When Rabbit Howls

by Truddi Chase

  Regardless of the treasured glass and over a strong sense of apprehension, her eyes were riveted on the spider. Her mind soared for a moment, then focused. Unaware of what she was doing, the future course it would take, she memorised the spider’s motions, refined them. She was, in effect, “giving birth” to the seed that would eventually become Grace, the Zombie. The Zombie, not the child, would walk out of this field today.

  The child didn’t know that and yet she was suddenly doubly afraid, as if a chill wind had sprung up. The daddy longlegs’s motions had carried him up the blade of grass to where its tender green tip lay against the rock rim of the old well. The child moved, too, from the heat of the earth, and hoisted herself up next to him, feeling the stones cold and hard under her haunches. Her bare dangling heels brushed against rough stone walls and she saw the reflection of herself in the blackness of the well water far below.

  Her mind swung, from the glittering blue and red glass in her hand, to the spider, and back. Somehow the sun glinting on the shards of glass and the spider’s lazy motions became a single energy source, compelling, enveloping—and still, above that energy, separate from it, she was afraid.

  The shadow that had been there for some time moved in front of her, lay directly across herself and the spider, too. The stepfather, no longer a shadow, moved into her line of vision, carrying the planks with which he would reseal the well, now that he’d finished whatever he’d been doing. He carried something else besides the planks, she couldn’t see what it was, he’d hidden it behind his back.

  “Come play,” the stepfather said, but Olivia II had learned a lesson from what had happened to her predecessor, Olivia I. She prepared to flee. Before her feet hit the dirt, the stepfather grabbed her and she saw what he hid behind his back: a crate, the kind that lettuce or carrots were packed in. The slats were thin, held together with wire, and the crate was open on two sides, forming a sort of swing. A rope had been attached to it.

  The “dead essence” of Olivia II screamed on a far-away note that plunged straight down Stanley’s spinal column.

  The woman surfaced, shaking her head so hard that the tears flew. “No, I won’t believe it; nobody can make me! There was only one well, by the kitchen door!”

  She was suddenly shoved aside. Olivia II had seemed to speak from the depths of irreversible damage. The child who emerged over the woman showed signs of that same damage, except that hers was voiced in near-hysteria.

  “Oh, yes, there was a well in the field,” the second child sobbed. “The stepfather put Olivia II in the crate and hung her down.”

  “Do you know why he did that to her?” Stanley felt as if he were choking.

  She held her fists together in her lap; the sobs were racking, and she talked in a sort of lispy baby-talk. She seemed ashamed of what had been done by the stepfather and petrified to tell. The woman’s denial had made her furious; enough, Stanley thought, to force her out, this child whom he had never seen before.

  The child replied over wilder sobs that the stepfather had been angry over a refusal to play “that dumb game.” She had no concept of how long the torture had lasted. She was far more determined to tell him something else.

  “Snakes,” she screamed, “he knew we hated them, he found a lot and threw them down the well on top of Olivia II!”

  The child cringed with every word she uttered and gripped both hands together between her knees.

  “Olivia II died in the well,” the child sobbed. “She hadn’t been around long enough to have anybody to take over, so Catherine did it. Catherine is her adult mirror-image.”

  Catherine, Stanley thought, who hated the idea of motherhood, had become an adult stand-in for a six-year-old dead self.

  “Who are you?” Stanley asked.

  “Olivia I is dead, too, because of the stepfather and what he did to her with the pink thing, and because the mother walked on her. She was four years old. From Olivia I, there’s just me left. I’m her child mirror-image.”

  Stanley asked what her name was; she howled that she didn’t have a name, didn’t want one.

  “Who,” Stanley asked with a dry throat, “took over as the adult for Olivia I?”

  “The Outrider.”

  In the control booth Tony’s expression was unreadable but his hands flew over the dials in a frenzy of outrage. Stanley didn’t know what to do with his own outrage. He signaled for a break.

  The university hallway was silent. Only a faint murmur escaped from the classrooms on either side and his footsteps had a hollow, lonely ring. The night cleaning crew had left the odour of Lysol hanging on the linoleum floors; it made his eyes water. He tried to imagine, but could not, what might have gone through the child’s mind as she’d hung there in the well. The screams in the studio today and the wild sobbing . . .

  “Kill him,” the students had said. Again Stanley wondered what the woman would decide to do when she had possession of full memory? She didn’t believe the well existed, but someone had drawn it months ago in the sketchbook. Marshall had been right. There were other, smaller, far more damaged selves behind the first child who’d evidenced on the videotape that day.

  Shocked to the point of nausea, Stanley again took his place across from her in the video studio, unaware that more puzzle pieces were about to surface. The woman sat with blank eyes and frozen features, giving no sign of distress over the children’s recall. Only when prodded did she disclose the 2:00 A.M. “nightmare.” She insisted it was simply a bad dream.

  Stanley listened to the denial. He doubted if she would fully experience any of it, at least for a long time to come.

  After the break she fought not the label but the actuality of multiple personality.

