The Patient

by Jasper DeWitt

  “Then my husband got in a sculptor to make that thing you saw when we first walked in and pretend it had been killed on Joseph’s behalf, but that didn’t do any good either. We decided that perhaps Joseph was seeing insects around the house and they were triggering the problem, because he was so terrified of insects that just the sight of one would send him into hysterics. So we hired an exterminator to make daily visits and asked him to go over the whole house—especially Joseph’s room—every day to kill any bugs that crawled in. Nothing worked. He insisted the monster was waking him by stroking his face with its claws and holding his head in its pincers every night.”

  Martha nipped her drink. “Charles was insistent that he would get over it eventually, that all little boys have recurring nightmares or see bogeymen of some kind, and that this was no different. He worried that putting Joseph into therapy or bringing him to a mental ward might scar the boy more than whatever he was seeing at night. And he was certain that it would negatively affect his chances at getting into a good middle school.

  “But after nine months, it started to get worse. Joseph had grown listless. If a six-year-old could be depressed, I’d say he was. He didn’t talk about it as much, and some nights we’d just hear sobbing. But then. Then he came down to breakfast with bruises. It took me a couple of days to realize what it was; I thought it was just rough play with friends. But then there were scrapes, too, all up and down his arms. I realized I could bear it no longer, and I made Charles call Thomas, who had us bring him to CSA.”

  She finished the last of her drink and, clearly working to maintain her composure, paused and went to the decanter. Turning her back to me, she refilled her glass, and I didn’t interrupt. I sensed this was a story that was taking everything she had in her to get out.

  “He stayed there. I think a night or two, I don’t recall. But when he came home, Parker, you would not believe that little boy had ever been scared of anything. He chattered excitedly the whole way home that he wasn’t scared of the monster anymore. That he was brave now, and that the monster was just him scaring himself. ‘I’m not scared of me, Mommy, so I can’t be scared of it! The doctor in the castle for scared people said so!’ That’s what he kept repeating.”

  She smiled wryly, “It seemed as though this was a variation of what Charles had been saying to him for years—that it wasn’t real, there are no such things as monsters, he was imagining it—but I suppose it was the effect of Thomas. The effect of a very special kind of doctor. Anyway, we tried to give him the sedatives that night, but he insisted he wouldn’t need them. He said he wanted to confront the monster and let it know it couldn’t scare him anymore.

  I noticed her hands were shaking when she took another sip of her drink. “Well, he did scream at first, but before we got to his bedroom door, he went quiet. We thought maybe this was him facing his fears, that whatever the doctor had told him was working. And when he didn’t make another peep that night, we assumed he was finally sleeping peacefully.

  “But the next morning, we found Joseph squatting in the corner. He had started making awful noises at us and was . . . was sort of leering at us. The way he looked at me, I didn’t know him. It was awful.

  “So we took him right back to Thomas,” she continued. “And I know this must sound like an awful thing to say, but as soon as he left for the hospital, it was as if a cloud lifted. And I know this is probably nothing but my own desperate need not to feel so helpless, but I . . . I have long worried that I blamed my little boy for what was happening to him. That I didn’t love him enough to see him through it. And that’s why he is . . . the way he is.”

  It was inconclusive as far as my theory went, but hearing it described in such grim detail only drove home the tragedy of it. “I don’t think you should blame yourself. It’s obvious you love him, and I’m guessing your husband did, too,” I said. And then I infused a gentle quality into my tone. “If you don’t mind my asking, why haven’t you visited Joe since he was institutionalized?”

  Martha gave me an anguished look. “We wanted to, Parker.” She spoke so softly it was almost a whisper. “Believe me, for years, we wanted nothing more in the world. But Thomas wouldn’t have it. He told us our presence might upset Joseph, and that Joseph was too erratic for more disturbances. We kept asking when it would be all right, but eventually, Thomas lost patience with us. He practically shouted at us that Joseph—my little Joey—was a dangerous lunatic. Unstable. Violent. He told us that he was keeping us safe, as much as Joseph, by keeping us apart. If the situation improved, he said, he’d tell us. But decades went by and it . . . didn’t. We eventually gave up hope. I think it broke Charles . . .

