November's Fire

The relentless lust for blood drives the hideous Thing created, born, like Pallas Athena, from the minds of men.

A thing brought forth, a terrifying, shapeless mass, an amorphous thing upon which the sadism and vengeance of a people can enact that sacred ritual of blood, wherein is expiated the fear and guilt of a people. The wind howls, the world darkens down to await the Sacred Fires, the bonfire holocausts of animals, to appease the Lord of the Dead.

And the spilling of blood does not stop at the four-legged beasts. The two-legged upright simian, furless, hirsute, speaking and reasoning Mankind (non-generative) is also prey to the predator; and also, to The Shape.

Death lives on two feet. It breathes. Its face is a brutal mask of suppression; its ragged breathing moves in and out, in and out. Its eyes are vacant, black; they retain not the semblance of human eyes, but are deep wells, little doorways into Hell, set into the featureless white face. Its body is a solid grey suit of indefinable and inscrutable shell-like covering, a second skin of protective but undistinguished layering.

It is the hideous child of the night. It is born, like Pallas Athena, from the brainpan of the Sacred Mother, who writhes at the coming of Winter, twisted on a crunching blanket of dried, dead leaves, as the earth creeps down to freezing.

Halloween begins for us, at least insofar as it begins at all, in the pages of the book of the film, in ancient Ireland.

Enda, a poor, deformed boy, born irregularly as a breech birth, the son of a cursed lineage, desires Deirdre, virginal Maiden of the Ripened Fruits of Summer, awaiting the killing blade, the stroke of desire, from the accursed Enda, whose father and uncle had mocked him as soon as he confessed his great love.

Chiding him for his "twitching lip" and shrunken arm, they compared him to a dog, and the fire within, the hot-blooded urge for revenge, led him to try to take Deirdre by force while she tarried at a lake.

She screams for help. It is a wild, savage scene, but then we find ourselves shifting to the drunken village revelries, wherein Enda is holding a wineskin of the sacred juice, the wine transmuted to fiery blood, the product of his accursed line.

Deirdre, the daughter of Druid King Gwynwyll, was dancing around the fire with her betrothed, Cullain, when Enda, downing the blood and holding a fine, tempered blade, suddenly leapt, like a crouching panther, forward to the maiden whom the Winter brought forth, and

Enda’s legs shook and his body trembled in the cold night, though the heat of the fire was intense. And when the couple pirouetted past him once more, he leapt like a wildcat on his twin prey. Unarmed, their elbows linked, they didn’t have a chance. Enda’s blade sliced easily through Cullain’s jugular and windpipe. His legs kicked out in a grotesque finale to his dance of life. Then he fell like a slaughtered bull, dragging Deirdre downward. Her head turned away, she laughed, believing that her drunken partner had merely stumbled. Enda’s blade caught her with laughter on her face, the same laughter that had mocked him after she had run safely into the arms of her tribesmen the day he had approached her at the stream. The highly honed weapon plunged into her breast up to the hilt. In the clamor, no one heard the explosion of wind from her lungs, the gurgle of blood, the whimper, or saw the look of dreadful recognition as the light faded from her eye.

Leaping upon his quarry, he sliced her head from her bones. Instantly enraged, the shock benumbing such hardened village tribesmen only for the space of a moment—these were people used to the killing brutality of existence—they fell upon Enda, it is said, in a manner of frenzy, destroying him, and preserving only the heart and the hands—the organs that both pump blood and allow the possessor of said physical encumbrance to perambulate the earth.

And at the Hill of Fiends these remains were left. The king, writes Mr. Richards, told his shaman to pronounce a curse. In the symbolism of Tarot, this is tantamount to the Emperor commanding the Hierophant. Following is, by right, the Fool, the Sun badly dignified, the Divine Child—and also, Nine of Swords, anxiety; the Tower, turbulence; the Devil, naturally, the cursed union of opposites, the toxic romance that can never be shirked, as Enda proceeds across the span of the ages, to spill the blood upon the carpet of crushed leaves, the brittle cracking and the howling winds warning of the coming of winter.

The Shaman invokes:

“Thy soul shall roam the earth till the end of time, reliving thy foul deed and thy foul punishment, and may the god Muck Olla visit every affliction upon thy spirit forevermore . . .”

And so that doomed and tortured soul is given bloody birth. To walk across the span of time, across the creation of the day of Hallowmas, Hallowe'en, the celebration of Pomona the Romans took from the Celts, because blood and only blood can open the gates and expunge all human sin.

