relationship of not only Mitch and Melanie, but also that of him and his mother (Tandy), who sabotaged his relationship with Annie Hayworth (Pleshette), his previous girlfriend. On top of this is Melanie’s estrangement from her mother, who ran off with another man.

To get back to Lydia, who disapproves also of her son’s budding relationship with Melanie and tries to sabotage it by telling him of a scandal involving Melanie falling naked into a fountain, his mother fears his commitment to a woman will result in him abandoning his mother. Mitch’s father died several years before the beginning of the film, so Lydia is afraid of having to carry on life alone.

This fear of loneliness, coupled with difficulties forming healthy relationships, is often a consequence of alienation under capitalism. Dialectically speaking, this clinging love of Lydia’s, which spoils Mitch’s love life, is another sublation of the film’s theme of the love/hate opposition, which is symbolized by the green lovebirds and Melanie in her green outfit on the one hand, and the attacking birds on the other.

One interesting contrast between the short story and the film is how, in the former, the first of the bird attacks happens on page two of the link provided above, but in the latter, we must wait about fifty minutes until a group of birds attacks children at Cathy’s birthday party. Prior to that attack, there’s only the one gull that hits Melanie on the head, the one that crashes into Annie’s front door, and the ominous hovering and resting of birds on several occasions throughout the film.

Because all that matters to imperialists is the controlling of other countries, the ruling class gives not a second of thought to how their bombs not only kill people, but also traumatize and disrupt the lives of the survivors. The lengthy process of developing the main characters, prior to the birds’ first major attacks, humanizes them for us in a way that the East Asian or, more recently, Middle Eastern victims of bombings are never humanized.

We see the traumatized reaction of Lydia when she sees her neighbour’s eyeless corpse, and we sympathize with her. We rarely contemplate the trauma of the surviving Japanese after the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We imagine North Koreans to be neurotically servile to the ruling Kim family; we never consider how the North Koreans’ collective trauma, after the US bombed their whole country, drove them to look up to the strength of the Kims to ensure that such a bombing will never happen again.

We see the terror of the children attacked by the birds at Cathy’s party, then later as they run from their school. We seldom consider, for example, the Yemeni children killed in a school bus after being hit by an airstrike. The only way many of us in the West can contemplate such horrors is if they’re inflicted on us, but with the bombs replaced with birds. Recall how, in the diner scene, the bird attacks are sometimes referred to as a “war” being waged against man.

Speaking of the diner scene, a tense discussion of the bird attacks there brings up responses as varied as the denials of Mrs. Bundy, the hysterics of the mother of two children, and a drunk Irishman proclaiming doomsday. His insistence on it being “the end of the world” makes me think of Biblical allusions other than his to Ezekiel, though.

Recall how this all more or less started not only with Melanie’s buying a pair of lovebirds, but also, just before her entrance into the pet store, hearing a boy on the sidewalk whistling at her, all while we hear the cawing of a huge flock of black birds in the sky; the boy’s and birds’ sounds are similar enough to suggest that the whistling may not have been from him, but may have actually been one of the birds screeching. It’s as if the birds were the ones making the pass at her.

These associations symbolically suggest the sons of God in Genesis 6:1-4, who are sometimes identified as angels (i.e., winged ones!), looking down from heaven onto the daughters of men (e.g., Melanie) and wishing to mate with them. This unnatural love union led to the sinfulness of the world that led, in turn, to the Great Flood, another ending of the world. Here again we see the birds’ dialectical linking of love and violence. (Recall also how Nat, from the short story, theorized that the birds’ attacks coincided with the high tide, a rising of water that can be associated with the Flood.)

Another way the bird attacks suggest “the end of the world” is how they symbolize avenging angels, coming down to earth with Christ’s return and bringing about Armageddon (Matthew 16:27).

To return to the airstrike symbolism, a closer linking of the birds with bomber planes is suggested when–after a bird attacks a man at a gas station and causes him to drop the fuel dispenser of a gas pump, spilling gasoline all over the ground–a man parks his car by the spillage and, unaware of the gas, lights a cigar. His dropping of a match causes an explosion, killing him and causing a huge fire in the area. Bird-bombers, as it were, have caused explosions and a fire, however indirectly.

The disruption of people’s lives continues when we learn that Annie, Mitch’s original flame, has been killed by the birds, her corpse lying out by the stairs in front of her porch and traumatizing poor Cathy, who looks on from inside Annie’s house. We rarely think, however, of how bombings cause the same kind of suffering in those countries victimized by imperialism.

The self-absorption and narcissism we have seen in the main characters, especially in Melanie, have abated now that the terror of the birds has forced everyone to work together, help each other, and sympathize with each other. Since bourgeois Melanie–bringer of the lovebirds and, symbolically, the bird attacks–represents capitalism, her subsequent helpfulness should be seen to represent how capitalism sometimes tries to make accommodations to appease the working class, as was seen in the welfare state from 1945-1973. Nonetheless, accommodations to the labour aristocracy of the First World are never good enough to compensate for the wrongs done to the Third World.

Holed up in the Brenners’ house, Mitch, Melanie, Lydia, and Cathy are safe for the moment. Cathy would like to bring her lovebirds into the living room, but Lydia won’t tolerate even those birds, as harmless as they are in their cage. These two birds are the dialectical opposite of the violent ones, though, so there’s no need to fear them.

No one knows why the birds are trying to kill people; neither, I imagine, do many of the poor people in the humble, provincial villages of the Third World understand why drones fly over them and kill innocent civilians there. Especially ignorant of the reasons for this violence against them are their children…just like Cathy.

More bird attacks come, even after Mitch’s efforts to board up the windows. Melanie goes up to the attic, and she experiences the climactic bird attack. Just as she’s learned “what it’s like to be on the other end of a gag,” now she learns what it’s like to experience an extreme, life-threatening bird attack, just as eyeless Dan, Lydia’s neighbour, and Annie have. Luckily, though, she barely survives.

Imperialists sometimes treat their bombing atrocities as if they were as trivial as practical jokes, the way Hillary Clinton cackled at the brutal murder of Muammar Gaddafi. Sooner or later, though, all empires fall, as the American one is expected to do within the next ten to fifteen years or so. Just as birds attack Melanie, so will the ‘practical joker’ US/NATO one day get their comeuppance, perhaps in the form of a bombing.

If and when that happens, it truly will be the end of the world…the world of capitalism, that is, since many have speculated that the latest economic collapse could very well be the self-destruction of capitalism that Marx predicted, symbolized in the film by the near-fatal attack of birds on the green-suited bird.

After the attack on her, the birds are at rest. Now would be a good chance to get Melanie to a hospital in San Francisco; Mitch and the others would be putting themselves at great risk of being exposed in their car to another bird attack, but Melanie’s injuries are so severe that her life depends on getting her to a doctor.

As Mitch gets the car ready for Melanie, Lydia, and Cathy, he hears a radio newscast mentioning the possibility of involving the military. Naturally: the bird attacks symbolize a foreign aerial invasion. Indeed, as Melanie, Lydia, and Cathy get into the car, we see the tense enveloping of the area with resting birds. The sight of so many birds suggests the occupation of a foreign army…or air force. In this symbolic sense, Americans can get an inkling of what other countries must feel when they have US military bases in them.

So the ending of the film is an ambiguous one: how much longer will the bird attacks continue? The short story’s ending seems more pessimistic, as we find Nat smoking a cigarette–like a man condemned to a firing squad–as he awaits the next bird attack. He seems resigned to his fate. Many victims of US imperialism must feel the same resignation when confronted with endless air strikes.

