The Occult Persuasion and the Anarchist's Solution

by Lisa de Nikolits

  I always felt scattered, as if there was something I had forgotten to do or forgotten to tell someone. Or maybe I had said the wrong thing. In all likelihood, I had said the wrong thing. It used to drive Lyndon crazy when I’d come home from social events and I’d say to him, “I think I said something really stupid,” or “I feel like I made a real faux pas,” or “I’m sure that person will think I’m such an idiot,” or “Why do I say such strange things to people?” And then I’d tell him word for word what I’d said, and generally, he’d say something like, “Most people aren’t listening to you anyway,” which wasn’t helpful. Why weren’t they listening when I was talking to them? Was I that insignificant? Or he’d say, “Most people have very short memories. They’ll forget about it soon,” meaning that I had indeed said something bizarre. So the odds were, I was going to say something awkward to Graham, and she’d think me a foolish woman, but I was going to take that chance.

  I waved at her and she smiled at me, and that radiant smile transformed her face. My chest released—for the moment anyway.

  “I’m so glad to see you,” she said, and she gave me a hug. I wasn’t a good hugger, and I worried that I had responded a fraction too late. Had I already ruined our friendship by not being as engaged in the hug as I should have been?

  But Graham just looped her arm in mine, and we walked to the market that was set around a church. I’ve always loved markets and she and I shared the same tastes, stopping to look at pieces of antique jewellery we both liked, and both of us laughing quietly at some of the artwork on display.

  We walked around for nearly two hours. I hadn’t noticed it had been that long until Graham asked me if I was hungry, and I realized I was ravenous.

  “Let’s buy a picnic and go and sit in the grounds of the old Callan Park Hospital for the Insane,” she said, and I was startled.

  “Don’t worry,” she told me. “It’s the Sydney College of the Arts now, and the grounds are lovely. I often go for walks there.”

  We bought muffins, lemon tarts, and coffees to go and set off for Callan Park. The acres of mowed green lawns featured several large buildings, and it was surprisingly peaceful and lovely.

  “We’ll just walk down that hill a bit,” Graham said. “There’s another writers’ group here, a famous one in Sydney, the New South Wales Writers’ Centre, but they are so full of themselves. I’ve been to a few meetings, but all they do is compete to see who’s read so-and-so’s book before anyone else has, and how many literary journals they’ve all been published in.”

  “Do they do any actual writing?”

  “Oh yes. A lot of them are very well-known. They’re the real literati of Sydney. It’s a vicious little circus.”

  She led me down the hill and pointed at the building. “The Garry Owen House. That’s where they meet. The Guild of Craft of Bookbinders are also in there, with all their fascinating tools of the trade.”

  “When was the Garry Owen House built?” I asked as we settled down on the grass under a large tree. It was a hot day, and I was glad to find shelter in the cool shade. We ate our muffins and tarts, and washed them down with lukewarm coffee.

  “Around 1839. It started out as a luxury mansion and later became part of the Callan Park Hospital for the Insane, then later still a school for nurses. Hard to imagine the horror that those folk in the asylum suffered.”

  “I don’t suppose they had air conditioning,” I commented absently, which was typical of my stupid faux pas comments that I would later use as a self-flagellation tool for hours.

  Graham laughed. “They did not. And there were twice, even three times as many people inside the asylum as there were supposed to be. Those poor people. Many women sought refuge from abusive husbands, but you could end up in the loony bin for domestic trouble, or so-called religious ‘excitement,’ or even love affairs and sexual seduction, or sunstroke, or overwork, or sexual intemperance, or even nostalgia.”

  “Nostalgia?”

  “It is listed as a cause. And then, once you were in, that was it. Complaints were seen by doctors as further evidence that you were nuts, and it was nearly impossible to get out. There were scads of normal people in these places, but by the ends of their lives, they were crazy from the horror of it all.”

  “That wasn’t so long ago,” I said, “One imagines things like that happening to women in the dark ages, not a couple of hundred years back.”

