the mask of god: The Rabbit Hole (Mr. Harvey)

Zeus

Hades

Persephone

Go ask Alice

"According to popular British folklore, the tradition once had a sinister twist, in that the May Queen was put to death once the festivities were over."

The Hanged Girl

But on December 6, 1973, it was snowing, and I took a shortcut through the cornfield back from the junior high. It was dark out because the days were shorter in winter, and I remember how the broken cornstalks made my walk more difficult. The snow was falling lightly, like a flurry of small hands, and I was breathing through my nose until it was running so much that I had to open my mouth. Six feet from where Mr. Harvey stood, I stuck my tongue out to taste a snowflake.

“Don’t let me startle you,” Mr. Harvey said.

Of course, in a cornfield, in the dark, I was startled. After I was dead I thought about how there had been the light scent of cologne in the air but that I had not been paying attention, or thought it was coming from one of the houses up ahead.

“Mr. Harvey,” I said.

“You’re the older Salmon girl, right?”

“Yes.”

“How are your folks?”

Although the eldest in my family and good at acing a science quiz, I had never felt comfortable with adults.

“Fine,” I said. I was cold, but the natural authority of his age, and the added fact that he was a neighbor and had talked to my father about fertilizer, rooted me to the spot.

“I’ve built something back here,” he said. “Would you like to see?”

“I’m sort of cold, Mr. Harvey,” I said, “and my mom likes me home before dark.”

“It’s after dark, Susie,” he said.

I wish now that I had known this was weird. I had never told him my name. [...] Mr. Harvey said it would only take a minute, so I followed him a little farther into the cornfield, where fewer stalks were broken off because no one used it as a shortcut to the junior high. My mom had told my baby brother, Buckley, that the corn in the field was inedible when he asked why no one from the neighborhood ate it. “The corn is for horses, not humans,” she said. “Not dogs?” Buckley asked. “No,” my mother answered. “Not dinosaurs?” Buckley asked. And it went like that.

“I’ve made a little hiding place,” said Mr. Harvey.

He stopped and turned to me.

“I don’t see anything,” I said. I was aware that Mr. Harvey was looking at me strangely. I’d had older men look at me that way since I’d lost my baby fat, but they usually didn’t lose their marbles over me when I was wearing my royal blue parka and yellow elephant bell-bottoms. His glasses were small and round with gold frames, and his eyes looked out over them and at me.

“You should be more observant, Susie,” he said.

I felt like observing my way out of there, but I didn’t. Why didn’t I? Franny said these questions were fruitless: “You didn’t and that’s that. Don’t mull it over. It does no good. You’re dead and you have to accept it.”

“Try again,” Mr. Harvey said, and he squatted down and knocked against the ground.

“What’s that?” I asked.

My ears were freezing. I wouldn’t wear the multicolored cap with the pompom and jingle bells that my mother had made me one Christmas. I had shoved it in the pocket of my parka instead.

I remember that I went over and stomped on the ground near him. It felt harder even than frozen earth, which was pretty hard.

“It’s wood,” Mr. Harvey said. “It keeps the entrance from collapsing. Other than that it’s all made out of earth.”

“What is it?” I asked. I was no longer cold or weirded out by the look he had given me. I was like I was in science class: I was curious.

“Come and see.”

It was awkward to get into, that much he admitted once we were both inside the hole. But I was so amazed by how he had made a chimney that would draw smoke out if he ever chose to build a fire that the awkwardness of getting in and out of the hole wasn’t even on my mind. You could add to that that escape wasn’t a concept I had any real experience with. The worst I’d had to escape was Artie, a strange-looking kid at school whose father was a mortician. He liked to pretend he was carrying a needle full of embalming fluid around with him. On his notebooks he would draw needles spilling dark drips.

“This is neato!” I said to Mr. Harvey. He could have been the hunchback of Notre Dame, whom we had read about in French class. I didn’t care. I completely reverted. I was my brother Buckley on our day-trip to the Museum of Natural History in New York, where he’d fallen in love with the huge skeletons on display. I hadn’t used the word neato in public since elementary school.

“Like taking candy from a baby,” Franny said.

