When Rabbit Howls

by Truddi Chase

  The second had lasted too long; in the Tunnel, the Weaver’s fingers flew, blessedly overtaking the woman and the screams coming out of her mouth. She found herself, moments later, listening to static on the radio and searching for a lamp that would light. The bulbs blew so often, perhaps the wiring had grown faulty. But then she’d lived in a lot of places and the light bulbs always blew fast. At the back of her mind, knowledge formed and was swept away.

  Go away, leave me alone, I hate you. Why did that expression pop into her head so often, along with an almost childish anger and a feeling of dirtiness? She stood in the kitchen, two brand-new seventy-five-watt bulbs in her hand, anxious to replace them before dark. The words were repeated. As with all else, she’d assumed, on hearing them in the past, that they were hers. She didn’t know what they meant. She’d simply lived with them, noting vaguely now, after two months of grinding therapy, how they coincided each time, with certain events. Sometimes it was a flick of memory, or her perpetration, real or imagined, of a social gaffe, or someone discovering her mistake at one task or another—it never dawned that immediately after hearing the words she could not sit in a chair but had, in order to perform any task, to kneel on the floor. At those times, she shook and there was the sound of hysterical crying.

  Now as always, she tried not to listen to the banshee wails, tried to continue without interruption the task at hand. The small fingers rapping on the walls of the Tunnel that were her mind, went unnoticed.

  Go away, leave me alone, I hate you. The words kept echoing in a small, fearful, crying voice. And again she felt the unknown danger. Along with the knowledge of her own cowardice because she didn’t dare to wonder what the small voice was terrified of, the woman trembled as she went from room to room, gathering lamps. She sat them down on the kitchen floor and knelt, with hands that shook and eyes that were too full, to put new bulbs into each socket. She did consider for a moment the extraordinary amount of money she spent on light bulbs and batteries.

  FOURTEEN

  “NO question. She’s a multiple. I’ve counted at least seven of her in thirty minutes. So what’s the problem?”

  Marshall Fielding turned away from the video screen. Stanley had purposely avoided, all through drinks at the airport and the ride to the university, any mention of the woman. Stanley preferred to let Marshall see for himself, from his vantage point as researcher in a complex field. It was now six in the evening and neither of them had thought of dinner.

  “The problem,” Stanley said, “is that she doesn’t always jibe with what I’ve been reading.”

  “And she won’t. We’ve barely touched the surface of how varied multiplicity can be. These people are unique, Stanley; they’ve got their own patterns and if double or triple the amount of case histories were recorded, there’d be areas in most of them that wouldn’t match. We know very little about this phenomenon.”

  “Mental health,” Stanley sighed, “the inexact science.”

  “That’s why I’m not in your end of it, remember? Can’t take pain too close up.” His dark brown eyes were level and serious behind the affable smile. Marshall was not a big man; in height he reached just below Stanley’s nose. His body, wiry and compact in a tan, summer-weight suit, gave the impression of fitness and no wasted motion. “I’d rather chart the researchers, watch the clients from a distance. And watching them isn’t always what the movies lead us to expect. On the other hand, these persons here have only known you two months; they may be a little reticent, sort of feeling you out. The tapes show a very smooth transition from one person to the other, and sometimes I don’t even see a transition, I simply hear more than one of them verbalising at the same time.”

  “Today’s session was the strongest it’s ever been in that regard, but you’ve no idea how I wanted a second opinion.”

  “Well, this is it—multiplicity, full blown. Whatever you’ve researched, pretend you never read it. Multiple personality isn’t always materialisation after a great struggle. By that I mean all multiples don’t necessarily turn red in the face or seem to fade away before the changes. That may happen in the case of this woman, but so far on the tapes everyone has been relatively cool about it. I daresay her friends probably don’t notice many changes because they are so smooth, and to some, she just seems moody or excitable.”