  “But you are here now.” She tried to mask her desperation, but despite her years of stoic WASP breeding, it was obvious. Listening to her, I felt at once dirty for thinking that what Dr. A—— had suspected might be true and desperate to prevent her hope from being in vain. “Martha, I have a favor to ask you. It may help with Joe’s treatment.”

  “Yes,” she nodded. “Anything.”

  “We think Joe might have gotten the idea that, rather than the monster being his imagination, part of him was the monster,” I said. “That means we need to know as much as we can about its origins and determine any environmental factors. In one of the tapes we have of Joe’s therapy sessions, he says that the monster came out of his wall. If you don’t mind, I’d like to see his room, and with your permission, I’d like to examine that wall to see if there’s anything strange about it. Perhaps for evidence of an infestation that your exterminator might have missed?”

  Martha didn’t seem to need time to consider. She drained her glass in one gulp, then stood and began to walk out of the room. Seeing that I hadn’t moved, she jerked her head impatiently.

  “Well, what are you waiting for? The answer is yes. Come along.”

  It was four long flights up through a stately, yet immaculately appointed home. The lower floors were done mostly in the luxe sage and gold with hardwood floors that I associated with the 1990s, while the narrower, carpeted hallway on the top floor revealed the earthy rust and deep brown of the 1970s. I suspected that any remodeling in the intervening years since Joe’s departure was confined to the lower floors. As for Joe’s room, it was obvious as soon as I walked in that the room hadn’t been lived in, or even entered, in quite some time. Dust caked all the surfaces, and some of the old toys in the room looked like they’d rusted. Even so, it was a room that should’ve put even a nervous child at ease. Toys were scattered everywhere, ranging from action figures to stuffed animals to extensive model train tracks that ran the length of the room. The walls were painted a deep, relaxing blue, except on one side, where a massive, hyperrealistic mural of a bright red race car had been painted in painstaking detail. The four-poster bed looked less like a bed and more like a cloud given physical form, so layered was it with pillows and a downy comforter. And the floor was covered in lush, soft carpeting of the same soothing blue as the rest of the room.

  Nevertheless, Martha hesitated on the threshold, as if the sight of the room alone shook her resolve. Then, a steely look entering her eyes, she walked in and beckoned me toward a ten-foot expanse of wall next to the bed. She pointed at it with a disgusted look on her face.

  “This is where Joseph said the thing would come from. Rankly impossible, of course. Even if I believed his monster could exist, it couldn’t hide here. This is one of the outermost walls of this part of the house. There’s nothing on the other side but open air, not even a small crawlspace.”

  Her eyes seemed to bounce around the room. She made a small gesture of helplessness and looked at me.

  “Thank you, Martha,” I said.

  She nodded stiffly but graciously. “We have an intercom in the hallway here outside his door. I assume it still works, so call me if you need me.” She swept out of the room and closed the door behind her.

  And now, there was nothing else to do but investigate the room. I started by going throu
gh the seemingly endless supplies of toys, games, and books. There was an obvious absence of anything that bore even faintly insect-like features or touched on subjects related to insects; I found nothing that resembled the horrific thing immortalized in sculpture downstairs. Aside from how numerous they were, there was nothing remarkable about Joe’s personal effects. These were just the sort of things you’d expect to see in a wealthy child’s room, though the games and books were clearly dated to the early 1970s.

  Next, I checked closets and drawers, sifting through boys’ clothes. And I checked the bed, but as gingerly as possible, because the dust cloud it would kick up would kill me. As it was, the tang of mold and smell of decay were considerable. It was useful that the place seemed to have been entirely untouched since Joe’s departure, but I hadn’t encountered anything significant.

