PSYCHO-ANALYSIS
KHEDLAR’S STORY - THE BEGINNING
PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER OF HOW A TRUE PSYCHOPATH IS BORN
CATHERINE NUZA
PO Box 221974 Anchorage, Alaska 99522-1974
[email protected]—www.publicationconsultants.com
ISBN 978-1-59433-729-1
eBook ISBN 978-1-59433-730-7
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2017948740
Copyright 2017 Catherine Nuza
—First Edition—
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in any form, or by any mechanical or electronic means including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, in whole or in part in any form, and in any case not without the written permission of the author and publisher.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
Psycho-Analysis is dedicated to my beautiful wife Angelique.
“Where angels were born in Heaven, you were born on earth”
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction into Insanity
Chapter 2: Defeat But Never Acceptance
Chapter 3: White Plastic Hell
Chapter 4: The Monkey Man
Chapter 5: The Recreation Room
Chapter 6: Confusion
Chapter 7: Am I A Killer?
Chapter 8: Doctor Fanstick - Shrink
Chapter 9: The Hospital
Chapter 10: The Verdict
Chapter 11: Crazy killer
Chapter 12: Waiting Is A Killer
Chapter 13: Get Mad Or Get Even?
Chapter 14: One Week to Freedom
Chapter 15: Good News and Bad News
Chapter 16: Free at Last!
Chapter 17: Who Am I?
Chapter 18: Questions
Chapter 19: It’s Settled
Chapter 20: The House
Chapter 21: Light as Dark
Chapter 22: Cruel Game
Chapter 23: Expect the Unexpected
Chapter 24: Family
Chapter 25: Ignorance Is Bliss
Chapter 26: The Penny Drops
Chapter 1
Introduction into Insanity
“Come on, get up Khedlar!”
“What? Where am I?”
I could feel the bed sheets tightly muddled up around my body, forcing me to be a slave of sleep. My mind was absent, drowsy and dull and I could feel the sharp pain of a pending headache. My hands were shaking as I tried to aim with numb fingertips to wipe the dry sleep from my eyes. My obstructed vision managed to gain focus as the last piece of sleep lifted, revealing someone approaching my bed. As my eyes began to focus I saw it was a lady standing over me dressed completely in white.
Oh God! It was the nurse. I had always hated nurses. She was an odd-looking woman who was plump, in her mid-forties and had dark curly hair framing her round, red face. She wore no make-up apart from green eye shadow that was plastered thickly onto her eyelids. Her old-fashioned glasses hung by a pearl strap around her neck. She stood there, hovering over me, staring at me the way they all did, with their stupid smiles of sympathy, as if to say, ‘Oh, I am sorry you’re crazy and condemned to this white hell.’
This was the V.I.P. destination for the sanity challenged. A place where other people on the outside can be put at ease that all the “lunatics,” are in an isolated dump and won’t bother them any more. More people would join us on a weekly basis and slowly, bit by bit, they would go from passably normal to utterly insane.
It is the drugs … I mean medication they give you in this place. If the nurses were fed up with someone they would just force you to take an obscenely large pill to send you off to Narnia. Less work for them although it would result in a bad headache for the patient in the morning. This would fall under normality in this dismal place. Drugs were at their disposal and the government was supplying them by the cartload, for free. Excuse me but yes, I do believe that hell is the best word in the whole English language to describe this inhumane place.
Your demons become your best friends and like for all, the inner torment proves too much. It smothers your soul and makes your thoughts abstract, dark and twisted. It takes you to places you only ever used to visit in your darkest dreams. Not all prisons in life have bars you can see. In fact the worst ones are the cages we create in our minds designed by fear and despair. Growing up I was an outcast, different and never understood even by the people who should have known me, should have loved me … What can I say, no one ever really took the time to get to know me. I guess I never really got to know myself.
I would live in my books, become the characters of the stories … the darker the better. Some have commented in the past that I never acted like a child at all. Mother would at times show concern about me, she would sit me down and talk about great-great-grandma Ruth. According to my mother, Ruth was the same as I was, an antisocial loner who was obsessed with the darker and bloodier things in life. Apparently she lost her mind completely one day. She’d had enough of her husband Bernard and stabbed him twenty-eight times in the chest with a butcher’s knife. When she was taken to the police station and they asked her why she had done such a horrible thing and stabbed him so many times, she had simply replied that she was looking for his heart. Ruth had been convinced for years that he never possessed one. Mother would always cry when talking about great-great-grandma Ruth which I personally never understood.
Mother’s emotions mostly confused me and honestly just took up so much of my time. I tried to keep her happy to a certain point or at least create the illusion that I had real friends and was sociable.
“Time to have your pill, Khedlar,” the nurse insisted in her bland monotone voice, brining me back to my current reality.
I didn’t complain as that would only lead to trouble and trouble would result in getting mentally probed again, or worse, starved. No, I will behave.
“Okay I hear you,” I said trying to find one connective ounce of compliance between my body and mind. I sat up slowly in bed, shuffling the white sheets loose so I could move freely. They always itched terribly and had a disinfectant odour about them.
