Alex stands up, his face frozen as he watches me. I see him reach behind his back, still hiding whatever he’s got in his hand. I know what is happening now, but I can’t explain why it’s happening. Anaphylactic shock, my mind screams, anaphylactic shock. But how? How is this happening? I keep my mind focused on taking short breaths, using what time I have left to think of a way to tell Alex what he needs to do.
“Are you sleepy?” I hear him say. Why is he asking that? Painfully I raise my head, watching him through blurring vision as he steps back, bumping into the doll’s house. He is sobbing now, his eyes streaming with tears.
“It’s okay,” I whisper, and it feels as if someone has put an invisible hand around my throat, squeezing tightly. I gag. “Help me,” I beg him. “Michael—get Michael.”
But Alex turns away, facing the doll’s house. There is a plastic tub on the floor, tipped on its side, the small kind you’d buy from a vending machine. A jelly bean tub, maybe. Or … There is a trail of dust pouring out of it, like sand. And amid the sand is a pebble. No, not a pebble.
A peanut.
Quickly I roll my eyes to my left. My coffee cup has rolled beside the table leg. I have to look twice, but it’s there: on the rim of the cup is a small dusting of the same beige dust.
Keep calm, breathe, breathe …
How did he do this? Just a minute ago, I wasn’t looking …
Did he pour peanut dust in my coffee? He must have …
Why is he doing this? Does he know what he is doing?
Does he realize he is killing me?
Alex is speaking fast and loud, pouring out apologies and explanations. My cheek is pressed to the floor, my arms splayed, my knees bent. It is vital to keep my breathing shallow, my heartbeat as slow as possible. I can feel saliva building up in my throat, and I start to panic. It feels like I am drowning.
Alex is standing above me. He is pacing, his face screwed up in a mixture of terror and grief. I hear him mutter “Ruen,” and I understand. “Ruen” is making him do this, or rather the belief he has invested subconsciously in his self-image as the child of a killer—as an inevitable killer-in-the-making. I think back to the YouTube footage, of a five-year-old Alex in the corner of the frame, watching. He was so young—too young to process the meaning of what he had seen. The media coverage afterward—newspapers, television footage—would have stirred up negative feelings toward a man he looked up to. A man he loved. His father. How many headlines had he seen like the one on the painting he did for Karen Holland’s class. RUEND PEEPELS LIVES.
My eyelids sag, plunging me back into darkness. Nothing but the sound of my small little gasps. I hear Alex’s feet edge closer, his whimper of fear. A muffled scraping sound. He is pushing my chair against the door, wedging it neatly beneath the handle.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I hear him say. He is pleading with someone or something. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.”
I try to think of anything but the terrible alien feeling that has overwhelmed me, the thickness of my tongue in my mouth, the seductive urge to pass out. I musn’t. With my last ounce of strength, I lift my head and open my eyes a fraction. At last, I see what Alex was hiding before: a thick shard of broken glass.
“Alex,” I whisper, though it’s a hopeless gargle of phlegm and tears and spit. Then I say what I longed to say to Poppy, “I love you, sweetheart.” He bends down slightly, sobbing.
The last thing I see is Alex raising the glass shard high above him, the light glinting on its lethal edge.
27
WAKING UP
ALEX
Dear Diary,
I looked at Anya on the floor and I wanted to tell her I’m sorry. I wanted to tell her not to be afraid. I wanted to tell her more about Ruen, about what he had asked me to do and why I was doing it. In my mind I could see Mum in the hospital, her face the color of vanilla ice cream, only in my mind she looks like Anya. I didn’t expect her to get so sick. My hands were shaking and I thought, she should just be falling asleep so why does she look like she’s in pain? I was so confused.
