EVIL DEAD: THE SERIES
Episode 12
"The Abyss Gazes Also"
September 1, 1999.
A long, hot summer is drawing to a close. And, in the half-joking opinion of my old college roommate Bill, the world inches ever closer to the Apocalypse at the Millennium.
As I drive to work, I think over the last conversation I had with him, a few days earlier.
"Trust me on this," he said. He always says that, especially when you shouldn't trust him. The only night I ever spent in jail was caused by 'trusting' him, or more specifically the friend of his who made a fake ID for me, combined with the skinheads he picked a fight with in the bar once we'd made it in.
His doom and gloom theory sounds a bit too plausible for my tastes. Sure, the Y2K problem won't be a big deal for us here in the United States. Maybe power will go off briefly, maybe not even that. But in the backwards parts of Eastern Europe, where antiquated Russian computers keep track of nuclear missiles... well, something could easily go wrong there. One glitch, somewhere in Whoknowzistan, and whoosh, a missile that, long ago, some Communist programmed to target New York City launches toward its destination.
I don't know why this, of all his conspiratorial gibberish, has stuck in my head. Well, actually, I do have a few clues: one a gentle and far too understanding wife named Amelia, the others a headstrong 16-year old named Akina and a precocious 12-year old named Kiyoshi. Any talk of disasters, natural or manmade, immediately triggers my 'protect the family' reflex. I can't believe this, but in the dark of night, listening to Amelia's gentle nose-whistling snore, I kept thinking about what Bill had said and actually considered moving them somewhere far from Russian military targets. Not that Atlanta is high on the list, I would assume, but it's still a fairly major city.
I won't do it, of course. I have a good job, we live in a great neighborhood. We've lived in Atlanta four years now, since I took the job with the Wellness Institute. Amelia wouldn't complain anyhow, but she really has taken a liking to the South, and our spacious home and back yard have really brought out the Martha Stewart in her. Kiyoshi found some co-conspirators his age within days of arriving in Atlanta, and they've ridden bikes and scraped knees ever since. Even Akina is as happy as anyone suffering through the angst of her mid-teens can be.
My latest patient reminds me of Akina, in a way. She isn't as strong-willed, at least in her present condition, but she has the same wistfulness, the same quiet introspection.
As I drive through the gates to the sanitarium --- check that, the 'Institute' --- and I park my car, the rain starts. Typical. I just got it washed day before yesterday.
I nod at the guard at the front door --- Gilbert, if I remember correctly --- and make my way into the facility. I'm running a few minutes late, but not enough to be concerned about. My secretary knows that I'm terminally incapable of arriving on time on Monday, and schedules my appointments appropriately. I have just enough time to get a cup of coffee and settle in before my 9:15 a.m. appointment.
Gretchen Halspont shuffles her feet when she walks in, escorted by one of the burly interns. He is a bit too rough with her when she pauses at the door, and I make a mental note to talk to his superiors about his attitude; we're here to help these people, not bully them.
It's not as if Gretchen is a troublesome patient, anyhow. Even if she wanted to cause trouble, she's a mere slip of a girl, 5'7" and barely tipping the scales at 100 pounds. I've asked the nurse to help her get to a healthier weight, but in her time at the institute, she's never had much of an appetite. Considering the delusions she suffers from, it's easy to understand why.
On top of my other concerns for her, which I'll get to in a moment, I've begun to suspect that someone on the staff is shuffling through my confidential files on her. It happens in this business... staffmembers who aren't authorized to look at the reports get curious and start rummaging for gossip. But I don't like it, and I plan to start writing down information about our sessions in Japanese, so only I will most likely be able to read it.
As she enters my office, Gretchen casts a wary eye out the window and seems reluctant to sit down.
The intern starts to move toward her, to push her into her seat, but I make a thumb gesture for him to leave, and he does, not shutting the door completely.
I go to the door to close it the rest of the way, and when I turn around I see Gretchen staring out the window. Her dark green eyes are focused on the arboretum behind the Institute, where on clear days patients frequently take nature walks. But never Gretchen.
From her records, I know that Gretchen is 21 years old, but she seems so fragile and mild, I could easily imagine her as an introspective school friend of Akina's. Perhaps this sense that she is so close to being a contemporary of my daughter's makes me more concerned for her; I do feel an almost parental responsibility for her, and in our weeks together I've grown to care deeply for her in that way.
And only in that way, before you get any inappropriate thoughts. I feel strongly about the responsibility we have to take care of, and not take advantage of, our patients. Just last year, I had to file a report about a colleague who I caught fondling a patient. I despise people like him, predators posing as protectors.
Besides, my warm-hearted little redhead Amelia is all the woman I'll ever need, and I've known that since we met, when she was working at the coffee shop across the street from the college the senior year of my undergraduate studies. I became quite the caffeine addict before I worked up the nerve to finally ask her out.
