Tag: Horror fiction

‘Slutlips,’ a Surreal, Psychological Horror Story: Chapter Five

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[NOTE: this is the fifth chapter (click here for the first, here for the second, here for the third, and here for the fourth) of a psychological horror story based on an audio film of the same name by my musician friend, Cat Corelli, something I wrote up an analysis for; you can learn more about that here. Before you begin reading, though, TRIGGER WARNING: as a horror story, this one has some graphic content of a violent and sexual nature; so if you’re one of my readers with C-PTSD or other forms of psychological trauma, you may want to skip this one. As for you braver souls, though, read on…]

The next thing Alice (still in Lily’s consciousness and feeling herself having gone, so to speak, further and further down the rabbit hole) heard was an elegant piano waltz. The notes were punctuated with such crisp precision, one would think Glenn Gould had risen from the grave.

Still, there was an eerie sadness in the melody.

Lily opened her eyes and saw herself in the middle of a playground in that Austrian grassland, with the Alps not too far away. The skies were a cloudless blue. Her father was in lederhosen again. She, in the dirndl, was physically about nineteen years old, though in her cute pigtails and childlike manner, she psychologically seemed to be about six.

The piano player was a man in a cowboy hat, plaid collared shirt, and jeans. He seemed charming to her. She felt an urge to get up.

“Daddy, I wanna dance,” she said.

“Darling, sweetheart,” Danny said in his fake German accent. “You can’t be doing that.” He, back in the Nazi uniform, pushed her back onto her swing.

“But why, Daddy?”

“This dance requires both legs, darling.”

She looked down at herself, and saw only one leg. She began sobbing, then said, “But, who cares?”

“Well, people will be watching.”

“Tell them it’s OK,” she said, stopping her crying. “They have to understand it’s OK.”

“I can’t risk my reputation,” he said.

“Daddy, you’re a moron.”

He looked down at her with threatening eyes.

The piano man stopped playing, got up, and walked over to her and her father, who was now in lederhosen again.

“Hey, howdy, man,” the pianist said, in a southern accent so overdone it could only have been fake. “I’m Morgan.” He reached out his hand to shake her father’s.

“Howdy to you, Morgan,” her father said, shaking his hand and genuinely pleased to meet him. “Nice to meet you. I’m Dan. Daniel Torrance.”

“Nice to meet you, Danny Torrance. May I call you ‘Danny’? Like The Shining Danny?”

“What’s The Shining?” Torrance asked.

“Oh, forget it,” the would-be southerner said. “You don’t have it anyway.” He paused, looking down at Lily. “I want to ask you something, man.”

“Talk to me.”

“I’ve been playing that waltz for years. Kids always dance to it. Ha! My lil’ Jack and Jill over there…” he pointed to his twins, his ten-year-old son and daughter “…were dancing to it just now. Dancin’ ’til they done got dizzy, that’s how they danced.”

“Those two blondes?” Danny asked, eyeing the two kids lewdly.

“Yeah,” Morgan said. “Sweet kids. I love them, man.” He paused and looked at them with a similarly eerie lewdness, then back at Lily the same way. “Your lil’ girl didn’t dance. Why? All kids have fun dancing to my waltz.”

“Well…” Danny began.

“Tell me,” Morgan almost commanded.

“There’s a problem. She thinks she has only one leg.”

“Jesus Christ! How come?” Morgan looked down at Lily and ogled her two legs.

She also looked down at herself; she smiled to see both of them there again. Then she thought, Wait a minute: I have one leg if Daddy says I have only one?

“I don’t know, man,” Danny said. “I keep saying she’s wrong, but she won’t listen.”

“Strange world,” Morgan said. “Do you play the banjo by chance, Danny? You seem like the type who might.”

“Why would I play the banjo, of all the low-class instruments?” Danny said, offended. “It’s the kind of instrument a nigger would play. I’d be risking my reputation if I played that.” He was in his SS uniform again.

“Daddy, you’re a moron,” Lily said.

“One more word of lip from you, young lady, and you’ll wish you’d kept your mouth shut!” He scowled down at her with Goebbels’s face again. She recoiled, shaking.

“Well, I gotta say you know jack about niggers and banjos,” Morgan said, now a black man. “And you’d better change your attitudes, Danny. ‘Cause you don’t wanna mess with niggers in the South.”

“Says who?” Danny said, in lederhosen again and looking like himself.

“Says Morgan Freeman,” Morgan said, now looking like the actor, but still with the ridiculously fake southern accent. “But you don’t have The Shining thing anyways, so you won’t get it.”

Lily looked up at him, excited to see him looking like the movie star in the cowboy hat and jeans. “Oh! That’s coool! So you’re, like, Morgan Freeman from the movies?”

“Yeah, pretty girl,” ‘Freeman’ said, eyeing her lewdly again.

“So, maybe you can give me two legs so I can dance to your waltz…could you?” She pawed at her legs, to feel only one.

Her father, in the SS outfit again and looking like Goebbels, scowled at her, “Lily! You can’t be doing that! You’re supposed to have only one leg!”

“What is the problem with you, Danny?” ‘Freeman’ asked. “Why can’t you let your kid have both legs? I thought you said she only thought she had one leg. She really don’t!”

“Yeah! Please, Daddy!”

“Well,…” her father said, then leaned over to whisper in ‘Freeman’s’ ear, “Because if she has both, she’ll misuse them.”

“Oh, but how?” Morgan asked, white again, and smirking.

Her father whispered again, softer, “By spreading her legs before other men!”

Now both men smirked while looking at her…who had both legs again.

“So, why can’t I have both legs, Daddy?” she asked, feeling her leg shrink away yet again.

“Strange world, indeed,” Morgan said.

“I just can’t risk my reputation,” Danny said again.

Moron, she thought.

“Oh, that’s too bad,” Morgan said. Lily looked up at him. Now he looked like Donald Trump in that cowboy hat. “You know, if you weren’t his daughter, I’d probably be dating you.”

She cringed at the sound of those words.

“You know, maybe we could allow her to have both legs,” Danny said, smirking.

They all looked down at her, and indeed, she had both legs again.

The men grabbed her.

She had a dizzy spell. She felt herself falling down that rabbit hole. Further and further down. It was pitch black all around her.

Then, an ever-so-slight amount of light allowed her to get a sense of her surroundings.

She looked up at the sky. Now it was night. The sky was starless and black, for there was a new moon, and the pine trees were so tall all around her that they blocked out any possible starlight. The pines stood tall…then she did fall.

She shook as she felt Danny and Morgan on top of her, tearing off her dirndl.

They’re both beneath my skin, she thought as she felt them entering her.

As the men were panting and having her, she heard a familiar voice call out to her.

It hissed, “!yliL, yliL…yliL”

As the men shook and stabbed inside her, she looked around, trying to find the source of the voice.

“.doog od uoy fi emit erom eno em raeh lliw uoY”

Lily’s head swung left and right, following the voice as spectators would watch a tennis ball in play. The men’s sweat and saliva were dripping on her skin.

They’re both beneath my skin.

“.dab od uoy fi semit erom owt em raeh lliw uoY”

Am I doing bad now? Lily thought, since she felt no pain with the men inside her. Numbness was a protective shield, as she’d learned years ago.

The Mystery Girl ended with “.thgin dooG”

Lily lay there, catatonic on the grass, as the men zipped up their pants.

“As you can see,” Danny said, smiling, “she does have her uses.”

With her eyes closed, she felt a man’s foul beer breath by her face.

“Time to wake up, pretty girl,” that familiar, fake southern accent grunted in her left ear again.

She opened her eyes and saw Roy Torrance in the cowboy hat, standing next to Nazi Danny.

‘Slutlips,’ a Surreal, Psychological Horror Story: Chapter Four

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[NOTE: this is the fourth chapter (click here for the first, here for the second, and here for the third) of a psychological horror story based on an audio film of the same name by my musician friend, Cat Corelli, something I wrote up an analysis for; you can learn more about that here. Before you begin reading, though, TRIGGER WARNING: as a horror story, this one has some graphic content of a violent and sexual nature; so if you’re one of my readers with C-PTSD or other forms of psychological trauma, you may want to skip this one. As for you braver souls, though, read on…]

As Alice drifted back into unconsciousness, she remembered a dream of Lily’s, when the girl was thirteen years old. She was in Danny’s car, going along the Oregon coast on a vacation. She looked out the car window and sighed with a smile as she watched the peaceful ocean waves flowing by her side. Some Sixties saxophone lounge music, like something from a noir film, was playing on the car radio.

Alice heard a voice say, “It’s all beneath your skin,” as she felt herself returning to Lily’s head in that dark, mental ocean. Coming back into Lily’s consciousness, Alice wondered, What is all beneath my skin?

Now as Lily, she sat in the passenger’s seat, trying to ignore Daddy’s Dan’s non-steering, right hand on her knee. The sentence repeated in her mind over and over again, like a mantra: It’s all beneath your skin.

Lily herself was drifting off to sleep, and and in Lily’s dream, that mantra grew into a song.

The Mystery Girl’s voice said, “.ecilA, pu ekaw ot emiT”

Lily got scared, and the wind blew heavier, howling against her slightly-opened car window. Her consciousness, merged with that of Alice, sank deeper into farther removed states of unconsciousness…beyond repressed memories, and into dreams within dreams.

It was like going into a dark basement cellar, then opening a secret door in the floor and entering a second basement cellar below, even darker than the first, then going down into a third, even darker cellar, and so on, and so on…

Finally, fully as Lily, she saw herself as a teen with Danny somewhere in the country, near the Alps. The June sun was shining in an ocean of blue skies, with only occasional white islands for clouds. Cows and sheep could be heard grazing on the grass.

Danny was wearing lederhosen, and she, sixteen, was in a dirndl. Her hair was in pigtails, each arching cutely over her ears.

He looked down at her, with lustful eyes thinly disguised as loving. She looked up at him and frowned.

“How lovely you are,” he said in a badly-mimicked German accent. He put his arm around her and tried to pull her up close to him. She resisted.

“Daddy, no,” she said in a trembling voice.

“I can’t let go of such a treasure,” he said, still in the faux German accent.

She avoided his eyes and looked at his legs. No longer in lederhosen, he now wore black pants and black leather shoes.

“Please, Daddy, let me go,” she said, struggling to pull free from his tight grip. She looked up and saw him in a uniform of the SS.

He looked down at her with cruel eyes. No longer in Danny Torrance’s body, her father now had the form of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda.

“You must obey your father, you little bitch!” He slapped her.

She drifted still further into a deeper, darker level of unconsciousness. Lily was swimming on waves of pitch black…or trying to swim, for she looked behind herself and saw only one leg! The bloody stump where the other leg should have been was dying the black water red.

She struggled to keep her head above water. She panted in desperation for air. She felt her face often sink below, the reddish-black water rising to her eyes.

Soon, she found herself swimming in nothing but red. Only the sky was black. She could hardly see anything.

She passed out, and fell into an even deeper level of unconsciousness.

Now she found herself in a brightly-lit hotel lobby. The elevators were directly in front of her, about ten metres away.

Blood started pouring through the side openings of the elevator doors. The red filled the lobby like the Great Flood.

