“I’ve found something,” she interrupts. “I think it’s important. Do you have time to talk?”
I glance at my watch. “I’ve a meeting in twenty minutes. Can I see you later this afternoon?”
“Perfect.”
After I hang up, yesterday’s events continue to rain down on me, stark and unnerving.
For even after a solid fifteen hours’ sleep, I know I saw Poppy; I know I felt her hands on my face, I heard her voice, I smelled her hair, her breath. But I have no idea how to explain it. Nor do I understand the encounter with the old man, Ruen. His face, rock-like, ancient, and those terrible empty eyes, all still burn in my brain with a force I can’t quench.
After I regained consciousness, I had told Melinda about Ruen’s visit to the practice room. She checked the visitors’ register at reception, then CCTV footage, even contacted campus security. When she couldn’t find any trace of him, we reported him to the police.
“Ruen?” the police officer had asked as I sat in Melinda’s office nursing another coffee. She was skeptical. “As in R-U-E-N?”
“That’s the only name he gave.”
“And about how old?”
“Somewhere between mid-seventies and early eighties,” I said.
“Did he have a knife?”
I sighed. It sounded ridiculous. I didn’t mention anything of our conversation, nor how I felt. I thought of kidnap victims who discovered they had been taken hostage not at gunpoint, but by the barrel of a Magic Marker pressed against their neck. Sometimes the imagination is the true predator.
Melinda asked to speak to me for a moment and the police officer stepped aside.
“This guy,” Melinda said to me. “Did he really give his name?”
“Yes,” I said with conviction, then doubt crept in. Perhaps he hadn’t said he was Ruen. Perhaps he hadn’t said his name at all.
“Are you sure?” she insisted. “It’s just that, from your descriptions it sounds like he could be one of the visiting professors.”
“He knew my name,” I interjected. “He called me Anya.”
“Your name would have been on the booking sheet on the front of the door, wouldn’t it?” Melinda pointed out. “The school’s VPs sometimes just turn up. Some of them are very, very old. There’s this one man who sounds very similar …”
“Do you have a picture of him?”
She nodded at the computer on her desk and we both walked around the other side to face the screen. Melinda gave the mouse a wave to close the screensaver, then typed a name into the search bar. Seconds later, the school’s banner appeared in a Web browser, followed by a list of staff. Melinda scrolled down to a section marked VISITING PROFESSORS and clicked on a small thumbnail.
“Here,” she said. The page reloaded. Staring back at me from the screen was a bald man, smiling, his pale eyes shielded by thick black glasses. His mouth was tombstone-shaped, his top gum broader than his small yellow teeth. He was wearing a bow tie and a tweed jacket. I leaned forward to the screen, my heart hammering.
“This is Professor Franz Amsel,” Melinda told me. “He gave a paper at the School of Music a couple of nights ago. Do you think it might have been him?”
I study the wide smile and the thick glasses. The man I had seen looked older than this, I told Melinda. She shook her head dubiously.
“Most of these guys send us photos that are older than me,” she said ruefully. “I know Professor Amsel is in his seventies, at least. Let me contact him, find out if he was here today.”
I swallowed, then nodded in agreement. The police officer tapped her foot at the other end of the room. Melinda lifted the phone and dialed a number, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.
“Hi, Professor? This is Melinda Kyle here at the School of Music at Queen’s University. Yeah, hi there. I was just wondering if you visited one of our practice rooms this morning, we’re in a little pickle with security for not keeping our guest register up to date. Uh-huh.” She nodded deeply. “You were here.” I felt my heart sink. She looked deeply relieved. “Oh, thank heavens. No, nothing. That’s okay, Professor, I’ll tell her. Thank you.” She set down the phone and rolled her eyes. “He extends his deepest apologies and hopes he didn’t upset you.”
