Creeped.
Me.
The. Hell.
Out.
But then my eyes refocused and Naida was right at the window, face almost pressed against the glass, staring at me. My heart is still racing. Jeeeeeeebus.
It was the weirdest thing. She stared at me for a full three seconds, then leaned forward and blew out the candle, and the room was plunged into darkness. Could she have known I was there all along? Maybe she’s always known that I spy on her. Maybe these creepy rituals are for my benefit. Maybe she’s just laughing. Except she didn’t seem amused, Dee.
She looked scared.
Purple Post-It
Kait, did you move my biology textbook?
The one with the anatomy diagram on the front?
I really need it!
NO. But if you put your books in the bookcase once in a while instead of dumping them in piles all over, then you wouldn’t lose things! (And quit blaming me, you cheeky arsewipe—I despise structured education.)
10
The following video footage does not contain a time index and has been placed here because of its relation to the previous Kaitlyn diary entry.
Naida Camera Footage
Date and Time Index Missing
Magpie House Corridor
“Hey!”
The camera shakes violently as Naida moves briskly towards Kaitlyn, who is walking away from her down the hall. Kaitlyn doesn’t turn.
“Why were you spying on me last night?”
Still Kaitlyn doesn’t stop.
“I saw you!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Outside, in that tree. I’ve seen you there before.”
Finally, Kaitlyn turns, notices the camera, and blanches. “So?”
“So I want to help. Maybe you could, like, have a hobby? It’s sort of creepy having an audience.”
“Screw you.”
Kaitlyn storms away and slams the door behind her, glaring through the glass for a moment before running down the stairs.
“Shit.”
“Language, Naida,” comes a stern voice from off camera.
Naida films the empty corridor, but we catch her reply to someone at the other end. “Sorry, Miss Chisholm.”
“And you’re late for lights-out. The bell went off five minutes ago.”
“Sorry, miss.”
[END OF CLIP]
Naida Camera Footage
Date and Time Index Missing
Naida’s Dorm Room
Naida kneels before a short candle, and the shadow of the flame flickers along the floor and wall. Outside, the light is growing brighter, and the rain patters the windows in rhythmic droves. Beside her, Carly sits biting her lip. Naida first covers the candle with a small pot with holes all over it, so that the candlelight is scattered over the walls like raindrops. Then she removes a little drum from beneath her bed and begins to beat it while chanting phrases that the mic cannot pick up.
After a brief silence, during which Naida’s head remains bowed, Carly glances up at Naida’s mirror on the wall. It is covered with a cloth.
“So the dead can’t enter,” Naida says, looking up at her. “And so that our souls can’t get lost or be harmed.”
“Are we in danger?”
“We should be careful.”
Carly blinks, swallows, nods.
Naida takes a breath. “Great Father, Gorro, aid us in our prayer for our friend. Open the doorway for this communication. But protect us from wandering ears and eyes, and keep us safe. Keep her safe. Forgive our bold request. Bring us cleanly into the spirit world and help us bring our friend—sister—peace. Accept my small offering tonight, great Gorro, majestic Karrah, and bring harmony to the school.” She pours what appears to be wine or grape juice into a chalice from a silver jug, her hands shaking visibly. “Quiet any evil that may exist here and let it sleep.”
She raises the chalice to her lips and drinks deeply, then hands it to Carly, who sniffs the liquid, then takes a sip.
“Finish it.”
Carly does so with some difficulty, and when the chalice is empty, she coughs.
“Is it done? Will Kaitie be—”
“Blessed Father, great Gorro, honored Mother, kindly Karrah,” Naida interrupts, squeezing her eyes shut. “Thank you for your communion. We close the door.”
“Is it—”
“Done. Yes.”
“Kaitlyn will be happier? Calmer?”
Naida hesitates. “I hope so.”
[END OF CLIP]
11
126 days after the incident
Criminal Investigation Department, Portishead Headquarters
Avon and Somerset Constabulary, Portishead, Bristol
Tuesday, 7 June 2005, 09h20
AUDIO INTERVIEW #1, PART 1: Detective Chief Inspector Floyd Homes (FH) and Dr. Annabeth Lansing (AL)
(FH): Detective Chief Inspector Floyd Homes, Avon and Somerset CID, interviewing Dr. Annabeth Lansing on the seventh of June 2005. You were Carly Johnson’s therapist?
(AL): That is correct.
(FH): In what respect were you treating Miss Johnson?
(AL): Emotionally and psychologically. Carly suffered numerous complications after the death of her parents.
(FH): Were you the admitting doctor in Carly’s case? For Claydon, I mean.
(AL): No. Dr. Phillips admitted Carly, and I was brought in when she was diagnosed with DID.
(FH): DID?
(AL): It’s a personality disorder, normally brought on by severe trauma. Dissociative identity disorder.
(FH): Can you elaborate?
(AL): Dissociative identity disorder is a disruption of identity. There are usually two or more distinct personality states.
