Diego took a sip of coffee. “The original story they gave was about another girl. And a monster. And demons. And a dog. But neither boy agreed on what happened. Do you know what happened?”
“I don’t remember...I told you. I want you to take me back there. I’m ready.”
“You’re sure? You weren’t ready before. Something always held you back, even when you were under. And I can’t promise much,” Diego said. “It probably won’t be pleasant, because whatever happened there was extremely traumatic for you.”
“I want to go back there,” she said, and he did not need to look into her eyes again to know that she was weeping. “I lost all that time. All the memories.”
Diego Correa nodded. “All right. Let’s put you under.” He spoke the words he had used before to help ease her into a relaxed state of mind. He placed his hand over hers to calm her.
Then the woman’s eyes glazed over, as if he’d keyed into some mantra with the simple phrase: “what if.” Her hands, cold a moment before, began to warm, and she would not let go of his hand. Her own hand felt so hot to him it was as if her blood were boiling beneath the surface of her skin, and he was afraid that they would both burst into flame if he did not let go of her hand.
“I saw a man eating his own skin,” she said, but her voice was different. It was the voice of an adolescent girl. A very different young girl who was more confident than this woman sitting before him. “Peter,” she said, her eyes moving rapidly in their sockets as if she were dreaming with them wide open. “I can’t go back there. Don’t make me go back there ever. Promise. Promise.”
4
When the session was finished, he waited while she slowly awoke. “Shall I replay the tape for you?” he asked.
“Did I say anything bad?”
“You’re not a little girl; you’re allowed to say a few bad things.”
She grinned, covering her face as if trying to hide the fact that she was blushing. “I say far too many bad things as it is.”
Because the session had left him perspiring, just hearing what she’d said while she’d been under, he opened his top desk drawer and took out a pack of Salems. “Do you smoke? I do, I hope you don’t mind. I didn’t start ‘til I was sixty, and then only because I had dreamed all my life of smoking and had put it off because of the health hazards, until finally I thought: what are you waiting for? But I only smoke when I’m onto something, which isn’t often.” Diego shook his head as he lit the cigarette. “My dear, I feel like I’m on the threshold of something absolutely illuminating.”
Why has she bewitched you, abuelo? Is this young woman the key to the door you wish to unlock? Or are you deluding yourself yet again, chasing down a phantom that only exists in the imagination? Her hands were so pale and smooth. He wanted to touch her hands, in friendship and comfort, but when he had held them before, ah, the heat they had generated. “I will tell you what happened. I said two words that triggered something, perhaps a memory. And then from there, you were out and quite amenable to answering whatever question I could think of. Let me play the tape for you and you will not be so worried about your sanity.” He reached across his desk and pressed the play button on his Sony. “I wasn’t quick enough to press the record button at first, so it begins in the middle.”
The voice on the tape sounded different, younger, more confident than the woman who sat in front of him.
5
“...Ever. Not ever. Promise me, we don’t have to go back there.”
“Are you talking to your husband?”
“Peter.”
“And your name is?”
“Alison. Alison Hunt.”
“And Alison, are you scared?”
“The scared Alison is gone. Really gone. I killed her. I made sure she died. Peter helped bury her. I don’t ever want to go back there, understand?”
“What was Alison scared of?”
“Demons.”
“Demons? But there aren’t any, are there?”
“Yes. There are.”
“You saw them?”
“No. But not everything is visible. Some things you see and some things you don’t. I didn’t see any demons, not the way demons are in pictures, but I saw a girl eating something terrible. Something bleeding all over her hands. She ate as much of it as she could.”
“Why did she do that?”
Silence.
“Alison? Why did she do that?”
She paused, and then said slyly, “Because she liked the taste.”
6
Alison reached across the desk and shut the tape machine off. “I don’t want to hear the rest. Not now. Maybe never. I don’t need to hear it. But maybe you can tell me about it. About what’s wrong with me.”
Diego leaned over the desk to her. “You are either insane or blessed, and let me tell you, it may be the same thing. Don’t be afraid,” he said. “You’re not crazy just because something happened to you a long time ago.”
“Have to go,” she said, standing up abruptly, almost knocking her chair over.
He nodded. There would be other days; there would be time. You must not let your excitement scare her away. She has been through so much. “I am here. You call me if you want to. I would like to speak with you some more. I think I can help you. I don’t think you’re in any kind of trouble. But I would like to help you. Here...” He reached for a pen, and tore off a piece of paper from the calendar on his blotter. “My home number.” He began writing the phone number down for her.
“Look, I think I was wrong to come here,” Alison said.
When he looked up from his desk, she had already left his office; he heard her footsteps as she hurried down the hallway.
