A Very Paranormal Holiday

by J. T. Bock

  Despite my first attempt, where I’d tried to slide up onto the horse and ended up sliding off the other side, I stuck at it. And I loved it so much, it had become my unmovable appointment.

  Clipper was a dainty bay mare and she belonged to Mrs. Hanson, but she was my horse when I came. And she was a human whisperer.

  It worked like this. I’d saddle her, ride her with varying degrees of success, then I’d bring her back to her stable, strip off the tack and brush her down. All the while, I’d talk to her. She’d tell me what she thought by moving her ears. If she got angry at something, she’d stomp a little or swoosh her tail. By the end of any session I spent with her, I was calm.

  Much cheaper than counseling and more effective for me. It wasn’t as if I could actually tell anyone the things I could tell Clipper.

  And now it was over. This had been my last time here.

  The numbness in my legs wasn’t the result of the cold weather. I couldn’t risk a fall. I couldn’t even risk being too tired. I would retreat into my safe cocoon, stay as healthy as could be expected and come out for the court case.

  Clipper knew. I’d told her. Just the way I’d told her about my memory problems, Dr. Henderson’s prognosis, my test results, Zedous, the case, the attempts to make me back down: the threatening letters and the deliberate damage to my car. She’d heard it all.

  She was back in her stable and I was outside. I pressed my face against her neck and ran my hands over her strong withers for the last time.

  “Goodbye, Clipper.”

  She stomped her foot as I turned. I didn’t dare look back.

  I could hear her thump her hoof against her stable door and a line of other heads came out to watch me walk away. Ears flicked questions at me, but I couldn’t answer them.

  Mrs. Hanson was waiting outside, looking like the Michelin man in her down jacket.

  I hadn’t told her, but beneath the ceaseless instruction, her eyes missed nothing. She knew I was sick and getting worse.

  “Well,” she said, rocking on her heels. Her words seemed to run out and I didn’t trust my voice. She gave me a sudden hug. She smelled of horses and oats and bourbon.

  “Make sure he stays in prison,” she said.

  “I’ll do my part.” My voice cracked.

  “If afterwards…” she called out after me, paused, then shook her head like one of her horses. “Well, we’ll be here.”

  Back in town, I had a session scheduled with Scott. He didn’t like Mr. Scott apparently, so he was Scott now.

  I’d abandoned proceeding formally as a therapist. If he was suffering a delusion, I didn’t have the time to fix it, and I couldn’t charge him for session where I wanted information from him for myself.

  I’d made it clear we would do this one session at a time. He knew something about the previous me, or claimed he did. As long as he kept feeding me information, I’d keep meeting with him. It wasn’t as if any other attempt at finding out my past had worked.

  We’d have to meet at a hotel. I couldn’t use the office any more. Not that Frances’ partners meeting had gone the way she’d hoped. The practice partners hadn’t suspended me; they’d given me unconditional leave. According to the letter, I was officially expected to talk to them after the court case and tell them when I could return to work and discuss my taking Scott on privately.

  I knew I wouldn’t be able to, and I think they suspected it too. Frances would get her way eventually, but I appreciated the sensitive way the other partners had handled it.

  He was waiting for me in the old hotel opposite the Art Institute, which I had to admit suited him. They could have paid him to sit around and give the place that authentic, old-fashioned feel.

  We had our private meeting room and I placed the book on the table between us, like an agenda item.

  A waiter came in and left a pot of coffee, two sweet little cups and saucers and a plate of cookies.

  He poured. We both took milk. Yes, a cookie would be pleasant. Thank you.

  “You made it quite clear on the phone,” he said. “Your terms are that you require me to answer questions. Fire away.”

  “First, what are your terms?” I said. “Just so we can both be clear.”

  He took a sip of the coffee. “That you continue to speak with me. Nothing else.”

  I covered my surprise. He must want more than that.

  “All right,” I said, dropping that subject for now. Whatever he wanted from me, it would no doubt become clear in time. Once I explained to him that he couldn’t have it—whatever it was—he might stop answering my questions, so it was probably to my advantage that he wouldn’t say.

  “That photograph, in the book,” I said. “How do you explain the resemblance between you and the man in the picture?”

  He hadn’t planted the book on me when my eyes were closed. That was one of the first things I’d thought of, that it was all a con. But there were two more copies of the book on the shelves, and they both had the same photograph. No matter how much I studied it, looking for differences between that man and this one, I couldn’t find any.

  “Quite simply,” he said. “I’m the man in the photograph. I was there, in Cologny, in the summer of 1816, with Byron and Shelley.”

  It was impossible, of course. But he certainly believed it; his eyes were calm and steady. He showed no nervous tics, not in his movements or his voice.

  My password was just a coincidence. Hugely unlikely, but not impossible.

  My career is based on listening to people tell me what they think they want me to hear and understanding everything that is behind it. I’m good at spotting lies. Without modesty, it’s what makes me a better therapist than Frances. It’s what made me so sure that Zedous was a stone-cold killer and callous trafficker of women rather than someone who’d suffered temporary insanity brought on by the grief of his sainted mother’s death.

