I stared squarely into Dr. A——’s eyes. “And you know what? Even if I don’t see any evidence that the parents are off, if there’s no evidence of anything supernatural there either, then I’ll admit you were right and that my brain got caught up in antiscientific nonsense. Good enough?”
Once more, we looked at each other for a long moment, and by the time the gaze was broken, I could tell that he had made his peace with the idea, even if he couldn’t bring himself to respect me for entertaining it. Then my eye caught movement, and I turned to see that Dr. G—— had pulled out a pen and scribbled down a note in her calendar.
She looked up at me. “Yes, you can have the day off. Regardless of what Thomas says, I want to know what you find. Don’t worry, I’ll tell Bruce that you’re on an assignment at my request. I don’t believe the family ever moved, so use the address in his file. Now go home and get some sleep if you can. We need you alert tomorrow.”
April 24, 2008
I underestimated how hard it would get to write this story the deeper I got into it. Believe me, I wish I could have had this particular part of the story posted sooner, but as I think you’ll see, the subject matter made that impossible. I swear I’m not trying to milk this or draw it out unnecessarily. It just is that hard to remember and recount, to get my head back in this space. That said, when I do sit down to lay it out, the story pours out. Sort of like an infected sore that’s just been lanced. I do feel loads better with each installment.
If you’ve been with me this long, thank you for your patience. If you’re looking for an answer to the mystery of this story, this is probably the post you’ve been waiting for.
I wish I could say I followed Dr. G——’s instructions and slept like a baby when I got home that night, but the fact is that what I’d learned made sleep virtually impossible. My brain was on a hamster wheel, wondering at my own increasing willingness to entertain erratic, absurd theories. Just a week ago, I was convinced that Joe was a sane man trapped by a group of criminal medical professionals. I got caught trying to set him free. Now I was going on a field trip to see if I could find proof that he’d been possessed by . . . what, exactly? A demon? A vengeful spirit? The bogeyman? Don’t all crazy people think they’re the rational ones? And who was to say I hadn’t just snapped the way all of Joe’s other doctors had, and that Dr. G——’s staff would be waiting with a straitjacket when I finally went back to the hospital? Come to think of it, I wouldn’t have blamed them if that had happened.
And thumping under everything alongside my heartbeat was the sound of that laughter from Joe’s room.
Unfortunately, Jocelyn wasn’t there to help me process any of this or, alternatively, take my mind off it. There was a note in the kitchen that she was having a late night at the library to make headway on the next segment of her writing. I texted to let her know I was home, and she called, eager to hear if I still had my job or if the police were arriving soon. I didn’t want to get into it over the phone, so I reassured her that everything was fine, and I’d share the whole story when I saw her.
Eventually, desperate for sleep, I washed down a few antianxiety pills with a copious amount of wine, and somehow, the combination of chemicals finally made me fall asleep. However, the sound of my alarm, which rang seemingly the second after I’d closed my eyes, only compounded the horrors of the previous night with a splitting headache.
Still, a shower, ibuprofen, and a small ocean of coffee later, I felt functional enough to drive. So it was that I dug out my copy of Joe’s file and looked at the first page to find his family’s home address.
The location listed instantly explained how Joe’s family could afford more than twenty-five years of inpatient treatment. It was located in a part of the state so infamous for its wealth that its very name conjured images of gold-plated cars, palatial homes, and family-owned yachts. What was more, a quick look at MapQuest showed that Joe’s family home stood at the center of a vast estate bordering the water. Under any other circumstances, I’d have been at least a bit curious about what such opulence looked like up close, but in this case, the only thing that struck me was how isolated the place was, and therefore how far from help anyone there—particularly a small child—must’ve been. The one mercy was that it was only about an hour-and-a-half drive from New Haven and would be shorter if traffic was light. So, laying the MapQuest directions on the passenger seat of my car for easy reference, I began the drive out to find whatever might be waiting for me at the birthplace of Joe’s insanity, if that was, indeed, what it was.