The hope that Mitch et al must feel, as they drive Melanie to a San Francisco hospital, would symbolically reflect the Western hope of reviving from a vulnerability that other countries have felt, courtesy of the US/NATO alliance. As we witness the geopolitical shift from a unipolar world to a multipolar one, Westerners may find their hopes dwindling.

‘Sirens,’ a Horror Novella, Chapter Eleven

The door to Nancy’s apartment had been left open when the Sirens lured her out during her sleepwalking. Still shaking from the gang rape of Serena that she’d just vicariously experienced, Nancy staggered in and shut the door. Eddie was shaking on the sofa, wincing in discomfort both from the ropes tightly wrapped around his body and from his full bladder.

“Where the fuck did you just wander off to?!” he yelled. “Untie me. I gotta pee.”

She walked over and stood before him, with a look on her face saying she wanted to kill him.

“What’s wrong with you? What happened out there?”

She said nothing. She just continued scowling at him.

“Was it the Sirens? Did they get you?”

“Yes…and no,” she said, still scowling.

“What do you mean? C’mon, untie me. I gotta take a–“

“I have a feeling you already know what I mean.” She was snarling at him now.

“Who is killing my friends with all this ‘black magic’? Who is trying to kill me? Do you know?”

“You know. You and your friends…knew her…in the Biblical sense.”

“What are you talking about? C’mon, untie me!”

“You had a vision of three hot chicks singing to you, offering themselves to you, then making you almost fall off an apartment building.”

“I gotta use the bathroom!”

“I just had a vision of five good-looking young men in suits, singing to me, then…raping me. Guess who they were.”

He looked away, unable to say a word.

She bent down so her eyes were level with his.

“You know, don’t you?” The guilt in his avoiding eyes was more plain an answer than any simple yes. “Guess whose piss-smelling dick was in my mouth.”

His face scrunched up. “Eww!”

“Exactly,” she said, bringing her hand up in the air. “Now you know why I feel no sympathy for your bulging bladder.” Her fist came down on his cheek with a punch so hard, he felt as if he were going to fly off the sofa and into the bathroom.

“Hey! What’d you do that for?!” he shouted.

“What did you do what you did to her for, besides the obvious?”

“D-do what?” He was avoiding her eyes again.

“You know what. I saw you in that vision. Did you force someone named Serena to perform oral sex on you?”

He kept quiet, still looking away.

“Tell me!” Her yell stung his eardrums.

“Look, my friends peer-pressured me into it, OK?”

“Bullshit! And no, it’s not OK. I didn’t see any peer-pressuring. You were smiling! I looked up at your face! What would Mom think, looking down on you from heaven, knowing what you did? You should be in jail for what you did!”

“You’d want your own brother in jail?”

“I want all rapists to be in jail! I want their victims to have justice. Instead, Serena, this user of the black arts, wants to kill you. After what I just suffered, I ought to untie you and feed you to her Sirens! But I’ll just have to save my brother from that fate. That’s as much sisterly love as you deserve, if you even deserve that. In the meantime…”

“In the meantime, what? I gotta take a piss!”

She slapped him again, even harder.

Walking out of the room, she said, “I’ll find you a bedpan.”

‘Sirens,’ a Horror Novella, Chapter Ten

[WARNING: SEXUAL CONTENT OF A TRIGGERING NATURE]

“There,” Nancy said after finishing tying Eddie’s arms and legs to her living room sofa. “That should hold you.”

“I’m saying this for the fiftieth time,” he said, squirming in discomfort at the rope fibres cutting into his skin. “This is ridiculous.”

“Would you rather be lured away to your death by those Sirens?” she asked. “This is the only way we can keep you safe…you know, from wandering off.”

“What if I need to use the bathroom?”

“I told you. I’ll untie you. Now, I’m really tired from all the stress of today. I’m going to sleep. I’ll leave the bedroom door open, so shout and wake me up if you need to use the bathroom.”

“What if you don’t wake up when I shout?”

“I will,” she said. “I’m a light sleeper.”

She left the living room, went into her bedroom, and collapsed on her bed without even bothering to undress. Within five minutes, she fell asleep.

In her dream, she found herself in a pub just a few blocks away from her apartment. She was sitting at the bar, drinking from a bottle of Molson Canadian.

A group of handsome young men in navy blue and black suits walked up to her.

“Hi!” one of them said to her. “Can I buy you a drink?”

“Well…” she said, then gulped down the rest of her beer. “OK.” The whole pub area was a blur to her, except for most of the men’s faces, which looked familiar to her.

“We come to this pub all the time, but we’ve never seen you here,” one of them said. “It must be because you’re so pretty, you don’t need to find a man to pick you up.”

She giggled and blushed.

“Yeah,” another of them said. “You must have a boyfriend.”

“No,” she said with another giggle and blush. “I’m not taken…yet.”

“Hoo-hoo!” all of the young men groaned.

“We have ourselves a contest for your charms,” the first of them said, getting another giggle out of her. They began singing Cole Porter’s “All of You.”

As they charmed her with their singing, one of them took her by the hands and danced with her. They all got to the door of the pub, one of them opened it, and all of them went outside, all the time singing the song and getting giggles out of her.

(Their tight, flawless five-part vocal harmony so enchanted Nancy that she couldn’t hear the voice of her brother calling her name and shouting, “Hey, where are you going? Come back! Untie me!” as she went out the door of her apartment.)

She danced out the front door of the apartment building, giggling as she heard the singing. She went several blocks down the sidewalk, past the actual pub of her dream, then a few blocks further until she saw one of the men open the door to an apartment building. She went in, still charmed by their singing.

Where have I seen their faces before? she wondered as they got into an elevator. In old photos? In the newspaper?

They reached the third floor, then got out. She saw one of them unlock the door to his apartment, and they all danced in together to the Cole Porter melody.

No sooner had she come into the living room than one of them grabbed her and began kissing her. With his face up close, she recognized it as Tor’s.

Wait a minute, she thought. He’s dead!

The other boys crowded around her, aggressively feeling her up and unbuttoning her shirt. Another hand unzipped her pants.

“No…no!” she said, trying to push them off.

Her shirt was torn off, and her pants were pulled down to her ankles. She kept trying to fight them off, but she couldn’t. Tor unclipped her bra, and he grabbed her exposed breasts.

“No!” she screamed. “Help!”

Tor slapped her hard. Someone pulled her panties down to her ankles, then removed them, along with her pants, shoes, and socks. She looked down and recognized the one undressing her as Ari.

She felt someone behind her removing the bra strap off her shoulders and arms. She looked back and saw Virgil tossing her bra across the living room.

Now completely naked, Nancy was laid on the floor on her back. The five young men unzipped their flies and exposed themselves. She turned her head away in disgust. One of the boys mounted her. It was Tor.

She tried to push him off, but he balled up his raised fist, so she stopped resisting.

“Good girl,” he said, then slid inside.

She screamed from the stabbing against her vaginal walls, then felt someone raise and spread her legs; then she felt him spit on her anus. She shuddered and looked down to see who he was: it was Ari, pushing in. She groaned from this next stabbing.

Chad sat on her chest. She squeezed her eyes shut the split second she saw him put his erection between her breasts. He squeezed them around it and began rocking back and forth, just like the stabbers in her vagina and anus. His zipper was scraping against her lower chest, cutting a bleeding mark there.

Now, someone sat on her shoulders. The foul smell of urine indicated his much-too-close erection. She looked up and saw the one face that, up until now, had been blurry.