7
Diego listened to the rest of the tape. When it was done playing, he rewound it and played it again. At first, Alison was speaking in that youthful, confident voice, but as she continued speaking, her sentences broke down into fragments that he hadn’t understood: “demon sky cold is not snake skin red flower dog dog dog what if big what green rat house wall wall wall...” And then, even the language had shredded, until she was making noises in the back of her throat as if she had somehow forgotten how to form words.
Diego stood, stretched, and went to his file cabinets. He opened the middle drawer. Dust blew out from the crush of yellowed papers. The interviews with the children. One of the two boys he’d spoken to would grow up to be Alison’s husband. You will be up all night, old man, reading about it again. About the demons he had spoken of, too, but back when no one believed him. Not even you. Back when you thought there might be nothing more than a boy’s imagination. He found the notebook he was looking for.
It was marked, “PETER C., JANUARY, 1981.”
How that boy kept her safe all these years, and how wrong he was to do it, how wrong and how understandable. Diego opened the notebook to the first page, and chuckled, because he remembered how this one boy had changed his story three times, three times, and never admitted to lying at all.
It would be several days before he would see Alison Chandler again.
8
Early one evening, Diego Correa leaned back in his chair, opening his Alison notebook, where he’d left off scribbling the night before. The final page read: But what real progress do we make, she and I? I get the jumble, the clutter of non-sequiturs, and she seems more confused with every session. Must speak with husband, he’s got the connecting tissue. Only he can help open up her mind and help her grow. What kind of a man would want to overshadow her life like this? She is so innocent, so terrified, and yet so strong. Strong, but breakable, like a spider’s thread. How have you come this far and gone nowhere? How many years of this must you document before you find that illumination? Mention possibility of brain hemorrhage, fever. Is she seeing some physician?
He barely noticed Alison when she entered his office. He looked at his watch. She was early. “I didn’t expect you for another hour.”
“I know. I’m beginning to thi
nk I’m using our sessions like a drug. Leave it to me.” She plopped down in the chair opposite him. She seemed to be getting more nervous as the sessions wore on. He wondered if he was only doing damage to this woman, or if some good would come of his explorations of her subconscious.
“You seem to be a quick study. It’s amazing to me that the doctors you’ve seen in the past wouldn’t try to regress you. My guess is you were too smart for them.” He watched as she blushed—she didn’t take compliments easily. “That’s the upside. The downside is you seem rather young to have had a stroke. You did have some sort of stroke, didn’t you? When you were younger?”
She heaved a great breath, as if a tremendous load were taken off her. “What do you—how do you know about it?”
“Your voice, your language. You have worked on your voice. You have had to learn your voice over again, haven’t you? You lost words or comprehension at some point.”
Alison was finally trusting him, opening a little more. She stood and went to pour herself a cup of coffee from the pot by the window. “My husband taught me. It took six years, and every day he had to sit down with me and the alphabet, and records, and times tables, but I finally relearned things. And then school. I officially graduated from high school at my grandmother’s in San Francisco, but it was Peter who cheated for me so I’d get by. I’m not sure if I can do anything by myself.”
“Yet you project a great deal of confidence.”
She laughed, sipping from the Styrofoam cup. “I can fake anything for about an hour. It’s having to talk with other people and things. That’s half the reason I work with animals. I, um, get along fine with animals, and, like I said, with people I can fake it.”
“What’s the other half?”
“Excuse me?”
“Why you work there? You implied there’s another reason besides not dealing well with people.”
“Did I say that? That’s funny. Maybe there’s no other reason. I have a hard time keeping most jobs I’ve tried. Sometimes I say these things...”
“But there’s another reason. Something about dogs.”
“I can’t think what. I just like animals.”
“Why do you like them?”
She considered this question a minute. “You’re going to find this strange, and I’ve never even told my husband this. But it’s something about the smells. The way animals smell. It makes me feel—I don’t know—safe or something.” Alison went back to the desk and sat down. She began combing her fingers through her hair.
Diego turned his tape recorder on. “I’m going to put you out now.”
“You are? But we’ve done it twice this week. I thought you said it wasn’t a good idea to keep at this thing.” There was a worried note in her voice. “You said that a couple of times a week was enough.”
“I think it’s reached a crisis, Alison. I think we can make some real progress.”
“Oh.” She seemed to calm just a bit. She closed her eyes. “All right.”
“Feel all the tension melting from your body. Think of darkness. Cool darkness. And in that cool darkness, what if there is a dog, what if you know that dog, what if...”
She whispered, “Dog blood dog Peter Wendy Sloan Charlie.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Peter opened his notebook computer and began typing:
“I am scared shitless. The bungalow. Hallucination? Madness? Seeing him down there, after all these years. Crucified. The basement like the Corazon. The bodies. The faces. The fire. I have been wrong. She will not give up. She will not let us alone. Twenty years have not bought us freedom.
