by Ted Dekker
“You’re okay, Jacob.” Maybe better off than me.
Too true at the moment.
He stuck his head into the hall, saw that the way was clear, then quickly pushed the gurney through the doors and wheeled it back toward the morgue at a run. Slid to a stop next to the wide double doors.
Unlocked. Finally, a break. He banged through with his back and pulled the gurney all the way in. With a whoosh, the doors swept closed.
The room was quiet. He looked to the far corner where Alice had been earlier.
Gone.
Urged forward by fear and adrenaline, Austin pushed the gurney next to one of the refrigeration units in the wall and tugged. The long tray slid out on rails. A cool draft spilled over his arms.
He dragged Fisher’s body onto the metal slab and carefully pushed it back into the wall. Latched the door. The large steel handle engaged with a hollow click.
Austin stepped back. His shirt was under Fisher’s body, but it hardly mattered. The evidence would show that he’d killed the man. He simply had to live with that now. It was self-defense. He hoped Jacob could confirm that somehow.
Okay… Okay… He had to think. First things first. A shirt.
He ran to a rack against the far wall and pulled off a blue shirt that looked about his size. Slipped into it. Good enough.
Okay… Good… This was good. He ran his hands through his hair, clicking through the thoughts crowding his mind. He was on the second floor. Fisher was out of the way. He was alive. Christy had to be somewhere near.
Good, good, all good. Right? He was actually in a good place.
He had to find Christy, and the only way to do that was to check every room, rule each one out individually. Problem was, the rooms were secure, accessible only with a biometric chip.
Austin caught his breath, an audible gasp that sounded throughout the room.
Fisher’s chip!
He whirled around and ran to the scattered instruments on the surgical tray. He grabbed a scalpel and rushed back to the refrigerators.
The drawer that held Fisher’s body slid out at his first tug. Right arm. He could do this. For the first time since waking on the second floor, he actually felt the all too familiar rush that came with solving a challenging problem.
Next to mopping up blood and disposing of a dead body, cutting a microchip out of a man’s arm felt like a summit of victory. Why?
Because with this chip, Austin would have access not only to whatever door separated him from Christy, but to the elevator.
To the front door.
He turned Fisher’s hand and ran his finger along the forearm until he found the chip’s hard shape embedded beneath the flesh, one inch above his wrist.
He pressed the scalpel’s razor edge against the skin and sliced cleanly with only slight pressure. The flesh parted easily, and Austin peeled the skin back and worked the blood-coated cylinder to the surface. He wiped it clean on the sheet before returning Fisher’s body to the cooler.
This small silver chip would be their savior.
He palmed the chip and headed for the door. He just hoped it wasn’t too late.
Austin entered the hall and began his search at the elevator. The first five rooms along the northern wall were empty. The sixth housed an old man who sat on the corner of the bed and grinned at Austin with two teeth.
“Sorry.”
He pulled the door shut and noticed that a small green light just above the entry pad was lit. The others had all showed red. Green for occupied, red for empty. Set by a motion sensor inside the room?
Christy had to be in one of these, and he now knew how to search.
Unless she wasn’t in any of these rooms. Unless Lawson had her locked up tight in a special place far away, where he could probe her mind with far more progressive measures.
Austin hurried forward, glancing at the lights on each pad. Red, red, red. All red.
He was well past the operating room, nearing the end of the first corridor where it turned sharply left, when the sound of someone walking stopped him in his tracks. Hollow footfalls echoed ahead. High-heeled shoes. Whoever it was would round the corner within seconds.
A single thought crashed through his mind: They’d found him!
He rushed to the next room and lifted the microchip to the access pad. But before he could bring it to bear, the chip slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor.
The sound of the clacking feet was closing. If they found him with the chip…
He snatched it up and frantically waved the transmitter in front of the security pad. This time the door clicked open. He barged in and eased the door shut behind him, breath still, praying he’d made it without being seen.
But there was another problem, wasn’t there? The light. If he was right about the motion detector, it would shine green.
The room he’d entered was larger than the others and contained more furniture—a desk framed by a whiteboard that hung on the wall behind it, a bed, a dresser, and just past the bed, a bathroom.
He padded across the hard floor, slipped into the bathroom, and eased the door closed. With any luck, whatever sensor indicated occupancy wasn’t active in the bathroom.
Austin turned his back to the door and looked around. Mirrored walls. Every wall. He tilted his eyes up. The ceiling, too, was covered in mirrors.
For what purpose, he neither knew nor cared. His mind was on the footsteps in that hall, willing them to pass. Just go, keep going. He had the chip, he had the way out. They couldn’t find him now. Not now, please not now.
Knuckles rapped on the bathroom door and Austin startled.
Okay… So it was now.
“Hello?” A woman.
Thoughts tumbled through his mind. Thoughts like taking the curtain rod from the shower and beating the woman on the head. Thoughts like curling up and hiding under the sink. Absurd thoughts.
He stepped away from the door and turned as it swung open.
Nancy Wilkins, the psychiatrist who’d interviewed him and Christy, stood in the doorway.