What is this? Alice thought. The Overlook Hotel?

She felt that blood gushing out of her leg-stump like a cascade of red. Lily’s skin grew lighter and lighter. She looked like a living corpse.

It’s all beneath my skin, Lily thought, over and over again.

Then she heard the voice of a man by her left ear. He said, in a badly imitated southern accent, “Time to wake up, pretty girl.”

‘Slutlips,’ a Surreal, Psychological Horror Story: Chapter Three

 

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[NOTE: this is the third chapter (click here for the first, and here for the second) of a psychological horror story based on an audio film of the same name by my musician friend, Cat Corelli, something I wrote up an analysis for; you can learn more about that here. Before you begin reading, though, TRIGGER WARNING: as a horror story, this one has some graphic content of a violent and sexual nature; so if you’re one of my readers with C-PTSD or other forms of psychological trauma, you may want to skip this one. As for you braver souls, though, read on…]

Alice woke up at about two o’clock in the afternoon. Her whole body was in throbbing agony from the hangover she’d worked so hard the night before to drink herself into.

She seemed to be drowning in the seas of her feeble ego-state; then, with effort, she rose from the carpet she’d been sleeping on and looked at herself in the mirror on the hotel room’s dresser.

“There I am,” she gasped. “Thank God.”

Then she looked down and saw blood stains by her feet.

What are those drops on the carpet? she wondered, then the memory of the night before faded back into her mind. “Oh, yeah…”

She turned on a radio on the bedside table and set it to the local news-station. As the news played, she went into the bathroom and washed the rest of her victim’s blood off her face. The stains on her dress would have to wait ’til she got back home (if she’d be safe from the cops there). Besides, the red and black stripes on her dress obscured the blood well enough for cleaning it not to be urgent.

The news continued playing as she scrubbed the stains off the carpet with an old rag she found in the bathroom. By the time she’d almost finished getting those red drops off, she–in spite of her relatively dissociative state–heard the radio announcer say, “The search is ongoing for the murderer of Ray Terence, a man found with his throat cut in the alley between the NRG Club and the Eden.”

Alice heard the announcer say, ‘Roy Torrance,’ ‘Energy Club,’ and ‘The E-Den.’

“Oh, my fucking God,” she whispered, eyes agape, then she put her hand on her mouth. Looking away from the mirror, but still half-listening to the news report, she felt those ocean waves carrying her off into another ego-less reverie.

She heard the voices of two men investigating the case. It sounded as if they were…maybe…being interviewed by the radio announcer. She saw dark waves enveloping her in a vortex of darker and darker grey, fading into that black spiral.

Inspector Trudeau said, “The slash on Roy’s neck. It looks big enough to be the slash of a machete.”

FBI Agent Curtis spoke in a gravelly near-Brooklyn accent; it sounded cheesily stereotypical of crime investigators in noir novels or films. He said to Trudeau, “So…the report says there were teeth marks on his skin, as if he was bein’ sucked by a vampire, or a psycho who thinks he…or she…is a vampire. Barely distinguishable from the goddamn machete cut, if that was the murder weapon, but still, there…That’s not quite a typical case, is it?”

“Pretty far from typical, agent,” Trudeau said.

“Do ya figure the killer has any connections to Satanic sects, devil worshippers, maybe?”

“None so far that we can see.”

“Do you know know anything about who the killer might be?” Curtis asked. “Anything that could lead to him…or her? Background? Occupation? Family members?”

Every time Curtis referred to the killer as possibly female, Alice felt a chill go through her. Just this once, she thought, it would be great to hear a sexist use of pronouns.

“Well, the victim’s name is…Terence…or Torrance…something like that–I don’t have the file with me,” Trudeau said. “But this killing happened outside a bar, so I doubt there’s any family connection with the killer, or close friendship, or anything like that.”

Alice breathed a sigh of relief.

“In any case,” Trudeau continued, “our Winchester boys in South Dakota are on the case. They’re informing the victim’s brother…one Donny, or is it Danny? I don’t remember. If you like, I’ll tell them to ask if there’s a possibility of anyone in the victim’s family wanting to kill Roy. Anyway, that’s all for now.”

“Thank you, inspector,” Curtis said.

Alice turned off the radio and shuddered to hear the name Danny.

He was Roy’s brother…and her father.

But…was he Alice’s father…or Lily’s?

Still spinning down that black spiral, Alice couldn’t remember.

“Lily,…Lily,…” she whispered in the darkness. The waves returned, the undulating shifting from absolute black to a dark grey.

The current of waters surrounding her brought Lily’s head near. Alice’s consciousness entered the head…

…Lily, eighteen, was on all fours on a large bed with wrinkled blue sheets. As the bed creaked and jerked back and forth with Roy on top of her, the sheets looked like rolling ocean waves.

Beside them on the bed were Lily’s father Danny, and a girl about Lily’s age, who was getting doggy-style from him, just as Lily was getting it from Roy. Also as in the case with Lily, the other girl’s face was hidden by her hair and her tears.

As the men were invading them, Danny chanted, “We’re…the sons of God, coming into…the daughters…of men!”

All the girls could hope for was a quick end to the ordeal.

“The sons of God…are good…men of God,” Roy grunted between thrusts. “We’re…the descendants…of Seth!”

“You daughters…of men,” Danny panted, “are descended…from Cain…You’re wicked…you tempted us…you look…like sluts!”

“Your hot…slut-lips,” Roy moaned, “make us want…your slit-lips.”

“You’ve earned,” Danny sighed, “God’s wrath.”

I wish God’s wrath would cause the Great Flood to wash you two away, Lily thought. An endless ocean to purify me of your filth. Envelop us, ocean.

The pain of the men’s stabbing was getting overwhelming. The girls felt more and more blood coming from their insides.

Suddenly, the queen’s voice was heard: “Off with their heads!”

A Great Flood, indeed, came and enveloped them all. Alice’s consciousness left Lily’s head, which Alice could barely make out rolling away under the water. She saw other dismembered body parts whisk past her like hurrying schools of fish being chased by a shark.

As the dark waves continued to flow around her, Alice heard an unintelligible voice repeat something to her.

A female voice said, “ecilA ,pu ekaw ot emiT.”

I’ve heard that weird woman’s voice before, Alice thought. Who is she? She feels so close to me, yet so far away, too. Is she a part of me,…or am I a part of her?

“lrig ytterp ,pu ekaw ot emiT,” the Mystery Girl said again.

The dark waves were getting a bit lighter, and Alice rose to her feet, saw herself in the mirror again, and tried to ignore her pounding hangover. She looked down.

“Fuck,” she hissed. “I’ve still got some drops on the carpet.”

Too exhausted and still too much in pain, she collapsed on that spotty carpet.

She heard a voice–it sounded like Daisy’s–say, “Lily…It’s all beneath your skin.”

The waves grew darker again. She lay there, hovering between consciousness and unconsciousness…

‘Slutlips,’ a Surreal, Psychological Horror Story: Chapter Two

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[NOTE: this is the second chapter (click here for the first) of a psychological horror story based on an audio film of the same name by my musician friend, Cat Corelli, something I wrote up an analysis for; you can learn more about that here. Before you begin reading, though, TRIGGER WARNING: as a horror story, this one has some graphic content of a violent and sexual nature; so if you’re one of my readers with C-PTSD or other forms of psychological trauma, you may want to skip this one. As for you braver souls, though, read on…]

Those ocean waves, all around her mind and in it, were making it difficult for Alice to keep walking straight on the sidewalk. A couple of times, her high heels clopped off the curb, and she almost walked into the road. The honking of car horns pushed her back onto the sidewalk.

She needed a unified self to keep stable. Her reflection in the store windows, dark in the night oblivion, and further off from her than her mirror at home when she’d stood before it, wasn’t clear or detailed enough to reassure her that Alice was indeed Alice. She needed another self for her body to assume.

Among those waves that rose and fell in her mind, she saw the floating heads of Daisy and Lily. “Daisy,” she called out.

Her consciousness entered that head. Animating it, she now saw a different world: a sidewalk during the day.

She skipped on the sidewalk like a carefree little girl, singing the main riff from a song called “Scapegod” as she approached school one weekday morning. Trees lined the sides of the sidewalk. Birds were chirping. It was a lovely day.

She looked down at herself and saw her now-teenage body in a Catholic schoolgirl’s uniform, with a white blouse and a red-and-black plaid miniskirt, instead of the red-and-black striped dress Alice had been wearing. Also, instead of the black fishnet stockings and high heels Alice had had on when leaving the apartment, Daisy was now wearing knee-high white socks and black leather shoes.

She’d gone from slut to sweetie.

She arrived at the ‘school’ and opened the door. No student chatting or horseplay, though. No teachers monitoring the halls with disapproving scowls. Electronic music was blasting all around her, as palpable and thick as those enveloping mental waters. She also saw mirrors for walls, everywhere. It was safe to be Alice again.

Safe for her–not safe for the man she’d take home.

She removed her consciousness from the Daisy-head, ignored the surrounding water, and looked at herself in those mirrors on the walls. No longer did she see a sweet teen in a Catholic schoolgirl uniform. Now, she saw thirty-something Alice, in that tight-fitting, red-and-black striped dress.

Reassured of her distinct ego, she lit a cigarette, took a drag from it, and looked around the bar. She saw a familiar face…or at least one that reminded her of someone from her remote past. She swallowed an ecstasy pill.

She slid in among the sea of gyrators on the dance floor. A special guest DJ was doing a show for the club.

She swayed her ass to the pounding beat. Her eyes met those of the man. Her eyes’ lewdness set a snare for him.

As she looked further off to find her reassuring reflection in those wall mirrors, she thought, That guy kind of looks like Uncle Roy, Daddy’s twin brother. Looking at him is, in a way, almost like looking in a mirror. She eyed him again.

Her undulating curves continued their enticing dance for him. As he approached, though, she slid into the crowd of dancers. She was submerged in that ocean of bodies, invisible to him.

No matter, he thought. I’ll wait for her outside.

An hour later, she–wasted–stepped through a side doorway of the club and into a dark alley. Without any mirrors, Alice saw and felt only dark waves. The decapitated heads of those girls floated by in her mind. Instead of her addressing them, and them ignoring her, though, it was the reverse.

She just barely heard Daisy’s voice, “Hi, Alice!”

Lost in her thoughts, in that black ocean of oblivion, Alice just sailed by. She sensed the presence of that man as she passed him. Roy Torrance, she thought. It is him.

“Hey!” he shouted to get her attention as he stepped out from the shadows. “Our eyes met when you were on the dance floor, then you disappeared. You’re hot, in a kind of vampiress way.”

Vampiress? she mused as she turned around to look at him. I could play that role for him.

“Are you, like, BloodRayne, or something?” he asked.

Looking in his eyes, she was reconfirmed in her mind that he was her uncle. She smiled to see a face that, as hateful as it was to her, was nonetheless like a mirror reflection. She was sure of herself in seeing him as one acknowledging the reality of her existence. One who once dominated her, but who now would be dominated by her. “Yeah,” she sighed.

“Cool!” he said, looking her up and down and licking his lips. “Do you suck?”

