“I want my voice recorder.”
“What voice recorder?”
“The recorder I used for all my interviews with Alex.” I slid from the bed carefully and shuffled toward the small cupboard, certain that my handbag and briefcase would be stored there. I found only a small white plastic bag containing a copy of Hamlet, a framed photograph of Poppy, a set of keys, a makeup bag full of elastic bands, and a leather journal that I deduced was a notebook I’d forgotten about. At the bottom of the bag I found my tape recorder. I pulled it out, triumphant. “Look,” I told Michael, as if the thing itself was evidence. “Better yet, listen.” And I pressed PLAY.
Michael sat down and leaned back into his seat with a sigh. I glared at him, waiting for my or Alex’s recorded voice to break the silence. To prove to him that he was wrong. When nothing came, I glanced at the volume dial, flicking it with my thumb. The sound of static merely increased to hiss. “You erased the tapes.”
“Anya …”
With trembling hands I plucked the cassette tape out of the recorder, flipping it over to the other side. Still nothing but static when I pressed PLAY. “Why would you do that? Why would you go to such lengths?”
“Believe me when I say that I wish I could have taken a little more time to guide you back to reality, but the events over the last few weeks have proven that too much is at stake. So what I need you to do right now is step back inside your role as a psychiatrist, Dr. Molokova, and help me solve the riddle posed by my most challenging patient.”
I searched his face for a few seconds, reluctant to play along. “Go on.”
He seemed visibly pleased by my response. “For the sake of argument we’ll refer to the patient as Patient A.”
“History?”
“Parental bereavement. Witnessed an only child plunging to her death. Patient A was medically trained to deal with the condition the child was afflicted with, but ultimately could not prevent this terrible tragedy. Possible psychological impact?”
I drew a breath, certain he was talking about me, but he immediately held up a chiding finger. “Please retain your professional focus, Dr. Molokova.”
I nodded, feeling a spike of fury at the game he was insisting on playing. “Okay. Possible psychological trauma, ranging from guilt to severe depression and reenactment.”
“Psychosis?”
I blinked. “Potentially. Of course, that depends on other factors.”
He continued in a perplexingly hypothetical tone. “Patient A experiences psychotic episodes of an escalating intensity. Is delusional, and given medication for delusions.”
“Risperidone?”
He nodded. “These delusions have strong ties to the deceased child.”
“Such as?”
“Patient A reports a primary delusion in the form of a child with a similar condition as the deceased, a condition Patient A works tirelessly to treat.”
“Go on,” I said carefully.
“Many other delusions seem to be founded on memories.”
“Gives the delusions strength,” I reminded him. “It’s essentially building fiction on the foundations of undeniable fact. What are the delusions?”
“The home of the child that Patient A believes they are treating. The child’s mother. The child’s social worker …”
“You’re a social worker.”
He shook his head, sadly. “I was a social worker when we met six years ago. You believe I’m Alex’s social worker, when in fact I’m a psychiatrist working at MacNeice House, just like you.” He leaned forward. “You once said you came back to Northern Ireland to rebuild lives. Now help me rebuild your own.”
Panicked, I thought quickly to what I remembered about the moment before I lost consciousness. Alex, his face wet with tears. But somewhere in the background I could hear echoes of another voice: “What have you done? Anya, what have you done?”
“You said I came to MacNeice House a year ago,” I said, recalling the day I met him—handsome and serious in his navy suit, how I had had to flex my hand after our handshake. That was only months ago, wasn’t it?
“Yes.” He nodded. “And you were fine. More than fine, actually. You were changing things, exactly as you said. You rented an apartment. You were treating patients. I took you to see Hamlet at the Grand Opera House. And then you changed. You didn’t want to see me anymore. You started working at home. Only ‘home’ wasn’t your apartment. You moved so I wouldn’t know where you lived. And when I tracked you down, I was certain something was wrong.”