If I believed that nature had a sense of irony, that drive would have been a strong bit of evidence. The weather was the sort of cool autumn balm that one hopes and prays for every year, the traffic nonexi stent, and, to top it off, I got a text from Jocelyn wishing me well and letting me know she’d be home in the evening, so we could catch up. In short, under any other circumstances, it would have been the perfect day, which made the drive into a secular equivalent of the mouth of Hell that much more unnerving.
The postcard picturesqueness of the part of the state where Joe’s family lived only enhanced this cognitive dissonance. I must have driven past hundreds of expansive yet tasteful manses of the sort only old money could construct, each of which looked as if it belonged in a Jane Austen novel rather than in the United States. The few residents I saw out on the streets seemed to have been plucked from a Brooks Brothers or J. Press magazine spread, each decked out in clothes worth several months of my salary and watches that probably would’ve cost my annual income at least. My relatively modest, though well-kept Ford Taurus must have been conspicuously out of place alongside the armies of Mercedes, Audis, and Bentleys. I was surprised that anyone from a town like this would end up in a hospital at all, let alone at the Connecticut State Asylum. This was the sort of place where pain of any kind was either flushed out with medication and trips to boutique psychiatrists or kept at a respectable distance with copious expenditures. It was, in short, a place where anything unpleasant, let alone a supernatural horror, had been ruthlessly gentrified out of sight and out of mind.
It wasn’t until I was pulling up to the heavy, wrought iron gate set into a high, thick, cobblestone wall at Joe’s family estate that I felt any sense of ominousness in my surroundings. Though that may have partially been the result of being roared at by a burly security guard who looked like he should’ve been on a mission sponsored by Blackwater rather than guarding a quiet family home. Not wanting to seem unduly nervous, I explained in my best bedside manner that I was a doctor and had come to speak to the residents about their son.
He spun around with military precision and marched to his kiosk, where he dialed in a few numbers on his console. A woman’s voice, tinged with the sort of polite, clenched-jaw accent that one usually heard only from elderly yacht club members, emerged from a microphone, and after a brief conversation with the martinet who’d just blockaded me, she agreed that I should be let in. The guard ended the communication smartly and pushed a button, causing the gate to swing open with almost perfect silence and smoothness. My stomach churning with the nerves I’d been trying to suppress since setting out this morning, I continued on my way.
The driveway to Joe’s family home ran up a gradual, obsessively manicured hill surrounded by a small forest of equally well-kept sugar maples and northern red oak. At the top of the hill, encircled by beeches, stood the house itself—a towering, Gothic Revival stone manor that seemed to transform the sun’s rays into a radiant pastel glow. I pulled up in front and, handing my keys to a stiff-necked valet who looked pained to even set foot in a car as modest as mine, stepped out to face whatever the house had in store for me.
However, the longer I stared at it, the more uneasy I felt. Frankly, if Joe’s family had lived in a castle built of pitch-black stone covered in screaming demonic gargoyles and permanently backlit by lightning flashes, I think I would have found it less unsettling. The place was colossal: so large that it could have housed an e
ntire school and still looked spacious. I’m pretty sure it rivaled CSA’s main building in size. Its ornamentation was superfluously pleasant, with plenty of stone roses and cupids smiling from its many windowsills and ramparts, not to mention the numerous hand-carved lattices and copious amounts of stained glass. But even to my untrained eye, this finery looked like a tacked-on, glittering mask for what was essentially a spartan, forbidding stockade of a building, all severe angles, sharp spires, and protruding buttresses. I wondered what sort of architect designed a house like this, let alone who originally wanted to live in it. Small wonder that an incurable mental patient had sprung from the walls of this imitation Bastille in Strawberry Hill Gothic.
As I walked up the sparkling limestone stairs, the door opened and a wispy woman whose face looked the picture of gracefully aging beauty swept down to meet me. I must admit that my first thought on meeting her was that she was hardly the sort of person I could imagine conspiring to keep the sexual molestation of a child a secret, even out of denial. She had a kindness to her, but it was girded with such naturally aristocratic steel that I imagined she’d been born ringing a bell to summon servants.
