Unusual people? Her brain struggled with the question. “Oh, the boy with the things on his legs, and the woman who comes through the ward every day… Yeah, I guess they are unusual, but other patients aren’t really my business.”
“You… speak to them?”
“No, not really.”
“Do they… er… speak to you?”
“No…”
“What about the ‘doctor’?”
“What doctor?”
He sat back in his chair and folded his hands. “You seemed to be talking to someone you called ‘doctor’. You did it on the morning when you first awoke; do you remember?”
“Which doctor? I saw two: the old-fashioned man and then the surgeon in the blue.”
“The first one. We know about the second doctor; he is your surgeon. You saw a man by your bed and he said he was a doctor?”
She knew it. He was probably an imposter, someone who dresses up and pretends to be someone he isn’t; she had read about cases such as that in the paper. “Yes, he did say he was; isn’t he a doctor then?”
“No… no, he isn’t. Miss Holloway, it is our opinion that the bleed to your brain appears to have caused you to begin to hallucinate, and this can mean a number of things.”
“Hallucinate? What do you mean?”
“The doctor you speak of… There is no such doctor. No boy with ‘things on his legs’ or anything like that. Rachel, you are simply seeing things, things that are not there, and we need to find out why.”
Her brain began to fog up again. She really didn’t understand what this man was talking about. “What do you mean not there? Of course he was there. I saw him; I spoke to him.”
“Yes, you were seen speaking, but to thin air; no one was there. You imagined this doctor, and chances are that it’s also true of this boy in callipers, or whatever they were, and this other woman you say walks through the ward. You were seen by another patient – on more than one occasion, even today – talking to yourself. I am a psychiatrist, and I am here to help you, as there may have been something we missed when we first looked at your scan. More damage, for example, causing these hallucinations.”
“I am not hallucinating…”
“They may seem very real, but they are not. We will be discharging you, but you will be under the care of a mental health professional, and it will be put on your notes.”
*
Half an hour later, Rachel was sitting on her bed again, waiting for John to pick her up. The boy in callipers had gone, at last. Nothing was amiss. Thoughts went round and round in her head, Hallucinating? I couldn’t have been; it all seemed so real. A mental health doctor… great. I’m not mad; they were there, and that doctor spoke to me. To suggest she was mad was upsetting.
She lay back and closed her eyes. Maybe when she got home, things might get a little better. She had to keep positive; whatever happened, she didn’t really have a choice.
Chapter 5
Andy knew he was different to most other people. He was 41 and had never really had a long-term girlfriend, or what people often referred to as a ‘proper job’, but he got by. Living as a lodger in his room with the elderly widow, Mrs Braithwaite, seemed an odd arrangement, but it suited him. When he got evicted from his last flat, Mrs Braithwaite – a friend of his deceased father – had said he could have her spare room. At first, he hesitated; at 85, he feared she may be a little intolerant of his lifestyle, but he need not have worried. She spent most days helping at the church and having tea in cafés; she was also mostly deaf, which was handy. The room was rented to him for next to nothing, and Andy helped her out with things around the house and doing the shopping. He felt at home now. Andy saw Mrs Braithwaite like a grandmother, as his own grandparents had died long ago.
Andy was not able to live with his mother; he had tried that, twice now, and both times had failed. People had asked why he struggled in this rented room when his mother lived three miles away in a large house with two large empty bedrooms. He didn’t wish to explain, but would simply reply, “We don’t get on,” and leave it at that. Not getting on was an understatement, as Andy and his mother were like chalk and cheese. Once – at a Christmas luncheon, in fact – she had announced, to his then short-term girlfriend that, “I love Andy, as he is my son, but I do not like him.” This kind of summed up the relationship they had suffered since Andy had passed puberty. Prior to that, she could control him, and she decided what he wore, said and did; however, after that – when he had started making up his mind about the world, the direction he had wanted to take and the kind of man he had wanted to be – she had begun to reject him.
She criticised him for being slightly overweight, his dress sense and the fact he insisted on wearing a small ponytail at the back of his head, although he was slightly balding. It was odd, he recalled, as when he reached forty, he had considered shaving off the ponytail, until his mother went into one of her rages about it and asked if he was gay. Then and there he decided it was staying.
This was why he lived at Mrs Braithwaite’s.
Andy Horton wasn’t sure what to call himself. When asked outright, “What do you do?”, he would reply, “I’m an investigator”; people were inevitably impressed with the title, and asked if he worked with the police and tracked down missing people, till he let the cat out of the bag. He was an investigator all right, but a psychic one. He went to people’s houses when they claimed they had hauntings or paranormal activity, and he would – using modern methods and ancient commands – try to find out what the problem was. He made enough money to get by doing this, but his income was topped up by benefits, or he would have been in trouble.
He had never confessed to anyone in the benefits office that he earned cash on the side, as he didn’t like talking to people about what he did, unless they seemed open to the fact that spirits and ghosts did exist. He also thought they would probably take a very dim view of this and stop his benefits. Andy found the whole idea held by some that the paranormal world didn’t exist to be quite hilarious, as he had seen numerous ghostly activities take place, some mundane and some horrifying.