Melinda threw me a smile, then went to the police officer, explaining in a smooth, affable voice that we’d had a little misunderstanding. I sat numbly on the chair behind her desk, looking at the image of the professor on the screen. There was no denying the similarity. I felt utterly, ridiculously stupid. How could I have let myself stray so far from reason? How could I have believed that the man was … The thought of it was crazy now, and I felt furious with myself. Deep inside, I felt harrowed with fear at the workings of my own brain. If I couldn’t keep it together, what future did I have as a child psychiatrist? How could I ever hope to rebuild the lives of others by helping them piece together their sense of what’s real and what is not if I didn’t know the difference myself?
My phone rings as I leave Karen Holland’s classroom later, having spoken with Karen for almost an hour. What she has showed me there makes me want to run back to MacNeice House and speak to Alex immediately. I have already tried contacting Cindy’s therapist, Trudy Messenger, without success. So when the phone rings I assume it is her.
“Trudy, I need to tell you something about Alex’s father—”
A cough on the other end of the line. “It’s Ursula.”
“Oh. Is something wrong?”
“I need to speak to you immediately, Anya. Are you on your way back now?”
“Can I ask what this is about?” I say. “I have some calls to make—”
“I’ll speak to you when you get here,” she cuts in stiffly, and hangs up.
At MacNeice House I meet Ursula in the foyer and sign into the register. “You want to talk in your office?” I say, taking off my jacket. She smiles. “Why don’t we talk in yours?”
Inside my office I move the last of the boxes of books from the coffee table and invite her to sit down. I see her glancing over my posters and the dog-eared, incomprehensible paintings given to me by some patients as thank-yous for their treatment—a gift much more meaningful than any other.
“How have you settled back into Northern Ireland?” Ursula asks, clasping her hands in her lap.
I pour us both a cup of water and sit down opposite her, catching my breath. I am still wearing my jogging shoes.
“I’m actually settling back home far easier than I would have imagined,” I tell her, brightly. “You never know, I might even stay.”
It is a light joke, offered to break the tension. She presses her lips together.
“I heard about what happened yesterday. At the university.”
I hold her gaze, feeling my heart sink. My excitement at the progress made in Alex’s assessment withers. “Yes,” I respond. “I’m afraid I haven’t felt myself lately.”
I explain to her about my unfurnished flat, how I still hadn’t properly unpacked. About my patients. About my progress with Xavier’s case, the effectiveness of art therapy on our newest inpatient, Ella. About my insomnia. About Alex’s situation.
“Alex,” she says on a sigh, as if his name is a byword.
“Yes. In fact,” I tell her, “I’ve just had a meeting with one of Alex’s old schoolteachers. I think I’ve just made a huge breakthrough in his treatment.”
“I’m sure you have,” she says dismissively, glancing at her nails. “But I’m afraid I have severe concerns about your ability to proceed here, Anya. Let’s not forget about the episode yesterday.” She lifts her eyes and I see disappointment there. And also—something that startles me—worry. “I’d like you to take a small period of sick leave.”
“Sick leave?”
“You must understand that your episode, or whatever it was was … well, it was troubling, frankly. Both in terms of the future of our practice and in terms of your own personal health. Any time the police become involved it raises the level
of seriousness, and with the kinds of funding bids MacNeice House is making and with the recent interest from the health minister, we don’t want it to look as if—forgive me—the lunatics are running the asylum.”
I am stunned. I try to respond to her, but no words come. Instead, my mind turns to what I had seen in Karen Holland’s classroom less than an hour before—a photocopy of a newspaper from December 2001, bearing the headline RUINED PEOPLE’S LIVES. Beneath it was a large photograph of a shooting in progress: a masked man pointing a gun at a policeman. “Read it,” Karen had told me.
Yesterday afternoon two policemen lost their lives in what the deputy first minister described as a “monstrous act of hate targeted at the newly formed PSNI” at a checkpoint outside Armagh. Sergeant Martin Kerr, 29, the father of a two-week-old girl, was killed by a single shot to the forehead at close range. Sergeant Eamonn Douglas, 47, died from his injuries last night at the Armagh County Hospital. Two men—Alex Murphy, 30, from north Belfast, and Michael Matthews, 69, from County Kerry—were charged this morning with first-degree murder.
