‘Mama,’ a Psychological Horror Novel, Chapter Two

And now that we’ve arrived in my apartment, I’ll take you over to Mama’s bedroom, where I’ll show you the proof that she was evil and, therefore, I had to kill her. Just step this way and follow me.

Here, her room. It looks pretty ordinary, doesn’t it? With all the usual things: her bed, her dresser, her closet, etc., nothing out of the ordinary, right? Well, let me show you something in one of her dresser drawers that will make your hair stand on end!

I’ll just open this drawer, and…here it is, this book. Look at the title: Bewitching Smells…er, Spells. Let me open it up and flip through the pages, so you can get a full idea.

Check out all these herbs she uses to make magic spells: lavender, rosemary, basil, thyme, sage, etc. I’ll flip past these pages and show you some more interesting, incriminating stuff…

Here, look at all these pictures of bottles of potions. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think they were bottles of perfume or something, but I know! They’re all phials of magic potions she’d been using on me and on anyone else she wanted to control!

Anyway, we can look at that later. I’ll just put it back in the drawer for now. Now–you, the man I see in the mirror of Mama’s dresser drawer, my superego, my conscience, as it were–come with me into the living room, and there I’ll tell you the whole story: how I found out she was a witch, how I plotted to kill her using a little magic of my own, and how she actually died at my hands. Let’s go.

Yes, let’s sit on either side of the living room TV, you on the sofa under the mirror where I can see you, and me in the big, comfy chair. It all started with this TV, where I was just starting to watch a horror movie on Netflix. I’d never seen any of the Friday the 13th movies, not being interested in any of them, but nothing else was on that night.

Mama was going to bed. “You keep the volume down, Roger,” she told me as she was going into her room. “I have to get up early tomorrow to do some work at the pet store.”

“OK, Mama,” I said as the movie began. There was this strange sound I’d hear from time to time in the movie: “Ch-ch-ch-ch…ha-ha-ha-ha…”

Several more minutes into the film, I heard her call to me from her bedroom: “Roger?”

I paused the film. “What is it, Mama?”

“I left my pillow on the sofa,” she said. “You know, my little pink one. Bring it in here for me, would you?”

“Yes, Mama,” I said, then took it into her room. I’d left the door wide open as I handed it to her. I looked over at the top of her dresser, where the book was sitting, all white and innocent-looking, except for its title, which I barely made out in the dim light coming from the living room: Bewitching Spells.

I shuddered as I stared at it, frozen in my tracks for several seconds.

“Roger?” she said, waking me out of my daze. “You can go now. I’d like to get some sleep, if you don’t mind.”

“Oh, yeah, uh…sorry, Mama,” I said, then went out of her room and closed the door. I went back to the TV and unpaused it. I no longer paid any attention to the movie, though I sat on the sofa in a trance, staring at the screen. I kept hearing an echoey, reverberating whisper: “Kill…Mama…”

That night happened a couple of months ago, and I kept hearing that whispering in my head, over and over again, in the days and weeks that followed: “Kill…Mama…” I also kept the vision in my mind’s eye of that white book cover, with that disturbing title: Bewitching Spells.

The day after that night–always hearing “Kill…Mama…” in my mind’s ear, again and again, at least once every two minutes, and often far more frequently than that–I waited for her to leave the apartment for the pet food store. As soon as she was gone, I went right into her room to look at that book again.

Now it was in her dresser drawer, the same one you and I just saw it in. I’m sure she was trying to hide it from me, though hiding it had slipped her mind on the night that I first saw it, surely.

Though I flipped through the pages and saw all the pictures of the herbs and phials of magic potions, as you and I just saw, I was careful not only to keep the book in its drawn-out drawer, but also to keep it in the exact same position in the drawer, so she wouldn’t suspect I’d found it and learned of her schemes. Indeed, apart from opening the book and flipping through the pages, I didn’t move the book one millimetre from where she’d left it.

Yet as I flipped through the pages and had my worst fears about Mama confirmed, I felt a tear or two run down my cheeks. Apart from the sheer terror I felt knowing what power she’d had over me, the power she’d always had, I also felt the most stinging betrayal. How could she have done this to me? I’m her son! She was supposed to love me, not hex me! What had I done to deserve such an evil mother?

Memories of my relationship with her flashed before me: all those times she’d bullied me, told me what to do in her growling voice, showed me no pity or compassion whenever I’d been hurt as a child, all of those things now took on a new meaning for me, a meaning that gave no comfort, but a meaning that at least made some sense of all of my life’s suffering. It had all been her fault!

The most significant of all of these memories, starting from my early childhood, was how I’d always felt incapable of fighting back. Oh, I had the rage inside me to fight, I oh, so wanted to, but somehow I couldn’t. It was something deeper, more fundamental, than mere cowardice…it was like a mental block, like Alex DeLarge and the Ludovico Technique used on him to stop him from committing crimes.

Now I knew what the cause had always been for my consistent inability to stand up for myself. It was her magic spells, all used to control me! That’s why not only could I never stand up to her, but I also could never stick up for myself against all the bullies at school, in the neighbourhood, even against little kids! Yes, I was that pathetic, but in my defence, Mama had been jinxing me the whole time!

Knowing my own mother had always wanted me to be weak and cowed, this hurt more than anything else ever had in my whole life. Her magic had done nothing less than ruin my whole life. By the end of this meditation, with her book open in that drawer in front of me, I was sobbing. Fortunately, none of my tears dropped on the pages, so Mama wouldn’t know I’d been looking at them.

I closed the book and the drawer, then I went out of her room, wiping my tears off my face. I kept hearing that reverberating whispering: “Kill…Mama…”

I’m sure that at least a large portion, if not almost all, of my hallucinating–visual and auditory, for the most part–has been the result of her spells. It was part of her scheme to control me, to make me doubt my senses and feel that I needed her total guidance in life.

My hallucinations cannot, however, have all been directly caused by her magic. That voice I kept hearing, the one that whispered, “Kill…Mama…”, couldn’t have been caused by her spells. Why would she have wanted me to kill her? She never showed any suicidal tendencies, and even if she’d secretly wanted to die, she could have simply killed herself–why involve me in it?

No, that voice telling me to kill her must have come from another source. Since she was surely using her magic to control other people, as well as me, there must be spirits out there, agents of good, that recognized her evil and wanted me to be their agent of justice, of retribution.

For though her spells weren’t the source of every single voice I’ve heard in my head, her spells surely altered my brain to the point where I’ve been creating my own hallucinations, my mind altering the things I see and hear to serve some kind of purpose that I’m not consciously aware of. I had to remove her from my life in the hopes that her spells might wear off soon after, and I will then be free to live a normal, happy life, at last!

Hey…wait a minute. Who is that? Just a sec. I wanna look out the window, and see who that is. Hey, that’s that man at the funeral, the one my aunt tried to introduce me to. What’s he doing there, standing across the street and looking up at my window? What does he want? He doesn’t still think he’s my father, does he? What a creep! I’ll give him the finger: there, that should get rid of him…good. He saw it, and he’s going away.

Alright, back to the comfy chair, and back to my story. Now, to kill her, I knew I had to be really careful, ’cause with her skill at using magic, she’d probably see me coming from a mile away; so I knew that using any spells from her book would be a no-go from the start. I’d have to get a magic book of my own. I wouldn’t even bring the book into the apartment, nor would I research anything online at my laptop here. I’d go to the library on the other side of town, take notes there, and proceed accordingly.

In the library, I found a book on how to make a voodoo doll. I knitted it up at home, telling Mama that it would be a gift for her great niece, my aunt’s granddaughter, five-year-old Emma. I did a convincing acting job, even if I say so myself, telling Mama the lie with a perfectly calm voice and face. She was surprised at my generosity: her only doubt was that I had any inkling towards doing something nice for anyone, let alone sweet little Emma, whom I sincerely adore. This was the kind of hurtful attitude I’d always resented in Mama.

Nonetheless, she never indicated any suspicions in what I’d been planning. I kept at work knitting up that doll, privately amused that she was seeing me there creating the instrument of her imminent death, and not knowing of that at all. Of course, as I was knitting away, I was careful never to think about the doll as anything other than a gift for Emma–just in case Mama’s magic gave her the ability to read my mind!

A month later, the doll was finished. It took so long because I have no skill whatsoever at knitting, of course. Mama laughed at me for the many mistakes I made, taunting me that I should have just given up. Those mistakes forced me to start all over again, many times–it was so frustrating, but I was determined to kill her. Her taunts only hardened me in my resolution.

I didn’t want Mama to see it during the final stages of knitting, because I’d managed to make it look like her, so that she’d, naturally, get suspicious. So during the final stages, I worked in my bedroom with the door locked, or when she was out.

According to the book I’d found in the library, I had to do some magical incantations in a ritual to ensure that the doll would be linked to her. I’d also used yarn and knitting needles she had handled, as well as material from an old shirt she used to wear, but which I’d rescued from the garbage just in time.

I did the ritual in my bedroom at night, with my door locked. I was taking an enormous risk, since she might have sensed, through her own magical powers, what I was doing; but I had no other choice than to do it there, for where else could I have done a magical ritual without anyone interfering?

I did the ritual with the lights off, and a circle of glowing candles surrounding me. I’d bought a black mat with a giant white pentacle on it. I played a recording of soft chanting on my laptop. Mama was already in bed, so I figured she wouldn’t notice the sounds.

My success at making the doll near her, without her suspecting anything, encouraged me to keep going, and to take the chance of doing the ritual there at home. Perhaps her powers were weakening with the onset of old age–who knows?

I stared at the eyes of the doll, visualizing that it was my real mother sitting across from me on that pentacle mat. I kept hearing “Kill…Mama…” over and over again; I softly whispered it, too, in time with the chanting as it reverberated in my ears.

I remembered, shortly before the night I’d watched Friday the 13th, that Mama had begun clutching at her chest and complaining of pains there. I understand that such pain is how heart attacks start to happen. So during my ritual, I visualized those pains getting worse, leading towards heart attacks.

I kept whispering “Kill…Mama…” while holding little pins I would soon stab into the chest of the doll; as I did these things, I’d visualize Mama having heart attacks.

I continued with the ritual, repeating the same actions for another twenty minutes, according to the instructions of the book. I never stuck a pin in the doll that night, for according to the book, you can’t do that until the effects of the completed ritual have fanned out and permeated the whole area, a process that would take the rest of the night. This was another reason I had to do the ritual near her: to ensure the spell would contact her and her energy as soon as possible.

