When Rabbit Howls

by Truddi Chase

  “You may be too smart for your own good.”

  “That’s what the stepfather used to say to us.”

  The woman started to cry because she knew it was true. Many little feet, belonging to sullen and angry owners, stomped through the kitchen area.

  “We didn’t deserve it.” Lambchop threw the paper from her straw on the floor and refused to pick it up. “That strap hurt, and being told you were crazy every time you cried wasn’t nice, either.”

  “Why were we punished so much?” Rabbit lifted red-rimmed eyes to the cup of hot chocolate sitting on the table.

  “The mother knew he was a monster,” Lamb Chop said. “She just wouldn’t say so. I used to watch her face. After a while, it got all closed looking when he did bad things right in front of her.”

  “So how come she said we were the bad ones?” Twelve turned to the woman, frowning. “It doesn’t make sense to me.”

  The woman went on with snack preparations, trying to shut them out, diminish their humiliation and anger; to tell herself that she knew what was best for them.

  As the mother had done, years ago?

  “Not fair.” Lamb Chop yanked a cookie out of the bag on the counter. “Do you think it was fair that he beat us that way, with that silly smirk of his? Like we were so dumb he could get away with anything?”

  Silence. The small Troops, some of them still unrevealed to the woman, were sharing memories.

  Mean Joe crooned softly, but even the small sleeping face on his shoulder began to stir.

  “What about the day with the teapot? All that hot, scalding tea.” Twelve wanted to run from her own words.

  Rabbit, who had been crouched on the floor silent, was silent no longer. Her howls rent the air.

  The woman stood stock still. “What teapot?”

  Two or more of the small selves told her then that when Stanley called them out in the sessions, their bellies still burned with its liquid. Rabbit continued to howl and hold her head in her hands, her tears a river on her sweater.

  Snacks forgotten, the woman headed in the direction of the bed and didn’t quite make it. She lay where she’d dropped and grabbed for the teddy bear. It was very important, for some reason, that it be with her.

  Flick. She could see the mother seated across from her at the kitchen table. The mother’s eyes were wild and emerald green under the piles of rich, red hair. She held the teapot with a hot pad in her left hand; she reached with the right for her six-year-old daughter . . . and tilted the pot. It was a pretty piece of china, white with pink flower designs. Steam hissed from the spout. Tea, boiling hot, flowed in a steady stream.

  Rabbit uttered a banshee scream as the water coursed down and shriveled the white cotton blouse she wore. It sogged, instantly, the crust-trimmed tuna sandwiches on the plate in front of her. Rabbit moaned and held herself, but not too tightly, for the pain was fierce.

  The recall, encapsulated in one of the widest flicks the woman had ever encountered, wearied her terribly before it faded. She found herself making a nest of the floor cushions and tucking her head into the curve of one shoulder. In a foggy, floating haze, flashbacks clear as winter ice continued. Smells of flowers, tuna fish, and a hot summer rain. The flashbacks halted. A sensation of nothing more than movement gripped her.

  The little ones waited.

  Alright, Lamb Chop said. Now.

  I’m scared.

  Don’t you dare be scared. It will only take a second and don’t you make a sound. Not one.

  They might have been counseling over a game of hide-and-seek in the dusk of another time. Movement. Forward and back, steady at first, then jerky. The woman’s mind began to accept what it was being given. Like a motor running unsteadily, the sensation cut on and off. The woman refused it. Lamb Chop summoned up all the strength she had, and bore down harder. The flicks went on, showing an enormous white square of cloth. The square grew larger on all sides, it stretched in the woman’s mind, sparkling white.

  Now, Lamb Chop told Rabbit, Now.

  The words kitchen table circled in the tortured mind of the woman while she battled to identify the white square. Lamb Chop wasn’t giving up. She pressed harder. The woman saw it then, the tiny child who’d seemed to accompany the Seventh Horseman, whose hands had been so sticky . . . the woman saw her head of golden curls and the little scrunchy eyes . . . dressed this time in navy blue corduroy trousers and a knitted top of faded mauve. Jerky, forward-and-backward motions, a child’s crying as it struggled, choking for breath. The child sat in the middle of the wrinkled sea of white cloth.

