Night Terror

by Chandler McGrew

  “I don’t know where to start,” said Audrey, taking a seat.

  Cates shrugged, cleaning his glasses with a monogrammed handkerchief. “Just begin anywhere you like, then.”

  “I think I’m getting better,” she said.

  “That’s good.”

  “I’m not taking the pills.”

  Cates frowned. “You stopped the Halcion? Why?”

  “I didn’t like the way it made me feel. Like I was out of control. Out of touch…. And I believe now that you were right. I need to confront my past and deal with it.”

  “I’m glad you’ve come to that decision. You have to face your past. I can only help you work through it.”

  Audrey nodded. “Where should we start, then?”

  Cates steepled his fingers in front of his face. “What can you tell me about your aunt and your therapy sessions with her?”

  “I told you about the hypnotherapy.”

  “Do you remember any of your past before that at all? Are any of the memories starting to work their way through to the surface?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good memories or bad?”

  “They’re all mixed up.”

  Cates nodded.

  “Will you be hypnotizing me?” she asked.

  “How do you feel about being hypnotized?”

  She shifted in her chair. “All right… I guess.”

  “Well, then, maybe we will try to open some doors that way.” Cates noticed Audrey’s shocked expression. “What?” he asked.

  “Doors. Why did you say doors?”

  Cates seemed confused. “I don’t know. It seemed like a fitting analogy. Why?”

  “Tara called it closing doors.”

  “Interesting way of putting it. As though she thought of the past as compartmentalized. Rooms to be shut away where they couldn’t be seen.”

  Suddenly a large lump formed in Audrey’s throat, and a vision flashed before her eyes. A young girl screaming as a woman’s hand slipped a heavy, eyeless mask over her head. Audrey could barely breathe. The room around her grew dim and she felt dizzy and cold. Just as her mind started to drift back to that long ago night, Cates started speaking again.

  “Audrey, what can you remember of your sessions with your aunt? Anything at all?”

  She shook her head, struggling to drag herself back into the room. “I can’t remember much of anything. That was the point. To forget.”

  “To forget your terrible past.”

  “Yes.”

  “But doesn’t it seem strange to you that you would forget the sessions too?”

  “I never thought about it.”

  “Do you recall anything? Anything at all? Images?”

  Audrey shook her head, staring at her hands, searching. “Tara saved me. If it wasn’t for her, I’d be dead, like my sister and brother.”

  “Did Tara ever treat your sister or brother?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t remember them. Tara saved me.”

  “Yes, so you said. But we weren’t discussing that. We were discussing the treatments. What do you remember?”

  “I… Light. I remember bright lights. Tara saved me.”

  Cates stared at her until she looked into his eyes. “You keep saying that. But each time you repeat it, you seem less certain.”

  “Do I?” That thought shook her. Why would she be unsure? Tara’s coming to save her from the terrors in her past was the very foundation of her existence. The one memory she clung to, however faint.

  Cates nodded. “All right,” he said, unsteepling his fingers. “Leave that for now. Tell me about the things you’re starting to remember.”

  Audrey began to rock back and forth in her chair like a child. “I remember a twin sister and an older brother.”

  “Yes. What happened to them?”

  Audrey stared at the floor between her legs. “I don’t know. I think my mother did something terrible to them.”

  “Terrible? Like what?”

  Audrey took a moment answering. “I think she killed them. But she did other things first.”

  “What other things?”

  “I see my mother, then my brother goes away with her and never comes back. The same thing happens to my sister. But that time I remember being in a dark room. I think it was in our basement and my mother was putting this horrible mask on my sister and my sister was screaming bloody murder and then I never saw her again and then Tara came for me. Tara saved me.”

  “Audrey, the way you say that I sense that you want to believe it more than you actually do. It’s almost like a programmed response.”

  Audrey glanced quickly around the room. “I do believe it.”

  “When you talk I hear you say one thing, but your eyes and expression seem unsure. Your body language tells me you’re unclear on Tara’s position in your past.”

  Audrey’s frown spread. “Tara never hurt me. Tara never would hurt me.”

  “But she buried your past.”

  “To protect me from the bad memories. Why are we talking about Tara?”

  “Tara seems to be central to this. She’s the one who buried your memories to begin with.”

  “She had to. They were terrible. I couldn’t live with them.”

  “But could all of them have been so terrible that they needed to be hidden?”

  “I don’t know.” But she did know. Cates was touching on the same thoughts that had been gnawing at her for days. What good things had she lost when Tara erased her past like a giant hand swooping across a blackboard?

  “Do you want to?” asked Cates. “Are you ready to try to find out?”

  She nodded slowly. “What do you want me to do?”

  “I think I’ll let you tell me what you want to do first.”

  Audrey took a long, deep breath. The doors had been closed for so long and she’d gotten by. Tara had said her past was unimaginably horrible, but she sensed that somewhere in there Zach, or the truth about Zach, was hiding, and she’d face any horror imaginable if it meant even the slimmest chance of finding him. Even if it only meant finding out what had happened to him so she could put him to rest at last. She had to know.