The next morning was when I could finally put the magic to the test. I heard her moving around outside my bedroom: she was probably going to the kitchen. I was holding the doll in one hand, and a pin in the other.

I heard a familiar groan of pain from her; I imagined she was grabbing at her chest again. This seemed like a good cue to stab the pin in the doll’s chest…so I did.

Now I heard a huge roar of pain from her. A dish smashed on the kitchen floor: she’d obviously dropped it. I grinned. My doll worked!

Though I left the pin in the doll’s chest, I wouldn’t stick another one in for a few days. I wanted Mama’s death to be gradual, not suspiciously sudden. I also wanted her to suffer before she died.

Because I’d left the pin in the doll’s chest, I saw Mama going about her day frequently clutching at her chest and moaning in pain. She went to a doctor after three days of that pin in the doll; he just gave her pills.

Back at home, I stuck another pin in the doll’s chest.

In my bedroom, I heard her wail in pain in the kitchen, and this was just after she’d taken one of her pills. My grin grew wider.

Over the next few days, she took more of the pills, going from one at a time to two, then three, despite the doctor insisting she take only one at a time.

The following week, I stuck in a third pin.

She bellowed and fell to the living room floor with a thud.

I called an ambulance, and she was taken to the hospital. I let her rest there for several days, making visits, too, of course, and acting all concerned for her welfare. I think my acting job was convincing.

All the medication they were giving her had managed to cancel out the pain my pins in my doll were giving her. About a week later, she was released, and I took her back home.

The day after that, I stuck a fourth pin in the doll. She fell down dead.

The funeral happened a week after that.

…and here we are now.

Analysis of ‘Videodrome’

Videodrome is a 1983 science fiction/body horror film written and directed by David Cronenberg (who just two years earlier wrote and directed Scanners). It stars James Woods, Debbie Harry of Blondie, and Sonja Smits; it costars Peter Dvorsky, Les Carlson (who also played a man tracing telephone calls from the killer in Black Christmas), and Jack Creley (whom we may recall as the teacher from that old Glosettes TV ad from two years before this film).

Videodrome was Canadian Cronenberg’s first film to get backing from a major Hollywood studio. Though it had the highest budget of any of his films at the time, it was a box office bomb. It did, however, receive praise for its special makeup effects, for Cronenberg’s direction, and for the performances of Woods and Harry. It’s now a cult classic, and is regarded as one of Cronenberg’s best films.

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

Since Videodrome (“video arena,” or “video circus”) is about a broadcast signal, “Videodrome,” showing snuff films, a signal that lures its viewers into a hallucinatory world of mind control and paranoia that ultimately kills them, the film can be seen as an allegory of how the media in general is used to manipulate us, the people, into believing anything the media’s corporate owners want us to believe, and to act on those beliefs, no matter how harmful they may be. Such manipulation includes manufacturing consent for wars, which can be seen as symbolized by the violence of the snuff films seen in the movie.

What’s so alluring about Videodrome is precisely this video aspect, for the TV screen can be seen as a metaphorical mirror reflection of the viewer, analogous to the mirroring back and forth between one person and another to whom he or she may be talking at one time. We see an example of such an analogy at the beginning of the film, when Bridey James (played by Julie Khaner) wakes up her boss, Max Renn (Woods) through the use of a TV to remind him of a meeting he is to have that very day with Japanese pornographers about a film to be shown on his Toronto UHF TV station, CIVIC TV, which specializes in showing extreme erotic content.

Her talking to him on a TV screen, rousing him from his sleep is meant to look almost like one side of a conversation. As Professor O’Blivion (Creley) will tell us later, “The television screen has become the retina of the mind’s eye.” Seeing Bridey on the screen is like seeing her eye to eye; the worlds of fantasy and reality are blurred and fusing.

If looking at someone on a TV is hardly to be distinguished from looking at someone in real life, in front of oneself, then we can extend this idea to what I’ve discussed before of the dialectical relationship between the self and the other, of how there’s a bit of the self in the other, and vice versa. One could relate this idea to how Ian Anderson once introduced the Jethro Tull song, “The Minstrel in the Gallery,” as being about the performer not just being watched in his performance, but also him watching the ‘performance’ of his audience, for “he saw his face in everyone” after “he threw away his looking glass.” As I said above, the TV in Videodrome is a metaphorical mirror, or looking glass, in which the viewer sees his face in everyone on the screen, and narcissistically identifies with each of them.

The point is that Max projects his own unconscious desires onto the screen when he watches Videodrome, and the violence of his resulting hallucinations is a reflection of what’s inside of him. Then Videodrome in turn projects its violence back onto him, making him consciously act out his unconscious violent urges.

He watches the TV…and the TV watches him, so to speak, at least in his hallucinations. There are, or seem to be, two-way conversations going on between him and whoever is on the TV screen. This sense becomes more explicit when Max sees the Marshall McLuhan-like O’Blivion address him on the video he watches, the video when we see O’Blivion killed.

One establishes one’s sense of ego, as a distinct self, by seeing oneself for the first time as an infant in front of a mirror. One sees oneself, but the self is ‘over there,’ as if another person. One establishes oneself, yet is alienated from that self, hence conversely, there’s the sense of the self in the other, and vice versa.

Metaphorical mirrors exist in people we face in two-way, dyadic relationships, as with the infant held by his mother, them looking into each other’s eyes. An analogous two-way relationship is felt between the viewer and the person being viewed on TV.

When the media successfully manipulates our emotions, making us feel what its corporate owners want us to feel, this manipulation is the TV watching us back, like those two-way telescreens in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s significant that O’Blivion is meant to represent McLuhan in Videodrome, for recall what McLuhan said about the modern media: “The medium is the message,” or “the massage,” or the “mass age,” or the “mess age”; how the message is presented is, if anything, more important than its content.

Yes, the medium also massages us–that is, how the content is presented, in the case of Videodrome, via TV videotapes, is a visual form that charms us as a mother does her baby, she being one of those metaphorical mirrors; and through this charming, this massaging, the media gets us to do its bidding. It is the mass age because we’re in an age in which the media does this charming and manipulating of the world’s masses, interconnecting us all to the point of creating a global village. The medium is also, by making a mess of our age, a mess age.

Such manipulating is why some are concerned about CIVIC TV. Max appears on a TV show to defend his channel by rationalizing that, by giving his viewers an outlet to release their dark fantasies onto, they won’t feel the need to vent them on non-consenting people in real life. It is at this TV show where he meets Nicki Brand (Harry), and he immediately finds her attractive in that red dress.

That the two quickly begin a sexual relationship, all while Max has been watching his first samples of Videodrome, is significant, for she in her seductive beauty personifies the allure of Videodrome. The show presents plotless, realistic scenes of sadism, while Nicki is a masochist, enjoying being pricked with pins and burned with cigarettes.

That a masochist should personify a show featuring sadism, the dialectical opposite of her desires, is reconciled with a quote from Freud: “A sadist is always at the same time a masochist.”

Nicki is so taken with Videodrome that she decides to go and “audition” for the show. That she so quickly becomes part of Max’s hallucinations on his TV screen shows us how much she is, and has always been, at one with Videodrome.

Another character, one closely associated with Nicki as I’ll point out soon, is Masha (played by Lynne Gorman). She, in about her mid-fifties, is old enough to be 34-year-old Max’s mother (“Masha” could be heard as a pun on “Mama”), which is significant, because he occasionally flirts with her, indicating a transference of the Oedipus complex.

That Masha is associated with Nicki is made clear in the scene when Max hallucinates first whipping tied-up Nicki, who masochistically enjoys it, then realizes he’s whipping Masha, tied up and in Nicki’s place, even wearing red, as Nicki was. Max wakes up and hallucinates seeing Masha lying next to him in bed, still tied up and gagged, and dead from the beating; this indicates further his Oedipal transference onto her, as well as her association with Nicki (i.e., her involvement in the erotic fantasy).

If ‘Mama’ Masha is associated with Nicki, then Nicki is also a kind of displaced Oedipal transference, which can be seen in the earlier scene when Max hallucinates seeing her on his TV screen, and she says to him, “Come to Nicki,” which almost sounds like, “Come to Mommy.”

Therefore, Masha represents his good mother, and Nicki represents his bad mother, to use concepts from Melanie Klein. Masha is the good one because, apart from submitting ‘nice’ porn to CIVIC TV, she also warns him against looking further into Videodrome. Nicki is the bad mother because, of course, she lures him more and more into Videodrome.

This splitting of Max’s mother transferences into good and bad objects reflects what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position: paranoid because of his fear of the bad internal object possibly persecuting him (which Nicki does, of course); and schizoid because of the splitting of his world into absolute good and bad, black and white. Trying to reject the bad, through projection, will result in bizarre objects, Wilfred Bion‘s term for hallucinated projections of the bad objects. Such projective identification is why Max is hallucinating.

One crucial thing to understand about his Oedipal transferences is that they are narcissistic in origin. Seeing that mirrored other face in front of oneself, be it the mother’s, a maternal transference, or a face on the TV screen, is a participating in a dyadic relationship with the other (only one other person), as opposed to Lacan‘s Other, meaning the many other people of society in general. The one other is a mirrored reflection, or an extension, of the narcissistic self, and that other is selfishly hogged, never to be shared with other people.

In his being sucked further and further into the dangerous world of Videodrome, Max is isolating himself and regressing to an infantile state where fantasy and reality have a blurred boundary. The removal of the societal Other, as represented by a father figure (here in turn represented by O’Blivion, whom we see killed, reduced to oblivion, on the videotape), is what Lacan called foreclosure, which leads to psychosis, Max’s break with reality, leading to more hallucinations and more delusions.

The media’s manipulation of us, beguiling us with those seductive images on the TV screen (or, in today’s world, our computer screens or smartphone screens; and incidentally, McLuhan predicted the internet) and twisting our minds with propaganda, is doing basically the same thing to us as Videodrome is doing to Max. In mindlessly supporting imperialist war after imperialist war, we’ve become as narcissistic, violent, delusional, and paranoid/schizoid as he is.

Max asks Masha to find out more about Videodrome for him, and as I said above, she tries to warn him to stay away from it. She insists that these snuff films show real murders, not faked ones. Of course, any producer of snuff films, in his right mind, would never risk being charged with murder when he could just fake the killings, as is done in mainstream films. Videodrome, however, doesn’t fake the killings because, as Masha tells Max, it has a philosophy.

