David Cronenberg's The Brood

by Richard Starks

  Carveth put the pictures back on the desk. “So what’s the problem?”

  “It’s these,” Ruth said. She passed across the rest of the pictures.

  Carveth studied them, shocked by the difference. These drawings were scenes from a nightmare. The bright colours had gone, replaced by heavy blacks and dark shades of brown. And the familiar, comfortable landscapes had changed to abstract images of desolation and torment. The figures were no longer smiling; instead, their faces were demon-shaped with sharp, twisted features.

  The last drawing, at the bottom of the pile, was almost totally black; even the white spaces had been criss-crossed with dark lines.

  “She did that one this morning,” Ruth said.

  Carveth shuffled the pictures, looking at each of them again. “These are terrifying,” he said.

  “I know.” Ruth leaned across the desk. “Look, here, at these first ones I showed you. All the scenes are familiar to Candy’s experience. They show things that she has actually seen with her own eyes. They’re the kind of thing you would find in any ordinary neighbourhood, and a few of them show scenes from the countryside, hills, trees, mountains, lakes. And look again at the people,” she said. “They’re stick-shaped, just simple representations, but you’ll notice that nearly all of them are shown with their arms up high or away from their sides, and their legs point out from their bodies. They’re expansive, open, welcoming.

  “But now look at these other pictures. The people are all huddled together, their hands crossed or wrapped around their bodies, keeping people away. They’re defensive. And their faces are distorted too, not just by a child’s inability to draw, but by a feeling that Candy is trying to express. Their features are misshapen, and their mouths are open as if they’re screaming. But worst of all,” she said, “look at the scenes themselves. They don’t come from Candy’s experience. There are no scenes like that, anywhere. She’s not drawing them because she has seen them with her own eyes. She’s drawing them because that’s what she sees inside her head. Candy,” she said, “must be living in a constant nightmare.”

  Carveth put the drawings back on the desk. “I had no idea.”

  Ruth gathered up the pictures and put them back in her drawer. “Candy’s changed outwardly too,” she said. “She used to be one of the more sociable ones in my class. Always answering questions, talking a lot, and popular with the other kids.” She shook her head. “Not any more. Oh, sometimes she is. Outwardly normal and happy. But a lot of the time, she’s quiet, withdrawn, turned in on herself. I don’t want to be critical, Mr. Carveth, but I would have thought, as her parent, that you would have noticed Candy’s moods yourself.”

  Carveth felt himself flush. “I had noticed, Miss Mayer,” he said. “Candy has been withdrawn at times. But I thought it was just a phase she was going through.”

  “Well, perhaps I’m overstating things,” Ruth said. “Her moods are erratic really, one minute she’s up, but the next she’s down. She’s been like that for three months now.”

  Carveth turned and looked out the window. A number of kids were swinging on the monkey bars in the yard outside, tumbling in somersaults.

  Three months.

  He looked back at Ruth. “Miss Mayer, would you be willing to sign a statement on what you’ve just told me? About the pictures and the change in Candy?”

  “A statement? I don’t understand.”

  Carveth stood up straight. “I have been watching Candy,” he said, “maybe not as closely as I should have been, but I have noticed the change in her. It started three months ago, just like you said. And it was three months ago that Candy first started visiting her mother at the Somafree institute of Psychoplasmics.” He faced Ruth across the desk. “Look, this may not make too much sense to you yet. But my wife, Nola, has been under psychiatric care for a long time now. She has the right to see Candy every week, on Sundays, and everything was fine for a while. When Candy went to see her in the hospital, she came home as happy as ever.

  “But three months ago, Nola signed herself into the Somafree Institute, under the care of a Dr. Raglan. You may have heard of him, or his book, The Shape of Rage. Anyway, Candy started to go see her there, at the institute, and when she came back, that was when she was most subdued and withdrawn. The visits haven’t been doing Candy any good; in fact, they’ve been doing her harm. Somehow I’ve got to stop Candy from going to see her mother at Somafree, but Nola has those visiting rights. They’re part of our separation agreement.”