  “I’d like you to hypnotize me. I want to know what’s behind my doors.”

  “All right. But have you really considered this? You of all people should know that regression has risks.”

  “Everything has risks. I want you to hypnotize me.”

  Cates steepled his fingers again. “All right, then. Lean back and try to relax. I want you to take slow, deep breaths and imagine yourself in the most peaceful place in the world.”

  She did as she was told, half-closing her eyes. Imagining herself in a beautiful garden. Not her own garden. She still wasn’t quite ready to go back there after all. No, this was the garden of her dreams. Ever so slowly Cates began to speak and she felt the well-remembered sense of losing herself. She was surprised at how fast she started to go under. Cates’s voice was full and throaty in the big office, then more distant, finally echoing down a long corridor. And then she was back in the recesses of her mind again. She didn’t hear the voice commands now. It was as though she was directing this memory walk.

  That long-ago day in her childhood began to replay for her, slowly at first. Her sister and brother were romping in the yard. Gidown bounced off the end of his chain. Her mother, her hair gleaming in the sun, called from the back porch. And then her brother disappeared and once more that door in Audrey’s mind swung closed. She didn’t need to remain here. She’d opened this door on her own. She knew where it led. With only the slightest hesitation, she turned to the next door. When it opened, she was faced with a terrible darkness, but as she entered—had she really wanted to enter?—the gloom was splashed with milky moonlight.

  A child cried in the distance, and Audrey shook with fear. It was the same cry she had heard that day in the kitchen. She glanced at her hands and saw that they were the hands of an adolescent, unlined and free of the gardening calluses
her fingers now sported. Across the floor, an arrangement of sofa and chairs faced a large bookshelf. She slipped behind an open door to get out of the moonlight. A dog barked wildly outside.

  Was that Gidown?

  She tried to remember the sound of Gidown’s bark. But she wasn’t sure. In any case, this wasn’t the mournful howl of a pet left out of the game. The barking sounded more like a hunting animal, angered at not being able to reach its prey. The sound pressed Audrey farther back into the wedge of wood between the door and the wall, but there was another sound as well. Coming from the other side of the room. The sound of laughter.

  Laughter that sounded like darkness.

  That was a thought directly from her childhood, blurted into the present. She could no more help herself in this recreation of her past than she could control events in that forgotten year. This was not a dream she might manipulate. It was a memory, cast in stone. She either had to exit into the white corridor in her mind or ride the recollection to whatever terrible end it revealed. She crept around the sofa and found herself staring down a long dark hallway, but she needed no light. The laughter was guide enough. She followed it through endless corridors of darkness. Then there was the strangest sense of dropping through space and she was in another corridor.

  The smell of mildew and damp concrete hung in the air. Overhead, bare bulbs lit cold white concrete. The cellar seemed devoid of life. Still the insane laughter rattled Audrey’s ears. She followed it along the winding brick-lined tunnel until she found herself in front of a heavy metal door.

  Just like the ones in my mind. Only this one is real. This had to be our house. But how could it? The tunnels seemed endless. No one owned a house like that. There was something wrong with the picture. Something skewed, as though two memories were trying to assert themselves at the same time. Still she knew the place. And she knew the laughter as well. Because she had heard it often enough in her childhood that it was burned into her brain, and now she was recalling it as though it had been there all along. Only it didn’t always sound like that. Not dark, and sad, and crazy.

  It had to be her mother’s laughter.

  She reached out with a childish hand and turned the knob. It wasn’t locked and the door swung open as easily and silently as only a well-hung, well-oiled door can. The small room was better lit than the dusky basement, and it was lined from floor to ceiling with some gray metallic-looking sheeting supported by evenly spaced broad-headed nails. They were sheets of lead.

  She rounded a corner and froze, staring at her mother’s back. Mother was on her knees, struggling with Audrey’s sister. The girl’s feet kicked frantically between her mother’s legs and she was screaming. But her screams were muffled. Sweat streaked her mother’s raven hair and the lights glinted on the gray that had begun to appear in it. When Audrey gasped, her mother glanced over her shoulder and Audrey saw the glint of madness there.

  And terror.

  “I have to, Audrey,” she said, in a breathless but gentle tone. “I have to do this. Please try to understand.”

  As Audrey backed away into the basement, biting the back of her hand, her mother rose to her feet and then Audrey could see her sister, clawing madly at the hideous eyeless monstrosity that was locked onto her head. There was a small hole at the mouth, but the rest of the heavy metal device covered the head like a helmet, strapped tightly beneath the chin and belted around the throat. A small brass lock clinked behind Paula’s neck. Audrey could just see her blond braids beneath the horrid object as the girl rolled over and over across the cold, lead-lined floor.

  “No!” Audrey whispered. “No!” Until the words became a scream echoing around her. “It’s my fault! She did it because of me!”

  Finally she could hear Cates’s excited voice. “Come back, Audrey. Come back, now! Can you hear me? Come back, now! It’s not your fault!”