Eddie was force-feeding his erection into her mouth.

She whined and squeezed her eyes shut. He pushed so far in, she gagged.

“When do I get a turn?” Virgil said.

“I’m…almost…done!” Ari grunted. “Oh!” He came.

Ari got out of the way and zipped himself up. Virgil took his place, ramming it in.

“Mmmph!” she screamed, with a full mouth, at the painful tearing of her anus and rectal walls. This can’t be real, she thought. My rapists are all dead, and Eddie would never do this to his own sister.

The ordeal continued for several more minutes.

This must be a nightmare, yet it feels so real, she thought. Is it the ghosts of Serena’s victims? Wait: is this all her doing?

Finally, the other four rapists orgasmed, Eddie having pulled out and come on her face.

She opened her eyes, but instead of seeing Eddie and his friends, she saw the three Sirens, all crouching around her.

Nancy had all of her clothes on: no ejaculate was dripping down her face. It was as if the rape hadn’t happened.

“That is what they did to me,” the brunette said.

“And that is why they must all die,” the blonde said, with the exact same voice as the brunette’s.

“Including Eddie,” the redhead said, also in the exact same voice.

“Serena?” Nancy asked in sighs. “Is that you?”

“Yes,” all three answered, but in only one voice. “Though I don’t look like any of these three.”

“Where am I?” Nancy asked, catching her breath.

“In Virgil’s apartment,” Serena said through the Sirens’ mouths. “It’s not so many blocks from yours. You’ll have no problem getting back home as soon as you’re outside. Eddie’s waiting, by the way.”

“Have you done anything to him?” Nancy asked in a tremulous voice.

“No, he’s safe, still tied to your sofa,” Serena said. “You’d better get back to him, though. He needs to pee.” She laughed to herself. “I’ll take care of him later.”

Nancy got up, still shaking. She was surprised to feel no vaginal or anal injuries, no cut from a zipper on her lower chest, and no foul, urinary, penile taste in her mouth.

But she couldn’t stop shaking.

The Sirens disappeared. Nancy waited for her heart to slow down.

“It wasn’t real,” she whispered breathily. “What just happened to me. It couldn’t have been real.”

“It was real for me, though,” Serena said, a buzzing intonation in Nancy’s ears. “I’m sorry I put you through that. I wouldn’t do that to my worst enemy; but I had to get you to understand. What they did to me was unforgivable, and your brother was a part of it, not just the passive spectator you want to believe he was. You won’t like hearing this, but he must die with the others. Don’t try to stop me. You know what I can do to you. That bookstore owner won’t be able to help you, either.”

“You’re not the only one with power, Serena,” Nancy said, still shaking. “I’ll punish Eddie in my own way. Still, he’s my brother. Don’t you touch him!”

She listened for a reply, but got none.

I guess she’s gone, Nancy thought. “As for you, Eddie, you and I are going to have a little talk when I get home.”

She walked with staggering legs to the door and left the apartment building.

‘Sirens,’ a Horror Novella, Chapter Nine

The next morning, Eddie was in his apartment, trying to call Chad. His friend’s ringtone, Soundgarden’s “Drawing Flies,” just kept playing and playing.

“Come on, Chad, answer!” Eddie growled.

After a minute of letting the ringtone play, Eddie hung up.

I called him twice late last night and got no answer, he thought. I emailed him and got no reply, either. Please, God, let it be that he met a girl last night, and he’s so into her that he doesn’t wanna talk to me. One girl, not three!

***********

Nancy went to the occult bookstore, Raising Power, around lunchtime that day. A heavy-set, forty-something-year-old woman with her hair dyed black, in a black dress, and wearing goth makeup was sitting by the cash register.

“Hi,” Nancy said. “Are you the owner of this shop?”

“Yes,” she said, getting up and shaking Nancy’s hand. “I’m Deanna. How can I help you?” She looked in Nancy’s eyes as if, strangely, she already knew the answer.

“Nancy Sayers. I’m a reporter, investigating the string of bizarre deaths that have been happening over the past few weeks. Do you know about that?”

“I’m not responsible for them, if that’s what you’re implying.”

“Oh, no. I didn’t mean that. I just wondered if you’ve been following the story in the newspaper.”

“A number of young men,” Deanna said, “one died in a motorcycle crash, one flew off his bicycle and got impaled on the fork of a forklift, one got sliced up by an airplane propellor, and one fell off a building and got impaled on a flagpole.”

“Oh, no. That last one almost happened, but I stopped–“

“Oh, it happened. Believe me.”

“Oh? B-but–“

“It didn’t happen to your brother, Eddie,” Deanna said. “It happened to his friend instead.”

Nancy’s eyes bugged out at this revelation. “Chad died?”

“Yes,” the bookstore owner said, with the utmost conviction in her eyes. “He saw three hot babes at the time.”

“How do you know all this? How could you know their names, and all? That information wouldn’t be accessible to you.”

“How do you think I know?”

“You’re a psychic, I take it.”

“Correct.” Deanna had a slight smirk.

“How much of this case do you know about, beyond what I’ve reported?” Nancy asked, still fighting her incredulity at Deanna’s abilities. “How much of it have you…psyched out, as it were?”

“Quite a bit.”

“Do you know who’s behind all this?”

“A young woman named Serena Lavin bought a book here on how to raise spirits. She wanted to get revenge on the young men who…wronged her.”

“So, you know she’s responsible for these killings, and you never reported her to the police?”

“What police detective is going to believe a woman is using spirits to murder people? What policeman is going to believe what a psychic says?”

“Of course, but you didn’t try to use your own…powers…to stop her yourself?”

“I warned her of the dangers of bringing bad karma on herself,” Deanna said. “But those young men deserve to be k–…well, to be punished, anyway.”

“My brother was almost killed by her spirits!” Nancy was looking at Deanna with accusing eyes.

“Your brother is as guilty as his friends are.”

“For what crime do they all ‘deserve’ to die?”

Deanna looked Nancy hard in the eyes. “They all gang-raped Serena almost a month ago.”

Nancy gasped. “How could you know that?” Her eyes widened.

“I felt it…Serena’s trauma, in all the vibrations in her body and around her. All those boys did it.”

No, Nancy thought as her jaw dropped. Not Eddie, too! Please, God, don’t let my brother be one of the rapists. He just watched his friends do Serena, surely that’s all; and he was too cowardly to stop them, but he didn’t participate. Please, God, let that be the truth! Deanna may be right about a lot of this, but her psychic powers aren’t strong enough for her to be right about all of it!

“Nancy?” Deanna asked. “You look a little dazed. I know this is hard for you to hear, and I assure you, I never meant for Serena to use the book to help her get revenge on those guys. I warned her not to let feelings of hate into her heart when chanting the book’s incantations. I told her: be in a calm, meditative state when reciting the words; allow the forces of karma to flow without your emotions to misguide them, for if you say the words with an angry or hateful attitude, those spirits will not only bring about far too harsh a revenge, but one day they’ll come back to you and make you destroy yourself, just as you, in your secret thoughts, want those boys to destroy themselves. I told her that; I guess she refused to listen.”

Nancy let out a big sigh. “Is Eddie the only remaining one of the boys that Serena wants to kill?”

Deanna closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and ‘felt’ the psychic energy in and around her for an answer. After ten seconds of intense concentration, she said, “Yes, he’s the last one.”

“How do I stop those spirits from killing Eddie?”

