Beyond The Bare Maple

by Christopher D Eckersley

  They hear nothing from me. They think I'm comatose.

  “What will you be giving him to ensure that he cannot hurt anyone?”

  “Mrs. Kruger, Simon is suffering from psychotic delusional schizophrenia with varying states of paranoia. I'm not exactly sure what factors might have caused this to develop in him. In most cases, it is usually biological, but there are rare cases where environmental factors may have played a part, or even a combination of both. The good news is that we can correct the chemical imbalance in his brain as much as possible. There's a newer anti psychotic drug that's showing great promise. It's not on the market yet, but Simon's condition is perfect for this drug, and I think you will be quite pleased with the results.

  Now don't you worry Mrs. Kruger, there's nothing to worry about. Trust me. I have years of experience with this sort of thing and I have numerous patients living full and beautiful lives. With proper supervision and the right drugs, Simon has a chance at a near-normal life. It is safe and has very few side effects. I predict it will be the drug of choice for treating cases such as Simon's. Now we only have to wait for the paperwork and assign him a more permanent bed.”

  I'm hearing all this, and it doesn't sound like I'll be going home anytime soon. But the good news is that I can feel more and more of myself coming back to my own control. But I don't show them any signs because I don't want them to know that I have regained anything at all. I figure the longer I can fake my comatose like state, the longer it may be before they inject me with mind altering drugs. I just have to hold out long enough to work up the strength to escape.

  But it sucks that I can no longer trust anyone. I don't feel loved anymore. I feel alone and all empty inside. I wish things were like they were a few years ago. No, wait. I wish things were like they were a long time ago, before Mom brought home grandpa's old cuckoo clock with those devilish owls on it. They're responsible for this mess. Those owls have got to go.

  I hear them leave and the door closes. Mom, Tina and the doc are gone. The room is quiet now except for the constant electronic beeping and occasional rush of air which still persists. So I relax to encourage my power of perception to gradually kick in and be useful to me once again. Even though they are just outside the door, I can sense them planning something, but my powers are not strong enough to get the whole picture.

  I'm finally able to open my eyes a little more; just enough that I can see that the room is dim but lit softly with a low wattage lamp in the corner by another door which I think might be a bathroom or closet. I discover that the beeping sound that I've been hearing all this time is coming from my apparent heart monitor, and there's another machine which stands next to it that is intermittently pushing oxygen through a pair of tubes that I now realize for the first time are taped under my nose.

  What the hell happened to me? I think back and remember the struggle in the living room. Tina was there and she smashed me in the head with Dad's heavy hammer. If only she had smashed the clock like I told her, things would probably be different. Everything would be back to normal. Mom would have stopped hitting Dad, and I'm sure she would quit poisoning him too. Tina would have probably come to her senses once the owls were smashed to bits and helped me rescue Dad. And Dale... where the hell was Dale? And Kyle too. I wish I had those hidden cameras. I wish they were already setup. I need proof that something evil in our house is affecting Mom and Tina's behavior. But I gather the solution is really quite simple. All I have to do is be stronger than the owls.

  I want to be back home in my room. I'd be writing like crazy in my red journal because a lot has happened that needs to be recorded. I don't know how long I can commit everything to memory. I've got to get it written down before they drug me, but I need to heal myself, and escape whatever devious plan Mom and Tina are devising. And, I need to find out where Dale is because I fear that he will be next to suffer some mortal fate at the hands of my mom or my sister.

  CHAPTER

  8

  _______________

  What seems like several more days and several more visits from the doctor is starting to feel like routine now. A couple days ago he told me the swelling has gone down on my brain which is obviously a good thing, and so has the swelling around my eyes. That's part of the reason why I couldn't open them before. But now that I can see him, he's sitting at the foot of my bed in his white coat jotting notes down in a notebook he took from his briefcase. I have no idea what he could be writing because he hasn't said one word to me yet since he entered my room a few minutes ago. He's writing like crazy, as if he's going to write a damn book or something.

  I'm growing impatient, and after several more minutes of this I feel that he has written quite enough, so I decide to interrupt his important work.

  “So, doc... how long have I been in here?”

  He finally stops writing and glances up at me through his thick wire frames, pushing them back up on to the bridge of his nose. He seems reluctant to answer my question, so I fire him another one.

  “When do I get out?”

  He's back to writing again, avoiding my questions and doesn't say a thing.

  “Nice bedside manner,” I mutter sarcastically. But it doesn't faze him. He's so focused on whatever he's writing that I'm convinced he's in his own little world.

  “Hello?... Hey! Doc!” I raise my voice. He's right there at the foot of my bed, still writing, but he might as well be a million miles away because he doesn't respond.

  “Jerk.”

  I turn my head and look out the window. There's a huge tree outside. Its thick branches are like the ones on the big maple at home that I climb all the time. I think about climbing this one, or rather climbing down it, because from the looks of it, I figure I must be on the 2nd or 3rd floor.

