Circe

by Jessica Penot

  Pria and I cleaned up quickly and fell into bed. I slept deeply with the liquor as my sedative. I woke up around 3 a.m. to the sound of the wind catching the branches of the old oaks above me. All the windows were open and the room was cold. I closed the windows and went to look for Pria. My head pounded with the excess alcohol I had drunk and my vision was still a little blurry.

  I found Pria sitting in the living room with her knees drawn up to her chin. The dog was sitting next to her on the floor, licking her hand. She was staring fixedly at nothing and there was a puddle of blood at her feet.

  “My God Pria!” I yelled. “What happened?” I pulled her up and began to look for the source of the blood. I lifted up her night gown to find her belly covered in what looked like cat scratches. “What happened? What are you doing?”

  She looked at me. “I thought I was still asleep. I’m sorry.”

  “What happened to your belly?”

  She looked down at her stomach and put her hand on the open wounds in disbelief. “I thought it was a dream.”

  “What?”

  “The creature. It was tiny like a cat. I woke up and it was on our bed. I got up to throw it out. I didn’t know what it was and it did this. I must have been still partly asleep. It was probably a cat. It couldn’t have been what I thought it was. It was angry.”

  I took her to the bathroom and carefully cleaned all of her wounds. I covered them in bandages and kissed each one. “It must have been a stray cat,” Pria whispered. “I opened the windows because I was hot and it must have come in through the windows.”

  I nodded. The wounds almost looked self-inflicted, but the claw marks were too small and close together. I had seen plenty of self inflicted scratches at Circe and none of them looked anything like the wounds on my wife. They were sharp and deep, done by an animal. An animal with terrible strength. Memories of old dreams crept up over my senses, filling me with irrational dread. I could still remember Circe standing in my kitchen with her familiar on the counter before me. The memories were so vivid they seemed more like flashbacks, like I was the victim of some horrible crime whose images couldn’t be erased from my mind. I shivered. I could almost see the beast on the bathroom floor, clawing the tile and writhing with some feline, serpentine hunger that came from someplace more basic than its gut. It looked up at me from the shadows, calling its master with its howl. I blinked, dispelling the memory and returning my attention to my mangled wife.

  I comforted my wife with all of the sweetest lies. I told her that I had seen a stray cat in the yard just yesterday. I told her the dog had barked at it for over an hour. I smiled as I told her I had left a crust of a sandwich on the nightstand before I went to bed. I explained to her how it must have been the food that lured the beast in. My very disposition was a lie. I covered fear with pretty smiles and falsehoods so elegant they lingered in the air like a kind of symphony. I did not tell her I had seen the beast. I wouldn’t have even known how.

  The hospital, Circe, seemed colder to me when I was at work. All the halls felt longer and the old hospital loomed over my office window like a ghost, condemning me for my sins. Things began to change for me. Everything should have been better. Dr. Donalds was an intelligent and supportive supervisor. He was always willing to spend extra time with me. He always wanted to help me learn and grow. He came to all the treatment planning meetings and took me to court with him. He wanted to model what it was to be a good therapist.

  Yet, despite the light shining on my life, I was lost in the dark. I was haunted by odd hallucinations. Things crept out of the shadows. The walls whispered. Patients I had never met called my name. I pushed these images to the back of my mind. I tried to ignore them, but they became intrusive thoughts that would torment me at the most inopportune moments. I would be interviewing a patient, and Circe would stand in the corner behind him, unleashing her hoard of roaches upon him. The cat demon that had so brutally attacked Pria would slide in between my legs and out a window. Circe would tell me that the storm was coming. Over and over again the same things. The storm was coming. I clutched my head and gritted my teeth, but C.R.C. became a haunted house for me and my carefully constructed mask began to chip away.

  And always there was Jane. She’d sit with me at lunch. She’d chat idly with me about Roy. She found me whenever I was alone and told me about C.R.C. She smiled as she told me about herself. She told me she had been a witch and that she had tried to use magic to seduce the old doctor. She laughed as she said she killed five patients. She said she had painted the floor with their blood. No one cared, she said. No one cared.