“Try keeping him immobilized, restrained somehow. The spirits are Sirens, essentially: they kill you by luring you into a dangerous situation with their singing and seductiveness…at least usually that’s how they do it. The idea is to make the victim kill himself with his own desires. The Sirens are agents of karma; they kill you with your own sinfulness.”

“So, I could tie Eddie to a chair, or something?”

“That…could work…maybe. But you’ll also have to confront Serena herself. Otherwise, Eddie will have to be tied up indefinitely.”

“I’ll have to fight this woman? How? Is there any magic you can teach me to use on her?”

“I’m uncomfortable teaching anyone how to use magic in confrontational situations. I’ve already gone too far with Serena; I sold her the book out of compassion for how much those boys hurt her, but now I realize I shouldn’t interfere–“

“But she’ll kill my brother!”

Deanna took a deep breath. “Karma may intervene to stop her. Eddie’s near-death, where Chad died, may be enough to have scared him into repentance. That may be enough karmic retribution to stop her from killing him again.”

“I need better assurance than ‘may be enough to stop her,’ Deanna!”

“Perhaps I can do some kind of ritual to help you. I can keep my emotions out of it, then there won’t be any karmic risks for you.”

“Thank you,” Nancy said. “Please do something to protect him–as soon as you can.” I can’t believe I now believe in magic and spirits, she thought. What a fucked-up day.

“I’ll do what I can. I feel responsible for selling Serena that book, so I have to take care of my own karma. I’m more than motivated to help you.”

“Thank you. I’m gonna go find my brother now.”

“Good. And if you confront Serena, remember not to let your emotions govern how you react to her, no matter what happens to him. The spirits will sense your hate, and react to it in a way you won’t like.”

“OK.” Nancy left the bookstore.

*********

She found her brother standing in the hallway in front of her apartment, his phone to his ear.

“C’mon, Chad!” Eddie said. “Answer!”

“Chad is dead,” she said with a blank look on her face.

“Oh, no!” he said, putting his phone in his jacket pocket with a shaking hand. “How did he die?”

“The same way you were supposed to die. I talked to the owner of that occult bookstore, and all it took was one chat with her to believe that spirits, psychic powers, all that shit, really exist. It was mind-blowing how she could know so much about this case with what little I was able to report about it.”

“Really?”

“She knew your name, Chad’s name, things never made public. It was eerie.”

“What am I going to do? All my friends are dead. Those ghosts have only me to kill now.”

“Come inside,” Nancy said, unlocking her door. “Stay in here with me, and you should be safe.”

“How?” he asked as they went inside.

“You’ll see. Go sit on the sofa; I’ll be right back.”

She looked for some rope.

‘Sirens,’ a Horror Novella, Chapter Eight

Nancy’s hand grabbed Eddie by the wrist, and she pulled back with all her might. She fell onto the gravel roof with a grunt of pain when her back made impact. Eddie hit his head on the floor of the roof, cutting his forehead and snapping him out of his hallucination.

“What?” he shouted, his head moving left and right as he tried to orient himself. “Wh-where am I?”

“Eddie, you’re with me,” Nancy said.

“Nancy, what are you doing here?” he asked, touching his bloody forehead and seeing red on his fingers. He also quickly put his dick back in his pants and zipped himself up with a blush. Thank God I didn’t bang my cock on the ground, he thought.

“What are you doing up on the roof of this building, about to fall off of it to your death?” she asked. “That seems the more relevant question.”

“I was gonna fu–” he began, his eyes still darting all around the area, trying to make sense of what was going on. “Where’d the girls go? Their bedroom?” He took a tissue out of his shirt pocket.

“The girls? Their bedroom? Are you high?”

“There were three beautiful, hot girls that I was with. I was gonna get laid, then you took me from it.”

“Eddie, you were gonna die. I saved you from it. There never were any girls. At least not physically.”

“I don’t understand. What’s going on?” He was using the tissue to soak up the blood on his forehead.

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Did you do any drugs before this happened?”

“No,” he said. “I drank only a half bottle of beer.”

“You almost died, just like your friends, who it seems thought they were with beautiful women, too.”

“What is this? Some kind of black magic? Is someone messing with the spirit world? Raising up demons, or something?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t believe in that kind of thing.”

“Neither do I,” he said, remembering that night with his friends and that woman, but not wanting to bring it up and remind his sister of it.

“As crazy as it sounds, still, I can’t think of any other way to explain what the hell’s going on here. There’s a lady who owns an occult bookstore downtown; It’s called ‘Raising Power.’ I understand that she believes in the supernatural; selling the books is more than just a business to her–it’s like her calling. I’ll go over there and talk to her, see if she has any insight into all this.”

“OK. I’ll go back to the bar and find Chad.”

“You stay out of the bars.”

“But I should go see if he’s OK over there,” Eddie said. “Maybe these evil spirits wanna get him, too.”

“You should come straight home with me. Chad can fend for himself, for the moment. Call him on his phone if you’re worried about him. Right now, my brother’s safety is much more important to me than Chad’s is.”

*********

As the two of them got off the roof, went down the elevator, and left the apartment building, Serena Lavin had been watching the whole scene through the eyes of her three female spirits, a vision presented to her in a crystal ball on a table in the living room of her apartment, which was on the other side of town.

Who is that woman? Serena wondered. I’ve seen her face before. Oh, wait…yes! She’s Nancy Sayers, the reporter; her photo is with all the newspaper articles I’ve been reading. She’s been following the murders of my gang-rapists, including her kid brother, Eddie, over there. Oh, well, he’s safe for the moment. I’ll get him later. I’ll take care of Chad instead. I’ll also have to do something about that Nancy before she goes to ‘Raising Power,’ where I bought all this stuff. I don’t wanna hurt her, but I can’t let her know too much about me.

‘Sirens,’ a Horror Novella, Chapter Seven

Nancy’s brow furrowed as she leaned forward in her chair to see what her brother was doing.

“Who the hell does he think he’s talking to?” she whispered as she saw him grinning and moving his lips in conversation with the empty air.

After about a minute of this imaginary conversation, he put his arms around two imaginary waists.

“Invisible women, apparently,” Nancy whispered. “Two, at least.”

Still with his arms around those invisible waists, he began walking towards the door.

“Alright, that’s it,” she said, and rose from her chair.

She ran after him, bumping into Chad on the way.

“Sorry,” she said to him, then continued running. “Eddie!”

Going through the doorway with the three invisible, singing women, Eddie didn’t hear his sister at all.

“Eddie!” she called out again, following him outside.

“Eddie?” Chad said, then looked around for him at the bar. “Hey, where’d he go?”

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

Nancy saw Eddie get into his car after opening and closing the passenger and back doors for the three beauties that only he saw.

“Eddie!” she shouted, running to her car. She still wasn’t heard by him.

Chad, at the opened door, saw Nancy get into her car. Both cars drove off.

I guess Eddie got lucky while I was in the bathroom, Chad thought. Who was that other chick? A jealous ex-girlfriend, or something? He went back inside.

Nancy’s car followed Eddie’s from far enough away that she figured he and ‘the women’ wouldn’t notice her, but not so far back that she’d lose him.

She was torn about how she should deal with her brother’s predicament. Should she stop him as soon as possible to prevent another killing, or would a blunt intervention provoke a sudden killing? Also, it might have helped her investigation to observe what exactly was happening right up to and just before the killing, she hoped just in time to prevent it from happening.

Eddie parked his car near an apartment building about ten minutes away from the bar. She parked a block away from where he was and watched him. He got out, opened and closed the doors for his invisible lovers, and walked with them, his arms around two of them, into the building.