The problem with ghosts, he always said to clients, was that they didn’t know they were not supposed to exist, and people got haunted whether they believed in ghosts or not.
Work had dried up a little since it became more popular to look for paranormal activity in established groups. A lot of ghost hunting ‘tours’ in his area staged things, so when people attended the events, noises would inevitably be heard, lights seen, things found, tap once for yes and twice for no, etc. He did not subscribe to that; if people were foolish enough to be taken in by money-making tomfoolery, he didn’t want them as a client…
At least, that was how he used to feel before his empty wallet managed his conscience out of a job. He needed to find more work. And soon.
*
Coming home had been more difficult than Rachel had thought. The school had signed her off with full pay, but John still had to work, so she was alone in the flat most of the day. Her recovery had been slow. Well, she thought it was slow, but maybe it hadn’t been; she didn’t know many people who had suffered brain haemorrhages to compare herself with.
The doctors had told her that many people died after having a brain bleed, or were left with permanent disabilities. Rachel was still getting used to what she could and couldn’t do, and she was still experiencing a few problems. Her main one was headaches; she had always suffered from headaches and lived on painkillers, but now they were worse. Every other day, she would have a bad throbbing head, which would inevitably end up morphing into a migraine. Pills helped, but she did have to take a lot of them. She was also constantly exhausted, but she was used to dealing with being tired in her job. It seemed that talking or thinking about complicated things was also difficult; the words would often get stuck, and she forgot what she had said. But, overall, things could hav
e been a whole lot worse.
It was like being in a constant fight, akin to Moses commanding the sea, with her holding back her symptoms day and night, using nothing but the power of a concoction of pills. With every twinge of pain she felt, she also would feel panic flood through her, as she feared this might be the start of another haemorrhage. The twinge was always in the same place, at the top left of her skull. She wondered what was there that was causing the twinge and the pain. A person could go mad thinking that way…
She hoped she could go back to teaching in a couple of months. Rachel wanted to return, but she was worried how she would manage. Her job meant she would often have to speak most of the day and teach complicated things; she wasn’t sure her mind was up to the job at the moment, but she was hopeful.
Rachel was more worried about John. He had become more distant recently; in fact, to be honest, he had been drifting away from her before this even happened. He’d been staying late at work, rowing with her more and saying things that were unkind. For the first time, she actually began thinking, What if he left?
She heaved herself off the sofa and walked to the window. Yawning, she pulled her curtain a little to one side and looked out onto the street; below her, she saw a lady walking along. This woman was wearing a long, black coat and hat, and she had about thirteen children around her, aged between four to twelve. In her arms, there were not one but two babies, both swaddled in cloth. How odd. Maybe it was a school thing, such as fancy dress? The children were all dressed up, some as urchins and others in regal-looking clothes, like lots of little King Henry VIIIs. One, a little girl, wore a pinafore and a bow in her hair. Rachel didn’t think this looked good; the woman should have dressed them all the same if it was fancy dress. Also, why take the babies as well? They were real, she saw their hands clasping and moving. Whilst working as a teacher, Rachel had arranged many of these dressing-up events, and decided she would have dressed them as the Von Trapps or perhaps all as urchins. However, with all their different costumes, it looked mismatched.
As the woman drew level with Rachel, she slowly looked up and their eyes met. Rachel smiled; the woman looked back at her, full of sadness, then walked on, her ragtag of children following her.
*
The following week, things were looking up; she felt a lot better, and so she had to do her first follow-up visit to the psychiatrist. As she stepped into the street, the sunlight burnt her eyes, and she fumbled for her dark glasses. A group of about fifty Orthodox Jewish men walked past, seeming to not notice her as she headed for the high street. Dressed in black, with their beards and big hats, they resembled a group of shadows, with half on the pavement, some in the road. They rushed past, talking in what she thought might be Hebrew. Where were they off to? She turned around; they had gone, probably into a shop. Good luck to any shop owner dealing with them, she mused.
She continued on her way and, once back at the hospital, she paused on the pavement opposite. Rachel hoped the doctor would have some good news for her, and there would be no more of this crap about her seeing things. She hadn’t seen anything odd at all, and she would tell him so.
She crossed the road, entered the building and took the lift to the second floor (before the brain bleed, she would have bounded up the stairs). She quickly swallowed a painkiller before she got to the waiting room, then sat and waited for the doctor.
“Miss Holloway?” It was the same bow-tied doctor Rachel had seen before, the psychiatrist. He motioned that she should come into the room, which was Room 3.
She went in and sat down.
“How are we today? How has everything been going?” he asked.
“Fine. Well, I get very tired and find things hard to say at times, but I am getting there,” Rachel confirmed.
“Your surgeon will talk to you about your physical symptoms; I am more concerned about your mental health. Have you seen anything unusual lately?”
“No, not at all. I am quite well in that department; I think I told you before that I am not hallucinating or anything like that.”
“You have seen nothing odd at all recently then?”
“No, I have not.”