“Oh, yeah,” she purred with a lascivious smirk.

“So,” he grunted, sliding his fingers up and down her bare arm as he stared at her tits, “You wanna do it?”

“Yeah.” She giggled lewdly. She plunged her tongue into his mouth. He grabbed her ass as she reached into her purse. Their tongues slithered over and under each other.

Then, she felt his hand sliding up her dress. A memory flashed before her mind’s eye: Daddy and Uncle Roy taking turns on Lily…when she was only twelve! She remembered Roy’s hand approaching that part of her body back then. Definitely not a turn-on for her.

Alice bit off the tip of his tongue and swallowed it.

“Aah!” he screamed, pulling away. “What are you doing, you toffer?” he shouted in an inarticulate voice, as if he had no teeth. He kept moaning in disorientation as she pulled a switchblade out of her purse.

What am I doing? she thought. Sucking your blood.

She slashed with the knife in a sweeping arc, the blade slicing through his throat and spraying blood everywhere. He fell to the ground, his body shaking as he coughed blood. Then his body stopped shaking.

She reached down for his neck and began feeding on his blood. As she sucked and drank it down, thoughts raced through her mind: Come into me, Uncle Roy. Be a part of me. You always liked being inside me: now’s your chance. We’ll be one now. She cackled for a moment.

Though she couldn’t see his face in the dark, she knew something was wrong. She suddenly remembered–this couldn’t be Roy.

She stopped sucking and pulled away. “Wait a minute!” she said. “Shit! He was already dead.” Uncle Roy’s been dead for the past five years…hasn’t he? she thought, her head swimming and swaying. I don’t remember…

She rose to her feet, and waddled and stumbled a bit. Instead of seeing dark blue ocean waves, now she saw a black spiral. A void. Blacker and blacker. She felt dizzy. Keeping her balance was difficult. She almost fell again.

She heard a siren further off in the background. Was it the cops? Did they hear his screaming and shouting? She felt the man’s blood dripping off her face. She had to get away. Fast.

As she staggered out of the alley, she took a handkerchief from her purse and wiped her face clean as best she could. Afraid the police would trace her to her apartment, she sneaked into a dive of a hotel just further down the alley, and checked in for the night. Her mind still in that black vortex state, she never noticed the strange look the man at the counter gave her when she paid for her room and got the key from him.

She went into her room and collapsed on the furry carpet by the bed. Within a minute, she lost consciousness.

‘Slutlips,’ a Surreal, Psychological Horror Story: Chapter One

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[NOTE: this is the beginning of a psychological horror story based on an audio film of the same name by my musician friend, Cat Corelli, something I wrote up an analysis for; you can learn more about that here. Before you begin reading, though, TRIGGER WARNING: as a horror story, this one has some graphic content of a violent and sexual nature; so if you’re one of my readers with C-PTSD or other forms of psychological trauma, you may want to skip this one. As for you braver souls, though, read on…]

Alice looked at herself in the mirror as she applied cherry-red lipstick to her lower lip. The face in the reflection was a painted beauty. She smiled.

Her flowing, wavy hair (dyed a she-devil red), her piercing brown eyes, her almost ghost-like skin–except for her tattoos, the pink blush on her cheeks, the dark blue eye shadow going from her eyelids up to her brown-pencilled eyebrows, and those aforementioned cherry lips–and the dark red and black striped dress that draped from just under her white shoulders; all of this in the mirror reflection gave her reassurance of a woman, a unified, coherent entity.

This was comforting, for everything on the other side, where she stood, her unseen self–if it even was a self–felt spastic, uncontrollable, broken in pieces, even merged with the surroundings. Where did she end, and where did everything else begin?

Only mirrors gave her assurance of being whole. Seeing a whole body, all together, in the reflection gave her peace. Looking away from it, she’d begin to feel as if in pieces. She’d have to look back at the reflection to remind herself that she was all in one piece. Still, she couldn’t just stare at her reflection forever. She had to walk away from the mirror if she was going to go to the bar and pick up a dude to take back here and screw…in more ways than one.

Away from the mirror, she always felt as if her body was either being torn limb from limb, like a victim in a Romero zombie flick, or already thus torn apart. Her mind was perpetually in a nightmare state, her dismembered parts floating in the ocean as if her murderer had thrown her naked body parts in the water.

In this hallucinatory state, she sometimes saw a penis and a castrated, hairy sack of balls floating by her arms and legs, as if the male genitalia were hers.

“Off with her head!” a familiarly regal woman’s voice shouted in Alice’s mind.

Her consciousness would shift up and down, lighter and darker, in oceanic waves. With those undulating movements, she’d see naked body parts other than her own mixed with hers. There were torsos, sometimes male, but usually female. The decapitated heads of young women were most familiar to her.

“Off with her head!” she heard again, off in the distance.

It sometimes seemed that those bobbing female heads were hers.

She’d call out their names. “Daisy, Lily,…” she’d sigh.

As the wave-like movements of her consciousness continued slowly vibrating up and down, she’d see the world through the eyes of each of those heads. Often, with her consciousness inhabiting one of the heads, she’d feel whole, in a unified body. She’d look down at herself and smile to see a body…for a while, at least.

Then she’d hear, “Off with her head!” again, and she’d leave that head and haunt another, like a ghost animating a body.

Indeed, she put the psychosis into metempsychosis.

After her wavy reverie, Alice looked back into the mirror.

Her made-up face was putana perfection.

“Oh, my God,” she said with a Lilith-like vocal fry. “You look like a slut.” She grinned at her image with almost serrated teeth. “Those are slut-lips.” She pursed them, then touched herself between her legs. “And those are my slit-lips.” She giggled and licked her lips.

She could hear music in her mind’s ear. It sounded almost like a harpsichord playing Baroque music…or was it a pair of acoustic guitars, with bluesy fingers bending strings? She wasn’t sure: the two musical styles shifted back and forth like those waves in her mind.

She chanted along with the rhythm of the music. “Everybody wants you, everybody needs you, everybody hates you, everybody bleeds you, everybody wants you, everybody needs you, everybody fucks you, everybody kills you.”

At the sound of those verbs, she looked away from the mirror, and the hallucinations resumed. She felt hands grabbing her. Her breasts and ass-cheeks were being squeezed ‘til it hurt. Fingers went up her pussy and ass…then the fingers felt like fists; she felt blood dripping from down there.

Then, the fists inside her felt like phalluses ramming in and out of her; it felt like repeated punches. More blood.

Those grabbing hands were all over her, seeming to be tearing her dress and underwear off. At first, it felt like a dozen hands; then it felt like only two. Now she felt as if naked, shaking before the mirror, her eyes squeezed shut. She moaned a mix of pain and sexual excitement.

She opened her eyes. The face of her father, on top of her and sweating like a pig. A creaking, shaking bed under both of them.

Now those two phalluses felt like knives. An ocean of blood.

She looked around and saw all those dismembered body parts floating in the waves of red.

“Daisy, Lily,…” she sighed with each phallic stab.

She looked up into the eyes of her smirking, fucking father.

She showed him her serrated grin. His smirk turned upside-down.

She bit him hard on the nose. His blood sprayed out in all directions. He screamed so loud, it pierced her eardrums.

The hallucination vanished. She looked at herself in the mirror and grinned.

That horror had given her inspiration: she knew what she had to do.

“Oh, my God,” she said again in that vocal fry. “You look like a slut.”

She picked up her purse, left the mirror, turned off the lights, and left her apartment. As she walked in the direction of the local bar, her high heels clanking on the sidewalk, she felt those waves all around her…and through her.

‘Bloodsuckers’, a Surreal Horror Short Story

My name is Samir. I am ten years old, and I don’t know how many days it’s been since the last time I ate.

I do remember the bombs, though.

When they hit our house, I was with my parents and sister, trying to celebrate her sixth birthday.

I haven’t seen any of them since.

I haven’t eaten since then, either.

I don’t know how many days I’ve been in this hospital. I just lie on a bed, and the nurses have no food to give me. I have dirty bandages on my half-naked body. The blood from my wounds has stopped flowing, but other spots of blood, little red spots, drip blood from new wounds.

They are from the bites of the purple, flying insects.

They’re like mosquitoes: I’ve never seen such bugs before. They bite me, and suck out a little of my blood each time.

Do they put something in my body, too? I think they do.

I lie on my back, my head swinging left to right—not so much left, anymore, since I don’t like what I see in the mirror to my left.

My upper head has blown up into the shape of a giant, green-yellow ball. Much of my hair is gone. My skin is green-yellow, too. I look like an alien, or a monster. I’m like a skeleton with skin.

Did the bombs do this to my skin and head? When they hit our house, I remember something burning in my nose, eyes, and mouth. I was coughing, desperate to suck some pure air into my lungs—then everything went black; then I woke up here. Did I inhale a chemical from the bombs?

Or are the purple flies doing this to me, squirting some kind of poison into my body while they suck out my blood? I think that’s what it is.

I’m not sure if I’m awake or dreaming, but I see a TV, I think, on the ceiling. What a TV is doing up there, of all places, I don’t know; maybe I’m seeing and hearing things, because I think I’m awake.

Anyway, a white man in a dark blue suit is talking to me on the TV. He is in his fifties or sixties, I think, because he has lines of silver in his combed-back hair. He smiles and speaks with a gentle, kind voice, but his words don’t comfort me. They confuse me.

My stomach is grumbling. It hurts so much. Could someone please give me some food? Was I a bad boy? Am I being punished for eating too much at my sister’s birthday party? I’ll be good next time, I promise!

“You are being a very good boy,” the man says to me in Arabic (Wow! I didn’t know white people could speak my language!) “My name is Brian Oates, Samir, and I want to tell you that your sacrifice is bringing happiness to a number of worthy people in my country. You should be proud of your selflessness!”

“Am I…giving them something?” I ask Brian, who seems to be able to hear me. (Is this TV that thing they call ‘Skype’?) “I have…nothing to give. I’m just a…poor Yemeni boy. I only feel…as if someone is…taking everything…from me.” I begin to sob. “Where is my family? I want my mother! I’m so hungry.” My tears are the only wet my face has felt in so long.

“Well, some people would say you’ve had everything taken from you, but it’s only a point of view,” he says, grinning like a friend. “There are other ways of understanding what is happening to you. Alternative interpretations, other facts that are equally valid, if not better, explanations of what you’re doing.”

“There are?” I ask, hoping his alternative facts will ease my pain. I stop crying. I almost smile as I listen.

“Yes, of course there are. It is possible for many different realities to coexist, in the same place and at the same time. One reality says you’re starving and dying on a hospital bed, being bitten by insects. Another says you’re giving qapita, your life-force, so others may live better.”

“Qapita? My ‘life-force’?” (Is that an Arabic word? I’ve never heard it before. His Arabic must be really good.)

“Yes, qapita, your life-force. Yemen isn’t the only country in the world that’s dying, Samir. Even we in the richer countries are running out of food and other needed things. Some people say that Big Business destroyed the environment, but that’s just their facts. Our facts say that too much government caused the problem. Too many rules took away people’s freedoms.