I nodded, thinking frantically. Proof. It would be easy to erase cassette tapes, but my notes on Alex would be at my office. I could contact Karen Holland, Jojo. I could show Michael the YouTube footage. We were so close to bringing Alex to realizing what he feared all along: that he was going to turn out to be a murderer, just like his father.
The roar in my head was getting louder and louder. I closed my eyes against it. “You said Patient A’s delusions were grounded in memories,” I said.
“Yes,” he said, so tenderly that I opened my eyes. “Memories of meetings with colleagues, interviews with previous patients, each of them compounded to inform the primary delusion. The problem is, Patient A is not conscious of these memories. Reality and irreality have become so confused that they’ve switched in Patient A’s mind, meaning that memories are now perceived as elements of subconscious fantasy. Or in other words …”
“Dreams,” I said. He nodded.
“What do you remember?” he said gently.
I opened my mouth to speak but found I could barely articulate what I wanted to say. Instead, more and more images seemed to flood into my mind: a memory of me cooking up onions in Alex’s house, the feel of the metallic handle cold in my hand, the view from the kitchen window overlooking the weed-spotted patch of concrete the council called a garden. The blue armchair positioned in front of the television. Try as I might, I could not summon Bev’s face, or Alex’s. I could make out the nicotine-stained lace curtains hanging on the bay windows, the tuneless piano in the hall, the damp-ridden walls of Alex’s bedroom …
But a psychiatrist would never enter a child’s bedroom. Not without reason or a parent’s consent. I knew I had never been inside his room. And yet, I could remember it. How could I? Which of my memories were real?
“Please,” I said, steadying my voice. “Take me to Alex’s house. I need to go there, Michael. Please.”
I watched the faces of Belfast unfold before me as Michael drove his ailing Volvo through its streets, my spirits lifted by the sight of the murals we had visited together, by a gleam of sunshine falling on the River Lagan, turning it for a moment into a gold ribbon. We slipped up an alley close to the Opera House and continued on the narrowing streets toward Alex’s neighborhood, and it was then that Michael broke his silence.
“After your breakdown you came back to work, remember? Ursula said it was fine, but I was uneasy. I tried to get you to confide in me, but I should have known better. Anytime I tried to get close, you backed away, until one day I showed up at your apartment with a bouquet and a bottle of wine and found a sixty-year-old barrister living there. You’d moved out some time ago. And so I followed you home.” He glanced at me. “I hope you don’t mind.”
I felt the car start to slow down, creeping along the pavement of a street I recognized instantly. Alex’s house was visible through the windscreen. The broken windowpane causing the familiar lace curtains to billow out into the front garden. I breathed a sigh of relief. I hadn’t imagined this.
“We’ve no way of getting inside,” I told him. “Unless lock picker is on your list of former occupations.”
He reached down and grabbed the plastic bag from the backseat, giving it a shake. “The key’s in here, isn’t it?”
He smiled and held out his arm for me to take. I walked with him toward the house, noticing the decrepit blue car parked outside the house, both wheels flat, its windscreen shattered. Teenage boys heckled us from the house op
posite, but Michael ignored them.
“It did strike me as odd that you would choose such a neighborhood to reside in,” he said, taking the keys from the bag. “And as you would never admit to it, I had to work it out all by myself. But I think I cracked it.”
“You do?”
“You’re anonymous here. No one to disturb your work.”
“My work?”
He slipped the key into the lock. “The creation of Alex Connolly.”
I stepped inside, shivering.
Everything was exactly as I remembered it, with one small omission: the piano that Cindy had kept in the hallway. It was missing, but at the spot where it once sat were four distinct grooves from its brass wheels.
In the living room I spotted the blue armchair in front of the ancient television, the round table where I had sat with Alex, the electrical socket hanging off the wall.
