emotionally, spiritually, and then mentally. By the time Katherine arrived at Mrs. Yancy's place to have her father's baby, she was every bit as mad as Leo had been. But she apparently also had acquired his control, his ability to pass among normal people. She lost that control for three days when the twins arrived, but then she pulled herself together again.'
'She lost control a second time,' Hilary said as the plane bobbled through a patch of turbulent air.
'Yeah,' Joshua said. 'When she told Mrs. Yancy that she'd been raped by a demon.'
'If my theory's correct,' Tony said, 'Katherine was going through incredible changes after the birth of the twins. She was moving from one severe psychotic state to an even more severe psychotic state. A new set of delusions was pushing out the old set. She had been able to maintain a surface calm in spite of her father's sexual abuse, in spite of the emotional and physical torture he put her through, in spite of becoming pregnant with his child, and even in spite of the agony of being girdled in day and night during all those months when nature was insisting that she grow. Somehow she maintained an air of normalcy through all of that. But when the twins were born, when she realized her story about Mary Gunther's baby had come crashing down around her, that was too much to bear. She flipped out--until she conceived the notion that she'd been raped by a demon. We know from Mrs. Yancy that Leo was interested in the occult. Katherine had read some of Leo's books. Somewhere she had picked up the fact that some people believe twins born with cauls are marked by a demon. Because her twins were born with cauls ... well, she began to fantasize. And the idea that she had been the innocent victim of a demonic creature that had forced itself on her--well, that was very appealing. It exonerated her of the shame and guilt of bearing her own father's babies. It was still something she had to hide from the world, but it wasn't something she had to hide from herself. It wasn't something shameful for which she had to make constant excuses to herself. No one could expect an ordinary woman to resist a demon that had supernatural strength. If she could make herself believe that she'd really been raped by a monster, then she could start thinking of herself as nothing worse than an unfortunate, innocent victim.'
'But that's what she was anyway,' Hilary said. 'She was her father's victim. He forced himself on her, not the other way around.'
True,' Tony said 'But he had probably spent a lot of time and energy brainwashing her, trying to make her think she was the one at fault, the one responsible for their twisted relationship. Transferring the guilt to the daughter--that's a fairly common way for a sick man to escape his own sense of guilt. And that sort of behavior would fit Leo's authoritarian personality.'
'All right,' Joshua said as they fled northward into the yielding sky. 'I'll go along with what you've said so far. It may not be right, but it makes sense, and that's a welcome change in the situation. So Katherine gave birth to twins, lost herself for three days, and then got control again by resorting to a new fantasy, a new delusion. By believing that a demon had raped her, she was able to forget that her father was the one who had actually done it. She was able to forget about the incest and regain some of her self-respect. In fact, she probably hadn't ever felt better about herself in her whole life.'
'Exactly,' Tony said
Hilary said, 'Mrs. Yancy was the only person she'd ever told about the incest, so when she settled into the new fantasy about a demon, she was eager to let Mrs. Yancy know the 'truth.' She was worried that Mrs. Yancy thought of her as a terrible person, a wicked sinner, and she wanted Mrs. Yancy to know that she was only the victim of some irresistible supernatural thing. That's why she babbled on about it for so long.'
'But when Mrs. Yancy didn't believe her,' Tony said, 'she decided to keep it to herself. She figured no one else would believe her, either. But that didn't matter to her because she was positive, in her own mind, that she knew the truth, and that truth was the demon. That was a much easier secret to keep than the other one, the one about Leo.'
'And Leo had died a few weeks earlier,' Hilary said, 'so he wasn't around to remind her of what she had forgotten.'
Joshua took his hands off the airplane controls for a moment, wiped them on his shirt. 'I thought I was too damned old and too cynical to respond to a horror story any more. But this one makes my palms sweat. There's a terrible correlation to what Hilary just said. Leo wasn't around to remind her--but she needed to keep both of the twins around to reinforce the new delusion. They were the living proof of it, and she couldn't put either of them up for adoption.'
'That's right,' Tony said. 'Having them with her helped her maintain the fantasy. When she looked at those two perfectly healthy, unquestionably human babies, she really did see something different about their sex organs, like she told Mrs. Yancy. She saw it in her mind, imagined it, saw something that was proof, to her, that they were the children of a demon. The twins were part of her comfortable new delusion--and I say 'comfortable' only in comparison to the nightmares with which she had lived before.'
Hilary's mind was racing faster than the airplane engine. She grew excited as she saw where Tony's speculations were leading. She said, 'So Katherine took the twins home, to that clifftop house, but she still had to keep the Mary Gunther lie in the air, didn't she? Sure. For one thing, she wanted to protect her reputation. But there was another reason, much more important than just her good name. A psychosis is rooted in the subconscious mind, but, as I understand it, the fantasies a psychotic uses to cope with his inner turmoil are more the product of the conscious mind. So ... while Katherine believed in the demon on a conscious level ... at the same time, deep down, subconsciously, she knew that if she went back to St. Helena with twins and let the Mary Gunther story collapse, her neighbors would eventually realize that Leo was the father. If she had to deal with that disgrace, she wouldn't have been able to support the demon fantasy that her conscious mind had fabricated. Her new, more comfortable delusions would be replaced by the old, hard, sharp-edged ones. So to maintain the demon fantasy in her own mind, she had to present only one child to the public. So she gave the two boys just one name. She allowed only one of them to go out in public at any one time. She forced them to live one life.'
'And eventually,' Tony said, 'the two boys actually came to think of themselves as one and the same person.'
'Hold it, hold it,' Joshua said. 'Maybe they were able to double for each other and live under only one name, one identity, in public. Even that's asking me to believe a lot, but I'll try. But for sure, in private they still would have been two distinct individuals.'
'Maybe not,' Tony said. 'We've come across proof that they thought of themselves as ... sort of one person in two bodies.'
'Proof? What proof?' Joshua demanded.
'The letter you found in the safe-deposit box in that San Francisco bank. In it, Bruno wrote that he had been killed in Los Angeles. He didn't say his brother had been killed. He said he, himself, was dead.'
'You can't prove anything by that letter,' Joshua said. 'It was all mumbo-jumbo. It didn't make any sense.'