The rain beats down heavily now, and Gretchen leans her forehead against the glass of the window, so she can gaze out at the arboretum without taking in any of my office in her line of sight.
"They're out there, Dr. Takoshi," she says hoarsely, her voice barely audible. Her eyes stare intently at the woods. The rain, and the woods. It makes more sense now that I think about it.
She looks back at me, pleadingly. She wears her dark brown hair straight, the bangs almost coming down over her eyes. She cocks her head downwards and slightly to the left, so she seems to be staring at me through the bangs, adding to her already waifish appearance. "They are," she says emphatically.
"You can take a seat now, Gretchen," I say soothingly. But she doesn't, she just turns her attention back to the woods.
She's never seemed so fixated on the woods before, but then again, in the weeks I've been treating her we've been going through a bit of a drought. It's raining now, and the woods and the rain combine to draw her attention away from here and now. I'm no mindreader, but I'm reasonably sure that her thoughts are back nearly 5 years, to the night when her life changed.
I come up beside her and look out at the trees. Lightning flashes, and a few moments later thunder rumbles.
"There's nothing out there, Gretchen," I assure her. "Nothing but trees and bushes... and maybe a squirrel or two." I grin, hoping to get her to respond in kind, but of course she doesn't.
"They dwell in the woods," she replies evenly, and I know from her tone she's not referring to the squirrels. "Just outside of sight, darting past the corners of our eyes, whispering in the shadows, skimming across the tree limbs above us before we take notice. Coming up behind our backs and then vanishing just before we glance over our shoulders. Watching us. Waiting."
'They' indeed. Like many schizophrenics, Gretchen is convinced that demons are out to get her. With some patients, it is best to humor them. With others, it is more effective to dismiss their demonic fixation right away, to ridicule the notion without, hopefully, ridiculing the patient. It takes finesse, and I happen to be very good at convincing patients that their obsessions are misguided. That's why, when Gretchen was transferred here, they turned her case over to me. She's been a hard nut to crack, her therapist at the Nashville institute told me. His attempt at psychiatric humor, I guess.
Any time I try to dismiss her concerns, to reassure her that there are no mysterious creatures lying in wait for her, she just looks at me as if I were the patient. To convince her that her fears are misguided, I first have to understand and empathize with those fears, and see where she's coming from. Every time I think I've done that, I realize that whatever traumatized her struck more deeply than I thought... every time, she looks at me as if I'm an idiot for not understanding what she has gone through.
"I've walked through those woods many times," I tell her. "And nothing has ever attacked me."
"But they've watched you," she replies, her voice melancholic and her eyes hollow. It's not as if she cares about the supposed demons stalking her; she rarely shows any emotion at all, and seems more resigned than anything else. She's not trying to warn others about these demons, she's just... telling us what is out there, as she sees the world. Giving us matter-of-fact information.
In the back of my mind, I think --- just for a split second -- about telling her about Bill's 'end of the world' theory, as if perhaps distracting her from her current fixation might be enough to shake her out of the daze she's been in so many years. But before that split second ends, reason and responsibility take over. I can't try to push a patient over a second cliff to save her from falling off of the first one she's teetering on... if that imagery makes any sense.
"I know what you're thinking," she says, turning her gaze back out the window. "Poor little crazy girl, got her mind scrambled in the woods during a storm, so every time she sees rain and trees she snaps."
Not quite the way I would have worded it, but her statement isn't very far off the mark.
She brushes her hair out of her eyes and stares at me even more intently.
"But you have to ask yourself," she says, leaning in uncomfortably close and whispering, "what if I'm right? What if we're not the masters of the world, not the highest order of species, not the final draft in God's grand design scheme... but instead just the prey for some breathing nightmares we only dimly comprehend?"
"I...." I start to say, without a real finale to the statement. She doesn't give me a chance to finish it anyhow.
"Have you ever been hunted, doctor?"
"No..."
She smiles sadly. "That's what you think."
Our session doesn't go very far. It's hard to make progress with someone whose psychotic fixation is as resolute as Gretchen's... it's going to take a lot more therapy, over a lot more time, before I make any progress.
The rest of the day goes uneventfully. When I leave that evening, I see Gretchen standing in front of the picture window in the rec hall, staring at the grove of trees, silent. A nurse tells me that she's been there for more than an hour, watching the patients who have gone to walk through the trees after the storm and enjoy nature. I start to speak to Gretchen, but think better of it; next time we have a session, I tell myself, I'll make sure to do it in Kendrick's office, which looks out at the road instead of those woods.
Amelia's taken the kids to visit their grandparents, so I have the house to myself tonight. I make my famous diced pork omelette for supper --- not a bad job, if I say so myself --- and start to settle in.
It seems like a Nick at Nite kind of evening. I'm not in the mood for the History Channel. Amelia teases me that we pay for sixty channels, but I only watch two of them. I lean back in my easy chair, clad in my jeans and tattered 'Psychiatrists Do It in Hour-Long Sessions' T-shirt, and relax.
