The Howardsfield Horror

by Jay Mason

  “Hang on,” said Rusty. “Go back a bit. They want you to get pregnant.”

  “I said they wouldn’t mind too much. They don’t think I’ll ever amount to anything.”

  “Are you ever going to let them know how smart you are?” said Rusty.

  “Maybe,” said Alex. “But not until I know what happened to me …. Before.” She stood up. “I’m too stuffed for ice-cream. Why don’t we get on with it? I’ll try not to fall asleep. Do you want to use the couch or should we use your bed?”

  Rusty’s jaw dropped.

  “Hypnotism. I’m talking about you hypnotising me,” said Alex. “My parents might be ready to welcome the next generation, but I am not!”

  “Yes, of course,” said Rusty, flushing a fiery red. “I knew what you meant. I never thought you meant …. I mean I’ve been practicing my script. Let’s go through the living room.”

  ****

  Alex did her best to get comfortable on the Gibson family sofa. She hadn’t counted on it being quite so lumpy. A three seater velour couch in a rubbed goldish yellow, it had seen better days. Each cushion had six buttons in various states of coming free. Some of them had been replaced by larger coat buttons. These especially poked into her back. Worse yet, something had happened to the stuffing down the years, and if she tossed and twisted the best bits she could find felt like lying on old tennis balls.

  “Did you ever have a dog?” she asked, thinking maybe it had lost its toys under the cushions.

  Rusty shook his head. “I would have liked one, but none of us were ever in enough to look after one. We had a goldfish for a while. But Cat made it an outdoor pond and next door’s cat ate it. It felt it’s head on the back door mat. Cat made us call her Squirrel for a few weeks after that.”

  Alex shifted a loose cushion under her head. “Can we get on with this?” she said.

  “Okay.” Rusty sat in a chair next to the sofa and opened a folder. The pages rustled.

  “That is going to be distracting,” said Alex.

  “If you look at the ceiling you will see I’ve drawn an X.”

  “You’ve drawn on the ceiling, won’t your mum go mad?”

  “I thought you were the subject because hypnotism is meant to work best with people who can con-cen-trate,” said Rusty, drawing out the last word.

  “Alright. Alright,” said Alex. She lay back and sure enough about level with her eyeline was a cross on the ceiling.

  “Now I want you to keep your eyes fixed on that spot,” said Rusty. “I want you to keep staring at that spot …”

  “It’s an X,” said Alex.

  “At the X,” said Rusty through gritted teeth, “and while you are starting at the X I want you to start counting backwards in your head from one hundred, but I want you to count backwards in threes. In a minute I will give you further instructions.”

  Rusty watched Alex carefully. When her eyes started to flicker he spoke again. “Now, your eyelids are starting to feel heavy, very heavy, so heavy in fact that you need to close them and now you have closed them they simply don’t want to open again. You can test them once, but you’ll find your eyelids are simply too heavy and relaxed for you to want to lift them.”

  This was the first test. He waited for Alex to open her eyes and scold him for doing it all wrong, but instead he saw the tiny muscles at the side of her eyes flex, but the lids stayed shut. He was so surprised he lost his place in the script.

  “For now, you will keep breathing easily and deeply,” he said as calmly as he could as he ran his finger down the page. When he found his place he almost gave a sigh of relief. He continued to give Alex instructions deepening her trance and relaxing her further. He still half expected Alex to sit up and demand he do better, but she didn’t. Her facial muscles relaxed and as the concerns and worries of the day dropped away from her, Rusty thought she had never looked lovelier.

  He gave himself a mental shake. It was coming to the most difficult bit. If they were going to deprogramme Joe then they would have to get him to talk about what he was thinking while in the trance state. Rusty took a very deep breath. He had agreed with Alex what he would ask her, but he had some foreboding at doing so.