  “True. The state government bought the Callan Estates in the 1870s in order to build what they thought would be a state-of-the-art psychiatric institution. And the Garry Owen House started being used as part of the asylum in 1875.

  “My mother tells a story of having to bring her boss here,” Graham continued. “My mother was a typist in an ad agency, and she arrived at work one morning to find her boss in terrible distress. He’d been drinking all night, and everyone knew he was an alcoholic, but all of a sudden, he demanded that my mother bring him to Callan Park Hospital to dry out. She did what he wanted. She brought him here and helped him get admitted, but then shortly afterwards he left. He drank himself to death. That was around 1960. So, this place has a long history of housing tormented people.

  “I’m thinking of writing a new book about it, looking at madness as a subversive form of resistance to gender oppression. Madness was considered primarily a woman’s condition, under the powerful hand of patriarchy.”

  “I remember reading that nurses could be terrible to the patients,” I said. “I read that in a book, but it was about an institution in Canada that also no longer exists, so maybe it wasn’t the same here.”

  “Oh, they were terrible all right, even here. These places were sometimes home to sadists who enjoyed wielding their power over those who had no way of fighting back. And yes, nurses could be cruel to their patients. So sad, the awful human tendency to kick those who are down, to take advantage of a situation to express our most base desires to torment others.”

  And it was then that I began to feel odd. The black cardboard cut-out of the Virgin Mary flashed before my eyes and I felt cold, as if I’d been out in the snow wearing only summer clothes. I rubbed my arms, which were covered in goosebumps, and Graham noticed.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Freezing all of a sudden,” I said. “And I feel sick too, as if the flu has just hit me with full force. How odd.”

  “Let’s move into the sun,” Graham said, and she gathered up our picnic. “It was most likely my horrible stories of all the locked up and tortured women here.”

  “I don’t know what it was,” I told her as we shifted into the sun and as we did, I looked up and screamed, then grabbed Graham’s arm.

  “There,” I said, and pointed. I was shaking, and cold sweat ran down my body. The muffin I’d just eaten rose in my throat, making me gag. “Look up there, at that window. A woman is looking at us.”

  Graham looked up, but I could tell she couldn’t see anything. I was transfixed and shaking, and my fingers were digging into Graham’s arm.

  “Tell me what you see.” Graham was calm, and she put her arm around me. “What do you see?”

  “A woman. Her eyes are black holes. Her mouth is wide open, and she’s screaming. She’s wearing an old-fashioned nurse’s hat and uniform, and her hands are up against the glass. Now, she’s trying to tell me something. Oh dear God, her black eyes are bleeding and the blood is running down her face.”

  “What is she trying to say to you?” Graham talked to me as one would a child, in a soothing, quiet way.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know. Oh wait, she says she’s sorry. She says, ‘Tell them I’m sorry.’”

  “Tell who?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.” I screamed again, and Graham hugged me closer to her.

  “White light’s coming out of her eyes,” I gasped. “Like lasers. I can’t look anymore. It’s like looking in
to a camera flash only much stronger. I want to look away but if I do, she might go away, and I have to hear what she wants to tell me.”

  But as I watched, the woman started to fade. She dissolved into a shadow, and then finally, there was nothing left but the shadow of a tree branch.

  Warmth slowly returned to my body as if my frozen bones were being lowered into a hot bath. And all the shards of ice that had felt lodged, deep within my muscles, disintegrated.

  I leaned into Graham. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t know what that was.”

  “I do,” Graham said. “That was your cardboard Virgin Mary. She wants your help.” She looked at me and rubbed my back. “Margaux, please don’t be angry with me, but that’s why I brought you here. I just had a feeling this place might be helpful in some way. Don’t ask me why, it was just an idea. Because I’ve had that feeling too, walking through here, that here’s a soul in need of my help. And then, when you and I met, and you told us your story, I thought coming here might be helpful. I thought that perhaps it might jog your lost spirit into action which it did. Because I can’t tell you the number of times I have walked through these grounds trying to speak to this distressed soul and ask how I can be of help. But I thought she was a patient, not a nurse. That’s very interesting. Let’s go up into the building and see if we can access that room.”