Then, I realize, tomorrow is garbage pickup day. Without even stopping to put my shoes on, I head to the kitchen and grab the trash can from under the sink. The rain stopped hours earlier, and I don't bother turning on the lights as I head into the back yard to get the trash can and roll it around to the front yard. It's just past dusk, and it isn't very dark outside yet. The air is crisp and fresh, replacing the stifling humidity of the past few weeks. I breathe it in, glad that we've had a break in the weather, when I feel the hairs on the back of my neck.
In the woods behind my house, I hear leaves rustle.
I don't know why it unnerves me so much... there's a wide back yard between me and those trees. If a rabid possum, or an angry bear, or heck, even a snarling demon were to leap out of the woods all of a sudden, I'd have time to run back into the house.
If I hadn't just locked myself out of the house.
Shit.
I chuckle to myself, thinking about the times I've teased Amelia for locking her keys in the car, as I take the trash out to the curb. I can visualize my keys, sitting there on top of the entertainment center next to my wallet, beside that photo of Amelia's parents. The front door's locked. I have a spare house key in my car, but I locked my car doors tonight for no good reason, and my spare car key is in my wallet. So I'm trapped out here til Amelia and the kids get back.
I plop down in a lawn chair in the back yard and gaze out at the woods. No way I'm going to wait on the front porch, and let the neighbors know what a boneheaded mistake I made, locking myself out of my own home.
In the darkness, with no moonlight due to the cloud cover, it's easy to see how Gretchen could have gotten scared lost in the woods. She was only 16 at the time, when she and her friend Peter wandered into the woodlands of rural Tennessee with a camcorder. They had been trying to tape footage of an old cabin out there in the woods, where some murders had taken place a year earlier.
A storm started up, and the two kids panicked. I still haven't been able to figure out much about what happened to Peter... Gretchen clams up when I bring up his name, and when I called the Spiegel County, Tennessee sheriff's office to clarify the sketchy details in her folder, they wouldn't help me. It's almost as if they were trying to cover up something. I also asked them about the video tape footage that Gretchen had been taping, and they claimed the tape was missing.
Gretchen said something had attacked them in what was left of the cabin, and as they tried to escape, the woods literally came alive and....
You know, this might not be the best line of thought while I'm stuck here in the back yard.
I stare off into the woods, and see a few limbs moving in the breeze. Nothing, however, comes to life or tries to attack me.
Amelia and the kids WERE coming back tonight, weren't they? Her folks live two hours away, so sometimes they decide it's such a long drive they'll spend the night. I hope that doesn't happen this time.
I could try to open a window, but with the money I paid for a security system last May that would just set off alarms... and I'd be embarrassed to admit to the cops that I'd locked myself out of my own house. No, if I have to, I can just sleep out here on the patio furniture. It's nice and moderate, at least... I'd hate to have been stuck out here during the humid, hot nights we were having a month ago, or during the cold weather to come in a few months.
I think again about the woods, and what Gretchen has said about them. Creatures lurking in the dark bowers, at the edge of man's domain... it sounds so cheesy, so melodramatic.
Still, it's not without precedent. Mankind has long been afraid of the woods, of what might be hidden out of sight. In ancient times, people believed in evil faeries, lurking in isolated mountain passes, waiting to abduct mortals or merely rip them apart without rhyme or reason, and in werewolves, stalking the forests in search of prey, their animal cunning blended with the intelligence and cruelty only humans are capable of. Lumberjacks used to tell stories of the "Hide-Behind", a beast that, true to its name, hid behind trees, watching them and waiting to isolate one Lumberjack from the rest and tear him to shreds.
Isolated. I look to the trees, and hear a chittering sound in the distance. A raccoon, perhaps?
This is silly. It's not as if I'm deep in the forest somewhere. I'm sitting beside my $200,000 home, in the middle of the suburbs, safely nestled in civilization.
And yet, I can't get my mind off that chittering.
Maybe I should wait on the front porch, after all. Or maybe I should walk down the block and see if Charlie's home. We could watch ESPN for awhile, me feigning interest in the sports he is so enthusiastic about, like usual. But no, I remember, this is the night Charlie always works a double shift at the hospital. He wouldn't be there.
It's a shame I haven't made more friends in the neighborhood. I'd hate to impose on the Kellys... they're more friends of Amelia than me. And Bob moved last month, and I haven't even talked to the people who moved in to his place yet other than saying "Hi" from across the street while picking up the morning paper.
Even if the chittering is just a raccoon, it might not be a good idea for me to stay back here. What if he's rabid, and comes and bites me?
I hear the phone ring in the house.
I start to dart for the back door, before I think about how useless that is.
What if it's Amelia, calling to say they'll be spending the night at her parents' house? I run around to the front porch and put my ear against the glass beside the door, hoping to hear her voice on the answering machine when it picks up, but whoever called just hangs up.