  I turn back to the doc. If this guy doesn't start talking, I'm gonna start making a scene, I think to myself. But instead, I decide to calm myself. I allow my power of perception to return. It feels a bit rusty, but I allow it to work its magic.

  Nothing. I get nothing from this guy. It's as if he's got an invisible wall of defense up around him, or that he doesn't even exist at all. And that thought scares me. Because if he doesn't exist, then who am I seeing? He's right there, still scratching away in his notebook.

  The door to my room opens and in walks his identical twin. The one sitting at the foot of my bed instantly vanishes into thin air. Gone. Not so much as even a dent in the chair's cushion. It's as if he was never really there.

  “Good morning, Simon,” this other man says to me. He's wearing the same white coat, and the same thick wire frame glasses, and carrying the same black leather briefcase. I watch him take the same seat as his vanished twin, and he too removes a notebook from his briefcase and begins to write. But this guy seems like he at least has a personality. Then it dawns on me. The vanished twin was actually him. It was just my power of perception working without me even knowing it. I had perceived the doc coming in, taking a seat at the foot of my bed and writing. I simply couldn't interact with the twin because he wasn't real. He was only an instance, an image of the real thing who had not come into my room yet. So I'm to conclude that my powers of perception have become visually stronger than ever. I should be careful though. If someone were to see me interacting with people who aren't even there yet, well... they're naturally going to think I'm crazy.

  I decide to try my luck with my questions on this guy.

  “So, doc... how long have I been in here?”

  He stops writing and glances up at me through his thick wire frames, pushing them back up on to the bridge of his nose, just exactly like my powers of perception revealed to me earlier.

  “Five months and...” he looks over at the calendar on the wall near the window... “three days.”

  “Five months!” I say.

  “Well let's see.” He flips back several pages in his note book. “September fifteenth is when you were a
dmitted this time.”

  What did he mean “this time?”

  “It only seems like a few days at the most,” I say.

  “Well, you were in pretty bad shape. You had some head trauma from ...” and he stops. Now he wants me to fill in the blanks so he can gauge how sane I am. So I fill in the blanks for him.

  “I was hit in the head by my sister, Tina.

  He takes a moment and scribbles a bit more.

  “With what? Do you remember, Simon?”

  I have no trouble at all with detail. I can tell him everything that happened that night, right down to the minute. So I proceed to tell him about the owls and how they are evil and that they tried to recruit me to kill my mother in order to stop her from poisoning my dad, which I'm starting to think was a lie. I tell him about my parents getting into a huge fight and that I suspected it was the owls making them do it because they have never had a real fight in my entire life. I tell him about the sledge hammer that I retrieved from the garage because I wanted to smash the clock where the owls live, but that Tina got it away from me and hit me in the head with the long handle.

  The doc is rubbing his chin, contemplating his words. I know he's not buying my story, at least not my version of it.

  “Doc, if you don't believe me, just ask Derrick. He was there. He didn't do anything to help, but he was there – Derrick stood in the doorway and saw the whole thing.”

  The doc looks down at his notebook, scribbles something again, but my power of perception doesn't reveal it to me.

  “Simon, do you realize that you just said Derrick? Don't you mean Dale was standing in the doorway?”

  “I did?”

  “Yes, you did. A slip perhaps?”

  “Well, if I said Derrick, I meant Dale. Dale was definitely there.”

  “Why do you suppose you said Derrick?”

  I'm a bit taken back by this because I have an incredible memory. I rely on it to memorize every detail of things that happen to me throughout the day so that I can later write it all down in my journal, or journals to be more precise. The red one for the real stuff that nobody gets to see but me, and the green one for the made up stuff that I share with my psychiatrist.

  “Do you remember, Simon? Your little brother Derrick died five years ago in Miller's Pond. You took him there to go catch frogs but he was afraid of the water and didn't want to go in. And that's when you pushed him. But he hit his head on a rock and drowned before you could drag him out. That's why you've been my patient for the last five years. Derrick couldn't help you because he wasn't there. But Dale was. He tended to your father's wounds while the police were hog-tying you.”

  As he tells me this, I realize why this man looks familiar. He's not a doctor in a hospital. He's my psychiatrist, and this room has changed. There's bars over the window and the tree outside has no life, it's leaves presumably on the ground or blown away to decompose in some out of the way place. I'm restrained to the bed and I have very limited mobility.

  “I want to go home,” I say. “I want to go home!”

  “Simon, calm down. Let's talk this out.”

  But I can't calm down. The restraints are tight and I feel like I can't breathe, like when the owls were squeezing me.

  “Do you remember telling me about your dad, and how he seemed to look at you suspiciously, as if you weren't really his son? And your mother... You told me that she always seemed to be pondering something, and that she was very distant to you. Do you remember telling me these things?”

  “No,” I reply, fighting the straps that are holding my arms down.

  “Well, it's dated right here,” he says, flipping through the pages of his notebook again. “One of our first sessions after Derrick died. They acted that way towards you because of the way they felt about you... after killing your brother.”

  “What a bunch of crap!” I say. “I didn't kill my brother! I didn't push him! He fell in!”

