Beauty vs. the Beast

by M. J. Rodgers

  “Well, before I go trekking into the unknown, I need some logic under my feet. Where was this Roy personality when Lee was being abused?”

  “Lee wasn’t being abused. Lee was tucked away in a mental attic, sleeping and watching the world pass by, but not affected by it or interacting with it, remember?”

  Kay shook her head as though trying to get her disjointed thoughts to settle into place. “Right. I forgot. Lee grew up in a mental attic. So it was Roy who took the abuse, right?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “It’s time for you to see the next tape. This is Roy and his first memories. It might help you to understand what I have to tell you.”

  * * *

  ROY FLOATED UP to the ceiling of the shed, crossed his legs and lit a cigarette. He inhaled deeply and then blew out two perfect smoke rings. They wobbled through the air, expanding and dissipating until they broke apart and drifted away.

  Finally, that damn, whiny kid had shut up. About time. His ears were still ringing from the kid’s clamoring every night. He was getting really tired of that wimpy little brat.

  The kid was just a skinny, runny-nosed, pain in the butt. He deserved everything he got. His old lady, too, for that matter. What a pair of losers. He didn’t know why he wasted his time with them.

  If she ever opened her yap again about his cigarette ashes burning holes in the carpet or starting fires in the bedding, he’d knock the rest of her teeth out.

  He took another drag on his cigarette and entertained himself by blowing some more smoke rings. These spurted out with such momentum, they smashed into a spiderweb in the shed’s corner.

  He watched the spider come running out, all eight legs spinning. It spewed out a thin thread and began to rappel itself to the safety of the earthen floor.

  Roy’s tight lips drew down into a sneer. He held out the lit end of his cigarette to burn the spider’s slim lifeline.

  “You nonsmokers are really starting to piss me off.”

  As the spider fell, Roy began to laugh, a hollow, tuneless bellow that ricocheted off the ceiling until it totally filled the shed.

  Chapter Six

  “Damian, what was that all about?” Kay asked.

  “Roy’s earliest memories.”

  “But his descriptions sounded so bizarre, particularly that thing with the cigarette rings and the spider. Were they drug-induced or alcoholic hallucinations?”

  “No.”

  “Then what in heaven’s name were they?”

  “Kay, from the very beginning of his existence, Roy floated on a mental ceiling, generally with a cigarette in one hand, sometimes a drink in the other.”

  “He was smoking and drinking? On a ceiling? At two years old?”

  “I know it sounds strange. But, remember, all these things were happening in his head and perfectly real to him. Roy knew himself to be an adult. He dissociated himself from the child’s body when it was subjected to abuse and lived a separate life from it.”

  “Floating on a ceiling. Good Lord. Who would believe this?”

  “Maybe only a psychologist trained in multiple personalities, or other multiples who have experienced similarly strange states of altered awareness.”

  “I know you warned me I might not understand what I was seeing, but I never expected...this. There has to be some logic here somewhere. Damn, I’m a lawyer. Logic is what I live by.”

  “The human mind is not always logical, Kay. In my field, there aren’t hard-and-fast rules to go on a lot of times.”

  “Then what do you go on?”

  “At times simply on what I hope to be right. Multiples have performed what is tantamount to mental miracles to survive horrendous childhood abuse. What a psychologist does to treat these patients sometimes seems more like voodoo than science.”

  She shook her head. “Having to cope with such illogic and imprecision must drive you crazy.”

  “Crazy?” He smiled. “On the contrary. It’s what keeps me sane.”

  She looked at him for a long moment with other questions in her eyes that had nothing to do with psychology or the case, and everything to do with being a woman thoroughly intrigued by the man she was with.

  Damian had always known he could control himself around a woman. But looking into those blueberry eyes filled with so much candid and curious interest, inhaling the sweet scent of her skin and hair and feeling his body’s immediate and urgent arousal, he wondered if he’d been kidding himself. His stomach muscles tightened involuntarily as a hot poker of desire stabbed through him.

  He deliberately stopped playing with her silky honey-gold hair and leaned back. He harshly reminded himself that she was off limits, repeating just that several times in rapid succession.

  Finally, she looked away. He breathed a sigh of both relief and profound regret.

  “All right, answer me this, Damian. If Lee was in his mental attic and Roy was smoking and drinking up on his mental ceiling, who was conscious in the child’s body as it was being abused?”

  “No one.”

  “No one? How can that be possible?”

  “Roy was the caretaker of the child’s body when it was growing up. This arrangement worked because the abuse didn’t bother him as he never accepted it as happening to him. He floated up on his mental ceiling and the child’s small body went numb.”

  “Leaving no personality to have to endure the pain?”

  “That’s right. Although, as you may have surmised from his comments during the sessions, Roy was plagued by the echoes of the child’s pain.”

  “You mean that crying he spoke of?”

  “Yes.”

  “How could he hear crying from pain that wasn’t being felt?”

  “You’re looking for neat, logical explanations again, Kay. I’m sorry, but I don’t have any to offer you.”

  “Did Lee ever hear the crying?”

  “No.”

