Psycho Therapy

by Alan Spencer

  Just run.

  You can go anywhere. Think. Imagine it.

  Willis wasn’t behind the counter. That’s the only thing about the scene that had changed so far. As it happened that night, anger boiled under Craig’s skin. This anger was focused on Willis. The moment Willis revealed he didn’t have a job for him must’ve already happened, Craig realized, and now he was plotting how to channel his fury.

  I won’t be mad. It was wrong. I won’t assault him again.

  Willis returned from the back room. He was a young bartender, a fresh and upbeat face despite the hard-luck bullshit he absorbed on a daily basis. But he wasn’t himself today. His face was solemn. The apologetic frown he wore months ago for Craig vanished and was replaced by an emotion he couldn’t place, though it inspired a gut-churning pain in his abdomen to witness it.

  Run for the door. Get the hell out of here.

  Craig lunged for the exit, trusting his newly minted intuition. He knocked down the cardboard cutout of four Victoria Secret Angels posed with footballs. The specials chalkboard smashed onto the floor. The crowd was roused from their fantasy cave of sports at the man suddenly running for his life. They were evil in his peripheral. Sneering. Scowling. Demonic. And now, calling out to him—

  “Grab him!”

  “Willis wants a word with you.”

  “You haven’t received your free drink.”

  “I’ll buy.”

  “No, allow me.”

  “You got next, I said I’d buy him one first.”

  “I owe him from last week.”

  “Scotch and soda.”

  “Seven and seven.”

  “He likes it on the rocks.”

  “I thought he’d enjoy a finger of scotch?”

  “He likes a shot of anything that burns.”

  The door slowly grew farther and farther out of reach, like an optical illusion, and his fight grew weak as did his limbs. He was swarmed and surrounded by everybody in the bar, pulled back to where he was from the beginning and forced onto the stool. Then his arms were forced behind him. Grain alcohol exuded from his accuser’s mouth—an accuser he couldn’t see—so thick he could light a match and set the man’s mouth aflame.

  “You like alcohol, don’t you? Oh yes, you’re a booze hound. It’s high time, Craig. Willis said you wanted the bar.” A single snigger escaped the man’s ragged throat, “Well, he’s giving it to you.”

  Thirty men and women formed a circle around him in a barrier, stealing his air, creating a film of sweat on his body. Rope bound his arms, legs, and torso, his body secured in minutes. The neon signs blurred as his processes raced to interpret the fate that would befall him. Instincts craned to full blast, he sensed every twitch and movement, each whisper and rant in the room, and then he caught Willis again. His face was chalky white, his lips blue-black. He could pass for a corpse. Purple saucers hardened his eyes, stealing what used to be a naturally friendly face.

  “You wish to bust me up, huh?” Willis challenged him. “After everything I’ve done for you, Craig?—free booze, I loaned you money, you shit in my ear on a daily basis about unemployment and your dead bitch wife, I let you sleep on the futon in my one-bedroom apartment, and then for all my trouble, you smash a barstool over my head.” He cranked out a sideways smile. “That’s not the friendly thing to do, now is it?”

  The damage played out on Willis’s face without anything hitting him. An invisible bludgeon shattered his collarbone and dented his jaw, the effect as awe-inspiring as it was horrid. He spat out a row of teeth and a blood-spit combo, the mess dribbling down his mouth and chin and staining his brown cashmere shirt. He smiled to display the knocked-out teeth, the gums oozing red.

  “You always wanted to become a bartender?” He raised his hands so those around him would cheer. “Hoorah! Hoorah! Let’s have you drink up, then. Earn your stripes.”

  They stole the air—and his ability to breathe—with the scents of wheat, and barely hops, and grain alcohol. The room wavered like heat deflecting off the road. The room was combustible. Craig’s eyes dried out. His skin ached as if paper cuts were inflicted upon every inch of him. Willis’s ice-cold hands jerked his head up by his hair. “I’ll give you what you always wanted, you fucking lush.”

  Joey, Willis’s younger brother, sauntered from the back room after Willis said that. Uproarious cheers—clapping and carrying on three times that of the Kansas State and Kansas University basketball game—dominated the room. Joey returned, clutching an oversized steel funnel. It was larger than the ones used to place coolant into a Mac truck.

