Set This House in Order

by Matt Ruff

  “Take them…?”

  “The people in my head. Can you…”—Mouse wants to say “kill them,” but that’s too harsh, they’d hear that for sure even if she whispered it—“…can you get rid of them?”

  The doctor doesn’t seem surprised by this request, but she also doesn’t seem inclined to grant it. “Penny,” she says, in that tone of voice used to deliver bad news, “do you understand why they’re there in the first place? Did Andrew tell you—”

  “I don’t care why they’re there! I just want them gone!” Mouse says, but then her courage crumbles. “Please,” she begs. “I don’t want anything to do with them. Not those awful twins, not that creepy little girl, not any of them. I just…can’t you take them out?”

  “I’m sorry,” the doctor says.

  “Can’t you just hypnotize me? Or maybe…maybe there’s a drug, some medicine I could take…”

  But the doctor shakes her head. “Even if there were some magic pill that could suppress your alters, they’d eventually resurface—or you’d call out new ones.”

  “No,” Mouse insists. “No, I wouldn’t, I’d—”

  “You would. It’s what you do, Penny. It’s how you handle stressful situations: by dissociating, devolving them on someone else. With the right therapy, you can learn less disruptive methods of coping with stress, but it’s not going to happen overnight. I’m sorry.”

  “Andrew says,” Mouse stammers, afraid that she is about to offend the doctor, “Andrew says that you…that your method of treating…our condition…is different than most psychiatrists’. Maybe…maybe if I talked to somebody else, maybe they would…well…” She fumbles to a halt.

  The doctor frowns but doesn’t get angry. “Some of my methods are unorthodox,” she admits. “Andrew may not be in the best position to comment, since his own treatment, his father’s treatment, was…interrupted…in an unfortunate fashion. But that’s neither here nor there. Other psychiatrists may disagree with me about a great many things, it’s true, but there’s one thing they won’t disagree about: an important step in treating your condition is coming to terms with the experiences that precipitated it. And for that, you’re going to need your Society’s help. Whether you choose to regard them as real people or psychological phantoms, you need access to information that they have. Later, after they’ve shared that information with you, there’ll be plenty of opportunity to debate what their final disposition should be—whether you want to reintegrate them, or learn to live with them, or some combination of the two. It’s an important question, but it’s a question for the latter stages of treatment. You can’t start by getting rid of them.”

  You need access to information that they have…Mouse thinks of the little girl with her bag. She thinks of the other people in the big cavern, too, the people she heard but didn’t see. God! What if they are all children, all carrying bags? Take the terror she felt at the prospect of being reunited with that one memory, and multiply it by a hundred…no, worse, multiply it by every blackout she has ever had.

  “No,” says Mouse. “No, I don’t think so. I can’t do that.” She looks at the doctor. “I can’t.”

  “Only you can decide if and when you’re ready,” the doctor replies, with surprising patience. “Although the fact that you’re here suggests to me that you’re close to being ready. But we won’t force it. What I’ll do, I’ll give you my number, and also the number of another doctor in Seattle—the one who’d actually be handling your treatment if you decided to go ahead with it. And then you can go home and think it over some more, as long as you need to.

  “Just one suggestion,” the doctor adds, raising a cautionary finger. “I think you are making a mistake by regarding your alters, your Society, in purely negative terms. I can understand why you might view them that way, given the degree to which they disrupt your life, but they aren’t your enemies.”

  “They aren’t my friends, either,” says Mouse, remembering the way Ugly hissed at her.

  “Not friends, perhaps, but…allies. People with common interests. Not identical interests: you may at times find yourself at cross-purposes with them, and even when you don’t, you may not always like them, or they you. But in general, you are pulling towards the same ends, and I think you’ll find it much more constructive to work with them than against them…and I can see now by your expression that you don’t believe me, but that’s all right. Just keep it in mind as you’re deliberating.”

  “All right.”

