Psychopathia: A Horror Suspense Novel (24 page)

‘No scars,’ the doctor said. ‘Should there be some?’

He took his wrist back and peered at it. He didn’t understand what was going on. They were tricking him somehow.

‘Where am I?’ he asked again.

‘In the hospital. The psychiatric ward. You were admitted last night after suffering from acute psychosis.’

He strained to remember, but his head was such a
n annoying jumble. He shook it as though something useful might come loose. He’d been asleep. In one of their comas. It had lasted a long, long time.

‘Your sister called us. She was very worried about you.’

His sister? ‘My sister?’

‘Tully. She’s your twin, I believe.’

That was ridiculous. He had no sister.

They gave him some lunch and left him alone. He ignored the food and prowled around the room. The door was open, and it seemed he could have gone out, but the big man that had stood inside the room by the door now stood
outside
the room by the door, and Tobias didn’t want to go near him. Not yet. He had to be cunning. He had to take his time, find out exactly what was going on, then he’d get it right.

The room confused him though. He put his hands
either side of his head and gave it a shake as though his head was a container he could shake things loose from. It was the drugs. They’d put him to sleep again, sent him into a coma, pumped him full of insulin, and this was a dream. Right now he was tied to the bed, and this was a dream. They’d keep him full of insulin for weeks and the dream would go on and on. His face twisted in a snarl. One day he would make sure they never did that to him again. Or anything else.

No. Not this time. He wasn’t asleep. This time he’d woken up and they thought he was cured. Why else would he be here in this nice room, without the smell of mouldering canvas in his nostrils, without his arms bound to his sides, not even in his little cell, that stank of shit and
piss, that was always wet from damp?

He rubbed his wrists and looked down at them
, rubbed his thumb over the tangle of blue veins and wondered where the scars had gone.

But
maybe this was a dream, maybe that’s why his scars weren’t there. Because really, he was strapped to the bed, asleep, knocked out, and filling a rubber bag with piss from the tube that stuck out of his thing.

He would have fought. He always did when they came with the tray
that held the syringes. They couldn’t call him stupid, he knew what they were about – and if it was such a good cure, how come they had to keep doing it and it didn’t make any difference?

Every time he woke up from one of those, he knew less about everything. Someone, one of the nurses, he thought, had explained it once. The coma was to give his brain a rest. Then he could wake up normal again.

He never woke up normal. He woke up not knowing who he was, or where he was, or even what he was. Just the tickling whisper of voices in his head.

But he was lucid right now, wasn’t he? Rolling his tongue around his dry mouth, he completed another circuit of the room.

It was definitely a dream. The only room they’d given him was the padded one. They let him have that one all the time, white canvas walls that stunk of mould and the mice that burrowed into them and nested there. Sometimes he’d talk to the mice. He bared his teeth in a grin. The mice had never talked back though. They were too afraid of him; he could eat them in one mouthful, without a thought. Of course a mouse would be afraid!

But no. He pinched himself. Awake. Definitely awake. And in a different part of the hospital. Any moment now, they’d let him go, escort him to the door, clap him on the back call him cured, and he would walk away, smiling and nodding his head – oh how he would smile! He would smile and grin all the way back to his little railway house, and maybe they’d give him his job back and he could ride the rails, looking for company. He missed his company. He missed his house and the trains and he missed
having company, inviting the pretty boys back to his house, giving them tea in the cracked china cups that used to belong to his mother. Sometimes he’d pick up one of the ladies of the night, if they were out on their own, and he’d give them tea too. Everyone liked the tea he made, and it didn’t matter that the cups were cracked just a little. They all drank it anyway.

So it was just a matter of waiting until they let him out. He would answer all their questions, and smile and nod and they would know he was cured, and they’d open those huge front doors that he thought would be forever closed, and he would walk away.

Eyeing the sandwich on the tray they’d left, Tobias sat down on the bed. Perhaps he should eat the food they’d given to him. He had to be obedient in case they changed their minds. The sandwich smelled all right. He leaned down and put his nose to it, sniffing. It smelled good. Saliva squirted into his dry mouth. He should eat it. They hadn’t smeared shit on this one. They wouldn’t, they were letting him out.

He picked it up, sniffed it again, and took a bite.

Someone came into his room again and he lifted his eyes to them. It was the doctor. The one who was going to let him out of here. He took another bite of sandwich.

‘Toby, it’s Doctor Stebbins again. Can you tell me what’s bothering you?’

‘Tobias. My name is Tobias,’ he said. He would be a free man again soon. It was right that he should be addressed by his proper name.

There was a pause. ‘
Okay. Tobias. How are you feeling?’

He had to be careful. ‘The sandwich is good,’ he said, smiling at his cunning. There was no trick in talking about sandwiches.

‘Yes, I can see that. And how are you? Do you have any confusion?’

He blinked. ‘Yes. Some.’ He thought it was safe to admit to that. ‘But it worked this time, didn’t it? All the treatments?’ He wanted to mention the beatings, but with an effort smoothed his face back into a wide smile.

‘What treatments are those, Toby? We’re only just beginning to map out a treatment plan for you.’ He reached into his pocket. ‘In fact, here’s what we’re going to start you on right now. It will take some time to get the dosage correct, but it’s important that we get your recovery underway now.’

‘I am recovered.’ Tobias put the sandwich aside. ‘That is why I am here, is it not?’

There was a small jar in the doctor’s hand, and he was twisting off the lid. The man tipped two white tablets into the palm of his hand.