“Scott? What are you doing here? I thought they were putting you in 426.”
Stay calm. Nothing to hide. Play along.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. They put me in this room.”
“Huh. Not that it matters.” She regarded him for a moment. “Are you okay? You seem upset.”
A thin bead of sweat slipped along the edge of Austin’s face. He smeared it with his hand. “Just not feeling very well. That’s all.”
“The headaches?”
He nodded. “They can be pretty bad.”
“Hmm. I’ll get something for that, okay?”
“Thank you.”
“I was just coming to get you.”
“Get me? What for?”
“It’s what we do here, Scott. We call it therapy.”
He stared at her, aware of the chip in his palm.
“Actually, our first appointment isn’t scheduled until later this afternoon, but I think that you might be able to help us out now.”
“How?”
“Alice has hit a rough patch. You two seem to have a bond. Sometimes having a familiar face in the room can help a breakthrough happen in two days instead of twenty.”
Alice. But to Nancy, Alice was Christy.
Christy.
“Sure.”
“Perfect. Let’s say…” She checked her watch. “Ten minutes?”
“Where is she now?”
“With the administrator. Dr. Lawson. My office is number 405, down the hall and to the left. You can’t miss it. I’ll open your room remotely a few minutes before.”
“Remotely? How do you do that?”
“All of the locks are on a central system that the therapists and staff can access remotely from certain computers.” She cocked her head and smiled. “Ten minutes then?”
Austin nodded. “Okay…yeah. Ten minutes. I’ll be there.”
“Good. I think this will be a turning point for
her. And maybe you, too, Scott.”
He forced a smile and nodded. “I hope you’re right.”
IT WAS an odd reunion, a mix of great relief and terrible trepidation at once.
Great relief because seeing Austin again after being on her own for a day returned Christy to a place of familiarity and security. He was real, in the flesh, the same person who’d spoken reason to her a thousand times since they’d become friends in the orphanage four years earlier.
This was Austin, the one who had his head screwed on straight. The one who always had the answer no matter the question. The one who could solve any problem given enough time and thought.
And great trepidation, because her own thoughts now told her that he might not be real at all. At least not the Austin she thought she knew. If she’d fooled herself about herself, she could have easily tricked herself about him.
Lawson had taken Christy to Nancy’s office a few minutes early and stepped out with the psychiatrist for thirty seconds—presumably to discuss her case—before ushering Nancy back in.
“I have a speaking engagement outside the hospital at one o’clock,” he said. “But if you need anything, Nancy knows how to reach me. Fair enough?”
Nancy had smiled.
Christy had nodded.
Austin had knocked on the door a couple of minutes later, stepped in looking a little shell-shocked, and quickly put on his brave face. She’d rushed to him and thrown her arms around his neck, unable to stem the flood of tears that his arrival brought to the surface.
“It’s okay, Christy,” he said, rubbing her back. “It’s going to be okay.”
And for several minutes it was.
For starters, they’d admitted him to the second floor, which came as a relief. If they were going to find a way out together, they had to be together. The closer, the better.
More importantly, seeing him seated on the couch next to her, she was able to think that she might not be delusional at all. Or at the very least to hope that her delusion was Alice, not Christy. She was letting the suggestive powers of being in a psychiatric hospital get to her. Once outside, she would be just Christy—the same one she’d always known herself to be.
At least the one she’d known the last four years.
But as Nancy led them through some general small talk to break the ice, so to speak, Christy began to notice the change in Austin’s demeanor.
Nancy was talking about the history of the psychiatric hospital and Dr. Lawson’s rise to his current position here at Saint Matthew’s. His earlier papers on progressive therapy had been received with skepticism, she said, but the results of his sometimes unorthodox methods couldn’t be ignored. The medical community didn’t know what to do with him, nor he with them.
He’d found a home at Saint Matthew’s, which gave him some autonomy and allowed him to treat patients in a manner consistent with his better judgment. His success rate over the last five years was astounding.
“How do we know your information’s reliable?” Austin asked.
Nancy crossed her legs and leaned back in her chair. “Well, Scott, let’s talk about that, shall we? Is it fair to say that you can’t really be sure that anything I say is, in fact, true?”
Austin, Christy thought. His name is Austin.
Or was it?
“You tell me,” Austin said, crossing his arms. He shifted his eyes from her and glanced at her neatly organized desk: a stack of files, two wooden receptacles—one with highlighters, one with ballpoint pens and pencils. A Green Bay Packers coffee cup on a white ceramic coaster. Two thick leather-bound journals of psychiatry stood next to her iMac, which cycled through nature scenes.
Austin continued without looking her in the eye.
“I’m evidently suffering from delusions of grandeur, which afford me all the answers. If you’re right, I can’t know what is true and what is delusional.”
“That’s true.”
He finally returned her gaze. “If I can’t be sure that this isn’t a delusion, how am I to know if anything you say is true?”
“That’s right, Scott. You can’t. And we’re here to help you differentiate the two so that you can know, with absolute certainty, what is true. I’m assuming you want to know, Scott. Am I right?”