  Ruth looked uncertain. “Well, I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t want to get in the middle of a custody fight.”

  “It’s not a question of custody,” Carveth said. “I just want to stop Candy from going to Somafree. And the only way I can do that is to show that the visits are really harmful. I’ve got an appointment this afternoon with a former patient of Raglan’s. He’s got some horror story to tell about the kind of treatment he received. But I still need some assistance for Candy. If you could show that she is suffering, and that the suffering started with her visits to Somafree, then that would really be a help.”

  Ruth hesitated. “I’m not sure. I’d like to help Candy, of course. But I can’t really contribute much. And I can’t make any judgements about Somafree.”

  “Look,” Carveth said, “last Sunday when Candy went to see Nola, she came back home with bruises all over her back. Nola had beaten her.”

  Ruth looked at him for a moment. “All right,” she said. “I’ll do what I can.”

  Carveth smiled his thanks. “I’m sure you won’t regret it,” he said.

  The nursing home was ten miles west of the city, and Carveth had trouble finding it. There was no signposts to guide him, and the sketchy directions he had been given were not providing much help. Still, he supposed he’d been lucky to have been contacted by the man in the first place. So a little inconvenience now would probably be a small price to pay.

  When Carveth had first discovered that Candy had been beaten, he had resolved to devote as much of his week as possible to preventing another visit to Somafree. He couldn’t really afford the time from his job; not with winter coming on and a lot of outside construction work still to be done before the first snowfall. All he’d been able to free was a single day, with the possibility of another later in the week. His workcrew hadn’t liked the idea, and his foreman had registered an unspoken protest. But too bad, Carveth had thought. Some things had to be put to one side as others were given priority, and whatever had to be neglected, it surely wasn’t going to be Candy. Not after the experience she’d been through with the death of her grandmother.

  To Carveth, the murder still had an air of unreality about it. It was impossible to think of Juliana in the past tense, to realize that he would never see her again. In analysing his emotions, he found that the murder had left him more shocked than saddened. It was the senselessness of it, and the apparent ferocity with which it had been committed, that he really couldn’t accept.

  As he drove west, still searching for the nursing home, he wondered how Barton had really taken the news. On the phone, he had sounded calm and practical. The eight years since his divorce from Juliana was certainly a long time, but the two of them had been married for close on twenty years. And no matter what had happened since then, those twenty years were sure to have left some scars.

  Still, Carveth thought, his own responsibility lay first with Candy. Maybe it was callous, but he had to protect the living, rather than mourn the dead. There would be time for sorrow later.

  He finally found the nursing home by stopping at a gas station and asking for directions. The attendant was off-hand at first, but softened considerably when Carveth mentioned the name of the home. It was only when Carveth turned into the long, tree-lined driveway that led to the home, that he realized the reason for the attendant’s sudden change in attitude: a sign by the entrace to the driveway announced that the home was a private clinic for the victims of cancer.

  Carveth park
ed beside the house and walked round to the front. The nursing home was a large Victorian mansion, previously the country retreat of a wealthy industrialist. Carveth climbed the steps to a wooden veranda and pushed open the front door.

  He crossed the hallway to a receptionist’s desk that had been set up at the foot of the stairs.

  “I’m here to see Mr. Hartog,” he said. “Mr. Jan Hartog.”

  The receptionist, a male nurse in a white uniform, looked up from the book he was reading.

  “Name?”

  “Frank Carveth.”

  “One moment.” He punched a button on the intercom by his side, and spoke quietly into a phone.

  Carveth turned away. Through the open front door he could see the sweep of the driveway and the grove of trees he had just passed through. There was a sense of tranquility in the view, and a relaxed atmosphere in the house itself. But knowledge of the purpose of the home, and the fact that here there were patients who were no doubt terminally ill, made him feel uncomfortable and in a hurry to leave.