  “All right. And now, if you would…please get Meredith in here…”

  The doctor has her helpmate give Mouse a card with two phone numbers on it—the doctor’s own, and one for a Dr. Eddington. Mouse tucks the card away in her wallet and tries to sound sincere as she says that she will carefully consider everything the doctor has told her.

  A few minutes later Andrew comes back from his walk. He’s clearly curious about what has happened in his absence, but—still smarting, maybe, from being yelled at before—he doesn’t ask any questions. The doctor, who has suddenly become very sluggish, rouses herself enough to insist that Andrew call her again soon: “I want to talk to your father,” she says, “and I want you to make that appointment to see Dr. Eddington.” Andrew promises that he’ll do as the doctor asks; Mouse thinks that his sincerity is only slightly more genuine than her own.

  They are in the car, on their way out of Poulsbo, when Andrew finally breaks down and asks: “So, how did it go?”

  Mouse shrugs. “All right,” she says.

  The inside of the car telescopes, the same way the doctor’s sitting room did when the doctor counted to three. Mouse finds herself back in the cave mouth, without a helmet this time. She hears the voice of Ugly issuing from Penny Driver’s mouth: “Bullshit. It wasn’t all right. That little cunt took one look inside, saw us, and freaked out. Little fucking Mouse.”

  “Maledicta,” says Andrew. “Were you…were you nice to her?”

  “She’s afraid of her own fucking shadow. Why should I be fucking nice to her?”

  “Maledicta…”

  Mouse, in a sudden flare of anger, surges forward again. Ugly—Maledicta?—is caught by surprise; there is a brief struggle for control, during which Penny Driver’s hands go slack on the steering wheel, and the Buick starts drifting to the left. Maledicta, realizing the danger, gives up the fight.

  “Penny?” Andrew says, wide-eyed, as Mouse grips the steering wheel again and swerves the Centurion back into its proper lane. “Please don’t talk to me right now,” Mouse replies. “I need to concentrate.”

  “OK,” Andrew says.

  Mouse is furious. She wouldn’t have thought it possible, but the visit with the doctor has made things worse. Bad enough to just lose consciousness, but to be tossed like a backseat driver into your own head and forced to listen and watch while someone else takes over your body and says terrible things about you…

  She will have to be vigilant, now. She will have to stay alert, always alert, to attempts by the Society to seize control, and be ready to fight them off.

  But vigilance, Mouse soon discovers, is hard work; by the time they get to the ferry landing, she is a wreck, trembling like someone who hasn’t slept for days. As they wait for their turn to board, Mouse rests her head on the steering wheel—

  —and lifts it again an hour and a half later. The Buick’s engine is off; they are parked in front of the house in Autumn Creek where Andrew lives.

  “Penny?” Andrew says softly.

  Autumn Creek! Realizing what has just happened, Mouse jerks upright—and yelps, as pain stabs the back of her neck again.

  “Oh, Penny,” Andrew says, wincing sympathetically from the passenger’s seat. “I thought you were going to have that checked out. Didn’t you go to the hospital?”

  Mouse looks at him, her eyes blurry with tears. “I don’t know,” she says. She tried to go to the hospital, on Sunday night; she knows that much. But as she approached the entrance to the emergency room, s
he saw a group of security guards wrestling a man in a straitjacket to the ground, and it occurred to her that if she told anyone how she bashed her head into a tree while trying to outrun herself, she might end up in a straitjacket too. So she froze up, and she doesn’t know what happened after that. Maybe she went into the emergency room; maybe somebody did. But if so, it must not have done any good.

  “Would you like me to go with you to the hospital now?” Andrew offers.

  “No,” says Mouse. “No, thank you.” She swipes at her eyes with the back of her hand. Her vision clears, and she sees Andrew’s landlady sitting on the front porch of the house, watching them. Watching her. “She doesn’t like me, does she?”

  “Who, Mrs. Winslow? She likes you just fine.”

  “She doesn’t trust me. She thinks I might be dangerous to you.”

  “Mrs. Winslow does worry about my safety. But it’s not personal, Penny. She—”

  “She knows that I’m crazy. She’s seen it.”