  A sheet. She sat on a sheet, there in the second farmhouse kitchen. The mother always covered the kitchen table with a white sheet during the canning season. The woman didn’t know how old the little girl was, except that she was too young to climb down from the kitchen table by herself.

  The image of the child receded to permit a glimpse of the stepfather. His huge, muscular arms reached out and grabbed the child around the waist and wrenched its stomach in a choking motion. As one would do to someone who’d swallowed food the wrong way. There was the pink thing, a balloon deflating back into the stepfather’s zipper opening. Then the woman saw the pale, gooey, white stuff, spurting from the child’s mouth, dripping from her nostrils.

  She slept.

  * * *

  Catherine had been waiting. She followed the woman into the bathroom. Presently, water filled the claw-legged tub. The dazed woman lowered herself into it.

  “Well, darling, just no rest for the wicked, is there? Do me a favour. Don’t turn away recall again, just because you don’t recognise an object as being familiar. The stepfather put the child on the table occasionally, and for a change of pace, ejaculated into her mouth. One day it backfired on him. She nearly choked to death.”

  Why didn’t the recall sink in? The woman pushed herself further under the water and watched it lap against the sides of the tub. Her mind drifted, looking for escape from Catherine’s words, as if there had been something awful in them, aside from the recall. A second later she was down on her knees by the toilet, feeling harsh splinters of wood in her kneecaps. She held her head in her hands while Rabbit’s moan rose to an inhuman pitch.

  Still, none of it applied to her.

  “Get up,” Catherine said. “We just showed you the mother’s idea of punishment and the kind of act that precipitated it over the years. Things like hot tea always came after the mother’s discovery of one of the stepfather’s games. When she couldn’t get through to him with her rage, she turned on us.”

  Rabbit sobbed with her hands over her ears, unable to stop. Catherine issued a command and Rabbit pulled herself to a standing position at the bathroom sink.

  Catherine’s voice softened. “Good,” she said to Rabbit, including the woman in her remarks. “I knew you could do it. There’s more but we’ll take it slowly.” Rabbit scuttled away, back to the furthermost reaches of her own private hell.

  The child still sat in the middle of the sheet with a peculiar expression on her face. Catherine waited a moment, but the woman did not react as the meaning in the child’s expression, and the thoughts she sent, became clear.

  “This is me you’re looking at,” the child was saying, “me, not you. Help me.”

  The woman realised that the child’s thought was being expressed through Catherine’s adult mind. Catherine wouldn’t shut up.

  “Are you listening?” she asked.

  “Down and dirty,” Elvira said, and in her voice there was a hint of sadness.

  The silent child waited.

  “She’s the sleeping child core’s mirror-image,” Catherine said. “One of the dead. I just transmitted for her—thought and longing that’s dead and gone. Makes your own position more palatable, doesn’t it? And now as you try to answer me and can’t—you feel the other one who says ‘I can’t get in,’ the adult core’s mirror-image—all that b
lankness, just minutely saved by the bemusement as she stares at the shreds and pieces of our lives.”

  “Catherine is a bitch,” Elvira said to the woman, “but she’s a truthful bitch.”

  Elvira turned up the music and Joe Cocker began to lament in his croaking style. The woman couldn’t speak or move. She sat there with her blank face and a loose look about her mouth, as if she were made of wet paper.

  It didn’t stop Catherine. She said that when the first-born died at two years old, she split into two cores: one potential child, the other potential adult. She explained how both cores slept and that mirror-images had been created for them, to absorb what happened to the other selves. The cores themselves, she said, absorbed none of the abuse.

  “The cores,” the woman said, “sleep on Mean Joe’s shoulder. I know, I can feel him protecting them. I just didn’t know what they were.”