“And now that I’m finally inside, it all makes sense,” Michael continued, glancing around the room. On the mantelpiece, the school photographs of Alex that had once rested there in cardboard frames were gone, as was the framed portrait of him and Cindy. There was nothing there, now. Not even holes in the peeling wallpaper from the nail upon which the portrait had hung.
“What makes sense?” I said distracted.
“When you first mentioned Alex I believed he was as real as you did. You complained about the state of the house he lived in, the bad neighborhood. It was soon after that that you moved out of your flat. It makes sense. You went looking for Alex. And you came across this place. You started off carrying out your ‘interviews’ here. And then, when Alex took hold, you moved in.”
I nodded, less agreeing with him than processing the information he was giving me, piece by piece. So far, the pieces fit. I had to think of the person he was describing exactly as he had offered—as Patient A. Only by remaining objective could I begin to understand how or why the things he was saying might be true—whatever that truth might be.
“I want to go upstairs,” I said.
I looked into each of the bedrooms, noticing my own suitcase on the floor of the room with a double bed. “What about Cindy?” I said levelly. “You say Alex was a delusion. What about Cindy? Did I make her up, too?”
“Poppy’s death was your breaking point, Anya. Your fears were so deep inside you that only Cindy could give voice to them. Cindy. A woman full of sin. You believed you were a bad mother, Anya.”
I contemplated this. Much of it rang true, but I said nothing, glancing at the second stairwell and indicating that I wanted to continue upward. And so we continued on, mounting the creaking, carpetless staircase that led to the top floor and Alex’s bedroom.
The door to the room was closed. Michael stepped forward and leaned against it, pushing it open.
Inside, the room was freezing. The large dormer window was completely gone except for a single jagged shard hanging down like a fang. There was no bed, no posters, and no wardrobe. But there were two items in the room. A small stool, and before it a piano.
“Anya, careful,” Michael warned as I took a nervous step toward it. “It’s not safe up here. Whoever moved a piano here needs their head examined. That floor is unsafe.”
“I moved it here.” I sat down at the piano, suddenly recalling the two men I’d hired to shift the thing up three rickety flights of stairs. I’d paid them generously; they’d taken one look at the wad of cash and another at the scar on my face, then set to work without asking questions.
“You say that Alex doesn’t exist,” I said to Michael. “Yet I remember you and me—we interviewed him together in the therapy room.”
He shook his head and rubbed his hands to keep warm. “I interviewed you in the therapy room, Anya, when you claimed you had a patient in there and I found nothing but thin air.”
“What about the hospital visits? Our meetings with Harold and Ursula?”
“We had many hospital visits and meetings, but always about other patients.” He hesitated. “Patient A’s primary delusion was a small boy who believed he could release his own father from Hell, the father he loved but whom he feared he was becoming. Hypothesis: Patient A was attempting to release herself from her own hell. She was struggling with the two sides of her character: the side she saw as virtuous, loving, and the side she perceived as demonic, unloving.”
My fingers slid up the yellowed ivory of the keys, the notes of Ruen’s music blooming vibrantly in my mind. I played the first bar, then, wincing at the tuneless chime of the piano, turned back to Michael. “You want to know why Patient A suffered from those particular delusions?”
He cocked his head to one side, his expression changing. I played the second bar of the music slowly, the music rising sourly into the icy air.
“Patient A believed that she was a murderer for not preventing the loss of her child. Patient A’s psyche could not tolerate the fact that she possessed the tools to heal her child and did not use those tools effectively, and so a gaping hole was torn in the fabric of Patient A’s life.” I closed my eyes, Poppy’s face rising up in my mind. Her voice. It feels like a hole, Mum. I felt my breaths shorten, the wind beginning to howl its way through the broken window and the cracks in the walls.
“Go on,” Michael said softly.
“A common response to such grief would be manic depression or suicide. But there was an additional element to Patient A’s situation.”
“What was that?”
“Love,” I answered. “Patient A believed that her lack of love caused the child to die. Patient A was convinced that, even if the child had lived, she had been doomed from the outset by the fact that her mother knew too little of love to save her completely. That’s where you’re wrong, Michael.”