I had lowered the newspaper and looked at Karen. “It’s the same headline as Alex’s painting,” she told me.
I frowned. “This is terrible. But why would Alex be so disturbed by this particular story?”
She opened a laptop on her desk and clicked on an Internet icon. “I found this on YouTube,” she said, opening a new page. I watched as the screen filled with rain-smeared footage of a calm street in Belfast. A church was visible on the right side of the road, a post office on the other. The screen blurred as several women walked past pushing prams, their chatter audible but muffled through glass. Two policemen were on the road, stopping traffic and chatting to the drivers, before letting them pass on. For a moment it seemed as if nothing was out of the ordinary—it was just another checkpoint, like so many I had witnessed in Belfast. A small figure in a red school sweater was visible behind the metal fencing of the church, and a little girl in a white dress stood in the doorway of the post office.
Then, a blue car rolled up toward the checkpoint. Only one of the policemen stepped out. The other stood at the side of the road and folded his arms. I watched, my throat growing dry, as a masked man jumped out of the passenger side of the car. He pulled out a gun, pointing it at the policeman in front of him. For a moment he seemed to hesitate. Then the screen blurred as people ran past the camera, positioned, I suspected, in the back of the police van. A gunshot resounded, cracking the windscreen of the blue car. The masked man hesitated, then lifted his gun. Seconds later, there was the sound of a second gunshot, and the first policeman on the road crumpled. Another crack. The policeman by the roadside flung his arms out and fell. The gunman paused and turned his head to the boy by the church, and I gasped, afraid that the boy would be his next victim. But the gunman lowered his weapon, taking a step backward. The driver of the car signaled him, and he got into the car, which sped off.
The footage had cut from there to a mugshot of the killer, a surly-looking man in his late twenties with startling blue eyes. His name flashed beneath the photograph in white letters: ALEX MURPHY. I leaned closer.
The footage cut again, this time to a journalist holding an umbrella with one hand and a microphone with the other. “It seems a dissident faction of the IRA was involved in what happened in this very spot just yesterday afternoon, when a masked terrorist opened fire on two policemen, supposedly in anticipation of their finding a heavy arsenal transported illegally from the southern border …”
I tapped the space bar on the keyboard, freezing the film. I needed a moment to take in what I had seen. To understand its meaning. Karen walked across the room to close a window that was beginning to let in the din of the school run. I fumbled with the YouTube controls, anxious to rewind the footage. There was something about the young boy at the doorway of the post office, something familiar.
“Can we zoom in on this?” I asked Karen. She pressed something on the screen, enlarging the image. The picture was pixelated, but I was certain I knew that young, terrified face.
“I recalled something after our last meeting,” Karen said. “Alex said that his mother told him that he was similar to his father. That he had his Dad in him. What do you make of that?”
I hit the space bar again, starting the footage from the beginning. Alex learning of his father’s crime was one thing, but witnessing it …
The blurred footage refused to give up the boy’s face. I turned to Karen.
“I think Alex knows his father was a murderer.”
“… just a couple of months,” Ursula is saying, and suddenly I am snapped back into my office at MacNeice House, listening to her make arrangements for my replacement while I “recuperate.”
“Ursula,” I interrupt, keeping my voice and my gaze firm. “I found out something this afternoon about Alex’s childhood that affects everything about this case.”
She narrows her eyes. “Anya, Alex is—”
I raise my voice. “I’ve found out something about his past that puts everything about his condition in a completely new light. I urgently need to speak to him and to his mother.”
“I’m sorry, Anya. But it’s important that we remain vigilant as to the health of our staff as well as our patients. I’ll email you the relevant forms for occupational health.” She stands. “I’ll initiate your period of sick leave with immediate effect.” Then, with a tilt of her head: “Much better than an enforced absence. Or being fired.”
I close my mouth. She eyes me coolly. “I’m sorry that it should come to this,” she says, before walking to the door and closing it behind her.
