Headhunter

Or perhaps this is impossible and there must be a fight to the finish.

If there must be a fight then the common method used by the human mind is the sledgehammer of repression.

In using repression, conflict is avoided by banishing one of the opponents to the cellar of the mind. From there the exile is no longer allowed to achieve normal expression, and the victor of the fight is left in control of the field of consciousness.

But here, Dr. Ruryk said, comes the second rub!

Though the complex is shut up downstairs in the dark and denied its normal function, it is not annihilated. It continues to exist within the deeper layers of the mind, festering, while prevented from rising to the surface by the constant resistance of the guard at the door, namely the mind's force of repression.

Have you ever put tarmac on a driveway before the winter snows set in?

Well if you have — and if you failed to kill every last living seed on the ground before doing so — come spring the tarmac will crack and up through its surface will sprout a small plant shoot.

Same with the human mind.

But in a much more devious way.

For a repressed complex can only influence the conscious mind indirectly. This is because of the 'censor'' guard standing watch at the cellar door. It must slip out in disguise.

The uglier the monster, the more circuitous its route.

So, Dr. Ruryk said, back to your inquiry about an obsession with death.

Assume something has happened which has caused remorse in a person's mind. Perhaps you know such an individual?

(Yes, I think I do.)

Now say this remorse is painful to that person's mind. Perhaps it's guilt over a death. To deal with this upset to equilibrium the complex related to this remorse is repressed by the conscious mind. But that complex still tie.. press itself. So how does it manifest?

Sometimes the mind uses symbolism to express these repressed and dissociated ideas: here you have the man who thinks that he is Napoleon. The man with the delusion.

Sometimes the mind uses the device which we call projection. Here the repressed complex is no longer regarded by the personality as being part of its own self. The complex has been projected onto another person — and thus conflict is avoided.

If the complex is projected onto a real person, then a delusion of persecution by that individual may result. And in self-defense the patient may try to kill that other person.

If the complex is projected onto an imaginary person, or one who is long since dead, then the repressed set of ideas appears as an hallucination. The patient sees ghosts. Or hears commanding voices telling him what to do. Perhaps a voice from Hell.

What you must realize. Dr. Ruryk said, is that any one of our instinctive drives may give rise to a conflict in the mind.

Freud said that most cases of repression arise from the instinct of sex.

Perhaps he was right.

But right or not, the fact remains that the origin of a mental aberration is not to be found in any disturbance within the mechanics of the mind.

It is to be found in the material from life fed into the brain of any particular human being.

Therefore to answer the question of whether or not you yourself may go insane, ask yourself: Do I have monsters lurking in the cellar of my mind?

But there's a final rub!

For if you do they've been repressed, and you won't even know they're there until they break out of the dungeon.

That's what Dr. Ruryk said when I saw him early today.

He suggested that if I was interested in pursuing the matter further I might wish to sit in on a psychology seminar given by one of his former students. He told me her name is Genevieve.

I might just do that and find out where it leads.

Of course I didn't tell Dr. Ruryk about my problem with the heads.

Complex is to psychology what Force is to physics. Let's see where this goes. Eh, whadda ya say?

1954

That would have been the year.

I remember my father standing at the drugstore counter with his change in one hand and whisky on his breath, talking to Mr. Thorson. I was walking toward the rear of the pharmacy where the comic racks were kept. It was the first Tuesday in the month so the new Blackhawk would be in. I remember I never made it to those racks.

To reach the comic stands at the rear of Thorson's Drug Store you had to pass a long shelf filled with adult magazines. Life and Look and Ellery Queen and Saturday Evening Post. The head was waiting for me buried in among these books.

The head was on the cover of a pulp magazine, Real Man's Adventure. As I recall, those words were printed in red. the same color as the blood which dripped from the neck, from the eyes and from the nose of that head stuck on a pole. Between the shreds of skin that hung down from the hacked-off skull you could just make out a trace of neck vertebra peeking through. But most of all what I remember is the eyes. Rolled back into their sockets, just a slivered moon of pupil showing beneath each eyelid, both eyes definitely staring right at me. I was seven years old.

For at that moment a very strange thing happened, and I was no longer in that store. It was as though I had been sucked right off my feet and transported through the door of that magazine cover. I recall clearly sitting in the front of that dugout canoe facing the Great White Hunter who was crouched in the stern. His khaki jacket was soaked with sweat and plastered to his chest. I remember bullets sewn into loops across the front of the jacket. I could see a St. Christopher's medal around the tense muscle cords in his neck. He wore a safari hat with a leopard skin band pushed back from his forehead. His index finger was on the trigger of the Remington in his hands.

And I knew we were surrounded.

There was a circle of severed heads ringed around our boat, each head stuck on the end of a pole fixed to the front of a dugout. The dugouts were manned by South American Jivaro Indians (I know that now), all conspiring to close off any chance of an escape. The Indians all had bronze skin and long black hair. Their bodies were naked except for breechclouts covering their loins. Each man was armed: a few with spears that were decorated with hanks of human hair, others with long hollow blowpipe tubes resting on lower lips, most with machetes three feet long with the sun glinting off sharp edges spattered with blood and gore.

Then something bumped our dugout and a hand touched my shoulder.

I could have died of fright.

For there was this grip trying to steady my trembling body before a blade swooped my head away.

'Easy, son,' a voice said. 'Just turn and look at me.'

Though I tried to do as it said, I couldn't — that picture would not set me free.

Then I saw another hand reach over me to turn the copy of Real Man's Adventure face down on the stack of magazines below.

'There,' my father said, squatting down on bended knees. 'Out of sight, out of mind. That picture bothers you?'

'No,' I remember saying, now back in the store. I was shaking my head from side to side.

'Well it bothers me,'my father said. 'That's what it's meant to do. It's like your comic Tales From the Crypt but a little more realistic. Don't be afraid of fear, son. We all have to conquer it someday — one way or another. Now go on and pick out a comic. Your mother's got supper waiting.'

I did what he said.

Then with his arm on my shoulder, the two of us left the store. But I do remember one final look back at that