“Dr. H——, ” she said in the same prep-school-inflected accent I’d heard over the intercom, “such a pleasure to receive you. Dr. G—— called ahead to let me know you’d be coming today, and I must say I was relieved. How is my boy? I have been wondering ever so much about my poor Joseph and haven’t heard almost anything from the hospital these past years—other than the bills, of course—so you can imagine my pleasure at your calling. Do please come in.”
“Thank you, Mrs. M——,” I said graciously, shaking her hand with what I hoped was appropriate professionalism. “I’m very glad to have caught you at home, since I’ve been hoping to speak to Joe’s parents.”
“Well, I’m afraid you’ll have to make do with me,” she said, a touch sadly. “Joseph’s father has been dead for the past ten years. However, if I can be of help, I will be happy to do what I can. Just come into the sitting room and we’ll talk.”
The “sitting room” was actually a high-ceilinged vaulted chamber abundantly furnished in aged mahogany and cherrywood, with what looked to be a few genuine mounted animal heads. Unaccustomed to the trappings of such advanced wealth, I naturally found myself looking around with no small amount of wonder, when one particular mount made me jump back in shock and utter a small gasp.
It was, to be blunt, not the head of anything I had ever seen or wish to see again. If I had found out it was genuine, I might have had nightmares for the rest of my life. Protruding from the plaque to which it was grafted stretched a bulbous, almost shapeless head nearly a foot long bearing a pair of massive, sickly yellow segmented eyes and several rows of pincers that looked like they were dripping with venom. Worse, the taxidermist had evidently set out to make it look as lifelike as possible, because the eyes still flickered with the malignant glare of sadism, and the pincers flared out from the face in an attitude of furious aggression, as if the thing might slam its mandibles shut at any moment and crush the head of whatever innocent creature it had caught in their grip. A yawning, fanged maw like the mouth of the world’s largest leech stretched between the pincers and the eyes, ready to eviscerate whatever entered it.
Seeing my horror, Mrs. M—— followed my gaze and shuddered.
“Awful thing, isn’t it?” she asked. “I’ve never had the heart to take it down, though. Don’t worry, it’s only an artistic piece—nothing real. Charles—Joseph’s father, I mean—was quite an accomplished hunter, and when Joseph’s night terrors first started, he thought it might help him if we pretended he’d caught and killed the thing and mounted its head in this room. We commissioned an artist to get a description of what it looked like from Joseph himself and to study his drawings. That’s what he produced.”
She sniffed bitterly. “The hideous thing didn’t reassure Joseph, of course. If anything, I suspect it scared him more. But since his long hospitalization, I’ve kept it here partially to remember how much Charles wanted to see Joseph cured and partially as a sort of symbol of hope for me that one day Joseph might beat the mental illness that made him imagine the filthy thing in the first place.”
Still transfixed with disgust and fascination, it took quite a bit of effort to tear my eyes away from that monstrous depiction of a six-year-old’s bogeyman. However, the mention of his night terrors did remind me of my purpose, and I turned to look at Joe’s mother.
“Mrs. M——, it’s actually Joe’s night terrors that brought me here,” I began, having practiced my pitch several times in the car. “Even though we’ve tried many courses of treatment with your son, we have begun to wonder if his more lasting psychosis might somehow be connected to his earlier night terrors. We never really explored them when he first came in, and perhaps there’s something we would have learned if we’d asked more about them in the first place.”
Joe’s mother gave me a searching look, and for the first time, it struck me that despite her exceedingly polished appearance, she really appeared quite anxious, even desperate, for some good news.
“Dr. H——, firstly, call me Martha,” she said. “If you are serious about trying to bring back my son after all these years, then at the very least, we should be on first-name terms. Ask whatever you like. If I know the answer, I will give it to you.”
I nodded. “Thank you, Mrs. M—— Martha.”