“She is within us.
“She is back.
“She wants what we took from her.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Alison Runs a Fever
1
Alison opened her eyes. She didn’t recognize the older man at first. Consciousness returned slowly—and she realized she was lying back in the lounge chair in the office of the mythologist and writer Dr. Diego Correa. She felt something hard and thin, like a glass straw, stuck beneath her tongue. She tried talking, but the straw was in the way. Diego leaned over her and plucked it from her mouth. A thermometer? She couldn’t remember it going into her mouth. Just a few seconds before he’d told her he was putting her out.
“You’ve been running a fever,” he said, his voice full of concern.
“Don’t—nothing—understand,” she said, trying to sew the words together correctly from the jumble of language in her mind.
“You were out quite awhile—three hours—and one thing I’ve noticed is your body starts, well, overheating, for lack of a better expression, when you start this trance state. So I took your temperature every half hour, and you got as high as one hundred and four, and then dropped down in the last forty minutes. Usually, in a trance, the body cools off a bit.”
“Am I sick?”
“Perhaps you should get a physical.”
“Did I talk the entire three hours?”
“Give or take a few minutes for the thermometer, yes. I’d like to talk to your husband if I could.”
“No. I don’t think so. He doesn’t even know I’m here right now.”
“Do you think what we’re doing here is bad?”
“I almost feel like I’m cheating on him, or something.”
“Why is that?”
“Private reasons. If I’m going to work through this, it’s going to be without Peter knowing. That’s it.”
“Fair enough. Would you like to hear the tape?”
“Should I?’
“You repeated one phrase the entire time. Nothing monumental, although I’m certain you’ll know what it means. You said: ‘fire skin cold light blood.’ I stopped the tape an hour ago. I asked you questions about it, but it’s all you said. There’s another word you’ve been saying for the past four sessions, and when I ask about it, you go back to that phrase.”
“What was it?”
“Lamia. Do you know what that means?”
She shook her head and almost grinned. “That is one word I’ve never run into.” She was afraid her voice was sounding too stressed-out; her head was beginning to throb, and there was something about that word that made her wish she’d never heard it. I’m crazy. The whole problem is I’m crazy and Peter’s just been too good a man to tell me. Maybe coming to Dr. Correa was all wrong. Maybe it’s unsafe.
Correa smiled, too, but something in his dark eyes made her think that he knew how scared she was beneath the surface. “Lamia. Well, while I haven’t had much experience with them, I have seen cultures that worshipped or feared such things under various guises. The feminine personification of the darkness of the universe, somewhat related to vampires as well as serpents—and even wolves. The shape shifter. In myth, her children were murdered and she roams the night stealing the children of others. When the Judeo-Christian-Islamic world took hold, she became, as did all good fallen gods, a demon. When I interviewed your husband, when he was in his teens, he mentioned her, too. He also spoke of the territory of demons, a place called no man’s land. What does that mean to you?”
But she drew a blank, and what was finally emerging in her mind continued to hurt, a hammering away at her brain and skull from the inside. Could he tell how much she hurt, or was she hiding it well enough? He looked at her so knowingly. It was a headache she recognized, one she had with increasing frequency, one that she’d been having whenever she hit the wall in her mind.
The yellow wall that came up without warning most times.
When it had first happened, in her early twenties, she’d been afraid that it was a tumor, or a sign of some kind of depression, or even a seizure. She hadn’t gone to see a doctor. As time went on, she got used to the headaches. They were like hammers on her skull, but she got used to them. She would go and lie down in a cool, dark place and rest and tell her coworkers it was just a killer migraine. But always there was the leaning of memory, of the clicks and buzzes in her brain as if
the computer were checking its files, certain words that she did not understand, holdovers from relearning the language, as if Peter hadn’t taught her every word again, as if he’d withheld some. Alison closed her eyes, trying to will the headache away. The words formed an image, the wall.
And over the wall, what?
The man reached across his desk and pressed down on the play button of the tape player. “I want you to listen for a minute. Something you said.”
Alison barely recognized her own voice on the tape.
“We are those she touched.”
“How were you touched?”
“We saw her face. Her real face. We saw what she was. And it touched us.”
“What was she?”
And then Alison heard a noise from the tape that made her shiver, like she was listening to someone being tortured. Not a scream, and not a moan, and not a laugh, but all of these. Pure human pain.
Diego Correa reached back to switch the machine off but she shook her head. She wanted to hear the rest.
She listened as her voice on the tape growled. Then the sound of what seemed like a wolf’s howl came, but within her voice, other voices as if several people were crying out at once.
“Stop it!” Alison stood up. “Shut it off! Turn it off!” She clapped her hands over her ears; tears burst from her eyes; she began shivering.
Correa turned the tape machine off.
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