The Boy Who Could See Demons (12 page)

This shocks both Anya and Ruen, who is the Old Man just then. Auntie Bev is still in the kitchen, singing. Ruen looks very weird, like he’s managed to crack his scowl into an open cave and his eyes are all droopy, like Woof’s.

‘Is he here now?’ Anya says, her eyes all wide and round.

‘He wouldn’t dare miss a conversation about him, would you, Ruen?’ I jeer at him and he scowls. ‘What. Do. You. Get. Bored. Of?’

Eventually, he answers.

‘Not being seen,’ he says, and his voice is very hoarse like he’s been smoking.

I thought as much. I tell this to Anya.

‘Not being seen?’ she says. ‘You mean, because only you can see him?’

I say yes and then I remember something Ruen told me a while ago. ‘He says that demons are old-school angels of Hell, which is a culture as old as the Earth. Demons have souls but they don’t have human bodies. This is like a big deal to them so they get points for stuff they do.’

‘What sort of things do they do?’ she says, and she has to turn over her page because it’s filled up with scribbles. I pause for half a minute because there’s a demon right above Anya, and he’s so fat his skin drips down around his body like a mountain of ice cream. It’s like he’s lying on her shoulders, trying to get comfortable. He yawns and then he disappears and I take a big breath of relief.

‘I thought he was gonna squish you,’ I say by accident.

‘What?’

I shake my head and remember what she asked me. ‘Ruen says he likes bringing a human to their lowest point. That’s when demons get a prize called a human likeness.’

‘They become human?’

I shake my head. ‘No, they just
look
like a human. But even then they don’t really get seen by anybody, not really. And I think invisibility’s a very odd thing to be bored of,’ I tell Anya. ‘Being invisible would be so cool!’

I start to tell Anya all the cool stuff I’d do if I turned invisible, and she writes some of it down and then holds her hand up.

‘Can I ask Ruin another question?’

I glance at him and feel a bit annoyed. I’m sick of talking about him now and wish I’d never bothered telling Anya about him in the first place because he’s getting all the attention. He just stares. ‘Yeah,’ I tell Anya.

‘Wait, where
is
Ruin?’ she asks, looking around the room. I point at the spot he’s standing in, which is right next to the window and beside the blue armchair.

‘There,’ I say.

Anya shuffles in her seat so she can make out the exact spot. She points. ‘There?’ Ruen looks taken aback by all this pointing and for a moment I think he’s going to disappear.

‘Yeah, there.’ I get up and stand next to him. He looks down at me, frowning. He doesn’t seem to be cross, just in a bit of a daze. I hold my hands out to my side. ‘Right here.’

Anya nods. ‘Can you hold your hand up, Alex, right so it touches Ruin’s head? Just so I know how tall he is. Only you can see him, you see.’

I stretch up on my tiptoes to measure Ruen’s height. My fingers brush the bald spot on top of his head and it feels cold and smooth.

Anya smiles and writes something down. ‘Ruin seems tall for a boy,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you say he was a boy?’

I shake my head. ‘He’s old.’

More scribbles in her notebook.

‘Can you describe for me what Ruin’s wearing?’

I tell her. I could tell her with my eyes shut: when he’s the Old Man he never wears anything else. Same dusty brown suit with the same smell of a dead dog. It makes me want to be sick. I don’t mention that he’s a monster sometimes, and I would never, ever tell her about Horn Head because when he’s the Horn Head he just freaks me out.

‘So you’re both wearing suits?’ She laughs. ‘Is there some wardrobe copying going on here?’

I look from the straggling bits of black thread dangling from the hems of Ruen’s suit to the shirt collar, so green and crusty it looks like someone gobbed on his neck, and I say: ‘There’s no
way
I dress like that.’

Then she asks something weird. ‘Can you tell me what Ruin is
thinking?’

I look at him. He looks at me and raises an eyebrow as if he’s curious about that, too. I look back at Anya.

‘Of course I can’t tell you what he’s thinking. That would make me a mind-reader, wouldn’t it?’

She just smiles. Then it occurs to me: she thinks I’m lying. She really does think I’m making all of this up. I feel my cheeks get hot. I clench and unclench my fists. ‘I don’t want to do this any more,’ I tell Anya. ‘Can I see my mum now, please?’