  The receptionist called to him. “You can go right up, Mr. Carveth. Mr. Hartog’s getting ready for his bath, but he’ll see you first. You’ll find him in the third room on the left, top floor.”

  Carveth climbed the curved wooden staircase and counted the doors on his left. He knocked, received no answer, then tried the door. It opened and he looked in.

  The room was an incongruous blend of old Victorian furniture, handed down from the original owner of the home no doubt, and relatively new hospital equipment. A metal-frame bed in the centre and an antique wardrobe and desk along one wall. The high ceiling gave the room a strong sense of space, but the small attic windows and darkened wallpaper were oppressive and cold.

  Carveth could see no one. He was about to leave, thinking he had the wrong room, when a voice called out to him.

  “Come in, come in. Don’t just stand there.”

  Carveth stepped round the bed and found a man, about forty years old, rolling from side to side on a small mat on the floor. The man was overweight, with short, thinning hair. He was sweating profusely inside a heavy, two-piece track suit.

  “Sit down. Sit down.” The man grunted with effort as he rolled his legs up to his chest and began cycling in the air. “Yes, you there. Take a seat.”

  Carveth looked around, found a canvas-and-frame chair and pulled it forward. The man on the floor was lying on his side now, raising and lowering his knees, curling into a foetal position, then stretching out to his full length again.

  An alarm suddenly went off by the side of the bed, and the man rose painfully to his feet. He had a thick towel wrapped round his neck and he used the end of it to wipe the sweat from his face.

  “Ten minutes, twice a day,” he said, shutting off the alarm. “Got to keep the heart working.”

  “Heart?”

  “The second one. The first heart, this one here”—he patted his chest just left of centre—“that’s the one that pumps the blood around, right? But what makes the lymphatic fluid circulate, eh? What makes that go around, do you know?”

  Carveth shook his head.

  “Movement,” the man said. “Walking, running, jumping, anything at all, as long as it’s movement. You’ve got this whole other system inside your body, the lymphatic system it’s called, but most people don’t even know it’s there.” He waved one hand in the air. “Anyway, the hell with it. You didn’t come here to talk about that, did you? You’re Frank Carveth. How did you get my name?”

  “Through my lawyer,” Carveth said, “Al Resnikoff. He heard you were preparing a case.”

  “Against Raglan, right?”

  Carveth nodded. “And his institute.”

  Hartog sat on the edge of the bed. “You too?”

  “Maybe,” Carveth said. “I’m trying to get something started. But different from your case.”

  “Yeah?” Hartog rubbed his hands on his towel. “Sorry about all the sweat,” he said. “How different?”

  “My wife’s a patient of Raglan’s, I’m not. And as far as I know she is suffering psychologically, not physiologically.”

  “So you’re coming to me for the physiological damage, is that it?”

  Carveth nodded uncomfortably.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Hartog said. “Give Raglan a little more time with your wife and you’ll be able to go to her for physiological damage too. That man uses the body any way he can, and he doesn’t care what harm he does along the way.”

  Carveth asked, “How long was Raglan treating you?”

  “On and off, only about six months. But he still did his damage.” Hartog reached up to his neck and unwound the towel. “Here,” he said, “have a look at this. People’s exhibit number one.”

  Carveth, in spite of himself, couldn’t help wincing at the sight. Hartog’s neck was a swollen mass of discoloured flesh.

  “It’s called lymphosarcoma,” Hartog said. “A form of cancer of the lymphatic system. That’s Raglan for you. That’s psychoplasmics.”

  “You can really blame Raglan for that?”

  “Sure. He did it. He encouraged my body to revolt against me. He taught it how. I’ve been like this for a couple of months now, and it’s spreading. The doctors, the real ones that is, they tell me they can slow it with drugs and radiation, but they can’t stop it. It’s killing me, literally. I can feel it.”