  “You absolutely believe you’re a vampire and you’re over two hundred years old,” I said.

  “No to the first and yes to the second. Vampires do not exist. I have walked through the winter sunlight to this meeting without shriveling up and blowing away. Obviously, I am not a vampire. But I am over two hundred years old.”

  “An immortal then.”

  “Merely very long-lived.”

  “But you used the phrase immortal before.” I wanted to find an inconsistency in his rationalization of what he was. It was the way I might be able to begin to unravel his delusion.

  “Yes. It’s not the right name though.”

  I remembered how he’d hesitated before when he’d said it.

  “What is?”

  “Athanate,” he said, pronouncing it slowly.

  I shivered. These old hotels were never able to keep the heat turned up high enough.

  “That sounds Greek,” I said to cover my reaction.

  “It is. It means undying, and it’s a better descriptive for the people who have, over the centuries, given rise to the myths of the vampire.”

  “Athanate, immortal, what would be the difference?”

  “It’s a philosophical difference, I suppose. Words are important to me, and I prefer to be precise with their use. For example, truth can be immortal. A truth now will still be a truth after mankind has gone. Athanate would not survive the loss of mankind.”

  “Why won’t they survive?”

  “Athanate require kin. That’s the name for those humans who decide to join the Athanate and provide them with the Blood they need to survive. Without kin, the Athanate die.”

  We’d launched too quickly into the main part of the session, where I listened to him explain his delusional world view, and so I hauled it back.

  “You also said, back at the bookstore, that you knew me. How?”

  He finished his coffee. He offered me a refill first, then poured a second cup for himself when I refused.

  Why is he playing for time?

  He was nervous now.

  He leaned forward and open
ed the book to the picture, turning it toward me. “Is there nothing there, Manda?” He spoke slowly. “Is that bright, inquisitive mind so occluded that you cannot recall anything from Cologny? Anything?” He was almost pleading.

  “Please don’t use that name,” I said, my voice trembling. “It’s not appropriate.”

  Why does it feel so painful?

  He dropped his eyes and closed the book gently. “You bought that infernal photographic contraption in Paris and had to rent that damned mule to haul it out onto the hill. And then you took that photograph with it, Amanda.”

  Chapter 6

  The call from Willard interrupted our second session, a few days later.

  I wasn’t happy. After the bombshells that he’d dropped on me last couple of times, I’d gotten this session much more under my control.

  I’d done it by ignoring the impossible. He wasn’t two hundred years old and neither was I. He wasn’t a vampire.

  He did seem familiar. Did that mean we’d met before I’d lost my memory? What if, for instance, we’d known each other, and had both come across the remarkable coincidence of someone looking identical to him in an old photo? I’d been so taken with it that I used the name of the village and the year as a password on my computer. He’d been so taken with it that he’d build an entire delusion around it.

  I was trying to find a way to break into that delusion, but it was so well-constructed that a distraction threatened to lose me an hour’s work.

  If we’d been in my office, Willard’s call would never have gotten past the front desk, but I didn’t have that support structure any more. And Willard wouldn’t call unless it was important.

  “Excuse me please, Scott.”

  He waved and set about getting more coffee, while I wandered to the far end of the meeting room and answered my cell.

  “Willard, good morning. I’m actually in a therapy session; can we keep this brief, please?” Small lie.

  “I thought you—no, never mind. I was just calling to warn you that Schaeffer’s put in a petition for deferment to the new year.”

  Willard didn’t want a deferment. No new evidence was likely to come to light, and any delays just provided more time for Zedous’ lawyer to muddy the waters or intimidate witnesses. But the prosecutor knew I was unwell. He was calling to find out if a delay would be good for my health.

  Time to disabuse him of that.

  I was acutely conscious that Scott might come back at any second. I lowered my voice.

  “Willard, listen to me. This is important. I’m sorry, I know I should have been more open with you, but the fact is, I’m not going to get better. I haven’t got the time to wait for the new year.”

  There was a shocked silence, then he said simply: “How long?”

  “A couple of months, probably less now. We need this finished by Christmas.” My breath caught in my throat. Saying the words aloud to someone else brought it into the room like a ghost.

  “Okay. This is…” he paused. “Leave it with me. I may need you available when we hear the petition for deferment. We can raise the issues of the threatening letters and vandalism of your car at the same time.”

  I knew where he was going.

  Get the judge on our side. Sympathy for the sick woman being intimidated.

  I hated the thought. Hated the thought of anyone knowing about me. I wanted nothing more than to hide myself away.

  But to nail Zedous? It was worth it.

  We ended the call.

  I turned to find that Scott had come back into the room, followed by more coffee.

  That’s what I needed. More coffee. Followed by more control of this session. There wasn’t time to feel sorry for myself.

  My approach was solid.

  There was a man in 1816 in Cologny, Switzerland, who looked exactly like Scott.

  Scott had come across that photograph and had been drawn by his delusion to rationalize how that could be him: he had to be long-lived; vampires are long-lived; vampires provably don’t exist; therefore he must be something like a vampire but different. The mind can do that in such a way the person can’t remember when they didn’t believe the story they’ve made up.

