'Paul will do.' His weak smile faded quickly. 'So Lila's really at risk.'
'She spent the afternoon literally bouncing off the walls of Beauforte House, knocking over furniture.' Cree glanced around to make sure no one was near enough to overhear, and then went on in a quieter voice: She was in a state of absolute panic. Her clothes were torn and she had bruises and scratches all over. She was being chased by a pigor boar-headed man who took sadistic pleasure in the pursuit, who drew it out, hiding, popping out at her, chasing her, and then hiding again.'
Fitzpatrick looked aghast. After a moment, he spread his hands helplessly. 'I have to admit, even from a psychiatric perspective, this is a little beyond my experience. More than a little. This is – '
He stopped when a waitress appeared, a harried-looking middle-aged woman who set down a bowl of boiled potatoes and then stood, one pencil behind her ear and another poised over her order pad. 'Can I get you something to drink? Wine? Cocktail?' she asked.
'I'd like a whiskey,' Cree said. 'Bourbon, whatever's cheap. And a beer to knock it down with. Anything on tap, you choose for me.'
Fitzpatrick ordered a glass of Chablis. When the waitress left, he looked at Cree with a mix of concern and amusement in his eyes.
'A family remedy,' Cree explained. 'My father wasn't a regular drinker, but he believed that extreme circumstances demanded extreme measures.'
Fitzpatrick pursed his lips and nodded.
Cree leaned forward across the table. 'It's beyond my experience, too, Paul. I can't explain the boar head, and I can't find any of the
… 'handles' I usually look for. I can't find his dying experience in him, he's very one-dimensional. I've never even read of anything like it. Nothing legitimate, anyway. You'll think this sounds strange, coming from me, but this is almost like a – a fable, or a horror story. Something teenagers tell each other around a carnpfire. But it's very real to Lila.'
'That's all it did? The… pig-headed ghost? It chased her?'
'It raped her, Paul. That's what it does when it finally catches her. That's what happened back in December. It scares her to death, and when she can't run any more, it rapes her. And it does it again and again.' It was the first time Cree had said it out loud, and the enormity of it struck her. Cree believed Lila's account, but in one sense it made little difference whether this was a real manifestation or purely the savage hallucination of a tormented mind: Both were equally, deeply frightening.
Fitzpatrick was looking shaky, as if suddenly he'd lost confidence in his ability to cope with Lila's condition. He picked up his fork and played with it for several seconds, then dropped it with a clang as if he were disgusted with it.
'Hospitalization,' he said. 'I'll get her admitted tomorrow. Cranial diagnostics, sedation. A complete blood workup. I know a neurologist with an excellent reputation, we'll get him on it.'
They both were quiet for another moment, and then the waitress came back with their drinks. 'You ready to order, or do you need another few minutes?'
They hadn't even noticed their menus yet.
'Another few minutes, thanks,' Fitzpatrick said.
Cree lifted her whiskey glass, sighted quickly through the amber fluid, and raised it toward Fitzpatrick. 'Skoal,' she said automatically. Before he could raise his glass, she tossed hers back. The unaccustomed burn brought tears to her eyes, but she swallowed it down and quickly followed with a draft of beer that replaced the fire with ice. Her eyes popped wide.
Fitzpatrick watched with interest. When she set down her half-empty stein, he tipped his stemmed glass and took a moderate sip. 'You drink like a… Jeez, I don't know who drinks like that. My mother used to tell me, 'You burp like a stevedore.' Nowadays, people don't even know what a stevedore is, but – '
'I drink like a plumber. My father taught me.'
'Does it help?'
Cree pondered the warmth growing in her midsection, the tentacles of anesthetic already reaching out to the nerves in her hands and feet. The ball of icy jitter in the center of her chest remained unthawed.
'No,' she admitted.
'So what does a ghost buster with a Ph. D. in clinical psychology make of Lila's situation?'
'I saw the shoe tips. I didn't see the boar face. But I did see the shoes.'
'Oh, man.' Fitzpatrick moaned. He tasted his wine, made a face of disapproval, shook his head. 'I don't know what to do with this. What the hell am I supposed to do with this?'
'Think back to your sessions with Lila. Before you knew what I've told you, what would you have said? Preliminary diagnosis?'
He gave it a moment's thought. 'Well. So far, I've tagged chronic depressive tendencies, as indicated by low self-esteem, morbidity, indecisiveness, preoccupation with smaller problems. She told me she'd had a previous bout of depression around the time she went off to boarding school. My father was the one who treated her, actually – he was Richard's friend and physician back then.'
'Did you know her when you were younger?'
Fitzpatrick shook his head. 'Oh God, no. Lila's six years older than me. I was barely getting into baseball cards by the time she was getting into boys. We never played with the Beauforte kids. After my father died, about fifteen years ago, our contact with the family kind of fell off.'His eyes narrowed and he looked at Cree with a touch of accusation. 'If you're wondering if they came to me because of the old family connection, I like to think I have enough of a reputation in this town, on my own – that they came to me because I am good. Even if I didn't win the Christ-forsaken Haverford.'
Cree grinned. 'Never crossed my mind. I can tell you're good.'
'In any case, I'm not surprised she got the blues back then – that's a tough time for any kid. But in Lila's case it was a particularly lousy period. Apparently her uncle had died in a fishing accident the year before, and just before she went off to school her father died of a heart attack.'Fitzpatrick stared out into the bustling restaurant, drumming his fingers.'Beyond that, I'd have said I've got a patient in some kind of denial. A lot of repression, especially in her feelings toward her birth family, focused on ambivalences – pride and resentment, love and dislike. A yearning to live up to expectations and a desire to be free of them. Has a domineering mother who probably found her kids a bother and a disappointment and didn't mind letting them know it. Loved her father, his loss hurt her probably more than she admits, doesn't want to get too close to that. Poor self-esteem, probably based on a sense of failure. Guilt for those supposed failures.' He thought about it some more. 'But she's a patient who's hard to probe, reluctant to reveal too much. One minute she's defiant, her pride won't let her open up, the next her guilt and shame take over and she's too ashamed to talk about it. It's hard for her to let anyone near her.'
Fitzpatrick glanced at Cree and then looked away. 'I know it's not much. Could fit a lot of women her age. Doesn't explain what she claims to be seeing. I've really only had, what, four sessions with her,' he finished apologetically.
Cree was thinking that the oscillation between poles of affect and response Fitzpatrick reported matched exactly Lila's behavior in the last two days. Going to the house alone was one such extreme act of defiance; the backside of it was hopeless collapse.
'Paul, what's your take on the repressed memory theory?'
He tossed an equivocal hand. 'I've read both sides. I guess I'd say repression is possible, but the satanic ritual abuse business really discredited it. Recovered memories of buried trauma are too often programmed by the therapist. They say more about the therapist's unconscious fantasies and fears than they do about any experience of the patient's.'
He stopped as the waitress appeared again. She regarded them with expectant disapproval.
'Sorry,' Cree told her. 'We'll need just another minute. We'll be good, I promise.' She picked up her menu to prove it.
When she'd gone, Cree put the menu down. 'I agree completely. But, Paul, /experienced something there. I know you can't readily accept my
… approach… but I believe Lila is reacting to the presence of an entity at that house. It is interacting with her. I don't know who or what it is, but there's something there. I agree with you about conducting diagnostics, but don't be too surprised when they come back clean.'