She ran over there as fast as she could. When she went through the front door, she saw the elevator door close with him in it. She watched it go up to the top floor before getting in.

Is he going up on the roof? she wondered as her elevator moved–far too slowly–up after his. Are those demons, or whatever the fuck they are, going to make him jump off?

The elevator was only at the third of ten floors now.

“Come on!” she growled in clenched teeth. “Hurry up!”

Meanwhile, Eddie reached the top floor, and he was being led by ‘the women’ to a door at the end of the hall leading up to the roof.

Only he saw something completely different.

“Wow,” he said. “This is a really nice apartment you girls have.”

“Thanks,” the blonde said to him.

The living room was adorned with luxurious furniture of leather and antique wood. The light purple wallpaper had flower motifs on it. Baroque and Rococo paintings hung on the walls.

“Wait ’til you see the bedroom,” the redhead said.

Their singing continued as they approached the bedroom door. The brunette opened it, and Eddie saw a golden flight of stairs leading up to another door.

“Stairs?” he asked as he and the women began their ascent.

“Yes,” the redhead said. “Our place of lovemaking is so heavenly, you have to go up to get to it.”

“Well, I guess that makes sense,” he said as they got half-way up.

The women’s singing continued to intoxicate him and drown out Nancy’s yelling as she ran down the hall to reach the door to the roof.

When Eddie reached the roof, the blonde had opened a shining silver door showing him a bedroom so decadent in its opulence, it was as if the three women were empresses: black satin sheets on the bed with matching bed curtains, a dark purple rug blanketing the entire bedroom floor, a dresser with a golden-bordered mirror, and paintings of erotic art, all over the pink walls, that only Sade wouldn’t have blushed at.

“Whoa!” he sighed.

They led him to the bed with lewd grins and more of their hypnotic three-part vocal harmonies as they sang in a language he’d never heard in his life. Only it wasn’t a bed they were leading him to.

It was the edge of the roof.

Where they’d have him fall was onto a flagpole, the top of which had been broken, leaving a sharp, jagged edge to cut all the way through his torso.

“Are you ready for the penetration of a lifetime?” the brunette asked him.

“Oh, yeah!” he grunted as he stepped closer to the ‘bed.’

“I guess we’d better get undressed,” the blonde said.

Eddie saw all three women drop their dresses, revealing lace bras and panties of–appropriately–black for the brunette, red for the redhead, and golden for the blonde.

Grinning and sighing with delight at what he saw, Eddie unzipped his pants as he reached the side of the ‘bed.’ His feet were now a few inches from the edge of the roof.

Panting Nancy finished getting up the stairs, and threw the door open with a loud slam against the outer wall…though the women’s singing still drowned out all other noise for him. She needed a few seconds to catch her breath; she staggered closer to him. Then she winced when she saw her brother pull out his erection from his pants.

His grin grew wider as he saw the three beauties remove their bras, panties, and high heels to be gloriously nude before him.

“What flawless bodies you three women have,” he sighed as he ogled them.

Three women, eh? Nancy thought, almost beside him now and keeping her eyes looking high enough not to have to see his dick.

“Go sit on the bed, honey,” the redhead said.

“And savour the coming penetration,” the blonde said with a lewd giggle.

Nancy saw him about to sit on…nothing.

“Eddie, no!” she screamed, reaching for his arm.

‘Sirens,’ a Horror Novella, Chapter Six

“Virgil is dead?!” Eddie shouted as he read his sister’s news story on the online local newspaper on his phone. “And all…sliced up…like that?”

He continued reading, his shaking hand making it difficult to read. According to Nancy’s report, Anne Petrovic, a pilot on the airstrip, saw Virgil by the airplane. “I tried to communicate with him,” she said. “I asked him what he was doing here, and I tried to get him away from the propellor, but he just ignored me. He looked like he was hallucinating, on drugs or something, because he was acting as if he was making love with an invisible woman or two. It was crazy. Even his zipper was down, with his…yuck!…erection sticking out. And he just let himself be cut up like that, as if he felt nothing!”

Then Eddie remembered seeing Virgil leaving the bar earlier that night, seeming to have his arms around two invisible women. According to Nancy’s story, the autopsy revealed no drugs in Virgil’s system, only about half a bottle of beer drunk.

The propellor turned off, as automatically as it had turned on, by the time it had begun to slice off the tip of Virgil’s nose and the edge of his protruding belly, Nancy’s story went on. A second or two before he fell down dead, he’d begun screaming in final recognition of what was happening to him. “He finally woke up from his trance,” Anne said. “Then he fell asleep again, so to speak, never to wake again.”

“All my friends are being killed in accidents,” Eddie whispered to himself. All of us who were with that woman we screwed…no, I don’t wanna think about that, he thought. “I do wanna talk to Chad about it, though.”

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

A few nights later, Eddie met up with Chad in front of that same dance club. “Have you given any more thought to what I told you in my text message a few days ago?” he asked Chad as they walked through the front doors.

“No!” Chad said with a sneer. “Look, I’m as shocked as you are that Virgil, Tor, and Ari have all been killed in freak accidents, OK? But they were accidents. You implying that something supernatural is happening to us in revenge for gang-banging that girl is, frankly, ridiculous.”

“OK, I agree that it’s incredible,” Eddie said as they approached the bar. “But don’t you think we took things a little too far with her?”

The bartender asked them what they wanted, and they ordered beers.

“Look, that bitch was a slut and she wanted it,” Chad said as he and Eddie each received a bottle of Heineken, then Chad gulped some down. “But even if what we did was wrong, why would our buddies’ deaths have to be related to it? They’re just coincidental.” He and Eddie paid for their beers, then Chad gulped down some more.

Sipping on his beer, Eddie hadn’t noticed that, sitting at a table on the other side of a dance floor half-filled with people, Nancy was watching him and his friend. I correctly made a mental prediction that Virgil was one of your friends, Eddie, she thought while sipping her glass of bourbon. Now I’m gonna see if you or your friend leaves with his arms around the waists of invisible women.

Ten minutes later, Chad gulped down the last of his beer. “I gotta go take a piss.”

“Wait,” Eddie said. “I’m worried about you walking off alone.”

“I’m just going to the washroom, Eddie. You wanna watch?”

“No, I’m just worried that–“

“The ghost-women are gonna cut my dick off? Don’t think so much. I’ll be back in two minutes.” Chad walked across the dance floor to the bathrooms, which were several feet away from Nancy’s table…not that Eddie ever noticed her there.

His eyes followed Chad all the way to the men’s room, as did hers. When the bathroom door shut behind Chad, Eddie’s eyes stayed on it, while Nancy’s returned to watching her brother.

Every second of those two minutes were agony for him. He more or less counted to one hundred and twenty as he waited to see Chad open the door and return. When Eddie had reached one hundred and twenty-two seconds, his heart started beating harder and faster.

The techno beat was pounding with a bland, repetitive, bass synth line of four notes. Then, Eddie heard a three-part vocal harmony on top of it.

“Hi, honey,” a female voice called out to him.

He turned his head to the right.

A hot blonde, a hot brunette, and a hot redhead were grinning at him.

He smiled back and stopped worrying about Chad.

‘Sirens,’ a Horror Novella, Chapter Five

[WARNING: sexual and violent content]

The electronic beat was pounding in their ears, and pink, green, and white lights were flashing in their eyes. Eddie was making progress with a pretty, curvaceous blonde that he was dirty dancing with; then he noticed one of his friends, Virgil, was dancing off on his own. Virgil was acting as if he were dancing with several girls.