His eyes were shifting more than usual, like someone trying hard to hide something.
“Yes,” he finally said. But she couldn’t help thinking that he was only playing along with Nancy. That was smart, wasn’t it? That was what Austin would do. Gain their confidence so he could do what he needed to do to get them out.
But it was smart only if they really needed to get out.
“You’re extremely intelligent, Scott,” Nancy said. “In fact, you’ve perfected your delusion to the point that you’ve become it. Most psychiatrists would look at you and conclude that you’re nothing more than an eccentric genius even though we know the truth. Can you see how that would be possible?”
He nodded. Again, there was that slight shift in his eyes. It was something that only she, knowing him so well, might notice.
“Good. I want you to play that role for me. Can you do that?”
“What role?”
“I want you to explain to Christy the logic that supports her delusions. Play the psychiatrists for me. You can probably do it better than most real doctors.”
He averted his stare again, clearly uncomfortable with the idea.
“I’m not sure how I can help,” he finally said.
Nancy slowly dipped her head. “Well, let’s leave that judgment to me for the moment.”
“I thought you wanted me to play the psychiatrist. As the psychiatrist, my judgment is that I’m not sure that’s a good thing for me to do.”
“Then humor me.”
Christy knew that he was vacillating, think, think, thinking, the way he always did. Why wasn’t he playing along?
“It’s okay, Austin,” she said. “Something’s off in me, I know that now. In fact, I’ve always known something was wrong with me. You’re the smart one… just tell me.”
“Tell you that you’re delusional?”
“Just explain why I’m seeing things in mirrors.”
He flinched. “Seeing what?”
Her mind filled with the image of herself, the uglier one, and with that single, fully formed memory, her pulse began to surge.
Nancy redirected the conversation.
“Scott, why don’t you tell us how delusions are formed in the mind.”
Austin stared hard at Christy for a few seconds, then faced the psychiatrist.
“There are a number of possibilities,” he said. “But delusional disorders usually present themselves as non-bizarre illusions triggered by chemical imbalances affecting the neurotransmitters in the brain. They are thought to be either hereditary or the result of environmental influence. Sometimes they result from trauma. More severe delusions are present in cases of schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder. Again, the causes are often genetic but can also be triggered by trauma.”
He stopped.
“Good. Now tell Christy how she might have become delusional.”
“I already know,” Christy said.
“It’s okay, Alice,” Nancy said. “I want Scott to explain.”
“You know?”
He didn’t know what she’d learned about her childhood.
“We’ve made some real progress with Alice,” Nancy said. “Just tell her, based on what you know of her, what might have triggered her delusional disorder.”
He took a deep breath. Began to count his fingertips with his thumb, as he was prone to. Nodded.
“You don’t have any memory of your childhood that I’m aware of. It’s possible that you suffered some form of trauma severe enough to trigger disassociation with that former identity.”
“Go on…”
The speed of his tapping fingers increased, timed to some invisible meter in his head. Christy typically found his compulsive behavior
endearing. At the moment it was getting on her nerves.
“Depending on how severe that trauma was, you may have shut out the real world in favor of a fictional one that is more tenable. After prolonged abuse, the pain of the trauma maybe have become too intense to bear. But the mind cannot live in a vacuum, it needs content. Over time, a new identity was formed. Eventually it became you. All memories of what previously existed have been repressed. It’s very rare, but possible.”
“Very good. Now we’re making some progress.”
He’d just described her to a T. The last shreds of Christy’s doubt slipped away. Tears welled in her eyes. She wanted to hug him, to cry on his shoulder, to tell him thank you, thank you, because he’d helped her see the truth, however ugly that truth was. Knowing was better than not knowing; at least in knowing, they could fix it.
“Thank you, Scott,” she said.
He blinked. And with that blink his demeanor shifted.
“We both know that’s not what happened to you, though,” he said rather forcefully.
She flinched. “How do you know?”
“Because we both know that you’re not delusional. And if you are, then this,” he flung his arm out, “is the delusion. And my name isn’t Scott!”
“How do you know?” she snapped.
The sudden anger coursing through Christy took her off guard. But how could he just sit there and in one fell swoop dismiss her suffering as a child?
“Because I know!” he said.
“Is that so? And did you also know that my father kept me in the basement and refused to let me out because he was a monster?”
Austin went perfectly still. His eyes glared, angry.
“How dare you?” she cried.
“Take a breath, Alice,” Nancy said.
“No! No, I won’t just take it easy.” She slapped the cushion with her hand. “I’m sick and tired of taking it easy. Calm down, Christy,” she mimicked. “Think, Christy. Take a deep breath, go to sleep, quit being so emotional, things will look differently in the morning. Well, you know what? Things don’t look better in the morning. They never look better. You know why? Because I’m thinking your way too much!”
“Christy…”
“Don’t Christy me!” She wasn’t sure she’d ever talked to Austin this way, but then again she wasn’t sure she’d ever talked to Austin. She’d probably been talking to Scott all along. Or not at all.