“Good, good… We are going to discharge you from our mental health care today; however, should anything become amiss mentally that worries you, you must contact us at once. Do you understand, Rachel?”
Rachel said nothing, but then quickly nodded. Her attention had been snared by the nun in a full wimple and veil standing behind the doctor’s half-closed cupboard door. Rachel could see the nun’s hands – gnarled, veined and clasped together – and the nun was obviously no simple hallucination, as Rachel saw her chest slowly rise and fall, and heard the slow wheeze as air escaped her desiccated lungs. Rachel looked slowly up to her face, but where a face should have been, under the wimple, was just darkness – a never-ending abyss.
Rachel stood up, thanked the doctor and left.
Outside, standing too close to the door for her liking, was the old-fashioned doctor she had first seen in the ward. Today, he wore a long coat that was buttoned up almost to his neck, a crisp white shirt and cravat, and what appeared to be a slightly larger than usual bowler hat on his head. She jumped when she saw him and walked past hurriedly.
“Rachel, my dear. I must speak with you,” he stated.
“I am in a hurry,” she replied.
“You need to talk to me.”
His voice sounded like he was right behind her, but she had left him back by the psychiatrist’s door. Obviously, he was fast on his feet.
“What?” She turned to find him right behind her. “Will you stop harassing me?”
He looked hurt. “Harassing… but…” He closed his mouth and looked at her. “I need to explain your situation to you; you’ve been seeing odd things, haven’t you? Do you know why?”
“What odd things? I am perfectly OK.” She looked at him more closely. “Why are you dressed in that way? Aren’t you warm?” The afternoon was quite mild; he must be sweltering in that garb.
“I don’t feel the heat or cold… You must understand that the woman in the ward, the child in callipers, the soldier, that nun back there… me… Why do you think you see us?”
“You’re mad.”
“No… I’m not mad, just very dead. Yet you see me; you see all of us… I am thinking perhaps this is a miracle sent to free us from our imprisonment here in purgatory.”
“No, sorry, you really are mistaken.” She turned and walked away.
“We are all dead, Rachel, yet you see us. You are the answer.”
She turned to tell him to stop, but he had gone. With a growing sense of unease, she headed home.
Chapter 6
Rachel arrived home to find a letter waiting for her from the school. The headteacher wanted to see her next week, which was good news; he probably wanted to talk to her about returning to work.
John was there in the living room, watching TV, with the back of his chair facing her. He never seemed to ask how she was or anything anymore.
Rachel decided she would start the conversation. “I went to the doctor today.”
“Oh… what did he say?” John didn’t bother to look back; he just sat in his chair. His voice seemed to emanate from the folds of the cloth, as she couldn’t see his face.
“Well, it wasn’t the doctor I thought it would be. It was not the brain doctor, but a psychiatrist…” She walked round to the side of his chair. She could see him now; his face was intent on the flickering screen before him. Rachel continued, “It was a shrink; it’s embarrassing to be honest. They think that the knock on my head made me see things that are not really there… They think I am a bit mad.”
He looked at her slowly. “What do you mean see things that are not there? That sounds a bit psychotic. What things? Objects? People?” He began to frown.
“Er… mostly people, I think.”
“That’s crazy, man.” He turned his gaze back to the screen.
“I know; I told them it isn’t right. I am not seeing anything that isn’t there.”
“Why do they think you’re seeing things? They wouldn’t make it up... Oh, man.” he put his hand up, a visible sign that the conversation was over. She walked away, feeling the pain of another headache coming on.
Leaving the living room, Rachel pondered how what the old-fashioned doctor had said about seeing dead people was ridiculous. Dead people didn’t walk about; you didn’t see them. That was quite the most stupid thing she had ever heard. Right, she would test this theory; the next time she saw someone unusual, she would pay more attention and maybe even speak to them. She would get to the bottom of this, one way or another.
This wasn’t what was supposed to happen. Her life up to that point had been difficult, but one thing she had always relied on was that her health wouldn’t fail her. She had too many plans for her future – children, maybe marriage, travelling abroad (she had never had enough money to do it up till now) – but a quiet, nagging feeling started in her gut that maybe she was kidding herself, none of this was ever going to happen, and she was an idiot to think so.
No, she thought, I must keep the faith; everything will be OK. I’m not sure I believe it 100%, but I have to keep thinking that or… She didn’t want to contemplate the ‘or’, not right now. But it was getting even harder to fight the feelings of panic that kept engulfing her, rising like a tide of pins and needles, which started in her gut, then spread down her limbs, and left her dizzy and weak for hours. In her head, she wrestled with the fear of whether these were panic attacks or something physical, just waiting to consume her, similar to the brain haemorrhage. Rachel tried to brush the fears aside again, but it was growing harder and harder to do so.
*
He stood for a moment in front of the mirrored revolving doors that were placed inside the entrance to the hospital. He had never been so excited in his life, or death, and he hoped he hadn’t scared her away. Dr William Maxwell looked at the mirror, which only reflected a couple of chairs and a poster that warned of the dangers of not washing one’s hands.
Seeing Things Page 3