Eddie tapped on the shoulder of one of his friends dancing nearby. “Hey, what the fuck is Virgil doing over there?” he asked, gesturing over to Virgil’s loneliness at the side of the dance floor.

All of Eddie’s friends looked over at Virgil and laughed.

“Hey, Virgil!” Eddie shouted. “What the fuck, man?!”

Virgil seemed deaf to him. He also seemed to be talking to himself.

Eddie’s friend tapped him on the shoulder. “Did Virgil take a half-pill of powerful ecstasy, or something? He must be too high to know what he’s doing.”

“I’d say he took a whole pill,” Eddie said. “He must be hallucinating. He’s acting like he’s with a bunch of hot chicks.”

“It looks that way,” the friend said.

A few seconds later, it looked as though some invisible person were holding Virgil by the hands and leading him off the dance floor. The boys saw an ear-to-ear grin on his face, as well as sparkling, hypnotized eyes. As he walked towards the door out of the dance bar, he had both arms around invisible waists.

“Holy shit,” Eddie said, wide-eyed. “He must be really, really wasted.”

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

Virgil was driving his car, feeling the redhead blowing him. (His hard-on was poking out of his open fly, doing nothing but getting harder.)

“So, where…are we going, girls?” he panted. “Oh!“

“Just keep going straight,” the brunette said. “We’re almost there.”

He kept driving for several more minutes, hypnotized by the three girls’ singing and the lips and tongue he felt going up and down on his cock. Oddly, he heard three-part, not two-part, vocal harmony.

“Oh, you girls…are talented,” he moaned. “You suck…while singing, but don’t…suck at singing. Oh!“

He looked all around his surroundings, seeing flat fields of grass, airstrips, and parked airplanes.

“You wanna screw…in an airfield?” he grunted.

“Yes,” the brunette said, then resumed singing with the other two.

“Why here?” he panted.

“It’s sexy,” the blonde said. “In a public place, we might get caught.” She resumed singing.

“Don’t you think that’s exciting?” the brunette asked, then sang again.

“Yeah, I guess,” he sighed. “Unh!“

They approached a big plane, one with a huge propellor.

“Stop here,” the brunette said.

“OK,” he sighed, then parked his car by the plane.

He got out, hearing the girls’ singing as his full erection was still pointing out of his zipper. The redhead took him by the hands and led him just in front of the propellor, a few steps to the left of the centre. Then she knelt before him and resumed her sucking…or so he imagined.

At the same time, he imagined the brunette behind him, kissing him on the neck and fingering his nipples. The blonde was facing him, her legs spread out and on either side of the squatting redhead. He was French-kissing the blonde while her hands were on his buttocks, squeezing them and pressing them with her fingers.

The girls were singing the whole time, even while French-kissing and blowing him, and while the brunette nibbled on his neck. They didn’t need their mouths to be free, since they weren’t physical. Virgil heard what sounded like the words of a foreign language in their singing; he couldn’t recognize what language it was, let alone understand its meaning…not that he cared.

He was in sensual heaven.

Then, the engine of the airplane started, though no one was in the cockpit. The wind blowing on him, the rumbling of the engine–he barely noticed them. It was as if the mild breeze and hum of a large fan were cooling him. He was too busy screwing his illusions.

The wheels of the plane were moving it slowly forward.

He, still with his hard-on pointing towards the propellor, was still standing a few feet to the left of its centre. All he saw, though, were the mesmerizing eyes of the blonde he seemed to be kissing.

“Hey!” called out a female voice he didn’t notice at all. “What are you doing here? Who is in that plane…? Oh!” She was now close enough to him to notice his dick was out; she quickly looked away. “What are you, some kind of pervert? All alone with your…?”

Since her head was still turned away, it was his blood spraying all over her that made her realize the propellor had already begun slicing him up.

She looked back at him and screamed from all the red she saw splashing everywhere. She quickly backed away.

Oddly, he didn’t seem to notice what was happening to him. No pain at all.

Armless, with only half of his dick left at the moment, and thoroughly bloody, he just kept French-kissing that invisible blonde.

Analysis of ‘Pet Sematary’

Pet Sematary is a 1983 supernatural horror novel by Stephen King, the one he considered his scariest (King, page ix) because of a real-life situation in which his toddler son ran off to a road and almost got hit by a truck (page xi). It has been made into two film adaptations, the 1989 one starring Dale Midkiff, Denise Crosby, Blaze Berdahl, and Fred Gwynne; and the 2019 version starring Jason Clarke, Amy Seimetz, and John Lithgow.

Here are some quotes from the 1989 film, the screenplay written by Stephen King:

“But he’s not God’s cat, he’s my cat… let God get His own if He wants one… not mine.” –Ellie Creed, afraid of her cat, Church, dying on the road in front of the Creed’s home

“The barrier was not meant to be crossed. The ground is sour.” –the ghost of Victor Pascow

“The soil of a man’s heart is stonier, Louis. A man grows what he can, and he tends it. ‘Cause what you buy, is what you own. And what you own… always comes home to you.” –Jud Crandall

Louis: Has anyone ever buried a person up there?
Jud: Christ on His Throne, NO! Whoever would!?

“Today is thanksgiving day for cats, but only if they came back from the dead.” –Louis Creed

“I knew this would happen. I told her when you were first married you’d have all the grief you can stand and more, I said. Now look at this. I hope you rot in hell! Where were you when he was playing in the road? You stinkin’ shit! You killer of children!” –Irwin Goldman, at Gage’s funeral, to Louis…then punches Louis

Louis: I’ll bite, Jud. What’s the bottom of the truth?
Jud: That, sometimes, dead is better. The person that you put up there ain’t the person that comes back. It might look like that person, but it ain’t that person, because whatever lives on the ground beyond the Pet Sematary ain’t human at all.

Rachel: It’s okay, Ellie! You just had a bad dream.
Ellie: It wasn’t a dream, it was Paxcow! Paxcow says daddy is going to do something really bad!
Rachel: Who is this Paxcow?
Ellie: He’s a ghost, a good ghost! He was sent to warn us!

“Rachel, is that you? I’ve been waiting for you, Rachel. And now I’m going to twist your back like mine, so you’ll never get out of bed again… Never get out of bed again…NEVER GET OUT OF BED AGAIN!” –Zelda Goldman

“I’m coming for you, Rachel… And this time, I’ll get you… Gage and I will both get you, for letting us die…” –Zelda, who then cackles

“Darling.” –reanimated Rachel, to Louis

The deliberately misspelled title is derived from an actual pet cemetery whose sign had the same misspelling, made by a child (page x). In the story, as in the real pet cemetery (it’s safe to assume), a number of the grave markers of the children’s dead pets have other misspellings; these all give a sense of the innocence of children who must learn to come to grips with loss.

I see another possible interpretation of the “Sematary” spelling, that it is a pun on seminary, or a school of theology. To study God is to study life’s meaning, as well as the mystery of death, the afterlife, and how to cope with suffering and loss. In this connection, recall the surname of the protagonist, Creed (the Christian belief system), and the name of their cat, Winston Churchill, usually shortened to Church. Pets are churches that, through their deaths, teach children about loss.

There are two cemeteries in the story, the good one (the Pet Sematary) and the bad one (the Micmac burial ground). The good one helps children deal with their grief and to learn to accept loss; but the bad one, which resurrects the dead and transforms them into demonic versions of their former selves (because the ground is inhabited by a Wendigo, an evil spirit of the First Nations tribes of the area), is for those who cannot accept the loss of loved ones.

