by E. C. Bell
“Others?”
“Yes,” I yelled. “Others! Jesus, Doctor, all the patients knew about him! They warned me to keep away from him. But that’s next to impossible when he works here every frigging day!”
She took a deep breath, in and out. I recognized the method. She’d taught me to do that, so I could calm myself when I was having a panic attack. “I don’t want to talk about the others, right now,” she said. Her voice still sounded ragged-edge angry, and she took another quick breath in and out.
“I want to talk about you, and what happened in your room,” she continued. “You do understand that you attacked Mr. Rafferty almost exactly the same way you attacked Andrew Westwood. And that you have tried to convince the staff that it was an apparition that attacked Mr. Rafferty. Just like you tried to convince the police about Andrew Westwood.”
She’d talked to Nurse Willoughby.
“Maybe you should let the cops figure this out,” I said. “They seem to be more open-minded than you.”
“I understand that the police have already interrogated you,” she said. “Nurse Willoughby shouldn’t have called them.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“We handle assaults in-house,” she said shortly. “You can’t think you are the only one to attack an orderly.”
I glared at her. “Have you even looked at the video yet? It proves I did nothing. Nothing.”
“I haven’t seen the tape,” she said, “but I have seen your room. The aftermath of that—butchery. It proves you are out of control.”
My heart started to hammer. She had to watch the video, because it proved that I had not touched Rafferty once. What was going on?
“Nurse Willoughby saw it,” I said. “She knows the truth—”
“I know what she believes is the truth,” Parkerson said harshly. “But she’s deluding herself. There are rational explanations for what transpired. Rational, logical explanations that have nothing to do with ghosts attacking staff.” She snorted derisively. “Perhaps it’s time for Nurse Willoughby to take a few days off, to collect herself.”
“Good God,” I yelled. “Willoughby’s not deluded. It’s you! At least she’s open-minded enough to recognize something that she sees before her very eyes. And at least she’s willing to admit that Rafferty shouldn’t have been near me. Near any of us.” I snarled at her. “But you? You hear the truth about that bastard, and you don’t believe it. You leave him here, to victimize even more of us. And then you want to blame me when someone finally does something about him.”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” she said. “Natalie never complained to me about Mr. Rafferty bothering her. Not once. How was I to know—”
“Well, Phillipa Wonderly told you about him!” I yelled. “And what did you do? You said you’d handle it, but you did nothing until she killed herself to get away from the guy.”
Parkerson’s mouth worked, but she did not respond.
“That’s right,” I said. “I know all about her.”
“How do you know?” she asked, then shook her head. “You’re going to tell me that her ghost told you,” she said. “Right?”
“That’s right,” I said. “She did.”
She stared at me for a long, cold moment. “The staff is afraid to come near you,” she finally said. “Do you know that?”
“I didn’t do anything,” I said again. I was starting to feel completely hopeless. She believed what she believed, and she wasn’t going to let facts dissuade her for even a moment. “They don’t need to be afraid of me.”
“I disagree,” she said. “I’ve seen your room. I think the staff has every reason to be afraid of you.”
“They don’t!” I yelled. She jumped, like she thought that perhaps I was going to attack. “God,” I said. “It’s you. You’re afraid of me.”
“Schizophrenia can be a dangerous disorder,” she said. “Especially if the patients aren’t properly medicated.”
There it was. Schizophrenia, just like Sylvia Worth said. “You can’t possibly believe that I’m schizophrenic,” I said. I dug through my memory desperately trying to remember something—anything—that I’d read about the disorder. “It starts when people are in their teens, doesn’t it? I’m way past that.”
“When did you start seeing these ghosts you claim you can see?” she asked. “When did you start talking to them?”
I was much younger than my teens when I first started interacting with ghosts, but I didn’t think that would make her feel less inclined to call me schizophrenic.
“So what?” I said.
“Having delusions about having the ability to see ghosts is a big indicator,” she said. “As are the hallucinations you’ve been having. This has been happening to you far longer than six months. Also, your insomnia. We’ve been trying to deal with that, but so far, I have not seen any appreciable improvement. And the staff has noted that sometimes, you have difficulty with your speech.”
I frowned. “I don’t have problems speaking,” I said. “Unless you mean that what I say gets me in trouble.”
“Your speech sometimes becomes disorganized,” she said. “As though you’re having difficulty following the conversation.”
I suspected that happened when I was trying to carry on one of those horrible three-way conversations when a chatty ghost was in the room, but I didn’t enlighten her. I figured that would just prove to her that her stupid list was right.
“We have found nothing else—no other mental health issue, medical issue, or addiction issue, that would produce this diagnosis. You understand?”
My heart jumped in my chest as she spoke. Man, I could see why she’d think she was on the right track. If you didn’t believe in ghosts, I would look schizophrenic. And she didn’t believe.
“I’m sorry to talk to you about the results of your evaluation like this, but, Marie, you’ve seriously injured two men in less than two weeks. You can’t be allowed out of here, not until we have your medication regimen established and you are under control. You can understand that, can’t you?”