  “I don’t know if I want to,” I said. “That was terrifying. Those holes for eyes. And the blood pouring out of them. And that terrible light. I don’t think I ever want to see that again. And why me?”

  “She knows you can help her,” Graham said with confidence.

  “But why me? I mean really? I’m just a suburban wife and mother from Oakville, Ontario. I’m nothing special. I thought I had some psychic abilities when I was a teenager but I haven’t even thought about that in years.”

  “Maybe you’re in the crux of some crisis you don’t even know about,” Graham suggested. “Have you had any life-changing events happen to you recently? At times like that, if one is the kind of person who is receptive, then these things can become stronger.”

  Life-changing events. My husband had left me stranded in a strange country. My daughter was pregnant. “Yes, there’ve been a few things,” I said vaguely. “But I don’t know if this ghost wants my help. She frightens me. She looks so evil.”

  “But she said she was sorry. She wants to atone.”

  “Maybe she wants to draw us into her trap, possess our souls,” I argued because what Graham was saying didn’t feel right.

  “Why would she want to do that?”

  “Evil is evil,” I shivered. “Maybe she’s apologizing in advance for luring us into the trap of her darkness.”

  Graham laughed, and I could hear how foolish that sounded.

  “Come on,” she said, “let’s go inside. I’ll protect you.”

  I staggered a bit and Graham caught me. “You could have warned me this might happen,” I said to her. “You knew it might.”

  “It was just an idea. And I didn’t want to colour your behaviours with any kind of suggestions. It had to come from you.”

  “Well, it did do that,” I replied.

  We had reached the front door of the Garry Owen House and we slipped inside. We heard voices, a lively debate, and Graham pointed down the hall. “Writers’ group in progress,” she whispered.

  “Are we allowed to be in here?” I asked.

  Graham shrugged. “Why not?” She started to climb the winding, curved staircase, and I grabbed the wooden banister to steady myself. A colourful stained-glass domed skylight was set high in the ceiling and it cast rainbows and reflections on the walls. Our tread was silent on the thick floral-patterned carpet, and, despite the light and the colours, I didn’t like the place one bit.

  But my body temperature regulated, as did my mind, and I began to convince myself that nothing had happened. But then I pictured those black holes for eyes and that terrifying, open-mouthed scream, and I knew it had been real. I told myself to think about something else, to focus on being here, now, so I followed Graham. I was safe with her. We had reached the top landing. Graham was opening doors and trying to find the room that we would have seen from our position on the lawn.

  “Here,” she said, and my gut told me she was right. There was something evil in the room, and the air was thick. I shrank against the wall while Graham went and studied the window.

  I closed my eyes. I was afraid to open them in case the woman appeared again, but then I felt something brush against my skin and my eyes flew open. It wasn’t Graham who had touched me. She was still at the window and I was pressed up against the wall, against the wallpaper. I smelled starch and bleach and old-fashioned hairspray, and there it was again—the brush of fabric against my arm.

  “Who are you?” I whispered. Graham turned to me, and I hoped she wouldn’t say anything. She didn’t. She froze and watched me. I repeated my question.

  The shape of a figure formed, a white-light cardboard cut-out this time, instead of black. But the light, although the opposite of darkness, was not soothing or warming but icy and terrifying. There was movement to the whiteness, like the static on an old television set, and I could hear crackling, snapping sounds, like the needle on a record being scratched back and forth.

  Nancy. I knew her name was Nancy. “What do you want from me, Nancy?” I whispered.

  Sorry. Tell them I am sorry.

  “Tell who? And how can I tell them?”

  I felt Nancy’s anger slap me. She was furious at my unintentionally obtuse stupidity.