  No matter how many weeks I spent pretending that life was normal it had become impossible. Pria and I both knew it. We were mimes mimicking the motions of life with none of the sound. We painted our faces and pretended, but all those who observed us knew we were only mimes. Everyone asked us if we were alright. Everyone asked us how the babies were. Concerned looks followed us everywhere. We held each other’s hands in the evening, but our hands were cold and we found no words. Night after night, I found Pria sitting up alone in the living room with the dog. She spoke of the cat. She was afraid to sleep in our bed. She didn’t want the cat to come back. Finally, we slept on the floor in the living room. Still, we both found our dreams too vivid to escape. We both had a hard time staying asleep until we’d surrender to our fear and sit up watching bad movies and infomercials.

  No matter how bad home was, work was always worse. I lost countless reports as the electricity flickered on and off in my office, erasing my hard drive. The voices moved from subtle whispers to brutal screams. Sometimes I even found myself answering them. I would tell them to be quiet, but they never heard me.

  Jane would sit with me. She’d rest her head on my shoulder. I ignored her. I called her a hallucination. She whispered secrets in my ears. She told me that the Fort had been set on fire by a Comanche witch doctor who said that the soil was evil. The fire didn’t take. The wind blew it out and the witch doctor was hanged. She said, “I am the voice that is great within in you. I am the voice within all of you.” She said it with a purr. “I am many. I am legion. I am Circe.”

  Jane. Jane. Her stories became longer and more enthralling. Her histories were far more detailed than Cassie’s. Her whispers were like caresses. She smiled and told me about murdered children and pregnant inmates, raped by orderlies. The stories colored my days until all I could hear was Jane. She told me about Roy. She told me how she couldn’t wait to hold him, to make him hers. He had brought her back to her beloved. He had brought her back to Caal. She said she had waited so long. She had slept so long.

  “I like it here,” Jane said. “I like the sunshine. I’ll never leave. This is my home. I won’t go back.”

  I turned to her and looked at her with tired eyes. “Go back where?”

  Jane only smiled. “You should come with us. You can live forever here. Live with us in the pretty sun.”

  The more I saw of Jane the worse my episodes became. I heard voices. Swarms of cockroaches would cover me while I interviewed patients. I would see Circe in the shadows, fetid and monstrous. There seemed to be nothing I could do to stop the hallucinations, but I couldn’t admit to myself that I was losing my mind.

  One of the worst of my new episodes happened while I was in treatment planning. Dr. Donalds was relaying the rather banal history of a typical bipolar patient to a room full of staff when the cat creature leapt up onto the window sill behind the patient. It opened its twisted bifurcated jaw and grinned at me. I blinked twice, attempting to dispel the hallucination, but the creature was only moving closer. Its tiny claws dug into the table as it crept towards me, hissing and crying at the same time. I sat paralyzed, afraid to reveal my weakness to the crowded room, but unable to escape from the fear that was taunting me.

  My heart crept into my throat. My pupils dilated. All sensation, all feeling, even my breath was lost in the creature that was pulling its rancid carcass towards me. I flinched. I moved
backwards involuntarily. The scream was lodged in my throat. I told myself not to scream. If I screamed they would know. They would know that I was as sick as Roy. But the creature kept moving closer. I could almost feel it. There were tears in my eyes..

  “Dr. Black? Dr. Black?” I could hear Dr. Donalds calling my name. Finally I tore my eyes from the cat and looked at him. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  “Dr. Black? Are you okay?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry. I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

  The thing was practically on my lap. I could feel the saliva from its open mouth on my leg. I shook my head again. Help me! I screamed in my head. Make it stop! There was no answer. Only the creature sitting on my lap. The walls bent and moaned. My vision blurred. I was insane. I had to be insane.

  “Dr. Black, do you have anything to add on the Smith case? You did the initial assessment, didn’t you?”

  I couldn’t think. “I’m sorry,” I responded, transfixed by the demon sneering at me. “I have to go. I think I have a touch of the stomach flu.” I knocked over my chair as I ran. I bumped into Dr. Donalds. I just had to get away. Reason was gone.

  I ran out of the room and into the bathroom. I splashed water on my face and tried to recover some semblance of composure. Dr. Donalds came in behind me.

  “Are you okay, Eric?” he asked.

  I looked down into his warm and concerned eyes and shook my head. I couldn’t find words. I tried a relaxation technique I had learned in graduate school. I closed my eyes and counted slowly to ten. I breathed steadily in and out. My heart rate returned to normal. My sympathetic nervous system shut down. I steadied myself and thought of the words I needed to say to appear normal. I needed to appear normal.