I placed the odd-looking tablet in my sleep dried mouth and coaxed it down with a large gulp of water.
“Now,” she said in a higher octave as if she was trying to sound enthusiastic, “get dressed and someone will be by in a while to take you to the recreation room, okay?” She did an impersonation of a smile and left.
God how I hated the lack of personal space the staff gave me in this place. Taking orders and doing exactly what they said when they said it at times made me feel like a performing circus animal in a demented warped world where nothing makes sense.
I like order because everything has a purpose, everything has to have a pair. I once was a pair. I was once in my right place but now I feel out of place, my mind a prisoner of solitude with nothing of substance to think about.
My slippers lay exactly three centimetres from the side of my bed, that’s how I liked it. I might have been in others eyes a bit obsessively compulsive but that is me, everything in its place.
As a child I had a twin. They say that the second twin is a mirror image of the first, as if the same person’s soul was shared between two bodies. Sometimes I would strain to remember what had happened to my twin, his name was Demetrius. We sometimes shared visions of what the other was doing, it was a strange connection that we both had with each other even though we were never close.
He was the happy one, where my compulsive urges ruled my life, his was ruled by spontaneity. He was an erratic force to be reckoned with. He would act as if I never existed in his life, in his world. We could be
sat in the same room and yet walls in our personalities kept us from engaging with each other, even at any basic level. I would never have said it but at times I had wished to see life how he did, with such ease and lightness. That was impossible for me!
Our parents were “normal,” anything but bland I guess. That is why I was their favourite son until, well, there’s no point in thinking about my isolated, death-filled youth. My memories of growing up usually sparked up layers of uncontrollable anger. I used to pass out a lot when I got so angry. I wished to rip the skin off my flesh and reveal the raging beast which slumbered within.
I took my work very seriously in school. I always kept a good report constantly going and I was able to shine in class. After the bells rang it was a different story. All I remember after school was the name-calling, harassment and demoralizing mocking, but most of all the inability to fit in with a crowd. I never knew what clothes to buy not that mother gave me much of a choice in the matter. I sat alone at lunchtime, peering down at my food and wishing that all of these feelings of not fitting in would somehow disappear. I hated being a child physically as in my mind I felt a lot older. I was talked down to by all and ignored by most. I found it hard to even know how to act as my father was away a lot on business trips and I had no guidance. Everyone could tell I was lost.
I would leave the classroom and head straight for the restrooms to wait until the bullies were tired of waiting for me. That way I would be left alone to have a safe walk home.
I always wondered why Tom and Jake liked to bully me. I speculated on occasion if they had been bullied themselves. A couple of times Tom had mentioned to the teacher that his dad wouldn’t help him with his homework but as he stood there saying this, the bruises on his arms told a much more detailed story of his life at home.
Jake on the other hand came from a very wealthy family. His parents had left him at home with a Norwegian live-in nanny and gone off to the States for work related reasons. At least that’s what the older kids spread around school. He must have felt quite alone in a way, I suppose. Although the thought of trying to talk to them came to mind every now and then, I sensed a passive approach would be the best strategy for me to pursue. My sole purpose in their lives was to be used as a punching bag.
I lived in an old refurbished farmhouse situated in the town of Dawn Vines, a small and isolated place for most, unkind for me. My parents had bought the old farm off Marta. She was in her late sixties and had to sell it as she was physically unable to keep up the maintenance. My mother had decided that this was a brilliant place to raise kids. Within a couple of months she had renovated the whole lot and created a home for us. We even got to keep two of the horses.
I would dream of becoming a doctor, helping people and saving lives, feeling the balance of life and death in my hands, “playing God,” so to speak. It was a lifetime ambition of mine and I craved to make my parents proud of me.
My parents never knew at first but I’d done several successful operations on cats and dogs in the far corner of the garden under the cover of the large rose bushes that grew tall and dense. Equipped with a home-made scalpel, one of my mother’s old sewing needles and thread, I was on my way to becoming an amazing surgeon. I loved to feel the blood, hearts and guts in the palm of my hand. Holding life was amazing, too amazing to describe in mere words.
Creating my scalpel was a mission in itself. Father had forgotten to close the tool shed one winter’s day. Naturally I was curious and decided to have a look inside. I saw it from the corner of my eye, father’s Stanley knife. I took it and ran to the cupboard in the hallway of the house. I remember staring at the sleek, sharp blade as it just begged to be used. It sparked the thought of what I could create from this blade … , a scalpel maybe? The blade would be sharper than the knives I had swiped from the kitchen for sure. I had been filled with excitement as I always loved to create things using my hands. I had looked up at the shelves above me and saw an old, smooth wooden photo frame which would work perfectly as a handle. It was broken so I knew it wouldn’t be missed. I meticulously cut two lengths off the frame to the size I needed and shaped it for the grip with a wood file. The two pieces of wood sandwiched the blade perfectly. It was beautiful the way both elements came together. From that point on my cuts were sharp and precise. It was my most valued possession growing up and I loved the way it sat so perfectly in my hand.
