Last year, I guarded this place with such jealousy that I never told Carly about it. When she asked me about my night in the Message Book, I lied, and it became a habit. Now all I do is lie.
“How are you tonight, Kait?” Oh, fine. Feeling good.
“What are you going to do tonight, Kaitie?” Probably read. Watch a movie in the common room. Have a blast.
“Are you okay, Kat?” Of course I am, Carly-bean.
“I love you.” Yeah.
How quickly the tables turn. Now I’m desperate for her to tell me something real, instead of the short little lies she feeds me. Her last message to me: “Everything’s going to be okay, Kaitie. I promise.”
What does that even mean?
21
131 days after the incident
Criminal Investigation Department, Portishead Headquarters
Avon and Somerset Constabulary, Portishead, Bristol
Monday, 13 June 2005, 14h56
AUDIO INTERVIEW #2: Detective Chief Inspector Floyd Homes (FH) and Dr. Annabeth Lansing (AL)
(FH): Detective Chief Inspector Floyd Homes, Avon and Somerset CID, interviewing Dr. Annabeth Lansing on the thirteenth of June 2005. Thank you for coming in again. For the record, I will once more ask you a few standard questions. You were Carly Johnson’s therapist?
(AL): Yes.
(FH): In what capacity were you treating Miss Johnson?
(AL): Psychologically. I was also responsible for administering psychotropic drugs to control various symptoms.
(FH): The DID. [Rustling of paper] The… dissociative identity disorder.
(AL): Yes, and later for early psychosis. She was hearing things. Sometimes seeing things. Her thought pattern was erratic.
(FH): How was this psychosis diagnosed?
(AL): Initially, Carly was an inpatient at Claydon. When she became stable enough that continued residence at Claydon became detrimental to her recovery, she was sent to Elmbridge High.
(FH): That is a rather well-known and well-thought-of school, am I correct?
(AL): Yes.
(FH): And how did a girl with a diagnosis of early psychosis end up there?
(AL): Claydon and Elmbridge have had a partnership agreement since the thirties. Elmbridge High is a top school in the academic leagues, but it is also a feeder for some of the Claydon children who have had psychiatric treatment but are not a danger to themselves or others. Depression. Anorexia nervosa. Persistent insomnia. A number of the Elmbridge staff consult for Claydon as well. Essentially, it allows them to classify their institution as a charity for tax purposes. And Miss Johnson wasn’t psychotic at that time.
(FH): Did Miss Johnson acclimatize well?
(AL): When Carly started at Elmbridge in September 2003, she seemed to be doing remarkably well, yes. She even made a friend or two. However, the Kaitlyn alter persisted, and she began to talk of seeing things. Shadows. A girl. And having feelings about other people being around at night.
(FH): Can you be more specific?
(AL): She described something touching her. No more.
(FH): So you were treating Carly for… emotional troubles?
(AL): Among other things.
(FH): Please elaborate.
(AL): I assume you have my therapy session notes. I received the court order. I surrendered everything I have.
(FH): Why don’t you just humor me, Doctor?
(AL): [Pause] Carly was overcompensatory in her affairs. She was… clingy. Needy. Chatty. Her emotional state was fragile at the best of times. Too heated, too scared, too timid. She would fluctuate between paralyzing shyness and overly tactile displays of affection. It was dangerous, given the chaotic nature of her Kaitlyn alter, who would climb onto roofs, drink, smoke, and cause a lot of trouble for herself. Carly was easily broken when someone said or did something she felt was either a betrayal or purposely cruel. She was anorexic—something she could control fastidiously—
(FH): And Kaitlyn, the alter, was anorexic also?
(AL): No.
(FH): Isn’t that unusual?
(AL): Not really, no. Carly was also paranoid. She was phobic; extremely so.
(FH): And superstitious?
(AL): Curiously, no. That was Kaitlyn. Kaitlyn was superstitious, which was her only unusual behavior. Yes, she was reclusive, depressive, hermetic, but these traits are common in this type of alter. She was clever, but morbid. Rather than have the phobias Carly suffered, the Kaitlyn alter was reckless. Self-harming, always wanting to push some kind of limit, to cross a line, whether she created that line or the law did.
(FH): How was it possible to treat such contrary conditions when they existed in one single human?
(AL): I used psychoanalysis, hypnosis, counseling, cognitive behavioral therapy, reasoning. Sometimes all she needed was an ear to listen or a restraining force. But… as time went on, Carly required medication.
(FH): Which drugs was she on?
(AL): Olanzapine at first. Later, haloperidol, lithium—
(FH): Yes, I have the list here. Is it not true that a certain percentage of people actually become psychotic on these kinds of medications? Particularly haloperidol?
[Pause]
(AL): That’s extremely rare.
(FH): Though it happens?
(AL): [Pause] It does.
(FH): Is it possible that your own treatments are what made Carly worse? What drove her to act as she did?
(AL): What are you suggesting, Detective?