  “I’m so sorry. I’m letting the entire team down. Things have been rough for me lately, you know, and I really have been quite sick.”

  “Why don’t you take a sick day?”

  “I’ve taken too many already and Pria is going to need me. She’s having twins and this has been a rough pregnancy. God only knows how many days I’m going to need as she gets further along.”

  “You don’t look so good, son. Truth be told, I’ve seen patients before they killed themselves who looked better than you. You want to talk about it?”

  I shook my head. “I’m losing my mind,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I keep having these horrible hallucinations. I can’t shake them. I’m gonna be in here soon, one of the patients.”

  “No. I think you’re just having some kind of nervous attack. Too much stress. I’ll talk to Bob and see if I can get you some meds. Just some stuff to calm you down, and then I want you to go home. You’re no good to anyone like this. You’re a mess.”

  “Okay.”

  Dr. Donalds walked me back up to our office and gave me a glass of water. He opened a window and gave me fifteen or twenty minutes to myself. I took the two bottles of pills he gave me eagerly and took one from each bottle. I began to shake. I was losing my mind. I knew I had to be losing my mind. I wanted to cry, but my face was hard. So I just sat there staring out at the old hospital building with her glorious red brick.

  Pria was at work when I got home, so I climbed into bed and pulled the covers over my head. The medicine knocked me out. I slept well into the evening. It was a deep dreamless sleep, unmarred by visions or nightmares. I woke up with my face stuck to the pillow. I had been drooling and my nose had run. I cleaned myself up and walked into the living room.

  Pria was home. She was sitting on the couch talking with her sister Rachel. The dog was sitting at her feet. Rachel smiled at me as I walked in, but Pria had been crying. Too many tears. I went back to bed. What else could I do? Pria was surrounded by family who would support her. I had only myself.

  Time crept by. Work took much longer than it should have. Everything seemed more tedious than it had ever been before. Every shadow that caught my eye grew into something monstrous. I spent most of my time pretending to be the man I once was. The days were long and the work was hard. On Tuesday, I called Pria at work several times, only to be confronted by her angry receptionist. She was busy. She’d call me back when she was free. After the fifth call, I gave up. I had only myself to rely on.

  That day was the longest I had spent at the old fort. I left out the front gate that evening. I wandered through the courtyard and gazed up at the old hospital, wondering why they had never torn it down. The white walls of the old fort glistened in the twilight, and the ancient archway looked more like a relic of a forgotten dream than the gateway to a modern hospital. The peacock sat on top of the arch, displaying its plumage for no one.

  I jumped out of my skin when Mr. Smith put his hand on my shoulder. At first I wasn’t sure who he was, and then I remembered I had been in his treatment planning meeting when I had my nervous breakdown. I smiled at him warmly.

  “How can I help you, Mr. Smith? I apologize for leaving your treatment planning so abruptly. I’ve had a touch of the stomach flu.”

  “You saw it.” He said this with the distinct slur he had acquired from Korsacoff’s syndrome. He also suffered from Bipolar I disorder and tended to go on mad rampages, spending all his money and destroying anything that got in his way.

  “Saw what?”

  “The cat. Circe’s cat. I saw you see it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Dr. Black. Dr. Black. You pretend, but we know. You saw it.”

  I gave in to whatever dark forces had been compelling me since the moment Cassie had carried me into her subterranean hell. “Yes. I saw it.”

  “I’m not crazy. I’m fucked up, but this place is cursed. I been here before and I got better, but now everybody’s sayin’ that there is something in the walls and ain’t no one gonna believe us, but this place is alive.”

  I nodded. “Don’t worry,” I said. “You’re going to leave soon. The social worker has got a place all lined up for you.”

  “It don’t matter. We all hear it at night and it says the same thing. The storm is comin’ and there ain’t no place any of us can hide.”’

  “You’ll be safe. I promise.”

  “Not you.”

  “I know.”

  I wandered through the white gate, dismissing Mr. Smith like another part of my dream. The peacock loomed over me in the shadows, watching me wander into the darkness and fog of the winter night. I walked through the moist grass around the back of Circe. I pulled my fingers along the chipped paint of the old fortress, trying to feel what Cassie felt when she touched its mortar. I was searching for some sense of history. I thought maybe I could see the ghosts of the long dead soldiers of Fort Laconce or of the slaughtered Indians who came before. I tried to envision the tortured black patients who came long before civil rights, but all I found was paint beneath my fingernails and dirt on my shoes.