I knew I should ask more about the nightmares, but as I observed the opulence surrounding me, something else came to mind. “First . . . well, I have to wonder. Why did you bring Joe to our hospital?”
Martha laughed lightly. “You think your hospital is too pedestrian for the likes of us? Well, I suppose you’ve never had to deal with prep school admissions?” I shook my head.
“We were concerned that if we took Joseph to a hospital or doctor who was familiar within our community, the black mark of mental issues would interfere with his eventual application to school and would mar his whole life. My husband and Thomas A—— had been classmates at Choate. He agreed to keep Joseph’s therapy at CSA a secret as a personal favor. Of course, after a few years, it became clear that the precaution had been pointless. But Charles insisted on keeping Joseph under Thomas’s care. We felt reassured by his skill and dedication to our son.”
“What were his earliest symptoms? And when did you notice them?”
“Joseph was around five,” Martha said. “We had moved to this house and decided it was time for him to have his own room. I was pregnant with his little sister, Eliza, at the time, and while we could have knocked down a few walls and expanded the nursery, all our friends told us that five was too old to be sleeping in a room for babies—it wouldn’t be fair for a growing boy to have to put up with a crying newborn. So we had a decorator come in and remodel one of the smaller top-floor suites into the most charming little boy’s bedroom you can imagine and put Joseph in there. He absolutely loved his new room when he saw it, and his nanny practically had to drag him down to dinner to get him to leave it. But that night . . .”
She swallowed hard and put up a hand. “If you don’t mind, Dr. H——, I think I’ll pour myself a drink before we continue. Can I get you one as well?”
“Parker, please,” I said. “And no, thank you.”
She stood up and walked briskly to a hand-carved globe bar and poured an ample amount of amber liquid into a fine crystal glass, which she swirled for a few moments before taking the first sip. Apparently fortified, she sat back down and continued talking.
“That night . . . Parker, you cannot imagine how terrible it was. Joseph began screaming as if he were being murdered barely an hour after we put him to bed. And when we went to check on him, he told us that a giant bug had got hold of his head with its pincers and was going to hurt him. His bedclothes didn’t show any signs of damage, and his face was completely unharmed, so we chalked it up to a nightmare from being in a new room. We thought it would go away after that night
, but it didn’t. It kept happening.”
She took another sip of her drink, and this time it was longer and more pained.
“We tried everything,” she said emphatically. “At first we thought it was his imagination, but his reaction was so vivid and expressive. We set traps near the wall he said it came from. But they were never sprung when he started screaming, and nothing as big as he described could’ve avoided it. We asked the nanny to wear him out with physical activities during the day, in the hope he’d sleep more deeply. But then . . .”
She paused, recollecting something that evidently puzzled her.
“Then his nanny began acting oddly, so much so that we had to fire her. Yes, I remember now. When we first hired her after we moved in, she seemed like such a sweet and loving caretaker. We needed someone who’d be good with a young boy but also able to handle being a combination night-and-day nurse for an infant when Eliza came along. But then, a few weeks later, we found her shouting profanities at Joe as he cowered in a corner. I suppose his troubles must have worn on her, too, but whatever the cause of her ill temper, we couldn’t have her taking it out on him. At any rate, we let her go and hired someone who was older. More experienced. We hoped she would be less prone to losing her patience with a little boy’s energy. Sadly, she wasn’t ideal either after a while. She became sluggish and slow. She was fine with Eliza when she arrived, which I suppose was most important at the time, but she could never keep up with Joseph. So I did my best to tire him out before I got too big with Eliza.
“Every day, we told Joseph we were ‘cleaning the monster out’ and throwing it away, but he’d insist it was still there. We tried moving him to other bedrooms on his floor, but that didn’t help. For one month early on, I brought him into our bedroom, but Charles wouldn’t let that stand. For starters, Joseph was still restless and having nightmares, though nothing nearly as potent, and for another, we needed him to learn to sleep on his own. To grow up. At some point, we started sedating him, which seemed to buy him a few hours of rest before he’d wake us all up howling in the early hours of morning.
The Patient Page 11