Silent Treatment

by David James

  Sarah reached forward and with trembling hands picked up the journal and forced herself to continue reading.

  Why introduce something like that?

  You needed to be at the meeting to fully understand, if you were you would understand why we did what we did.

  I am content they reached this consensus and I am more than happy to facilitate their idea. My experience will certainly be of value.

  There were tears beginning to form in Sarah’s eyes as she continued to read.

  It's only really an extension of displacement theory, that's how we are looking at it. Or even a slightly different version of transference. Instead of unconscious conflicts being transferred to the therapist, they are transferred to an external entity. You can call them what you want. You can call them “monsters”, or “demons”, it doesn’t really matter.

  All of the children are displaying character traits that suggest they are deeply troubled. We haven't managed to get to the root of their particular problems, in fact we now realise that all we were doing was training them to mask their problems. To equip them with a way to hide their fears deep down and present a good face to the world. What if we could take their demons away? Transfer them all into something else. Someone else?

  We are uniquely equipped here to do this. We control every aspect of their environment; or at least we did initially. But I feel we still control enough to make it work.

  I can already see the staff are beginning to pull in the same direction. There was a relative calm came across the room as we thrashed out their idea.

  I know it may seem a little unorthodox to the outside world, but if you had been here for as long as we have it would make more sense to you.

  I'm inevitably paraphrasing here, but these are the questions that arose from the meetings

  What if we took away all the children's fears and put them all in some other form? Personified them in something external. Take them away from the children and blame them on something else. Something external.

  And the best bit is that if we create these, monsters if you will, then we can destroy them as well. Taking all the children's fears and anxieties and visibly destroying them. They will be free then.

  There is a small part of me that worries that some of the more negative researchers may just be trying to get back at the children. The ones that see them as almost the enemy now. Are they just trying to frighten the children as some sort of punishment? I have to believe that this isn’t true and I feel slightly guilty just saying this.

  Besides, I have tried a form of transference before with someone much closer and that seemed to be a success and they were in the same age group as well.

  As Sarah read on, the image of the studded door in her father’s house filled her mind, and in her mind it was beginning to swing inexorably open once more.

  Sarah put the journal down, her hands were now trembling uncontrollably.

  She wondered if they had completed the treatment and she thought of Ben’s question ‘Did it work?’

  As she put the journal down she noticed a corner of paper poking out. She tried to push it back in, but it wouldn't go. Slightly annoyed, she pulled at it instead and it tore, but enough survived for her to see that it was a photo.

  She moved her torch over it and it illuminated the two figures central in the photo. It was what she had now expected. It couldn’t have been anything else after what she had read in the journal, but it still made her gasp.

  The door burst open and Ben stood there panting, holding a photo in his hand. 'Sarah, you're not going to believe it.' He was struggling for breath. 'I found a staff room, and look what I found.' He proudly held the photo aloft.

  Sarah looked up from the desk and said 'I already know.'

  Chapter Sixty

  Ben hadn't expected this reaction. Sarah should have been shocked at what he was about to reveal. He stood at the door, still brandishing the photo.

  'I know who you have in your photo,' said Sarah as she produced her own photo.

  'You have a picture of my father,' she said.

  Ben looked puzzled. 'Maybe I do,' he said, 'but the picture I have is of you.'

  Ben approached her and showed her the photo.

  It was indeed her. And she was standing next to her father.

  She remembered that it had been taken on one of their holidays, Sarah was suitably attired in typically garish holiday clothes. It reminded her of happier times.

  As she looked at the photo she slid her photo across the table to Ben.

  'So that is your father then,' said Ben.

  Sarah nodded.

  ‘It looks like it was taken a while ago. Who are the other people?’ said Ben.

  ‘You should recognise one of them,’ said Sarah.

  Ben stared more closely at the photo, it was difficult to make out anything clearly in the dim light of the torches. ‘It almost looks like the director from the institute,’ he said hesitantly, afraid he had said something stupid.

  ‘You’re right,’ said Sarah.

  ‘He has changed a bit,’ to Ben it was hard to reconcile the younger, more bohemian man in the picture with the suited director he had seen around the institute.

  'I know more about what the experiment was about now. And I know which way the treatment went,' said Sarah. She decided to wait until later to tell Ben about the discovery of her own connection to the experiment. But she knew she had to tell him at some point or nothing would make any sense to him.

  'And now we know who was in charge here,' said Ben, pointing at her father in the photo. 'Did you really have no inkling of what he was doing?'

  'He was away a lot and he didn't discuss his work towards the end.'

  'I can see why if this was what he was doing.'

  Ben realised he was criticising Sarah's father and adopted a more conciliatory tone as he said 'And does it make sense to you, what he was doing here?'

  She thought for a moment before replying.

  'Perfect.'