(FH): I’ll be frank with you, Doctor. I’m suggesting that Carly Johnson was overmedicated. That she was mentally damaged, but recovering until you medicated her—and that these drugs are what drove her to her eventual break.
(AL): Excuse me? If anything, that proves that she was undermedicated. [Intake of breath] You saw what happened in February. Can anything else be true? And given so, I was right to do what I did.
(FH): I’m not so sure. In the end, you didn’t even do that right, did you?
(AL): I was trying to help her, Detective. I followed every rule in the book, and I did everything I could for that girl.
(FH): Sometimes the rules are not enough. Thank you. That will do for now.
[Scraping of chair]
Don’t leave London, Doctor. I may have more questions for you.
[End of tape]
22
119 days until the incident
From: AriHait558
To: RealxChick
Date: 6 October 2004
Subject: Where Are You?
Miss Confessional,
You haven’t come to confession in a while, and I fear for your heavenly soul.
Yours,
Benevolent Ari
PS—Will I have to keep calling you Miss Confessional forever? I could shake things up a bit and start calling you Miss Falls Flat on Her Arse?
Naida Camera Footage
Friday, 8 October 2004, 7:33 PM
Magpie House Roof
The camera wobbles; a tiled slate roof, slanted on both sides, comes in and out of focus as Naida moves towards a figure sitting near the very edge. Kaitlyn straddles the roof as though riding a horse, her back hunched. Naida’s breathing echoes in the camera’s microphone, unnervingly loud.
“What are you doing here?” Kaitlyn asks. She doesn’t turn around, and the microphone barely catches her words.
Out of breath, Naida replies, “I’m looking for you—what’s it look like?”
“How did you know I’d be up here?”
Naida focuses the camera on Kaitlyn’s back, but her knee can be seen, as well as the tip of a black boot.
“Carly told me that you hang by the old chapel sometimes. I was heading there when I saw you up here. Brooding, as usual. I want to invite you to my cousin’s house for Halloween. She’s going out of town and said I could throw a party.”
Kaitlyn doesn’t blink. “Get that thing off my back.”
Naida ignores her and the angle remains steady. “Are you gam
e, or are you afraid?”
It seems, for a while, that Kaitlyn won’t answer. Then, slowly, she gets to her feet. The motion is lithe and fluid—easy—as though she’s three feet from the ground instead of three dozen. Her feet are bare, but she seems unfazed by the cold. She turns to look down at Naida, and the wind catches her hair, throwing it up around her.
Folding her arms, Kaitlyn says, “I’m no coward.”
Naida leans forward, indicated by the sudden decrease in distance from Kaitlyn’s face. “It’s so strange,” she muses, “to see my friend standing there, and yet not her. So different… yet the same.”
“Don’t confuse me with Carly,” Kaitlyn warns. “She might be easy to win over, but I’m not.”
“No,” Naida agrees. “I doubt you’ve had a friend in your life, have you, Child of Darkness?”
Kaitlyn’s face stills for barely a second, then her mouth quickly quirks up a fraction, but her eyes remain cold. “If I refuse to go, Carly won’t force me.”
Naida leans back, and the jerky camera movement indicates that she either folds her arms or switches hands. “I think I like you better than I thought I would.” She tilts her head to the side. “There’s depth in you. Unmeasured depth.”
“Dark waters run deep.”
“Shallow waters see the sun, though. And they’re warmer.”
Kaitlyn’s eyes glint with a kind of curiosity or amusement. “That’s true.” Her eyes flicker down to the necklace around Naida’s neck.
“Gorro, Kaitlyn!” Naida bursts out, a peal of laughter close behind. “Relax, doll, would you? I’ve got no agenda, okay? My cousin’s letting me use her house. I’m just throwing a party. Candy, booze, movies, and pizza. No reason to go all psycho-suspicious on me.”
Kaitlyn merely turns away. Naida gets to her feet, wobbling.
“Are you in?”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Just remember: Carly’s my friend, sure. But I’m her friend too, and she wants to come. I made it early so she’ll be able to enjoy it a bit before your turn. Wouldn’t be fair of you to stop her.”
“It won’t make a difference to her if I leave after the transition. She can have her fun without me.”
“You know it will. It matters to her what you do. It matters to her what other people think, and if ‘she’ suddenly leaves just after she got there? That would look weird, and you know it. She wants you to come, Kaitlyn, and to have fun. She told me.”
Kaitlyn turns back, and her gaze never flinches. “I’ll think about it.”
“You do that. For both of you.”
[END OF CLIP]
From: RealxChick
To: AriHait558
Date: 8 Oct 2004
Subject: Weird Developments
My Benevolent Forgiver,
Yes, I realize that my confessions have been infrequent of late. I have a few things on my mind. I haven’t figured out, yet, if you’re cocky enough to think one of those things is you.
One hilarious development is that Naida actually followed me onto the ROOF to hunt me down and practically DEMAND that I go to her party. Have you met Naida yet? You should know that she’s a nut job. She’s probably planning to cut me into little pieces and serve me in a stew.