  “That's not what's in the report, Simon.”

  “To hell with the report! It's all lies!”

  “Lies, like what's in your green journal?”

  “Yes,” I reply. “Lies, like what's in my green journal. It's all made up.”

  “And your red journal?”

  “True. Everything in the red journal is true.”

  “I'm going to read something to you, Simon. It's something you wrote, and it's right here in your red journal...” The doc cleared his throat and read to me out loud.

  “I have been hearing those voices again. They whisper to me day and night. I try to block them out with humming or music, but it doesn't help. Now I find myself acting out the wishes of those whispers in my head. I started with rat poison in my brother's breakfast cereal, but he eventually recovered. Today they told me to push him, and so I did. Not because they told me to, but because I hoped that if I did what they said, their voices would finally go away and leave me alone. So I'm very sad today, because I pushed my brother into the pond.”

  CHAPTER

  9

  _______________

  I'm shocked. I remember now and so I say nothing. Those are my words. But what do I say now?

  “If I killed my brother, then why aren't I locked up in jail?” I blurt out.

  The doc glances over towards the window with the bars on it.

  “There are no owls, Simon,” he says. “They're only in your mind. You put them there to explain to your rational, logical side – your sane personality. To give you some sort of justification to commit murder.”

  Now he's talking nonsense to me.

  “What about Tina? Why would she try and kill me with the sledge hammer if it weren't for the owls messing with her?”

  “That wasn't Tina,” he says.

  “Then just who cracked me over the head then?” I ask, even though I know exactly how it all happened.

  “The police couldn't control you, and unfortunately you sustained a blow to the head from one of their batons. It was Tina who called the police. She came home and found your mother unconscious on the floor and your father beaten badly, and you covered in blood.”

  To this statement, I frantically search my memory for the truth. The doc's version cannot be true. And yet he continues to explain it as if it were fact.

  “In our last session, you said you remembered the feeling that you were floating, and seeing flashing lights that lit up the neighborhood.”

  I don't remember telling him that, but I do remember the floating sensation rather well, and seeing the star constellations in the nighttime sky.

  “It was the police, Simon. They hit you over the head with their baton. It wasn't Tina with a sledge hammer. It was the police that cuffed your hands and ankles together, and then carried you out to their patrol car.”

  The doc looks at me in a way that I sense he's trying to see if he's getting through to me.

  “I have it all down here in the police report, Simon. It took four officers to hog-tie you. You broke the nose of one of them, and nearly gouged out the eyes of another.”

  “Doc, I find your version impossible to believe because that's not the way it happened at all. I trust my own memory more than anything, and I don't care if you have a police report that backs up what you say. It could be faked. It might as well be full of lies and made up events.”

  “You mean made up, like the events you wrote about in this?”

  He holds up my green notebook. Then he reads a couple pages to me, about a perfect kid living in a perfect world, and all is good and life is great. It was stuff I wrote. Stuff I made up on purpose with the intent to pass it off as my journal, containing the thoughts and experiences of what I figured a psychiatrist might expect from a normal, mentally healthy young teen.

  Then the doc pulls out my red notebook. My heart skips a beat and I can feel the pores on my skin fill with a nervous sweat. A lump in my throat develops and I swallow to keep it down. My breathing becomes s
hallow and I wonder if the doc can see just how nervous I am, so I rustle the bed sheets a little to hide my trembling hands.

  My nervousness gives way to anger as I think back to that day when everything happened. I showed Kyle where I kept my journals – down in the heat-vent in the floor under my desk in my room. We were going to use them to keep track of clues and eye witness statements from field interviews we were going to conduct regarding the investigation into the possible poisoning of my dad, and any other possible murders that may have been committed by the women in previous generations of my family. But I trusted Kyle. He's the only person besides myself that even knew about the red journal.

  “Did Kyle give that to you?” I ask the doc with a tone.

  “Kyle does not exist,” he replies matter of factly.

  “What are you talking about?” I say. I think the doc is messing with me almost as much as the owls have messed with me and my family.

  “Kyle is your imaginary childhood friend,” he says. “You created him in your mind right after killing your younger brother Derrick.”

  The doc is trying hard to get through to me but I'm not buying it for a second because I know that Kyle's name is carved into one of the benches back at the Knoll.

  “Take me to the Knoll!” I say. “I'll prove Kyle exists.”

  The doc is reading from my red journal and because of that, I can't help but feel a little violated.

  “Kyle does not exist for the same reason the Knoll does not exist. They are figments of your imagination, Simon. They are replacements for the things you lost that day when you pushed Derrick into the pond. You lost Derrick that day, so you invented Kyle to take his place. You lost the pond that day too, so you invented the Knoll to take its place as well. But to be sure, we even went to your old school to see if we can find the Knoll. We asked around and nobody seems to know anything about it. It's not on any maps. We even went to the courthouse and were shown old maps of the area, before all the homes and apartments went up around the school. There is no record of the Knoll, Simon. It's a place you invented in your mind.”