‘Hold on a minute, Alex,’ she says quickly, setting her pen on her lap. ‘I was enjoying learning all about Ruin. Maybe you can tell me what his hobbies are?’

And so I look at Ruen and he rolls his eyes. ‘Tell her I quite enjoy genocide,’ he says, and I go to say it but then remember what
genocide
means and think that she might look at me funny and so I stay quiet. When I don’t say anything Auntie Bev comes in from the kitchen with a big smile and bends down in front of me.

‘If you tell the nice lady all about the things you can see, we can go visit your mum. OK, Alex?’

‘Today?’

Bev looks at Anya and then nods. ‘Yep. Today.’

And I feel really excited then and tell Anya that I can see all Ruen’s friends, too, and that some of them are scary and look like dragons, and some of them look like human-looking robots with red eyes. ‘Like the Terminator?’ she says and I realise that yes, that’s exactly how some of them look. And so I start wondering whether James Cameron who directed the film sees what I see too and maybe she could speak to him as well.

I hear Bev whispering something to Anya about ‘masculinity issues’ and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Anya nods and says, ‘Potentially.’

‘Let’s talk more about Ruin,’ Anya says, turning back to me. ‘What does he like to eat?’

But I’m fed up now. I just want to see Mum. So I say: ‘Why do you want to know so much about Ruen, huh? He’s a miserable old fart who does nothing but make false promises and whinge about how crap our piano is.’

I glance over at Ruen, expecting him to be cross at me for saying this. And he does look very cross, just not at me. He is looking right past me at the doorway. I follow his gaze but I don’t see anything.

‘Alex?’ I hear Anya ask.

‘What’s wrong?’ I say to Ruen, but he doesn’t reply. He is showing his teeth like Woof does when he’s cross; his face is turning bright red. Then he changes into a monster right in front of me, his short skinny arms bursting out of his shirt and turning dark and shadowy and his eyes rolling back in his head. He grows so tall that his head bends against the ceiling and instead of his funny, purplish monster-skin he looks like thick black smoke with eyes and a hole like the middle of a tornado where his mouth should be. And in the middle of that hole are four long fangs. Then he turns and lunges towards me and I shout, ‘Ruen!’

When I look up I see he’s launched himself across the other side of the room in a kind of twist and crashes into the doorway of the living room, and I am screaming.

When he crashes, I feel very strange. There is such a sharp pain in my chest that I fall to the floor.

‘Alex!’ I hear Anya shout, then Auntie Bev runs towards me and Ruen lets out a huge, deep roar and then there is nothing.

10

THE THIN EDGE OF BELIEF

Anya

At my last session with Alex I met his temporary carer, his aunt Beverly, who drove up from Cork on the evening of Cindy’s suicide attempt. I am relieved when I see her – she is lively, warm, and keen to put her all into helping Alex in whatever way she can. Beverly is Cindy’s elder sister by eleven years and she works as an ear, nose and throat doctor. She has no children of her own and, having had a somewhat intermittent relationship with Alex over the years, is anxious to make up for lost time and be a support for her sister and nephew.

‘I wish I’d come home sooner,’ she tells me over and over at the back of the house, her face twisting as she looks over the smashed window in Cindy’s kitchen, boarded up hapharzardly with cardboard and stickytape; the spots of mould above the sink. She pulls a cigarette from a fresh packet and asks if I mind. I shake my head and she opens the kitchen door, stepping out into the mossy yard.

‘I knew Cindy was struggling. I should have come back for good, helped her out. I love Alex to bits. Cindy and I haven’t always seen eye to eye but …’ She trails off, taking a deep drag. ‘We had such different childhoods. I’ve never understood Cindy. She’s always kept things to herself. My mum did a good job of pulling information out of her, but she never opened up to me.’

I glance back at Alex, who is bringing his plate into the kitchen. He sets it on the bench and smiles at me. Bev waits until he is gone before she finishes.

‘I only have so much time that I can take off work to care for Alex,’ she says, giving up on her cigarette. ‘But I’m all he’s got until Cindy pulls herself round.’

‘What about Alex’s grandparents? Are they around?’

She stubs out her cigarette. ‘Dad died when I was little,’ she says quietly. ‘Mum passed five years ago. She would be horrified by all this.’

‘And Alex’s father?’ I ask. ‘Does he have contact with him?’

