Elizabeth shook her head.
“Peyton Mills, Scottie Ferguson, Sven Lindstrom, Jewel St. John, Bryce, of course, and Nina Alberghetti – and who knows how many more are involved. It’s hard to find someone in Hollywood who has reached their heights of power who didn’t make a pact with some sort of devil, real or imagined.”
“It’s hard for me to believe that Sven was involved with these people.”
“From what I have pieced together, Sven Lindstrom and Bryce Avondale were in a power struggle over Nina Alberghetti. Nina did not kill herself. Sven Lindstrom killed her, designing her accident to appear like suicide. It was only a matter of time before Bryce would seek his revenge. You barely escaped becoming a victim yourself that night. Bryce was still in the house when you discovered your husband’s body. Naturally he couldn’t trust that you might one day recover your memory and realize he was the one you saw hiding in the shadows.”
“The blur,” Elizabeth whispered. In her mind’s eyes she saw the blurred movement of a figure retreating into the shadows of the murder room, and as the veil of shock and fear was lifted, she at last saw the handsome features of Bryce Avondale revealed within the folds of the cowl as it fell away from his head.
“I’m very sorry, Elizabeth,” Dr. Abernathy said. “I’m sorry all this happened to you. I can’t image how this ordeal has affected you, but know I am here to help, in any way that I can, in any way at all.”
The back of his hand gently caressed her cheek as she tilted her face toward his. His touch was warm and reassuring.
Elizabeth smiled. “Thank you, Doctor,” she said and closed her eyes as his lips touched hers.
“Please,” he said, “call me Clark.”
Epilogue
Sven Lindstrom loathed making the monthly trip to the Abernathy Clinic. It looked more like a mausoleum than a hospital, a sprawling throwback from a forgotten era, perched on its cliff like some deformed ogre ready to pounce on the innocent passerby, gobble him up, and keep him inside its black belly with the rest of the lunatics. The place was downright creepy.
He supposed it was better than keeping his wife at the Los Angeles County Mental Hospital. He had spent time in County Mental, not as a patient of course, but for research for one of his films. The place was deplorable beyond imagination. The old Olivia de Havilland picture, The Snake Pit, didn’t begin to come close to depicting the true horrors that went on inside that place. Patients wandered the halls, screaming obscenities at the top of their lungs, wallowing in their own filth. The violent often tore loose from their straitjackets and attacked the nearest passerby. Arms were bitten, faces clawed, eyes gouged out, and worse, much worse. At least the Abernathy Clinic treated its patients with respect. Still, it made him think of something out of a Roger Corman picture, and he always expected to be greeted by a glassy eyed Vincent Price at the door.
No, the real reason he hated making the trip was the dread of not knowing what to expect when he saw his wife, if Abernathy would allow him to see her at all. He dutifully made the monthly trip, but it seemed her condition had only deteriorated during the past year.
He could not forget the day Abernathy had explained to him about the various multiples that fought for control of Elizabeth’s psyche. He had never really believed such things. He thought they were either some sort of elaborate fantasy role playing on the part of the patient or some invention on the part of the doctors. Elizabeth was an actress after all, although admittedly not a very good one. She had been cranking out hack work, a bizarre rendition of Hamlet that was geared more toward the sex and drugs crowd than the usual Shakespearean aficionados, and that last fiasco that found her playing a heroin addicted hooker. That was the one that really sent her over the edge. She came home from the set every night raving about how the part was going to earn her an Oscar. He didn’t have the heart to tell her it was nothing more than drive-in B movie fare.
But the day she had spoken to him in a male voice, the one the doctor said was called Chet, and spoke to him at length and with convincing detail about the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, he felt every hair stand up on his neck
All told, Abernathy said there was a cast of six fully realized multiples. Elizabeth believed, the doctor explained, that she was living with these others as a sort of long term guest at a psychiatric hotel. Abernathy himself did not seem as much disturbed by the comings and goings of this disparate cast of characters as he was by the paranoid plot lines that came along with their frequent appearances, fantasies involving hallucinogenic drugs, Nazi experimentation, and Satanic cults.
Sven couldn’t begin to comprehend how a mind could fracture into so many personalities, but neither could he fathom the workings of the mind that could so easily commit patricide.
He didn’t blame Elizabeth for killing her own father. No one did. He knew well before they were married that her father had molested her as a child, not once but often, and that he routinely invited his friends to share the carnal pleasures of his own daughter.
He could understand why she did it. He just couldn’t understand where the ability came from.
He had come home that night to find her wandering in a daze about the estate of their mansion nestled in the Hollywood Hills, oblivious to the fact that she was drenched head to toe in cold, black blood.
She lived in a state of denial from that moment all the way through the arraignment, and thank God his attorneys were able to prove that Elizabeth was incompetent to stand trial. Between lifelong commitment to a mental asylum or lifelong without possibility of parole in the women’s penitentiary, or worse, the death sentence, Sven knew which he would choose.
Looking back he realized he should have heeded the warning signs. One night he got a call from his neighbor, Marlon Brando, saying that Elizabeth was curled up beneath a palm tree near his swimming pool. When questioned, she had no recollection of how she got there, the same as when the cops brought her home after they picked her up wandering barefoot along Mulholland Drive. And once he had learned the characteristics of Elizabeth’s alters, the teen pop sensation, the best selling novelist, the fashion photographer, he realized that these personalities had been clawing their way to the surface long before she murdered her father.
Several months before, Sven’s signature consented to electroshock therapy, but as he learned during subsequent visits, the treatment only exacerbated Elizabeth’s condition.
Sitting among the grim faces of the other patients’ families in the waiting room always made him uncomfortable. The waiting room of any psychiatric ward is a dismal place. Being a private clinic, Sven hoped the majority of the patients here had visitors, which was more than could be said for those poor souls committed to County. Today his wait was mercifully short. The Hispanic nurse, - he always had such a hard time remembering her name, Ramirez? Sanchez? no, Valdez, that was it - came for him within moments of his arrival.