  “Now you are deeply relaxed, Alex, and quite safe here with me, you will be able to answer my questions. You will only tell me what you want to tell me. Nothing more.” Alex had insisted he put in that bit. “So I want you to let your mind go back to a memory — a memory you’d like to share with me. Something you want me to know.” This was the part that worried Rusty most. He had tried to repeatedly explain to Alex that from the psychodynamic stuff he had read it would be her unconscious mind or ‘id’ that chose the memory. Alex thought Freud was a fraud and that there had never been any proof that the mind had a subconscious. “Just because everyone talks about our hidden, dark desires trapped down in a murky consciousness as if it’s a fact, doesn’t make it true,” she’d said. “Freud’s ideas are only a theory for a model of the mind. They are not proved.”

  Rusty’s reading suggested the same thing, but from the experiments he had researched the unconscious mind seemed to crop up quite a lot whether or not the subject believed in it. Alex, on the other hand, had become suspicious of so called reclaimed memories especially as an awful lot of them seemed to be associated with so called past lives and so very many people believing they had been Cleopatra or Louis XIV.

  “I’m in a hospital bed.” Alex’s voice was so low Rusty had to strain to hear her.

  He licked his lips. “What is wrong with you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Alex. She turned her head slightly. “There’s a lot of screens, flashing lights, wires and tubes. And it hurts. It hurts a lot.” Her voice rose now. Tears formed at the corner of her eyes and her face contorted. “It hurts so much. Make it stop. Please, make it stop.”

  Alarmed, Rusty said quickly, “Go back further. Go back to before you were in hospital. Find another memory.”

  “I’m in the car. They’ve put me in the back and locked the doors. I’m trying to get out, but I can’t. Mum is telling me to calm down, but I know I need to get away. Dad’s driving. He’s driving so fast.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “They’re taking me to the Centre,” said Alex. “I don’t want to go.”

  Rusty flicked through his notes. He wanted to wake her up, but he wanted to do it safely. He needed her to calm down.

  “Everything’s going to be alright, Alex. You’re safe,” he said.

  “That’s what Mum kept saying.” Alex’s whole body arched then fell back onto the sofa. “We’re here. Dad and another man are dragging me along a corridor. It’s white and shiny, but it smells like vomit. I keep telling them I’m okay. Dad’s fingers are hurting me. I tell him, but he won’t even look at me. Then there’s someone else. I try to see. Straker. It’s Straker,” Alex twisted on the sofa, “he sticks a needle in my arm and it all goes black.”

  “Okay,” said Rusty, trying to keep the shake out of his voice. “It’s all gone black. That means it’s all over. This memory is gone and you can come back to me.”

  “I wake up in the bed. Every part of me is hooked up. I can only move my head. I turn it and I see a boy in the next bed … I … I …” Alex started to gasp for breath. “Straker’s here. He says I have eight more injections to go. No! No! I won’t!” Alex screamed.

  “Alex. Calm down. You need to calm down,” said Rusty urgently. He could feel his heart beat thudding in his ears. His mouth was so dry he was struggling to speak clearly. Why had he ever agreed to do this. “You’re with me, Rusty, in my home. Whatever happened in the hospital is over. It’s gone. You’re here with me. Here with me.”

  Alex’s breathing slowed as Rusty repeated again and again how safe she was, where she was, and when she finally seemed relaxed again, he jumped to the end of his script and woke her up.

  Alex blinked several times. She stretched. Then she turned and looked at him. “Sorry,” she said. “D
id I fall asleep. Must have been all that pizza.”

  “You don’t remember anything?” said Rusty in alarm.

  “Stop playing around,” said Alex. “We need to do this if we are to help Joe. Now what do I have to do?”

  Rusty went through to the kitchen and got Alex a glass of water. “Here, sit up and drink this. You’re going to need it.” He told her what she had said to him.

  When he’d finished he said, “You do believe me. I wouldn’t make something like this up.”

  “I admit,” said Alex slowly, “that for a moment I wondered if you were teasing me about an alien abduction, but you didn’t mention aliens.”

  “Neither did you.”

  “I talked about Straker?”

  Rusty nodded. “You don’t remember anything?”