I can still see the hole like it was yesterday, and it was. Life is a perpetual yesterday for us. It was the size of a small room, the mud room in our house, say, where we kept our boots and slickers and where Mom had managed to fit a washer and dryer, one on top of the other. I could almost stand up in it, but Mr. Harvey had to stoop. He’d created a bench along the sides of it by the way he’d dug it out. He immediately sat down.

“Look around,” he said.

I stared at it in amazement, the dug-out shelf above him where he had placed matches, a row of batteries, and a battery-powered fluorescent lamp that cast the only light in the room – an eerie light that would make his features hard to see when he was on top of me.

There was a mirror on the shelf, and a razor and shaving cream. I thought that was odd. Wouldn’t he do that at home? But I guess I figured that a man who had a perfectly good split-level and then built an underground room only half a mile away had to be kind of loo-loo. My father had a nice way of describing people like him: “The man’s a character, that’s all.”

So I guess I was thinking that Mr. Harvey was a character, and I liked the room, and it was warm, and I wanted to know how he had built it, what the mechanics of the thing were and where he’d learned to do something like that.

But by the time the Gilberts’ dog found my elbow three days later and brought it home with a telling corn husk attached to it, Mr. Harvey had closed it up. I was in transit during this. I didn’t get to see him sweat it out, remove the wood reinforcement, bag any evidence along with my body parts, except that elbow. By the time I popped up with enough wherewithal to look down at the goings-on on Earth, I was more concerned with my family than anything else.

My mother sat on a hard chair by the front door with her mouth open. Her pale face paler than I had ever seen it. Her blue eyes staring. My father was driven into motion. He wanted to know details and to comb the cornfield along with the cops. I still thank God for a small detective named Len Fenerman. He assigned two uniforms to take my dad into town and have him point out all the places I’d hung out with my friends. The uniforms kept my dad busy in one mall for the whole first day. No one had told Lindsey, who was thirteen and would have been old enough, or Buckley, who was four and would, to be honest, never fully understand.

Mr. Harvey asked me if I would like a refreshment. That was how he put it. I said I had to go home.

“Be polite and have a Coke,” he said. “I’m sure the other kids would.”

“What other kids?”

“I built this for the kids in the neighborhood. I thought it could be some sort of clubhouse.”

I don’t think I believed this even then. I thought he was lying, but I thought it was a pitiful lie. I imagined he was lonely. We had read about men like him in health class. Men who never married and ate frozen meals every night and were so afraid of rejection that they didn’t even own pets. I felt sorry for him.

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll have a Coke.”

In a little while he said, “Aren’t you warm, Susie? Why don’t you take off your parka.”

I did.

After this he said, “You’re very pretty, Susie.”

“Thanks,” I said, even though he gave me what my friend Clarissa and I had dubbed the skeevies.

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

“No, Mr. Harvey,” I said. I swallowed the rest of my Coke, which was a lot, and said, “I got to go, Mr. Harvey. This is a cool place, but I have to go.”

He stood up and did his hunchback number by the six dug-in steps that led to the world. “I don’t know why you think you’re leaving.”

I talked so that I would not have to take in this knowledge: Mr. Harvey was no character. He made me feel skeevy and icky now that he was blocking the door.

“Mr. Harvey, I really have to get home.”

“Take off your clothes.”

“What?”

“Take your clothes off,” Mr. Harvey said. “I want to check that you’re still a virgin.”

“I am, Mr. Harvey,” I said.

“I want to make sure. Your parents will thank me.”

“My parents?”

“They only want good girls,” he said.

“Mr. Harvey,” I said, “please let me leave.”

“You aren’t leaving, Susie. You’re mine now.”

Fitness was not a big thing back then; aerobics was barely a word. Girls were supposed to be soft, and only the girls we suspected were butch could climb the ropes at school.

I fought hard. I fought as hard as I could not to let Mr. Harvey hurt me, but my hard-as-I-could was not hard enough, not even close, and I was soon lying down on the ground, in the ground, with him on top of me panting and sweating, having lost his glasses in the struggle.

I was so alive then. I thought it was the worst thing in the world to be lying flat on my back with a sweating man on top of me. To be trapped inside the earth and have no one know where I was.

I thought of my mother.

My mother would be checking the dial of the clock on her oven. It was a new oven and she loved that it had a clock on it. “I can time things to the minute,” she told her own mother, a mother who couldn’t care less about ovens.