(FH): And Carly had this disorder?
(AL): That’s why I was brought in. It’s my field of expertise.
(FH): I see. [Shuffling paper] In plain English, Doctor, what are the symptoms?
(AL): Altered personality states, amnesia surrounding the trauma. Sometimes accompanied by a paranoid alter ego, a scared alter, a sexually deviant alter, a dominant or aggressive alter—
(FH): How many of these alters did Carly have?
(AL): That’s what made her case so interesting. She had only one other alter, and that one was fairly normal, as far as alters go. She was fully developed, but not exaggerated, like alters can be. Another unique feature is that the alter, who called herself Kaitlyn, came out regularly, at timed intervals.
(FH): Is that unusual?
(AL): It’s unheard of. Another unusual thing about the Kaitlyn alter is that she heard a voice—a voice speaking to her when there was nothing there. She called it Aka Manah.
(FH): A voice. She was delusional?
(AL): She heard a voice. We all hear voices, but we know that they are our thoughts. Kaitlyn wasn’t sensitive to that. She heard the voice in her head and outside of herself. Most often outside of herself. She thought it was real.
(FH): I see. [Pause] When did the Kaitlyn persona come out?
(AL): At night. Kaitlyn called herself a child of darkness.
(FH): And that wasn’t extreme?
(AL): In the scheme of things, no. It simply amounts to a normal teenager’s angst about her existence. I believe it was Kaitlyn’s “job,” as it were, to protect Carly from the dark hours, owing to what happened to her parents. In trauma, darkness is often given personification—like an evil force.
[Pause]
(FH): Tell me about what happened at the end of September 2004.
(AL): I only found out about all of this later, but it was around the end of November when Carly seemed to integrate, but she did so in a peculiar manner.
[End of tape]
12
136 days until the incident
Diary of Kaitlyn Johnson
Sunday, 19 September 2004, 6:30 pm
Dorm
I should throw tantrums more often.
Jaime
knocked on the door before she came in, which I should have known meant something was wrong. She’s grown so much that when I saw her, I thought I might actually cry. Her arms are leaner, her stomach flatter; the pudginess of her toddler years is gone. She’s five years old already.
When she saw me, she paused, eyes searching mine, she was afraid of me but when I opened my arms, she laughed and ran into them. I picked her up—she’s so heavy now!—and spun her around like I used to.
My heart was breaking.
“It’s been too long, Spud,” I told her. “Were those fake parents of yours trying to keep you away?”
Jaime bit her lip as I put her down, and I felt bad, but only for a minute.
“Hey,” I said, bending low so that I could look her in the face. “Don’t listen when they talk crap about me, okay? The Baileys are a different kind of people from our family. They don’t understand.”
Jaime’s eyes began to well, and she nibbled on her lip. Some things don’t change after all.
“What is it, Spuddy?” I took her waist and wiggled her until she laughed. “You can tell me anything, you know.”
“Even a bad thing?”
“Of course, even a bad thing. And you know, when you tell someone else a bad thing, it breaks in half, so that you’re only carrying a small bit of it. So come on.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Bailey don’t like you.”
What else is new? I’m well aware that they look down their straight, pointed little noses at me, judging with their self-righteous little eyes. That Johnson girl… she has problems. Mental problems… Gasp! Shudder!
“I know. It’s okay. They don’t have to like me. But you have to like me because I’m your sister and I love you. That’s all that counts.”
“They want to keep you away. I heard them talking.”
It took all my self-control not to press her for information right away. Instead, I said, “Oh?”
She nodded. “They say that you’re a bad affluence—”
“Influence.”
“—a bad iff-iffluence, and you should go back to prison.”
Prison. What a nice euphemism for the loony bin.
“Jaime, we weren’t in jail. You know that, right? We were in a kind of hospital getting better after the accident.”
“Mrs. Bailey says that you have to be locked up because your personality is wrong.”
Word for word, Dee. My. Personality.
Is.
Wrong.
I took Jaime’s hands. “My personality isn’t wrong. And I don’t think Carly’s personality is wrong. Do you?”
“No.”
“Mrs. Bailey thinks our personality is wrong because she thinks one of us shouldn’t be here.”
“Oh.”
“I want you to do something for me, okay?”
She nodded, her eyes fixed on my face. I was her big sister. I would make everything right again. I would take a world that had become bent and confusing overnight and smooth out all of the wrinkles. Her hope is a noose around my neck.
“Whenever the”—insert: Dickball—“Baileys talk about me, I want you to close your ears. Close them like you close your eyes, and don’t listen. They don’t understand. They think they do, but they don’t.”
“But I can’t close my ears. I don’t have earlids.”
“Oh, you do,” I said earnestly. “They’re inside your head. If you imagine them closing, they will.”
Jaime considered this for a moment. “Okay.”
“Now, come on, enough about the Baileys,” I said, rolling my eyes. She giggled. “Tell me about you, about friends—everything!”
She wrapped her little arms around my neck, and I helped her onto my lap.