  Well, almost. There was one thing that was a bit odd. The vast majority of Joe’s toys were broken. This was particularly true of the stuffed animals, which was counterintuitive, seeing as those items are often designed to withstand a child’s abuse. And yet, most of the plush toys I found bore obvious signs of having had parts sewn up or back together, or still bore incisions where stuffing was poking out. Theoretically, I suppose these could have been done by a child, but it would have taken some imagination. Particularly so, given that I didn’t see any toys or objects that looked obviously sharp or durable enough to do the job. Nor did the sliced-open parts of the stuffed animals correspond to areas where a child would be most likely to stretch or put pressure on them—ears, necks, tails—which raised the question of who or what had opened up these toys to begin with. Was it Joe? Was it his father? An act of sadism meant to harm the child’s treasures? Dr. A——’s theory came to mind. But I needed more evidence. I had to look at the wall itself.

  At a glance, it didn’t seem suspicious. I got between it and the bed and began touching the wall, pressing on it, and knocking on it with a knuckle, looking for signs of softness or deterioration. I studied it for evidence of bugs or other vermin.

  My eyes scanned the wall, crossed the floor, and moved up Joe’s old bed, then back . . . and noticed there were two areas where the carpet looked slightly uneven. The legs raised the bed about a foot off the floor, so I could just see something underneath.

  Wondering if it was a trick of the light, I knelt down and reached out to feel the wrinkling, only to find that the carpet had been partially ripped up from the floor in both places and imperfectly set back in place.

  Intrigued, I pulled at what seemed to be the origin point of the rip, and a long stretch of the carpet came loose from the floor, sliding back as easily as if I were pulling up a bedsheet. It was then that I noticed that the floor underneath, rather than being the same handsome mahogany as it was in other parts of the house, was made of some lighter-colored, more modest hardwood that the carpet had been intended to conceal.

  I mention this because it was only on account of the wood’s light color that I was able to spot a trail of small brown stains that followed the same trajectory as the ripped-up carpet and stopped at the wall behind me. If I’d had any doubt as to what these were, it was immediately destroyed when I discovered a few small shards of hard material near the foot of the bed, which my medical education enabled me to immediately identify as a child’s fingernails. A child had been clinging to the carpet so hard that the fingernails had been ripped out when the carpet itself was torn up, leaving a trail of blood that stopped at the wall.

  I stood up and stared at the wall for a long moment, then went out to the intercom and summoned Joe’s mom. When she came, I showed her the ripped carpet and bloodied floor and asked her if she’d noticed any of this before. Unaware that the carpet had ever been damaged, she was stunned by the sight of blood and had no idea what to make of it. Her eyes followed the trail of blood, then stared at the wall in fright.

  I had to wave at her to get her attention. “Martha, I’d like to have a look inside that wall. Would that be OK?”

  “Yes . . . um. What do you need?”

  “Do you have an axe?”

  Ten minutes later, Martha had found a fire axe in an attic box stored under a window in the nursery down the hall. The weapon was beside an old-style wood-and-rope fire escape ladder. After she handed it to me, I encouraged her to wait in the hallway; I didn’t know how messy it would be or what I would find.

  I grabbed the axe and began my attack, pouring every ounce of strength my muscles could produce into each swing. The plaster and wooden laths resisted, but the sharpness of the blade and the desperation of my assault pushed through both, and a chunk of the interior wall came loose. As it did, it disclosed a gut-freezing horror that made me wonder if I had either already lost my mind or was about to lose it. A terrible stench wafted toward me.

  I kept up my attack, bringing down plaster and chunks of wooden lath and studs, until a large, eighteen-inch sheet of gypsum fell forward, revealing a small nook behind it. And inside that space, with the wood sculpted around it so perfectly that it looked as if it had been carved in place, was the tiny skull of a human child.

