When Rabbit Howls

by Truddi Chase

  But “leakage” aside, Stanley’s small bank of Multiple Personality Disorder information rattled around in his head, incompatible with the image of three separate entities roaming through a 7-Eleven store. Again he came face to face with the term hallucination, the perception of sights and sounds that were not actually there. Might it be true that within the realm of multiple personality, the sights and sounds were actually there? He silently cursed Marshall Fielding and whatever was delaying his promised arrival.

  “There isn’t that much information to go on,” Stanley hedged.

  “If you’d been in the car with me, if you’d been in the bedroom this morning, it was as if they’d created that grey haze especially for their coming-out party, something to hide in while they made themselves known to me.”

  The woman’s soft, hesitant voice went on, laying out the truth of her own reality, in spite of her dismay and the fear that he would lock her up. It was time, Stanley knew, to define the problem once and for all. She’d come to a point where answers, even harsh ones, would be easier to live with than more unknown terrors. But a premature diagnosis of multiple when the problem might lie elsewhere could damage therapy progress, perhaps irreparably. His job at the moment would be to encourage and help her define her own reality.

  “You may be quite right,” he said. “Perhaps they are people.”

  The scene came abruptly but she could not place the incident in time: The breakfast in Howard Johnson’s and what had felt like awakening inside somebody else’s mind—the awareness that her own mind was empty in comparison. After two false starts, she tried to convey to Stanley exactly what the experience had been like. His face revealed no disbelief, but he didn’t understand. Then she saw his willingness to listen and, with no comprehension, to accept what she said as being valid to herself.

  Distracted because her head felt bigger than it should (almost as if she were a child carrying an adult’s head on her shoulders), the woman attempted to deal with what amazed her so thoroughly: Stanley believed her on faith alone. She reflected and finally, because the patterns were so ingrained, had to regard his faith with high suspicion.

  So did Nails and Ten-Four, each one from the seclusion of their individual minds, and each one still unaware of the other. No one present at this moment, except the Gatekeeper, knew how accurately the Interpreter had judged the process this morning: right now, more than three persons hovered around the woman, yet were unaware of her and of each other.

  The session had begun on a note of disruption and revelation that continued; memories were dredged up and spewed out in tones of guilt, fear, and heated rage. When pieced together the memories gave Stanley a partial understanding of the woman’s childhood—and the reasons why as an adult she avoided human contact. He watched the body, face, and voice switch, in the same smooth meld as in previous sessions, from one attitude to the next. No identities were revealed to him. But he felt more strongly that behind the smooth changes, separate and distinct identities did exist.

  Apparently the stepfather’s voyeurism had not been confined to the outhouse. He’d managed over the years to watch covertly as the child had bathed in a tin tub in the kitchen; as she changed into a swimsuit at the nearby lake; and even to peer up at her from a filigreed floor register in her bedroom. The child had reacted violently to the invasion of her privacy and had been severely punished by her mother for the resultant “uncontrollable tantrums.” Stanley probed, wanting the woman to see whatever feelings her mother’s punishment had caused.

  Ten-Four’s tougher voice replaced the woman’s and both were unaware that it had happened. “Hey,” Ten-Four said. “It’s hard to think mean thoughts about a mother who trimmed the crusts off the bread for your school sandwiches.”

  Ten-Four told Stanley something else the mother had done, that forever made complaints against her verboten: To earn money for lean winters she had prepared fruit for canning at the adjoining farm. The mother’s fingers, numb with cold water and sticky juice, had clutched a paring knife she could barely hold onto.

  The bitterly self-protective shrug Stanley saw just then belonged to Ten-Four. “I can’t eat canned peaches or apple sauce anymore. I still see her sitting there . . . summer dusk in upper New York State could be very cold, especially when it rained. There’d be water all over the barn floor. The mother would sit with her feet in the water, leaning down into the crates of fruit, bent over in that awful position. She did it to feed us, give us Christmas presents.”

  “That’s very nice,” Stanley said, “but did your mother protect you from your stepfather?”

  “Sometimes. In the beginning, she yelled at him. But he got crafty, he started camouflaging his moves.”

  The face relaxed as the woman surfaced. The voice changed from tough to bemused and while her sentences flowed smoothly after Ten-Four’s, the words were spoken with more hesitancy. “My stepfather,” the woman said, “would pretend to be doing something very innocent when he was really spying on me. That way if he were caught he could claim immunity for his actions. So I stayed in my room, away from the floor register and the windows. But that made my mother angry, first because it was so cold and I was prone to flu and strep that lasted forever, and second, because she couldn’t keep track of me. I didn’t feel the cold. I drew or read under a heavy quilt. ‘I know what you’re doing up there,’ she’d yell. When I sassed back and demanded to know what she thought I was doing, the speech began: ‘I gave you the breath of life . . . if it weren’t for me you wouldn’t be alive.’”

  Stanley had seen the change rippling across her face and body. She’d started cracking her knuckles; it sounded like rifle shots in the video studio.

  “In my head,” she told him, “I’d feel hatred at her words. My mother hadn’t done anything wonderful for me. What made bringing a child into the world such a class act? It shocked me when I found out later that everyone didn’t live the way my ‘family’ did.”