“Anyway, the fewer and fewer resources in the world are why we invented the purple bloodsuckers, which are taking out little bits of your life-force at a time, then we’re having them all flown back to Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand, where we have the technology to turn your life-force, as well as that of millions of other poor people in countries like yours, into food and other necessities for us.”

“You can…turn blood into…food?” I look around the hospital room. The other patients on the beds all have purple flies biting them, too. I don’t see anyone from my family among them, though.

“Yes, we can transform qapita into food, with the help of machines we have over here! It’s amazing what modern technology can do in the 2030s. We need you to stay alive as long as you can, though. As the bugs suck out your blood, they also inject a greenish-yellow blood substitute, to keep you from dying, so we can get as much life-force out of you as we can, before you finally die. By keeping you alive as long as we can, we are showing you how much we love you and care about you. You’re very important to us, Samir!”

“I am?” My stomach just keeps on growling. I feel as if my belly is eating me up from the inside.

“Yes, of course you are!” His smile reminds me of my mother’s: oh, how much more comforting she would be to me now! She would have her legs cut off to feed me! “Some say we’re using you and your people; but that’s only one reality. There are so many others to consider. We would say that you, Samir, are a hero, generously giving of yourself to people here that you don’t even know, as if they were your own family.”

A memory is flashing by my eyes at this moment: my mother, father, and me giving toys to my sister, and the wide-eyed joy on her face when she saw them. Two seconds later, we heard bombs falling.

“Why believe in sad truths when you can accept alternative ones, happy ones?” the white man goes on. The video on the ceiling TV shows happy white people laughing, dancing, drinking, and…eating! They are handsome young men, beautiful young women, enjoying a large banquet of food, delicious dishes covering a long table from one end to the other: chicken, vegetables, fruit, breads, noodles, rice, wine, juice, eggs, and so many others! A small drop of spit falls out of my mouth, the only wet it’s felt in a while. I reach up at the screen, hoping at least to touch it. My failing strength, and the pain in my arms from trying to move, means my arms keep falling back down on the bed with each two-second try.

“Can I…have some?” I say in a rough whisper. “I’m so…hungry.”

“Now, Samir, if you had some, there would be less for all the people in that party, wouldn’t there?”

“I guess so.”

Remember, you’re a selfless hero. You don’t want your own desires to spoil their happiness, do you?”

“No, I shouldn’t…be selfish.”

“That’s right. As I said before, happy realities are better to think about than sad ones. That’s why we in the West show only happy things on TV and in movies, to help people forget the troubles of the world. We never show our people the reality of places like Yemen—it would make them unhappy. Similarly, you should forget your sorrows and think of the happiness you’re giving people on the other side of the world, so I’ll leave you with this video of the banquet, and all the happy Americans here enjoying food converted from the life-force of the blood of heroes like you. Alternative truths, Samir! They will give you comfort. Watch, and enjoy!”

I’ve been getting light-headed. The purple flies are buzzing around my face. I’m too weak to swat at them, and the pain from moving my body is greater than the pain of their bites, so I mostly just let them bite me.

Their purple is glowing: is my vision getting blurry? Am I dreaming? I see purple balls of light floating in the air above me, then rising up to the ceiling TV screen. The purple balls seem to be changing into new food on the banquet table, when they touch the TV screen.

I feel bites, then I see the purple, glowing balls rise up to feed the white people. I see my shining life-force being taken up to the TV.

My stomach is growling louder now. It’s making my body shake. I look down at my chest: red spots of blood are everywhere. The purple bugs keep biting and flying up to the ceiling-TV. I can’t see my legs.

I look to my left and see myself in the mirror again: I’m all green now. I look like a rotting corpse! Also…where are my legs?

My bald, swollen head looks like a giant melon. Before the bombs, Mother, Father, my sister, my friends, and my neighbours all used to say how cute I was. What an adorable little boy, they’d say! What would they say if they saw me now?

I look down at my growling belly. I no longer have legs or a pelvic region. Am I dreaming? What I see can’t be real! There is a huge mouth where my belly should be. The mouth is like a huge navel. With the teeth of a tiger, or some wild beast, it is eating at my flesh above. Am I eating myself?

Below is too painful to watch, so instead I look above, a much happier place to be. The glowing purple balls are floating up to the banquet on the ceiling. They flash when they touch the TV screen, then turn into meat, bread, fish, and other delicious dishes.

The white people sitting at the table are smiling, laughing, and talking to each other as they bite into the food that was once my blood. The love they reflect to each other on their grinning faces, it’s like a big, happy family. Is my family up there, eating with them in Allah’s paradise? I hope they are, but I don’t see them anywhere: I see only white people, dozens of white people.

They’re young, handsome, and beautiful. They’re wearing nice clothes, unlike the filthy rags that covered the private parts I once had, or the bandages I have on my arms, or those I had on the legs I used to have.

Well, if I cannot have food, let the white people have it for me.

If I cannot have a family, let them be the family I’ve lost forever.

If I must be naked, let them wear clothes for me.

If I cannot have a body, let them have bodies instead.

If I cannot live, let me die so they can live.

I don’t want to be selfish. Let them be selfish instead. I don’t want to be a burden to anyone.

I feel numb, even where I still have a body. I look down at myself, to see what is left of me. I have only a head and neck now, a longer neck, almost like that of a giraffe; that mouth is still eating, chewing at the base of my neck with loud chomps. The mouth’s bloody, beast-like teeth seem to be grinning at me as they bite their way up my neck. There is very little blood, apart from the tiny dots of red that splash in all directions with each bite; the mouth must be drinking the rest of it up.

I don’t care. Let me die. Numbness means no more pain. I don’t feel hungry or thirsty anymore. My mouth is dry; everywhere I feel dry, if I feel anything.

I don’t want anything anymore. Let the white people do the wanting. The fight in me is over now. I accept my lot, my place in the world. It is the will of Allah.

There are truths other than mine here in Yemen. Happy truths in the West. Believe the happy truths. Forget the bad ones.

Two tears are running down my nose. It’s all right, though, everything is alright.

I love my white brothers.

I’m happy for them. Losing my family and my life doesn’t ma…

‘Pills’, a surreal horror short story

“Here’s his address,” Max said, handing me a small piece of paper. I looked at it. “You know where that is?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Easy to find. But will this Pauly guy have what I need?”

“Of course,” Max said, waving his hand to reassure me. “Trust me. Tell him I sent you.”

I left Max’s apartment building. Walking on the street to the bus stop to catch the bus to Pauly’s place, I found myself ruminating on my life, and why I was hoping Pauly could…help me.

I went over memories of my life with my family, a dysfunctional bunch. My brothers and sister bullied me, the baby of the family. One brother used to spit on my face for the fun of it, laughing as I wiped the spit off my cheek; the other once pulled a chair out from under me when I was about to sit on it, so I fell on my ass on the floor, everyone else in the living room laughing at me, including my mom. My sister once made me do something that was…well…private…with her…

I twitched from that memory as I arrived at the bus stop. I continued going down bad memory lane, standing in the bus shelter and frowning.

My mother never cared how much my siblings hurt me. She made excuses for them instead of defending me. She was hurtful herself, always undermining my ability to develop self-confidence.

I’ll never forget the day my mother looked me straight in the eye and said, “The kind of things you’re good at simply don’t make a lot of money, Paul.”

I was twelve when she said that.

My high school grades weren’t good enough for me to get into university. As a young adult, I roamed from job to job, usually working in either restaurants (in my late teens–a busboy, dishwasher, or cook), or as a cashier once, in a pet food store, when I was in my mid-twenties.

In contrast, my brothers became an engineer and a salesman, and my sister got a job in the government. Mom never failed to point out the difference between them and me.

Just after the cashier job, there was my disastrous experience as a clerk in the reserve army: I’d made an error setting up the monthly pay for my regiment, and when everyone’s pay got delayed, I practically got a lynching.

After getting fired from yet another menial job, I was faced with either moving back home to be reminded by my mother of what a failure I was, or being homeless. Pride compelled me to risk the latter.

I’d been homeless for six weeks before I found my current job, making stuff in a factory.

I felt trapped in that job, working long hours, feeling lonely among a crowd of other workers, with none of whom I had a meaningful friendship. I’d never been good at making friends, as a kid at school, or anywhere: if you can’t be friends with your own family, who can you be friends with?

I’d chat a little with Max (a coworker in the factory as well as my personal drug connection), and take orders from Carl Parshin, my manager. But there was nothing beyond that, in terms of human contact: it was just a drab, tiring job. I could have quit, but then where would I have gone? Back on the streets again, panhandling? Enduring my mom again?

Don’t bother asking about my luck with women–I’m even more pathetic there. (I’m awkward with even the occasional prostitute, for fuck’s sakes. Seriously, I have to pay for it, and it’s not as if I were hideous or something.)

The only escape I’d ever had in life was with drugs. Some marijuana or hashish for my pipe on the weekends, or some LSD if I was lucky enough to score some, could see me through. Now, I was pushing thirty, and my depression, about aging without having done anything respectable with my life, meant I needed something stronger in the hallucinogens area.

I got on the bus, sulking in my seat the whole ride.

Please, Pauly, I thought, have something to help me forget my shitty life.

Ten minutes later, I’d got off the bus, and I was now on the sixth floor of a high-class apartment building, knocking on Pauly’s door. A man in a yellow and black striped suit answered. He looked like a hornet with red hair, more like a pimp than a drug dealer.

“Yes?” he said, looking at me as if I were a cop.

“My name is Paul Turian,” I said. “Max Midea sent me.”

“Oh, Max,” he said, then put out his hand to shake mine. “Pauly Tishin. Come on in.”

The living room of his apartment was roomy, with orange-red wallpaper, and large mirrors on each wall. I could see myself from all angles. What a strange interior design, even frightening: it was like being surrounded by the flames of Hell, where one judges one’s own sins by seeing oneself for all eternity.

“So, what can I get you?” Pauly asked. “You seem tense.”

“I am,” I said. “I need something to take my mind off my troubles.”

“And what would those troubles be? I don’t mean to pry, but knowing something about them will help me get the right…product…for you.”

“Well, I feel lonely, alienated, like I can’t connect with anyone, or anything.”

“Alienated from who? From what? Can you elaborate?” He flapped his upturned hands at himself, as if gesturing to me to come closer, or to draw out more about what was troubling me.

“Well, I work at a factory, making household things, like taps, doorknobs, pipes, and fans…mostly metal stuff. All of us there work long hours, the pay is shit. We don’t really talk to each other, or even look at each other, except for two or three coworkers, Max is one of them. There’s also my manager, Carl Parshin. They’re not really friends, though, just acquaintances. I have no real friends. It’s depressing. I have no real creative outlet in my life. I’m going nowhere.

“I get home late, and I’m really tired then, too tired to do anything creative or social. I just turn on the TV, hoping to be diverted, but the news just reminds me of what a shitty word we all live in. Movies and TV shows are just the same old, Hollywood garbage. As I said, my life is depressing; it feels meaningless. I don’t like myself. I need an escape from it all. Do you have any acid, or ketamine, maybe?” I was fighting back sobs.