  Horrified, I had to back away from the wall and cover my mouth to keep from retching as the smell of decades of decomposition hidden by that carved-out tomb hit my nose. Worse still was the incredulity I felt. What I was smelling and seeing seemed impossible. There was no way that anyone could have carved a space sized so precisely that it would conceal a child’s corpse inside a solid wall so perfectly that you’d have to knock down the wall to find it. There was no point! No purpose! Then, in a sudden cataclysm of horror, it all came together.

  I’m not scared of me, mommy, so I can’t be scared of it! The doctor in the castle for scared people said so!

  I worked out why his delusions kept changing. They shift every time someone calls him a new nasty name.

  It goes back in the walls when they come. It melts. Like ice cream. It looks like it is the wall.

  I’m going to tell it that it doesn’t scare me the next time I see it!

  The rush of thoughts that blasted my mind was so terrible I couldn’t help screaming aloud. Because in that instant, I knew that what had happened was far worse than anything I, Rose, or Thomas had surmised.

  The real Joe had been dead ever since the night after his first return from the hospital. He’d been asphyxiated in a tomb created by hands that could melt through a solid wall, the hands of the Thing that had tormented him. And then, having been told that it was Joe, the monster living off his fear and suffering had assumed his form and proceeded to the all-it-could-eat buffet that was our “castle for scared people.” There, it had tortured more than two decades’ worth of unsuspecting mental patients, staff, and doctors. It had grown fat on years of bad thoughts that it had barely had to work to produce. And with every attempt we made to “cure” that unnamed, malevolent parasite, we had sent it a new victim. If I had held on to any remnant of faith in the ultimate curative powers of science and medicine before then, that revelation destroyed it.

  But painful as that was, it also brought a sort of cold clarity. As Martha, Joe’s mom, came bursting through the door, I understood I had to find a way to get justice for the poor, murdered boy whose corpse I had just disinterred.

  When Martha looked into the hole in the wall, I think her mind must have at first refused to accept what was there. For all she could do was stare—with wide, uncomprehending eyes—at the petite skeleton that had been entombed in that cursed room for so long.

  When she finally broke her gaze, it was to look up at me with a childlike expression that seemed to implore me, the doctor, to provide a rational explanation.

  “What is the meaning of this?”

  I couldn’t even begin to formulate an answer, so I didn’t try. Instead, I replied with a question of my own. “Mrs. M——, may I keep this fire axe?”

  Still looking at me with a mixture of fear and incomprehension, she slowly nodded.

  April 27, 2008

  Well, fol
ks, this is it. The end of the story that I’ve kept hidden for over ten years. I’m finally letting out a truth that nearly destroyed my interest in the fields of medicine and psychiatry forever, nearly broke my heart and made me insane, and was the cause of devastation to many people associated with the Connecticut State Asylum. To be honest, this should have been the most difficult part of the story to write, yet because of all the positivity you’ve shown, I felt nothing but relief in being able to set it down. I realize many of you don’t quite interpret my discovery in that wall in Joe’s childhood home as I did, but I think you’ll understand once you hear this final part.

  After my horrifying discovery, the next few hours passed in a haze. I suggested to Martha, half-heartedly, that she call the police, but she seemed to be too much in shock to really hear me. Either way, I felt I should depart her property, especially considering how I’d probably just wiped away whatever traces of hope she’d had that she might get her son back, while also raising all sorts of uncomfortable and sanity-threatening questions about what, exactly, she’d been paying to hospitalize for the past twenty-five-plus years. It was best, I reasoned, if I wasn’t the first psychiatrist she talked to after that, so I excused myself and headed for my car.

  I recall it being about four in the afternoon when I left that cursed mansion, fire axe in hand, whereupon I immediately drove back toward the hospital. But I didn’t head straight there. If there was a way to catch the Thing that called itself “Joe” admitting to what it had done, I wanted to be able to use it, so I stopped off at a Radio Shack near the hospital and bought a mini-recorder and a blank cassette tape that could be stored in my pocket. I figured if it didn’t know I had the tape, it might slip up, and I could get it on the record.