The Possessions of Doctor Forrest

by Richard T. Kelly

  ‘Oi. Gimp. Can’t yew take a fackin ’int?’

  Was it the ungovernable in me, or the nothing-left-to-lose? In any case I tossed back my dram, stood and made my way round them, as if for seconds. Whereupon I was hit hard under the right ear, struck violently in the back too, and I went reeling. I tried to get square-on to my attackers, swung a counter into fresh air, but was punched again, right on the nose, and went down on the grass. Instantly a kneecap was squeezing on my diaphragm. I was hammered in the mouth, kicked on the crown of my head, ‘Get his feet, his feet!’ was the last I heard.

  I stirred probably within an hour or so, finding myself dumped like rubbish in long grass beyond the back fence, nothing broken, though my aches and pains were lancing, and Killian’s wallet was gone from my pocket. The pub lights were out now, but I forced myself to limp back, make a search for my leather bag. I nearly shed tears at the triumph of finding it still nestled in the dark under my table.

  Then I picked a way back out into the overgrown grasses, the cover of trees and the profound dark; came to a riverbank, and by a willow I found a boat covered by tarpaulin, hauled off the sheet and covered myself, stretched out on the ground. There I slept.

  The sun rose hatefully early. I wanted no part of daylight. In my state I believed I’d be as well to roll my bones down the bank into the river and be done. And yet, something hard and insistent inside me, a beaten yet resilient core of ego, told me I had been tricked, assaulted, unfairly bested in the game. And I had to strike back, somehow.

  I understood, under the warped rules governing the air I breathed, that another killing – my third! – ought surely to bring about a third ‘transference’ of myself; moreover, that opportunities might well present themselves in this remote environment. But my spirit was rock-bottom at the thought of yet another contaminating act. It seemed just as likely it would prove one more terrible self-deception – the deceiver’s secret wish. Her amusement at my plight was abundantly clear. I distrusted most thoughts in my head, for fear She had planted them. And I could so easily see myself stood over another outstretched body, yet still in Carver’s tortured form; running again, but this time apprehended … Bars and grey walls round the prison where I already languished.

  Thus I saw no course of action but to seek an audience – a confrontation – with Her, in Her lair. And so, bone-weary, damp and cold, inexpressibly wretched, I started the hike back to London.

  I must have trudged ten miles that day, through woods and by streams, into miles of fields of wheat and rapeseed, across construction dumps and timber yards, skirting new-build cul-de-sacs and cement factories. My boots, slathered in riverbank muck, let in all the while, a loathsome feeling. And yet, there were consolations. For a mile or so I idled through the lambent cover of trees shading a golf course; got on my belly and drank from a stream; spooked some horses in a sun-dried paddock, content at least to be shunning human eyes.

  With light still in the sky I reached the London outskirts and a 1930s tube station. Now my challenge, over which I’d obsessed for some miles, was the price of a ticket. Though it pained me, I knew what I had to do. I dumped my backside on the cold paving, put my back to the brickwork, hung my head like a proper penitent; and, watching feet go by, I could just about bear to mutter under my breath, ‘Spare some change please, sir, madam …’ It was a necessary rite: I had found my place in life. Still I had the strength to believe this was not how things were meant to end for me. Here, at least, my face was my fortune, earned me enough donations before I was moved along. I had money over for a bacon roll, which I slathered in sauce and devoured. An hour later I stepped out of Warren Street, headed for Fitzrovia, slouched awhile in the recess of a door before Her mansion block. But the porter busying round the foyer seemed an insuperable barrier. In one clear stretch I risked a dash over the road to ring at the bell of 6F, but the intercom speaker-box stayed silent.

  With night coming on I sought shelter in an underground car park, stealing as far down as I could into the gloomy petrol-stinking depths of its subterranean circles. Mindful of CCTV I hunkered down under cars, scrabbled intermittently from spot to spot, alert to voices or footsteps. On one such run, I was ‘made’. From forty feet a small girl in a red coat, grave-faced, Alice band in her blonde hair, stared at me, with an unalloyed look of – what? Not disgust, not pity nor fear – but, on reflection, perhaps a compound of all three. Then her smart-suited father was shielding her from me, lifting her up into his BMW’s child-seat. I was still trying to name the look on her face when the strangest voice crackled through my head: not mine, but not Hers, nor Darren Carver’s neither:

  What you think you see out there is not real. Little children can see that. I told you, I knew when I was four. You see it in people, their eyes, doesn’t matter how old they are. They know. They just know.