  What she didn’t say to Ben was that she felt she recognised some of the techniques that her father had been describing using here at the village. And that there were certain memories that were fighting to resurface from her childhood.

  Her mind was cast back to the house, and the room in the house where she had gone with her father when things had begun to overwhelm her.

  She was maybe fifteen years old and the room was dark, but her father’s voice pierced the gloom and then it would begin to take shape and her father's voice would be telling her to focus, focus on it and to transfer her fears onto it. The darkness felt as if it was closing in on her and then as the fear began to reach its crescendo within her…

  ‘Are you alright Sarah?’ said Ben.

  He had stood and watched her as she had sat there without speaking. But he could see that something was troubling her. Her face seemed to be contorting in fear at some memory. He worried that he wouldn’t be able to get her back from it.

  ‘Sarah!’ he half shouted.

  Her head snapped back and there was a glazed expression on her face.

  He needed to get her mind back to the here and now.

  'I dread to ask, but how did it turn out in the end?' He thought about what he had seen around the village, and he suspected that he knew the answer.

  'I think I'm just coming to that part,' said Sarah, and she returned her fading torch beam to her father’s journal, lowered her head and returned to the experiment.

  The staff have certainly thrown themselves into this. The arguments between colleagues have all but disappeared and they are working together as a team with a common purpose. That common purpose might look a little strange to an outsider, and it has crossed my mind that at some point in the future I may have to justify this to another authority. But at the moment it is just good to see them working together.

  We have run some workshops where we have tried to discuss the children’s thoughts and fears. The first stage is to draw them out and then
we can focus them on the monsters and then “slay” them as it were. We have had some rather disturbing sessions as we slowly tease out their fears (details in following appendix). Indeed some of the sessions had to be stopped as they became too intense, but it is still progress.

  We introduced the idea of the monsters to the children today. We weren't exactly sure what the reaction would be. But I am still trying to assess what really happened.

  In simple terms we got the children to recount their fears and tried to get them to act them out. This they seemed to take to quite well. And then one of the members of staff introduced the idea of transferring the blame to the monsters. The children seemed nonplussed at first, as is to be expected, but they gradually began to transfer their fears to the ideas of the monsters. The monsters are to blame. Not them. They seemed relieved after a while, I think they have been taking blame all their lives and the thought of something else being to blame appealed to them.

  And at one point one of the children, Jack I seem to recall, looked as if a weight had been removed from his shoulders. It was only brief. The sad and troubled expression returned quickly like a mask being put back on. But the change was there. We all saw it. It may be time to step up the sessions.

  We had a meeting today and the feedback from the staff was generally positive. With each session, there seemed to be a marked improvement in the children’s behaviour. You could see that they were beginning to develop the technique of transferring their fears into an external force. If they can learn to do this themselves then the improvement in behaviour should be marked. We can begin the experiments again in effect.

  Last meeting of the week today and they came up with some interesting ideas. They said that the children would find it easier to believe in the monsters if they could see them. I reminded the staff members that they were illusory, but they said 'do they have to be illusory? Why can't we give them form’. I was worried that maybe I have been driving them too hard and being in this claustrophobic atmosphere was causing them to lose perspective. But they convinced me that they would be happy to create the monsters for the children. And I couldn't see the harm. Indeed some of the members of staff have already created some quite disturbing costumes to represent them.

  The experiment seems to be taking directions that even I hadn’t thought of taking before.

  They tried the visualisation of the monsters today, with the members of staff dressed accordingly. They tried to be subtle and introduce them slowly, which seemed sensible. The affect is hard to measure. It seemed to some members of staff that it had the desired effect; namely making the children associate their fears with the monsters. Which of course they could now see. They intend to increase the frequency and intensity of the sessions over the next few days. So maybe we will see real results then.

  Sarah turned the next page and it was blank. She feared that it was the end of the journal entries. What hope did she have of finding the final journal, if it even existed?

  She turned the next page and the next page until suddenly she saw that the page was filled with text. It was almost as if the person had tried to separate the next part from the previous entries.

  I think we may have made a terrible mistake.

  The children seem truly terrified of the monsters now. Their hatred for them is beginning to get frightening. The family unit situation has all but broken down now. At one point, the children were all in the one house; the staff effectively barred from there.

  The children barely communicate with the staff now; they greet them with sullen silence and refuse to speak to them. Some of the staff seem to think that the children are communicating in some way with each other, but not the staff. One even suggested a telepathic ability amongst the children; much to my surprise their idea wasn't immediately dismissed.

  We need to find a way out of this situation. The staff are actually afraid to address the children and are reluctant to enter what has become the children's house.

  I am struggling to find a way out of this. And struggling to find the energy. The doctor visited again today and I rather rudely told him that nothing he was doing was working.

