The Syndrome (6 page)

He thought about the feminists—who had become entangled in the Satanic Ritual Abuse controversy. Many of them believed that denying the reality of SRA was the first step in disavowing more pedestrian forms of sexual abuse. Which made every skeptic an “enabler,” or even worse, a collaborator in the sexual destruction of innocent women and children.

And yet …

If there really
was
a Satanic underground whose sacraments included human sacrifice, cannibalism, and pedophilia—where was the evidence? Where were the bodies, the bloodstains, the bones?

This had always seemed like a good question to Duran, but there were consequences to asking it aloud. For many, it was the sexual equivalent of denying the reality of the Holocaust. And, in fact, SRA
was
a kind of latterday holocaust—or so it was claimed.

He looked up at the wide-open sky and for a moment, thought that he was going to faint. The words in his head—
bloodstains, bones
—seemed disconnected.

Nico, he reminded himself. You are thinking about Nico.
No matter what she told him, Duran kept a lid on his own feelings. No shock, no doubt. Just his own, helpful neutrality, his informed sympathy and concern.
Something
had happened to her, he told himself, and this story, this fable—if it was a fable—was her way of dealing with her own dysfunction, her own dissociation. She’d plucked it out of the culture, out of the air, and fixed on it as an explanation for her problems. Somehow, it helped her to function, and his job as her therapist—was to …

But he’d arrived at the mailbox. He slid the JetPak into the mail slot and turned around and began to walk home. At least he told himself to walk—just
walk
—but after a few steps, and almost imperceptibly, his pace began to increase so that, by the time he got back to the Towers, he was practically running. The security guard—today it was the kid with the Buddy Holly glasses—gave him a funny look as he came crashing into the lobby, but then the kid recognized him and lost interest. Duran managed a smile. A nonchalant salute. And then the elevator took him back to his sanctuary.

For a guy who didn’t get out much, Jeff Duran was in very good shape.

This was owing, in part, to his determination to stay in shape, and in part to the fact that he lived in a building with a health club on the top floor. Since membership in the “club” came with residence in the Towers, the facility was undersized and not quite state-of-the-art. But it had all the basics, the treadmills and Nautilus, Stairmasters and free weights, and in addition boasted a terrific view of Georgetown and the National Cathedral.

Duran was there every morning at six-thirty. His body was well-muscled and flexible, and he kept it that way with a demanding regimen of stretches, cycling, jogging, and weights. His midsection was flat and hard, the result of a punishing routine of sit-ups and crunches. Five days a week, he ran six miles on one of the treadmills that stood in front of the windows, looking out across the city. From that vantage point, he could see Georgetown University’s spires and, beyond it, the curling band of light that was the Potomac.

He always did the first mile at an eight-minute pace, warming up to the next five, which he covered in thirty-seven minutes. It was always the same. When he was done with his run, forty-five minutes had transpired (give or take a minute, here and there).

He could have run faster, but there were two reasons that he didn’t. First, he’d reached the point of diminishing returns:
neither his VO-max nor his pulse rate would benefit from speeding up.

Second … Well, the second reason was idiosyncratic. It was, simply, that when the treadmill exceeded eight and a half miles an hour, it gave out a high-pitched whine that most people couldn’t hear, but which Duran found extremely disagreeable. So he took it a little slower than he might have.

Today was like any other. He arrived at the club a little after dawn, stretched, jogged, and lifted without saying much of anything to anyone. Then he returned to his apartment, showered and shaved.

Standing before the mirror, drying his hair with a towel, he caught a glimpse of himself, and remembered Nico’s remark of the day before:
You oughta get out more, Doc. You’re pale as a ghost.

And so he was. And so he
would be
—unless he overcame the peculiar phobia that was keeping him indoors.
You need a shrink
, Duran told himself, chuckling silently, but not with much conviction. He
was
pale. Not sickly looking, but white—
like a vampire in his prime
, he joked to himself.

Returning to his bedroom, Duran strapped his watch onto his wrist, and noticed the time. It was 8:35, which meant that he had less than half an hour to prepare for his meeting with the day’s first client, Henrik de Groot. Dressing hurriedly, he strode into his office, sat down at the desk and turned on the computer.