1963

It is a month away from the killing shot fired, ostensibly, by Mr. Lee Harvey Oswald, and America, despite the uneasy stirrings of Cuba and the Communist world, is certain, still, of its own righteous and just cause in the world. While the world might be awakening, outwardly, to the horrors awaiting in a few years in the jungles of Vietnam, inwardly, it still clutched in its belly such places as Haddonfield, Illinois, a small, sleeping, quite Midwestern city of perfect houses and beautiful lawns. In 1963, on Halloween, a grandmother, Grandma Myers, appraises a pathetic, boxed clown costume bought at Woolworth's, comparing it with the Halloween costumes of her own girlhood in the wee morning hours of the early twentieth century.

They took the Boogeyman seriously; not as a mere prankster and fool, a trickster who might "trick or treat" you by slapping your clothing with a sock full of powder, but as a living, breathing (heavily, one assumes) incarnation of paranoia and fear, fear that someone would "slaughter your animals," or otherwise sabotage your farming. These might, of course, she concedes, also be jealous neighbors, but to put it off onto the scapegoat is an old, old affair, dating back to the accusations against witches and Jews that they poisoned wells and curdled milk.

Grandma tells a story from girlhood of awakening and finding the house filled with smoke. Alarmed that there might be a fire, her father emerges and finds the smoke erupting from the chimney. A butchered hog, unaccountably, has been shoved up the flue, its throat slit—a perplexing sacrificial victim. Only a supernatural predator, they surmise, could have gotten the hog up there without disturbing anyone in the home.

Edith, Michael's mother, tosses her hair nervously, and they send Michael out to get into his clown costume, while Grandma hints darkly of her brother who went insane, and Michael's mother speaks of the increased combativeness of the troubled young Michael, his penchant for arguing with his sister, getting into trouble at school, wetting the bed (which, along with starting fires and abusing animals, is a part of the “Dark Triad” of behaviors attributed to psychopathic serial killers), and his “hearing voices.” The reader is informed that the voices tell Michael he hates his family, or they hate him. He also has bloody, “violent” dreams. One can hear the ominous music of foreshadowing here, and the uncle is said to have been under the care of a psychiatrist.

The aberration is a familial curse. The curse of madness, the degenerative Tainted Blood, that must be expiated with a killing frenzy. Judith, Michael's sister, is said by author Richards to be glad there was no “kid brother...to pinch her boobs or ass...to try and peep her.” Right away, we are hit with the uncomfortable but undeniable specter of incestuous fantasy, as Michael covets the sister who is unobtainable always, much as Enda coveted Deirdre. And the voices? The voice of Enda calling him, through the ages, to take on the sacred mantle of the indefinable, hulking, menacing shape of pure evil, the Boogeyman?

“Boogey” no doubt is a corruption of “Bogie,” undoubtedly the ancient designation Celts gave to the hideous, nameless, and deviant trickster figure that lived in the bog, awaiting its prey.

(This author is faintly reminded of an old folk tale he read in a collection at a children's library in the Eighties, a contemporary collection, in which a “thick-buttocked lass” was chided by the imp for daring to “give stale bread and piss to the Bogie,” as she had substituted urine for wine to defy his demands.)

Sister Judith, Michael's Forbidden Desire, has made love with boyfriend Danny after carving a pumpkin. Sending trick-or-treating children off into the night, the two go upstairs to fornicate. To do the forbidden thing. Michael, one of the trick-or-treaters, has crept back into the house, arming himself with a butcher knife. The spiritual echoes he hears from his benumbed skull, the voices of the spiritual darkness pushing him to murder, are loudly proclaiming that only blood can expiate the sin of engaging in lust and sin.

Upstairs, watching his nude sister.

Danny has gone, his head soon full of wonder at the horror holiday and wondering at its specific strange rites of costumes, candy, bobbing for apples, and the Boogeyman, and Judith is alone in front of her mirror, as in the film, where any backstory is omitted, and Michael is presented solely as a cipher, a cryptic monster using the vehicle of the semblance of a small child in a mask and a clown costume.

Nude, the pretty young Judith teases her hair in front of a mirror, concerned about her looks, her image. We can hear the heavy, ragged breathing of excitement build as the penetrating blade, the act of forbidden lust enacted as a final, killing, homicidal-incestuous stabbing, is unleashed. The audience of the film sees through Michael's eyes, becoming implicated in his killing rage; the blood on his hands is the blood on OUR hands. Was this titillating? Did it excite, in some forbidden way, YOU, the unsuspecting viewer, who perversely sees through the eyes of a small, besotted boy who mutilates, quite savagely, his own sister?

This is the family sin. As the mask of a clown is ripped off the boy in the iconic shot of him from the film, as the camera pulls back, we are apprised of the sense of clueless, blank indifference on the boy's face. Why did he do it? Was it the voices?

End of Act 1

Next:

Act 2 — From Spirit to Shape

***

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