“I don’t know how to convince you, but ghosts are real,” I said. “They’re real. Go watch the video feed, and you’ll see. I didn’t do that to Rafferty. It was Phillipa. She killed herself, because of him. When he attacked me last night, she attacked him.”
“That’s all terribly convenient, now isn’t it?” Parkerson said.
“What?”
“An apparition who has an axe to grind shows up just when Mr. Rafferty is allegedly attacking you. And saves you, by ripping the poor man apart.”
I almost laughed. “There was nothing convenient about that, at all, trust me,” I said. “I could have done without all the bloodshed. All I wanted was for him to leave me alone. But Phillipa had other ideas. And you know what that means, don’t you?”
“What?”
“It means you have a bigger problem in this place than me,” I said.
“And what is that?” she asked.
“You have a poltergeist who is bent on revenge,” I said. “And I don’t think she is going to stop at Rafferty. She doesn’t want to leave. Doesn’t want to move on. She wants to stay and take over the place.”
“Can you even hear yourself?” Dr. Parkerson asked. “You are actually expecting me to believe that there is a poltergeist in the hospital attacking people? Thinking about taking over the hospital?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t expect you to believe anything. But I’m telling you facts, Dr. Parkerson. Whether you want to believe or not, you have a poltergeist, and she’s going to keep on hurting the people here until I figure out a way to make her stop.”
She stared at me for a long moment, then shook her head, looking infinitely sad and tired. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have seen the signs before the first attack. I could have helped you before this all got so out of control.”
Exhaustion washed over me. There was nothing I could say that would convince her. Nothing.
>
“Just watch the video,” I said, even though I knew it would do no good, either. “Then you’ll see.”
“The video will prove nothing,” Parkerson said. “And I can’t let you back out in the world believing what you believe. In order to do this, I’ll be changing your medication. It’s time for you to face reality, Marie. You’ve been living in a fictional world, invented by your mother and maintained by your father and your boyfriend and, it seems, every other person around you. It appears that I’m the only person you have in your life who wants to see you well, and I’m going to help you back to reality, before it’s too late.”
And then, she was gone. Shortly after, two orderlies entered my room. “It’s med time,” one of them said, and handed me the container filled to brim, it seemed.
I recognized all of the pills but two. However, the good doctor had mentioned changing my meds, now hadn’t she?
I poured them into my hand and stared at them—no pink pill, I noticed—then, I dropped them onto the floor. “I’m not taking these,” I said. “Not until Parkerson tells me what they are.”
“No can do,” he said, and signalled to his cohort, who knocked me to the ground so quickly I had no time to react. Then, they roughly fed me the handful of pills.
“Stop!” I cried. “Don’t do this, please!”
I tried to fight them off, but it didn’t do me a bit of good, of course. Even though I managed to get a couple of good shots in, bloodying the nose of one of them, I was soon choking down the pills—choking on the pills—until one of them pressed a glass to my lips.
“Drink,” he said, so I did, because I honestly was afraid I’d choke to death, and finally the pills were down and I was starting my new drug regimen, just like the doctor ordered.
They left me in a heap on the floor and locked the door on me, but I didn’t cry. Not this time. No way. No way in the world. I was too angry for that.
There was only one way I would be able to stop her from ruining my life. I had to convince her that ghosts were real, and the only way I was going to be able to do that was if she dealt with one, up close and personal. That meant a poltergeist, and lucky me, I had two at my disposal.
Phillipa was too unstable, but Jasper wasn’t. And he’d do anything for me. I decided it was time to call in a small favour and turn Jasper of the rolling pencil loose on the good doctor. Then we’d see what she thought about me and my delusions.
Jasper:
Marie’s Request
I FOUND MARIE a couple of hours later, back in her room, picking at a meal from a tray sitting on her bedside table. She looked white and shaky and wasn’t eating the food so much as moving it around on her plate.
“How you feeling?” I’d made a decision about the conversation we’d had, and I wanted to tell her all about that but I realized she’d been through more than I had, lately, and maybe needed a little TLC. Now that I was able to interact with the living world, I was happy to supply it to her. “Want a back rub or something?”
I wasn’t sure I could actually do that, but I reached out to see if I could. She flinched away from me and shook her head. “Don’t,” she said. “Parkerson changed my meds, and I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. For all I know, I could turn into a ghost black hole, and have all of you sucked into my soul, forever and ever.”
I pulled my hand away, because, like I said, I had made a decision about my future, and it definitely didn’t involve being sucked into someone else’s soul—even someone as cute as Marie. “That can’t actually happen, can it?” I asked. “I mean, really?”
“How the hell would I know?” she replied. “This stuff is messing with my head so much, I don’t have a clue what the side effects will be.”
I laughed a little, even though it wasn’t funny. She was right. Those drugs had been messing with her big time, which had helped me learn a second language, but didn’t seem to be doing much for her besides giving her a really messed up mind and even worse nightmares.
“I wish there was something I could do,” I said. “But we both know that’s not possible. As a matter of fact, I’ve made up my mind. You know, about those choices you said I had.”
Yeah, I was pushing the conversation over to me, in spite of the fact that Marie was in some kind of crisis.