“Actually, I have something even better, if you’re willing to try something new. I synthesized it myself. I guarantee it will take away all those problems you just mentioned. Are you in a daring mood?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “Anything to make me forget about my problems.”

“I think you and I have a lot more in common than just our names, Paul. You see, I’ve been working on a solution to just that whole ‘alienation’ issue myself.” He put his arm around my back and led me to a corner of that mirrored living room, where he had a large, black garbage bag filled with what looked like hundreds of pink pills. “I’ve discovered something even better than escapism, even better than a drug high. I’ve found a solution to your problem, for it was once my problem.” He took one of the pills and showed it to me. “I once felt lonely and powerless, but having this…and giving it to others…gave me a new power few people have.”

“Really?” I looked around at the opulence of his room, the expensive furniture (antiques?), the golden frames around the mirrors. “This is a nice apartment building you live in, but I don’t wanna be a drug dealer. I’m just looking for a few hours of escape.”

“Oh, I’m not saying you’ll be a drug dealer. I’m not a drug dealer. I’m a realizer of dreams.”

What was he talking about? I wondered. Whatever it was, it sounded too good to be true, and was turning out to be more hassle than a good high was really worth, more danger than dream. I took a few steps back.

“You know the difference between the successful and the poor? The real difference? It’s attitude. You need to believe in yourself. You need confidence. You need to see yourself differently. That’s what my mirrors are for. Take this pill, then look in the mirrors. When you see the difference, you’ll want more. Trust me.”

Well, I thought, I may as well get something out of this dandy. “How much?”

“$20 for one, $30 for three, but you must act now.”

Act now? I thought. He sounds like one of those pushy internet ad-men. “What if I don’t like what I see?”

“Money back guarantee, and you walk out of here as you were as soon as the pills wear off.” His grin was Mephistophelian, an omen I should have thought about more.

“And how long would it take for them to wear off?”

“Oh, just a few hours. No more than that.”

I paused, looking at that pill between his finger and thumb. Was I seeing things, or did it seem to shake slightly?

“The $30 offer ends in a few seconds.”

“OK. Hit me.” How bad could it be? I wondered, giving him my cash.

He dropped the pill in the palm of my hand; again, it seemed to fidget a bit. I thought I could hear an ever-so-faint, squeaky, high-pitched voice calling out: No, no, no!

Where the fuck was that coming from?

Nah, I thought. I’m hearing things.

I tossed the pill in my mouth. I felt it shaking again slightly before dissolving in my throat.

Then, the weirdest thing happened.

I gagged, feeling something metal growing out of my mouth, starting in my throat, pushing my jaws open and pushing past my lips. My tongue was stuck between the steel outgrowth and my lower teeth: damn, it hurt! My eyes widened as I looked at myself in his mirror to the right of me: there was a fucking faucet coming out of my mouth!

I tried pulling it out, but it was stuck in there, attached to my body, as if grown into my jawbone and the flesh of my throat or something. It hurt my tongue even more from trying to pull it out, so I gave up trying. I wanted to say, “What the fuck’s the idea?”, but with this thing in my mouth, I could only whine muffled squeals.

He put his hand in the bag for another pill, but I shook my hands to tell him not to; I could only make inarticulate grunts, so I gestured to him to give me my money back.

“Oh, you want your second pill,” he said, smirking as if only pretending to misunderstand me, while acting as if I had to have the full experience before asking for my money back. Then, he held the faucet still and put the next pill under the spigot, which acted with some kind of bizarro vacuum function and sucked it into my body.

As it went in, I thought I heard another faint, mouse-like No! again.

My right ear started to swell; it felt hard, metallic, it grew heavy. My head tilted from the weight. I looked in the mirror. It morphed into a doorknob, like one of the ones my factory makes! Indeed, I felt like a knob for agreeing to this conman magician’s offer.

“You see?” he said, getting a third pill from the bag. “Now you’re not so alienated from your work. It’s truly a part of you. Wait for more changes to come.” He giggled.

He brought the third pill over to my faucet-mouth, but I tried to back away. I felt my legs stiffen and grow hard. I looked down at them. Below my shorts, I no longer saw the flesh of my legs. They had turned into pipes that penetrated into the floor, rooting me to the spot!

I tried to swat at his hand with the pill, but my arms were now stiffening, though they didn’t feel like metal. I looked to my left and right: they’d turned into tree branches, with leaves and shiny, red apples hanging from them!

What kind of a monster is he turning me into? I wondered. Is this a drug trip, an intense hallucination? Or is it some kind of black magic? I looked at that flame-coloured wallpaper, and had a feeling the latter was the correct answer, for that devilish grin remained on his face.

I could only moan like a gagged prisoner, and fidget with my still-human torso. I tried shaking my head, but he grabbed the faucet and put the pill under it. It got sucked in.

I could suddenly see all of the room, from many different angles at the same time, for eyes had appeared all over my body: on my chest and my back (though my T-shirt was blocking their view), on my tree-branch-arms, on my pipe legs, and on the back of my head, peeking through my hair. The sight of my monstrous new form, from all angles in those mirrors, made the fear in all those agape eyes too easy to understand. Tears formed in all of them.

I kept shaking, trying to hit him with my branch-arms, but he grabbed the left one and plucked an apple.

He ripped my T-shirt off my torso. My chest and stomach eyes, no longer shrouded in darkness, looked up in terror at him. Tears ran down my belly.

I whined in annoyance. Damn this faucet, I thought as it kept pressing my tongue into my lower incisors, still stabbing sharply into it. The steel had a rusty taste mixed with the blood from my tongue.

“Now,” he said, holding the apple level with my belly, “you can enjoy the fruits of your labour.” He laughed as a mouth opened in my belly and ate the apple…which I could feel breaking up not into smaller apple pieces…but into a few dozen, dissolving pills.

My torso turned into a huge fan, with that mouth in the middle axis, and weeping, bloodshot eyes all around the fan’s outer circle. I could no longer move, for I no longer had joints. I tried speaking through that mouth, but I could only make it moan and babble like a madman.

Is this just a drug trip? I still wondered. Will it wear off in a few hours? Or will this be the rest of my life?

The doorbell rang.

“Ah, my guests have arrived,” Pauly said with a smile as he walked to the door. Three young men came in the room. One of them was Max, the second, Carl, my manager. I didn’t know the third man.

Oh, Max, Carl, please! I thought. Help me!

“Paul!” Max said as he and the others approached me. “Looking good!” All four of them laughed at me.

I’m fucked, I thought.

“Holy shit, what a freak-show!” the man to Max’s right said. “This is totally worth the price of admission.”

“Indeed, it is,” Max said, playing with my doorknob-ear. “I promised you a good show, and I always deliver on my promises, don’t I, Paul?” Still playing with my doorknob-ear, he rapped his knuckles on my head, as if it were a door. “Hello? Anybody home?” They all laughed again.

You fucking bastard, Max, I wanted to say.

“Speaking of the price of admission, pay up, guys,” Pauly said, gesturing with his hands. “$50 a man.”

They all paid him. As he counted the bills in his hands, the other three were feeling me up, fascinated with what I’d turned into.

My nose now felt metallic, pushing forwards and swelling. It turned into a valve for the faucet. They all laughed at me.

“Whoa!” Max said. “Check this shit out! Paul, you’re a metal-head!”

Everyone laughed loud, high-pitched howls that stung my human ear, the only one that heard anything anymore.

I looked at the ridiculous monstrosity that I’d become in the mirrors. It made me think of my school years, when I’d been laughed at and bullied, my classmates taking over the duties of the tormentors in my family. At that moment, for a few seconds, I thought I actually saw four of my high school bullies instead of these four men.

The reflections of everyone in the mirrors, seen from all of my eyes from all those angles, from time to time looked like everyone in my old classrooms…all of them laughing at me.

“Does he dispense beer?” Carl asked.

Everybody laughed some more.

“Try his nose for yourself, Mr. Parshin,” Pauly told Carl, who then turned my nose-tap. Nothing came out.

“Useless!” he shouted, then slapped my still-human cheek. The sting of that slap made me so want to hit him, but I could only stand there, motionless. His slap caused a tear in my cheek, which now was dripping blood. “Eww!” Carl said, then wiped my blood on the side of my fan-torso.

In my daze as I recovered from the sting, I thought, just for a few seconds, that instead of seeing Max, Carl, and the third man in the mirror reflections, I saw my siblings tormenting me. I thought I saw myself as a little kid in one of the mirrors, and instead of Pauly, I saw my mother. Then I snapped out of the daze and saw my present tormentors. Again, I wanted to twitch from the memory of my childhood trauma, but I couldn’t budge.

I looked over at Pauly…and saw horns on his head! I blinked, then looked again: the horns were gone.

Did these brief hallucinations mean that my monstrous form was all one extended hallucination? I could only hope so.

“Want an apple?” the man to Max’s right asked, pulling one off my right branch-arm and handing it to Carl.

“No, thanks,” Carl said, swatting it out of the guy’s hand. “I might turn into this kind of freak. This is what happens when you do dope, Paul.”

“I like your fan, Paul,” Max said, laughing at me between each sentence. “Nice and comfortable breeze you’re blowing. Yeah, I got caught with a stash of weed in my apartment, and the only way Carl would save my ass from the cops was if I ratted you out. So I did. But since Carl doesn’t like you–actually, nobody has ever liked you–he said he’d love to see what you’d do if Pauly gave you some of his stash. Man, you didn’t disappoint. The third guy with us here is a cop, by the way. Again, I promised he’d be so entertained by you that he’d drop the charges against me. I guess I’m safe. Thanks, bro!”

Fuck you, I thought.

My many eyes were trying to avoid my oglers, who kept touching me, ripping off pieces of bark from my arms, or running their fingers along the screen of the fan.

Stick your fingers inside, guys, I thought. Let the fan blades cut them off, you compassionless bastards.

Blood flowed from where they’d torn off pieces of bark from my branch-arms. Any drops of my blood that got on their hands, they wiped off on the edges of my fan-torso. They wouldn’t tear off any more: I suppose I should have been grateful for that, at least.

As an hour or so of this ordeal went by–their eyes always staring at me, their hands touching me, their fingers poking a few of my eyes (which spouted blood, too, now), and their mouths laughing at me–my eyes kept looking at my mirror reflection, hoping for my transformation back to normal, or for an end to this drug trip. This has to be a trip. It can’t be real, can it?

Instead, I began to notice myself turning pink. Were those flesh tones I was seeing? My monstrous shape was the same, but everything looked flesh-like. Were the pills finally wearing off? They had to be! In my mind, I was begging for it.

A funny thing, though: I was now all pinkish, but every centimetre of me looked detached from each other. I looked like a man in a Georges Seurat painting–pointillistic, my body was all pink dots.

“Whoa!” Carl said. “What the fuck is he turning into now?”

Max tapped me on the chest. My body broke into thousands of little pink pieces…I was all pills now! I lay there in a pile before my four onlookers, who continued to gaze down on me without any pity, but with contempt.

I looked up at them the way many of us think a fly must see the world; for each pill-unit of my body was an eye of its own, looking up at the four men in utter helplessness.

“Man, that’s the weirdest shit I’ve ever seen,” Carl said.