So, the Pet Sematary is a kind of seminary, if you will, teaching children how to process the grief they feel after losing their beloved pets. The children can imagine that their pets are going from there to ‘dog [cat, hamster, etc.] heaven.’ The misspellings on the sign and grave markers, as I said above, show us the sweet naïveté of these children in their contemplation of God-like things; for as Jesus says in Matthew 18:3, “Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

The Pet Sematary is in a forest at the end of a long path from behind the house that the Creed family has just moved into. The religious often speak of following the right path to salvation, and the wrong path to damnation. There’s the path to the Pet Sematary (“It’s a safe path…You keep on the path and all’s well.” –page 39), and there’s also that road in front of the Creeds’ new house, where the Orinco trucks dangerously speed by, often killing people’s pets, thus filling up the Pet Sematary.

The inevitability of these trucks going by, something that happens regularly, is symbolic of the unescapable reality of death. Each truck is a juggernaut–not the actual Jagannath of the Hindus–but the apocryphal interpretation that Western observers made of it centuries ago: the idea that the chariot carrying the Hindu idol went non-stop down the road, and ecstatic worshippers threw themselves on the road to be crushed under the wheels of the chariot, in a rite of human sacrifice.

The name of the company printed on the trucks, Orinco (almost an anagram of the Cianbro truck King saw almost hit his little boy–page xi), sounds like a pun on Orinoco, the South American river whose name is derived from a term meaning “a place to paddle,” or a navigable place. Well, the road is good for Orinco trucks to drive on, since nothing can stop those juggernauts…nothing can stop death. The trucks are one with this road of death, a kind of via dolorosa.

So, the path to the Pet Sematary is a way to get to (pet) heaven, and the road the Orinco trucks drive on is a kind of highway to hell…or at least to Sheol. Then there’s the way beyond the Pet Sematary, the deadfall leading up to the Micmac burying ground, an evil sublation of the thesis–the Pet Sematary leading to eternal life for pets–and the negation of that thesis–the Orinco truck road to death. The Micmac burial ground is a place of living death.

That the Pet Sematary and the evil land of the Wendigo, leading to the Micmac burying ground, are closer together than the former is to the road suggests my ouroboros symbolism for the dialectical relationship between opposites (see these posts to understand my meaning)–the closeness between the Pet Sematary’s heavenly Godliness, if you will, and the devilish hell of the Micmac burial ground.

When Jud Crandall (played by Gwynne in the 1989 film, and by Lithgow in the 2019 one) takes Louis (Midkiff, 1989; Clarke, 2019) past the Pet Sematary and up the deadfall–“the barrier [that] was not made to be broken,” page 161–there’s a further trek of “Three miles or more” (page 164) to the burial ground, but before long one senses a hellish, demonic presence among the eerie animal sounds one hears (pages 166-169)…the Wendigo. They may be a while before getting to the burial ground, but they’re already in a kind of hell…Little God Swamp, or Dead Man’s Bog.

The dangerous climb up the unstable branches of the deadfall represents that meeting place where the teeth of the ouroboros bites its tail (symbolizing the meeting of the opposites of life and death, of heaven and hell), that meeting of opposites where, paradoxically, too much careful and nervous climbing leads to falls and injury, whereas climbing that is “done quick and sure” (page 161), never looking down, results in a miraculously safe and successful ascent.

That barrier is not made to be broken because it is so easy to break. Victor Pascow himself–a jogger hit by a car and killed before Louis can save him (page 89)–breaks the barrier to warn Louis never to break it, in thanks to the doctor for at least trying to save his life.

Jud advises Louis to have Church fixed (pages 23-24) because fixed cats “don’t tend to wander as much,” and therefore the risk of him running across that treacherous road, and getting crushed under the wheels of one of those Orinco trucks, will be lessened. The castrating of the cat, though, does nothing to prevent him from suffering the very fate Louis has tried to prevent. His daughter, Ellie (Berdahl in the 1989 film; Jeté Laurence in the 2019 film), loves Church so much that she will be heartbroken to learn he’s dead.

All of this leads us to a discussion of desire and the inability to fulfill it. Lacan considered the phallus to be the most important of the signifiers, since its lack (through symbolic castration) leads to desire, which can never be fulfilled. For Church, desire means the wish to roam and run about freely, whether fixed or not, whether the fulfillment of that desire is or isn’t excessive, transgressive, or dangerous (i.e., the racing across the road as symbolic of jouissance).

For humans, desire is symbolically expressed in being the phallus for the Oedipally-desired mother, though we can apply Lacan’s idea more generally–that of desire as ‘the desire of the Other’ (i.e., wanting to fulfill the desires of other people, wanting others’ recognition)–to the desires of the Creed family and Jud. Louis fixes Church in the hopes of keeping him safe, for Ellie’s sake; but when Church is killed, Jud has Louis take the corpse to the burial ground for her sake, too.

Louis, whose father died when he was three and who never knew a grandfather (page 3), has had strained relationships with father figures, particularly with his father-in-law, Irwin Goldman (played by Michael Lombard in the 1989 film). Irwin actually took out his chequebook and offered Louis a sum of money so he wouldn’t marry Rachel (page 146)!

If we see Louis’s love for her as a transference of Oedipal love for his mother, then his hostility to Irwin can be seen as a transference of Oedipal hate toward the father who left this world before Louis could even get a chance to know him. And Irwin’s disapproval of Louis marrying Rachel can thus be seen as a symbolic Non! du père, in turn resulting in Lacan’s notion of the Oedipally-based manque.

Louis has an even better reason to hate Rachel’s parents when he learns that they made her, as a little girl, take care of her sick older sister, Zelda, whose spinal meningitis made her so deformed and ugly that the sight of her traumatized little Rachel…especially when she found Zelda dead in her bed!

But in Jud, “the man who should have been his father,” Louis has found a good father figure, someone onto whom he can transfer positive Oedipal feelings (page 10). So when Jud, influenced by the Wendigo of the Micmac burying ground, has Louis bury Church there, Louis goes along with it, against his better judgement. After all, Daddy knows best, doesn’t he?

Lack gives rise to desire: Church’s castration, meant to keep him safe from the trucks, drives him to run across the road, to the point of him getting killed by a truck after all; “Cats lived violent lives and often died bloody deaths…Cats were the gangsters of the animal world, living outside the law and often dying there.” (pages 52, 53) The Creeds’ lack of a cat drives Jud, feeling compassion for Ellie, to have Louis bury the cat in the burial ground, though Jud knows it’s a foolish and dangerous thing to do. And Louis, lacking Gage after he is killed by an Orinco truck, is driven to exhume his son’s corpse and–with all the pain and exhausting work it involves–to rebury him in the burial ground. Then he’ll do the same with Rachel after demon-Gage kills her.

All four of these lacks lead to desires, which are excessive wants. The barrier that isn’t made to be broken is, symbolically, the barrier to jouissance, the forbidden fulfillment of excessive desire. We all have basic, biological needs, and as we learn language, social customs, culture, etc., in entering the Symbolic Order, we use language to make demands; but demands, especially the demand for love, are never expressed completely through the limitations of language, so some of that need and demand is never fully satisfied.

The residual lack gives rise to desire, an excess that’s never fulfilled. This remainder, incapable of being symbolized in language, is in the realm of the Real Order, a traumatic world symbolized by the frightening, inarticulate animal cries in the land of the Wendigo and the Micmac burial ground…”the real cemetery.”