Once the machine had booted up, he went into the caseload folder, and opened the file on the Dutchman.

At twenty-eight, de Groot was a successful and sophisticated businessman, commuting between the U.S. and Europe. His firm, one of the world’s largest in the field, designed and installed fire suppression systems for hotels and office buildings, specializing, as De Groot put it, in “human occupied facilities.” The company had pioneered a method of retrofitting halon-based systems in a way that minimized costs. (“Halon,” de Groot explained, “is being phased out in the same way as freon and for the same reason: it’s destroying
the ozone.”) Although Duran had not asked, the Dutchman had explained how “his” fire suppression system worked. When triggered by smoke or heat, a series of nozzles emitted inert gases which lowered the level of oxygen to a point where combustion became impossible—but not to the point that human beings suffocated.

Recently, de Groot’s firm had signed a contract with a major hotel chain in the mid-Atlantic region. This was why Duran had the Dutchman as a client—de Groot had relocated to Washington so that he could oversee the work.

Handsome and powerfully built, Duran’s client spoke four languages fluently and claimed to be “conversant” in Portuguese and Thai, as well. Duran didn’t doubt him.

When de Groot wasn’t working or visiting his therapist, he had one other passion: “trance music.” When asked, the Dutchman described this with a disciple’s enthusiasm. “It’s synthesized stuff, you know—upbeat, fast 4/4 beat. It energizes you, you get lost in the sound, you dance and you go into another dimension. Your mind … kind of explodes.” The Dutchman, jerking and spinning, had launched into an amazing imitation of a synthesizer playing a weird techno version of “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho.”

“Wow.”

De Groot had smiled. “It’s great! You ought to try it, Doc.” He’d named a couple of D.C. clubs. Duran had said he wasn’t much of a dancer and then he’d warned de Groot against using any of the drugs common to the club scene. (Given the medications de Groot was on, recreational drug use would be a big mistake.)

But the image de Groot projected—that of a capable and cosmopolitan businessman, multilingual and hip—was an illusion. Or not an
illusion
, really, but a gloss upon something so dangerous that his other qualities dwindled into irrelevance. Public persona aside, the businessman was in the grip of “command hallucinations.” Specifically, the Dutchman believed that “a worm” had taken residence in his heart and that, as his heart pumped, the worm whispered to him,
counseling de Groot on all manner of things, from politics to finance.

In fact, de Groot exhibited most of the diagnostic criteria listed under paranoid schizophrenia in the
DSM-IV
, the maroon-jacketed tome that served as the shrink’s bible.

Under the circumstances, there was only so much that Duran could do. The psychopharmacology was straightforward enough—Clozaril was the drug of choice—and it was prescribed by the Dutchman’s psychiatrist in Europe, who communicated occasionally with Duran by e-mail. Using hypnosis and regression therapy, Duran’s task was to uncover any trauma contributing to de Groot’s dysfunction, and to help him confront it. Only then would he have any chance of a sustained recovery.

It was, in many ways, a curious case. Among other things, Duran found it interesting that the Dutchman interpreted his illness as a kind of possession—with the instrument of possession being a worm. That the worm was a demon, rather than a parasite, was self-evident even to de Groot: parasites didn’t issue orders—incubae did.

At first, Duran had theorized that the worm was indicative of a multiple personality, with the Dutchman suffering from dissociation rather than schizophrenia. But, no. The Worm was an invader (in de Groot’s eyes), and not an alter ego.

Another disturbing element in de Groot’s personality was his overt racism. In an age of political correctness, it was startling to encounter someone who said the kind of things the Dutchman did. “I don’t know how you live in this city with all these niggers.” Duran was offended by comments like this and always and immediately objected; it was one of the things he and the Dutchman were working on, although so far they hadn’t succeeded in discovering the roots of de Groot’s bigotry. Holland had a small population of blacks—mostly Moluccans—but people of color did not seem to have played any significant role in his client’s life. Duran shook his head, wondering how the Dutchman got by in the business
world—particularly in D.C.—if he tossed off racist comments with any regularity.