Max brought his foot up as if about to stomp on me. I actually hoped for it.

“No!” Pauly said. “I have a use for him still. Don’t step on any…of him.”

The others laughed.

“Alright, guys,” Pauly said. “Show’s over now.” He motioned for them to leave. “I’ll have another spectacle for you to see soon.”

“When?” the third guy asked as they all reached the door.

“When she gets here, of course,” Pauly said. “I’ll let you all know. Until then, good-night.”

“Bye,” his visitors said, then left.

Pauly came back over to the pile of me.

“I know you still have consciousness,” he said, bending over. “Enjoy your new life. At least you won’t have to work in that awful factory anymore.” He walked away and laughed.

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

The next day, his doorbell rang. He answered it. I saw, through my pill-eyes, several dozen images of the same girl–a teenager from the looks of her–entering his apartment and approaching me. All my other pill-eyes saw only a hellish blackness. Was I put into a black garbage bag while I was sleeping?

“You were telling me about your problems,” Pauly said to her.

“Yes,” she said, beginning to sob. “I feel so alone. I hate my parents. No one pays any attention to me. I’m sick of feeling so…ordinary.”

Picking up one of me, he showed it to her. “I have just the thing for you.”

No! I said, hoping she’d hear me.

My Short Story, ‘The Manic Defence,’ in the Horror Anthology, ‘Trumpocalypse,’ by Horrified Press

I have a short story, called ‘The Manic Defence,’ published in Trumpocalypse: Where Dystopian Fantasy Meets Reality, a horror/political satire anthology by Horrified Press, published in paperback on the Lulu website. The book is to be released today, April 30th!

My story is a surreal political allegory, expressing political ideas I wrote of concretely in this recent post. There are lots of great writers in the book, too, including Alex S. Johnson, Pippa Bailey (and Leanna Locker), Jeffrey Penn May, Rhys Hughes, Bill McCormick, G.K. Murphy, Mathias Jansson, Emery LeeAnn, S.L. Koch, Christina Engela, Joey Burneez, Mandy White, Dino Parenti, B. Michael Stevens, Raven Dane, Kevin Henry, Jeff Stevenson, Samantha L. Nocera, Norbert Gora, and Florence Ann Marlowe. It’s on sale for $11.91. Go check it out! (The below picture is not mine: it’s by an amazing artist named Stephen Cooney.)17990786_10203198581481268_4885600579375284981_n

Analysis of ‘Carrie’

Carrie is a horror novel written by Stephen King, his first published novel, which came out in 1974. The title character is a troubled teen, bullied by her high school classmates and abused by her Christian fundamentalist mother. She also has telekinetic powers (TK), strong enough to kill anyone who hurts her, as the people of her town, fictional Chamberlain, in Maine, learn.

A superb movie version was made in 1976, directed by Brian De Palma and starring Sissy Spacek in the title role, and Piper Laurie as the mother (both actresses receiving Oscar nominations); it co-starred  John Travolta as Billy Nolan, Nancy Allen as Chris Hargensen, and Amy Irving as Sue Snell. Other film versions were made, though they weren’t as successful.

The dominant themes of the novel are bullying and abuse, the illusion of omnipotence, failed communication, and the motif of blood. Apart from these, I’ll be doing a psychoanalytic reading of the novel’s symbolism.

Much of the narrative is given in epistolary form, with passages from newspaper or magazine articles, books about the Carrie White affair (The Shadow Exploded, My Name Is Susan Snell), transcripts of an inquiry (The White Commission Report) into the tragedy, etc. This breaking up of the narrative flow into fragments, telling the story from different angles, symbolically suggests failed communication, with its starts and stops. This failed communication is much of the root cause of the bullying and abuse that Carrie suffers.

Like most victims of school bullying, Carrie is different from her classmates. This difference comes from how she’s raised by her mother, Margaret White (white as the Christian innocence she tries–and fails–to preserve), whose religious fundamentalism won’t allow her to expose her daughter to the ‘sinful’ ways of the modern world. This failure to communicate needed information leaves Carrie in a state of arrested development, infantilizing her. Psychologically, Carrie White (white as a baby’s innocence) is a baby going to school with teenagers.

This infantilizing is made clear when her mother fails to tell her about menstruation, her first period being her rite of passage, as it were, into womanhood. So when she’s bleeding in the shower during gym class, what should be a simple matter of using a tampon ends up a terrifying moment for her: all that blood makes her think she’s going to die.

Adding to her trauma are all her bullying classmates, who start laughing at her and throwing tampons at her, chanting, “Plug it up! Plug it up!” Since, as noted above, she is psychologically a baby among teenagers here, instead of this being a passage from girlhood to womanhood, she’s held back by one phase of life, passing from unborn to born, from unknowing innocence to the terrors of the real world, like a newborn baby. Thus, this naked, terrified ‘baby’, dripping wet and bawling her eyes out, is symbolically experiencing a birth trauma, or at least the triggered reliving of it.

Blood as a motif symbolizing death runs throughout the novel. The flow of blood signifies movement from ignorance to knowledge. Carrie finally learns about menstruation, and she is angry with her mother for not telling her about it; but her mother (pages 62-66) equates the blood with sin (e.g., the Tree of Knowledge, of which eating the forbidden fruit, symbolic of sexual indulgence, leads to death).

“…the first Sin was Intercourse. And the Lord visited Eve with a Curse, and the Curse was the Curse of Blood. And Adam and Eve were driven out of the Garden and into the World…” (page 63) Out of the Garden of Eden and into the world of sin parallels Carrie’s bloody movement out of the world of innocence into knowledge, out of a peaceful, psychological in utero state and into birth, into the physical, painful world, a world of blood. “And then there was a second Curse, and this was the Curse of Childbearing, and Eve brought forth Cain in sweat and blood.” (pages 63-64) Again, we have an association of blood with newborn babies, curses, pain, suffering, and death (Cain, the first murderer).

Later, the pigs’ blood, first being the result of the pigs’ deaths, of course, later becomes the cause of so many deaths not only in the high school, but all over Chamberlain, too. And with the splashing of that blood all over her comes the realization that her enemies are still enemies. The outflowing of her menstrual blood is her projected destructive instincts; the pigs’ blood poured on her is that death instinct re-introjected.

With the flowing of her blood from her mother’s stab (page 250) comes her knowledge that her filicidal mother is no less an enemy than her school bullies. Margaret is all the ‘bad mother‘ object; not even the slightest trace of the ‘good mother’ object exists in her. After Carrie finally dies in the presence of Sue Snell, one of the few people who tried to be a friend to Carrie, Sue leaves in a state of abject horror, in a knowledge of that horror and death, with her own menstrual blood running down her leg (page 277).

In the contemporary world, with all of our advanced science, technology, and modern knowledge, being raised in a fundamentalist family is a terrible handicap. So much ignorance of today’s world abounds in such a setting; it’s like being a naïve child among a crowd of adults. This is what I mean when I call Carrie a psychological baby among teenagers. Thus, I feel justified in using her story as an allegory for the pathological infant’s psychological state.

When we see a baby, we usually think of an adorable child smiling up at us. We don’t think of the terror that a vulnerable child feels so very often, weeping its frustrations at not getting what it needs. Normally, a good enough parent (to use D.W. Winnicott‘s terminology) provides for all of the baby’s needs well enough in the beginning that the baby is given the illusion that it magically provides for itself: the breast magically appears as soon as the baby wants it.

“The mother, at the beginning, by an almost 100 per cent adaptation affords the infant the opportunity for the illusion that her breast is part of the infant. It is, as it were, under magical control. The same can be said in terms of infant care in general, in the quiet times between excitements. Omnipotence is nearly a fact of experience. The mother’s eventual task is gradually to disillusion the infant, but she has no hope of success unless at first she has been able to give sufficient opportunity for illusion.” (Winnicott, page 238, his emphasis)

With Margaret’s calling Carrie’s breasts her “dirtypillows” (page 142), thus showing that she considers the breast to be only a ‘bad breast’, it can be safely assumed that she hardly, if ever, breast-fed Carrie when she was a baby. It’s not just the milk that the baby enjoys; the texture of the nipple provides pleasure, too, so bottles aren’t always a good substitute. Thus, Margaret is what Melanie Klein called the bad mother, whose frustrating bad breast rarely if ever gave suck to baby Carrie. This willful refusal to provide her baby with a basic need shows a child neglect that would soon grow into full-blown child abuse.

This failure to provide a good enough environment can lead to pathologies in the infant, as Winnicott noted. Margaret, with her prudish attitude towards sex and the body, would have been loath to hold her child or give her any physical affection. This is more emotional neglect, aggravating Carrie’s mental pathology. Carrie’s whole problem is a lack of love, which needs to be grounded in the body.

A healthy infancy involves a child’s peaceful “going on being,” without impingements frustrating that natural, peaceful, passive continuity in life. Not only isn’t she receiving a loving, holding environment, people frequently cut into her private space, bothering her, abusing her, and bullying her. If it isn’t her classmates throwing tampons at her, it’s her mother locking her in a small closet with frightening religious icons so she can pray for forgiveness (pages 65-67), when surely she is one more sinn’d against than sinning.

A baby in such an uncaring, hostile environment goes through terrible persecutory anxiety, the paranoid-schizoid position, as Carrie is going through. When asked out to the prom by Tommy Ross, she can only assume that it’s another trick from her bullying classmates to set her up for humiliation. The impingements she regularly suffers make her want to isolate herself from the world, as Winnicott said a child would want to do: an overly-aggressive environment makes for “…faulty adaptation to the child, resulting in impingement of the environment so that the individual must become a reactor to that impingement. The sense of self is lost in this situation and is only regained by a return to isolation.” (Winnicott, page 222)

“The persecutors in the new phenomenon, the outside, become neutralized in ordinary healthy development by the fact of the mother’s loving care, which physically (as in holding) and psychologically (as in understanding or empathy, enabling sensitive adaptation), makes the individual’s primary isolation a fact. Environmental failure just here starts the individual off with a paranoid potential…In defence against the terrible anxieties of the paranoid state in very early life there is not infrequently organized a state which has been given various names (defensive pathological introversion, etc.) The infant lives permanently in his or her own inner world which is not, however, firmly organized.” (Winnicott, pages 226-227) Recall Carrie’s words to Sue as she’s dying: “(why didn’t you just leave me alone)” (page 275).

Defenceless and without the infantile illusion of omnipotence that a good enough mother provides in normal circumstances, Carrie is forced to retreat into phantasy to provide herself with that omnipotence, which is symbolized by her telekinesis. “…a rain of stones fell from a clear blue sky…principally on the home of Mrs. Margaret White, damaging the roof extensively…Mrs. White, a widow, lives with her three-year-old daughter, Carietta.” (page 3) Her ability to move things with her mind is symbolic of the baby magically making the breast appear at feeding time, when Margaret probably never did it herself. This frustrating bad mother provokes wishes for revenge in Carrie’s phantasy life, represented by her TK.