  Kay sighed. “The personality of a child growing up in an attic shielded from emotion. Another personality born full grown floating on a ceiling and full of violent emotion. Memory echoes of a crying child who mercifully could no longer feel any pain. This gets more and more bizarre.”

  “And yet, Lee’s case is relatively simple compared to those of other multiple personalities. There are MPD individuals who possess twenty, forty, eighty, even as high as one hundred different personality fragments or alters, as they’re often called.”

  Kay shook her head as she raised her fingers to massage her temples. “Dear heavens, and I’m having trouble handling just two.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, so did I, Kay. So did I.”

  She gave him a small smile before she went on. “I can almost understand an unemotional Lee personality, protected from the awful reality of the abuse. But I can’t understand this Roy personality. He seems so uncaring and heartless. The more I learn about him, the harder it is for me to understand how the mind of a poor abused child could have created a part so abhorrent—so inhuman.”

  Damian was uncomfortable with her pain. Too uncomfortable for his own good. He turned more fully toward her, took her hands down from her temples and held them gently.

  “Probably one of the human mind’s most illogical acts occurs when it finds itself embracing that which it most abhors.”

  She looked up at him, her eyes cloudy and confused. “That which it most abhors?”

  “Kay, you see it all the time. The abused child grows into the adult abuser and repeats the repugnant pattern.”

  “But, Damian, that can’t be true in this case. This child didn’t grow up to be Roy. You said yourself that Roy sprang full grown from the mind of the child when he was only two.”

  “It happens sometimes to children forced to endure constant and unspeakable abuse and who are told by their abusers that they deserve what they get. A part of their mind begins to believe they must deserve it. It’s that part that recreates the persecutor personality.”

  “The persec
utor personality?”

  “Best way I can explain it is by likening the process to that old adage, ‘If you can’t beat them, join them.’”

  “Wait a minute. You can’t mean—”

  “Yes, Kay. Roy was a recreation of the child’s real-life abuser.”

  “My God. The child’s own abuser internalized in his mind. This is so damn...tragic.”

  His arm came to rest lightly across her shoulders. He understood how difficult this had been for her. Not just to accept mentally, but emotionally. He had wanted to spare her. She had insisted. Seeing the look on her face now, he wished he had gone with his instincts and refused.

  Particularly since he knew she hadn’t seen or heard anywhere near the worst yet.

  He gave her shoulders a light shake, intent on breaking up the sadness in her face, finding he could not bear to see it anymore. “Look, Kay, I’m starving. And I have to warn you that we beasts get unruly if not fed frequently.”

  Kay’s eyes dropped to her watch. “Eight o’clock already. I hadn’t realized. Is there someplace around here where we can get something quick before resuming?”

  “Only place I know of is right down the hall in the kitchen.”

  Her eyes looked up into his. “Are you offering to cook?”

  “Offering to cook? No. Offering to slap together a couple of roast beef sandwiches, yes. Of course, I’d be happy to step aside if you’d care to razzle-dazzle me with your culinary skills.”

  A smile relaxed the tightness that had gathered around her mouth. “What culinary skills? To me, cooking is slapping together a roast beef sandwich.”

  Damian smiled back as he slipped his hand into hers and helped her to her feet. He continued to hold her hand for no other reason than that it felt so very good in his.

  “What would you prefer, beer, wine, a cocktail? Dinner might be simple, but I’m not a half-bad bartender.”

  “I’d love a glass of milk if you have it. Nonfat or low fat, preferably.”

  “Milk?”

  She smiled in response to the incredulity of his tone. “Yeah, you know, that white stuff full of bone-building calcium. We small-framed, Northern European types have to guard against getting osteoporosis.”

  “All right. A glass of milk for dinner and then afterward a nice liqueur—”

  “Afraid not. Alcohol isn’t good for bones or for keeping mentally alert. There’s work to do, remember?”

  “Then a coffee liqueur. The coffee will counteract the alcohol.”

  “No, coffee is bad for bones, too.”

  He curled her hand into the crook of his arm and let out a dramatic sigh. “Ms. Beauty, whatever do you do for fun when you’re not snitching flowers from a beast’s garden?”

  “I’m snitching roast beef sandwiches from his kitchen. Come on. I’m suddenly quite hungry. And I’m warning you, we lawyers can get unruly if we’re not fed frequently.”

  He chuckled as he led the way into a large cavern of a room that he used to call the pit as a kid, because the stone of its floor and walls had been blackened by the coal stove that used to be in the far corner. Despite the fact that it had been replaced long ago with an electric range and other modern appliances, the kitchen still seemed like a pit.

  He switched on the overhead fluorescents, which he had had installed just the month before in hopes of eliminating some of the gloom.

  “The light doesn’t help much,” Kay said, mirroring his own reaction.

  “There’s so much that has yet to be done to this old place just to make it livable.”

  “Have you ever thought about tearing down this dungeon and starting over again?”

  “That, my dear Ms. Kellogg, is blasphemy. I grew up in this...ah...dungeon.”

  “Your parents lived with your grandparents?”

  “No.”