When Max asks for a name behind this philosophy, she tells him that it’s Professor Brian O’Blivion. I would say, however, that the name behind this philosophy is that of the Marquis de Sade, who in his erotic writings merged pornography with philosophy, anti-religion, a glorification of cruelty and crime, and an ironic commentary on the oppressive power structures of our world–the Church, the state, and class antagonisms.

Right after learning about O’Blivion, Max goes to find him, and it’s significant that the building he goes to is a place where the homeless are made to watch marathon sessions of TV. Here we see a parallel of the relationship this film makes between sex and violence: the pleasure of watching TV, of being seduced by images on the screen and being put in that infantile, dyadic, almost Oedipal relationship, is associated with the structural violence of being reduced to poverty.

The rich and powerful, like Sade’s wealthy characters, his politically influential sex criminals, are torturing and killing the weak and poor. The people behind Videodrome represent these powerful people, at least the corporate media faction, indulging in transgressive, pleasure/pain jouissance and getting the surplus value of what Lacan called plus-de-jouir. Sadomasochism in the film represents the pleasure the ruling class gets from oppressing the working class.

Just as there are competing capitalist, imperialist interests, so are there competing factions for the control of Videodrome: there’s the agenda of O’Blivion and his daughter, Bianca (Smits), and there’s the agenda of Barry Convex (Carlson) of the Spectacular Optics Corporation, and of Harlan (Dvorsky), the operator of the CIVIC TV satellite dish who, though feigning subservience to Max, his “patrón,” nonetheless has lured his boss into his obsession with Videodrome by getting him to watch a broadcast of it at the beginning of the film.

Before meeting with Convex, Max has had a particularly disturbing hallucination in which he sees a yonic slit appear on his belly. He has a handgun with obvious phallic symbolism, for he puts it in the slit, along with his fist. This scene reinforces the thematic link of sex and violence in the film. It also suggests an internalizing of the combined parent figure, an infantile phantasy based on a child’s witnessing of the primal scene, of his parents having sex, which looks painful to the child and arouses Oedipal jealousy, a feeling of being left out.

Connected with this unconscious phantasy (recall Max’s maternal transferences onto Masha and Nicki) is his feeling of lack, as symbolized by that yonic slit, in turn a symbolic wound from castration. A lack of being able to be, or to have, the phallus for the mother (Masha or Nicki) gives rise to desire, which is the desire of the Other, to be what Masha or Nicki desires, these two being manifestations of Max’s objet petit a.

Consider in this connection a scene not filmed, but in the novelization by “Jack Martin,” pseudonym of Dennis Etchison, in which Max sees a TV rise out of his bathtub like Botticelli‘s Birth of Venus. If you recall the myth behind the painting, Venus, or Aphrodite, appeared from the foam after Uranus‘ severed genitals were thrown into the sea. As I discussed in this post, the castration of Uranus leading to the birth of Venus can be allegorized as Lacan’s notion of lack giving rise to desire.

Max’s desire, fueling his growing obsession with Videodrome, puts him in such a vulnerable state that he can now be easily manipulated and exploited by Convex, who comes in right on cue and has Max driven over to a branch of Spectacular Optical, a seller of eyeglasses. Since, as O’Blivion informed us, “the television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye,” then these glasses, through the association of TV with one’s eyes, are a metaphorical television in themselves. And since Convex is Videodrome’s producer, as a member of the eyeglasses company, we see a stronger link between the glasses and TV.

In his self-introduction to Max in the car on the way to the Spectacular Optics branch, which is done fittingly on a small TV screen in the car, Convex explains that the eyeglasses company makes cheap glasses for the Third World, paralleling Bianca’s having homeless people watch TV. Convex’s company also provides missile guidance systems for NATO, so we can see a sinister link between his use of media manipulation via Videodrome, his eyeglasses (as I suspect) controlling and shaping what the poor of the Third World see, and imperialist capitalism.

It is at the back of the eyeglasses store that Convex has Max wear a device on his head to record his hallucinations of whipping Nicki, then seeing himself whip Masha. His inner fantasies of dominance and control, over the two representing his objet petit a, are being manipulated and exploited (and therefore in turn dominated and controlled) by Convex.

When Max later learns of Harlan’s involvement in luring him into Videodrome, and of Harlan’s association with Convex, Harlan tells him of the need for the West to toughen up against its toughening Eastern enemies, who I suspect were the communists. We’ve seen this Western toughening up since the time Videodrome was made, suggesting how prophetic the film was in linking media manipulation of the masses with the neoliberal counterrevolution starting in the 1980s with Reagan and Thatcher.

Another surreal moment comes when Convex puts a videocassette into that slit in Max’s belly. Since, as I said above, that slit is yonic, Convex is putting the cassette in Max against his will, and the insertion is done to control Max, it can be seen as a symbolic rape, another fisting.

Convex wants Max to give CIVIC TV to Videodrome, and to kill his two business partners. Here we have a pun already seen in American Psycho: murders and executions for the sake of mergers and acquisitions. Videodrome is an example of big capitalism swallowing up small capitalism–CIVIC TV. Once again, I must give that quote from Marx: “One capitalist always strikes down many others.” (Marx, page 929)

Max holds his handgun, which merges with his body and becomes an extension of his fist, a phallic fist, like those hands that put organic videocassettes into his vaginal belly.

He does as commanded. He goes into the CIVIC TV building and finds his two business partners, Raphael (played by David Bolt) and Moses (played by Reiner Schwarz; since Videodrome was filmed and set in Toronto, I wonder if this second business partner was named after Moses Znaimer, head of Citytv at the time). Max kills both of them, then flees the building, having pretended also to be wounded and therefore supposedly not guilty of the attack.

Here we see Max no longer just unconsciously getting his kicks from snuff films. And no longer is he just being manipulated by and hooked on Videodrome, as if it were a drug. Now he is an assassin for Convex. Just like those of us who start off enjoying transgressive, taboo pleasures (jouissance) brought about by Lacan’s lack and a narcissistic wish to be mirrored by a mother substitute (objet petit a), then are manipulated by the media to channel our aggressive, violent urges on specific, political targets, so is Max being used to wipe out Videodrome’s enemies.

Next, he is to find Bianca and kill her. She, however, has been expecting him, and she shows him a video recording of Nicki being murdered by the people in Videodrome, Bianca’s purpose being to sway Max over to the O’Blivion side. (But has Nicki really been killed, or is the recording yet another of Max’s hallucinations, an attempt to manipulate him into working for Bianca? Indeed, for that matter, was even her father really killed, or was his assassination, apparently done by Nicki, yet another hallucination?)

In any case, just as the killing of Professor O’Blivion represents the Oedipal wish to annihilate the father figure so as to have the mother transference (Masha/Nicki), so is the killing of mother figure Nicki a reflection of an unconscious Electra complex in Bianca (her “father’s screen”), a wish to protect her father…or at least to protect his legacy. With Max under her control now, him having seen a hand/pistol emerge from a TV, and having been shot by it (projective identification from the TV back to him, and we furthermore see bullet wounds in the ‘chest’ of the TV screen, indicating once again the mirrored, two-way relationship of the viewer and his TV), he is now to destroy Videodrome.

He recovers from being shot like a resurrected Christ, the bullet wounds being his stigmata. Accordingly, he is now “the video word made flesh,” and so, “Death to Videodrome! Long live the new flesh!” As a brainwashed, quasi-religious zealot for the manipulative media, narcissistically flattered to be associated with Christ, he will go off to kill Harlan and Convex.

His switching to the O’Blivion side mustn’t be seen as him being any better than before. The Videodrome/O’Blivion conflict is just symbolic of controlled opposition, as far as it represents media manipulation of the public. The two sides just represent competing capitalists.

Harlan puts another videotape–this time, a surreal, fleshly one–into that vaginal slit in Max’s belly; but now that Max is working for Bianca, the symbolic wound of castration that that slit has been is now a kind of castrating vagina dentata that closes up on Harlan’s hand, his fisting, symbolic phallus, and bites it off, leaving the remainder of his arm vaguely resembling a mixer’s beater. Max has gone from feeling powerless, like a eunuch, to powerful. His Lacanian lack feels fulfilled.

After killing Harlan, Max finds Convex at a Spectacular Optics convention on the theme of Lorenzo de’ Medici, to whom the following two quotes are (erroneously) attributed: “Love comes in at the eye” (actually from WB Yeats‘s poem, “A Drinking Song“), and “The eye is the window of the soul” (not definitively attributable to any one source).

Apart from being, as it seems, a mere error on Cronenberg’s (or Convex’s) part, could there be any deeper meaning behind associating these quotes with the Italian Renaissance statesman, banker, and patron of the arts? Perhaps the point of linking Lorenzo de’ Medici to Videodrome is to say that he was, on the one hand, the McLuhan/O’Blivion of his day, and the art of men like Botticelli and Michelangelo (whom he sponsored) was the TV of the time; and on the other hand, his political power was like that of Convex, Bianca, et al.

In any case, Nicki’s love surely has gone into Max’s eye, which is the window of the soul that he’s lost to Videodrome.

We see Convex come on a stage after a dance performance, and he says to the audience, “Well, you know me, and I sure know you.” We also hear a member of the audience say, “Yeah, we know you.” This exchange reinforces the theme I discussed earlier of the reciprocity between performer (e.g., Jethro Tull), or person on TV, and audience, or TV viewer.

With his hand-flesh-gun, Max shoots Convex, who falls to the stage floor with his body tearing to pieces in a manner reminding us a bit of the climactic scene in The Evil Dead. This over-the-top death is explained in the novelization as being the result of Max not shooting Convex with normal bullets, but rather with “new flesh” ones.

Max’s ever-increasing madness is, of course, resulting in his ever-increasing isolation. He escapes to a derelict boat in the Port Lands. He has a hallucination of Nicki on a television set there. Recall how I’ve characterized that mirror-like reciprocity between TV image and viewer as a narcissistic one, how the ego is established in what Lacan called the Imaginary. Alongside this experience has been Max’s traumatizing, maddening experience of the Real, these surreal, hallucinatory states that cannot be symbolized through language (how the novelization managed such verbalizing is anyone’s guess); in other words, the psychologically therapeutic realm of the Symbolic is absent here. Max can only get madder and madder; he cannot return to the social world.

Accordingly, Nicki tells him that he must “leave the old flesh” to destroy Videodrome once and for all. This means he has to kill himself. In his narcissistic imagination, Max thinks that doing so will raise him up to a higher level of existence (“the new flesh”), rather like Christ’s death and resurrection giving Him a ‘spiritual body.’ Since Max, in his insanity brought on by media manipulation, is bordering on psychological fragmentation, such narcissistic imaginings can feel like a shield against said fragmentation.