  Marshall had already given the manuscript a cursory examination and asked if he could have a copy to study more thoroughly. “If the title means anything, Stanley, you’ve got trouble. I know you don’t hunt, but the scream of a wounded rabbit is the one sound you never want to hear again.”

  Stanley told him that the officers in Albert’s police precinct never wanted to hear it again, either. He outlined the oddities and the most intractable problems he’d encountered with his client.

  “She’s as confused as you are right now,” Marshall told him. “Regardless of her strength, as she gets deeper into therapy, this smoother type of personality ‘switch’ will frighten her more. She may be coming in on the tail end of some of the switches already, or even in the middle at times. If so, she ‘hears’ snatches of conversation from a distance, whether it’s from outsiders like you or from the other selves. She may know periodically that she’s here or later that she’s been here, but it will take a certain trigger or a series of them to remember even vaguely what was said. And if any one of these persons starts revealing deep sore spots, she won’t remember what they’ve said at all. It may not be a matter of remembering; she may not have been there in the first place.”

  Stanley told him how the woman kept a daily journal and tape-recorded at home.

  “You realise, of course, that the others are participating in those efforts? You’re not used to their world; you tend to think of everything as originating from a single source, when in actuality the sources are many.”

  “It’s a habit I’m trying to break myself of,” Stanley said. “I’m just now realising how little memory my client has, and that I’m not even sure which one she is.”

  “You may never even have met her.” Seeing Stanley’s expression, Marshall gestured at the video screen. “C’mon, Stanley. I’m not saying that you haven’t; I don’t know. But think about this whole multiplicity process; its purpose is to protect the core, the original, first-born entity. These people can’t do that if the core is out wandering around all the time.”

  The tape rolled on. Marshall tried to make Stanley understand that he’d simplified what was a convoluted, unique-unto-itself process. Nobody, not even the experts, were sure they’d even scratched the surface of the mechanism. She, or whoever, sat there before them in full colour, her face and body reflecting a mind-bending range of emotion. Eventually, in the middle of the trauma and then an outburst of rage, “she” made an aside to Stanley that set the two of them laughing.

  “Somebody,” Marshall said, “has a true sense of comedy. The wit is sharp. It ranges from a gallows humour to a sophomoric naïveté but if I had to guess, I’d say most of it is coming from a single other self. One of them is playing games with you, testing your perceptions.” Marshall shook his head. “There’s so much diversity in these tapes. You’re lucky they’re willing to be filmed, but it may take a while to delineate each one.”

  He continued to watch. “You just asked a question and she couldn’t remember. There, she did it again! She can’t remember what you said just three seconds ago. Obviously three seconds ago she wasn’t there.”

  Marshall’s attention was riveted to the videotape. He watched the woman talking to Stanley, as her face, her body, began more obviously to shift and change. Seated there on the floor Indian-fashion, her face had lost the masquelike look of a second ago and was relaxing; her eyes had softened and become wide and innocent, her mouth the rounded “o” of a small child. The voice dropped to a whisper and she smiled, trustingly. After all this time, that voice still made Stanley shiver.

  “Oooh,” there was a giggle from the scre
en, “she’s coming, I feel her, she’s here, right now.”

  “It’s a child,” Marshall said. “You’ve tapped the well, so to speak. Behind this child, there are others, just as small and probably far more damaged. She’s a façade for them. I can almost feel it. See the way she holds herself?”

  Stanley did and he didn’t. Either Marshall had become a romantic over the two years since they’d seen each other, or an exposure to multiplicity had honed his senses. Stanley watched the screen, trying to absorb the action with Marshall’s faculties. The child gave herself a final hug and seemed to melt away. An older but just as innocent and lilting voice emerged, along with eyes that held nothing but happiness and wonder.

  “Who is that?” Marshall demanded. “Which one of them was the child talking about?”

  Stanley swallowed. “Miss Wonderful.”

  Marshall grinned. “The names are sometimes a trip. And I’ll bet you thought they’d call themselves Martha, Jane, or Henry.”