She would be worried, but more angry than worried, at my lateness. As my father pulled into the garage, she would rush about, fixing him a cocktail, a dry sherry, and put on an exasperated face: “You know junior high,” she would say. “Maybe it’s Spring Fling.” “Abigail,” my father would say, “how can it be Spring Fling when it’s snowing?” Having failed with this, my mother might rush Buckley into the room and say, “Play with your father,” while she ducked into the kitchen and took a nip of sherry for herself.

Mr. Harvey started to press his lips against mine. They were blubbery and wet and I wanted to scream but I was too afraid and too exhausted from the fight. I had been kissed once by someone I liked. His name was Ray and he was Indian. He had an accent and was dark. I wasn’t supposed to like him. Clarissa called his large eyes, with their half-dosed lids, “freak-a-delic,” but he was nice and smart and helped me cheat on my algebra exam while pretending he hadn’t. He kissed me by my locker the day before we turned in our photos for the yearbook. When the yearbook came out at the end of the summer, I saw that under his picture he had answered the standard “My heart belongs to” with “Susie Salmon.” I guess he had had plans. I remember that his lips were chapped.

“Don’t, Mr. Harvey,” I managed, and I kept saying that one word a lot. Don’t. And I said please a lot too. Franny told me that almost everyone begged “please” before dying.

“I want you, Susie,” he said.

“Please,” I said. “Don’t,” I said. Sometimes I combined them. “Please don’t” or “Don’t please.” It was like insisting that a key works when it doesn’t or yelling “I’ve got it, I’ve got it, I’ve got it” as a softball goes sailing over you into the stands.

“Please don’t.”

But he grew tired of hearing me plead. He reached into the pocket of my parka and balled up the hat my mother had made me, smashing it into my mouth. The only sound I made after that was the weak tinkling of bells.

As he kissed his wet lips down my face and neck and then began to shove his hands up under my shirt, I wept. I began to leave my body; I began to inhabit the air and the silence. I wept and struggled so I would not feel. He ripped open my pants, not having found the invisible zipper my mother had artfully sewn into their side.

“Big white panties,” he said.

I felt huge and bloated. I felt like a sea in which he stood and pissed and shat. I felt the corners of my body were turning in on themselves and out, like in cat’s cradle, which I played with Lindsey just to make her happy. He started working himself over me.

“Susie! Susie!” I heard my mother calling. “Dinner is ready.”

He was inside me. He was grunting.

“We’re having string beans and lamb.”

I was the mortar, he was the pestle.

“Your brother has a new finger painting, and I made apple crumb cake.”

Mr. Harvey made me lie still underneath him and listen to the beating of his heart and the beating of mine. How mine skipped like a rabbit, and how his thudded, a hammer against cloth. We lay there with our bodies touching, and, as I shook, a powerful knowledge took hold. He had done this thing to me and I had lived. That was all. I was still breathing. I heard his heart. I smelled his breath. The dark earth surrounding us smelled like what it was, moist dirt where worms and animals lived their daily lives. I could have yelled for hours.

I knew he was going to kill me. I did not realize then that I was an animal already dying.

“Why don’t you get up?” Mr. Harvey said as he rolled to the side and then crouched over me.

His voice was gentle, encouraging, a lover’s voice on a late morning. A suggestion, not a command.

I could not move. I could not get up.

When I would not – was it only that, only that I would not follow his suggestion? – he leaned to the side and felt, over his head, across the ledge where his razor and shaving cream sat. He brought back a knife. Unsheathed, it smiled at me, curving up in a grin.

He took the hat from my mouth.

“Tell me you love me,” he said.

Gently, I did.

The end came anyway. (Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones)

Persephone and Artemis (g8ors)

"The story of a love so powerful it broke down all barriers between past and present, between life and death. Between the golden girl in the dark tower and the tawdry redhead that he tried to remake in her image."

The Green Girl

Calvin and Hobbes

8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter

But it is unbecoming for a wife to receive any one as a guest at her house without the consent of her husband, so when Noah proposed to enter the Ark, it was necessary that Jehovah, the Spouse or Master of the house, should authorise his union therewith. It was therefore at the invitation of God that he so entered. The reason is found in the words: "For thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation." But Elohim is the celestial Bride, who is Shekinah, and it was by her permission, as Bride, Wife and Mistress of the house, that he had a license to leave the Ark when the Deluge was over. After leaving those hospitable quarters, Noah made a present to the lady of the house, but it reached her by the mediation of her spouse, because Scripture tells us that it was to Jehovah and not to Elohim that Noah erected an altar and offered sacrifice thereon. (Arthur Waite)

Silly Rabbi

"A very Lucky Shot."