“I started school, and I like it a lot. I have a friend called Mandy, and she likes me and lets me play with her dolls.”
I frowned. School? Already?
“Oh, yeah?” I prompted.
“She has a Bratz doll that has hair that can grow, and a Barbie doll with a tail like a mermaid, and…”
She told me the minutiae of her life, and I felt as though I had never heard anything more interesting or vital in my whole existence. I soaked up every little detail—about her new crayons (green was her favorite), the dresses she got to wear (disgusting, frilly concoctions to make her look like a doll), the shopping trips she and Dickball Mrs. Bailey took into London, and the dollies that Mandy let her play with.
“Do you have a picture of Mummy and Daddy in your room?” I asked her abruptly, because it suddenly occurred to me what the Baileys were doing. They weren’t merely giving an orphan a place to live; they were adopting her, absorbing her as their own, sucking out her Johnson and injecting their Bailey! It explained the dresses, the “keep away from Carly” mission, the “Carly’s personality is wrong” mantra—it explained why she had started schooling so young. Indoctrination.
“I don’t have any pictures from before.” The words slipped out like a bubble, too fragile to resist the destruction of dry air.
It was like a glass smashing against a wall.
“Who do they think they are? They won’t allow you to have a photo of your dead parents? That’s sick!”
“I don’t want one,” Jaime said in a little voice, her eyes already swollen with tears.
I. Don’t. Want. One.
A sledgehammer couldn’t have hit me as hard.
I whispered my reply. “What?”
“I don’t like to remember.”
“Remember them?”
“Remember what happened.”
It was like an electric shock to my head. “You remember the accident?”
She looked away, and although she didn’t nod, I saw the answer in her haunted eyes.
“Jaime… tell me. I can’t remember. Tell me—”
“Dr. Lasny said not to talk about it.”
“Dr.—Dr. Lansing?”
Jaime nodded.
Betrayal. Betrayed. I was betrayed. Dr. Lansing is in this whole thing with the Baileys—working to make Jaime forget me and to never come see me! She only caved when I threw a tantrum and made things hard for her! They want Jaime to forget me!
I grabbed Jaime by the shoulders. “I’m your sister! I’m the oldest now they’re dead, and you have to listen to what I say! You will not forget me!”
She cried out—a small, piercing shriek—and began to weep. I dropped her arms, instantly sorry, and gave her a big hug. She sobbed until she fell asleep, her head padded on my chest. I lay on my bed with her, taking in her little-girl smell (it had changed since living with the fake parents, but not so much that I couldn’t smell the real her underneath).
“Don’t forget me,” I whispered in her ear, holding her hand—a tiny version of my own.
We lay together for an hour or so, and I thought about how things used to be. Carly discarding me in our room, always the same. Cuddling up with Jaime in her bed for a while, reading her a bedtime story—always “The Frog Prince”—and then going out into the night after (maybe) a brief chat with Mum. Looking down at Jaime sleeping beside me now, I felt the loss of that normal all over my body like an ache. I could have stayed like that forever, but she jolted awake, dizzy and confused.
“Where am I?” she asked. She was shivering.
“With me in my room, silly,” I told her.
She gave a couple of sleepy grunts. “It’s too cold in here. I don’t like it.”
I glanced at the window—it was shut firmly. And Jaime was still in her fluffy coat.
“It’s not cold,” I said, touching her cheeks, which were warm.
“And it smells funny.”
I sniffed the air. Nothing.
“I don’t like it,” she said, eyes shadowed.
It was weird. Jaime loves everything, and when she doesn’t, she doesn’t moan about it. Those Bailey shits have got into her head.
“Come on, Jaime. It’s just a room!”
“There’s something bad in here.”
Wh
at could I say? The Baileys have been turning her against me for months. Not in an obvious way, of course, but in subtle ways. And there’s nothing I can do about it. It makes me crazy.
“I have to go,” she said, climbing off my bed. There were duvet lines across her cheek, and sleep was still heavy in her eyes. “Mrs. Bailey said she would wait for me at the end of the corridor.”
“Jaime?” I said, as she turned to go. “Don’t let those dickballs tell you things about me.”
“Okay.”
“You know me better than they do,” I added.
She nodded. “Okay.”
As the door was closing behind her, I thought of something.
“Wait—Jaime?”
Her little head popped back. “Yeah?”
“Have you heard from Carly lately?”
“Yes.”
“She sound… normal? I mean, did she sound okay?”
She just shrugged. “I have to go now.”
“Okay, Beanette.”
The door closed. I didn’t get a chance to say “I love you,” so I said it to the closed door. The words, spoken but unheard, fell to the floor, where they shattered like glass. Everything so fragile, and I love her so much. That, I think, is fragile too.
I sniffed the air, and still I didn’t smell a thing.
I should have asked what it smelled like.
Later, Dorm
Kaitlyn is:
1. A prophet
2. Demonstrably insane
3. An incredible force
The Dead House Page 5