  “Mean Joe is their safety,” Catherine said. “The cores may have the same kind of memory you do. Nothing more than a far-off sense of the abuse, and a daily apprehension.”

  “Go away.” The woman did not cry. She didn’t know how.

  “You are only a replacement for the first-born; you started evolving at the moment she became two cores who would sleep in safety. You acted through us, long before you were actually born. Someone had to present a façade, someone who would not know what killed the first-born, or what happened afterward, to us as individuals. The few glimpses we’ve had of the child core—she is so undeveloped that she can’t voice her own words. Lamb Chop transmits her mirror-image’s essence to you. As to the adult core, did you know that she saw her elbow for the first time the other day, while I was taking a shower? I never understood before, how separate, how protected, she is . . . that her own elbow could be such an amazement to herself.”

  “I’m not sure I want to know,” the woman said. “But then I guess wanting to know everything was the basis for the therapy in the first place. I feel very empty.”

  “No offense, dear, but you are empty. That is your essence. It’s hard for all of us when we discover that we are not the original child, the first-born.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “Do you know what it’s like for us to hear constant denial? I hated you for that until I understood where it was coming from: from all of us, in the backs of our minds, a sort of protective mechanism that we all share, I guess. Even if we know it’s useless. And you—standing outside the abuse, feeling only a way-off terror—I understand that for you, the terror is as bad as our actuality.”

  “But there is a purpose for me, isn’t there?”

  “Oh, yes,” Catherine said. “There’s a purpose.”

  The woman didn’t know what that meant and nobody explained. They were all getting ready for bed.

  “Is it hard for you,” Lamchop asked the woman, “knowing that you don’t think on your own—that all you are is us?”

  The woman didn’t reply because nobody gave her an answer for Lambchop. Twelve had been about to tell Lambchop to shut up.

  “Maybe,” Twelve said, cautiously, “you could say that the woman is very important among us. If it weren’t for the woman, the adult core’s mirror-image probably couldn’t pass her thoughts to anyone. She’d be totally locked out of the Troop Formation.”

  “We think and talk a lot, don’t we?” Lamb Chop was getting sleepy. “I hope we get to hear another story tonight. The one in the Tunnel talks more than anybody.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  A storm had hit Cashell, Maryland, in howling gales of wet white snow, but the Troops didn’t care. They stood at the windows of the warehouse loft that night, pointing out Christmas tree lights, winking blue and green and red, in the distant houses.

  “Pretty soon, Christmas,” Lamb Chop said. “Those men were right. The stepfather did always seem to be twelve feet tall. What do you think, Twelve? Think he’s maybe only ten feet now?”

  Lamb Chop had captured a seat in the old rocking chair first, and allowed Rabbit to join her. The red lacquered box sat in the darkest corner of the warehouse loft.

  “Maybe only nine,” Twelve said. “But then he isn’t sitting right in this room, either.”

  Lamb Chop whispered to Rabbit with momentary doubt in her eyes but the bravado of childish innocence won out and she giggled.

  “I just want to win,” Rabbit said.

  “We’ll win.” Suddenly Lambchop didn’t look so innocent. “It won’t be long now.”

  “That’s what he used to say.” Elvira tossed her head to the low-down, snake-level beat of the music.

  * * *

  Captain Albert Johnson had a Christmas tree in his precinct office, but he hadn’t paid much attention to it, except to wonder when the needles would begin to drop.

  “Stanley, how can I wrap these damn presents when I’m wondering what’s going on?” Albert sat with the phone to his ear, drumming his fingers on his desk.

  “Albert, they’ve decided not to kill him after all.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “I’m never sure of anything.” Stanley hung up the phone.

  * * *

  The woman had gotten used to waiting for Stanley in the university hallway outside his office. She always brought whatever part of the manuscript was currently being worked on. The number of pages turned out in those half hours never ceased to amaze her. It all seemed so effortless.

  “For you, it is,” Catherine said.