  Stunned where I stood, for some moments I could hear only the rattle in my catarrh-ridden chest. Then a hard Bangladeshi voice behind me, telling me to fuck off out of his car park yaar. But he didn’t need to lay a hand on me, I shuffled away, dumbfounded still.

  * * *

  It rained that night. I’d have welcomed a flood to carry me off, at least douse me clean – instead I felt cladded in my own filth. As I skulked about central London the crowded pseudo-civilised city seemed to mock me. Whenever I heard bright laughter I took it for scorn. I was, of course, invisible to a degree: most people couldn’t bear to meet my eye. But they saw me coming fast enough. I sat and begged in any dry doorway until sent packing. Knowing from Carver’s bitter experience that no hostel would have me, I further knew enough to avoid the homeless, so many of them fucking nuts, in need of anaesthetising, even if it be by booze or pills. I wanted none of that. I rode a night bus, fellow travellers giving me a wide berth. Time crawled, seemed limitless, as it will when no one waits or cares for you.

  I woke under a park bench in Kilburn, tortured anew by daylight and hunger. And so, finally, my feet took me to where my kind gathered: a day centre, where I shuffled through processing, was assigned a bowl of soup and settled into a plastic chair amid the open-prison ambience. Only a man sat with me, began to enquire gently after my ‘situation’. I told him nothing. Still, he spoke of Jesus Christ. I couldn’t stomach that, had to get free of the room.

  They often say of my profession that the theatre and the pathology lab, the sight and smell of life and death so raw, endow us with a lofty notion of humanity as so much privileged meat. And I agree – from the heights of invasive procedure, life can at times seem a toy, a mere vehicle for eating and shitting and fucking – activities that are, at one remove, deeply ludicrous. And yet how dear and lost to me these functions now seemed, from inside my famished, filthy, effectively sexless body.

  I was sheltering by rubbish bins behind a kebab shop, turning the leaves of a discarded Irish Gazette, when I came on the small plain notice of Killian MacCabe’s funeral that very day. Witless, I made the decision this was where I was fated to be, if only from a respectful distance … And so, from across the gulf of a street I gave myself the grief of seeing Malena enter the church, the marks I’d left on her in another life still apparent. I hung my head, only then to see Grey, so stalwart and sombre … Again I longed for his company, mourned the loss of our bond, my severance of it. That night I burrowed myself into a copse on Hampstead Heath, and come daybreak I foraged out, determined to confront Grey on what I knew would be his morning run. Instead, he hobbled up the incline on a cane. A world of things I should have said to him … But, really, how could he have been expected to respond? Instead I behaved rashly, intemperately – I daresay aggressively.

  Seeing no other course, then, I gave myself up to base instincts, what Dr Hartford used to call ‘the hierarchy of needs’. What I had on Steven, our shabby shared business with that hopeless head-case Dole, I decided I would now cash in, albeit cheaply. In my bag I had note-cards: I scribbled out something I knew would freeze his blood, named my price, delivered it personally through h
is letterbox in Primrose Hill. But by the time I’d trudged back to my lair on the Heath my zeal had subsided. The whole shaming, hare-brained scheme seemed only further evidence – as if it were needed – of my degeneration.

  The day was fine, cloudless, cheerless. I slashed my way into a shrouded place between bushes of Solomon’s seal, overhung by horse chestnuts. There I lay down, clasped my bag to my chest – and felt with my fingers a small something that I’d neglected until now, deep within the lining of the inner pocket. There I found the token Eloise Keaton had gifted me in what I suppose were, for her, the hopeful days of our little dalliance: a bracelet, a black leather strap bearing a silver Asclepius, the snake coiled round the staff. Idly I fastened it round my wrist, admired its incongruous elegance. I took a notion, and from the bag I retrieved the page from my files summarising Tim Judson’s medical record. Flipping said page I found, as expected, similar details for Eloise.