  He purposely turned away from her questioning eyes and quickly went on. “You have to admit that for a boy with a fertile imagination, its endless dark corridors make excellent hiding places for evil sorcerers and fire-breathing dragons.”

  “Well, before any come slinking into this kitchen, point me in the direction of the raw materials and let’s get started on those sandwiches.”

  Damian was waving toward the cupboard where the bread was kept, when he was interrupted by the ringing of the telephone. He answered with a relaxed hello.

  He didn’t stay relaxed for long.

  “I knew you were home now. Just called to let you know,” the breathy voice on the phone whispered.

  “Who is this?” Damian demanded.

  “You’ll find out when it’s time. But it’s not time now. Besides, it pleases me for you to just worry for a while. It pleases me very, very much.”

  A dial tone blared in Damian’s ear.

  * * *

  KAY KNEW something was wrong when his telephone conversation ended so abruptly after his demanding to know who was calling. She also suspected who was on the line.

  “It was the person who left the earlier message on the answering machine. The one with that strange, breathless voice, wasn’t it?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Have you been getting a lot of calls from that kook?”

  “The phone has been ringing off the hook since Fedora Nye’s first tearful interview last week. Most yell obscenities. But this one—this breathless one—is different. More disturbing.”

  “Damn, I’m sorry, Damian. I should have warned you that the crazies come crawling out of the woodwork when a case is high-profile.”

  “Not a problem. I anticipated it and let the answering machine accept the brunt of the abuse.”

  He lifted a loaf of bread out of the cupboard and pitched it toward her. She surprised herself by catching it.

  He reached into the refrigerator for the roast beef, lettuce and jars of pickles, mustard and mayonnaise. He gathered them into his arms and started for the butcher-block table in the middle of the cavernous kitchen.

  “As soon as I get in touch with all my patients and give them my private number, I’ll have the listed line disconnected and get rid of the breathy-voiced caller.”

  Kay opened a couple of drawers until she found the silverware. “You don’t feel uncomfortable giving your patients your private number and seeing them in your home?”

  He opened the jars of condiments. “You mean because of all the crazies I treat?”

  She lavished lettuce, mayonnaise, mustard and pickles on both slices of the bread.

  “I don’t mean to imply that all people who seek out a psychologist do so because they’re dangerous, any more than all people who seek out a lawyer do so because they’re criminals. But, I have to tell you, I wouldn’t have wanted to be alone in the same room with the Roy character.”

  He smiled at the emphasis on her words as he laid thin pieces of roast beef on both of their prepared slices of bread. “I’m continuing to see only my most critical cases. The rest I’ve referred to colleagues.”

  “Still, isn’t it dangerous? And don’t you find the professional distance compromised?”

  “I agree it’s neither professional nor smart to conduct one’s practice out of one’s home. Truth is, this arrangement has been forced on me by some recent, unforeseen circumstances.”

  “You don’t mean publicity from the trial?”

  “No.”

  “What then?”

  “I needed to vacate my previous offices somewhat quickly. I have yet to find suitable space in which to relocate.”

  “What forced you out of your previous offices?”

  He paused before he answered, seeming to focus all his concentration on putting the final touches on his sandwich.

  “An affair with the psychologist who shared them with me.”

  Kay heard a funny buzzing sound in her ears as she stared at Damian in the seconds following that unexpected admission. Several surprising reactions and questions popped into her mind. The one she ended up voicing surprised her most of all.

  �
��I can’t believe you’d do that, Damian.”

  His answer was even more of a surprise, particularly since it was delivered with a laugh and a candid look. “Hard for me to believe, too. Just goes to show you, I can be as big an idiot as the next guy. Even bigger.”

  She liked the good-humored sincerity in his laugh. For all Damian’s ability, confidence and understanding of the human condition, he didn’t place himself on an intellectual or emotional step above the rest of struggling humankind. Rather, he clearly saw himself as just a fellow struggler.

  Kay was finding that she liked someone who viewed life—and himself—this way. She also liked looking at his rugged face when he said these things. She liked hearing the intelligence and simple sincerity in his deep voice. She liked far too much about this man. Far too much.

  She pressed her sandwich together, cut it in half and reminded herself that she was a lawyer and Damian was her client. But she couldn’t quite achieve the nonchalance she was trying for in her tone. “So how did this affair happen?”

  Damian walked over to the refrigerator to retrieve the milk. He returned with two full glasses and a bowl of freshly washed blueberries, strawberries, raspberries and giant blackberries. They sat opposite each other on the bar stools around the butcher-block table. He didn’t pick up his sandwich right away. Instead, he popped a bright wild strawberry into his mouth and looked directly at Kay.

  “For the last three years, Dr. Priscilla Payton and I shared the administrative costs of office space and clerical staff. Our relationship was as professional colleagues and casual friends. We discussed cases and shared a few personal items over occasional lunches.”

  “Until?” Kay prodded.

  “Until one afternoon when I walked into her adjoining office to find her crying. In the three years I had known her, I’d never seen Priscilla cry. I didn’t think it possible. I was rather taken aback.”

  “What had made her cry?”