He sees himself on the TV screen putting a bullet in his head, then he immediately does the same to himself. He and the TV are one, a mirror of each other, because the media, in controlling him, have made him destroy himself…just as today’s media, in manufacturing our consent for war with Russia and China, are making us all destroy ourselves through escalation and raising the threat of nuclear war.

Like Max Renn, we are all mesmerized by the images we see on our screens, be they TV, tablet, computer, or smartphone. Neoliberalism has caused us to feel a particularly gaping lack, a hole in our lives like that slit in Max’s gut. We’ve been propagandized to see things in a split-up, black and white world, with ourselves narcissistically as the white, Christ-like good, and other nations as the black, absolutely evil enemy. Political parties, like Videodrome vs. O’Blivion, pretend to be at odds with each other, when actually they push for essentially the same agenda. And we are driven to support aggressive, violent policies that could end up killing us all, like Max the flesh-gunned assassin.

Media manipulation is making us see a world so divorced from reality, so distorted a version of the truth, so surreal, that we could be understood to be hallucinating. If we’re not careful, we’re all going to “leave the old flesh.”

Analysis of ‘Trilogy of Terror’

Trilogy of Terror is a 1975 made-for-TV horror anthology film directed by Dan Curtis. It features three segments based on unrelated short stories by Richard Matheson; the first two segments were adapted by William F. Nolan, while the third–and by far, the best–was adapted by Matheson himself, based on his 1969 short story, “Prey.”

All three segments star Karen Black in the roles of “Julie,” “Millicent and Therese,” and “Amelia,” which are also the names of the segments, since each story, as I’ll argue below, is really about the inner mental life of each character Black plays here. “Julie” costars Robert Burton, Black’s husband at the time. “Millicent and Therese” costars George Gaynes. “Amelia” is essentially a one-woman-play, with only Black and Walker Edmi s ton doing the voice of the Zuni doll.

Here is a link to a few quotes from the film.

The essential reason to watch, or own a DVD of, Trilogy of Terror is to watch “Amelia,” the excellent third segment, as the first two are rather mediocre stories. It’s never properly explained how Julie lures Chad Foster (Burton) into a brief sexual relationship before poisoning him: is she a witch, or some kind of succubus? And how come her sister (played by Kathryn Reynolds) never even suspects Julie of any kind of wrongdoing? That Millicent and Therese are two personalities in one woman’s body is pretty easy to predict–we never see the two together in the same scene.

It is, however, worthwhile to examine all three stories in terms of their common themes and elements, in order to grasp a deeper meaning in the superb and genuinely scary “Amelia.” All three stories are psychological studies of their titular characters, emotionally repressed women who are rigid, prudish, or otherwise neurotic on the outside, but who each have a hidden, inner dark side that is finally revealed at the end of each story.

These dark sides, or what Jung called the Shadow, are kept from the titular characters’ conscious minds (until the end of each story) through the use of a number of ego defence mechanisms: repression, projection (including projective identification), splitting, denial, and reaction formation. A merging with this repressed, projected, or split-off Shadow occurs at the conclusion of each story.

The sexual predator in Julie is projected (through projective identification) onto her young and handsome American literature student, Chad; the stereotypically male sexual predator becomes the victim of the erstwhile stereotypically female victim of sexual predation, thus reversing the stereotypes. He as a predator parallels the aggression of the Zuni fetish doll against Amelia.

Therese’s seduction of her father (or was it his seduction of her, as repressed by prudish Millicent?), of Thomas Anmar (played by John Karlen), and attempted seduction of Dr. Chester Ramsey (Gaynes) are all instances of Therese as a sexual predator. The Zuni fetish doll, with its phallic spear, and later, the phallic little knife, is symbolically predatory in a sexual sense.

Julie splits off her Shadow side onto Chad. Millicent splits off her Shadow side onto her “sister,” Therese. Amelia splits off hers onto the Zuni fetish doll, making it into what Wilfred R. Bion would have called a bizarre object, a hallucinatory projection of Amelia’s unconscious matricidal instincts.

All three stories involve some kind of strained family relations, the all-too-typical causes of mental disturbances. Julie’s sister, perpetually kept in the dark about Julie’s private life, just wants to help her, but doesn’t even know the half of the problem.

Was Therese’s incest with her father an expression of the Electra complex, including her killing of her mother; or was it (as I see as a possibility) that her father raped her, causing her to split into two personalities, and did her mother, knowing of the rape, kill herself in heartbreak?

Amelia’s mother places great restrictions on her social life, driving her to move out for the sake of at least some independence. The man she’s dating is named Arthur, which sounds like a pun on father and thus symbolically suggests, through transference, more of the Electra complex (which is further intensified by her plan to kill her mother at the end of the story), thus thematically linking this story to that of “Millicent and Therese.”

Along with this literal expression of the Electra complex in “Millicent and Therese,” and the metaphorical one (as I see it) in “Amelia,” there’s also–in how possibly forty-something Julie could be old enough to be the mother of her handsome young male students–a possible mother/son transference in her relationship with them, suggesting a Jocasta complex in her. We thus can see a thematic link among all three stories.

Amelia attempts to kill the Shadow in herself by stabbing the Zuni fetish doll; Millicent kills Therese (and herself, of course) by pricking a voodoo doll with a pin. Chad drugs Julie’s drink at the drive-in; Julie later poisons his drink.

Julie, in behaving so frigidly and unsociably, is engaging in reaction formation to hide her predatory interest in her handsome young male students. Millicent’s prudery is a similar reaction formation hiding how she, being in the same body as Therese, has the same sexual desires. In being so intimidated by her domineering, clingy mother, Amelia is using reaction formation to hide her wish to kill her mother and thus free herself from her.

Each of Black’s characters, in a symbolic or literal sense, merges with her Shadow at the end of each segment. Julie, in drugging Chad’s drink as he’d drugged hers, has merged with him (through their sexual relationship), her projected Shadow. Millicent pricks the voodoo doll representing Therese (since it’s she who wants to kill Therese, not vice versa), but has done so in Therese’s blonde wig, makeup, and clothes; in other words, both personalities had to have been present at the time of the killing, both of them sharing consciousness, or both “on the spot,” to borrow an expression from Billy Milligan, a merging of them in suicide. Amelia opens the oven in which the Zuni doll is burning, and its spirit enters her body, the resulting demonic possession being a symbolic merging of her with her Shadow.

Let’s now turn the discussion towards sharp teeth. There are the fangs in the vampire movie that Chad takes Julie to see. After he drugs her drink and she falls asleep in his car, he takes her to a motel, where he checks himself and her in as Mr. and Mrs., get this…Jonathan Harker, an allusion to the character in Bram Stoker‘s Dracula; Harker at one point is terrorized by Dracula’s vampiress brides, suggesting already that Chad is being used by Julie, not vice versa.

Then there are the sharp teeth on Amelia’s Zuni fetish doll, teeth that end up in her mouth at the end of the story. As with the drug or poison put in, respectively, Julie’s and Chad’s drinks, the biting teeth are symbols of projective and introjective identification, understood especially in the context of Bion’s notion of container and contained…that is, not the kind that mothers use to soothe their agitated babies, but rather negative containment, which leads to a nameless dread (see Bion, Chapter 28; for more on Bion and other psychoanalytic concepts, go here).

Bion used masculine and feminine symbols to represent, respectively, the contained and the container, suggesting phallic and yonic symbolism. In turn, the sharp teeth, like the spear and little knife the Zuni doll uses, are phallic (also like the vampire’s fangs), and the bite and stab wounds are yonic. In this negative containment, trauma (as opposed to the processing of pain that a mother does for her baby) is projected from the attacker and introjected into the victim.

The pricking of the pin into the voodoo doll representing Therese, as well as Amelia’s stabbing in the Zuni doll’s face as it tries to get out of the suitcase she’s trapped it in, are also symbolic examples of this projection and introjection.

With all these points of thematic comparison and contrast made, we can now focus on the deeper psychoanalytic meaning of the best segment, “Amelia.” As I said above, it’s fitting that these stories are all named after the women Black plays in each of them, because the real theatre of these stories dramatize what’s going on in the heads of these three mentally ill characters. That “Amelia” is more or less a solo performance emphasizes that we’re dealing with a drama happening entirely inside her mind.

I believe the Zuni fetish doll coming to life and attacking her is a hallucination, a projection of her repressed wish to kill her mother, who oppresses her with guilt trips to keep her from living a free life.

She buys the doll knowing about the warning not to remove the chain from it, that its removal will bring it to life. She doesn’t believe such a thing will really happen, of course, but the idea exists in unconscious phantasy for her. She looks at it, saying it’s so ugly that even its mother wouldn’t love it; saying this is a reflection of how the doll is a projection of her own unconscious matricidal urges–no mother, Amelia imagines, would ever love her daughter for having such feelings.

After arguing with her mother on the phone in the living room over whether they can cancel one night together (a regular Friday night get-together she and her mother always have) so Amelia can spend it with her boyfriend on his birthday, she–oppressed with guilt from her mother’s manipulations–brings up the doll, telling her mom of how it will supposedly come to life with the removal of the chain. Her bringing up of this is a wish-fulfillment and an implied warning to her mother, who, significantly, hangs up at just that moment.

Amelia then holds the doll, and she seems to have touched the chain at least a little. She sets it on the table and walks away. As we know, the chain falls off the doll’s waist. Now, consciously, she shouldn’t be concerned about this, since she doesn’t believe there really is a spirit inside the doll; but unconsciously, she has a wish that this spirit will come out, with the possibility of it one day attacking and killing her controlling mother. Therefore, Amelia’s fondling of the doll, leading to the chain falling off, is a parapraxis indicating her unconscious matricidal urges.

After being in the kitchen to slice up some meat (with that little knife) and put it in the oven, she returns to the living room to find the doll no longer standing on her coffee table. She looks around, including under the sofa (the obscurity below being symbolic of the unconscious), but can find only the Zuni doll’s spear, the tip of which pricks her finger. Her inability, at this point, to find the doll is representative of her repression of “He Who Kills.”

The living room lamp suddenly switching off represents further repression. Right when she goes to turn it back on is when the doll attacks her, at her foot. This attack represents the return of the repressed, in which the forbidden, repressed feelings return to consciousness, but in a totally unrecognizable form. In Amelia’s case, her matricidal desires have returned to consciousness in the form of a hallucination: the doll trying to kill her, rather than kill her mother.

