‘Hello, Timothy.’ The rocking continued. ‘It’s Dr Cartwright.’ She hung back against the closed door. ‘I wanted to make sure you were all right.’
From the corner came a high-pitched, insistent humming, like a wasp.
‘Dr Harrison told me you were upset last night. Would you like to talk about it?’ No response. Perhaps a distraction would help. ‘If you’re feeling up to it, we could play a game. Something with numbers.’ She removed a pencil stub from her pocket and sketched a triangle on the padded canvas. In the middle, she wrote the number nine. ‘It’s called a magic triangle.’
Tim’s face remained buried in his arms.
‘Take a look, it really is like magic.’
Slowly, he raised his head, and she gasped at the condition of his face. Eyes like bruised plums. An angry swelling disfigured his jaw. Did they have to be so rough? His eyes were fixed on a rust-coloured stain on the floor.
‘A triangle…?’Alert, but wary.
‘Yes. I’ve drawn one on the wall.’
Tim tightened the grip on his knees, but his battered face showed a flicker of interest. Whatever had happened, he was still in there.
‘This one’s easy,’ she said. ‘All you need to do is come up with three numbers on each side that add up to nine. Do you want to try it?’ She held out the pencil. Too short to be used as an effective weapon. But still. If she cried out, no one would hear her. She could only hope someone was watching them on the monitor.
His eyes flicked from the pencil to the floor. She stayed still, though her arm was beginning to ache. Like a wax figure coming to life, he loosened his grip on his knees and staggered upright. The room, no more than ten by twelve feet, was worryingly small, and she tensed. When she stepped forward and placed the pencil in his palm, her fingers grazed his skin. Gripping the pencil stub in his fist, he shuffled to the wall. In a matter of seconds, the puzzle was completed, the numbers jagged as chicken scratches on the dirty canvas.
‘Great, Timothy.’ She relaxed a little. ‘You’re a master at this.’
In his right hand, he clutched a wad of paper.
‘What’s that you’ve got?’
‘Sudoku.’ It came out as a croak.
‘You tore pages out of your book?’
‘No books allowed. No pencil. I can have three pages.’
She stepped away and sketched two more magic triangles on the wall. Tim completed them as effortlessly as breathing. Now she was stuck. Off the top of her head, she couldn’t think of another one.
‘Shall we try a different game? This one uses words instead of numbers. But before we start, I want you to close your eyes and take a few deep breaths. Like this.’ She placed her hands on her belly and breathed in and out.
Tim copied her, hands on his abdomen, and sucked air noisily into his lungs. His breathing was laboured and slow.
‘Okay, here’s how the new game works,’ she said. ‘I’ll say a word, and then you say the first word that comes into your head. Ready?’
Tim pressed his back against the wall and slid to the floor. ‘I’m tired.’
‘That’s okay, it won’t take long. When we’re finished, it’ll be easier for you to sleep. Ready? Sky.’
Silence. The only sound was the gurgle of water through the pipes in the ceiling.
He breathed out. ‘Clouds.’
‘That’s great, Timothy. Let’s try another one. Ocean.’ ‘Cold.’
‘Eagle.’
‘Free.’ He loosened the grip on his knees.
‘Rainbow.’
‘Parrot.’ He lay on his side and closed his eyes. ‘My head hurts.’
‘I’ll let you rest, then,’ she said, backing towards the door. ‘Later, when you’re feeling better, I’ll come back and we can do some other games.’
‘You’re leaving?’
‘I can stay a little longer, if you’d like.’
His eyes were half closed, his breathing ragged.
‘I don’t want to go back to my room,’ he said, his voice thick with fatigue. ‘Not if that man is there.’
‘You mean the attendant who turned your light off?’
‘No. That man on my bed. He had a mean face. I yelled at him. But he wouldn’t go away.’
A man on Tim’s bed? Harrison hadn’t mentioned anything like this. Was he delusional, hallucinating? Or was it something else? She was afraid to move and break the spell.
‘What did the man look like?’
Tim peered at her from under the fringe of hair, his eyes in shadow. ‘Like me. Exactly the same.’
*
During the long drive back to Lansford, Erin mused about this latest development, Tim’s mysterious hallucination about a man who resembled him, lying on his bed. Like a doppelgänger. A malevolent twin conjured up by a delusional brain, though it could be something neurological, like temporal lobe epilepsy – in medical school, she’d once read about a similar case. Or it could be a Fregoli delusion, that oddest of neurological quirks in which the affected individual believes that everyone they meet is the same person in disguise. But Tim’s medical history made no mention of visual hallucinations, only auditory ones: voices, ringing bells, whispers. The formal assessment she’d signed on to, and should have taken two weeks at most, had mutated into an endless labyrinth, full of false turns and dead ends.
By the time she reached the turn-off to Lansford, she was no wiser as to her next move. If Tim missed his court date, it could be another year before a new one was scheduled. Neither of them had time for that kind of delay.
The road to Lansford High School was coming up on her right. On impulse, she turned onto it and drove through a neighbourhood of modest brick homes with pickup trucks or rusty vans parked in the drives. She’d scoped out the high school twice before, without any luck, hoping to catch a glimpse of Cassie. Almost four o’clock, and school would be out for the day. But it wouldn’t hurt to swing by.
As a precaution, Erin pushed her hair under a cap and hunched down in the driver’s seat. A pity she didn’t have