  I pushed my forehead against the wall and whispered to the unseen higher being everyone else prayed to. I called him by all his names and asked him to forgive me for whatever sins against God or nature I had committed. Only the wind answered me. I turned to look at the large oaks looming in the darkness, their branches stretching out to heaven. I could hear her voice in the darkness.

  I turned and the walls themselves opened up in front of me. A knot of maggots and roaches swam out of the rancid hole that opened before me like torn flesh bleeding onto the earth. Black tentacles spread out from the hole like entrails opening up and spitting out the demon. She faced me boldly now. She didn’t hide in the shadows. She crept towards me on bloodied claws, dripping afterbirth behind her. Her womb held the screaming remains of those she had devoured. She stood before me, naked and repugnant.

  “Eric,” she called to me. “Join us.”

  I shivered and ran towards the employee parking lot. Andy and John were waiting by John’s car, looking bewildered. I ran to them, flushed and breathless, and pushed my way into the back seat without so much as a hello. I had given up on pretense and surrendered
to the two possibilities of my life. I was either suffering from some psychotic disorder, or I was being tormented by some otherworldly spirit. Either possibility was radical and tragic. I didn’t want to be that person. I didn’t want to be Mr. Nicca babbling about the demons beneath his bed and I certainly didn’t want to be Cassie dancing for the dead in a fetid tomb.

  Andy and John got in the car. “What the hell?” Andy said. “What are you running from?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head.

  “You’re running from something,” John said.

  “I’ve lost my mind.”

  “How so?” Andy’s voice was as much curious as empathetic.

  I opened my mouth and a flood poured out with tears and blood and all the hatred I could muster for Cassie. These were two people I could hardly bear to look at six months ago and now they seemed like my best friends. They listened attentively and nodded at the appropriate moments. Andy whispered exclamations like “Holy shit,” or “What the fuck,” and John just shook his head and wrinkled his forehead. When I was done, I talked about the cat, the creature that had assaulted my wife. I told them I knew I was either mad or haunted, and either way I could no longer be the man I once thought I was.

  Andy crawled into the back seat with me and hugged me. I gave into her warm embrace and her sympathy. “You’re not crazy,” she whispered. “Tell him. Tell him what you told me, John. I thought John had completely gone off his rocker when he told me this story. I guess it was about two weeks ago. But I’ve been listening to the patients differently since then and even though they are delusional, they are all telling the same story. What kind of coincidence does that have to be?”

  “I’m a little slow,” John said. “I don’t mean I’m stupid. I just always take a little longer than anybody else to get my work done. It makes my days long, but I think I’m considerate and compassionate and I just always give the patients a little more time. So, I was late, as always, two Fridays ago. I can’t keep up with all of Cassie’s stuff at my pace so I was the only professional left in the hospital, besides the nurses and what not, at like, I don’t know, ten at night. I was going up to check on Roy because he’s been having a real tough time lately. We’ve had him on and off all different kinds of meds and his hallucinations are getting worse and worse. I thought, I’m here in any case, I might as well go up and make sure he’s not having trouble sleeping. When I went up there, he was gone. And you know that doesn’t make any sense because that man is never supposed to leave the third floor for any reason. He’s dangerous. So I started looking around and I saw Cassie and him walking out in the dark. I followed them. I don’t know why. I should have just called security. In retrospect, that was the dumbest thing I could have done, but hindsight is twenty-twenty right? So I followed them into the old abandoned acute ward, the same one she took you to. She didn’t go into a basement or anything, but they were definitely having sex on the gurney. You know how Roy’s delusions focus on some demon he summoned that forced him to kill his family? Well, she was begging him to summon it again. I could hear her saying call Cask or Call or whatever his name is as they were fucking. I didn’t know what the hell to do, so I went back to the office and called Andy. I don’t think she believed me, but since then we’ve been asking around and a lot of the male patients claim they’ve had sex with her in that building. Some of them even describe that room in the basement. One female patient even claims that she cut her arm and used her blood in some ritual and a lot of the male patients claim that various fluids were used in some dark Mass too. Normally we’d blow it off as delusion, but it’s all too coincidental.”