So on the surface, conscious level, Amelia is terrified of the doll killing her, of course; on the unconscious level, though, she is afraid of what the doll represents–her matricidal Shadow merging with her, a merging caused by all those projective/introjective cuts and bites, the container wounds and the stabbing and biting of the contained.

Her real fear is her wish to kill her mother.

This fear/desire is what makes this third segment so scary.

So her attempts to stop the doll–wrapping it in a towel and drowning it in the bath water, stabbing it in the face, smashing it against a lamp, shutting doors to keep it out, locking it up in a suitcase, and burning it in the oven–are really attempts to prevent it from merging with her.

Now, there’s her wish to prevent the merging, but there’s also the wish for the merging to happen, hence, as I said above, her ‘accidental’ causing of the chain to come off, then her slipping and falling when running away from the doll–which allows it to get to her again–and, when she tries calling the cops, she oddly can’t remember the address of her apartment and thus can’t help the cops find her. This ‘forgetting’ is another parapraxis serving her unconscious wish to merge with her murderous Shadow as personified in the Zuni fetish doll.

Its unintelligible babbling, combined with her screams, is an expression of Lacan‘s notion of the Real, a realm of non-differentiation, of unverbalized trauma.The doll’s possibly killing her is far less horrifying that its merging with her to commit matricide, which–as the psychiatrist said at the end of Psycho–is the most unbearable crime of all. Amelia’s conflict is of the classic id vs. superego kind, or of gratification vs. morality.

As the doll is using the little knife to cut a hole in the suitcase she’s trapped it in, she tries to grab it by the blade with her fingers, a foolish, futile move that only gives her a bloody cut. Again, though, this act reflects her conflict between wanting to disarm the doll and stop its attacks on the one hand, and her unconscious wish to merge with it (i.e., the cut on her finger, the container, from the knife blade, the contained, as an act of projective and introjective identification).

Similarly, after she’s thrown the doll in the oven to burn it (as Julie burned down Chad’s apartment and him in it after poisoning him), she has to open the oven door…consciously, because she needs to make sure it’s ‘dead,’ but unconsciously because she wants to be merged with its spirit, which of course she does.

Now, just as I believe the doll’s coming to life is a hallucination that we, the viewers, share with her, so do I believe her merging with the doll’s spirit at the end, including her razor-toothed grin, is a hallucination, a delusion we viewers share with her. Her unconscious desire to kill her mother was there from the beginning; her belief that the demon in the doll has possessed her has given her a convenient excuse to kill her mother with a clear conscience. After all, it isn’t Amelia who wants to slice her mother up with that large knife she’s poking on the floor…it’s the ‘Zuni demon’ who wants to.

Similarly, Julie entertains the illusion in her mind that Chad is the sexual aggressor while she pretends to be innocent and frigid (her ‘witchcraft’ on him being a metaphorical projection onto him), and Millicent imagines Therese is a sister rather than a split-off personality bearing what’s actually Millicent’s middle name, another act of projection.

In therapy, one sometimes speaks of doing Shadow work, a confronting of and merging with one’s Shadow. Such a merging is not what’s happening here, with these three women Black is playing. Julie, Millicent/Therese, and Amelia split off, project, and repress their respective Shadows with such vehemence that the inevitable merging comes with a violent force that has tragic consequences.

One must assimilate the Shadow, but it must be the conscious personality that integrates the Shadow, not vice versa. Jekyll integrates Hyde, not the other way around. Julie projects Chad (remember that what we see on the screen is a dramatization of her inner thought processes; it’s not to be taken as literally happening), Millicent splits Therese off from her, and Amelia hallucinates the living spirit in the doll. These acts of projection result in Hyde taking over Jekyll.

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

Megan and her father, John, as well as Lynne and Herman, stood in a straight line, holding hands, before their own lake of blood. The only one of them not trembling at the thought of feeling the suffering of the other three was John.

You’re not afraid now, Mr. Fourier, Furioso said to him, but you will be…soon.

I only feel hate and anger, John said. Anger towards this unfilial daughter of mine, and hate towards the whole miserable world. I’ll be glad to end my existence. If this is the only way to do that, then so be it.

To end your existence, and to end the pain that you think your hate and anger are shielding you from, you’ll have to let go of those two emotions, Furioso said. When you let that pain hit you, be prepared for a shock. But stay with it, for only staying with it to the end will get you out of Hell.

Very well, John growled. Let’s just do this.

In you all must go, Furioso said.

Megan, Lynne, and Herman shook as they all took deep breaths. John just snarled as he got ready to jump in.

The four ghosts went in with a splash of red spots flying in all directions. They sank deep below the surface, seeing at first only a void of infinite black.

Then the visions of their rapes appeared.

As with the other groups of ghosts, each of the four of them experienced the suffering of each other, not of their own. They felt the phallic invasions of those that they themselves had invaded in their physical lives.

Megan felt a strap-on dildo suddenly jammed into her ass while lying on top of Lynne, who felt Herman vaginally invading her…but not in their bedroom at home. Lynne experienced it in Megan’s body in the changing area of the shower room in the high school gym.

Herman experienced a phallic penetration again, but as with Lynne, it was in the gym changing room. And he felt it in Megan’s body. He saw himself on top of him-as-her.

Oh, no, Lynne and Herman moaned together. Not again! Our crime, back to haunt us!

So, this is what I made them feel, Megan thought as she felt that dildo going in and out of herself. My saner self wouldn’t have wished this on my own worst enemies. Yet my not-so-sane self did wish it on them! Hate and lust for revenge really do take away one’s sanity. I want to heal from the trauma of my rapes, not go through them again!

As Herman felt his own phallus jamming in and out of him, tearing away at Megan’s vagina, he also felt a surprising emotion from Megan’s experience: he felt her crush on him, and her betrayed love.

Oh, my God! he thought as he saw her victimization through her eyes. Megan used to like me? She fancied me? And I did this to her. I let Lynne talk me into doing such a horrible thing to her? Lynne and I should both be ashamed of ourselves, far more than the guilt we’d felt years ago.

I thought I’d paid my dues, Lynne thought as she continued experiencing Megan’s rape with all of her senses. Going to church, being a ‘good Catholic,’ being monogamous with the rapist I’d goaded him into becoming, giving therapy to rape victims, going to confession and telling the priest what I’d conspired to do with Herman…none of that comes close to redeeming myself. No belief in Jesus could ever undo what I did to Megan. Why did I have to be so cruel to that poor girl, she who’d hardly done anything to me? I so deserve this, as awful as it is to have to experience. I’m so sorry, Megan.

I’m sorry, too, Megan, Herman moaned. I repaid your crush on me by being such an animal. I should have gone to jail for what I did to you.

We deserved to experience your revenge, Megan, Lynne said.

No, you didn’t! Megan said. I should have known from my own pain that no one, ever, should be subjected to rape.

The agony of these three, however, was an orgy of delight compared to what John was going through…he who, perhaps, should have been subjected to it.

John found himself in the body of a little girl–twelve-year-old Megan’s. That delicate body being used for the perverted pleasure of…himself.

He could no longer shield himself from her thoughts: Oh, Daddy! You’re hurting me! Why are you doing this to me?

He looked up at himself through her eyes, that sweating and grunting man with the hateful snarl on his face. He saw himself with the eyes of his betrayed daughter. He saw what a foul pig he really was.

He realized that all those bad boys he’d warned Megan about, those boys he’d accused her of yielding her body to…they were all actually projections of himself.

He remembered his constant, unchanging attitude every time he’d done this to his daughter, as well as to all those prostitutes he’d been so rough with at that brothel: They’re all just a bunch of sluts, tempting me to sin. They deserve no kindness for making me sin. The only good in them is the pleasure they give me.

He now felt the worthlessness he’d imposed on his daughter.

The pain he felt between his legs–experiencing it in Megan’s then-small body–the pain of his phallic stabbing, was a minor irritation compared to the torment of looking up at and seeing his ugly face. Now, John was a physically handsome man; but the scowl of hate and contempt on his face as he continued raping her, devoid of pity or remorse, cancelled out his good looks to the point of reversing them to the other extreme, making him as hideous as a Gorgon…yet looking in that face would never give him the mercy of turning him to stone.

If John closed his eyes, he still saw himself.

Now he knew who he really hated.

God, stop this! he screamed inside himself. I can’t bear to see myself this way! I’m a beast! I’m a devil! I’m a monster! I don’t deserve to exist! I don’t want to exist!

But he kept existing in that lake of blood.

He tried to push the pain away, to project it onto Megan, then to Lynne, then to Herman; but it always came back to him. The pain was a ball of fire that flew in a circle among all four of them…and this is when they all realized that their ‘ghost-bodies,’ as it were, had begun merging into one, single, deformed monster of a body. Megan was reminded of the fused body at the end of the Tool video for “Schism.” This body was shaped like a circle-jerk of a donut, with a phallus shoving into each ghost positioned before that phallus.

A donut-monster fucking itself.

All four ghosts were trying to pass the pain on, that fireball, to each other, passing it on in the form of rapes, but it always came back. As their four identities continued fusing, transforming from a ‘donut’ into one giant floating blob in all that blood, they began to see the futility of trying to pass the pain away, to project it. They realized, more and more, that they had to confront it.

Even John did.

I’m sorry, baby, he moaned to Megan. Though saying ‘sorry’ is useless. I was never a real father to you. I should never have even been born. I deserve this punishment…forever.

The fireball stopped flying around in circles. It stopped in the centre of their now fully unified identity, that grotesque ball of pain. The fire settled there, then it grew from the centre slowly, coming closer and closer to the periphery. All four ghosts, as one big ghost now, felt the painful experiences of all four of their lives simultaneously.

Besides experiencing each other’s rapes, they all felt such memories as Megan’s getting green paint all over her blouse, and hearing all the laughter from her classmates. They felt Lynne’s and Herman’s annoyance at getting in trouble with the high school principal for that prank; they also realized that Megan hadn’t wanted to involve the teachers or principal, meaning that getting revenge on her in the changing room was all the more indefensible. They felt John’s annoyance at his wife’s leaving him for another man…and they all knew of John’s shameful visits to that brothel, and how they justified his wife’s leaving him.

Shame, shame, and more shame.

