The ARC Chronicles Collection

Chapter 2

Outside, Jenny stood waiting as Eva closed the door. Her face was a mask of horror, pain mixed with the re-emergence of memories that had been repressed for far too long.

“Jenny, I am so sorry.” Eva enfolded her in a hug, feeling the warmth of tears on her chest as Jenny’s shoulders trembled with each sob.

At length, Jenny calmed down and stood back, taking the tissue Eva offered to dry her face.

“Satisfied now?”

“Dr Ross, I didn’t mean to undermine you in there. I just wanted the chance.”

“Yes, you did,” Eva replied with genuine amusement. “I am afraid you are a little too much like I was once for your own good. You will learn.”

“You still don’t think it was a good idea?”

“No, as a matter of fact, I don’t, but I promised you we would abide by Dr Homes’ decision, and that is exactly what we did. It is your decision whether the end justified the means.”

Eva handed Jenny a file and started down the corridor.

“Take a look on the way and consider carefully what I said to you earlier about BPDs.”

As Eva walked, she could sense Jenny trying to keep up, and falling farther behind as she became engrossed in the notes. The silence became oppressive. As they descended to the first floor where the more dangerous patients were housed, Eva looked back to find Jenny had stopped, her face drained of colour. “Do you see now what you were dealing with?”

“He… He actually did this? Ate a man’s face? While he was still alive?”

“Yes, and he was shot and wounded as he tried to escape. The victim is still receiving treatment in Miami, six months after it happened. Harold was transferred here within a month of being detained for evaluation. Dr Homes recommended an extended term given his particular characteristics.”

“Which are what?”

“He has an uncanny ability to get inside your head. He is extremely intelligent. If you are not careful, you end up feeling like you are the interviewee and not the interviewer. He can get right under your skin. The point is he knew exactly what he was doing when he started to feed on that homeless man, much as he had a plan of attack the moment you stepped through that door. I want you to consider everything you witnessed in that room, not as the victim of his cruel abuse, but as a future Doctor of Psychology. Put away emotion, and look at what was said, the stimuli for each of his responses. You might have been an innocent in that room, but you damned well came near to unlocking him. I’ll expect a report in the morning, but for now, I have questions of my own that need answering. Go on home. My next conversation may not be for your ears.”

Jenny turned toward the exit. “Eva, thank you.”

Eva smiled at her, and resumed walking.

The long white, sterile corridors glowed eerily under the lights did nothing to put Eva at ease. The air conditioning whined in the background, straining as it sought to keep the old building at a reasonable temperature. Eva sometimes imagined there were voices whispering behind that noise.

Reaching the top floor of the hospital via narrow stairs crowded with faded paintings of Worcester in its infancy on the walls, Eva avoided the temptation to seek refuge in her own office, instead knocking on the door of her colleague and mentor, Dr Gideon Homes.

Dr Homes was considered pre-eminent in the field of compulsive mental disorders, and over the time she had known him, he had molded her in his image. A once rash and outspoken young grad student had become a thoughtful, introspective doctor under his tutelage. That is what Jenny hopes I will do for her. Eva thought as a voice called, “Come in”.

That is what Jenny hopes I will do for her.Eva opened the door and entered the room. Gideon Homes turned in his chair from a bank of screens that piped feed from all over the hospital directly to his office. Bespectacled, and with a shock of iron-grey hair, her mentor, friend, and colleague greeted her with a smile. Standing up, he towered over her, at several inches over six feet, and, with a frame one could only call ‘brawny’, he cut an imposing figure.

“Quite a session, don’t you think?” he observed. “What do you make of it?”

Eva shook her head. “Ravings of a paranoid delusional. It could be the key to his present state, or it could mean nothing at all. You know these cases as well as I do. Better in fact.” Eva shuffled her notes and sat opposite him, the ancient leather of her seat creaking in protest. “What should not have happened there is Jenny. You should not have given her permission to attend. Harold saw right through her, and toyed with her like a damaged hare given to a pack of wolf cubs. The poor girl could be scarred for life. How dare you presume to treat one of our own staff like that? What were you thinking?”

“The girl learned a valuable life lesson,” Gideon countered, the smirk on his face betraying his amusement. “Never run before you can walk. I don’t think we will see her attempt that again, not until she is much more mature. Wanting and having are two different things altogether do you not think?”

“Jenny thought an interview with such a deranged mind would be good for her, much like children dream of petting animals at a zoo. Did you give her that impression?”

Gideon responded by picking up an apple and crunching into it, waving the fruit around in the air with his left hand as he mulled the idea over.

“Interesting,” Gideon replied as he leaned back on his desk, “that you describe them as such. They have minds, and at some point in their lives have had the capacity to make rational choices, yet you label them with a common denominator. They are in here against their will, and we view them without any necessary attachment, yet this is not the zoo you claim to think it is.”

Moving to lock a cabinet he nearly always kept shut, Gideon continued, “No I think this is more the result of a ploy for you to keep our little fledgling safe, Dr Ross. It sounded like a great idea to me. There are times when we should act with caution and others when we should go with instinct. If this bird believes it is time to fly, who are we to clip her wings?”

“But Harold Fronhouse…’

‘Is unstable, impulsive, has, in the past, shown cannibalistic tendencies, and you don’t know from one second to the next what mood he will be in. Yes, he is an interesting ‘animal’.”

The way Gideon used her words against her was not lost on Eva.

“He is also bound in a straightjacket, and has guards with him at all times. If he needs sedating, we have Thorazine. If you fear what he might say to her, please remember you were similar in age when I first spotted you, and you were already deep into a thesis on stress-related paranoia and had interviewed several inmates at Cedar Junction. That is a maximum security facility, not unlike this.”

Eva stared at Gideon, aghast a man she had trusted to guide her so many times in the past had acted with such recklessness.

“Are you saying that this was all part of an experiment? Just so you could sit up here and observe from afar, the dismantling of a young mind? You could have ended that young woman’s career in there.”

“And you could have made it your triumph. Consider it a lesson for you and her both. As you rightly said, you nearly unlocked the mind of one seriously beyond redemption.”

His tone infuriated her. “That is not just wrong, it is unethical. What happened to you, Gideon? You never treated me this way when I was a student. I am going to my office, and then home. I have had enough of this for one day. If this is your current approach to medicine, I don’t expect much in the way of results. Not if you don’t have any staff. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Gideon had already turned back to his research, and Eva had been taught very early on that was his method of dismissal. Never before had it been used on her.