From the time I was very small, I always wanted to be the girl in the horror movie who didn't get away.
“In my father’s house there are many mansions: if it were
not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.” –John 14.2
How many staircases has she been carried down, how many cold
steps of rough-hewn stone, into how many dank cellars, damp dungeons, mad
laboratories, underground labyrinths, suburban basement torture chambers,
transported across how many moonlit moors towards how many castles, cemeteries,
ancient mausoleums, abandoned construction sites and midnight back alleys?
How many times has she been cradled in the arms of some
hulking goon, priapic vampire, lunatic henchman, Frankensteinian monster, lifted
over how many thresholds like a bride, but always unconscious, always in
diaphanous nightgown, always barefoot, head and arms dangling, toes tensely
pointed to the floor in orgasmic anticipation, step-by-step descending in an
embrace of muscle, bone or moldering flesh to meet her softcore fate?
How
many walls has she been shackled to, drawn up by chains and ropes on tiptoes,
how many pagan altars has she been staked out upon, how many times has her
blood been drained by some suave bisexual aristocrat, some Count or Countess
Bathory, how many times has she fallen the pretty prey to the overly
complicated machinations of a madman from the wax museum?
Trapped
on uncharted desert islands, in dusty claustrophobic towns cut off from
anywhere, stranded in the last motel for miles around with a black storm
rolling in from out of nowhere relentless and about to break like all Hell
itself. Hopelessly lost, she inevitably finds herself in the place at the end
of every wrong turn, a flat tire, empty gas tank, or overheated engine away
from every homicidal drifter, lost within walking distance of every ominous
house on the hill, dilapidated farm, or Civil War manse that resurrects itself
once, every hundred and thirty years, to wet itself with Yankee blood.
For that matter, how many times has she come upon the ghost
of some unhappy ancestor in the attic, stumbled upon bones in the cellar? How
many times has she sat down to dinner at some hillbilly’s table and heard them
snicker in their sour-mash when she asks what time the next bus comes, how many
times has she thoughtfully chewed some succulent morsel off the elegant fork of
the high-and-mighty and asked, “This meat…why, it has such an unusual flavor. I
don’t think I’ve ever had anything quite like it before. What is it?” only to
have some parched and powdered old dowager wearing heirloom pearls smile and
with a withering condescension, with a haughty amusement, answer “Well, my
dear, if I’m not mistaken, when you arrived I believe you called it…Tammy?”
Upper
class titters to follow.
Laughter and vomiting—two sounds not as incompatible as they
might at first pass seem. No, quite a bit alike, they are, after all.
Hung on iron hooks, repeatedly stabbed, beheaded with axes
and chainsaws, run down in cornfields by farm combines driven by lunatics
wearing shriveled masks of human flesh, drowned in bathtubs, hung inside
elevator shafts, harpooned while sunbathing on honeymoon beaches, dismembered
by hacksaws, burned by acetylene torches, liquefied in acid baths, crucified by
nailguns, garroted by her own still-warm silk stockings.
Electrocuted by means of the most improbable accidents,
eaten by ants, cocooned by spiders, she is at the center of the feverishly
winged vortex of every inexplicable frenzy of birds. Tied to wagons wheels set
afire and rolled down bumpy hills, swallowed whole by enormous snakes, torn to
a bloody froth by sharks, nature bursting forth red from inside her, red, as it
is often said, in tooth and claw.
Gnomes, leprechauns, and fairy folk, things breathing
heavily inside walls, things vanishing into closets, things with long tails,
horns, eyes like burning brands. The world is haunted with such dead presences,
even inanimate objects, inspirited, can come alive and start wreaking havoc
with malevolent intent.
Automobiles with minds of their own, power sanders with
attitude, computers with messianic complexes--it’s the kind of world where you
don’t dare put your pencil down for fear it will get back up and turn it’s
eraser on you.
Every door that’s always locked, every box that remains
unopened, every floorboard’s hesitant groan and creak, all the covert glances,
vanishing smiles, half-heard conversations—is it paranoia, after all, or its blithe
dismissal that you must learn to counteract, and, if so, how, and how can it
make any difference when the script itself calls for you to break the heel of
your stiletto pump and stumble while fleeing the retarded son with scissor
hands? How can you escape when your doom is written like a genotype right there
into Scene 17, how can you even hope to live long enough to see “The End” when
you know damn well that you’re scripted to die every single time in the shower?
Does time repeat itself, then, or just stand still? Do all
the events of our lives come round again (and again) like a merry-go-round
where nothing is all too merry? Eternal recurrence, be damned! What we are
waiting for, it often seems, is for the sun, like the glowing tip of the master
interrogator’s cigarette, to come down out of the sky and to crush itself out
against the earth once and for all, leaving nothing but ashes and a comet trail
of bitter smoke, but that, of course, is another movie altogether, one not
given us yet to view, though the coming attractions have created quite a buzz,
they’re looking good, oh yes, they are.
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