When Anya fell on the floor I felt really scared. I looked at Ruen, and he frowned at me and said, “you know what you have to do, Alex.” I nodded and I felt sick. I didn’t understand. I had told him I would do it. I would kill myself. I would do it to save Mum, that’s what he said. He told me I had to do it in public, so everyone could see. In front of Anya. Why? I’d asked, but he wouldn’t say. He told me to give her the peanuts if it made me feel better, so she would fall asleep straightaway and not see me do it. I felt relieved then, but scared. I didn’t want to die. I wouldn’t do it. But then the black shadow trailed across the floor like a snake from Ruen and wrapped around me. He squeezed it and I knew what he was saying: if I didn’t do it, he would.
Anya lay on the floor, her body shivering like she was really cold. Ruen was Horn Head again, a big red horn jutting out of his faceless forehead, his body covered in hair and barbed wire. I thought, it would be better if I just went away, because then Ruen would come with me and the only person he would hurt is me. Mum, Anya, Michael, even Woof—they’d all be happier if I went away.
I thought of Mum again, and the picture in my head was just like the first time when she’d taken lots of pills. It was the morning Dad left—the morning he got arrested for shooting those policemen. When I found Mum in her bed she was so limp I thought she was already dead.
Do it, Ruen whispered, his voice in my head. But it wasn’t his normal voice. It was a soft voice, not too deep and not too old and his accent wasn’t English anymore; it was Irish. When I realized whose voice it was I got shivers right up my spine. It was my Dad’s voice. And when I looked at the red horn I thought of the policeman my Dad shot in the head, the blood spurting out of it, and I felt sick.
“Anya!”
I turned around to see Michael pounding on the door with his fists, his eyes all wide and scared. He slammed his hands against the glass and looked down at Anya, then up at me. He looked really angry.
“Open this door!”
I could see the chair that I had pressed against the door handle move each time Michael banged against it and I knew he’d kill me when he got in.
And maybe that would be okay.
My Dad’s voice whispered in my head again. She’s dying, Alex. Your mother is dying.
“Please let my Mum be okay,” I whispered to Ruen, because I knew he was angry that Michael was getting through the door and I was doing nothing to stop him. He had changed his appearance and was Ghost Boy now, his hands by his sides and his eyes all black and angry, and his clothes were exactly like mine, as if I was looking into a mirror.
Michael was still banging on the glass, shouting, and there were lots of people behind him now. Then someone hit the glass with a hammer and started trying to break it. A big crack formed across the glass in the shape of a W.
I looked down, and for a moment it wasn’t Anya lying there—it was her little girl, Poppy, just the way Ruen had described her. She had dark hair like Anya’s and had fallen from a terrible height and she wasn’t moving. I blinked again and saw it was Anya. I wanted to reach down and fix her arm to make sure she was comfortable. But before I could do anything there was a gigantic crash and I screamed. The glass in the door smashed and scattered to the floor.
“Anya!”
Michael reached through the broken glass and swept away all the shards with his hand before pushing the chair away from the door handle. I saw there was blood on his hand but he didn’t notice. Then Ruen tightened his grip around me and I started to yell because it hurt a lot.
The only way to save her is to kill yourself, he said. You’re nothing. You don’t deserve this life. You should have saved her.
I lifted the glass handle from the floor. My mind was playing the image of Mum over and over, her hand on the bed opening loosely like a petal.
I knew what Ruen was telling me.
I was going to grow up to be just l
ike my Dad. And that was a bad thing, because my Dad was a murderer. I didn’t want to hurt anybody. But I was already doing it. I was hurting me. I was hurting Anya. And I was never going to be free of him.
But he had lied. He said I was unlovable. But Anya said she loved me, didn’t she?
“I’m not nothing,” I told Ruen. “I’m Alex. I can be anything I want to be.”
I lifted the glass higher. Then I slashed it down over the thick black link between me and Ruen, and Ruen roared as the shadow shattered and every vein in my body felt like it was going to explode.
Someone grabbed my arms and yelled “She’s going!” and Michael shouted, “What have you done?” and then there was nothing but blackness.