  “I can’t even buy nylons anymore,” she sobbed. “Somebody doesn’t like them. When I get home from the store, the nylons I buy are gone. It’s probably Mean Joe and he won’t talk.”

  “Or someone very small,” said Stanley, “someone who is too young for nylons. Here. A friend sent this to you.” He handed her a package done up in red-and-white flowered wrapping and tied in red, crinkly ribbons. She tore away the paper to reveal a second green-and-gold box and a sketch pad. For all the joy on her face, Stanley had expected, at the least, a fur coat.

  Laughing and crying simultaneously, the woman read the words Jeannie Lawson had written: “Do not confuse childish with childlike. Someone inside you is very young and wants to play. Please try to believe that it does get better.”

  “Are you telling me that she’s a real multiple, that there’s somebody like me around here? Is she experiencing these same things; is it hell for her? Please. Is she real?”

  Stanley gave assurances, wishing he had a few for himself. From the very moment they’d sat down to film this morning, he’d felt it, the surge of energy, the forward momentum, the feeling of being “high.” It happened every time he was with her, but today it was particularly noticeable. Sometimes it took him several days to “come down” again. It seemed to be tied in with Tony’s periodic complaints about the picture and sound quality.

  With the opening of the gift, the energy in the room had grown. While Stanley pondered to himself, unwilling to give credence to his suspicions, the energy continued to emanate from many sources: Mean Joe peering over the woman’s shoulder to check out the present safety-wise; Catherine, who loved all gifts, admiring the wrappings; a number of children eyeing the crayons.

  It was no wonder that the woman asked if Jeannie Lawson were real. With all the Troop members coming and going over the crayons in her lap, the woman felt unreal herself, and disconnected to anything or anyone.

  Stanley explained Jeannie Lawson’s final integration.

  “Integrated. That means everybody is ‘one’? Before that, did she sound as crazy as I do? Is she really like me?”

  “Jeannie wasn’t crazy. Nor was she mentally ill or insane or whatever other label most people use. Her
other selves were protecting her. I suppose to an outsider the way they went about it might seem unusual.”

  Not crazy? Forces inside the woman for which she had no name burst and sent fresh tears. Someone stuck a nose into the brilliant crayon colours, peering at Stanley and crooning. The sound was that of a child, content with an old and familiar toy.

  “It’s like an underground movement, isn’t it?” The woman spoke, oblivious to the crooning. “I’ve never met Jeannie but she’s more real to me than I am.”

  She folded the wrappings, neatly, precisely, and hid them in her purse, trying to involve herself in the session she hadn’t wanted. She expressed concern about almost every waking action, showing Stanley, in effect, an adult who did not trust herself or her ability to cope with anything or anyone. The crayons were tumbled helter-skelter across her lap. Mean Joe emerged briefly, slant-eyed and unverbose. The eyes were a deep hazel, his body language angular and masculine. He did not announce himself. The woman only said that she “felt” him, the same as in the carry-out store that day with Miss Wonderful. The smile on the woman’s face grew wide as she uttered the words. The cheekbones vanished.

  After the emotional impact of the first two children in this session, it was almost a relief to see the third. It was not the “dead essence” of the same child who had described the field and the well, or the child who had emerged afterward, only slightly less damaged but angry and informative. Yet the voice held a tiny hint of a lisp.

  The terror and pain were back in the woman’s face. Like a small conjurer, the third child called up the name of her protector.

  “Mean Joe,” Lambchop said, “is a mountain. We call him Mean Joe Green now. Did you know that, Stanley? We call him Mean Joe Green ’cause we found out the other day that he’s black.”

  Stanley had been wondering for weeks, stumbling over clues to Mean Joe’s precise characteristics. The mother didn’t give approval easily. The Troops knew that. Yet she had smiled at a young black boy from the farm behind theirs, for delivering her lost child. Had the mother, unknowingly, thereby given “permission” if not for the birth of another alternate self then at least for his colour?

  There was another consideration. The stepfather had been white. Did any white man consequently frighten some Troops so badly that this hulking protector whom the children called Mean Joe had to be black for them? Or had Mean Joe himself made the decision? The question addressed MPD as a process and Stanley reminded himself that no one knew exactly how it worked.

  On the cushions, Lambchop jabbered, picking up one crayon after the other, lining them up neatly on the white skirt.

  “Mean Joe Green,” said Stanley, smiling over his clipboard, “that is a big man. Big enough to protect anybody, I guess.”

  “I’ll draw you his picture sometime.” The face looked sad. “When I get to play.”

  “Don’t they let you play?” For whatever reason, this child felt safe enough with him to stay for a while. Then he saw it: her body stance beginning a slow transformation from a free-moving child to one who huddled into herself and regarded her surroundings with terror.

  “I’m not allowed.” Damaged or not, the lisp was pronounced, unmistakable.

  “Well, what kind of games did you play when you were little?” Stanley wanted to yank his tongue out. This Troop member was still little. “Back then,” he amended.

  Silence.

  A tremour shook her. She tried to tell him how old she was, counting on her fat-fingered hands. She cried in frustration when she got to six and couldn’t go any further.

  “But you sound even younger than six,” Stanley objected.