People who are abused or bullied are essentially infantilized, treated as if weak and helpless, but never given compassion: their feelings and opinions are trivialized and invalidated. Carrie’s mother shows no interest in the pain Carrie feels from having been laughed at for not knowing about menstruation, nor does Margaret care that Carrie is mad at her for not telling her about it.

Carrie’s feelings are cared for so little that even when people do care, she thinks they don’t, as when the assistant principal, Mr. Morton, tries to speak kindly to her, but keeps getting her name wrong (pages 18-19). This is also why she indiscriminately kills people all over Chamberlain instead of just killing Chris Hargensen and Billy Nolan, the ones responsible for the prank with the pigs’ blood.

A few people want to show genuine kindness to Carrie, though it’s a case of too little, too late: Miss Desjardin, the gym teacher (Miss Collins in the 1976 movie, played by Betty Buckley, who also played Margaret White in the Broadway musical version of 1988), Sue Snell, and Tommy Ross. Sue, feeling remorseful over having participated in the “plug it up” teasing, wants her boyfriend Tommy to take Carrie to the prom, to get her to mix with people and build her self-confidence (pages 95-98).

This getting insular Carrie to socialize is symbolically like a baby experiencing the transitional phase between the illusory state of omnipotence (able to summon Mother at will) and reality-testing, where the baby progressively learns to accept that Mother isn’t always there for it, and environmental impingements are at a tolerable level. During this transitional period, the baby has a transitional object (a stuffed animal, a blanket, or, by extension into adult life, creative or imaginative stimuli like the arts or religion). As Winnicott states, “The transitional object stands for the breast, or the object of the first relationship.” (Winnicott, page 236)

For Carrie, the dress she makes for the prom can be seen to represent this transitional object (recall how, when her mother sees her wearing it, she can see her breasts, i.e., note the association of the dress, the transitional object, with breasts). She bought the materials (page 107) and made the dress (a soft material, like that of a security blanket), similar to how the arts and creativity are like an extension of the transitional object into later life. This making of the dress represents aspects of the task of reality-acceptance, away from the illusion of infantile omnipotence: “It is assumed here that the task of reality-acceptance is never completed, that no human being is free from the strain of relating inner and outer reality, and that relief from this strain is provided by an intermediate area of experience which is not challenged (arts, religion, etc.).” (Winnicott, page 240)

By wearing the dress when Tommy takes her to the prom, she symbolically demonstrates the transitional phenomena of going from “me,” the isolated world of dependence on Mother when the baby sees Mother as an extension of itself, to a “not-me” understanding, based on a growing independence from Mother. Carrie’s leaving home with Tommy, in open defiance of her mother, symbolizes this separation of “me” from “not-me”. “It is usual to refer to ‘reality-testing’, and to make a clear distinction between apperception and perception. I am here staking a claim for an intermediate state between a baby’s inability and growing ability to recognize and accept reality. I am therefore studying the substance of illusion, that which is allowed to the infant, and which in adult life is inherent in art and religion.” (Winnicott, page 230, his emphasis)

At the prom, she has a brief moment of happiness, finally feeling accepted by the external world. She has even forgotten her telekinesis, since she doesn’t seem to need it (i.e., she’s letting go of her need of the infantile illusion of omnipotence). But Chris’s cruel prank (ruining her dress, her transitional object, and thus rendering impossible her transition from inner fantasy to outer reality) reminds her of her ever-present persecutors, and like a baby suffering in the paranoid-schizoid position and fighting back against a frustrating outer world in phantasy, so does Carrie get her revenge. “She was forgetting (!! THE POWER !!) It was time to teach them a lesson.” (page 220)

Having been subjected to bullying and emotional abuse myself from family and school, I find myself cheering Carrie on whenever I watch the 1976 movie and she’s using her TK to trap and kill everyone in the high school gym. “Flex.” (page 222)

But her TK doesn’t give her the omnipotence against the danger of her knife-wielding mother, who won’t “suffer a witch to live” (page 175). Nor will Margaret’s fundamentalist faith give her an omnipotent God to save her from Carrie (who kills her in the novel by slowing down and stopping her heartbeat; in the 1976 film, Carrie kills her by making knives fly in the air and stab her to death in a manner similar to the death of St. Sebastian).

Chris imagines her lawyer father can help her get revenge on the school for not firing Desjardin for hitting her (pages 77-84); and she’s bitterly disappointed to know he can’t. This spoiled girl doesn’t have the omnipotence she thinks she has. She never considers how her meanness has consequences. Even after Carrie has already destroyed much of Chamberlain, killed many of the people there, and given everyone the uncanny sense, psychically, that she was responsible for all the mayhem, Chris and Billy imagine they can kill her by hitting her with his car (pages 260-262). Instead, she kills them.

One indication of Carrie’s infantile mental state is her calling her mother, ‘Momma’, one of the first sounds a baby makes in its baby talk; hence the reason that some variation on ‘mama‘ is common in languages around the world for the first object relation most of us form in early life.

Many paradoxes can be seen in this novel (“…she was weeping even as she laughed…” page 226). Blood is associated with death and birth (remember Margaret’s words: “Eve brought forth Cain in sweat and blood.” page 64; also, “I fell down and I lost the baby and that was God’s judgment. I felt that the sin had been expiated. By blood. But sin never dies. Sin…never…dies.” page 247). There are failures to communicate, then there’s Carrie’s uncanny ability to make everyone in town know, psychically, that she’s responsible for the destruction of Chamberlain (pages 213, 229-30, 232-33, 235, 241, 244, and 256).

Also paradoxical about this story is how people seem powerful, but are really powerless, and this applies especially to Carrie. With all of her formidable powers of telekinesis, and all the death and destruction she causes just by thinking it, she is still, in her mind, just a baby: sensitive, vulnerable, fragile, and helpless. One stab to her shoulder kills her. “Able to start fires, pull down electric cables, able to kill almost by thought alone; lying here unable to turn herself over.” (page 272)

Similarly, her bullies think they’re immune to punishment when they’re throwing tampons at her, then find themselves in detention, doing exercises with Desjardin in gym class (page 74). Chris and Billy don’t think anything will happen to them after they drop the pigs’ blood on Carrie. And Margaret assumes she’ll go straight to heaven after death, even when she stabs her own daughter.

So often, we think about our own vulnerability so much that we forget about that of our enemies; and so often, this is the basis for our hurting each other, without end.

At the beginning of the story, Carrie fears bleeding to death when she needn’t; at the end, after she’s reached the height of her destructive powers, she bleeds to death for real. As she’s dying, she whines, like a baby, “(momma would be alive i killed my momma i want her o it hurts my chest hurts my shoulder o o o i want my momma…o momma i’m scared momma MOMMA)” (page 275). She is going through the depressive position, wishing to have reparation with her mother, despairing at her loss.

Though Sue wants to show Carrie love, it’s too late: psychological baby Carrie has lived her whole short life unloved, and is hated all the more after death “CARRIE WHITE IS BURNING FOR HER SINS JESUS NEVER FAILS” (page 287).

Could anything be more horrifying than wishing death and eternal suffering on a baby, a baby that was never even truly loved in the first place?

“Graffiti scratched on a desk of the Barker Street Grammar School in Chamberlain:

Carrie White eats shit.” (page 4)

Stephen King, Carrie, Anchor Books, New York, 1974

D.W. Winnicott, Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis: Collected Papers, Brunner-Routledge, London, 1992

Analysis of ‘The Shining’

The Shining is a supernatural horror novel written by Stephen King and published in 1977. It was his third published novel, after Carrie and ‘Salem’s Lot. It was made into a film by Stanley Kubrick in 1980; and while the initial critical response to the film was mixed (with King especially disliking how Kubrick changed huge portions of the story), it is now considered one of the best horror movies ever made. King had a well-received made-for-TV miniseries version done in 1997, one that, naturally, was much more faithful to his novel.

His novel is a classic in the horror genre, and while his and Kubrick’s visions of the story differ so vastly, I find enough thematic material common to both that I will cite both versions in my analysis to make my point. These themes include the self-destructiveness of alcoholism, family abuse, the return of repressed bad internal object relations, repetition compulsion, and the death drive.

Though analyses of the themes in Kubrick’s film (the white man’s oppression of Native Americans, etc.) are well worth exploring, since they have already been looked into, I won’t be exploring them.

Jack Torrance has accepted a job as caretaker for the Overlook Hotel; and just as the hotel has a dark history, so does Jack. A former drinker and teacher, he has been on the wagon for fourteen months (in Kubrick’s film, five months) after having not only hit a student, George Hatfield (and lost his teaching job for it, ‘Up On the Roof’, pages 162-170), but also injured his own son, Danny (pages 23-25, ‘Watson’).

Ghosts inhabit the Overlook, which not only overlooks a beautiful mountain view in the Colorado Rockies, but also ‘overlooks’ (ignores, or doesn’t take responsibility for) the crimes that have been committed there. Jack’s connection with the Overlook–more and more complete as he goes mad in his attachment to the place, trying to ensure that he and his family never leave–shows how he is at one with the hotel. He has “always been the caretaker” (page 532, ‘Conversations At the Party’). The physical building represents his mind, with the boiler in the basement needing to be checked (to relieve the pressure) twice a day and once at night, for it symbolizes the death drive of his unconscious. There’s an interesting juxtaposition of ideas at the beginning of chapter 3, ‘Watson’, on page 22:

‘You lost your temper, Ullman had said.

‘”OK, here’s your furnace,” Watson said, turning on a light in the dark, musty-smelling room…Boiler’s on the other side of the wall. I’ll take you around.”‘

Jack’s anger and the furnace are mentioned side by side because they, and the boiler, are all one and the same thing. On the next few pages, Jack remembers injuring Danny for messing up his writing papers.

We learn through the course of the novel that Jack’s father had been abusive to him and his mother (‘Dreamland’, pages 335-338). Being abusive to Danny would be ‘normal’ to Jack, since his own dad’s abuse of him seemed normal: “In those days it had not seemed strange to Jack that the father won all his arguments with his children by use of his fists, and it had not seemed strange that his own love should go hand-in-hand with his fear…” (page 335). Similarly, his wife, Wendy, had a bad relationship with her mother. These bad object relations would haunt Jack and Wendy like ghosts…just as the ghosts of the Overlook will.

Wendy herself contemplates how the ghosts of her mother and Jack’s father could be among those in the hotel, when she thinks of Danny’s trauma: “(Oh we are wrecking this boy. It’s not just Jack, it’s me too, and maybe it’s not even just us, Jack’s father, my mother, are they here too? Sure, why not? The place is lousy with ghosts anyway, why not a couple more?…Oh Danny I’m so sorry).” (‘On the Stairs’, pages 491-492)

The isolation of the hotel, on a snowy mountain during a bitter winter, symbolizes the kind of social disconnect that often leads to problems like alcoholism and family abuse. In direct contrast, Danny’s psychic gift, the “shining”, as fellow shiner Dick Hallorann and his grandmother call it (‘The Shining’, page 117), connects him with people, and with the future, in an enhanced way. Jack and Wendy cannot contact the outside world (because Jack has destroyed the CB radio [‘Dreamland’, page 342], just as he’s ensured they can’t ride away in the snowmobile–‘The Snowmobile’, page 426), but Danny can “shine” all the way from Colorado to Florida to tell Hallorann of the threat to his family’s life.