A huge, deafening scream came from that blob as the fire reached its periphery and began boiling the surrounding blood. The scream died out, the blob melted into, and merged with, the boiling blood, and the bloody lake evaporated into a hot, pink mist, which in turn faded into nothingness.

A nothingness of peace.

***********

Furioso wasn’t there to watch it, though. He–as a demon who had lured so many thousands over the centuries to Hell, yet also had recently developed the compassion to show how some of the damned could escape it, was now standing before his own sea of blood.

He saw that red sea shrink a little, as it had shrunk a little on several occasions before.

A slight smile appeared on his lips.

THE END

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

Next, it was Tiffany’s turn, along with the ghosts of her mother Alice, Faye and her baby, George, and his mother. As with the previous group of spirits, Furioso led them all to a large lake of blood, the blood of their bodies mixed together.

Again, as with the last group, the ghosts of Tiffany and her victims/victimizers all stood in a straight line before the red lake, holding hands and feeling a heavy dread for what was to come.

In you must go, Furioso said, if you truly wish to end your pain. Just remember that the pain you feel submerged in that lake will feel much more acute. Still, as torturous as it will feel, it won’t last forever, as this pain outside will. When you go in, stay with it, be patient and endure it all the way, as extreme as the pain will feel, and it will come to an end. Keep faith in the ultimate outcome.

All the ghosts looked at the lake with fearful eyes. They took deep breaths, then jumped in together.

Whether their eyes were opened or closed under the surface of the red, they all saw visions of the past; but they experienced the pasts of their victims, as their victims had experienced those painful moments. The experiences were also synchronized, so the victimizers could glean the meaning of what they’d done, by seeing and feeling it done to themselves.

Faye and Alice, for example, were in Tiffany’s position when Faye’s fist came smashing down on Tiffany’s calculator in math class; this vision coincided with experiencing the block of ice dropped on Tiffany’s head in that neighbourhood on the way home from school. As this happened, Tiffany, in her mother’s place, felt the sledgehammer cracking her skull open in the same neighbourhood the same night Tiffany’s ghost killed her mom.

Experiencing the mutual suffering caused all of the ghosts to shudder. I should never have done those things to Tiffany, thought Faye. No wonder she wanted revenge.

My poor daughter went through so much, Alice thought. And I never supported her the way she needed her mother to. True, it was hard for me raising her without Barry, and the heartache of his leaving me had made it impossible to forget every time I look in Tiffany’s eyes–her father’s eyes–still, that gave me no right to take it all out on my baby. In many ways, I got what I deserved. Forgive me, baby.

No, mama! Tiffany’s ghost moaned back to Alice. You may have hurt me and neglected me a lot, but you never smashed anything–ice or a sledgehammer–on my head. The punishment I gave you far outweighed the crime. You did not deserve that, mama! I’m so sorry.

Speaking of cracked skulls, Tiffany next experienced Faye’s newborn baby being thrown to the wooden floor. The baby itself expressed its pain to Tiffany’s ghost in the only way it could, non-verbally, by projecting the feeling onto her.

Oh, my God! Tiffany’s ghost thought. That baby never did me or anybody any harm. How could I have done something so cruel to a defenseless child? I was so drunk on my hatred at the time, laughing at their suffering, that I didn’t see how despicable I was being!

Punish me, Tiffany! Faye moaned. Why punish my baby?

And I laughed as I watched you and your baby die, Tiffany’s ghost thought. I’m so sorry!

Next, the ghost of Tiffany saw the hallucination she’d made Faye see of her baby, with the elephant’s ears, tusks, and trunk. She felt Faye’s shock, as well as the trunk hitting her on the nose, hard enough that it hurt.

My God! Tiffany thought. That was so mean.

She saw the horrified reaction of Brad, Faye’s husband, when the baby was thrown to the floor.

That poor man was made to suffer, too, Tiffany thought in her swelling remorse. He never did anything to me. He didn’t deserve to see his baby die. I made her innocent baby look like a monster, when it is I who am the monster.

The ghosts of George and his mother saw what he had done to Tiffany back in high school: how mean he was to her when he called her “a wimp,” how he hit her on the shoulder with a triple-A battery shot from an elastic band, though aiming at her face as Boyd had done to Alexa, and how he and Faye dropped that chunk of ice on Tiffany’s head.

George! his mother moaned at him. Did I raise you to do things like that? Small wonder she wanted revenge.

I’m sorry, Mom, he moaned back at her.

Apologize to Tiffany, not to me, she said.

Apologize? he said. After what she did to you? My bullying of her wasn’t anywhere near as bad as what she made me do to you.

Dropping a block of ice on her head and leaving her unconscious on the sidewalk was not a minor thing, she said.

It wasn’t major enough to deserve your murder or my suicide in the hospital, he said.

And at that moment, Tiffany was made to experience that moment in the hospital room: him getting the syringe out while feeling his love for his mother, as well as his horror at being forced to make that air bubble in the tube leading into her body; her feeling the terror at helplessly watching her son’s inexplicable murder of her.

His mother never hurt me, Tiffany thought as she saw the air bubble come closer and closer. She never earned my hate. Still, I was so high on that hate that I never contemplated how low I’d let myself sink.

Each ghost was trying to separate itself from experiencing the suffering it had caused the other ghosts, but couldn’t. Each ghost tried to swim away from the others in that lake of blood, but the mixed blood ensured their inescapable togetherness. Swimming away led immediately to being pulled back to the others.

Their identities were merging, as were their pain, shame, and remorse. The ghosts’ moans were crescendoing into screams. They all begged for the pain to end, yet they were each also fearful of losing their individuality.

Eventually, they came to realize that each ghost clinging to its own ego was perpetuating its suffering, and they all came to understand the need to let go.

Though each ghost hated the other ghosts for having caused their suffering, each hated itself even more for having caused so much greater, and needless, suffering. Even George came to accept that it had been his and Faye’s bullying that started the chain of events that led to his mother’s death and his suicide.

Forgive me, Tiffany, he moaned.

Forgive me, George, she answered.

The ghosts all felt themselves melting and merging into the blood, and the red lake evaporated into a hot, pink mist. The mist slowly faded and disappeared.

No more existence.

No more pain.

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

Furioso started with the ghosts of Alexa, her parents, Arlene and Jonas Frey, Boyd McAulliffe, his daughter, Tess, his wife, Sharon, Denise Charlton, her husband, Jack Drew, and their son, Jameson.

Come with me, he said to all of them. He flew off, and the group of ghosts all flew off after him.

They reached an area of Hell at the centre of which was a huge, round, red lake. The water looked like blood.

In you all must go, together, Furioso told them. Prepare for the greatest agony you’ve ever felt. Yet remember, this agony will end. Stay with it. Be patient, and endure.

The ghosts shared a collective dread for what they were about to experience. They all held hands in a straight line as they stood before the bloody lake, then they all jumped in together.

After being fully submerged in the red–which really was blood, the blood from all of their bodies from their physical lives, mixed together–the ghosts opened their eyes and saw visions of their pasts, with the sound included, as well as all their other senses. Only one didn’t experience one’s own past…one experienced the past of one’s victims. These moments would fade in and out with the slow movements of the bloody waves.

Boyd’s ghost found himself in that old science classroom during lunch break…only he didn’t see himself aiming a bottle-cap in a slingshot to hit Alexa in the face. Instead, he saw himself in her shoes playing chess, then feeling that bottle-cap hit her just under her left eye.

Just as he was experiencing this sharp irritation, Alexa’s ghost found herself in the bushes, hiding from Tess’s dad. She was Tess this time, and she felt the bullet from his gun hit her, just under her left eye.

They both felt the impact of the projectile hit them at the exact same time, and they both keenly felt the pain they’d caused each other.

In their visions, they both shouted out, “Jesus Christ!” in unison, at the exact same time.

Next, Alexa saw herself in Sharon’s position, walking up to her husband, Boyd, asking where Tess was. Then she felt that other bullet hit her in the face again, just under the left eye.

As Alexa’s ghost experienced that kill she’d goaded Boyd into making, Boyd felt the bottle-cap hit him in the face, in the exact same place again, at the exact same time. He also remembered his shooting of Tess and Sharon, how they were hit in the face at the exact same spot.

He put it all together when he saw a vision of Denise kicking Alexa in that classroom, only he was in Alexa’s body feeling the kicks. He remembered how Alexa and the other two bullied girls, whose names he’d forgotten, all went missing shortly after this bullying incident, all three presumed suicides.

He then saw a vision of being pushed into a mud and slush puddle just outside of their high school, again, him in Alexa’s body; then hearing everyone laugh at him, and feeling kicks in the gut from himself and Denise.

This was all my fault, Boyd thought. If I hadn’t pushed Alexa so hard, she wouldn’t have killed herself, gone to Hell, then made me kill my wife and daughter. We’d all still be alive. Oh, God, I’m so sorry. It was all my fault!

Alexa’s ghost not only watched and felt what had happened to Tess and Sharon, she felt Boyd’s reaction. It hit her hard to realize she’d hurt two people who had nothing to do with her score to settle with Boyd.

My God, Alexa thought. I was so filled with rage at Boyd that I didn’t think of how his daughter and his wife never did me any wrong. How old was that girl…ten? And I made him shoot her in the face with that bullet, and the same thing to his equally innocent wife. He hit me in the face with a bottle-cap, and I thought making him kill his own family, with bullets in the face, was a fitting way to get revenge? That was wrong, way wrong…

Boyd kept ruminating over what he’d done as he felt the presence of the ghosts of his wife and daughter. He felt their pain and they contemplated how his bullying of Alexa, a needless, petty bullying based on envy, led to her suicide and her brutal revenge on everyone he cared about. The whole family just felt the pain and shame shift back and forth among them like the moving waves of that lake of blood.

Alexa’s own pain, guilt, and shame joined theirs. The four of them felt their consciousnesses merge, making the experience of each other’s pain more and more intense and unendurable; yet they had to endure it all to get out of the endless pain of Hell. As they felt each other’s pain grow and grow, each felt his or her shame grow in the same proportion.

Now, as if this pain somehow wasn’t enough, the pain of the ghosts of Alexa’s parents, Arlene and Jonas, was now being added to embitter the pot even more. Alexa’s ghost saw the bedroom of her parents, transformed into that ovoid shape without windows, doors, or furniture. She saw Jonas, lying unconscious on the floor with blood pouring out of his head.

But she saw everything through her mother’s eyes instead of her own. She also felt her mother’s hunger. She saw the large carving knife and fork by Arlene’s feet on the floor; she picked them up.