She steps inside, shutting the door behind her. It won’t close until she kicks it, making a dent in the base. She sighs. ‘You’d need to talk to Cindy about that. The identity of Alex’s father is something she chose to keep from all of us.’

I wonder why the decision has been made to hold it secret. I make a note to ask Cindy about it: even if Alex’s father needs to remain unnamed, I still need more information about their relationship.

My session with Alex ends badly, though it reveals much about his relationship with his mother. When I ask him to draw a picture of her he sketches an image of himself carrying his mother, and I notice that his self-portrait is much larger than his sketch of Cindy. She looks baby-like, vulnerable in his arms, her own arms wrapped tightly around Alex’s neck. From this I deduce that Alex has sensed her fragility and instability for a long time, which must have borne a huge impact on his sense of security and his role in the family as protector. His representation of his father is in the form of a blue car, which I believe is a memory from his childhood – most likely his father collected him in such a car during his visits.

He also tells me numerous things about the spiritual world, about what he can see and hear, and what he makes of it all. Most of it I can peg on the things I have witnessed in his surroundings, and there are connections to be made between his role in
Hamlet
and his interpretation of his home life. I notice his descriptions flit in and out of religious rhetoric – ‘a dragon with seven horns’, which I believe is in Revelations in the Bible – and the language he uses for such descriptions is far beyond his usual ten-year-old lingo.

‘Ruen is not
bestial
, he says, he’s a
committed intellectual,’
Alex informs me, when I query the portraits of some of the beings in the world he describes. His fondness for Ruin is palpable – protective, even – and I believe there is something of Alex’s feeling towards his mother projected on to his imaginary sketch of Ruin, and with good reason: whereas Alex cannot control his mother, he can control these other beings.

It is common for psychotics to construct a highly fantastical world with clearly defined boundaries and with a system of rules that derives from a system that exists in reality – in this case, the supernatural. Alex never mentions angels, which I find very interesting. No mention of God or any other deity either. However, he says there are demons everywhere, all the time, and that when he enters an empty room it is not empty, it is like a pub, with demons grouped in corners, plotting, huddled around any humans who happen to be about, tempting, cajoling, scheming.

When I press him to discuss Ruin in more detail, Alex erupts. His descriptions of Ruin ascend into a screaming fit, and to my horror he passes out in the chair opposite me.

Bev charges across the room and grabs him. He is limp and deathly pale, and for the first time during my assessment I feel afraid. I feel myself turn over the things he told me about demons, about spirits – immediately I dismiss the notion, but the fear lingers. On reflection, it astonishes me how frail a thing belief is.

After a few moments, Bev shouts, ‘He’s awake! He’s awake!’ I am in the kitchen getting Alex a glass of water. Then: ‘He’s going to be sick!’ I grab the basin out of the sink and race into the living room, just in time to catch a spew of vomit from Alex’s mouth.

‘That’s better, that’s better,’ Bev is saying, thumping him on the back and fumbling in her pocket for her mobile phone.

I kneel down in front of Alex and take his pulse. His heart rate seems fast, his pupils dilated. ‘How do you feel, Alex?’ I ask calmly. He blinks and tries to focus on me. Then he presses a hand against his chest.

‘It hurts.’

‘What hurts?’

‘Here.’

Bev quickly unbuttons Alex’s shirt. She gasps, and I look down to see three red stripes on his chest, as if something has just scorched his skin.

‘Did someone at school do this to you?’ Bev is shouting, and I try to tell her that these marks must have been made recently – as recent as my visit, in fact. My mind reels with questions, but just then Alex leans forward, his face pale and strained. I yank the bucket up, just in time to catch another fountain of puke. Bev dashes into the kitchen to find a cloth. When Alex collapses back in his chair he looks weak, but gives a little smile nonetheless.

‘You feel better?’ I say. He nods.

‘Is Ruin still here?’ I ask tentatively. He looks around, then shakes his head.

Bev returns, a tea towel in one hand, Alex’s coat in the other. Alex is mumbling something about a diary.

‘What should we do?’ Bev splutters.

I look him over. ‘We need to take him to hospital.’

*

We travel to the hospital in Bev’s car, where an examination determines that he is absolutely fine. The doctor can’t find any sign of the marks, despite Bev and I confirming that we saw them.