‘I want you to take these,’ he said. ‘They’re anti-psychotics. They’ll help you get rid of
some of the confusion you feel. I know you’re feeling a lot better today already, but I promise you these will help.’

Tobias looked at the tablets with suspicion. More dirty tricks? Not in needles this time, but little pills he had to chew and swallow? No. He would not. Every
treatment
he’d been given thus far had only hurt him. Why would they need to give him these when they were letting him go?

The doctor was reaching for his hand and tipping the pills onto it. He gestured to the cup on the tray. ‘Take them with some of the orange juice. You don’t have to chew them, but they are a little bitter.’

‘They will help the confusion?’ he asked. A little part of him wanted to believe. It was part of being well, to dissipate the last of the fog from his brain. It could not be a trick. ‘They will not make me sick?’

‘They will not make you sick. They will make you better.’ The doctor re-crossed his legs. ‘Now, tell me why you want to be called Tobias
.’

Tobias was staring at the pills in his hand. ‘I have always been Tobias,’ he said.

‘Your sister calls you Toby. I assumed you liked that better.’

‘I have no sister.’ What harm could come from two tiny tablets? Always so far, they had given him sharp needles, piercing his skin
, and packets of foul-tasting powder. Never tablets. They’d done many things to him, but never – never to his recollection – had they handed him little white tablets and told him it would help the confusion.

There was much confusion. He could not remember
waking up this time. He remembered the crying boy, but that had just been a dream. The boy had been one he’d taken home for company. Some of them lived inside his head now, cowering there in little padded rooms of their own. They were good company still.

Picking up the cup of orange juice, he licked the tablets from the palm of his hand, took a mouthful of juice and flung back his head, swallowing them. The doctor was right, they left a slight, bitter taste in his mouth. He took another sip of the orange juice and frowned over the container it was in.

‘What is this made of?’ he asked.

‘Plastic. You do have a sister. She is your twin.’

‘I have no sister.’ What was plastic? Was this something new, like the room, and the brown man outside the door and the two white tablets?

‘Your sister called us about you. She is very worried. You will be able to see her tomorrow.’

Tobias looked up, glanced at the doctor then away again, frowning. ‘Why are you so insistent that I have a sister? In all the time I have been here, I’ve had no visitors. I have no family. You have seen my records, you know this.’

The pause before the doctor spoke again was longer this time. ‘How long have you been here, Toby?’

More useless questions. The doctor would know better than he himself how long he’d been here. He shook his head, refusing to answer. 

But
this was the doctor who would open the door to the outside world for him. The one who would pat him on the back and smile at the world for having cured the criminally insane. He must do what the doctor expected of him. He must answer the questions and smile and nod and show him he was cured. And maybe the man was telling the truth and the two white pills would work, and the confusion would lessen.

‘I have been here too many years to count,’ he said on a sigh.

‘But when can I see him?’ Tully asked, gripping the strap of her bag in tightly clenched fingers.

The doctor smiled at her and went behind his desk to sit down. ‘Please, Miss Collins, sit down.’

‘I want to see Toby.’

‘And you will, but I need to talk to you about him a little first.’

Tully sat down, went to bite her lip and forced herself to stop. It was tender and sore where she’d worried away at it. She fixed her eyes on the doctor instead and waited, a little girl again, hauled in front of the headmaster for crying all the time when they’d put her and Toby in different classrooms. She sniffed and hoped she wasn’t going to cry now.

The doctor cleared his throat and clicked around on his computer for a moment.

‘He is all right, isn’t he?’

Stebbins looked at her, and smiled his fatherly smile. ‘He’s going to be all right, and that’s what you have to focus on, Tully. May I call you Tully?’

She nodded, and waited for him to go on, which he did, after some more throat clearing and a sip at a glass of water. He’d offered her coffee when she first got there, but she’d turned it down. It would have been her sixth that morning, and she could already feel the caffeine jitters.

‘Now that we’ve had a chance to assess your brother properly, we’ve discovered he is heav
ily entrenched in his delusion.’ A reflexive smile, as if to apologise. ‘Medication has been started, and that should make a big difference, help him to recognise reality again. Once we’ve achieved that, the rest of the therapeutic interventions can begin.’

‘I just want to see him.’

Was she imagining it, or was the good doctor stalling. She’d been online, practically all day yesterday, and she’d learnt far more than she wanted to about schizophrenia. She’d also – always a good study – boned up on manic depression, dissociative personality disorder, and a bunch of other mental disorders for good measure. It frightened her how easy it was for things to go wrong with the mind. She’d never thought of it as a fragile thing, before. Now it turned out it was probably the most unstable part of the homo sapien.

Doctor Stebbins leaned back in his chair. ‘I need to prepare you,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid he denies having a sister.’

She blinked at him. Whatever she’d expected to hear, that wasn’t it. ‘What?’ she bleated, shocked.

‘He refers to himself as Tobias, and according to him, he does not have a sister.’

‘But we’re twins!’

Stebbins came back to the desk again and
steepled his hands under his chin. Irrelevantly, Tully wondered if he’d taught himself that affectation because it somehow went with the label of ‘psychiatrist’.

‘His delusion is quite powerful. He believes he has been incarcerated – in a psychiatric hospital, alth
ough he called it a ‘lunatic asylum’ – for a number of years. He purports to have been the victim of some severe abuse in his time there.’

Tully didn’t understand any of what the guy was saying
, though her blood ran cold at the words
lunatic asylum
. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked. ‘You mean, he thinks he’s someone else now?’