Damn. At least I'd have known.
What am I being so paranoid about, anyhow? I don't believe in monsters. I haven't since... well, ever, actually. Even when I was a little kid, and Grandma Koshi tried to scare me with spooky stories, I just questioned the logic of what she was saying and didn't take any of it seriously.
Plenty of people go through woods without being attacked by monsters. Plenty of people probably lock themselves out of their homes without being found mutilated the next day.
But those people haven't heard Gretchen's ramblings, or seen the cold deadness in her eyes.
After half an hour, Mrs. Comstock from down at the corner goes past, on a nighttime jog with her Sheltie. She glances over at me curiously, but says nothing. Not wanting to admit my foolishness in locking myself out, I don't say anything to her, either.
The branches of the tree in the front yard sway gently. I glance at them, then stare more strongly, trying to make out any silhouettes that might be crouched up in the limbs, watching me. There's nothing, of course. This is absurd.
But you know, the tingle I feel down the back of my neck, that must be what Gretchen feels constantly. And with her dementia, she's convinced that there ARE things out there, watching her. I'm just toying with the notion, and don't even believe in it, and it still has me creeped out. What must she go through each time she walks into a shadowy room? Or when she lies in the dark, waiting to fall asleep? Surely if there are things lurking in the forests, it follows that they lurk elsewhere. Under beds, scaring children in the night. In basements and attics. In the shrubs near front porches where hapless psychiatrists sit.
Headlights flash in my eyes, and I blink instinctively. It is Amelia's station wagon.
Oh, thank God.
I get up and go to it, to open the door for my wife. She looks at me curiously, and gently teases me when she realizes I have locked myself out of the house. The kids get out, denying that they are tired after the long drive, but showing signs of weariness.
Amelia tells me that running around the yard in my bare feet, I'm lucky if I don't catch a cold. I start to joke that I'm even luckier that no monsters in the shadows decided to catch ME, but I don't. I just follow my wife to the front door, and when she unlocks it, I very happily go inside.
There, I feel safe. The carpet is warm and soft to my feet, the television set plays the sounds of 'Happy Days'.
I feel a comfort that Gretchen Halspont can't feel, the poor kid.
Perhaps some day, I'll help her get over her fears. Compared with what she worries about, the Y2K paranoia Bill has been telling me about is child's play. Both are absurd worries, of course. Civilization isn't going to end with a computer glitch, and sinister forces aren't waiting to maul us.
We speculate on worst-case scenarios such as Y2K with a morbid curiosity, but only the most deranged of survivalists actually believes in it. Humanity has always been good at worrying, and rarely with any good reason; one thousand years ago, people were convinced at the end of the year 999 A.D. that the world would soon end, that the rapture was upon them and they should give their lands to the church to 'buy' their way into heaven. All we've done is substitute computers for God, and stockpiling canned food and generators for desperate tithing. By worrying about something as big and all-consuming as Y2K or the Rapture, we take our minds away from our real problems and make them seem inconsequential, which keeps us from focusing on what's really important.
We create imaginary boogeymen in our minds to justify the unease we feel with the darkness, with the vast unknown. We'd rather think there's a hideous werewolf or some such nonsense watching from the shadows than admit that we have no way of knowing, that we comprehend such a tiny fraction of the spectrum of reality we're practically blind and deaf. We'd rather feel the adrenaline jolt from fear than admit that there are no ghouls out there eager to slaughter us, that the universe just doesn't care enough about us to bother sending monsters after us. We create monsters to justify our despair and disguise it as terror.
Which isn't to say there aren't monsters out there, but those monsters are our own creations. They're the ones 'civilization' has nurtured. They're the John Wayne Gacys of the world, the predators, lurking among us, the ones I feel a knot in my stomach about any time I don't know where my children are. Nature, red of tooth and claw, has nothing on the repulsive extremes humankind is capable of. But rather than admit there are people among us so sick, our fantasies give them fangs or turn them into ghosts and demons. After all, we want to say, no human would be so inhumane, would they?
But they would be. And they are. And they will be. The best I can do is try to help those in need of help, and hope that I bring them a little further back from the abyss, and in so doing bring humanity overall a little further back. It's not always easy, and it doesn't always work. But it's all I can do.
I don't know what happened to Gretchen out there in the woods, those years ago. It would probably be better for my well-being if I didn't know. But without learning about what she went through, I can't help her. Somewhere, in these crazy stories she tells --- about a disembodied hand, about the woods coming alive, about these spectres she imagines behind the trees --- somewhere in all of that, there's a grain of truth that will lead me to what happened to her, and I hope give me some clue of what I can do to bring her back from her torment, and let her rejoin the human race as the caring, compassionate person I detect in her. But first I have to help her shed her dark fantasies. We've got enough to worry about in real life without making up evil forces gathering in the shadows. Right?