  “Drink up, Craig.”

  Three hands pried his mouth open. Craig threw his face back and forth and cried out when fingernails tore into his lips. Hands intruded, fists causing his jaw to open wide, and then the funnel was jammed into his mouth with a wet thuck.

  “Naaawgh!”

  “Yes!” Willis shouted, throwing his head back. “Let’s hear it. What’ll it be, partner? Hard on your luck, asshole? Your woman leave you—no wait, did your woman die during childbirth? Oh wait, you lost both of them. That’s right. Both of them are dead.”

  “How so?”

  “Was it gruesome?”

  “Did the baby’s head poke out of the womb or did it die inside her?”

  “Did she bleed to death?”

  Willis waved them down. “No, this asshole’s car breaks down on the highway. He’s so broke ass, he can’t afford a car that runs. He uses this piece of shit during a snowstorm. What a fuck up.”

  You son of a bitch, how dare you say that?

  This wasn’t Willis. The man would never speak like this in real life. The crowd wouldn’t team up against him either. The people in the room were in lynch mode. He couldn’t slip the restraints. He was surrounded, regardless of his ability to escape.

  He called out again, his mouth obstructed by plastic. “Stawp!—graaaagh!”

  “He’s ready,” Joey declared. He tipped a bottle of High Noon whiskey into his mouth. “I think this is a good start. It was always Craig’s drink of choice.”

  He tipped the bottle into the opening of the funnel. Craig wasn’t used to downing the shots with his mouth wide open. The fluid splashed the back of his throat, burning hot and chemical. “Gaaack!”

  Craig struggled to swallow without gagging. He hiccupped. He aspirated on the whiskey and forced it back down, fearing he’d choke if it didn’t go down.

  “Hair of the dog,” Willis announced like the referee of the sporting event. “First round is always the hardest. Now you’re warmed up. Let’s make this interesting. You ever enjoy a Molotov Fire Dog?”

  He snapped his fingers, and Joey went to work. The man poured half a can of soda into a beer glass. Then he added Rumple Minz and Hot Damn. Next, he squeezed lime, lemon, and orange juice into the mix. Joey poured it into the funnel and struck a match simultaneously. Whup-whoosh!

  Fire exploded out the funnel the size of a basketball. The flames trailed like dragon’s breath into the air, but the tendrils were exaggerated, spraying across the room, and random patrons were set afire. They didn’t scream or panic. Laughter ensued, the kind so awkward and wrong it churned Craig’s stomach. The left wall burst into flames with the crackle and jarring splinter of wood. The ceiling was clotted with gray smoke. The barmaid poured a Guiness on tap, but half her face was busy with flames, the fat boiling on her cheeks dribbling into the glass. Another patron was hunched over The Simpsons’ pinball machine, engrossed in the game, fire eating into his back. Singed and cooking flesh stank up the room. Many others enjoyed buffalo wings and a new round while their flesh sizzled and evaporated. Joey’s left arm and midsection brimmed with fire and gobs of flesh slopped onto Craig’s body, searing hot.

  He shook his head, begging to be released before the fire consumed him. “Naaawgh!”

  Fire danced at his feet. The air continued to reignite itself, every square inch of space flammable. Whup-whoosh! Whup-whoosh! Whup-whoosh!

  Wi
llis’s skin slithered from his face in one piece, a slick skeletal face berating him, “Hair of the dog, hair of the dog—hah, hah, hah, hah, hah, hah!”

  The eyes of the patron tossing darts suddenly burst from the flames’ pressure, and then his torso broke down the center, spewing brighter fire and sparks like a disturbed log at the bottom of a bonfire. The man called out to Craig before he collapsed, “Another round on me, pal!”

  A pair of hands laid down ten dollars on the counter. The money went up into smoke before Willis accepted it—not that he cared. It was Susan from their singles club, but her clothes were missing, her naked body surrounded by acrid orange-and-red flames. “How about a double shot on the rocks, sexy?”

  The effects of the alcohol were setting in, and for Craig, the room was a spinning top, tilting upside down, right-side-up, and pivoting like he was inside of a mirrored moving ball. Craig used his tongue to shove out the funnel, but Willis shoved it back down into place, like a stake into the earth.

