by Torey Hayden
With those, Laura’s imagination was no longer confined to two hours a week at the clinic. It went home with James. Ate with him. Went to bed with him. And when he read, his mind became one with Laura’s and together they created a new reality. James had started the stories as nothing more than a means of better understanding Laura, but as he became more and more caught up in what happened next to Torgon, he ceased to be an objective bystander. He became, instead, a participant in Laura’s imagination, and from that joining had sprung a Torgon – and, indeed, a Laura – of his own creation.
Chapter Forty-Three
“I know it’s been my practice in here to let you decide how the sessions go,” James said as Laura settled into her usual chair in the conversation centre. “But sometimes it’s necessary for me, as the professional, to step in and put things back in balance. That’s my role in this and it’s the difference between a therapeutic relationship and just an ordinary, everyday relationship.”
A flicker of alarm crossed Laura’s features.
“So there are a few things we need to clear up.”
“Don’t scare me, okay?” she said, a worried note in her voice.
“I’m scaring you?” James said.
“Yes.” A pause. She looked down at her hands in her lap. “Because I’ve come to really trust you. I’ve been very honest in here and talked about things that have been so hard for me to acknowledge to anyone.”
“You’ve trusted me?” James said with irony. “You’ve been honest?’
“Yes.”
“Such as when you told me about Boston, for instance?” he asked.
Laura’s gaze snapped up to his face. There wasn’t the shock of being found out that James had expected to see there. Just a momentary flicker of surprise, followed almost immediately by an expression of deeper weariness, like a fox run to ground.
“Boston was not true, Laura. You were never at school in Boston.”
“Boston wasn’t true, as in the physical location isn’t true. No. It was not Boston. But what I told you is true. Every single experience I told you about really happened.”
“But it wasn’t in Boston?” he asked.
“No,” she said heavily, “it was not in Boston.”
James looked at her.
“The name of the city had no importance,” she said. “We weren’t discussing vacation destinations. Or good restaurants or whatever.”
“The problem is, you didn’t just say ‘back East’ or something else equally vague,” James replied. “You gave it concrete parameters the moment you called it Boston, and it became a lie the moment you didn’t qualify that.”
“I didn’t think I needed to qualify it, because it wasn’t important. I simply wanted to make the place easy to refer to, but I didn’t want to use specifics. James, I’m not anybody. I’m relatively well known. And I’ve been telling you about some very personal – and embarrassing – episodes in my past. In the city where it all took place, there are still plenty of people who would only remember me as a charlatan psychic or, worse, as Fergus’s New Age ‘queen’.”
“Okay, I can understand your wanting to protect your privacy, but can you see how not knowing about this discrepancy impacts on what’s going on here, in therapy? How it then makes me question everything else you’ve told me?” James asked.
“But what I’m telling you is real. Saying ‘Boston’ was a detail that made no difference whatsoever to the story.”
“Yes, ‘story’. I suspect we have a key word there, Laura,” James said softly. “Now we have to clarify this concept of ‘story’ because I think it’s behind quite a few of the problems that have resulted in your ending up here. When we talk about events that have really happened, it’s not a story – it’s a set of unalterable facts and we can’t depart from them without telling people why. Boston is Boston. Paris is Paris. Tokyo is Tokyo. One doesn’t mutate into another indiscriminately.”
“The world is not that fixed,” she said, just as quietly. If I learned anything from my experiences with Torgon, it is that all this around us that looks so concrete is, in reality, just as insubstantial as she is. Things are not more true simply because we can see them or hear them or find them on a map. Everything is just perception. We have no way of getting outside ourselves to verify if something exists. I see and feel this table, so it exists for me. It’s ‘real’. But an aboriginal living in the outback of Australia can not see or feel this table and has no knowledge of it, so it does not exist for him. If he has any knowledge of it at all, it’s only in his imagination. So how do we know the table is real? I perceive the Forest. I see and feel it with my inner senses, so it exists for me. You don’t perceive the Forest, so that place is unreal for you. But if I give you the stories to read, then soon you will see it and feel it with your inner senses. How do we know if that’s real? We both perceive it. Boston was Boston because you perceived Boston in what I told you, Boston existed for you. But that has nothing to do with whether or not Boston really exists as a place you can experience with your five senses. If you had perceived this place as Seattle or San Francisco or Kathmandu, what I told you still would have been just as true.”