28
THE ANSWERS
ANYA
I woke up in Belfast city hospital, a venue in which I had never spent any time during the thirty years I lived here but which was now startlingly familiar. I was in a ward with two other women, a heart monitor bleeping close by, but oddly, no wires were attached like last time. No drip, no signs of medical intervention. Just my alarmingly thin legs poking out from beneath a white hospital gown, a sour smell of body odor that suggested it had been days since I’d arrived. A bunch of red roses sat in a vase close to the bed. I lay in a blank daze as the wheels of thought warmed up again, wondering how long I’d been out for and—deep in the roots of my suspicions—if I really was alive. Gradually a series of aches and throbs announced themselves all over my body—my throat, my neck and shoulders, my stomach—and I realized with relief that I was alive.
A young black-haired nurse walked past and threw me a smile, then doubled back as it occurred to her that I had surfaced. She checked my vitals, read my chart.
“Well, well,” she said brightly. “Back in the land of the living. How are you feeling?”
“Where’s Alex?” I asked.
“Who?”
“Michael,” I corrected myself. She would probably be a stranger to the situation; Michael would know about Alex. “Michael Jones, he must have brought me in. Is he around?”
She considered while strapping a blood pressure gauge around my right bicep. “Don’t know a Michael Jones,” she said cheerfully.
She flipped open my chart and scribbled a figure in a column. “I’ll arrange for you to get some soup. You must be starving.”
Just then, footsteps made their way toward my bed. I looked up and saw Michael standing there. The nurse glanced at me.
“This is who you meant?” She smiled, then left the room.
Michael pulled a chair close to the bed and sat down. He had fresh silver stubble on his jaw; his eyes were puffy with lack of sleep.
“You look great,” he said, smiling.
“Where’s Alex?” I whispered. The memory of what had happened was creeping back like a slow tide.
Michael’s smile crumpled. He ran his fingers through his hair, visibly reluctant to tell me. I felt my heart sink.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?”
He took my hand. “You don’t mind, do you?” he asked. I shook my head. I was remembering it all now: Alex’s face, raw with tears and grief. The trickle of dust on my espresso cup. The sensation of drowning.
He swallowed, then looked away. “He’s not dead.”
I felt a surge of relief, so great that I felt my eyes sting with tears. An enormous weight left my heart. The feeling was familiar. It was exactly how I felt on those nights when I dreamed Poppy had not jumped. That, instead, she had closed the window and stepped back inside. That she had lived.
But then Michael looked back at me, his gaze intense and searching.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, frightened.
He shifted in his seat, pressing his palms together and adopting a poise that seemed familiar—it was one I often assumed when attempting to put patients at ease. “Anya, I have to tell you something, and I need you to listen and try to understand. Okay?”
I nodded, my heart pounding.
His voice was soft, his gaze unyielding. “Alex doesn’t exist.”
I blinked at him, certain that I’d heard him wrong and waiting for him to repeat the sentence in a different form. A long time passed before he spoke again.
“He’s not real.”
“What do you mean, not real?” I said, exasperated.
He was so close that I could make out the whiskered lines at the sides of his eyes—deeper when he hadn’t had enough sleep—and the look there that said he wasn’t kidding. “Listen carefully …”
“I am listening carefully,” I snapped. “Michael, what are you saying? No, why are you saying this? This is ridiculous. And it’s not helpful …”
His fingers tightened on my hand. “Anya, I have been treating you for several months now.”
“Treating me? What are you talking about? Treating me? For what?”
He cleared his throat, opening and closing his mouth as if testing the words before he spoke them. “You had a breakdown back in May, on the anniversary of Poppy’s death. I should have seen it coming. You had become more and more withdrawn, even from me. You began to tell me your mother had had schizophrenia.”
“My mother did have schizophrenia,” I snapped. My mind was reeling. Breakdown? What was he saying? Was I still unconscious, dreaming this?