  “You couldn’t go to your own father for help?”

  The nostrils were flaring now. “Not,” she said, “without making the mother loathe me more.”

  Catherine, who had merely voiced words through the woman for the last few moments, now materialised. Catherine had been speaking, for a more damaged Troop member, thoughts and feelings held as a child; a child who had lived until now behind Catherine.

  She’d screwed her face up, and Stanley expected her to shriek. She did not; the facial muscles struggled fiercely and then relaxed, and Catherine in her spokesperson role described the isolation of the farm, of snowbanks taller than a man’s head; days verging into weeks without transportation, the total silence when nothing moved across the winter landscape. Her only knowledge of people in any season, she told him, had come from the movies the paternal grandmother took her to each summer and from school, where she’d been carefully invisible, going silently from class to class and shrinking from close contacts.

  “The best times growing up were when I was totally alone, at the rock in the back field of the second farmhouse. The rock was huge; it had a deep indentation in the middle, so deep you could barely see over the edge. I hated the snakes. They lay around on the rim of the rock, basking in the sun. Once you made it to the center of the rock, you kept an eye out for the snakes and any human being sneaking up on you from the house at the other end of the farm.”

  “You’ve mentioned disliking snakes on other occasions. What else frightens you?” Stanley was busy writing on his clipboard but had noticed the change of voice, gradually taking on a rougher and less sophisticated tone.

  “What else? Water and animals and high places. They aren’t just frightening; they strike terror in me. Most women are afraid of spiders or lightning or something dumb. Spiders won’t hurt you and neither will lightning if you’re careful. But these other things? Hey, run for your life, man.”

  The manner in which her forearms rested loosely on the bent thighs, the way she lea
ned forward; it was the body language of someone physically fit, who did not fear physical violence. It was also tough and rather unfeminine. But in the eyes glittering behind tumbled bangs, there was terror.

  Just before the break, he was given a description of the nightmares that had taken over twenty years to fade.

  “I wanted,” the woman said, “to get down on my knees in thanks; I didn’t believe they’d ever fade. All I remember of them now, aside from my stepfather standing on that ladder naked with his head in the attic opening, were the parts where he chased me for hours, stark naked, gaining on me, finally close at my heels, looking at me, saying nothing. No words. Every night was the same. Darkness, the whole house asleep, just the hall light burning. My eyes shut tight, not to open for anything until morning. Because the sounds always began, the creak of a floorboard, a soft footstep. The total fright, the fear that squeezed my heart the whole night long, the sweat pouring off me. I’d wake up screaming, Oh, jesus, where was my mother?”

  Her hands beat the air, up and down and sideways, making a frantic sign of the cross. “I don’t know when or why but my stepfather was forbidden to come into that bedroom; something about screams . . .”

  “Who was screaming?” Stanley laid down the clipboard.

  “I don’t know, but it didn’t stop the footsteps, the whisper of a presence in that dark bedroom, the hand following my body under the blankets, pausing, resting. I had to have imagined that. I didn’t ever dare open my eyes to find out and it went on for years, until I was fifteen, I think. Every night I’d just roll over, pretending to sleep.”

  Stanley consulted the clipboard. She’d said that she awakened, screaming; then she didn’t know who was screaming. Could there be two people here, very similar to each other, so similar that he noticed no change? Stanley caught sight of Tony’s face in the control booth, turning into a masque of frustration. He glanced back at the woman in time to see her face contort, the muscles under the skin swelling.

  “I hated being home, hated being in school. It was like whoever looked at me must know all about me, all about the ‘family.’ Whenever the school bus neared our door, I prayed it would blow up and release me or that the house would burn down with all of them in it. Every last one.”

  Something was wrong in the control booth. Tony was twisting the dials furiously. Tony had managed to patch the most scratchy of the tapes so far, and still searched for a flaw in the equipment that didn’t seem to exist. Stanley kept his pen flying over the clipboard, jotting key words while his eyes tracked the woman’s movements.

  “If I protested anything,” she was saying, “the stepfather denied it and the mother went along with him, pointing out that I was an idiot. They both said, each in their own way, that I was unfit for much of anything. That’s how I thought of me, too; there was nothing I could do right! Nothing I said or heard or saw, seemed to be right!”

  She cried. Stanley asked if she’d like to sketch for him the layout of the second farm. The drawing, as it progressed, was crude. The woman’s face was blank. Her hand gripped the pencil above the sketch pad as she outlined the farm’s boundaries. The mailbox at the road, the two big poplar trees on either side of the driveway, and the house itself were put into place. At the walnut tree on the front lawn, the pencil paused. It started to tremble in her hand. There was still no expression on her face. The tremble continued as she sketched in the garage, the chicken house behind it, and a narrow creek running across one of the fields. She outlined the barn with apologies. She could not, she said, “see it” at all. Stanley noted that in sketching the hedgerow leading back to the orchards, the trembling wasn’t just in her hand but her whole body. After the corn crib and the field of tall grass had been delineated, the pencil shot over the pad to draw another open field lying just outside the back orchard. The field was surrounded on all sides by a dense hedgerow of thick bushes and tall trees. The pencil paused at the opening along the hedgerow and then, just inside it, began to draw a circle. Stones were being sketched around the circle.