End.
Episode 12
"The Abyss Gazes Also"
September 1, 1999.
A long, hot summer is drawing to a close. And, in the half-joking opinion of my old college roommate Bill, the world inches ever closer to the Apocalypse at the Millennium.
As I drive to work, I think over the last conversation I had with him, a few days earlier.
"Trust me on this," he said. He always says that, especially when you shouldn't trust him. The only night I ever spent in jail was caused by 'trusting' him, or more specifically the friend of his who made a fake ID for me, combined with the skinheads he picked a fight with in the bar once we'd made it in.
His doom and gloom theory sounds a bit too plausible for my tastes. Sure, the Y2K problem won't be a big deal for us here in the United States. Maybe power will go off briefly, maybe not even that. But in the backwards parts of Eastern Europe, where antiquated Russian computers keep track of nuclear missiles... well, something could easily go wrong there. One glitch, somewhere in Whoknowzistan, and whoosh, a missile that, long ago, some Communist programmed to target New York City launches toward its destination.
I don't know why this, of all his conspiratorial gibberish, has stuck in my head. Well, actually, I do have a few clues: one a gentle and far too understanding wife named Amelia, the others a headstrong 16-year old named Akina and a precocious 12-year old named Kiyoshi. Any talk of disasters, natural or manmade, immediately triggers my 'protect the family' reflex. I can't believe this, but in the dark of night, listening to Amelia's gentle nose-whistling snore, I kept thinking about what Bill had said and actually considered moving them somewhere far from Russian military targets. Not that Atlanta is high on the list, I would assume, but it's still a fairly major city.
I won't do it, of course. I have a good job, we live in a great neighborhood. We've lived in Atlanta four years now, since I took the job with the Wellness Institute. Amelia wouldn't complain anyhow, but she really has taken a liking to the South, and our spacious home and back yard have really brought out the Martha Stewart in her. Kiyoshi found some co-conspirators his age within days of arriving in Atlanta, and they've ridden bikes and scraped knees ever since. Even Akina is as happy as anyone suffering through the angst of her mid-teens can be.
My latest patient reminds me of Akina, in a way. She isn't as strong-willed, at least in her present condition, but she has the same wistfulness, the same quiet introspection.
As I drive through the gates to the sanitarium --- check that, the 'Institute' --- and I park my car, the rain starts. Typical. I just got it washed day before yesterday.
I nod at the guard at the front door --- Gilbert, if I remember correctly --- and make my way into the facility. I'm running a few minutes late, but not enough to be concerned about. My secretary knows that I'm terminally incapable of arriving on time on Monday, and schedules my appointments appropriately. I have just enough time to get a cup of coffee and settle in before my 9:15 a.m. appointment.
Gretchen Halspont shuffles her feet when she walks in, escorted by one of the burly interns. He is a bit too rough with her when she pauses at the door, and I make a mental note to talk to his superiors about his attitude; we're here to help these people, not bully them.
It's not as if Gretchen is a troublesome patient, anyhow. Even if she wanted to cause trouble, she's a mere slip of a girl, 5'7" and barely tipping the scales at 100 pounds. I've asked the nurse to help her get to a healthier weight, but in her time at the institute, she's never had much of an appetite. Considering the delusions she suffers from, it's easy to understand why.
On top of my other concerns for her, which I'll get to in a moment, I've begun to suspect that someone on the staff is shuffling through my confidential files on her. It happens in this business... staffmembers who aren't authorized to look at the reports get curious and start rummaging for gossip. But I don't like it, and I plan to start writing down information about our sessions in Japanese, so only I will most likely be able to read it.
As she enters my office, Gretchen casts a wary eye out the window and seems reluctant to sit down.
The intern starts to move toward her, to push her into her seat, but I make a thumb gesture for him to leave, and he does, not shutting the door completely.
I go to the door to close it the rest of the way, and when I turn around I see Gretchen staring out the window. Her dark green eyes are focused on the arboretum behind the Institute, where on clear days patients frequently take nature walks. But never Gretchen.
From her records, I know that Gretchen is 21 years old, but she seems so fragile and mild, I could easily imagine her as an introspective school friend of Akina's. Perhaps this sense that she is so close to being a contemporary of my daughter's makes me more concerned for her; I do feel an almost parental responsibility for her, and in our weeks together I've grown to care deeply for her in that way.
And only in that way, before you get any inappropriate thoughts. I feel strongly about the responsibility we have to take care of, and not take advantage of, our patients. Just last year, I had to file a report about a colleague who I caught fondling a patient. I despise people like him, predators posing as protectors.
Besides, my warm-hearted little redhead Amelia is all the woman I'll ever need, and I've known that since we met, when she was working at the coffee shop across the street from the college the senior year of my undergraduate studies. I became quite the caffeine addict before I worked up the nerve to finally ask her out.