Oh, no, Alexa thought. I’m about to taste my father’s flesh.

She looked down at Arlene’s stomach and saw it open into an empty black hole. She went over to her father’s body with overwhelming dread.

As she was experiencing this, Arlene’s and Jonas’s ghosts were in Alexa’s place, feeling the pain she’d felt from their lack of love or compassion for what their daughter had been through.

My God, Arlene thought. I really was a bad mother.

Me, too, Jonas thought. Arlene and I were so caught up in our own personal frustrations that we never took a moment to consider what she’d been going through. She was being bullied, and we blamed it all on her. We didn’t give her the emotional support she so desperately needed. No wonder she went crazy and killed us.

Alexa was tasting the bloody flesh on her father’s arm. She wanted to vomit, but she couldn’t. This was far too extreme a punishment to give Mom and Dad. What’s wrong with me?

Denise saw herself in Alexa’s body in that classroom, looking up at Denise kicking her. She saw herself getting pushed into the mud and slush outside of their high school. She felt Alexa’s humiliation. She felt the kicks to her gut.

As she was experiencing Alexa’s pain, Alexa’s ghost was in Denise’s home with the baseball bat, approaching Jameson. She brought the bat down on the boy’s head. The cracking of it on his skull coincided exactly with one of Denise’s kicks to Alexa’s gut. Both of them experienced each other’s pain, and Denise understood how the one caused the other. Alexa realized that her revenge was far worse than what had caused it.

Revenge made me into a monster, Alexa thought. That boy didn’t deserve that. Nor did Jack.

I did a lot of bad things in my life, Denise thought. Maybe Jack and Jameson didn’t deserve what happened to them, but I deserved it.

Mommy? Jameson’s ghost called out to Denise. Why did you kick that girl? Why did you make her hate you enough for her to make you kill Daddy and me?

His words caused a pounding pain inside Denise.

Alexa, in Jack’s body, just then felt the knife plunged into his gut.

What my wife did to you was bad, Alexa, Jack’s ghost said to her, but why did you have to punish Jameson and me as well as her?

These words cut into Alexa.

I’m so sorry, she said to him.

The consciousnesses of all of the ghosts–Alexa, Boyd, Tess, Sharon, Denise, Jack, Jameson, Arlene, and Jonas–were all merging into a huge mass of life experiences, memories, pain, hate, and remorse. They were truly suffering together, feeling compassion. Yet the pain only grew more and more torturous.

Boyd, for example, contemplated Alexa’s suffering from her parents’ emotional neglect for the first time. He’d never imagined how her own mother and father could have had such a callous attitude to the pain of the daughter they were supposed to love.

He’d only ever thought of his wounded pride, his envy of her getting into the Grade 8 gifted class, when he hadn’t been accepted into it. He now realized that we all too rarely consider the suffering of others; we’re usually focused just on our own.

Daddy, Tess’s voice called out to Boyd. Why were you so mean to that girl when you were a kid? What did she ever do to you to deserve that?

Hearing these questions stung in her father’s mind. He remembered Alexa, back in that science classroom, asking him, “What did I do to you to deserve that?” (the bottle-cap in the face) He remembered his answer to her: “You kept living.” Yet, when she was no longer living, she ended up being so much worse to him and his family. Her continued living, without his bullying and with more loving parents, would have spared his family’s lives.

All of the ghosts were feeling this kind of regret as they contemplated each other’s memories, a result of the continued merging of their nine consciousnesses. Individuality was fading. A collective moaning, wailing, and screaming in pain grew in loudness. Feeling each other’s traumas, more and more vividly with the merging, as if the traumas had been their own, was getting unbearable. Still, they knew this was the only way out of Hell.

Soon, there were no longer nine ghosts, but just that mass, that red blob of wailing pain. Then the redness dulled from its original fiery glow, dimming to a dull grey-red as the wailing did a slow decrescendo.

Finally, the grey blob started to fade away as the moans became barely audible, to not at all audible. The blob vanished.

Silence.

Non-existence.

Peace.

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

Back in Hell, Alexa, Megan, and Tiffany had all achieved their revenge on everyone who had hurt them badly enough to deserve getting the grief that they had all given.

The three girl-ghosts hit their enemies far harder than they had been hit themselves. They were beyond satisfied in that regard.

Yet, their own pain hadn’t subsided.

It had only grown worse…much worse.

The melting and decay of their ghostly apparitions was now at such an advanced stage that the three no longer had humanoid forms. There wasn’t even a distinction between any of the three of them anymore.

They were hill-like blobs of melted flesh that oozed into and mixed with each other.

The ghosts of all their victims–still with human apparitions–were there, too, facing them with expressions that were a mixture of hatred, gloating (over the three girls’ ugliness), and revulsion.

Furioso appeared between both groups.

So, he said. Everybody is here at last.

This pain is unbearable, Alexa said in a raspy voice.

I don’t regret having my revenge, Megan said in a similar voice, but I feel worse now than I did before.

Is there no way to stop this pain? Tiffany asked, also in that voice.

No, Furioso said. There is no way that is easy. No way that will give you comfort. There is only pain for you all, from now on, forever and ever.

Then why did you goad us into getting revenge on all of them over there? Megan asked, pointing to the mass of victims behind Furioso. You said we’d get relief through our revenge. We feel no such relief at all.

I never said your revenge would ease your pain, he said. Only that you’d feel satisfaction, a brief pleasure, in making those poor souls on the other side share your pain. And you got it.

But now, with them all looking at us with so much malice in their eyes, Alexa said. It feels like they’re all going to resume their former bullying on us.

Yes, Tiffany said. They all hunger for revenge on us.

We can see it in the eyes of their apparitions, Megan said.

How could you lure us into a situation with even more suffering than the kind we’d started out with? Alexa asked. How could you take advantage of us like that, as vulnerable as we were?

Well, I am a devil, Furioso said, shrugging. Did you really expect anything better than this? You’re in Hell. Here, hope is to be abandoned forever.

What benefit do you get by deceiving us with thoughts of revenge? Megan asked. Damning all their souls with ours?

The same benefit that you get, he said. By bringing down here more and more souls, by passing the pain off to others, I feel a relief…if only a temporary one. People on Earth do it all the time. They, your bullies, did that to you, for that very same reason.

But our pain feels so much greater now, Tiffany said.

Yes, it always feels worse and worse, Furioso said with a sigh and a frown.

Then what good is that temporary relief through passing pain on to others? Alexa asked.

Because the pain worsens regardless of whether you pass it on to others, or not, he said. Temporary relief, by causing others’ grief, is the closest thing to happiness that the damned can ever hope to have in Hell. Is there anyone else on Earth you’d like to afflict, for a brief taste of satisfaction?

NO!!! all three girl-ghosts shouted together.

Then I’m afraid that there’s nothing that can be done for you, he said with a shrug. You’ll just have to stay here and suffer, without any kind of relief, even temporary relief.

Wait! Megan shouted. You said before that there’s no way to stop this pain…no way that is easy. No way…that will give us comfort.

That’s right! Tiffany shouted. So, there is a way.

A hard way, but a way, at least, Alexa said.

Well, yes, but you won’t like it at all, he insisted.

We don’t like our situation here at all! Alexa said.

Yeah, what difference will it make? Tiffany said.

Tell us what this hard way is, Megan said.

If it will get us out of Hell, we’ll do it, Alexa said.

You’re talking about enduring a pain far more acute than you are experiencing now, Furioso said.

But the pain will all end, right? Megan asked.

It will end because you, as individuals, will end, he said.

That’s fine with me, Tiffany said. We originally wanted to end our lives, anyway. We hated life because all we did was suffer in it. Existence is only suffering for us, on Earth, or here in Hell. So wiping out our existence means ending our pain. It’s nirvana, basically.

That’s true, Furioso said, but prepare for an ordeal you could never even imagine.

We’re in Hell, Alexa said. Where there’s no hope of ever feeling happiness again. This is the ultimate ordeal. How much worse can anything else get?

You’ll find out, he warned.

Tell us, Furioso! Megan said. What do we have to lose?

What do we have to do to get out of this? Alexa asked.

You really won’t like it, girls, he said, shaking his head.

TELL US, DAMN YOU! all three melting ghosts shouted.

He let out a sigh. Look at all those ghosts behind me, he said, gesturing to the girls’ victims. All those damned souls that you hate so much, and who now hate you. You must let go of your hate. Let go of your pride, and love them. Feel compassion for them, and for the suffering you’ve caused them.

WHAT?!!! all three girl-ghosts shouted together in disbelief.

Yes, he insisted. That’s the only way out of here. To end your suffering, you must endure far greater suffering. That’s the paradox of salvation.

The three ghosts were speechless. They mulled the matter over in a collective sulk.

What will be even harder, he said, is that you must allow yourselves to feel the very pain you caused them. You must suffer with them, for that is what compassion means.

The three melting spirits continued contemplating this solution to their problem in miserable silence.

It is your decision, he said. Either go through this ordeal, or be trapped here forever, continually melting until you’re an unconsolable puddle.

Could this be a trick? Tiffany wondered. He tricked us before with the revenge idea.

It sounds like too shitty a solution to be a trick, Megan said. If it were a trick, he’d make it sound more enticing.

As I said, it’s your decision, he said.

If we have to pity those bitches and bastards over there, Alexa said, why not have all of them experience this with us? Have them pity us, too.

Yeah! Tiffany said. It’s only fair. Then they can escape Hell, too.

They’ll ultimately benefit, too, Megan said. Since we’re supposed to be sympathizing with them, we’d want to help them, too. Also, they’ll know the pain they caused us, and they’ll understand why we wanted our revenge. And their hate will change to pity and remorse. I think that could be really satisfying for everyone.

Very well, Furioso said, then he turned to face all of those ghosts on whom the three girls had avenged themselves. All of you, who have had your lives ruined by these three! You don’t wish to remain in this infernal prison forever, do you?

No, they said in a weary sigh.

You heard me explain the only way out of this suffering? he asked.

Yes, they all moaned together.

Then swallow your pride as the girls must do, let go of your hate for them, as they must let go of their hate for you, and join them in this collective outpouring of compassion, he said.

With the most lethargic of reluctance, the mass of ghosts nodded.

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

George just sat there at his mother’s side, watching her sleep. Another tear ran down his cheek.

He watched the rising and falling of her chest, each rise and fall reassuring him, if only for the moment, that she was still alive.

He checked her vital signs as they were displayed on the medical equipment by her bed. All was fine.