  Her personal/family history I remembered well: no cancer, general good health, previous operations/hospitalisations all elective – likewise her medications, for better or worse. Eloise’s seemed to me a gilded existence, for all that she cut a self-pitying figure – her trust fund matured, her Holland Park pied-à-terre, work for her hardly more than play, her beauty finessed by my own diligent hand …

  Pensive, I found myself spying out through the drooping branches overhead at two kids hand-in-hand, boy and girl in dark school uniform, bright-eyed and glossy-haired and dawdling off deeper into the shade. Where are you going?, I wanted to demand. To lie down together? By what right? I felt a sharp urge to rise, lurch off after them. Not without me! No way but through me! I will bless or curse your union, as I see fit …

  It took some moments for this fit to pass, like a shudder right through me. Becalmed at last, my gaze fell on a young proletarian mother sat on a bench, nursing her baby – banal, this image, a babyish aspect even to the mother with her scraped-back hair and soft pink clothes. Then, within an igniting instant, I was drastically groggy and brain-fogged – had to be hallucinating – for it was as though I’d been transported, fired out of my head and behind the woman’s eyes, decanted into her skin.

  Now I was the wet-nurse – and experiencing an extraordinary sensation of plenitude, ‘my’ breast pale but plump, coursing with life, the babe avid for me. I felt weakened at my core – chastened, even – and yet inexpressibly alive. I had full awareness, too, of how long had been the days until the baby came, my sluggish compacted innards, my slow-inculcated tenderness in that time of inaction, only waiting, nesting, girding myself to be oh-so-powerfully acted upon …

  Then with lightning rapidity I was back in my old Carver-head, woozy, unnerved – also oddly saddened by a lingering emptiness as I watched the mother rise, stretch, roll her pram off down the hill.

  I slipped into a doze, for how long I don’t know, before I felt a kick in my ribs as if I were a mangy hound. I peered up into sunlight, still dazzling through trees, a dark shape over me. ‘Please, brother,’ I groaned, ‘just let me lie a bit, I’ll move on, I swear.’

  I heard the tinkling laugh, shielded my eyes so as to properly make out Her, in Her Russian coat. If She was naked underneath, I cared not. ‘What a waste,’ She murmured, then was so calmly inscrutable and silent that I feared this was all She’d come to pronounce.

  I wiped my mouth on my sleeve. Still, as I spoke my diction was tortured. ‘Come to torment me, have you? Pleases you, does it, to see me like this?’

  I could read nothing in Her eyes, for in the shade they seemed the purest black orbs. I glanced away, through the trees, saw children playing ball, then back at Her – but still the same horrid sight.

  ‘Humani nihil a me alienum puto,’ She enunciated. ‘In human form I too am a poor relation on this earth. Incarnated thus’ – She gestured down Her figure – ‘I assume a certain risk, am prey to certain exigencies. Not so unlike yourself, mi frater.’

  ‘Then don’t waste your breath. I know what you want me for. And I want you to take me down.’

  ‘“Down”? From your cross?’

  ‘To whatever you’ve intended for me, from the start. I’m tired, I’ve no fight left – I want this to be done.’

  She tilted Her scorning face at me. ‘Such an insect you are. I see, your pride has been gored, your precious aesthetic sense violated. And you wonder, however did some doxy bring one like you so low?’

  ‘I said, save your gloating—’

  ‘Have you no mind of your own, doctor? To imagine what you could yet be capable of? Our bargain was that you be changed, translated. It appears wasted on you. You are making a mediocre, ingrate, third-rate fist of my extraordinary gift.’

  ‘Lies. You’ve toyed with me, all along, thwarted me deliberately.’

  ‘By no means. I warned you – brook no delay. Did you hear me?’

  ‘You’re in my head, aren’t you? You knew what I had planned …’

  ‘Not so. It was easier when you were “you”, doctor. Your head was more settled, our frequency clearer. I have far less power than you imagine. And ours is a … volatile process. But you cannot convince me you are “done”. Truly, do you want to be dead? To be ours, and ours alone? Shall I take you now?’

  I hung my head and, after some moments, shook it, slowly.

  ‘No. “Life clings to life.” The hourglass is turned, yes. But not yet run. In this body? I do believe you could serve quite some time – it has endured so much already, yet survived. But that is … not tolerable for you, surely?’

  I exhaled bitterly. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Then cast the die again. Take a life and live again. You know this.’

  ‘What do you want to reduce me to?’

  ‘Nothing other than the form that fits you truly. We will be in league until then. Be assured, I will honour our business, doctor.’