  His hands were tight on her wrists, pressing them down against the armrests of the chair, and his eyes were so close to hers that at first she had trouble focusing on his face. Her entire body was bathed in cold sweat, and the trembling that she had sensed before was barely subsiding.

  Cates let out a loud sigh. “Are you all right?” he asked, his voice easing a bit as he relaxed back into his own chair, releasing her arms.

  She nodded dumbly.

  “I had to physically pick you up and put you back in your seat. I thought you might run screaming from my office.”

  “It was bad.”

  “I know. You were talking all the time.”

  “Really?” That was weird. She didn’t recall that at all. She was accustomed to losing memory while she was under. But what else had she done physically while under hypnosis that she was unaware of?

  “So your mother put the mask on your sister?” asked Cates.

  “Yes.”

  “Why would she do something like that?”

  “I have no idea. She was crazy.”

  Cates studied her for a long moment. “The way you describe it, it would seem to have taken some expertise to make such a mask. Was your mother some sort of craftsman?”

  Audrey shook her head. “Not that I know of. I mean, I don’t really know what she was. All I know is that she was evil!” Audrey rocked in the chair even more frenetically than before, now clutching her sides.

  Cates nodded. “All right, Audrey. Try to relax. Would you like a Halcion now?”

  Audrey shook her head firmly. “No.”

  “All right. Some water or juice?”

  “Water, please.”

  Cates brought her a glass from a small bar in the corner, watching her closely as she sipped it. He set the glass on his desk and dropped back into his chair. As he did, he removed a deck of blue-backed cards from his jacket pocket. Audrey glanced at them curiously, but discovered to her surprise that she recognized them immediately. They weren’t a tarot deck, but she felt the same sense of nerves she’d felt in Babs’s house while watching her shuffle the cards.

  Cates nodded, studying her face. “You’ve seen cards like this before.”

  “I think so.”

  “Do you mind?”

  She took a minute answering and her voice was tentative. “No….”

  He held up a card, showing Audrey only the back, and she had the curious sensation of a glowing circle appearing behind her eyes. But a part of her rebelled, wanted away from the cards even more than she had wanted away from the door in the corridor. There was something about these cards that spelled danger to her in giant neon letters, but at the same time, she sensed a turning point here, a decision that had to be made, a nexus where some unseen forces crossed. “Circle,” she said hesitantly.

  Cates lifted the next card.

  Audrey paused.

  “Circle.”

  Another, and then more.

  “Triangle.”

  “Square.”

  “Triangle.”

  “Squiggly lines.”

  They worked their way through the entire deck and then Cates replaced it in his pocket.

  “How did I do?” she asked.

  Cates was slow to answer. “I just wanted to see how accustomed you were to working with the cards. There was a little bit of early apprehension, but it quickly disappeared.”

  “You’re saying I’ve been tested before.”

  “I think so. For one thing, you knew all the shapes that might come up without being told.”

  “There’s something about the cards. Something I can’t explain.”

  “What do you mean something?”

  “I’m terrified of them,” she said, frowning. “But it’s more than that. It’s almost as though I can see what’s on the other side but I’m afraid to tell you.”

  Cates frowned, pulling the cards out of his pocket again and watching Audrey’s face. “What exactly is it about them that frightens you? Why would you be afraid to tell me?”

  “I don’t know. But I was really scared to answer you when you first showed them to me.”

&
nbsp; “Why did you agree to the test, then?”

  She shook her head. “I’m here to make a change in my life. Maybe my subconscious sensed that this was the way to start. I don’t know. It felt right though. How did I do?”

  “Not bad,” said Cates. Without preamble, he started flashing cards again.

  “Circle,” said Audrey, staring intensely at the blue-back of the card. Then, “Square, squiggly lines, square, triangle, straight lines, square …”

  When the last card was done, Cates hid the deck in his pocket again and stared at his hands.

  “What was my score? You didn’t write down the correct answers.”

  “I didn’t need to,” murmured Cates.

  “Why not?”

  “Because there were no wrong answers. Not this time. Not last time. I’ve never even heard of anything like it.”

  “That’s impossible.” She stared at him, waiting for him to smile or laugh, but there was nothing in his face but amazement.

  “I agree,” said Cates. “But you must have known.”

  She looked at the top of the deck, barely visible in his breast pocket, shocked to discover that she was certain that the top card was now a triangle. “Known what? That I could do card tricks?”

  “The cards only reveal the existence of psi power. Nobody really knows whether what’s happening is a form of telepathy or something else altogether. Most subjects who do exhibit higher than average ratings have those scores drop to average figures when the person running the test is unaware of what’s on the card. This would seem to show that telepathy exists.”

  “You’re saying I’m telepathic?”

  “I don’t know how else to explain what you just did.”

  “Why did you think I might be?”

  “To be honest, I don’t believe in telepathy. Or… at least I didn’t. I merely wanted to get your reaction to the cards.”

  “Why?”

  Cates sighed. “I’ve done some research since I last saw you. Your aunt wasn’t only known for her work on hypnotherapy.”