The rain beats down heavily now, and Gretchen leans her forehead against the glass of the window, so she can gaze out at the arboretum without taking in any of my office in her line of sight.
"They're out there, Dr. Takoshi," she says hoarsely, her voice barely audible. Her eyes stare intently at the woods. The rain, and the woods. It makes more sense now that I think about it.
She looks back at me, pleadingly. She wears her dark brown hair straight, the bangs almost coming down over her eyes. She cocks her head downwards and slightly to the left, so she seems to be staring at me through the bangs, adding to her already waifish appearance. "They are," she says emphatically.
"You can take a seat now, Gretchen," I say soothingly. But she doesn't, she just turns her attention back to the woods.
She's never seemed so fixated on the woods before, but then again, in the weeks I've been treating her we've been going through a bit of a drought. It's raining now, and the woods and the rain combine to draw her attention away from here and now. I'm no mindreader, but I'm reasonably sure that her thoughts are back nearly 5 years, to the night when her life changed.
I come up beside her and look out at the trees. Lightning flashes, and a few moments later thunder rumbles.
"There's nothing out there, Gretchen," I assure her. "Nothing but trees and bushes... and maybe a squirrel or two." I grin, hoping to get her to respond in kind, but of course she doesn't.
"They dwell in the woods," she replies evenly, and I know from her tone she's not referring to the squirrels. "Just outside of sight, darting past the corners of our eyes, whispering in the shadows, skimming across the tree limbs above us before we take notice. Coming up behind our backs and then vanishing just before we glance over our shoulders. Watching us. Waiting."
'They' indeed. Like many schizophrenics, Gretchen is convinced that demons are out to get her. With some patients, it is best to humor them. With others, it is more effective to dismiss their demonic fixation right away, to ridicule the notion without, hopefully, ridiculing the patient. It takes finesse, and I happen to be very good at convincing patients that their obsessions are misguided. That's why, when Gretchen was transferred here, they turned her case over to me. She's been a hard nut to crack, her therapist at the Nashville institute told me. His attempt at psychiatric humor, I guess.
Any time I try to dismiss her concerns, to reassure her that there are no mysterious creatures lying in wait for her, she just looks at me as if I were the patient. To convince her that her fears are misguided, I first have to understand and empathize with those fears, and see where she's coming from. Every time I think I've done that, I realize that whatever traumatized her struck more deeply than I thought... every time, she looks at me as if I'm an idiot for not understanding what she has gone through.
"I've walked through those woods many times," I tell her. "And nothing has ever attacked me."
"But they've watched you," she replies, her voice melancholic and her eyes hollow. It's not as if she cares about the supposed demons stalking her; she rarely shows any emotion at all, and seems more resigned than anything else. She's not trying to warn others about these demons, she's just... telling us what is out there, as she sees the world. Giving us matter-of-fact information.
In the back of my mind, I think --- just for a split second -- about telling her about Bill's 'end of the world' theory, as if perhaps distracting her from her current fixation might be enough to shake her out of the daze she's been in so many years. But before that split second ends, reason and responsibility take over. I can't try to push a patient over a second cliff to save her from falling off of the first one she's teetering on... if that imagery makes any sense.
"I know what you're thinking," she says, turning her gaze back out the window. "Poor little crazy girl, got her mind scrambled in the woods during a storm, so every time she sees rain and trees she snaps."
Not quite the way I would have worded it, but her statement isn't very far off the mark.
She brushes her hair out of her eyes and stares at me even more intently.
"But you have to ask yourself," she says, leaning in uncomfortably close and whispering, "what if I'm right? What if we're not the masters of the world, not the highest order of species, not the final draft in God's grand design scheme... but instead just the prey for some breathing nightmares we only dimly comprehend?"
"I...." I start to say, without a real finale to the statement. She doesn't give me a chance to finish it anyhow.
"Have you ever been hunted, doctor?"
"No..."
She smiles sadly. "That's what you think."
Our session doesn't go very far. It's hard to make progress with someone whose psychotic fixation is as resolute as Gretchen's... it's going to take a lot more therapy, over a lot more time, before I make any progress.
The rest of the day goes uneventfully. When I leave that evening, I see Gretchen standing in front of the picture window in the rec hall, staring at the grove of trees, silent. A nurse tells me that she's been there for more than an hour, watching the patients who have gone to walk through the trees after the storm and enjoy nature. I start to speak to Gretchen, but think better of it; next time we have a session, I tell myself, I'll make sure to do it in Kendrick's office, which looks out at the road instead of those woods.
Amelia's taken the kids to visit their grandparents, so I have the house to myself tonight. I make my famous diced pork omelette for supper --- not a bad job, if I say so myself --- and start to settle in.
It seems like a Nick at Nite kind of evening. I'm not in the mood for the History Channel. Amelia teases me that we pay for sixty channels, but I only watch two of them. I lean back in my easy chair, clad in my jeans and tattered 'Psychiatrists Do It in Hour-Long Sessions' T-shirt, and relax.