  “She’s seen you acting out,” Andrew concedes. “A couple times, now. But even if she hadn’t, she’d still keep an eye out. Really, it’s nothing against you in particular.”

  “Right,” says Mouse. She closes her eyes and lowers her head towards the steering wheel again, wishing for another blackout, knowing she won’t get one as long as she really wants it.

  Andrew says: “Her family was murdered.”

  Mouse lifts her head again. “What?”

  “Her husband and her two sons,” Andrew says. “They were murdered. So, you know, if she seems a little overprotective of me, you shouldn’t take it personally.”

  “Murdered how?” says Mouse, shocked.

  Andrew thinks before answering, consulting with his own Society. “They were on a weekend trip to the San Juan Islands,” he finally tells her. “This was years and years ago, before my father moved in here, before I was…before I took over. Anyway, they went on this trip, and Mrs. Winslow was supposed to go too, but she got sick at the last minute and had to stay home. And on the way up, on the ferry, they met”—here Andrew says something that sounds like “a cougar” but then corrects himself—“a very bad man, who convinced Mr. Winslow to give him a ride. Once they were off the ferry and away from people, the man pulled out a gun and made Mr. Winslow drive to a cliff overlooking the Sound. Then he shot Mr. Winslow, and made the two boys jump into the water.”

  “Did the police catch him?” Mouse asks, already knowing from the way Andrew has spoken that the answer is no.

  Andrew shakes his head. “No, not for that. But my cousin Adam thinks he probably did get arrested for something in the end. At least we hope he did.”

  Mouse starts to shake her own head but then stops, wincing. “I don’t understand.”

  “The police never caught him for the murders,” Andrew explains, “but it wasn’t the last they heard from him. They figure he must have gone through Mr. Winslow’s wallet after he shot him, and found a picture of Mrs. Winslow, and something with a home address. And then later, after he made his getaway, he started writing to her…”

  “Writing to her?”

  “Notes, mostly,” Andrew says. “Awful notes. Postcards, greeting cards, sometimes longer letters—all of it completely nasty, evil stuff, I mean a hundred times worse than the meanest message you ever got.”

  “But what…what did he write to her? Threats?”

  “More like gloating. He would start out by reminding her who he was—he never gave his name, of course, but he’d remind her what he’d done—and then he’d go on and brag about what a great time he was having, traveling around, free. He really did travel a lot, too—the postmarks on the notes were from all over the country, never the same place twice.

  “So this went on for about five years.” Andrew pauses, cocks his head. “Five and a half years.”

  “Five…” The word chokes off in a squeak.

  “Yeah,” Andrew says. “And each new note that came, Mrs. Winslow would turn over to the police, so they could check it for clues. But they never got anything useful.”

  “But, but then…how can you say that he got caught in the end, if they didn’t—”

  “They didn’t catch him for the murders, or for the notes,” says Andrew, “but eventually the notes stopped—I mean they stopped all of a sudden, with no warning. And the police, and Adam too, they think that the kind of person who would keep up something like that for five and a half years, he wouldn’t just decide to quit voluntarily. So something must have happened to him—most likely, he got arrested for some other crime. Or maybe, maybe he just died.”

  “But you can’t know that for sure,” says Mouse, horrified. “You—”

  “No, but you can hope. The last note the man ever sent? It was postmarked from a town in northern Illinois. And this was in August of 1990, just a few days before a really big tornado touched down right near there. So who knows…maybe after he mailed that last note, maybe he got caught out in the open, with no storm cellar to run to. That’s the way Adam wishes it ended. And sometimes…sometimes I wish it too. “Anyway,” concludes Andrew, “anyway, the reason I’m telling you this, I know it’s a horrible story but I want you to understand, the things you’ve done? Switching souls, and running off to the woods last time you were here—that stuff is nothing to Mrs. Winslow. And when you say you’re a bad person? Penny, seriously…I hear you say a thing like that, I want to say that you must not know what a bad person is. Except that you do know, don’t you? You know very well.”