“That’s impressive reasoning,” James replied, “but it’s on a scale a little more broad than most of us use. What’s important to keep in mind is that when you are talking to someone else, it’s not just about your perceptions. It’s about theirs too. So, what happens to me is that when I find out that your location wasn’t the real location, I begin to ask myself what else in your stories might have been regarded as ‘flexible reality’. I wonder, did you really meet Alec, for instance? Was the Tuesday night group real? And what about Fergus? Is he who you said he was? Or did you create Fergus in the same way you did Torgon?”
“No! Oh, good God, no.” Her eyes went wide with horror. “Of course I didn’t ‘create’ him. How the hell could I create somebody like that?”
“But isn’t that what you just said? ‘I perceive the Forest, so it exists.’ How do I know you don’t just ‘perceive’ Fergus and thus he exists as well?”
“Why would I create someone like that?” she cried. “Why would I want to think all those horrible things had happened to me? Fergus was evil, James, and he managed to destroy just about everything that was good about me.”
“Sometimes,” James said, “very strong, difficult-to-deal-with events happen in our lives and they are so overpowering that the only way we can cope with them is to put them into a separate part of our minds. It’s the only way to get enough peace to carry on living.
“When we do this, these things do sometimes take on a personality of their own. They’re part of us, but they have their own identity representing what we are dealing with. This isn’t wrong, Laura, so I’m not chastising you in any way, and I’m not trying to make you feel bad about doing this. It’s just a way of coping. Because of the abandonment, the isolation, the sexual abuse that you suffered in childhood, it is very possible Torgon is an ‘alter’ personality. It would be quite understandable if Fergus is an alter as well. I think considering the possibility of multiple personalities would explain much of this ‘lying’ you’ve had such trouble with through your life. And you’re right – it isn’t lying. Switching back and forth between these personalities is going to create inconsistencies you really can’t help.”
Tears sprung to her eyes. “You’re wrong.”
“I know this is a huge concept to take in, so I understand –”
“I’m not crazy. I didn’t make him up. You want proof this is not all in my mind?” she cried angrily.
James looked at her.
“Because it’s been right in front of your face all along, James. Just fucking look at Morgana.”
“What do you mean?”
Laura began to cry in earnest. “Are you blind? How could she be Alan’s child?”
Astonished comprehension overtook James.
“She’s Fergus’s daughter,” Laura said between angry sobs. “I
only wish I had made him up! I wish it had really been Boston, because maybe then I never would have met him.”
She reached for a tissue. Snuffling, she mopped her eyes.
James sat in stunned silence.
“I managed to elude Fergus for about ten years,” Laura said. “Which was enough time for me to think the thing with him was over. And for me to meet a decent man like Alan and settle down.
“For the first time in my life I was happy. I had a husband who loved me madly, a wonderful home in a beautiful landscape, and work I adored. And I was pregnant with my first child, which – please let me emphasize – meant so much to me. I wanted to have children. I grew up in a world where I never quite belonged to any of the people I lived with, so having my very own family was a dream come true. That’s why Fergus crashing back into my life at that point was such a devastating event.”
James listened warily. “So, Fergus was your ‘demented fan’ – the stalker Alan has told me about?”
Laura nodded. “Yes, I didn’t want to tell Alan my whole past, so that’s how I described him.”
James paused thoughtfully. “I want to believe you,” he said slowly. “I really, really do, Laura. But things still don’t quite add up for me. You say you were pregnant with Conor when Fergus reappeared, but Alan says the fan was stalking you around the time Conor was two. And Morgana didn’t come along until Conor was three.”