  “This one’s all mine,” a seductive voice carried over to him, shoving aside Willis. It was Katie this time. She wasn’t pale, or dead, or on fire, but alive, actual flesh and blood. “This drink’s from me to you.”

  She swiped a bottle of vodka from the counter. Katie poured it down her arm and poised her hand above the funnel. It trickled down her arm, then her fingers, and into the opening. The gesture would’ve been arousing in any other scenario, but now, it was brutal and mean. The alcohol was like gasoline filling his mouth. Noxious. Stomach acids crawled up his throat. His throat rejected it outright, but Willis pinched his nose and squeezed his throat until he had no choice but to swallow it back again or suffocate.

  Katie bent over him, the bottle of vodka poised above the funnel. “Let me pour you another, cowboy.”

  This isn’t Katie. This isn’t Katie. This isn’t Katie. This isn’t Katie.

  The mantra did nothing to calm him. His heart thrummed twice as fast and loud by the power of alcohol. He closed his eyes, his head spinning, far beyond drunk. Craig was at the helm of a careening single-engine plane amid a jolting wind storm. He affixed his eyes on the smoke billowing on the ceiling, trying to hatch an escape plan and failing miserably.

  “Swallow this for me, baby,” Katie teased. Her eyes glowed with a demented fervor, tears running down her eyes, so gripped by hateful emotions, her grin boasted of sadistic pleasures created and fulfilled. He suddenly wanted her as far away from him as possible. Her touch wasn’t Katie’s. Nobody in this room was who they were supposed to be.

  “Drink it down,” she sniggered, her hair suddenly lit up by flames, burning bright and burning fast. “You’ll feel so good!”

  This isn’t Katie!

  Craig summoned the courage to fight back, and knowing this wasn’t his wife, he head-butted her. Her nose popped. The flames on her head carried down to the rest of her body, and every inch of her was animated with fire. The entire room was engulfed. Bodies lay in blackened piles, still shifting, trying to survive. Joey stole shots from bottles from the bar as he too was turning into a blackened crisp. Willis towered above him, covered in red, and orange, and yellow arches. His cashmere shirt melted into his liquid flesh and tangles of his black hair were embedded into the mudslide of his face. He was about to seize Craig by the throat when his legs buckled beneath him, and he landed in a burning pile at Craig’s feet.

  He wasn’t out of harm’s way, though, as the fires raged. Now Craig’s legs burned. The rope loosened under the flames, and using his strength, he pulled and snapped the binds free. The legs of the chair broke when he pivoted. He worked to his feet, not giving up on escaping the inferno. The room was curtain upon curtain of flame. Skeletons were twisted and mangled along the floor, and the room was becoming an oven. Craig struggled to walk a straight line, so drunk. Vomit lurched up his throat.

  Just run.

  Keep moving.

  Craig lost it. There was no relief afterwards. The alcohol was still absorbing into his system, and it would stay with him. Wherever he escaped, he would surely be at a disadvantage, and that was one thing he didn’t need against Dr. Krone.

  He stormed the exit of the bar, throwing himself through the doors, awaiting the blink, the next moment of horror.

  Nothing could prepare him for what he stepped into next.

  Beggars Can’t Be Choosers

  The blink happened without him realizing it. He was too drunk to notice. Craig clutched the wall for balance. He lost it again, retching and buckling to his knees. Booze and stomach acids burned his throat and corrupted his mouth. First-degree burns played down his legs up to the knees. His khakis were blackened and parts of his shirt were singed. He curled into a ball and attempted to sober up. The amount of alcohol he’d ingested, he would be under the effects for hours.

  Willis, and Joey, and Katie were villains in familiar masks. They wanted him dead. The torture wouldn’t have stopped at alcohol poisoning. He would’ve been a charred corpse. Then what would happen to him? Would he die sitting against the machine? Was he covered in burns and throwing up on himself in the room for real?

  “They wouldn’t hurt me,” he whispered, shaking his head, the dooming thoughts intensified by his condition. “Not for real.”