  Marshall yanked the tab from a can of Pepsi and told Stanley that he could forget his usual six-months-and-out-into-the-street routine. “No telling how many persons this woman will wind up with. Funny, isn’t it? A good shrink would give his eyeballs to get hold of a multiple personality because statistically, we’re lucky to find two bona fides in a professional lifetime. Notice I said ‘statistically.’ Yet when you see it in front of your face, in a real, live client . . .”

  Stanley nodded. “The sadness,” he muttered, “is incredible. For me, it outweighs the discovery.”

  “Hey.” Marshall raised a black eyebrow as wiry and mobile as his body. “I’m an optimist. I think to myself, Better to find the problem, no matter how old the client is, knock it out, give them some good years. And Stanley, you’ll be giving good years to forty or more of her.”

  “More than forty?” Stanley was thinking of Jeannie Lawson and her three separate selves.

  “From the tapes and the manuscript, your client is a candidate for the higher numbers. We’re discovering that between fifteen and thirty-seven is the median; beyond that, nobody knows. In Los Angeles right now there’s a man with two hundred, and at a very prestigious Ivy League university a young woman with one hundred and twenty-five is studying for her law degree. As to your client, when the incest starts that early, two years old, and it continues over the years with a close authority figure, not the guy down the street, you’re talking prime multiple personality breeding ground. Of course, you’ve first got to be talking gifted child, at least that’s what we’ve found in most cases. Multiples are born, the majority of them, creatively brilliant. But for those stripped bare by child abuse, the brilliance is fractured, hidden from view. In the case of this woman, you throw in a very peculiar mother and you add a maternal Irish grandmother steeped to the gills in catholicism. It had to make for an exceedingly restrictive upbringing.”

  “Her mother had broken away from the church. The children never went to church.” Stanley frowned.

  “It doesn’t matter. The catholic influence was, and is, still there. I noticed that nothing is capitalised in the manuscript if it’s even vaguely reflective of religion. There’s a lot of deserved hatred for all authoritarianism there, and for the church in particular. But there’s conflict, too. Someone on those tapes today made the sign of the cross, over and over.”

  “I told her two weeks into therapy that before becoming a therapist I was a minister. Come to think of it, the reply was a little strange. It took about thirty seconds of consideration and then she said, ‘We forgive you, Stanley.’”

  “Whoever said it wasn’t kidding but at least you’re outside this group’s ring of fire. That good old Irish grandmother, if my estimation is correct, was mean as hell, with the beads tucked under both arms and a tongue like a puff adder. They visited her often; she could have pumped gallons of sin and the devil into that kid over just one weekend. Then they all troop home to the farm and mommie takes over where grandma left off. You don’t forget catholic training easily. So mommie, fallen away from the church or not, could have planted more ideas of sin and retribution into an already tortured little brain and, presto, this kid’s got no place to go.”

  “So she goes into her mind. She splinters,” Stanley said.

  “She not only splintered, she pulled out. The human mind can only be pushed so far before it refuses to deal with the garbage. Some of these persons probably got started at two or three and if her stepfather took an immediate liking to the situation, which I’m sure he did—I mean, that guy had her locked up like private stock—a lot of the others were born shortly thereafter. We’d better find a sandwich, Stanley, you’ll need to keep your strength up. You’ve got what I’d call an increased case load.”

  “Must you cackle that way?”

  “I’m a very adjusted guy, I go with the flow,” Marshall’s tone behind the grin held a deep sarcasm. “As I was saying, certain ones become damaged along the way, they stop developing. Others are created to pick up the threads. The damaged ones remain, but usually their replacements are a lot more aware of the world through established knowledge; a form, if you will, of previous experience.”

  “While the client remains in blissful ignorance.”