Then, I realize, tomorrow is garbage pickup day. Without even stopping to put my shoes on, I head to the kitchen and grab the trash can from under the sink. The rain stopped hours earlier, and I don't bother turning on the lights as I head into the back yard to get the trash can and roll it around to the front yard. It's just past dusk, and it isn't very dark outside yet. The air is crisp and fresh, replacing the stifling humidity of the past few weeks. I breathe it in, glad that we've had a break in the weather, when I feel the hairs on the back of my neck.
In the woods behind my house, I hear leaves rustle.
I don't know why it unnerves me so much... there's a wide back yard between me and those trees. If a rabid possum, or an angry bear, or heck, even a snarling demon were to leap out of the woods all of a sudden, I'd have time to run back into the house.
If I hadn't just locked myself out of the house.
Shit.
I chuckle to myself, thinking about the times I've teased Amelia for locking her keys in the car, as I take the trash out to the curb. I can visualize my keys, sitting there on top of the entertainment center next to my wallet, beside that photo of Amelia's parents. The front door's locked. I have a spare house key in my car, but I locked my car doors tonight for no good reason, and my spare car key is in my wallet. So I'm trapped out here til Amelia and the kids get back.
I plop down in a lawn chair in the back yard and gaze out at the woods. No way I'm going to wait on the front porch, and let the neighbors know what a boneheaded mistake I made, locking myself out of my own home.
In the darkness, with no moonlight due to the cloud cover, it's easy to see how Gretchen could have gotten scared lost in the woods. She was only 16 at the time, when she and her friend Peter wandered into the woodlands of rural Tennessee with a camcorder. They had been trying to tape footage of an old cabin out there in the woods, where some murders had taken place a year earlier.
A storm started up, and the two kids panicked. I still haven't been able to figure out much about what happened to Peter... Gretchen clams up when I bring up his name, and when I called the Spiegel County, Tennessee sheriff's office to clarify the sketchy details in her folder, they wouldn't help me. It's almost as if they were trying to cover up something. I also asked them about the video tape footage that Gretchen had been taping, and they claimed the tape was missing.
Gretchen said something had attacked them in what was left of the cabin, and as they tried to escape, the woods literally came alive and....
You know, this might not be the best line of thought while I'm stuck here in the back yard.
I stare off into the woods, and see a few limbs moving in the breeze. Nothing, however, comes to life or tries to attack me.
Amelia and the kids WERE coming back tonight, weren't they? Her folks live two hours away, so sometimes they decide it's such a long drive they'll spend the night. I hope that doesn't happen this time.
I could try to open a window, but with the money I paid for a security system last May that would just set off alarms... and I'd be embarrassed to admit to the cops that I'd locked myself out of my own house. No, if I have to, I can just sleep out here on the patio furniture. It's nice and moderate, at least... I'd hate to have been stuck out here during the humid, hot nights we were having a month ago, or during the cold weather to come in a few months.
I think again about the woods, and what Gretchen has said about them. Creatures lurking in the dark bowers, at the edge of man's domain... it sounds so cheesy, so melodramatic.
Still, it's not without precedent. Mankind has long been afraid of the woods, of what might be hidden out of sight. In ancient times, people believed in evil faeries, lurking in isolated mountain passes, waiting to abduct mortals or merely rip them apart without rhyme or reason, and in werewolves, stalking the forests in search of prey, their animal cunning blended with the intelligence and cruelty only humans are capable of. Lumberjacks used to tell stories of the "Hide-Behind", a beast that, true to its name, hid behind trees, watching them and waiting to isolate one Lumberjack from the rest and tear him to shreds.
Isolated. I look to the trees, and hear a chittering sound in the distance. A raccoon, perhaps?
This is silly. It's not as if I'm deep in the forest somewhere. I'm sitting beside my $200,000 home, in the middle of the suburbs, safely nestled in civilization.
And yet, I can't get my mind off that chittering.
Maybe I should wait on the front porch, after all. Or maybe I should walk down the block and see if Charlie's home. We could watch ESPN for awhile, me feigning interest in the sports he is so enthusiastic about, like usual. But no, I remember, this is the night Charlie always works a double shift at the hospital. He wouldn't be there.
It's a shame I haven't made more friends in the neighborhood. I'd hate to impose on the Kellys... they're more friends of Amelia than me. And Bob moved last month, and I haven't even talked to the people who moved in to his place yet other than saying "Hi" from across the street while picking up the morning paper.
Even if the chittering is just a raccoon, it might not be a good idea for me to stay back here. What if he's rabid, and comes and bites me?
I hear the phone ring in the house.
I start to dart for the back door, before I think about how useless that is.
What if it's Amelia, calling to say they'll be spending the night at her parents' house? I run around to the front porch and put my ear against the glass beside the door, hoping to hear her voice on the answering machine when it picks up, but whoever called just hangs up.