  The hall was pitch-black. The kind of darkness where there were no windows to let in the moonlight or the sun. Soft mewls played throughout the hallways in varying levels of echoes. Complaints. Fear. Roused suspicion. The tripwires of this place were set off. Bedsprings groaned. Bare feet pattered the floor and paced back and forth—clop, clop, clop, clop. Steel doors were shook, pounded, and kicked. Toilets were flushed repeatedly. Arms reached through the square set of bars in each door for attention. Monkey jeers blasted through the chorus of noises—

  “The doctor’s in! The doctor’s in! The doctor’s in!” “Baaah! Baaah! Baaah!” “No more therapy.” “It’s my brain. You can’t have it!” “Check my pulse, Doctor. Do I have a pulse? Do I have a heart? How can it beat if I don’t have a heart?” “Don’t take my brain. It’s mine! Mine!”

  “Silence!”

  The thick guttural command down the hallway did the trick.

  The hall went silent.

  “I’ll take all of you with me if you’re not quiet.”

  The speaker was distinguished. Professional. The man could make serious things happen, and the patients in this asylum—that’s what it had to be—understood his capabilities. Craig followed the echo of the voices up the hall and made two turns. The event worked to sober him up enough to walk a straight line. A beam of light panned from one iron door to the next. Faces shirked from the light, frightened.

  “You can’t hide from me,” the man boasted, hidden in shadow. “I know who each and every one of you are. Some of you have visitors weekly, sometimes monthly, and some of you,” he cackled, “don’t have visitors at all. You don’t exist. I can shred your documents and have my way with you. Most of you are so far gone you wouldn’t even know anything’s different, dead or alive.”

  The speaker was familiar. He wore winter garb:—a black stocking cap, thick wool overcoat, and black leather boots. But there was another person with him. He was a teenager dressed in a blue polyester and cotton overcoat, clothing for a winter hiking expedition. The boy was glued to the older man’s side.

  That’s Dr. Krone and his father.

  Jesus, I’m in his head again.

  The last memory reoccurred to him. The man wrenching the brains out of straightjacketed individuals with an oversized corkscrew, it had to be Dr. Krone’s father doing the messy work. Now, they were exploring the sanitarium after hours for the best pickings. And it made sense what Dr. Krone’s father said moments ago. There were many people who’d given up on the criminally insane. How many people had been blasted with shock treatment and narcotics to the point they resembled nothing of their former selves? Nobody cared what happened to these people, he thought. How did they break into the sanitarium, Craig wondered, and why wasn’t security
here?

  Craig poised himself, ready to hide if they walked too close to him. The two were slow and precise about their choices, and he listened and waited.

  “Danny,” Dr. Krone’s father whispered to the boy. “Here’s Jamie Henderson. She’s a looker. And only nineteen, and wow, she’s a knockout. She’s an orphan too. Strangled four people on the streets for their money. She was already experiencing the early signs of dementia when the police booked her. Smeared her shit on the holding cell walls. She’s calmed down with the help of Thorazine and Deranal. We can clean her up and use her. You can do it this time, son. I’ll let you complete the process from start to finish. Would you like that?”

  “I’ve been waiting for you to say that, Dad,” a soft and hesitant voice replied. “Jamie’s the perfect choice. I like her. I like her a lot. She’s pretty.”

  Dr. Krone’s father fished out an oversized pair of jailor’s keys and unlocked the door. He loaded a syringe and entered the room. “She’s staring at the walls again. I’m surprised the world doesn’t care about what these people are thinking. They are curable. Drugs aren’t the answer. Drugs numb the beast, but the brain harbors it. Nurtures it. If I can find that beast and snuff it out, I can save these people from permanent isolation. Padded walls and institutionalized food would drive any disturbed individual further into the abyss.”

  Is that how you validate butchering the infirm? Looks like your son has taken the next step by kidnapping innocent people from the streets and removing their so-called “beasts”.

  A woman in a straightjacket with greasy black hair was dragged from the room. She was unconscious, but her eyes were wide open. The way the flashlight beam struck them, they shined like a goldfish’s scales. Permanently affixed to nothing, she was gone. Perhaps the notion itself of combing the mind for the malady rang of scientific purpose, but taking out the brain completely was a different science altogether.

  “Wouldn’t you ask the girl on a date if she went to your school, Danny?”