  It was becoming difficult for Sarah to bear reading the journal now. Now she knew it was her father writing it. She could see the illness that had killed him developing on the pages of the journal. It was painful to see him getting weaker in every entry he made. Maybe if he had left this accursed place earlier he would have been okay? But she knew him well enough to know that he wouldn’t see that as a possibility. The experiment must come first.

  I am sitting alone in my office and I can hear it all outside. It is still hard to explain how this happened. How it all started. As far as I can tell, they must have seen one of the members of staff entering the building with one of the monster costumes on. And then all hell has been let loose. The staff are now barricaded in the building.

  It feels like in here we are more trapped than safe.

  I am going down when I have finished writing this to see what I can do; the children still listen to me, but I don’t know for how much longer. The lights are out at the moment. It happens a lot around here, but I can't help thinking it is more than a coincidence. I'm afraid that is the level of paranoia we have all sunk to.

  You must understand this was all done for the best of reasons. The children were already in a considerably damaged mental state when they arrived. It may look like we took unnecessary risks; that we were even reckless. But you needed to be here to understand.

  But I can't help feeling if we were given more time. If we could have completed the experiment then the treatment would have been successful. And I know some members of staff agree with me.

  I fear now that we will not be allowed to finish the process.

  My biggest fear is for the children. We are struggling to keep control over them now. They refuse to communicate with us now.

  The surveillance cameras have been switched off in some buildings. I'm beginning to think the children did this.

  As I read back through this journal I can see that I have started to use it as a way of justifying our actions here. Justifying the experiment in fact. It wasn't meant to be used for that, so I apologise.

  I know it looks cowardly, but I must leave here now. The doctor told me that I had no option, I had to leave before it was too late.

  It is time for me to hand the experiment over to you. You must complete it, there is no other way. We can’t leave the children with what we have created. You mustn’t abandon the children.

  I hope this journal is of some use to you. And I hope we can speak soon after I have left here if I am well enough.

  Chapter Sixty One

  As Sarah put the journal down she could feel her father’s pain as he had written this, especially as his illness was clear to see in his writing. He had put the last of his life into treating the children here.

  She realised that he must have left this place and gone straight into hospital. Her mind was cast back to visiting him there. He had rapidly become a shell of the father she had known. She felt a tear begin to form and she had a desperate urge to pour the pills down her own throat again.

  But she resisted.

  They just blanked him out of her mind and no matter how painful it was, she didn't want that. Not now.

  She also wondered who exactly the journal had been written for?

  As she turned the pages over they didn't look pristine. There seemed to be some of the pages turned over and faint pencil marks like notes being made and then rubbed out.

  She suspected that she wasn't the only one to have read these journals.

  But what was also clear was that she didn't feel safe in this building.

  'We need to get out of here Ben,' she said.

  'Why? What was in the journal?'

  'I'll tell you back at the house,' said Sarah as she stood up and started to leave the room before Ben could question her.

  It feels like in here we are more trapped than safe.
r />   Sarah now had the urge to get out of here and back to what felt like the relative safety of the house. As they moved slowly through the corridors, retracing their earlier steps, she also felt the urge to switch on one of the lights. The torches were now only giving out a warm yellow haze. But having read the journal she had no desire to alert anyone to the fact that they were in there by switching on the light. So they both walked cautiously and slowly through the building. As the torchlight began to fade even further, every shadow felt like a threat to her. Seemingly innocuous objects took on hideous forms.

  Ben led the way and Sarah kept as close to him as she could.

  ‘Can you remember the way?’ she whispered to Ben.

  ‘Think so,’ he replied unconvincingly.

  And then he stopped.

  Sarah watched as he moved the torch beam wildly from left and the right.

  ‘Why have we stopped?’ said Sarah.

  ‘I’m not sure if it is left or right,’ he said.

  The truth was that he hadn’t been concentrating when they had arrived before, there seemed no particular reason to do so. But now when he really needed to remember the way he couldn’t be sure. The tone in Sarah’s voice didn’t help either. But he was aware that it was him that had led them in here in the first place and he would have to get them out.

  ‘I think it’s left, but I can’t be sure,’ he said.

  ‘We haven’t got much torchlight left and I really don’t want to stay in here any longer,’ said Sarah, trying to keep the rising feeling of panic out of her voice.

  ‘I know, I know,’ said Ben more harshly than he had meant to sound.

  ‘Maybe if I try left and see if it is okay?’ he said.

  It didn’t sound appealing to Sarah at all. But before she could formulate a reply, he said ‘I’ll just go a short way down here and then I’ll come back for you.’ And with that Sarah watched as Ben and the torch beam moved slowly away. She could hear the occasional bumping sound as he presumably collided with some office furniture, but soon the torch beam and the sounds faded away completely, leaving Sarah alone.