  Mouse doesn’t answer, but she finds herself checking the rearview mirror to make sure her mother has not slipped into the Centurion’s back seat somehow. She hasn’t. Of course not.

  “One other thing,” Andrew says. “When my father first told me this, about what happened to Mrs. Winslow’s family? He admitted to me that when he first heard about it, one of the things he wished he could do was take a look at the notes.”

  Mouse stares at him.

  “Not for any morbid reason,” Andrew explains hastily. “It’s just—my father wanted to know what would motivate someone to do such an awful thing, what would make them want to do it…and he thought, if he could read what the killer actually wrote, maybe he could get a handle on it, see something between the lines.” Andrew shrugs. “But of course, he didn’t actually ask to see the notes. I mean, Mrs. Winslow didn’t have them anymore, and besides, that’s, that isn’t something you can ask.

  “So my father never figured out what the killer’s motives were. But, he said, he knew what his goal was. That much was obvious: he wanted to destroy Mrs. Winslow’s soul. Why, we don’t know, but that’s what he was after.

  “And he failed.”

  And he failed: the words send a weird shudder up Mouse’s spine, turning the pain in her neck to something else for a moment, something silvery and light that jangles in the back of her skull.

  “He failed,” Andrew repeats. “Oh, he hurt her, all right: made her into a different person than she would have been otherwise. And maybe he even made her a little crazy: she still waits for the mail every morning, and my father thinks she won’t ever be able to move out of this house, not until she knows for sure that there aren’t any more notes coming. She sleeps badly; and she worries about me. So there’s that. But she survived. She got hurt, but she wasn’t destroyed. And—Penny?—she’s a good person. Still.”

  Mouse gets it—what he’s really telling her—but she can’t accept it. She shakes her head firmly, the pain settling back in hard, bringing fresh tears to her eyes. “I am not a good person.”

  “Why not? Because your mother tortured you?”

  “Because,” says Mouse, and stops, thinking: Because I deserved it.

  Andrew reads her mind. “How could you have deserved it?” he demands evenly. “Remember the little girl in the diner, Penny. What could a little kid do to deserve that kind of treatment?”

  “I don’t know!” Mouse shouts. Crying, she bangs her fists on the steering wheel. �
��I don’t remember! But I must have…must have…” She breaks off in sobs.

  Andrew waits for her tears to subside and then asks, gently: “Penny? Would you like to come inside for a while?”

  Still sniffling, Mouse shrugs noncommittally.

  “You could,” says Andrew, as if phrasing a delicate proposition, “you could meet my father. If you’d like.”

  “Your father?”

  “I could call him out. You could talk to him.”

  “Your father,” says Mouse. She wipes her nose on her sleeve. “Why…”

  “The thing is,” Andrew says, “what you’re experiencing right now…it’s not something that’s ever happened to me. I’ve never had to come to terms with being multiple, because I always just have been. All of that, the part where you learn how to cope with it, that happened before me. Which is maybe why I’m not more help to you.”

  “Oh no,” says Mouse automatically. “No, you’re helping.”

  “I don’t feel like I am,” Andrew says. “Not enough. But maybe my father…” He shrugs. “So do you want to meet him?”

  Not really, Mouse thinks. But then she thinks about driving home from here, alone—only not alone, oh God—and she decides that of the things that she doesn’t want to do, meeting Andrew’s “father” is probably the least worst option.

  “OK,” she relents. “All right.”

  “Great.” Andrew smiles. “Come on inside then,” he says, reaching for the door handle. “Mrs. Winslow will make you coffee, or tea if you like…”

  He practically bounds out of the car, and Mouse thinks, comfortable in the world. A part of her is appalled that he can act so carefree just moments after describing a triple murder and the mental torture of an old woman, but another part of her is envious. Maybe Andrew, or Andrew’s father, can teach her the trick of it: how to acknowledge evil without being consumed by it. Maybe if Mouse could do that, she wouldn’t need to be terrified of the little girl in the cave.