“What?” she said, and for a second I was afraid that the drugs had taken away her ability to hear me again.
“I said I’ve made a decision,” I said. “Can you hear me?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I can. Sort of. You sound like you’re standing in a really big, really echoey cave.”
“At least you can hear me,” I said, feeling very much relieved. “Because I realized that I don’t want to be like Phillipa.”
“Oh,” she said, and to my surprise, she looked disappointed.
“Didn’t you tell me that she’d picked wrong?” I asked and felt a prickle of anger winding through me. She’d told me to make my own decision. What was wrong with her?
“Well. I know I told you Phillipa is wrong about some things,” she said. “But maybe let’s put a pin in all that for a while. Because there’s something I really need you to do for me.”
“What’s that?” I asked. Now, usually when Marie asked me to do something, I was all “Yes ma’am, I’d love to ma’am,” but there was something about the way she was looking at me, out of the corner of her eye like she couldn’t quite convince herself to look at me full on, that made me wish I was somewhere else. Anywhere else, really.
“I need you to help me with a problem I have,” she said. She looked down at her plate and stirred whatever was on it into grey glue.
“What’s that?” I asked. I hoped it didn’t have anything to do with bringing Phillipa back to her, because Phillipa was scary right now and I didn’t want to be near her.
“I want you to haunt Dr. Parkerson,” she said. “Just a little bit. Just enough for her to realize that when I talk about ghosts, I’m telling the truth.”
“You want me to haunt your psychiatrist?” I asked.
“Our psychiatrist,” she said. “She didn’t do you much good, as far as I’m concerned, and she’s about to make the worst decision of her life concerning me. So, if you’d just follow her around for a while. Maybe move things on her desk, or I don’t know, leave her a note, maybe it would stop her.”
She sighed and dropped her spork into the glue in the bottom of her bowl, and then wiped tears I hadn’t noticed from her eyes. “It couldn’t hurt, anyway.”
“But what about me?” I asked. “I don’t want to turn out like Phillipa.”
“You won’t, if you just do it once or twice,” she said. “You’ll be OK.”
For the first time ever, I saw that she was lying to me. She wasn’t thinking about my welfare or anything. She was just thinking about herself. About what I could do for her, to make her life better.
It reminded me of my mother, to be honest, and I felt anger wind through me until the room was awash in red. Marie didn’t react. She couldn’t see it. But I could.
“Oh,” I said. I clenched my hands and lightning leaped from them and zigzagged across the room to the wall and down. “I must have misunderstood.”
“Yeah, maybe you did,” she said. “Or maybe I wasn’t clear.”
“Maybe you weren’t.”
“So, will you?” she asked. “Help me? You only have to do it once. Just to make her believe in ghosts, so I can get out of here?”
“Didn’t you say that you were going to help me figure out who is killing the patients before you left?” I asked. “Or did I misunderstand that, too?”
She looked at me, finally, and I thought I saw something flicker through her eyes. Maybe it was fear, or maybe it was guilt. I couldn’t tell. The red of my anger was washing out the room so that none of her colours came through at all.
“I did say that, yes,” she said. “But that was before Parkerson said she was going to do everything she could to keep me here for the rest of my
life.”
Finally, I could see the yellow of her fear. It was wound through with purple, the colour of depression, and was really quite pretty until I realized that depression wasn’t just sadness. It went much further than that, and Dr. Parkerson was pushing her there. Just the way she had me.
“Wait,” I said. “Did she give you the ‘I’m doing this for your own good’ talk?”
“Yes,” she said. “She’s convinced I’m schizophrenic, because I can talk to all of you.”
That stopped me, because that had been Dr. Parkerson’s diagnosis for me, too. Just because I could see the emotional colours of everybody around me.
“I’m sorry, Jasper,” she’d said. “But the evidence is irrefutable. I’ve already told your mother, and she agrees, the best thing for you is to stay here until you’ve stabilized.”
Apparently, I never stabilized, because this was where I died, years after I heard those words.
She needed to be taught a lesson. For Marie, and for me.
“Count me in,” I said.
A tear filled her eye, and then spilled down her cheek. She wiped at it absently. “Are you sure?” she said.
“Absolutely,” I replied. “Bitch has to be taught a lesson, now doesn’t she?”
“Yes,” Marie said. “Yes, she does.”
I WENT TO the pasture to practice, but my anger leaked out of me the further I got away from Marie. By the time I stood in the middle of the pasture, most of what I felt was befuddlement and fear.
I didn’t want to haunt the doctor. Really, I didn’t want to haunt anyone. It had been pretty cool to move the pencil, but what if I did what Marie asked and turned like Phillipa? What she’d done to Rafferty was horrible. I didn’t want to do anything like that, to the doctor or anybody else. I didn’t want to be like that. Like her.
Marie hadn’t said I would turn bad, but she hadn’t said I wouldn’t. And she was lying about something. That, I knew for sure.
What was I going to do? I didn’t want to let Marie down, I didn’t want to make Dr. Parkerson angry, and I didn’t want to turn bad. I needed help, so I decided my best bet was to go to the group and get advice from them.