  Alex frowned. “No. Maybe. I sort of recognise what you’re saying, but I can’t — I can’t get.” She put the glass down on the floor and wrapped her arms around her. “Do you have a blanket,” she said. “I feel cold.” Alex bit her lip. “I feel afraid.”

  ****

  When Alex got home that night her room was the same as how she had left it. Rusty hadn’t let her leave for hours. He’d got the ice-cream and made hot chocolate. He’d found some silly movie on the telly for them to watch. He’d done everything he could to make things seem normal and safe. He’d only let her leave because his mother had come back from the hospital exhausted and clearly needed him to look after her.

  Alex sat down at her computer. She couldn’t shake the feeling that everything had changed. She emailed c0numdrum about her experience. She expected him to be angry at her for not doing as he advised, but all she got back was one line.

  I did wonder. I am very sorry, Alex.

  Nothing else. She emailed him again, but got no reply. She checked as many chat rooms as she could think of, but his icon didn’t show up.

  She had been working at the machine for about an hour when she heard the door go and the sound of her mother’s heels on the hall floor. Alex made a decision. She got up and went downstairs. Her mother was sitting in the living, her shoes off and her feet up. She was sipping a cup of herbal tea.

  “Alex,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d still be up.”

  “We need to talk, mum.”

  “Not tonight Alex. I’ve had a long day. It can wait till morning.”

  “No,” said Alex, “it can’t. I think you owe me an explanation for why you had me committed to Straker’s psychiatric facility.”

  8. Rebooting Joe

  Alex and her mother faced each other, both of them rigid with tension. Then suddenly the fight seemed to go out of her mother and she flopped back into her chair. “I told your father you would start to remember one day. He didn’t believe me. What have you remembered?”

  Alex came further into the room and perched the edge of a seat opposite. Her body trembled. She clenched her fist to try and make it stop. “I know Dad and another man dragged me down a corridor. Dad hurt me. He was holding so tight. He dragged me to Straker, who stuck a needle in my arm.”

  Irene’s face expressed shook. She put her tea down on the side table. Her hand was unsteady and the liquid splashed onto her work suit. She reached down to her handbag, on the floor beside her, to extract a tissue. “I didn’t see that,” she said, her head bowed. She started to dab ineffectively with the tissue at the stain. “Your father didn’t tell me what happened once he’d taken you through the doors. He thought it was better I didn’t know.”

  “So you let him take me?”

  “He is your father, Alex. He only wants what is best for you. That’s all either of us have ever wanted. You don’t understand how difficult it has been.”

  “You weren’t the one strapped to the bed in agony,” said Alex. “You weren’t the one Straker was experimenting on.”

  Irene crumpled up the tissue. “Don’t be ridiculous the director never experimented on you. He did us an enormous favour. He hardly ever sees private patients now — and even if he did, we could never have afforded his fees.”

  “So he did this all out of the kindness of his heart,” said Alex. She could no longer stop the shaking now. Her voice waivered. “He was doing all of us one big, jolly favour. Like he did earlier this year when he gave me those sedatives.”

  Irene shot to her feet. “Don’t you dare take that tone with me,” she said. “You have no idea what it’s been like. Every time something happens you oh-so-conveniently forget all about it. We’re the ones that have to live with the results of your behaviour. Your father and I. We’re the ones who have to make excuse after excuse for you. Mr Straker has only ever been kind to you. He’s the only therapist who has ever been able to stop your outbursts.”

  “Outbursts?” said Alex.

  “Three years,” said Irene. “Three years of this and you still claim you remember nothing?”

  “Mother,” said Alex deliberately lowering her voice and attempting to be calm. “I have no idea what you are talking about.”

  Irene’s face went passive. “Your official diagnosis was schizophrenia. However, your symptoms do not conform — or confine themselves to the usual collection for the syndrome. Until we received Dr Straker’s offer for work here, and agreed to his proposal under the condition he come out of medical retirement and treat you himself, your father and I were faced with committing you to an asylum for life.”