The ghosts of the Overlook represent the ghosts of Jack’s past (and Wendy’s, to a lesser extent); but Danny, explicitly as such in Stephen King’s miniseries, points to the future, since “Tony” is actually Danny as a young adult (“Daniel Anthony Torrance”, page 639), advising his younger self to beware the dangers of the hotel (‘Shadowland’, pages 37-50). Thus, Tony is really Danny being a friend to himself, a form of self-compassion that can help victims of abuse to heal.

Redrum, or murder spelled backwards, represents not only the destructiveness of alcoholism–red rum, as red as blood–but also the destructiveness of looking backwards into the past, and letting internalized bad objects continue to dominate you, or letting bad old habits resurface and be compulsively repeated.

This brings me to my next point, what Freud called “the compulsion to repeat” in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Up until the horrors of World War I, he saw instinctual drives as geared exclusively towards pleasure, libido. The destruction of that war (Freud, page 281) compelled him to revise his theories and acknowledge a death instinct, what his followers would call Thanatos, which is opposed to Eros, the will to live. He now admitted that dreams aren’t always the fulfillment of wishes (Freud, page 304).

Sometimes his patients would compulsively repeat actions that seemed meaningless or without a clearly pleasurable aim, such a when an infant boy threw out a toy and reeled it back, perhaps to master the sensation of loss, as when his mother wasn’t with him (Freud, pages 284-285). Similarly, Freud treated traumatized veterans who repeated irrational acts in the form of flashbacks, traumatic dreams (Freud, page 282), and the reliving of battlefield events.

Jack’s inability to control his anger and compulsive drinking are manifestations of this death instinct and its compulsion to repeat. He was destructive and drinking before, and he will be destructive and drinking again.

The topiary animals make for interesting symbolism. Normally, the presence of plants gives us a feeling of peace, of pleasure, especially when they have been shaped into aesthetically pleasing forms, like animals–how charming. Yet the Overlook’s topiary is of animals that move when you aren’t looking (‘In the Playground’, pages 311-314). By the time Hallorann returns to help Danny, the topiary lion attacks him (‘Hallorann Arrives’, pages 617-618). So what we have are plants that are superficially charming, yet bestial and frightening when one knows them better. And since they are the Overlook’s topiary, they are an extension of Jack’s personality: charming and sweet on the surface, his ego ideal, but inside…

Then there’s Danny’s frightening experience with the fire extinguisher hose, which seems to unravel all by itself (‘Outside 217’, pages 258-262). Again, seen in light of the idea that the hotel represents Jack’s mind, we see something that, on the surface, is meant to protect and ensure safety, as a father is supposed to do. Instead, the hose, a near phallic symbol, moves surreptitiously, slithering, suggestive of a snake.

Because the hotel represents Jack’s mind, the ghosts in turn represent his internal object relations. Delbert Grady could be seen to represent Jack’s internalized abusive father, since grey-haired Grady eggs Jack on to kill his own family, just as the voice of Jack’s father, heard on the CB radio, urges him to kill them (‘Dreamland’, page 341).

The ghosts want Danny for all his psychic powers, that ability to connect with others that Jack lacks. When Danny rejects the ghosts, they go after Jack. Thus the ghosts initially represent, in WRD Fairbairn‘s revising of Freud’s id, the libidinal ego in its relationship with the exciting object; then, when Danny has rejected the ghosts, they represent Fairbairn’s revising of the superego, the internal saboteur or anti-libidinal ego, with its turbulent relationship with the rejecting object (both objects being symbolized by Danny).

Since I assume, Dear Reader, that you aren’t familiar with Fairbairn’s revision of Freud’s id/ego/superego conception of the mind, and since I further assume you haven’t read my analysis of The Exorcist, in which I discuss this revision, I’ll present the relevant quotes again here:

“…the intolerably depriving, rejecting aspect of the other person is internalized as the ‘rejecting object’, attached to the ‘anti-libidinal ego’…[,] the split-off ego fragment that is bonded to the rejecting object. We can think of it as the ‘anti-wanting I’, the aspect of the self that is contemptuous of neediness. Rejection gives rise to unbearable anger, split off from the central self or ego and disowned by it. Fairbairn originally termed this element the ‘internal saboteur’, indicating that in despising rather than acknowledging our neediness, we ensure that we neither seek nor get what we want. The anti-libidinal ego/rejecting object configuration is the cynical, angry self which is too dangerously hostile for us to acknowledge. When it emerges from repression we may experience it as chaotic rage or hatred, sometimes with persecutory guilt.” (Gomez, pages 63-64)

Fairbairn’s revising of Freud’s drive theory replaces the drive to pleasure/destruction with an object-seeking purpose, for which instinctual drives are mere avenues to seeking or dealing with objects. Fairbairn may have rejected Freud’s drive theory, including the death instinct and the compulsion to repeat, as superfluous (Fairbairn, pages 78-79), but I find both useful in explaining the symbolism of the Overlook, two ways of looking at King’s novel from different angles. Grady, the symbolic ghost of Jack’s abusive father, is pushing Jack to kill because Jack needs his father-object, regardless of whether it is good or bad for him.

Let’s consider what Fairbairn had to say about needing bad objects. “…it is worth considering whence bad objects derive their power over the individual. If the child’s objects are bad, how does he ever come to internalize them? Why does he not simply reject them…?…However much he may want to reject them, he cannot get away from them. They force themselves upon him; and he cannot resist them because they have power over him. He is accordingly compelled to internalize them in an effort to control them. But, in attempting to control them in this way, he is internalizing objects which have wielded power over him in the external world; and these objects retain their prestige for power over him in the inner world. In a word, he is ‘possessed’ by them, as if by evil spirits. This is not all, however. The child not only internalizes his bad objects because they force themselves upon him and he seeks to control them, but also, and above all, because he needs them. If a child’s parents are bad objects, he cannot reject them, even if they do not force themselves upon him; for he cannot do without them. Even if they neglect him, he cannot reject them; for, if they neglect him, his need for them is increased.” (Fairbairn, page 67)

Going back to drinking represents finding a pleasurable thing as an object to replace the meaningful objects, Wendy and Danny, that Jack needs. As Fairbairn explains, “…from the point of view of object-relationship psychology, explicit pleasure-seeking represents a deterioration of behaviour…Explicit pleasure-seeking has as its essential aim the relieving of the tension of libidinal need for the mere sake of relieving this tension. Such a process does, of course, occur commonly enough; but, since libidinal need is object-need, simple tension-relieving implies some failure of object-relationships.” (Fairbairn, p. 139-140) In the Overlook, Jack is isolated in his own mind, driving him to self-destruction and other-destruction.

Jack uses a bug bomb to kill a nest of wasps found on the roof of the Overlook, where he’s been doing repairs and been stung by one of them (‘Up On the Roof’, page 153). Danny is fascinated with the wasp nest, and wants to keep it. Wendy is unsure if it’s safe, but Jack insists all the wasps have been killed (‘Down In the Front Yard’, pages 177-178). The ghosts of the hotel reanimate the wasps that night, though, and Danny is stung (‘Danny’, pages 195-203). Since the ghosts and hotel represent Jack’s mind, the stings represent a return to Jack’s abusiveness (and self-destructiveness, since he’s the first one to get stung); and his assuring that the wasps are dead and harmless represents his denial of abusive intent, gaslighting, and his empty promise that he’ll never repeat injuring Danny.

The Overlook, Jack’s symbolic mind, full of the ghosts of bad internal objects, and with a boiler of anger that Jack must regularly “dump…off a little” (‘Watson’, page 28) to relieve the pressure, always repeats its aggressions. Kubrick’s adaptation brilliantly brings out this repetition compulsion in such symbols as rug patterns, the phrase “forever, and ever, and ever”, and Jack’s “writing project”, an endless repetition of the saying, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Similarly, we see repetitive columns, doors, wallpaper patterns, and the sound of Danny driving his little three-wheeled bike on and off rugs and the hardwood floor, over and over again…sound-silence-sound-silence-sound-silence.

Danny refuses to believe that Jack, swinging the roque mallet, is his real father (page 639); it’s just the ghosts controlling him. But the ghosts, the hotel, and the roque-mallet-swinging madman are all Jack. Typical with abuse victims, they can’t bring themselves to admit their abusers really are abusers–it’s Stockholm Syndrome, or traumatic bonding.

Jack is supposed to be writing a play, a goal pointing to the future; but instead, he finds a scrapbook of old newspaper clippings related to the history of the Overlook (‘The Scrapbook’, pages 227-249). Now he decides, instead of writing the play, to write about the hotel: a project pointing into the future is replaced with one pointing back into the past. (In the miniseries, the scrapbook is titled My Memory Book, implying a symbolic connection with Jack’s past.)

Jack phones Mr. Ullman–the stern owner of the hotel and Jack’s symbolic superego (“Officious little prick“, ‘Job Interview’, page 3), a man who has hired him with the utmost reluctance (‘Job Interview’, page 7)–to talk to him about writing a book about The Overlook (‘Talking to Mr. Ullman’, pages 269-274). Ullman is furious with Jack for wanting to do such a thing, as he is with Jack’s impertinent attitude…just as the superego will be resistant to any surfacing of repressed, unacceptable desires.

Ullman has good reason to oppose Jack’s plan to publicize The Overlook’s shady past. It is a past filled with violence–mafia killings, a woman having committed suicide in a bathtub (“Inside 217′, pages 326-327), and Grady’s violence against his family. The scrapbook is found in the basement, Jack’s symbolic unconscious, and the violent contents represent his repressed bad internal objects (i.e., his father). The old parties represent his past of alcoholism. (“Unmask! Unmask!“) [‘The Ballroom’, page 464], Show your real self, Jack.

The ghosts of the Overlook want Danny, which means Jack needs a good internal object to replace his intolerably bad objects, a notion in Fairbairn’s therapeutic methods. Since Danny resists the ghosts, they want Jack, meaning the repressed bad objects resurface, causing mayhem. Having Danny, a good boy whose “shining” represents strong empathy and an urge to connect with others, would redeem Jack’s bad objects and help him to be a good man again, looking ahead to a future free of the past; but their evil is too great, so Jack instead spirals downward and backward into his violent, alcoholic past.

Dick Hallorann goes to great lengths to help a boy and a family he barely knows, because like Danny, his “shining” abilities give him strong empathy and an urge to connect, unlike the isolated, freezing cold world surrounding Jack’s mind, the Overlook. After Dick, Wendy, and Danny escape, we find them all together in Maine the following summer, Dick being almost like a new father to the boy. Danny and Wendy have escaped the dark, abusive past that Jack couldn’t escape, because ‘the shining’ is a light leading to a future of freedom and love.

Stephen King, The Shining, Pocket Books, New York, 1977

WRD Fairbairn, Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality, Routledge, New York, 1952

Lavinia Gomez, An Introduction to Object Relations, Free Association Books, London, 1997

Sigmund Freud, 11. On Metapsychology, the Theory of Psychoanalysis: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Ego and the Id and Other Works, Pelican Books, Middlesex, England, 1984