  “Time,” she said, still crying and beating the fat little hands together, “time just . . .”

  Her eyes darted, she held herself as if she hurt, like one who expected blows, not hugs. Grinding down his reactions, Stanley clutched his old edict: Getting caught in a client’s emotion is a trap. He swallowed and reached back into his mental notes, to a past session. “Time stopped? Are you telling me that time stopped for you?”

  Stanley couldn’t decipher her words. Something told him that while she had nothing to do with the well incident, her development had been cut off completely but for other reasons. Where had this child been all these years?

  He asked her. He couldn’t tell by her movements on the cushions what was happening.

  Within the Tunnel walls there was a burst of panic. Certain informed Troop minds surged to the forefront, intent on a single act—to protect that which was now in grave danger. The child struggled with Stanley’s question, her infantile mind awhirl with the implications. But even as she struggled and grew more terrified at the answer, she felt them: Troop members massing, drawing the Tunnel walls tight around her.

  No one in the Troop Formation understood how it had happened. They only knew that the particular child in front of Stanley was the child core’s mirror-image. She had put herself in jeopardy and themselves along with her.

  Catherine’s eyes flew to Mean Joe and they were wild with pleading. The Front Runner and the Buffer jockeyed for a position that would give them purchase, a means of surfacing quickly over the wandering child. The Gatekeeper gave the signal.

  Mean Joe moved.

  Stanley sat frozen on the cushions, knowing the child’s eyes were turning darker, becoming hazel and slanted above the high cheekbones, and that suddenly the figure crouched there was very, very masculine.

  And in the child’s moment of extreme panic, Mean Joe wrapped her within himself and took her away. Back to the place Stanley would have given anything to discover.

  “Where are you?” Stanley prodded, but the face remained blank. “I’m here to help you. Unless you talk to me I can’t help you.”

  * * *

  During the break, Tony asked Stanley if the little one had been putting him on with Mean Joe Green.

  “Anything can be,” Stanley said.

  Back on the floor for the second half of the session, Stanley took note of the woman’s quiet tone, the withdrawn body stance and blank eyes.

  “I’m blessed,” she said. “No matter how bad things were as a child, it was always possible to hang in there until the next day, the next year. Why do I say that when I can’t remember what happened, just that I hated the farm?”

  “One day you will remember,” Stanley said. “All of it.”

  “Shit,” the woman said. “Hell, crap, and damn.” At least she heard herself saying it. She said she was sorry and looked contrite and then there was nervous laughter. “I don’t think too many other victims are as lucky as I am. Something always saved me. I found you, Stanley, just when I thought that my mind had snapped. No,” she added, seeing his thoughtful expression, “I may be blessed but it’s got nothing to do with god or the devil either if they exist, and I doubt that they do.”

  “For some people they do,” Stanley said, testing the water.

  The eyes glinted and the jawline hardened. The quiet tone vanished.

  “I spit on those things,” said Sewer Mouth, and she mimed the action over her right shoulder.

  “I suppose,” Stanley groped for a handle, knowing of the upbringing by a mother and a grandmother steeped in Catholicism, “that if religion were stuffed down your throat as a child in the face of the other things going on . . .”

  Sewer Mouth’s rage was expressed and thus vented, by means of cursing. She often ran into people who did not understand her rage and could see no good reason for such a filthy tongue. It seemed to her that their disgust over expletives which were perfectly natural to her was a denial of the reasons for them—reasons which she’d never explained to anybody except for a few abortive attempts.

  A family living together in peace and tranquility or even an uneasy truce was one thing. But a family of six, living with hatred and the threat of each other’s daily rages, was another. When the mother went to the fields or was preoccupied with hous
ehold chores, Sewer Mouth had found a way to cope with the screaming and the battles between the half brother and half sisters.

  Incapable of swatting anyone into silence, first because she would be beaten into retreat by the mother or the stepfather, and second because her rage frightened her, Sewer Mouth learned to use her tongue. It did not draw blood and could be employed freely without the threat of bodily injury to anyone, herself included. Her anger, while frightening, was always safely vented through the cursing.

  Seeing by Stanley’s face that he did seem to understand her anger, Sewer Mouth considered dropping her defenses.

  “God,” Stanley was saying, “doesn’t mean much to someone who lived the way you did. The thought of any salvation outside yourself must have seemed laughable. You’ve been taught to trust and depend on no one.”

  “Why don’t you look at me as if I’m a leper?” Her voice was a rough whisper. “Can you also accept my feelings that all parents stink? That they’re vengeful, even the best of them, and that no smile they show you is real? Does that mean you can also understand that I hate kids, that after I left that farm I never wanted to see another diaper or a bottle of formula, or hear a squalling infant?”

  “It makes sense to me,” Stanley said.

  “I wanted to be alone! But everywhere you looked there was another kid—the half brother and the half sisters—screaming their lungs out. I wanted silence; they yelled and tormented me. I still don’t want to see, hear, or smell anybody, ever again. Someday I’ll find a way never to have to be with another human being. I think about it night and day; there must be an island somewhere, or a mountain, with no damn people!”