One day Demetrius was dead, gone, as if he had never existed. Although my parents had comforted me for many years after his death I wasn’t the one who needed it as I knew exactly what had happened. I kept a twisted, dark secret that was so lush to hold in my head that I have never told a soul.
They never found his body but the police had concluded he was dead. His jacket and other personal belongings he wouldn’t have been without were found near the river by our house. The police told my family that the search had been called off as they had concluded he must have drowned in the river.
The river by our house was deep, dark, polluted and completely uninhabitable for life to survive. The only thing that had been able to live in it were lots of thick, tangled weeds. It would be the perfect place for a child to drown for sure but my brother and I knew the river like the back of our hands.
The wind would blow through the leaves in the day making almost musical sound waves but as the sun lowered the river would take on a much more sinister vibe. The darkness could play tricks on your eyes, no birds or any wild animals lived by the water’s edge; maybe it was evil. It was somehow tragically poetic and represented a time untouched.
My parents had never seen or heard from Demetrius since then to prove he wasn’t dead so they had come to terms with it and realized that this must have been what had happened.
That night I remember clearly. Mother was sat in her chair and father was smoking his pipe when there was a knock on the door. I could see in mother’s eyes as she opened the door her need to hear from the police that they had found my brother at last. The police explained to my parents that all resources had been used to no avail and that it was time to conclude he had drowned.
Mother fell to her knees and father dropped his pipe on the tiled floor. It made a loud clang as it hit the ground and cracked the edge of the mouth piece. He held mother tightly as she cried so hard that at times no sounds resonated through her lungs. The doctor was called that night and mother had to be sedated. It was all too much for her. Father was busy on the phone all night trying to make arrangements for someone to cover for him at work while she slept, but it was useless as he had to leave again the following Monday as planned. I don’t think mother ever really forgave him for that. She screamed at him for three days solid before he left, shouting how he had no heart and how could he leave at a time like this. Mother was broken, father was detached and I knew everything but I had to stay true to my word. I had made a promise to my brother that I would never tell a soul.
Death could be such a torment for some and a blessing for others. Death itself fascinated me into a dark endless chapter in my life, hidden from all around but always there for me to enjoy secretly.
My favourite aunt was on my mother’s side. Her name was Morgan and she owned the town’s morgue. She had set up the business when I was about three. I was persistent in asking my mother if I could go see what she did for a living but the answer was always “No!” By the time I was eight my parents finally gave in to me and allowed me to go visit aunty Morgan and to see her morgue.
They drove me there while asking me repeatedly if I knew what it was. Do I really want to see dead bodies? They kept saying that it was very strange for an eight year old boy not to be afraid of these kinds of things. All of these questions and statements came out of my mother’s mouth and were accompanied by stares of confusion as well as concern from my father. When we arrived mother stated that it was twelve o’clock and that they would be back at one-thirty to pick me up after they had run some errands. I set my watch alarm.
I quickly got out of the ca
r and gazed for a moment at the building. It was composed of red brick and in the display window there were tombstones in all different styles and sizes. Above the door there was a large black stone sign with the words “Town Morgue,” inscribed in gold.
Standing outside I could feel the excitement building up inside of me. I took a deep breath in and floated towards the door. I opened the large heavy wooden door and walked inside. The air smelled damp and I suppose the other odour I could not establish was the scent of death.
As I walked down the stairs I saw a desk much like the one in the hospital’s recreation room. It was old, black and solid except this one had incredibly intricate detail all down the legs. There was a lady there sitting at her desk. A free-standing lamp created a halo above her head and the background seemed to fade out into grey. As I approached her she slid her black-framed glasses down to the end of her nose.
“Hello kiddo, you must be Khedlar, your aunty told me to send you right in when you came. Just go through that door on the right and go on straight, and there she’ll be, okay?” she said as she watched my curiously.
I nodded and proceeded down the hall as she’d explained, buzzing with excitement.
She seemed nice enough and not at all the kind of person I would’ve expected my aunt to hire. She must be a good receptionist because my aunt was very particular about these things.
I followed her instructions and eventually found my aunt. She came up to me, gave me a hug and ruffled up my hair the way she always did.
“So your mum tells me that want to see some dead bodies? Why is that love? You’re so young, wouldn’t it scare you?” she asked seemingly trying to hide her pride for me in sharing the same interest as her.
“No it won’t scare me. I wish to learn about death because it’s intriguing. I wanted to come when I was younger but mother wouldn’t let me,” I admitted to Aunt Morgan.
Her eyes softened as she smiled warmly and patted me gently on my shoulder. This made me feel like I was about to see things in real life that I’d only been able to imagine from words in the countless books I’d read. For the first time in my life I felt like I was in the right place, a place I could allow my knowledge to evolve and grow. I felt like it was a small victory for me and through our shared passion I wondered if it would allow me to create a bond with my aunt that I’d never been able to have before.
Psycho-Analysis: The Beginning Page 1