Still, he had that fear of something going wrong. The paradox was that he felt compelled to be there with her at all times, to watch over her and make sure she was OK, but also, there was that haunting voice that had kept telling him the only danger to her life was him.

She just lay there, sleeping peacefully. Her chest kept rising and falling, as it should have. The vital signs display still showed no problems.

He let out a huge sigh of relief.

She’s fine, he reassured himself in his thoughts. Don’t worry. You’re thinking too much. That voice in my head is probably just my unconscious expressing my resentment over never having been freed from her to live my own life. Such resentment is natural, it’s understandable; but it doesn’t mean I’m really, literally planning on murdering her. It’s just my mind acting out, in all probability. We all have dark thoughts: even the saints do.

He looked at her again–sleeping like a baby. Her chest kept rising and falling…good. He checked her vital signs one more time; no problems.

He let out another sigh.

Then he heard that voice again…this time, though, it was a little differently worded.

You’re going to murder her…today.

He jumped up from his chair with a yelp that woke up his mother. His heart was pounding. Now, a drop of sweat was running down his cheek.

He looked around the room frantically to find the source of that voice. Every time he’d heard it before, the whispered voice of what seemed a teenage girl, no one was there to be seen. This time, however, he saw her: Tiffany, the goth-girl ghost, with those malevolent red eyes.

“Tiffany?” he gasped with agape eyes.

Suddenly, the ghost flew into his chest with the speed of a racing arrow. His body shook as the spirit took possession of his body.

“George?” his mother asked in the weakest of voices. “What’s wrong? You woke me. Are you okay?”

His back had been to her, but now he turned around to face her with an icy expression.

“George? Please don’t look at me like that. You’re scaring me. Are you alright? You seem…a little…”

He ignored her words…that is, bodily, he ignored her. The George in his mind, however, desperately wanted to tell her he was not alright, that he was sorry for scaring her with that cold look on his face, that he was sorry for having woken her. He wanted to scream out to the hospital staff to come in the room and stop him from doing what he knew Tiffany’s ghost was making him do.

But he couldn’t say or do any of those things.

He felt himself compelled to get up and walk over to where his bag of medical instruments was, by his bed. He picked it up and unzipped it.

Tiffany, he thought. What are you doing?

He was made to take out a syringe. He walked back with it to his mother’s bed. He was eyeing her IV external tubing, through which blood was going into her body. He put two and two together.

Oh, my God! he thought. She wants to give my mother an air embolism. No, Tiffany, no!

Her ghost made him stick the syringe into the tubing and introduce an air bubble into it.

He had absolutely no control over his body. He couldn’t fidget or jerk his arms in the slightest. Tiffany’s ghost even made him look into his mother’s eyes to see the terror emanating from them.

“George,” she gasped. “What did you do that for? You’re killing me. Why?“

He couldn’t weep. He couldn’t say sorry to her.

She looked at the long air bubble moving in the tube, getting closer and closer to her body. She began yelping, but the ghost made him cup his hand over her mouth to muffle out the sound.

As she fidgeted and struggled, she whined audibly enough that, if one of the hospital staff should have been close enough to their room, he or she just might have heard his mother’s muffled cries for help. Since he still had no control over his body, he could only hope a staff member was close enough to be in earshot, rush into the room, and stop him in time.

No such luck.

That air bubble, long enough to have been a three-to-five millilitres per kilogram dose, was inching closer and closer to entry in her body. She kept struggling and whining; he kept one hand on her mouth, the other on her chest to minimize the noise of the shaking of her bed.

Tiffany’s ghost forced him to look straight in his mother’s horrified eyes. He would not be spared a thorough observation of her pain, her terror, and her heartbreak over his oh, so unfilial act.

…and he had no way of telling her that it wasn’t himself who was doing this to her.

Why? her eyes kept asking him. Why, George?

I can’t tell you, he thought. I’m so sorry, and you’ll never even know I’m sorry. Tiffany, I may have bullied you in school, but punish me, not her.

Now, the ghost made him watch the air bubble reach her body and enter her. He looked back at her face. She was shaking all over for several seconds, then she moved no more.

The ghost left his body and, visible, faced him.

Finally, a waterfall of tears was soaking his face.

“I wish that block of ice we hit you with had killed you,” he hissed at the apparition.

Don’t be mad, George, she said. I did you a favour. I freed you from her. Now you can live your own life. She giggled at his teary face.

“Free to do what?” he asked in sobs. “Go to jail for murder? You fucking bitch.”

Only one thing left to do, George, Tiffany’s ghost said with a grin.

“Yes, I know,” he said. “I’ll see you in Hell…and when I get there, I’ll get you.“

She laughed. There’s nothing to get. We’re in Hell. We’re already suffering beyond hope. How are you going to add to that?

“I’ll figure out a way.”

He walked back over to his bag, found a scalpel in it, slashed his wrists, and lay on the floor, soaking it with his blood until a nurse walked in and screamed.

Only by then, of course, it was too late.

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

George Kelly’s 72-year-old mother was in bad shape. Just a few days before, she took a nasty fall down the stairs from the second floor to the ground floor of her apartment. She was already quite brittle, so one particularly hard knock on her upper right arm fractured it on the corner where the tread and riser of a stair meet.

Fortunately, George–who still lived with her–was there when the accident happened, having heard her scream from her apartment, which was right by the stairs. She’d meant to go to the grocery store just down the street to buy something, and she’d assured him that he didn’t need to accompany her; he could just relax in the living room and watch TV, for she’d be right back.

If only he’d accompanied her.

Instead of going to the grocery store, she of course went in his car to the hospital where he worked. He was a nurse, and he insisted on taking care of her personally.

She lay in her recovery room on a bed the upper half of which was raised up at about a forty-five degree angle. Her right arm was in a cast, going straight out from the side of the bed to the elbow, then going straight up from there.

George virtually never left the room. The rest of the staff liked and respected him enough to let him focus all of his care on her during his nursing shifts, and when his shifts were finished, he was allowed to stay with her even when she was sleeping and therefore not to be disturbed, which he of course would never do. He slept in a bed on the other side of the room, had a change of clothes handy, and food was sent to him as well as to her.

Why did he insist on being with her as much as possible? His love for her went far beyond the usual love of the most dutiful of sons. George, in his late thirties, never married. He was straight, but no woman could ever replace his sweet mother.

Though as a high school student, he’d bullied Tiffany along with Faye and all the others, George was far more of a ‘weakling’ (in the form of a ‘mama’s boy’) than Tiffany could ever have been. By calling her a “wimp,” he was really just engaging in projection.

His father died when he was six, so his mother’s burden of raising their one child was enormous. She’d been a timid, reclusive sort, with virtually no friends in the neighbourhood, so he became her best friend…in the Norman Bates sense, though without the psychopathy.

She was his entire world, and vice versa. Terrified of abandonment, she couldn’t bear the idea of him meeting a girl and marrying her, then moving away to some far-off city, his mother never seeing him again except for the ever-so-occasional visit.

So, in anticipation of such a scary prospect, his mother subtly manipulated her boy into such a state of emotional dependency on her that the idea of marrying and moving away would have been unthinkable to him. She even influenced his decision to become a nurse, so she’d have someone to take care of her in her old age…and now he would do just that for her.

On the third night of her hospitalization, he sat by her bed, his eyes tearing up. He knew in his intellect that with proper care, which she of course was getting, she would be fine and well again; but her fear of abandonment was something she’d managed to project onto him, so his emotions overruled his intellect, and any significant injury she’d sustain would put him in terror of her approach to death being at all pushed forward.

She lay there asleep. The medical equipment indicated, at a glance, that her heart rate and other vital signs were fine. He could see the rising and falling of her chest to indicate breathing; but the fear remained in his heart that that rising and falling would stop, even though he knew, in his medical expertise, that there was no reason for such a stopping to occur all of a sudden.

“Wake up,” he whispered in a barely audible voice. “Mom, please wake up.” He wanted her to wake up, but he didn’t want to be the cause of her waking up.

Her eyes opened. She looked at him and smiled.

“George,” she said in the frailest of voices.

“Oh, Mom,” he said, with a smile and a tear running down his right cheek. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“No, dear,” she said. “I just had a really good, long nap. I actually feel quite good, especially with you here. It’s comforting knowing my son, the best nurse in the world, is so dedicated to my recovery.”

“I am, Mom,” he sobbed. “Yet I’m so mad at myself for not insisting on going with you to the grocery store. When you slipped, I could have grabbed your arm and stopped you from falling.”

“We didn’t know this would happen. Don’t blame yourself.”

“You’ll be OK, Mom. Don’t worry. I’ll be sure of that.”

“I’m sure you will, son. But if you’re so sure, why are you crying?”

“I just hate to see you get hurt, Mom. There’s always that fear, in the back of my mind, of something…anything…going wrong.”

“What could possibly go wrong, honey?”

“Well, we assumed you’d be OK going to the store by yourself, and look what happened.”

“Oh, just because one thing went wrong doesn’t mean all manner of other things will go wrong, too. George, tell me: what’s worrying you so much? You always seem so afraid for me, and that’s sweet and all, but you’re making yourself needlessly unhappy, and that will affect your own health. What’s wrong?”

“Oh, nothing, I guess,” he said, looking down at his hands, which drooped between his knees. “I guess I’m just thinking silly thoughts.”

“Well, stop thinking silly thoughts,” she said, giving him a firm look. “Oh, I’ve gotten sleepy again. Back to sleep for me.” She closed her eyes.

“Good, Mom. Get some more rest.”

Actually, his thoughts weren’t all that silly. He just couldn’t tell her about the voice he’d hear, from time to time, a voice that he’d been hearing over the past year.

A voice that said, You’re going to murder her one day.

…and the speaker of that voice, invisible, was at that very moment hovering right beside him.

Two Horror Short Stories of Mine Published in ‘A Book Without A Name’

I have two horror short stories published in a new horror anthology, compiled by B.L. Blankenship, called A Book Without A Name. These stories are of specific sub-genres of horror: western horror, splatter western, and southern gothic.

My two short stories are called “Ghost Town” and “The Lake.” Other writers in the anthology include Blankenship, Dillon McPheresome, C. Derick Miller, Megan Stockton, and such classic writers as Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, William Blake, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Mary Wollstonecraft-Shelley, and Jason Roberts.

So, if you like horror stories with a bit of a 19th century, cowboy feel, please check out this anthology. You can find it on Amazon here. Thanks again to B.L. Blankenship for the chance to be published! 🙂

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