  “Okay,” I said quickly. “I’ll find a way. I’ll find a way to tell them you’re sorry.”

  And the white light of her anger dimmed. But the force of her former fury frightened me, and I thought that if she was a nurse and she tortured people, then what she was expressing wasn’t contrition but simply more anger.

  I decided to risk more of her wrath. “Excuse me, but you don’t seem very sorry to me,” I said and the white light glared again, pulsating and malevolent. Then I realized something. “It’s because you’re stuck,” I said. “That’s why you’re angry. You can’t move on.”

  The light dimmed to a less ferocious shade, and I took that as a yes.

  “But I don’t know how to help you with that,” I said, and the light flared so brightly I flinched and had to close my eyes.

  “Quite the temper you’ve got there, Nancy,” I said. I was beginning to feel less fearful and chatting to this angry ghost was starting to almost feel normal.

  “I’ll have to do some research,” I told her. “And I will. When were you a nurse?”

  Nineteen sixty-four popped suddenly to mind. That was it.

  “Great, good to know. Okay, Nancy, we’ll help you.”

  And then, just like that, she was gone.

  I slowly peeled my body off the wall, and Graham walked over to me.

  “We?” she said.

  “We,” I said, and I sank down to the floor and wrapped my arms around my knees. “That was intense.” I exhaled. “Yep, that was intense.”

  20. LYNDON

  LATER THAT NIGHT, Queenie, Jason, and I were in the kitchen. Jason was making his tofu curry of which I could easily eat vats. “So,” I said, and I affected a casual tone, or at least, I tried to. “Where were you today?”

  He gave me a look as he added freshly chopped lemongrass to the bubbling curry.

  “Why,” he asked. “Did you miss me?”

  “Actually yes,” I said. “You weren’t doing anything illegal, were you?”

  He laughed. “Like what?”

  “Well, Sean told me you have eight million followers on an anarchy site, so I thought maybe you were at a meeting or something, planning to blow up Parliament.”

  “I’m not into violence,” he reminded me mildly.

  “How l
ong have you had your website? That’s quite the following.”

  “You love the facts and figures, don’t you?” he said. “How long this or that, what are the numbers, let’s be practical.”

  “Numbers are everything in the magazine world. Circulation figures, deadlines, print runs, paper costs, advertising sales. And then it became iPad visits, iPhone clicks, how many likes, how popular your web links are. And then there was my family, bringing up two kids, balancing a mortgage, Margaux’s income. So, you’re right, my whole life was numbers and facts and figures. What’s wrong with that?”

  “What did Margaux do to make money?” Jason asked.

  I shook my head. “I can’t talk about her yet,” and I knew I should ask whether any of my family had replied to my email, but I didn’t want to know.

  “Fair enough,” Jason replied, and he spooned the curry onto two plates and brought them over to the table. “You want to know where I was today? I wasn’t doing anything illegal, unless you call dying an illegal act.”

  I dropped my fork into my food. “What do you mean, Jason?”

  “I’m dying. Pretty quickly too. I’ve had renal cancer for a while, and it has metastasized. They say I’ve got only months left at most.”

  I buried my head in my hands. “Oh my God. But I’ve just found you.”

  He laughed. “I wish you could hear how that sounds. ‘My darling, I’ve just found you!’ No, it’s fine, Lyndon. I’ve had two years since I was first diagnosed. My emotions have run their course. I’m ready.”

  I was crying like a baby. This man and his kindness had saved my life. He had rescued me. He’d given me a new life. I pushed my plate away, folded my arms on the table and buried my head in the darkness of my body. Jason came and put his hand on my shoulder. He let me cry myself out, which took a while, and I eventually blew my nose on a piece of paper towel and looked up at him.

  “Well,” I said. “Do the others in the shop know?”

  He nodded and sat down and picked up his fork. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I cried a lot when I first heard. Then I got angry. Then I wept again. And so it went on and eventually I reached acceptance although there will probably be more tears and anger.”