Macrocosm: Mr. Harvey chops 14-year-old Susie Salmon into pieces (the original sacrifice)
Microcosm: Lee Harvey Oswald (Oz Wald, the Perilous Forest of the Underworld) chops Osiris the King into 14 pieces (the atonement)

The Dead Blonde in the Tower and the Cellar Door

"You killed her, Frank!"

Frank

(Jimmy) Steward

Frank L.

THE MAY QUEEN. (Excerpt)

A queen is my lover, I say,

With a crown of the lilies of light —

For a maiden they crowned her in May,

For the Queen of the Daughters of Day

That are flowers of the forest of Night.

They crowned her with lilies and blue,

They crowned her with yellow and roses;

They gave her a sceptre of rue,

And a girdle of laurel and yew,

And a basket of pansies in posies.

They led her with songs by the stream;

They brought her with tears to the river;

They danced as the maze of a dream;

They kissed her to roses and cream,

And they cried, “Let the queen live for ever!”

They took her, with all of the flowers

They had girded her with for God’s daughter;

They cast her from amorous bowers

To the river, the horrible powers

Of the Beast that lurks down by the Water!

My was was more swift than a bow

That flings out its barb to the night:

My sword struck the infinite blow

That smote him, and blackened the flow

Of the amorous river of light.

I plunged in the stream, and I drew

My queen from the clasp of the water;

I crowned her with roses and blue,

With yellow and lilies anew;

I called her my love and God’s daughter! (Aleister Crowley)

The blonde girl builds the dollhouse . . .

. . . And then "falls asleep" and gets trapped inside of it

The Dead Girl on the Wheel (fight the furnace)

Sleeping Beauty and the Spinning Wheel

Dismembering Dolly Haze

Missing a phallus, Isis?

Trapped in the White Rabbit's dollhouse

Gotta get off, gonna get
Have to get off from this ride
Gotta get hold, gonna get
Need to get hold of my pride
When did I get, where did I
How was I caught in this game
When will I know, where will I
How will I think of my name
When did I stop feeling sure, feeling safe
And start wondering why, wondering why
Is this a dream, am I here, where are you
What's in back of the sky, why do we cry

Gotta get off, gonna get
Out of this merry-go-round
Gotta get off, gonna get
Need to get on where I'm bound
When did I get, where did I
Why am I lost as a lamb
When will I know, where will I
How will I learn who I am
Is this a dream, am I here, where are you
Tell me, when will I know, how will I know
When will I know why?

Oz Wald

"You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes."

(the following sync poetry sampled from The New Creatures Magikal Mystery Tour) . . .

While listening to this classic song Stairway to Heaven these things should be kept in mind: Jimmy Page bought Crowley's mansion in Lock Ness, which was used for many extensive occult rituals. The song refers to the 'Piper' in 2 different places. "the Piper's calling you to join him' and "the Piper will lead us to reason'. Here it feels safe to assume he is either referring to the Pied Piper who lured the cities rats into the water to drown, or he is referring to Pan. Either way, as far as I can tell, concidering the May Queen element, this seems to suggest genocide. Yet a genocide not only accepted, but embraced. "If there's a bustle in your Hedge Row, don't be alarmed now, It's just a Spring clean for the May Queen".

The overview of the model of dan's Labyrinth in the Shining when one side of it's mirror is taken by itself, can be seen to be a Mayan Pyramid, upon which a sacrifice is made. The Mayan King who would preform the sacrifice is translated as Golden Rey

~MK Ultrasound

For some time on their second trip Humbert had suspected that he was being followed by an Aztec Red convertible whose driver resembled a Swiss cousin of his, Gustave Trapp. We have earlier seen the family resemblance of Quilty and Humbert in the Dromes advertisement over Lolita's bed, and with this new detail we come a little closer to knowing the man who will perform a human sacrifice by ripping the living heart out of his victim and tumbling him down the steep steps he has so painfully climbed. (William Vesterman)