  A number of students walked by and said hello. The woman had gotten used to that, too. At 9:00 A.M., Stanley’s door opened and someone came out. She was tiny, with fragile bones. Pretty and feminine in a white lace blouse and designer jeans; around twenty-two years old and so fresh-faced that she called to mind an apple tree in full bloom.

  She walked slowly from Stanley’s office but on seeing the woman waiting on the bench outside, her pace quickened.

  Stanley was quicker. “Lisa,” he called. “There’s someone I want you to meet!”

  She came back. Sorrowful blue eyes under a fringe of black lashes scanned only the space between the woman and Stanley.

  Silence.

  Unsure of herself, the woman folded. Sister Mary Catherine reached out and gently tapped the girls’ white knuckles with a black, felt-tipped pen.

  “It gets better,” she said, passing along Jeannie Lawson’s message to the Troops, months ago.

  As if to question the statement, Lisa looked quickly at Stanley. Tears lay along the edges of her eyes. Without a word to either of them, she turned and walked away.

  “I don’t know,” Stanley said, distracted, “if that was appropriate of me or not. She’s reached a tough spot in her therapy, she’s clinging by her thumbs to what she considers her last gasp of sanity. Lisa is a sister under the skin.”

  “Victim and multiple,” the woman said, trying to believe it.

  “All the signs are there,” Stanley said. “I’ve tested her. I’m trying to tell her as painlessly as possible.”

  “Well,” Twelve said, “when she’s ready, we’ll give her crayons and a teddy bear. Do you think that will help? Does she have a lot of little ones? Is she very scared?”

  Stanley said a teddy bear would be nice and that yes, Lisa was very scared. In going from what he called “one heavy session to the other,” his fumbling motions with the tape recorder, usually so unobtrusive, caught the attention of the other Troop members. That and the drawn, worried look in his eyes caused them to announce silently to one another that Stanley was human, something they’d known but not fully believed.

  “Guess we can tell him anything,” Twelve muttered.

  In the control booth, Tony nursed his dials.

  Stanley watched from the corner of one eye, his head bent over the clipboard. Thoughts marshalled themselves inside the woman’s head. There were too many; she felt light-headed, out of control. The room seemed to sway. />
  Stanley was about to become privy to one of the strangest mechanisms of multiple personality.

  “What was I saying?” Pain began at the back of the woman’s neck, then it rapped smartly on her skull, as if demanding her full attention. “Oh, wow.” She heard the words, there was a giggle, and her mouth felt slack. “Time just goes away.”

  For the woman, momentarily, it had. Twelve sat on the cushions, experiencing the same light-headedness. Twelve wasn’t laughing as another Troop member shoved her aside, speaking over her words. Stanley was told how the Troops had explained to Norman the latest recall about the white sheet when the stepfather had practiced oral sex with almost fatal results.

  The lone, unknown voice faded and the woman surfaced again, but she’d picked up the threads of the recall, sobbing.

  “When I’d finished telling Norman in what I knew had been clear, concise English,” she said, “he repeated the conversation back to me. He said I told it using an allegory, as if it were a white sheet coming out of the child’s mouth . . . a white sheet, instead of the semen I had described. I sat there on the floor in front of him that night, feeling rotten because not only had I failed again, but I hadn’t heard myself correctly.”

  Stanley had never been able to put it into words, the process that now crystallised for him.

  Norman had heard the incident reported to him by means of an allegory, which the woman had not used. Stanley concluded, from this and what he’d learned in past sessions, that information considered too harmful to be spoken within earshot of certain Troop members could be disguised by one of the Troop members. An entire concept might be passed to the listener as a parable, and in the case of certain words or phrases, allegories were used. Stanley wasn’t sure which Troop member employed the subterfuge, but obviously someone in the Troop Formation was able at chosen times to “override” the voice of whomever sat out front. Which meant that words actually heard could be different from what the woman or even some of the other Troops heard. It was entirely at the discretion of the overriding Troop member.

  He believed that in this case, the allegory had been used not to protect the woman, but perhaps another damaged Troop member—or the cores themselves.