  Perhaps She saw hope in my eyes. Perhaps I found something in Hers other than malice. She appeared to ponder.

  ‘Possibly … you would be wisest to enter a headspace you know well. A life where the daily round inherited comes more easily to you. Someone who thinks fondly of you, trusts you – who might be persuaded to meet you, unsuspecting, on ground of your choice. Possibly, doctor, an old friend might do you one more service?’

  Her fraudulent wide-eyed ‘enquiring’ mien made my skin crawl. ‘Forgive me’, I muttered finally, ‘if I take no more lessons from you.’

  ‘Oh, then do as you have done. Among the sub-humans, the living dead, despised and uncared for. Try your luck as a spider or fly. Did I warn you, doctor, to stay your hand in that way? Or did I not? Since you are still on two legs, let us say it was … no matter.’

  She was herself arachnid to me in that moment, a vicious bag of venom. I grabbed Her throat. She didn’t flinch, and for a split second I feared my offending arm would, by magic, be ripped from its socket. Instead She screamed – shrieked, so piercingly my teeth hurt. Beyond Her black shoulder I could see the fathers of those playing children now making tracks toward my hiding place at a concerned canter. I turned and stumbled off and away, did not look back.

  She had got Her hooks in me again, yes. I understood the logic of stealing a life with which I was more closely acquainted. I confess, in the hours that followed – once I’d found peace and concealment hunkered in by the Hampstead Tunnel – I did contemplate what it might mean to despatch my old friend Steven. An attack on Grey I couldn’t contemplate: for all my transgressions, the thought of this one filled me with near-Oedipal terror. In any case, that fracas we’d had persuaded me I’d never ‘overpower’ him in a million years, even were he on one leg. His hardihood was a huge part of why I loved him. I honoured it still. Steven, though, posed a lesser challenge. Whatever warm or plaintive memories I had of my old classmate, there was longstanding mutual grievance there too. Moreover, though sturdy enough on his feet, Steven simply didn’t cut the same imposing figure as Grey. Usurping him in Professor Tessa’s bed proposed a test. But more vitally, in my
heart, I felt the whole notion … unpalatable.

  Within the hour, though, I was exploring an alternative solution, one that crept over me as a waking dream. Crouched down in that darkened tunnel, my head had already begun to swim. But then something came at me – only from within, not without …

  And I was surrounded by brightest daylight, a tableau of English summer, seen from a fragrant terrace overlooking landscaped grounds. Within moments I had my bearings from memory – this was Blakedene Hall, no doubt. But there was no sound for this picture, save for the blood beating between my ears. I was gazing out through foreign eyes.

  I was not alone. Five paces from me Eloise was lightly asleep, her legs curled under her in a wicker chair. She wore the blue silk dress I’d bought her – tunic-style, kimono sleeves, cut on the lower thigh. Though her head had slumped a little, her flaxen hair kept a perfect frame round those elfin features. I was rapt in admiration of my handiwork when Steven Hartford shuffled into my view, his back to me, oblivious.

  My lips parted – but I was silenced by a voice in my head, recognised it, the same voice I’d heard in that subterranean car park. It was masculine, low, fervent, and it spoke whirling, vehement words.

  … Hear me, I invoke thee, whom no man sees, master, lord of multitudes, I bow my head before thee, nameless, headless, feared by wind and rain, master, command me, I will do thy bidding, my shell has been emptied, my head blown open, my hands are yours to move, my throat yours to speak through, breathe your peace into me, master, rip clean through me if it be your will, this is my devotion, submissive to you, mine not to question, let me only bring you near us …

  By then I believed I understood – my confederate, my psychic ally was summoning me – whomsoever he believed ‘me’ to be. Given my wretched state, his fanaticism struck me as demented. And yet we appeared to be of one mind, he and I, my presence most impressive to him, since he was offering me his body.

  I, though, in common with my old friend Steven, was staring anew at Eloise – at her golden head and elegant throat, exquisite jugular venous pulse, the slow rise and fall of her breath, the well-tended languor about her – ‘the health of rich red blood, coursing with each heartbeat – life, doctor, years of life …’ And yet a life she knew not what to do with. I knew every inch of her, inside and out, knew just to look at her again that her melancholy sat so deep – I could nearly see how deliverance from it might be a kind of blessing.