“I dealt with Fergus on my own for a very long time,” Laura said. “I was desperate for Alan not to know about him. I finally had a normal life. I wanted to leave my past behind. What would Alan think of me, if he found out I’d spent years making money off gullible souls as a fake psychic? Or if he knew this insane guy had been my lover and that I’d stayed in such an abusive relationship for so long? I just wanted to keep it hidden, which wasn’t all that hard, because Alan was not around that consistently. He went off for a day or two each week buying and selling cattle, and even when he was home, I had most of the daylight hours on my own because he was out on the range. One of the reasons Alan and I work out so well is that we’re both independent people. We both do well with solitude. It was an ideal life for a writer, but, of course, it worked in Fergus’s favour too.
“Fergus had this way of just materializing without warning. In the old days, I’d believed this was evidence of his psychic ability, that he had a paranormal ability to sense where people were. By this point, however, I knew there was nothing mystical about it. It was just the result of his obsession with me. He was stalking me, plain and simple. I could be anywhere – at the house, at the supermarket, at my antenatal appointment – and I’d come outside to find him waiting by my car. He always said he only wanted a chance to talk to me, but he didn’t. The truth was, he wanted me to go away with him. He thought I would just walk out on this life I’d built in the meantime and return to … what? Being his ‘queen’? Fergus behaved as if all the years in between hadn’t happened, as if we’d never been apart. When I told him no, that I was never going to leave Alan, that I wanted him out of my life for good, he would get seriously angry with me.
“I had quite a hard birth with Conor. I haemorrhaged, so I was kept in the hospital a few extra days. I had a private room and Conor was with me. One evening – it was well after visiting hours, because Alan had long since gone home – Fergus appeared in my room. I was bed-bound with a drip in my arm and a drainage tube, so I couldn’t move easily. He breezed in and the first thing he did was pick up my buzzer for ringing the nurse. He set it on the side dresser out of my reach. Then he went over to the bassinet and peered into it.
“I told him at once to leave the baby alone, but he reached in and picked Conor up. Fergus didn’t cuddle him against his body the way you usually do with a baby. Instead, he held Conor out like this” – Laura demonstrated, holding her hands out away from her body, as if she were clasping a basketball. “He said, ‘This should have been our son. Try as you might, you can’t escape your destiny, my queen.’ And with that, he dropped Conor. Just opened his fingers and let him fall. And walked out.’
Laura’s face drained white with the memory. “I screamed,” she said. “I lurched forward to get out of the bed, to pick him up. I dislodged the tubing. I was screaming and crying when they all came rushing in …” She looked over and tears were in her eyes. “But you know what? They thought I’d dropped Conor. I kept trying to explain it had been Fergus, but no one had seen him. I don’t know how they missed him, but they did. They thought I’d done it. They wouldn’t believe me.”
James regarded her and thought, Can I?
Laura wiped her eyes and sat back. “Suddenly it felt like I was back in my attic at the lake house with my kitten Felix and Steven Mecks telling me he could do anything he wanted. Only this time it was my baby. I knew in Fergus’s warped mind, he saw my destiny as his and it was unthinkable that I should have another man’s child. He would kill Conor, I was sure of it. Conor was never going to be safe.”
“I’m not necessarily doubting you here, but a man has just come in and seriously assaulted your newborn son and you believe there’s a good chance he’s going to kill the baby. Why didn’t you call the police?” James asked.
“And say what exactly? Nobody believed he was real. They thought it was post-partum psychosis. They gave me Haldol to stop the hallucinations.
“Fergus disappeared for a while after that incident. This was typical of his pattern. He’d be around for several weeks, then vanish for months at a time. My guess is that he was being hospitalized. I was certain by then that he was seriously mentally ill, because he just wasn’t operating in the real world. His thinking was less and less clear every time I saw him, and it had to have been getting him into trouble in other ways. So I just kept praying each time he went away that it would be permanent.