25
SWAPPING CARDS
ALEX
Dear Diary,
Our new house is gone. Gone gone gone gone gone gone gone gone.
Michael just came to MacNeice House to tell me. He said he was very sorry and swore a little and said his so-called friend quit his job so the new person saw that we hadn’t moved in yet and moved me and Mum down “the list,” as it wasn’t really fair that some people were waiting for a house while we were in the hospital. I just nodded as he walked up and down my room with his hands making fists, and then as soon as he’d finished I ran to the bathroom and threw up all my lunch.
Michael said he’d try really really hard to make sure we get a house just like it. “But I liked that house,” I told him. He took a big breath and bent his knees so our faces were at the same level and his knees made a big crack.
“I know you loved that house, Alex,” he said. “It’s just the council decided …” He made a fist and pressed it into his mouth and I wondered if he was actually going to bite himself. “There are loads of new houses being built at the minute in Belfast. Lots of beautiful houses just like this one.” Then he leaned forward and I could see his green eyes and I felt a bit better because they told me I could trust him. “I promise you, Alex,” he said. “I will make sure you get moved to a better place.”
“But Mum liked that house,” I said, and I knew Michael already knew this but it was much more important than whether I liked it or not. I felt for a moment like I could hardly breathe and I was scared because I knew Mum would be upset. Michael stood up and said something else but I didn’t hear because I was thinking of Mum sitting in the swing next to me at the park. It was a long time ago and both of us were swinging ourselves higher and higher. It didn’t matter to me if I could swing higher, it just mattered that I could hear her laughing.
When Michael left I walked out of my room and walked along the long white corridor. The other boys and girls staying here were all out of their bedrooms as it was lunchtime so they were in the cafeteria. It was a Thursday, which meant they were having a Sunday dinner with extra onions and toast. I didn’t even care. My stomach was gurgly and I puked and then I locked the toilet door and sat against it.
Before I even saw Ruen I saw the dark thread of shadow on the ground, which made me jump for a second because I thought it was a snake. I sa
w it slide across the white tiles of the floor and then it seemed to float up and snag on my sweater.
“Where are you?” I said, because even though I couldn’t see him yet I knew he was somewhere.
Ruen appeared beside the trash can as Ghost Boy. He was looking at me funny as if he wondered how I knew he was there. He had his table-tennis paddle and white ball in his hands, but instead of bouncing them he just folded his arms and scowled at me.
“Where’s Braze?” I asked, because last time I’d seen him there was this other demon there, too, the one Ruen said was an intern.
“Shut up,” he said, and he lifted his leg and shoved me in the stomach with his foot and I fell back onto the ground.
“What are you doing?” I shouted, and quickly he leaned forward and pushed his face into mine and said: “if you don’t sit still I’ll make your heart stop beating, and you’ll die.”
So I stopped moving and sat still as a stone on the floor.
“Good,” he said, smiling. I held my breath because I wanted to pant and my heart was pounding. I hated that Ruen looked so like me just then because he was so mean and I didn’t even know why.
“I’m going to show you something,” he said, looking down at me. I felt scared but not of Ruen. I felt scared because the dark shadow that connected my sweater to Ruen was thicker than normal and moving the way a snake moves.
“Okay,” I said to Ruen. “Then can you go away, please.”
He bent down and his face looked like he was sorry for me.
“I want you to know that what I show you now is not a projection of your mind,” he said, and his voice was different, like a man’s. “You are not having a psychotic episode, Alex. All of this is very real, so pay attention.”
I nodded and looked away from the shadow beside me, then crossed my arms across my body and pinched the undersides of my arms so I knew that I was still there and that everything was happening, because lately I hadn’t been so sure. I feel so dizzy when I take the pills, especially on an empty stomach, that sometimes it feels like I’m on a ship and then sometimes I actually convince myself that I am on a ship and that we’re floating out to sea, that my bedroom curtains are icebergs and the fields outside are the polar icecaps and the sky is really the Arctic Ocean.
Boy Who Could See Demons Page 24