Duran looked down at his notes and picked out a word that he’d underlined:
mandala.

It was a term that figured prominently in de Groot’s fantasy world, with the Dutchman insisting at every session that the mandala was evil, and had to be destroyed. Duran recalled that a mandala was some kind of geometric design but still, he’d looked up the term in hopes of parsing its significance for his client. But the encyclopedia wasn’t very helpful. According to it, a mandala was (variously) a representation of the universe; a symbolic painting (consisting of a square, enclosed by a circle); and/or a field of power in constant flux. Buddhists used the figures for meditative purposes, but what they meant to de Groot was anyone’s guess.

Two weeks earlier, he’d shown the Dutchman a collection of Tibetan mandalas that he’d found on the Internet. De Groot’s reaction had been a soft shrug, and the polite remark, “How interesting …” The figures had not seemed to engage him at all.

What
was
interesting was what Duran had learned through his research—that visual hallucinations of mandalas were quite common in schizophrenics, who found in the rigid symmetries of the figures a kind of order and stability that did not exist elsewhere in their minds. Most schizophrenics found
solace
in mandalas whereas de Groot …

Bizzzzzzzzzzzttt!

The intercom startled Duran, as it always did, but his client was right on time. Closing the folder, he got to his feet, went into the living room, and pressed the switch on the intercom. “Henrik?”

The Dutchman was almost as handsome as he was crazy. His hair was yellow, rather than blond, spiky and glistening, like the pelt of a wet animal. High cheekbones and the palest of blue eyes flared and glittered on either side of a long, straight nose. A deeply cleft chin completed the picture.

Or not quite. There was something else about de Groot’s appearance that turned heads on the street. It was, for lack of a better term, an aura of athleticism—a nimbus of physical power and grace that his expensive business suits did nothing to conceal. And, somehow, that made his illness seem all the more tragic.

Henrik was humming to himself as he came in. It was the same tune the Dutchman always hummed and Duran had long ago discerned its melody: “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho.” He’d inquired several times if the song had some special significance. Had de Groot, for instance, been especially religious? A churchgoer in his youth? That might have explained quite a bit, but de Groot denied it. “Church?” He’d frowned, pronouncing the word as if it were foreign to him and slightly distasteful. “No.”

Escorting the Dutchman to the easy chair that he preferred to the couch, Duran put his client in a light trance, and softened him up with guided imagery. “We’re sitting together on a rock,” he said, “in a little harbor that no one else can see. There’s just you and me, and the waves, and the birds. And a light wind that smells of the sea. It’s our safe place, Henrik.”

“Yes.”

“And nothing can hurt you here. Nothing and no one.”

De Groot nodded. “No one,” he repeated.

“Now, I want you to tell about the Worm,” Duran suggested. “Tell me about the Worm.”

“The Worm is boss,” de Groot mumbled.

“We know that, Henrik, but—how did you come by it?”

De Groot frowned, and shook his head. “This is not to be discussed.”

“Of course it is,” Duran replied. “That’s why we’re here. And, anyway, we’ve spoken of it before—many times.”

“No … I think not.”

“There was a light,” Duran reminded him. “A bright light. Remember? You were driving….”

The Dutchman’s expression changed from a look of defensive certainty to apprehension. “No,” he said, “not today.”
Suddenly, he began to lean forward and sit up, as if he were about to get out of the chair.

Duran laid his fingertips on de Groot’s wrist, restraining him with the softest touch. “It’s okay, Henrik,” he said. “You’re with me. We’re in the safe place.”

His client sagged, and touching his tongue to his palate, made a soft
tsk.
“All right,” he said. “I remember.”

“What do you remember?”

“There was a light—on the road—”

Duran shook his head. “There was a light—in the
sky.”

“Yes … of course,
it was in the sky
, but … I was driving. I was on a farm road.”

“In America?”

“Yes—here, in America!”

“Where?” Duran asked.

De Groot shrugged. “Watkins Glen.”

“And then what?”

“The light was in the road,” the Dutchman said, suddenly agitated. “It was all around me. So brilliant! And blinding—like a flash that doesn’t go away. I can’t see!”