He was shaking his head. “No, she didn’t. Your mother died from cancer, ten years ago. It was you …” He trailed off, reluctant to say any more. I stared at him, waiting for an explanation, but instead he stood and nodded to someone. I leaned forward as he pulled the curtain around the bed, and as he swished the faded yellow fabric past my face I caught a glimpse of who he was addressing: Ursula, but not as I knew her. She seemed to have gained a considerable amount of weight in the last day or so, and her hair glinted with additional streaks of silver.
Something was very, very wrong, I decided. I watched numbly as Michael carefully tugged the curtain across the last inch of light so that we were completely alone. I jumped when he sat back down, and he saw.
“Anya,” he said, reaching for my hand again. I pulled away from him. He looked wounded. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said gently, holding up his hands. “Quite the opposite. I’m here to help you.”
“Help me?” I looked around me, noticing again the lack of wires. My body would need serious intervention to help it recover from anaphylactic shock, and yet there was nothing. I told Michael this, and he seemed mildly bemused.
“Blackouts,” he said, his face serious. “They became more and more regular once you began to make progress.”
“Progress?”
“You can’t … you can’t see any of them now?”
I glanced around the cubicle. “See who?”
“Alex. Ruen. Cindy. Any of them?”
“Michael, don’t be absurd! You’re scaring me—”
He nodded. “This is good. Ironically, you’ve been gaining clarity after each blackout. The last one was so serious I thought I’d lost you entirely.”
A new possibility struck me. “Am I dead?” I said then, very serious.
“No. But it was mentioned once or twice.”
“Mentioned?”
“You wanted to die, Anya. When you told me Ruen wanted Alex to kill himself, I knew what it meant.”
“Michael, please.” I wanted him to stop. “We’ve been working together on Alex’s treatment since early May. Why are you saying this?”
Several moments passed before he answered. “When I met you at the conference all those years ago … well, I was intimidated. You were this rising star, everyone was talking about how good you were. When you came to MacNeice House last year it took me ages before I could summon up the courage to ask you on a date.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Luckily, we never became lovers. Otherwise they’d never have let me treat you.”
“Last year? I only started working at MacNeice House a couple of months ago … Where’s Alex? What has happened to him? Tell me!” I suddenly needed proof, hard
evidence, anything to shoot down these ridiculous claims he was making.
“No, Anya. Look, I’m sorry to have to lay all this on you so soon. I thought I’d guide you out of your psychosis gently, give you time.”
“Time for what?” I thought of Alex: I didn’t want him to face the consequences of what he had done, and yet I needed to find out why he had done it. Why he had tried to kill me.
Michael’s face flushed. “I thought you were coming closer to seeing the truth, especially when you said you saw Poppy.”
“What truth, Michael?”
He held my gaze. “You really want me to spell it all out?”
“Damn it, yes!”
He took a deep breath, pressing his palms together—the way he always did when presenting a patient’s symptoms. “I only found out about your history when we became close. Your medical history. You had suffered delusions as a child, freaked out your parents when you claimed to be playing with a twin sister …”
“That was you, Michael!” I protested.
He shook his head. “You had a twin, Anya. She died when you were born. The delusions grew stronger. But you overcame them. With treatment and your own study of the illness, you overcame it all, Anya. Quite unheard of for a psychiatrist with a history of psychosis to rise to your heights.”
I stared at him. Surely he was talking about someone else.
“When your daughter displayed similar symptoms, you were convinced you could treat her. Her psychiatrist suggested that she be institutionalized, and you agreed. But then Poppy attacked you. You knew how badly she didn’t want to be separated from you, and so you decided to treat her at home. And later, when she jumped, you blamed yourself.”
It was suddenly all too much. There was a roar in my head that threatened to burst my eardrums if I didn’t press my hands against my ears and hold them there. When I opened my eyes again I was back on the bed, the curtain pulled back and the light from the windows pouring through, so that the nurse standing above me appeared haloed by sun. She inspected the monitor by my bed before producing several pills and a cup of water. Michael stood at her elbow, watching.
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