  “Sure, except that thirty years later she finds herself in a wall-to-wall brick bathroom. Your clues, the only two you need, are the amnesia and the headaches which resemble migraines. Forget the manner in which the persons emerge, or the overall operating pattern, MPs as a rule have got their own individual patterns, and survival is uppermost in their minds. Stanley, these people are the survivors. If the world blew up tomorrow, guess who’d walk out of the rubble? Unless, of course, they commit suicide first, and nobody has those statistics.”

  * * *

  “Is it settled?” Jeannie asked over the phone.

  “MPD,” Stanley replied, “your diagnosis and mine.”

  “Stanley, could you possibly be right, that if incest and physical and sexual child abuse is so prevalent, then multiple personality may be prevalent, too?”

  * * *

  Jeannie and a math professor and his wife joined Marshall and Stanley at a restaurant that night. Jeannie hadn’t gone anywhere socially in over two years; she seemed grave and silent. Fortunately the place wasn’t crowded; not so many eyes watching her, but she wished she’d been able to keep her coat on. She felt lost without its voluminous folds. She wished her counselor could be here, but it didn’t really matter. Jeannie still had the sharply retentive mind of one of her former “selves.” She would write out a report later and add it to her thesis material.

  Marshall was saying that according to Frank Putnam at NIMH, Stanley had handled his client with professional aplomb: he had given encouragement, never a feeling of rejection, no matter how strange she might have sounded. He had planted posthypnotic suggestions in her mind as to her worth and instead of downplaying fears had told her that she had every right to be scared out of her senses. Marshall outlined the kind of therapy multiples could expect as a rule, and the math professor’s wife made a sound of annoyance and disbelief.

  “You sound as though proper treatment for a multiple is practically unheard of. You mean that if I came down with multiplicity my chances of surviving therapy would be, say, ninety-percent negative?”

  “For one thing, you don’t ‘come down’ with it, but, yes, those are your chances. Provided of course that someone could diagnose you in the first place.”

  “Is there anything in particular that I ought to watch out for?” Stanley asked.

  “Watch out that you don’t kill her.” Marshall’s tone was sarcastic. There was silence at the table. “I saw a multiple killed once. Not in the strict sense of the word, of course. Her therapist did it. She had what I can only call a ‘flying mind.’ The god-damned thing soared, Stanley. It flew right over the garbage that bogs most of us down in this world; her own situation aside, it sliced like a sabre, straight to
the heart of any problem. Of course she wasn’t doing the slicing, it wasn’t her mind that was soaring. One of her people was a bona fide genius, the kind you see once in a lifetime. Her psychiatrist tried his damnedest to force her—them, her other selves, to integrate. He wanted to see one ‘well-rounded, whole’ person. I think in many ways the fragmented aspect of MPD scared the hell out of him, especially when he saw things he couldn’t comprehend, ideas he couldn’t have conceived himself in a million years. There was so much beauty unfolding in that woman, and she had such a long way to go—her people getting to know each other fully, exploring themselves and her, showing their wares, if you will. They never had a chance.”

  “What happened?” Stanley laid down his fork.

  “Nobody knows. The last time I saw her, the psychiatrist had managed to convince himself that he’d fused two of her selves and was aiming at the other one hundred and fifty of them. I’m not saying that integration can’t be a damned good thing for a lot of multiples. But it wasn’t good for her, and he kept trying to fit her into a mold. Multiplicity by its very nature wasn’t made for any mold yet conceived by man. I watched her for over a year, growing more and more confused and less productive. It was as if she were right back in the middle of the experiences that had caused the multiplicity in the first place. He had re-created a restrictive environment for her. She just disappeared one day. Gone. Multiples are good at that. Some could hide in the middle of main street, name tag and all, and nobody would find them.”

  Jeannie had been trying hard all evening to stay behind her disguise of a student researching her thesis. She hoped the strain she felt at her next question would not give her away.

  “Do people believe you when you talk,” Jeannie asked, “do they believe that multiplicity and the complexity of its process really exist?”