Oliver Davis woke around 10am on a Saturday morning. The first thing he noticed was that he was in his room in his parents' house in England, not in Japan. The second thing he noticed was the needles in his arm attached to a drip and other hospital equipment surrounding his bed.
As he forced himself into a sitting position, he tried to think back. What was the last thing he remembered?
They had just found Gene's body. Mai had confessed and he had pushed away her feelings. Then he, Lin and his parents had climbed into the car to leave for the airport. Had they been in an accident?
But this was definitely England. They couldn't have flown if he had been in accident, not without waking up beforehand. Before Oliver could do anything else, the door opened and a short brunette nurse backed into the room holding a tray of what he presumed to be food.
"Oliver! You're up! Wonderful!" It was Mai.
"Mai what is going on? Why am I here?"
"Do you not remember?" Mai said kindly. Oliver didn't like the way she was speaking. It wasn't Mai's usual kindness, but a sickly sweet forced imitation. "You had another fit and we had to sedate you until you'd returned home."
"A fit? You mean I used my PK?" Oliver frowned, why would he have done that?
"You're not still going on about that PK nonsense are you?" Mai continued in that deathly sweet voice as she placed the tray of food on his lap. "I thought you'd moved on from that now."
"Where's Lin?" Oliver asked. Mai was not making sense, Lin would straighten things out.
"If you eat your breakfast like a good boy, I'll fetch Lin for you."
"Mai, why are you talking to me in that ridiculous tone?" Oliver asked curtly. "Why are you in England dressed as a nurse? And why…" He had only just realised. "Why are you speaking English?"
"Because you live in England silly! And what else would I speak to you in? Japanese?" Mai laughed; the first sound out of her mouth that had almost sounded like the Mai he knew.
"Go and get Lin." Oliver demanded. Something was wrong with Mai. But when had she learnt English to a level where she sounded like a native speaker?
"Manners Oliver! Eat up!" She said cheerfully as she flounced out of the room. Suspiciously, Oliver began eating the meal she had brought him. Even the accompanying cup of tea tasted wrong.
Lin entered a few minutes after he had finished eating.
"Lin, what is going on?"
"Why don't you tell me what you remember and then I can fill you in?" Lin suggested gravely, taking a seat beside the bed.
"I remember finding Gene's body, then we all got in the car and then…" Oliver trailed off. "Then I woke up here. But Mai is acting strangely and I think she might be possessed. Yet that can't be right, my father had the house warded against spirits. And I didn't think Mai was a perfect medium either, so how is she speaking English?"
"Well you've had a bit of an episode Oliver." Lin said calmly. "And your parents and Dr Ayako hoped that if we played out the scenario it would help you come round."
"What are you talking about Lin? What happened to Gene's body? Is it still in Japan? Why is Mai in England?" Oliver could feel himself getting frustrated.
"Calm down Oliver, you're safe here. I think I am going to need to talk to Dr Ayako."
As Lin stood up, Mai bounced back into the room with Masako hot on her heels. Oliver noticed Masako was also dressed in a nurses' uniform.
"You've finished?" Mai asked with a big fake smile plastered across her face. "Let me take that from you!"
"Masako why are you here?" Oliver asked. He was starting to get seriously annoyed.
"I'm your nurse silly!" She giggled from behind her hand.
"Lin I demand you explain everything right now!" Oliver almost shouted. It was hard to keep so calm when the world seemed to have turned upside down.
"Masako, Mai, please go and get Dr Ayako." Lin said, and then retook his seat.
"Sure thing!" The two young women ran off.
"Oliver, about a year ago you began having delusions." Lin began. "Worse than your usual ones and the medication wasn't helping. You started to claim you had a twin brother named Gene, who died in Japan and only you knew about it. Dr Ayako suggested to your parents that we played through your delusion to see if we could help you work through it and realise it wasn't true but..."
"Lin, this is not funny." Oliver said dully. This had to be Yasuhara's idea of a joke. Though how he had got Lin and his parents in on it, Oliver would never know. "I did have a twin brother, he was killed in Japan. I saw it in a psychometric vision. Now stop this ridiculous idea of a joke and tell me what the hell Mai and Masako are doing in England?!"
Mai re-entered the room.
"How's it going?" She asked Lin.
"Poorly."
Mai sighed, then pulled something out of her pocket.
"Oliver, do you remember the photo you gave me of you and Gene before you left?"
Oliver nodded and Mai handed him the something she'd pulled out. It was the photo. It took Oliver only a moment to realise that something was missing from the photo; Gene.
"Why is it like this?"
"That's how it was when you gave it to me." Mai looked at Lin. "Get his passport out of the drawer."
Lin did as asked and passed it to Oliver.
"You never went to Japan Oliver; you can check your passport. See, there's no entry sticker or exit stamp."
Oliver recognised the crease in the corner of the cover of the passport where it had been previously jammed into a bag. It was his passport alright. Yet Mai was right, there were no stamps in it at all.
"But the people we helped? The cases we solved? The reports I wrote on parapsychology?" Oliver felt confused; something he was not used to and did not like. He watched as Mai picked up a laptop from the desk and passed it to him.
"Go on, check."
Oliver opened his laptop and booted it up, feeling unnerved by the watching eyes of Mai and Lin. The folders of his work were there, but when he opened a document up, it was just a bunch of scrambled letters.
"You made it all up Oliver." Mai said quietly, and she finally sounded like the Mai Oliver knew.
"But all the times I saved you?" He pleaded with Mai. "The lakes we visited?" He turned to Lin.
"They were staged. The lakes were just ones from the surrounding countryside."
"The people we helped?"
"Paid actors."
"No." Oliver said, calming himself. "Stop this right now Mai. Just because I spurned your advances does not mean you can try and pull this prank off. Trying to convince someone they are mentally ill is cruel. So stop it or I will sack you."
"Masako and I did wonder who it was you'd convinced yourself was in love with you. I had my money on Masako after all those dates…" Mai trailed off.
"I had to take Masako on dates because she was blackmailing me with my real identity!" Oliver replied tersely. "You were the one that confessed by the lake."
Ayako entered the room at that point.
"Ayako! Please talk some sense." Oliver tried not to sound like he was begging.
"I don't think playing through the hallucination helped." Lin said to Ayako as if Oliver wasn't even in the room. "If anything, I think it's firmly set it in his mind that his delusion was true."
"It wasn't a delusion!" Oliver shouted. "Where are my parents? They will tell you Gene is real! Martin will have backups of my files. I sent him everything we reported in Japan. Luella will tell you-"
"That you have an odd form of Schizophrenia." Ayako said as she straightened her white coat. "I think we will have to return to the medication. Lin will you inform his parents?"
Lin nodded and left the room.
"Mai please stop this." Oliver pleaded. He had lost all sense of his rational self. He was scared.
"Lie back down Oliver." Mai said kindly. "This won't hurt." She was fiddling with the needle that was inserted into his arm. Oliver could feel a drug taking effect; he felt ever so sleepy.
"Just remember Oliver, it's just like you said. Your brain works differently to mine."
The last thing Oliver saw was Mai's beautiful smiling face before he fell into a deep, deep sleep.
Author's Note: So I thought of this in the shower, and thought I should write it down. So please review!