Sven wiped his damp palms on the thighs of his perfectly creased suit slacks as he followed Nurse Valdez into the bowels of the clinic, listening to the squeak of her rubber-soled shoes echoing in the empty hall. “How is she today, Nurse?” he asked.
Valdez shook her head. “I cannot say.” He wondered if she meant that she didn’t know the answer, or if she was forbidden to give him information about his wife.
She ushered him into an office not much larger than a broom closet. A small, squat window with cross hatched wire inside the glass looked out over the gray, mist covered ocean. Sven longed for the short L.A. winter to come swiftly to an end. These sorts of days depressed him. Still he would rather live here than anywhere else in the world. For all the insanity that went into the fabrication of the fantasy world of the movies, he wouldn’t trade his friends and his lifestyle for any other.
Sven drummed his fingers on the arms of the chair. He glanced about the room, eyes scanning the framed copy of Abernathy’s degree, studying the crystal paperweight that sat on one corner of the desk, marveling at how clean and spot
less everything was. Other that the paperweight and a goose-neck lamp, there was not even a speck of dust on the desktop.
A timid tap sounded at the door, and then Clark Abernathy stepped into the room. Others often commented about how much he and Clark Abernathy resembled each other. They were both tall and thin with close cropped white hair, but to Sven the resemblance was only superficial. Abernathy was sober and withdrawn, pale and bespectacled, and the only time he ever seemed to smile was when a sort of grimace came across his face, as though he were in pain. Sometimes Sven sensed it was a sort of predatory gesture, the way that animals have of baring their teeth at their enemies.
Sven stood and shook the doctor’s hand. The gesture was cold, perfunctory and swift.
“Well?” Sven asked. No matter how many times he had come here, no matter how many times the news had been the same, when it came down to the minute, he couldn’t help being hopeful for some glimmer of good news.
“There have been some improvements,” Abernathy said as he settled himself into the chair on the opposite side of his desk, “and some setbacks. About a week ago she began killing off her alters. It was most unusual. In all my years working with patients with this disorder I have never seen the dominant personality randomly destroy the others. Although I shouldn’t use the word ‘random.’ Your wife obviously had very specific intent, and she killed them off rather methodically. I am still baffled by her motivation, but at this point I am sure we will never learn why she did it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I. When I attempted to speak to Elizabeth about it she flew into a fit of unimaginable rage.”
“That doesn’t sound like Elizabeth.”
“This is true. We have never considered Elizabeth to be dangerous, but she has become so violent it takes five men to hold her down and wrestle her into a straitjacket.”
Sven wiped a hand over his face.
“The next day she lapsed into a state of acute schizophrenic catatonia.”
“Which means?”
“She becomes completely unresponsive. She does not speak. She does not hear. She cannot care for herself. She must be fed, bathed, dressed.”
“How long has she been like this?”
“Until yesterday when she lapsed into another of her violent outbursts. Even in the straitjacket and with a hundred milligrams of Thorazine it took hours for her to become subdued.
“And now?”
“She’s as docile as kitten.”
“And there’s nothing you can do for her?”
“There is always a new path to explore. You will, of course, appreciate the fact that I waited to consult with you before I began a new course of treatment.”
“Yes, of course,” said Sven. “Tell me what it is. Anything is worth a try, isn’t it?”
Abernathy bared his teeth. “There is a surgical procedure, somewhat antiquated and seldom used these days, that involves severing the connection to the prefrontal cortex, the anterior part of the frontal lobe of the brain.”
Sven shifted in his chair. “You’re talking about giving her a lobotomy.”
“I am.”
Poor Elizabeth. He didn’t want to lose her this way, but she was lost to him more than a year ago. Perhaps even before that. She might never have really been there to begin with.
“May I see her before I give my consent?”
Abernathy shrugged. “As you wish.”
Valdez came again and ushered Sven deeper into the hospital, down long, dimly lit corridors with yellowed linoleum flooring that echoed the sound of his footsteps as he was led past door after door. At last she stopped at one door and after peering inside, jangled her keys in the lock and stepped aside for Sven to enter.
Elizabeth sat on the edge of a small, neatly made-up bed, barely larger than a cot, staring blankly into space. Her jaw was slack and a bubble of drool had formed on her lower lip. Sven reached into the breast pocket of his blazer and took out a silk pocket square and dabbed at his wife’s lips.
She did not react to his touch. Her eyes made no movement toward his. She did not see. She did not blink. He sat beside her and lifted her limp hand in his. Her skin was cool and dry, lifeless, as though no blood beat in her veins. He opened his mouth to speak, but realized he did not know what to say. What could be said? He realized she was gone. Gone forever.
He would go to Abernathy, and he would sign the papers, and the doctor would pierce his wife’s brain with his knife.
Sven rose and tapped on the door. Valdez opened the door, waiting for him to step into the hallway.
He turned back and gave Elizabeth one last look.
Her face turned toward him. Her eyes narrowed as she met his gaze. Her lips parted, and she whispered a single word.
In the silent room it was a blast from a shotgun.
“Daddy.”
Acknowledgements
Thanks are in order to the people who read early drafts of Night of the Pentagram, for their feedback and suggestions, but most of all for their encouragement. Without them you would not be reading this book today. Thank you to Lenore Thomson Bentz, Sarah Davidson, Brandy Flack, Joseph Collier, Peggy Roche, and Joyce Roberts. Very special thanks to Lynn Schlegel, Dan Fulcher, Heidi Fulcher, and most of all to Lisa Greer for her friendship and for mentoring me through the process of final drafts and self-publishing.
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