“Oh?”
“How else would any patient deal with such crippling emotions, and with the knowledge that there was something she could have done to save her daughter, but didn’t?”
He nodded, but his expression was one of fear. “Come back from the window.”
I realized I was no longer sitting at the piano but standing by the window, looking down over Belfast. For a moment I saw Poppy’s face as she sat by the window of our apartment in Edinburgh, her smile as she turned to me. I love you, Mummy. What had it felt like, I wondered, when she fell? Was it relief? Was it so much better than living with me?
“Don’t,” Michael said tersely, glancing at the window. His face was white with terror. “Poppy died, Anya. She was off medication. That wasn’t your fault. You can’t let this destroy you, too.”
I considered that as I looked out to the street below. It would be so easy to let go, to slip out of reality entirely, to step out of life. Is that how Poppy had felt?
And right then, as if he had read my thoughts, Michael said: “You know, it took me a while to figure out why you kept that diary. Why you wrote entry after entry in Alex’s voice. And now I think I know why.”
I stretched a hand out to lean against the window frame, dizzy with confusion. “You do?”
“Anya.”
From the corner of my eye I saw him holding up the leather journal that I’d found inside the bag. “You will never know how Poppy felt. Couching her inside Alex didn’t help you work out what was going on inside her head. Her death was an accident, Anya. A terrible accident. You were not responsible for it.”
I was close enough now to step forward without him being able to reach me; the distance between us was so great that I’d be out the window before he could react in time. He raised his voice.
“You told me once that you believe everything can be overcome. But can you stare at yourself in the mirror and see a demon looking back and still overcome that aspect of yourself enough to become human again?” He paused. “That is the question.”
I flicked my eyes at the shard of glass hanging loosely down from the frame, the insistent wind tugging at it like a child’s tooth. A second ago I had glimpsed my own face reflected there, the scar on my face like an asterisk. Now anoth
er face had appeared, and I was frightened to look at it. But I knew who it was. Ruen. When I summoned up the courage to look, he smiled, his green eyes malevolent, willing me to jump. I looked down, focusing on the cracks in the floorboards, taking my last step forward, into the open air.
But Michael lunged, fast enough to grab the back of my shirt and, holding on to the shard of glass hanging from the frame, yanked me backward. We both fell to the floor, the wind howling after me.
“Are you okay?” I whispered weakly.
Michael looked at his palm, streaked with blood. Quickly he wrapped the sleeve of his jacket around the gash. Then: “You know I was wrong before. He’s alive, Anya.”
“Who is?”
“Alex.”
I searched his face, wondering for a moment if had lost his mind. “What?”
“In your psyche. Alex never died. And he survived precisely because you saved him. You told me that you had managed to convince him that he wasn’t a murderer, but Ruen wouldn’t let up. It’s this that you have to work through now. You have to know that you loved her, how much you loved her. Play the song.”
“The song?”
He nodded. “You know which one.”
I glanced at the piano. “The music’s gone, Michael. I don’t have it …”
He struggled to his feet, holding out his good hand to help me up. “You wrote that music. And I believe the reason you wrote it was so that there could be some completion to the bond between you and Poppy. You finished what she had started. It’s not a ‘love song for Anya’ at all. It’s a love song for Poppy, a reminder that she loved you. You once said, ‘Hell is when no treatment is given.’ I am offering you that treatment, Anya, but I need your help. I need your willingness to step away from the abyss. If you believe you can, if you can only take my hand and begin the climb, I need you to play. Play.”
Reluctantly I inched around the piano toward the seat, flinching at the reflection of Ruen, changing through all four of his guises in the sheen of the wood. Could I ever be free of him? Could I ever accept that the demonic and angelic lurked in my own nature, and that I had a choice between which to act upon?
Boy Who Could See Demons Page 27