“Conor was nineteen months old when Fergus next showed up. I was in Spearfish up off Interstate 90. I’d stopped at the big supermarket there to get groceries before going back to the ranch, and as I was coming out with my stuff, there he was, sitting in the driver’s seat of the car parked next to mine. I hadn’t realized who it was at first because I was preoccupied with getting Conor into his car seat, but when I finished and closed the car door, I turned and saw him. I nearly jumped out of my skin. My God. Honestly, the way Fergus could turn up, it was like something out of a horror film.
“Anyway, he rolled down the window and, calm as could be, he said – with no preamble whatsoever – ‘A lion, when he meets his mate, will kill all the cubs that are not his.’ I thought, It’s now. He’s going to do it. I rushed around to get into the driver’s side of my vehicle but before I could unlock and relock, he just slipped into the front passenger’s seat, and there we were, side by side in my car, like any couple, looking ordinary to people passing by.
“My overwhelming sense was that he was going to kill us. I was madly trying to think of what to do.
“He said, ‘We’re bound together, Laura. Don’t keep fighting it. There can be no other love but our love.’ Then he turned to look over his shoulder into the back seat where Conor was. Conor started to cry.
“I knew I had to act fast. So I did the only thing I could think of. I hit him. Just with my fist. It was all I had. But hard as I could on the side of his head by his temple. It stunned him. He stopped abruptly and blinked in surprise. Then he turned to look at me, and in his eyes was a look of pure hate. I thought, ‘Oh my God, we’re done for.’
“I think he would have done something then and there, except that the person whose car was parked opposite mine just happened to return to it at that moment. Instead of just getting in and driving off, he sat down in the driver’s seat and then opened a packet of Ritz crackers and started eating them.” Laura shook her head faintly. “Weird to think your life could depend on such a small, random act by a stranger.
“So Fergus just sat there, waiting and staring at me with those eyes. At last he said, ‘You can never escape your destiny, my queen.’ Very softl
y, like it was a caress. Then he got out of my car and into his and left.”
“But you still hadn’t told Alan about any of this?” James asked.
“No.”
“That does seem an extraordinary thing to keep from him, Laura. Fergus is threatening his son’s life and you fail to share this with him?”
“I was trapped,” she said, her voice plaintive. “It felt like Fergus could still destroy my life without doing a thing.”
“Okay, but by not telling Alan about such an important thing, you give the impression of trying to control everyone’s life. Or else that you are simply ruthlessly censoring out whatever doesn’t suit you. I get the sense that you enjoy the freedom of not being confined to normal notions of what’s real and what’s not. With your kind of thinking, if Alan doesn’t know his son has been threatened – doesn’t perceive that – then it doesn’t exist for him, does it? You can treat it as if it didn’t happen.”
Laura was looking down at her hands. She didn’t answer.
“You may have managed to keep Alan in his place,” James said, “but what about Conor?”
“Conor?”
“If these events are real, then he experienced them all alongside you.”
“He was just a baby, though. Far too young to have been aware of any of it.”
“When was the last time you saw Fergus?” James asked.
There was a long pause before she finally said, “The night Morgana was conceived.”
“Would you tell me what went on that night?” James asked.
She hesitated, then sighed heavily.
James waited quietly
“That night,” she mumbled. “That night, that night, how do I talk about it?”
Silence.
“I knew the situation had got serious. I took out a restraining order, so that I could get the police there, if I needed them, because I knew we were in real danger. That’s when Alan found out, so we did talk about it then. I couldn’t go into the detail. I just couldn’t bear Alan thinking of me like I was in those years with Fergus. ‘Demented fan’ pretty much said what was going on. Once Alan realized that he had an unhealthy interest in Conor and me … he was so protective. It nearly broke my heart knowing I was the one who had put our family in that danger.