The Buddhists teach us that suffering is caused by desire, attachment to things in a universe where all things are impermanent. The reality of death is an impermanence too painful for Louis Creed to bear, so his lack of Gage and, at the end of the novel, Rachel, drives him to feel a desire so excessive as to want to use the burial ground to raise them from the dead.

One cannot have the originally desired object–the Oedipally-desired parent, a universal, narcissistic desire, since, as a child looking up into the eyes of that parent, he or she is looking in a metaphorical mirror of him- or herself, a manifestation of the Imaginary Order–so one spends the rest of one’s life searching for a replacement of that object, the objet petit a. This replacement can never be a perfect substitute for the original, so desire is never fulfilled.

The demonic replacements of Church, Gage, and Rachel can be seen to represent the objet petit a, for they, of course, can never replace the originals…though Louis does all he can to have them replace his lost loved ones. When Jud’s wife, Norma, dies, he wisely accepts her death and never even considers burying her in the Micmac burial ground; but its demonic influence drives him to desire to have Church buried there, for Ellie’s sake, since desire is of the other, to wish to fulfill what one believes others want. Similarly, Louis reburies Gage there in part out of a wish to fulfill what he at least imagines is what Rachel would want…to have her little boy back (“She cried his name and held her arms out.” –page 527).

So, the forbidden fulfillment of excessive desires, jouissance, symbolized by the demonic resurrecting of Church, Gage, and Rachel, is another example of the dialectical relationship between opposites–pleasure/pain, bliss/suffering, heaven/hell, life/death–as I would represent with the head of the ouroboros biting its tail. In passing into jouissance‘s indulging in transgressive pleasure, one goes past pleasure and suffers pain; whereas in the Pet Sematary, one learns to accept loss.

Young Jud originally buried his dog, Spot, in the Micmac burial ground (page 181); then, when he saw what trouble the resurrected dog was, he came to his senses, killed it, and buried it in the Pet Sematary (page 45). The problem is that the desires kindled by the Micmac burial ground are addictive, like a drug–hence, Jud’s ill-advised taking of Louis there with dead Church.

One always wants more, that ‘surplus value,’ or the plus-de-jouir that Lacan wrote about. When animals are brought back, their demonic nature is usually not so bad as it is with resurrected humans (“…because Hanratty had gone bad, did that mean that all animals went bad? No. Hanratty the bull did not prove the general case; Hanratty was in fact the exception to the general case.” –page 390); again, as with the animals buried in the Pet Sematary, they act as a kind of warning to us not to play around with life and death, especially not with human beings.

There is our attachment to what we can’t keep, what we love; and there’s what we wish we never had, what we hate, yet what we must have at least sometimes in our lives. The Buddhists speak of the Three Poisons: greed, hatred, and delusion. Greed represents all those things and people we want in excess, because we want to keep them, but must one day let go of them–still, we won’t want to let go of them: hence the resurrecting of Church, Gage, and Rachel.

Hatred represents what we wish would be gone, but must have, hence Rachel’s trauma in dealing with Zelda, and her shame at feeling glad her sick sister finally died…but the painful memories live on, haunting her, for she can’t get rid of Zelda until she’s properly processed her pain. Hatred is also in Irwin’s refusal to accept Louis as a son-in-law.

Delusion is the false belief that things can be permanent, hence Louis’s reburying of Church, Gage, and Rachel. Even though he sees how evil resurrected Gage is, Louis still fools himself with the belief that resurrected Rachel will be better, because apparently he waited too long with Gage. “Something got into him because I waited too long. But it will be different with Rachel…” (page 556)

So, the message of the novel is that we can’t force our desires onto the world…but we can’t help doing so, even though doing so will only make our suffering worse. We know this, but still do it. “Sometimes, dead is better”…but we refuse to accept it.

The sweetness and innocence of children and animals, as expressed in the Pet Sematary–that seminary, if you will, that teaches us to have the misspelling simplicity of a child entering the kingdom of heaven–turns rotten, into Oz the Gweat and Tewwible (pages 510-511, 513ff), if we try to bend the world to our will. The Wendigo makes all the difference.

As we already know, the Micmac burial ground is a demonic double of the Pet Sematary, with their spirals (pages 386-387, 498) and graves curling like the coiled, serpentine body of the ouroboros; the land of the murderous, greedy, cannibalistic Wendigo that so frightens Louis on his way to rebury Gage, is right where the serpent’s teeth bite into its tail, the abyss where heaven and hell meet.

It’s so easy for the sweet and innocent to phase into their opposite, the Gweat and Tewwible.

Stephen King, Pet Sematary, New York, Pocket Books, 1983

‘Sirens,’ a Horror Novella, Chapter Four

“Holy shit!” Eddie Sayers said as he read his sister’s story on the death of Tor. “I gotta go talk to Nancy about this.”

He tried calling her on her phone, but it was busy, so he sent her this text message: “We need 2 talk about this news story U wrote about Tors death When RU free”

About ten minutes later, she texted this reply: “In 2 days I’m too busy right now”

Eddie: “Ok Ur home Thurs”

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

“Hi, Eddie,” Nancy said that Thursday evening, opening the door to her apartment and letting him in. “So, what do you want to know about Tor’s death?”

“Well, it’s just that he was my friend,” Eddie said.

“He was?” she asked with her eyes and mouth wide open.

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “In fact, he’s the second friend of mine to have been killed in freak accidents recently.”

“Oh? Who was the first?”

“My buddy, Ari Schneider.”

“Oh, my fucking God.” Her eyes were opened even wider now.

“He died in a motorcycle collision with a truck.”

“I know,” she said, eyes still agape. “I wrote an article about his death, too.”

“Wow, what a coincidence. Small world.”

“Much too much of a coincidence, Eddie. Much too small a world.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because there’s something strange about their deaths. Those accidents should never have happened. They should have easily been able to avoid their accidents. Ari and Tor were neither drunk nor stoned. They weren’t suicidal, according to their families; nor were they self-destructive in any way.”

“Oh, yeah,” Eddie said. “They were the happiest dudes I’ve ever known. We partied hard all the time together, with my other friends I’m getting together with tonight. Talking about Tor and Ari dying is gonna darken our party tonight.”

“What do you guys usually do together?”

“You know, the usual. Go to dance clubs, get drunk, chase pussy. Man, this one time, about a month ago, we took this one girl to…Virgil’s apartment, I think. It’s hard to remember in detail. We were all really drunk, and we…oops! Never mind. You don’t need to know about that.”

“I don’t, don’t I?” Nancy asked, looking askance at Eddie.

“She consented.” He avoided her eyes.

“Really?” Nancy glared at him. She saw a confession of guilt in his eyes.

“What am I, on trial here?”

“Look, forget it. Just be careful tonight with your friends. Don’t do anything stupid. I have a bad feeling about what happened to Ari and Tor. And your naughty partying is giving me even worse vibes. That woman’s OK, right?”

“Of course. What do think we did…kill her?” He was doing a bad job of hiding that guilt on his face.

“No, but whatever you all did with her, or to her, after that she may have wanted to kill herself.”

“Oh, come on! What’s this bullshit? She was fine when we left her. Really.”

“Really?” she asked, looking hard in his eyes.

“Yes, really,” he said, looking back in her eyes with a more assured attitude.

“Look, something weird is happening to your friends, it seems. It almost seems supernatural. As crazy as it sounds, I don’t know any other way to explain it.”

“Do you think her ghost is coming after us, or something?” he asked with a dopey look on his face, mocking the absurd attitude she seemed to have.

“No, of course not. Just be careful tonight, OK?”

“OK, Ms. Paranoia.” He left her apartment, sneering.