  “What’s that you’re drawing?” Stanley asked.

  The eyes were wide open, staring, and the words were spoken through teeth that chattered. He could barely decipher the first answer. He pressed her, not sure if he should be pressing anything at the moment.

  “A well,” Sewer Mouth said, “a miserable, shit-assed well.”

  Stanley called for the break and went to speak with Tony, who waited to speak with him until the woman was gone.

  “Fragmented, huh?” Tony bent over his dials, frowning. “I’d like to know why this damned equipment only goes haywire when the two of you are in there.”

  TEN

  THE session resumed. Stanley had never felt so inadequate with any client before her. What kept him going was having read somewhere that treatment for most multiples (provided they really existed) was a guess-and-go situation.

  A rigidness of attitude gripped the woman so hard and so often that he wondered why it did not strangle her. The rigidness bothered him because it sprang from her fear and guilt, both of which had grown to enormous proportions. Her occasional blank face bothered him, too; it was reflective of what she’d told him about waking up in the middle of someone else’s mind, with her own mind quite empty.

  The face across from him now wasn’t blank. The expression was the same one that slid into place whenever the subject of family was brought up. She looked so haughty. He wanted to ask her name. More than that, he wanted her to volunteer her name. In other multiple case histories the personalities did not just appear, they introduced themselves.

  “He,” in reference to the stepfather, had dominated the conversation. Stanley decided to do something about it.

  “No one will know whom you’re talking about if you don’t call the stepfather something besides ‘he,’” he said.

  Prior to the break and for the last few minutes, Catherine had been verbalising sporadically. Part of her job was to hold her own rage and that of several other Troop members. The excess was filtered up to the Big Three, of whom Black Katherine was felt to be the reigning power. Until pressured, Catherine hid whatever emotion she retained for herself behind a cold and lofty exterior. In pressing for identification of the man whom the Troops despised, Stanley had unknowingly forced Catherine out of hiding.

  “What would you like me to call him?” An eyebrow shot up.

  “How about ‘my stepfather’?” Stanley asked.

  “I’m not related to anyone.” Being forced to identify with the stepfather as someone related to her when she knew he was not was tantamount to picking one’s nose in public. Aside from his tackiness, he had been evil. It was something one could feel whenever he walked into a room. Except, of course, when relatives visited (either his own or the mother’s, and sometimes even the child’s own father and paternal grandmother). Then the stepfather’s evilness vanished like a cloak he shed at will.

  The idea of being part of any family, in view of the one she’d grown up in, was anathema to her. For all Catherine’s sophistication, she could not control her ire—or the feeling that someone right inside her mind was crowding up against it, shooting straight past, yanking the reins from her grip. And Stanley pushed it just a hair too far. . . .

  “But the other children were related to you by blood,” he said, “by your mother’s blood.”

  One of the Big Three glared at Stanley and spoke through gritted teeth. “I have no mother. Family? I’d like to see them all bloodied before my eyes. We are related to no one. And that’s final.”

  The outpour of rage stopped as quickly as it had begun but while it had lasted, Stanley would have sworn he’d never laid eyes on her before. One thing was clear: if there were other personalities here, they did not consider themselves to be related (as the first-born child would be) to a flesh and blood family. It appeared that “family” was considered by at least two of them to be an ugly institution.

 
And again, because he didn’t know what he was doing, his floundering produced results. “But Page is your daughter, you’re related to Page.”

  “I have never been married,” Catherine said. “I’ve never been pregnant. What do you take me for, a fool?”

  The woman was staring at her cup, muttering over how cold her coffee had become. The muttering ceased and she was suddenly almost screaming.

  “Did I kill him? Oh, god, why can’t I remember? In the car the other day, I kept trying to remember, and I heard—you won’t believe it.”

  “Yes, I will believe it.”

  “Murder is an awful thing, one shouldn’t laugh! But along with wondering if I had murdered my stepfather, I heard myself laughing and doing an imitation of W. C. Fields, then Marilyn Monroe, Mae West, and Scarlett O’Hara. I can’t imitate anyone, Stanley, so where was it coming from? There was laughter and the idea that Fields, Monroe, West, and O’Hara all have similar voice characteristics. Then my mind just went blank. I couldn’t direct it anywhere, it was empty. If I did kill my stepfather, whether I remember or not, I’ve got to pay!”

  “That sounds just like something your mother would say.”

  “Well, she was right!”

  “She wasn’t right. Your mother ruled by fear. She convinced you that you were so bad that you could only survive at her side—for whatever purpose she wanted to use you.”

  For a split second, someone beat on the woman’s mind with joy at how clearly Stanley perceived the mother.

  “You got up and walked away from your family. That was healthy. Yet you persist in feeling guilty for having left your mother to her own devices. And you seem so frightened of your rage. But it’s warranted and you have to keep letting it out. I just saw a good deal of your rage; I applauded.”

  “You did? I was angry?”

  “Yes, you were.”

  “When?”

  Stanley looked at his watch. “Just a few seconds ago.”