  Carveth looked away. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” Hartog told him. “What the hell? Don’t waste your sympathy on me. You don’t even know me. Save it for your wife.” He stood up stiffly. “You know why I first went to Raglan?” he asked. “Do you? Well, I’ll tell you. I couldn’t stand the thought of getting old, couldn’t stand the idea that I was living inside a body that was decaying, gradually breaking down with nothing whatever that I could do about it. Oh sure, I’d exercised all my life, watched my diet, never smoked and only had an occasional drink by way of reward. I wasn’t always as fat as this.

  “But you know, all time time I had a horror of getting old and infirm. It became an obsession with me. So I go to see this Raglan and I tell him my troubles and he gives me his treatments. And I start to get really angry with myself, angry at my own body. Raglan’s teaching me all this, telling me how to express my anger through my body, through the source. But look what happens. My body starts to rebel. It shows its anger—and you know the result? My body begins to decay even faster than before. Hear that? Faster than before. It’s ironic, isn’t it? Enough to make you open your mouth and laugh out loud. Except you don’t hear me laughing very often.”

  Hartog wound his towel back round his neck, and went into the next room. Carveth heard water running.

  When Hartog reappeared, he was wearing a bathrobe. “So what do you want to hear from me?” he asked.

  “I want to know if your lawyer thinks he really has a case, if he thinks he can prove that Raglan is responsible for what’s happened to you.”

  Hartog smiled. “You kidding me? We haven’t got a hope in hell. I mean, how can we prove that I wouldn’t have developed this cancer without Raglan’s interference. No one can prove that. It just can’t be done.”

  Carveth shook his head. “I don’t understand. What’s the point?”

  “Revenge. Pure and simple. Win or lose, it doesn’t matter a damn to me. It’s too late to help me now. All I want is some publicity, to get my charges on the record so that they can be reported. When people read that Raglan’s been accused of causing cancer, then maybe they won’t trust him so much. All they’ll remember is that psychoplasmics and cancer go hand in hand. That gets around, then it’s goodbye Somafree. Is that going to help you any?”

  “Maybe.” Carveth stood up. “I’m not sure yet. Right now, I’m just trying to get as much on Raglan as I can.”

  “Well, I’m not alone, you know. I’m in touch with a lot of people who’ve been through psychoplasmics and aren’t any too happy about it. You need any more witnesses, you get back t
o me, hear?”

  Carveth nodded.

  “Just don’t take too long,” Hartog said. “Next time you call, I might not be around to greet you.”

  Barton Kelly was sitting in his rented car in the Somafree parking lot, and already he was on his third cigarette. Hunched low in the driver’s seat, he stared out the windshield, feeling his impatience slowly turning to anger. He wasn’t accustomed to being kept waiting, and he wasn’t used to being rudely rebuffed.

  Earlier that day he had completed the arrangements for Juliana’s funeral, setting the date for the following Thursday. That would give the rest of the family time to assemble for what promised to be their first reunion in more than a decade. Everything was set and ready to go—except for Nola.

  Kelly had called the Somafree Institute that afternoon and been told he could not talk to his daughter by phone. Nola, he’d been informed, was still in isolation and could not be disturbed. On impulse, Kelly had rented a car and driven to the institute. Maybe, he’d reasoned, the receptionist who had taken the call had not believed he was really Nola’s father. But if he showed up in person, then maybe he’d be allowed in to see Nola.

  Also, Kelly was aware, he’d had little or nothing to do with his daughter for the past several years, and it would be unforgiveable if he were to meet her after all that time on the occasion of her mother’s funeral.

  But when he arrived at the institute, he was met with the same blank refusal he’d encountered on the phone. No, he was told, Nola could not possibly have any visitors, no matter who they were. Only Dr. Raglan could authorize a break in her isolation.

  All right, Kelly said, he’d see Dr. Raglan. But that too was out of the question. Dr. Raglan was in the middle of another therapy session, and according to his calendar, he had a later appointment downtown. Perhaps if Kelly would care to call back in a couple of days, he might be granted an interview.

  Kelly had argued and cajoled, but eventually had been forced to leave—though not before he had picked up a copy of Raglan’s book, The Shape of Rage, that he’d seen lying on a reception-area table.