  Alex’s legs weakened and she leant back on against the wall. “No,” she whispered.

  “Can you imagine how that felt?” said her mother. “Confining your baby to a madhouse?”

  “I don’t understand,” said Alex. “You sound so angry with me. If all this is true wouldn’t you be sorry for me?”

  “If you ever felt any gratitude for what has been done for you I might,” said Irene. “But it’s always about you. Everything is about you. You have no thought or care about how you disrupt the lives of others. The only fights I have ever had with your father are over you.” She blinked back tears. “I don’t know what happened, but you’re not my daughter. My daughter was a sweet funny little girl who loved playing with her rabbits and her dolls. I don’t know who or what you are.”

  “So that’s why you let Straker torture me?” said Alex. “Because I was ruining your life.”

  “And there you go again,” said Irene, using her fingers to wipe away her tears. “Accusing people of all sorts of terrible things.” She raised her voice. “Dr Straker is a saint. The time and energy he has spent on you when he has so many more important things to do — when he is trying to change the course of genetic disease for countless generations. He’s about the only one who has never given up on you and you accuse him of causing you pain! That man has never done more than give you mild sedatives when you were raving and threatening to kill us all and engage you in the most intense counselling you have ever received. Without him you would be nothing — not even this.” Her mother gestured up and down at her, “this … this thing. This mad ungrateful creature that my beautiful daughter became.” Then Irene broke into gulping sobs and rushed from the room.

  Alex sank slowly to the floor. Irene’s conviction of how she had described Alex and her life was beyond comprehension. Alex could only be sure of two things. Firstly that her mother had believed every word she had said. And secondly, that none of it was true.

  ****

  Alex couldn’t sleep. She spent the next four hours forming a plan. Then she emailed it to Rusty. With luck he would see it at breakfast and reply to her before lunchtime. Then she lay down in her bed and listened to the sounds of the house. The wind blew up. It rattled the tiles on the roof and tugged at the window sashes. But despite that she could hear her mother talking urgently to her father in a low, distressed voice. She strained, but couldn’t make out the words. They had been talking for hours and while her father’s voice remained neutral her mother’s ranged up and down in tone. As she lay looking into the darkness Alex considered that maybe she did have mental healt
h issues and that she inherited them from her mother. She couldn’t explain how her mother had behaved this evening. As Alex had grown she had become increasingly distant, but Alex had thought that was because she was more naturally a career woman than a parent. She saw no reason why all mums should be maternal. There were always degrees, but she had always hoped that underneath it all her mother still loved her. Tonight Irene had spoken as if she hated her. Alex didn’t know how to deal with this. Her emotions ranged far and wide. However, they came to her in unfamiliar guises. She couldn’t work out how she felt in her heart and eventually she fell asleep.

  ****

  Alex met Rusty and outside Joe’s trailer at lunchtime on Monday. “Ready?” asked Alex quietly.

  “I don’t know,” said Rusty. “But I’m not sure about this plan. Are you sure you got the formula right. I don’t want to accidentally poison the guy.”

  “It’s not that complicated,” said Alex. “Besides do you have a better idea?”

  Alex moved up to the door. “Who goes in first,” whispered Rusty.

  “You,” said Alex. Then she raised her hand. “Hang on,” she said. “He’s not alone.”

  “Shit,” said Rusty. “Who is it?”

  “It’s Cat!” said Alex, bending her head to listen more easily. “She’s harping on about the Howardsfield Horror. Joe sounds like he’s politely trying to get rid of her.” She listened some more. “She’s brought him sushi. Damn, I shouldn’t have told her that was his favourite. She’s even got avocado California rolls. He’ll never throw her out now.”

  She retreated down the steps. Rusty followed. “Now what do we do?” he asked. “Abort?”

  Alex moved to the side of the trailer and glanced up and down the makeshift alley. “No one’s here,” she said. “This might be even better. We can go in through the back window. If you go first, hopefully Cat won’t scream.”