Damn. At least I'd have known.
What am I being so paranoid about, anyhow? I don't believe in monsters. I haven't since... well, ever, actually. Even when I was a little kid, and Grandma Koshi tried to scare me with spooky stories, I just questioned the logic of what she was saying and didn't take any of it seriously.
Plenty of people go through woods without being attacked by monsters. Plenty of people probably lock themselves out of their homes without being found mutilated the next day.
But those people haven't heard Gretchen's ramblings, or seen the cold deadness in her eyes.
After half an hour, Mrs. Comstock from down at the corner goes past, on a nighttime jog with her Sheltie. She glances over at me curiously, but says nothing. Not wanting to admit my foolishness in locking myself out, I don't say anything to her, either.
The branches of the tree in the front yard sway gently. I glance at them, then stare more strongly, trying to make out any silhouettes that might be crouched up in the limbs, watching me. There's nothing, of course. This is absurd.
But you know, the tingle I feel down the back of my neck, that must be what Gretchen feels constantly. And with her dementia, she's convinced that there ARE things out there, watching her. I'm just toying with the notion, and don't even believe in it, and it still has me creeped out. What must she go through each time she walks into a shadowy room? Or when she lies in the dark, waiting to fall asleep? Surely if there are things lurking in the forests, it follows that they lurk elsewhere. Under beds, scaring children in the night. In basements and attics. In the shrubs near front porches where hapless psychiatrists sit.
Headlights flash in my eyes, and I blink instinctively. It is Amelia's station wagon.
Oh, thank God.
I get up and go to it, to open the door for my wife. She looks at me curiously, and gently teases me when she realizes I have locked myself out of the house. The kids get out, denying that they are tired after the long drive, but showing signs of weariness.
Amelia tells me that running around the yard in my bare feet, I'm lucky if I don't catch a cold. I start to joke that I'm even luckier that no monsters in the shadows decided to catch ME, but I don't. I just follow my wife to the front door, and when she unlocks it, I very happily go inside.
There, I feel safe. The carpet is warm and soft to my feet, the television set plays the sounds of 'Happy Days'.
I feel a comfort that Gretchen Halspont can't feel, the poor kid.
Perhaps some day, I'll help her get over her fears. Compared with what she worries about, the Y2K paranoia Bill has been telling me about is child's play. Both are absurd worries, of course. Civilization isn't going to end with a computer glitch, and sinister forces aren't waiting to maul us.
We speculate on worst-case scenarios such as Y2K with a morbid curiosity, but only the most deranged of survivalists actually believes in it. Humanity has always been good at worrying, and rarely with any good reason; one thousand years ago, people were convinced at the end of the year 999 A.D. that the world would soon end, that the rapture was upon them and they should give their lands to the church to 'buy' their way into heaven. All we've done is substitute computers for God, and stockpiling canned food and generators for desperate tithing. By worrying about something as big and all-consuming as Y2K or the Rapture, we take our minds away from our real problems and make them seem inconsequential, which keeps us from focusing on what's really important.
We create imaginary boogeymen in our minds to justify the unease we feel with the darkness, with the vast unknown. We'd rather think there's a hideous werewolf or some such nonsense watching from the shadows than admit that we have no way of knowing, that we comprehend such a tiny fraction of the spectrum of reality we're practically blind and deaf. We'd rather feel the adrenaline jolt from fear than admit that there are no ghouls out there eager to slaughter us, that the universe just doesn't care enough about us to bother sending monsters after us. We create monsters to justify our despair and disguise it as terror.
Which isn't to say there aren't monsters out there, but those monsters are our own creations. They're the ones 'civilization' has nurtured. They're the John Wayne Gacys of the world, the predators, lurking among us, the ones I feel a knot in my stomach about any time I don't know where my children are. Nature, red of tooth and claw, has nothing on the repulsive extremes humankind is capable of. But rather than admit there are people among us so sick, our fantasies give them fangs or turn them into ghosts and demons. After all, we want to say, no human would be so inhumane, would they?
But they would be. And they are. And they will be. The best I can do is try to help those in need of help, and hope that I bring them a little further back from the abyss, and in so doing bring humanity overall a little further back. It's not always easy, and it doesn't always work. But it's all I can do.
I don't know what happened to Gretchen out there in the woods, those years ago. It would probably be better for my well-being if I didn't know. But without learning about what she went through, I can't help her. Somewhere, in these crazy stories she tells --- about a disembodied hand, about the woods coming alive, about these spectres she imagines behind the trees --- somewhere in all of that, there's a grain of truth that will lead me to what happened to her, and I hope give me some clue of what I can do to bring her back from her torment, and let her rejoin the human race as the caring, compassionate person I detect in her. But first I have to help her shed her dark fantasies. We've got enough to worry about in real life without making up evil forces gathering in the shadows. Right?
End.