Grumbling and disgruntled and all of the above,
Girl Who Falls Flat on Her Arse
From: AriHait558
To: RealxChick
Date: 8 Oct 2004
Subject: Re: Weird Developments
Miss Clumsy, Bruised-Bum Confessional,
Since I don’t know Naida very well (we share no classes)—except that you hate her enough to confess to God-slash-the-empty-or-not-so-empty-confession-booth about her and curse the day Carly (?) met her—I really shouldn’t offer you an opinion.
But since I have far too much opinion for one single person, and since my opinion is usually very insightful, here’s my two pence: GO TO THE PARTY.
Live a little, you weird—YES, WEIRD—secretive girl with no name and plenty of angst. Go to the party, drink a little, relax, and let go. No harm in that, right? I’ll be rooting for your teen-coming-out-into-the-world-of-living-actual-people moment.
Ari
PS—I’m CERTAIN one of the things keeping you up at night is me. ;)
From: RealxChick
To: AriHait558
Date: 8 Oct 2004
Subject: Re: Re: Weird Developments
I suppose by “the-world-of-living-actual-people” you’re trying to tell me that you are not, in fact, a living person? How nice for you!
I will give my teen angst some indulgence for a bit, while I consider the impending party of doom.
PS—Is anyone of your gender not cocky, arrogant, and stupid? I’m perfectly willing to take back the stupid once you prove it. But you might be stuck with cocky and arrogant for life, soz.
From: AriHait558
To: RealxChick
Date: 8 Oct 2004
Subject: Death of Vocabulary
Soz? People still say soz??? I fear for the human race. I assume you mean sorry. Now apologize properly, you heathen.
From: RealxChick
To: AriHait558
Date: 9 Oct 2004
Subject: Re: Death of Vocabulary
Go to sleep, you (cocky, arrogant, STUPID) vampire! ;)
PS—If I go to this ridiculous, adolescent ritual All Hallows’ Eve party… will you come with me? If by some miracle you will, come at 7:30 pm.
From: AriHait558
To: RealxChick
Date: 9 Oct 2004
Subject: Re: Re: Death of Vocabulary
The apocalypse couldn’t stop me. Come to the chapel now. I’ll bring cookies, and we can wallow in the minutiae of our lives in proper angsty fashion.
Expectant,
Ari
There is no reply from Kaitlyn on the server.
23
116 days until the incident
Diary of Kaitlyn Johnson
Saturday, 9 October 2004, 1:03 am
Attic
The noise was jarring in the silence of the basement, only the creak of a floorboard ahead of me. I stopped midstep and let my foot hang in the air, holding my breath. Every hair on my arms and the back of my neck slowly rose as I peered into the murk, which was nothing but hints of shadow masquerading as light and dark, sharp-looking edges and fuzzy blurs. And the room was still. Too still.
“Hello?”
A sensation, like that of the room suddenly expanding, even though nothing had changed, knocked the breath out of me, and I dropped my foot and hunched my shoulders from some primeval instinct—as though I was about to be pounced on. Then I saw her. The thin rake of a girl, the one I’d seen watching me from the basement, and in the vandalized mirror… She stood at the back of the room, in the shadows.
She was grinning.
“Dee? Is that you?”
And I heard it. A low breathing, slow and humid. The room itself was icy, but there was fever in the breath.
Adrenaline flooded my body, so that even when I looked back at what I had momentarily seen, my vision spotted in front of my eyes. I couldn’t tell if it was moving closer, even though I could hear the creak of weight falling on the wood and the click of nails on the hard surface.
I stumbled backwards and blinked furiously, staring with wide eyes as the dark shape peered around the corner at me—the corner which led to the stairs of the building, the corner which I had to go around—and vanished.
Crazy Crazy Crazy—you are so crazy.
I told myself to get a grip—I was very, very rational—but I couldn’t move my feet.
These meds. These damn meds! “Not real,” I kept saying it to myself over and over. Not real, not real—there was nothing there.
And yet… when I finally forced myself to move, and go down the corridor between the precariously balanced items that seemed to sway above me, I smelled something—I smelled sour breath, wet fur (?), and earth. I glanced quickly around,
and the darkness in the basement became pregnant with awareness, as if I was the actor, and the junk the observers.
I raced upstairs to the attic where I now sit, wrapped in a moth-eaten blanket, dreading the moment when I have to go back and traverse that dark, junky graveyard of a basement once more.
Because, whatever it was, it was very, very real.
24
[The tape that corresponds to the notes by Dr. Annabeth Lansing below has never been found.]
Dr. Lansing Therapy Notes
Session #48: Carly/Kaitlyn Johnson
Monday, 11 October 2004
Kaitlyn persists in her delusions regarding the dark shape (possibly a girl), but now an olfactory element has emerged. She describes the smell as “ashy” and “dead,” like “something out of a graveyard, only less bland.” When asked when she sees and smells these things, she replies that it is “random and unpredictable.” I fear that the worsening delusions may indicate incipient psychosis, and I will therefore begin grounding exercises from next session.
The Dead House Page 8