  Scott’s unconscious mind had urged him to seek help, and he’d picked my name off a list and come to the practice, only to have the delusional part of his mind simply absorb me into his delusion.

  Or he’d known me already. That was a more likely route for me to appear in his delusion.

  So far, so believable.

  But how could I rationalize my picking up that book by chance on the very day of meeting Scott?

  All I could do was a rework of the Sherlock Holmes method: forget the impossible—Scott being a vampire—and work on what was left, however improbable.

  It wasn’t a simple task.

  At the moment, my control of the session aside, it wasn’t going well.

  I didn’t let him talk much about my supposed role in his delusion because the more he talked about it, the firmer it might embed itself. It appeared that not only did he now think I’d been at Cologny, conveniently behind the camera so no image existed, but that we’d had a relationship.

  Again, that wasn’t that uncommon, but I felt no concern about his behavior. He’d continued to act the perfect gentleman and made no demands based on his belief that we’d been lovers. However much my traitorous body was disappointed by that, it was for the best.

  If only he wasn’t so damned hot. It wasn’t just the looks and the fine physique, the assured way he moved and spoke, it was the supreme confidence the man had. It was as if not making any demands on me was his way of telling me that he knew I’d go to him eventually.

  Idle sexual speculation aside, my primary aim was to get him to talk about the internal rationalizations he had made about his delusion in the hope that I’d find a weak point that couldn’t be explained. That would be my best hope, to get him to see it was impossible and for him to unravel it backwards from that point for himself.

  While we did that, I’d try and find out if he did genuinely know something about me prior to my memory loss.

  The possibility he did know me was nerve-wracking.

  Had we dated?

  Or was he far sicker than he appeared? Had he stalked me? Was he a psychopath?

  Assuming he wasn’t, then there was an even stranger emotion: did I want to know about my old self? Amanda No-past had become…comfortable over the year. Did I want to be reminded of whatever had been so traumatic I’d erased my entire memory?

  Whichever way it went, the big problem was time. Two months wasn’t enough. Sixty days. My heart missed a beat. That was all I had left.

  Last spring, when I’d first gone to Dr. Henderson, I’d known something was seriously wrong with me, but I’d been thinking in terms of the statistics of life expectancies with known and treatable diseases.

  In the summer, when my body responded to the transfusions, I remembered thinking that I might have five or ten years.

  The truth had turned out to be much less than the difference in those estimates and even that was nearly gone now, so I stopped thinking in months and converted it to days.

  I’d never spoken of my memory problems to Dr. Henderson, any more than I’d spoken of my health problems to the PI I hired to try to discover more about my past. The problems were separate and apparently insoluble.

  At the same time Dr. Henderson began frowning at the results of blood tests, the PI had come back scratching his head and telling me I was a ghost. I existed in records, but he hadn’t been able to find anyone who reliably remembered me before I turned up in Detroit. I’d been at Pitts, that much he’d confirmed, but even my tutors had been hard pressed to describe me.

  Scott cleared his throat, bringing me back from my recollections.

  Sixty days. I wasn’t working at the practice any more, and Willard wouldn’t need much for the court case except the last couple of days. Either I was going to put my whole heart into breaking this p
uzzle open, or I wasn’t going to do it at all.

  Deep breath.

  “We’re going to need more frequent sessions,” I said. “How are you fixed for time?”

  He smiled. It was like dawn breaking.

  Chapter 7

  It was very early in the morning, two weeks before Christmas, a few days from my appointment in court. I was sitting up in bed with my laptop. Sleep was impossible.

  There was something comforting about the barely audible clicking sounds of my keypad. Work distracted me. Work was better than crying and blowing my nose.

  Is this still work?

  I’d refused to see Scott professionally. As a therapist, I had to have the belief that I could resolve the patient’s problems, and I’d decided I didn’t have that belief. A combination of time available and personal involvement that made it impossible. Officially, this wasn’t work.

  I still hoped I could help him, even though I’d not managed to shake one single branch of the structure that comprised his delusion.

  On the personal side, without my job to go to, every day would have been more difficult to face without him to think about. We’d become friends in an odd sort of way. Outside of his central vampire delusion, he was as sane as any man. He was good to be with. It felt pleasant. Odd, but pleasant.

  It was a slow process. Every day another bombshell. I ended the sessions feeling shaken and he’d used that to control the flow of information he’d reveal at any one time.

  I did feel guilty that our conversations about his delusion seemed to feed it. I’d never caught him in an inconsistency, but as we talked more and more, his rationalization added level after level to this secret Athanate world of his mind. The whole thing had reached Byzantine levels of complexity.

  He’d incorporated me entirely into it.

  We’d been lovers since 1816, apparently. In keeping with the scandalous behavior of Byron and Shelley, we hadn’t been married. Not only that, we hadn’t been exclusive. We’d been a foursome. There was enough here to fuel several papers in the Journal of Psychiatry, given time I didn’t have and a stronger will to look at it.