Dance of the Demons

Ch. 1

Emily Saunders’s mother scrubbed crusty spaghetti sauce off a plate with a cloth, rinsing the foam clean under the tap. Soap suds slopped carelessly over the counter and dribbled onto the peeling linoleum underfoot, but she made no attempt to clean up the mess. As she shuffled between cupboards her holey slippers spread the puddle, and it picked up dirt and floaters from the nooks and crannies. A pair of headlights flashed through the bare windows, and the bowl she was carrying slipped through her fingers and hit the floor with a crash. The percolating sound of wheels on gravel resonated through the trailer.

‘Shit,’ she said, and knelt to gather the shards. ‘What’s he doing here.’

Emily sat motionless under the small kitchen table and watched the woman on the floor. Both heard a truck door slam, and saw a man head for the front door. Both sat stock still.

The doorknob twisted a few times, growing from a slow anticipation to a violent frenzy. The door shuddered in its jamb, resisting loosely on its hinges, as it was pounded repeatedly.

‘Lemme in, Lorraine. I know yer there, I can smell ya. Can smell yer, and – and yer... OPEN UP YOU—’

Lorraine crawled slowly backwards through the ceramic shards until she met the far wall. Reaching blindly behind her, she grabbed a coil of phone cord and pulled, jerking the receiver from its cradle. The clamour intensified as she dialled.

‘Dotty? it’s Lorraine. Listen-you’ve-gotta-help-me. He’s back, he’s back and he’s at the door. Listen . . . no they won’t make it in time. You’ve gotta help her. . .’

The pounding rose to a crescendo, as if the attacker were throwing a body against the door. ‘Lemme . . . thud . . . in. I’m . . . thud . . .comin’ baby. It’s my little . . . thud . . . gurl’s special day. Happy third . . . thud . . . birthday Emily! Daddy’s here. ’

‘. . . no—Dotty, you have to. OK, promise me. Oh, god bless you Dot. Now hurry. . . ’

At that moment the door, straining against the weight of its attacker, bellied, and the wooden jamb forfeited with a crack. With another heave the door fell clean through, and in its place stood Landen Bromden, his forehead and receding hairline blinding in the harsh flourescent lighting. He swivelled heavily as his eyes adjusted to the interior glare, and brushed through the entrance way, leaving grubby boot prints. ‘Where are mah gurls?’

For a heartbeat he seemed to stare straight at Emily, sitting cross-legged amid the table legs and tossed spaghetti, but swept instead behind the counter. ‘You,’ he spat, seeing Lorraine crouched against the wall. ‘Where is she? Tell me!’ He grabbed a fist full of her hair and twisted upwards. She winced.

‘She’s not here. She’s gone.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘Leave her, please . . . please don’t touch her. I’ll do anything, I’ll . . . Ughhh.’ She whimpered as he pulled her across the floor by her hair. She scrambled to reach her feet, sliding through the puddle of suds. ‘Leave her, Landen! Leave my baby! Please! Oh god, Oh God!’ she sobbed. Landen trudged on regardless.

Emily watched silently through the forest of furniture. She jumped only once as her mother’s foot swung wide and nicked the foot of a nearby chair, sending it thumping against the table leg. Landen threw Lorraine against the cupboards, and she hit the pots and pans with a clamour. Blubbering, she continued to plead. ‘Leave her alone . . . she did nothing. She’s so young . . . please don’t touch her, or I’ll . . .’

‘You’ll what? Kill me? Do it.’ He commanded. She shook with terror and rage below him. ‘Do it,’ he bellowed, and spread his arms akimbo. ‘Do it, cummon, DO IT.’

Lorraine grasped frantically about and flooded with relief as she found a nearby pan, and she swung upwards in a sloppy and meagre show of defence. It was a bad move, she realized, as Landen caught it mid-swing in one of his bear-sized hands and wrenched it from her grasp. She gave barely a whimper for his satisfaction as he bore down on her, and her ears rang with his taunts.

‘Do it. Do it.’ He swung heavily, almost lazily at her with the pan. ‘Do it,’ he growled as he repeatedly struck her with blows. ‘DO IT! DO IT! DO IT!’ When at last he had finished, he tossed the bloody pan beside the body on the floor, stood up, and composed himself with a few deep breaths before turning around. He wore a hideous smile as he wiped his hands on his pants, and, like a transformed man, called out in a clear, oily voice.

‘Emily.’

Ch. 2

‘Emily? Emily, are you even paying attention?’

Emily looked across the table at the squat little man she had affectionately come to call ‘The Brain.’ The doctor’s bald pallet and over-strength glasses seemed only to add to his diminutive figure, one that appeared to magically ooze out over his belt more and more every year. Yet his crystal blue eyes were honest, and she felt a little guilty at her disobedience.

‘Mm hmm. You were talking about my mother again.’

‘You know why we have to do this. It was crucial to your development, and I believe that understanding this relationship might help us discover why you do what you do, even thirteen years later Your Aunt agrees.’

Emily ignored this last remark and instead looked around the small oval office for the umpteenth time. Nothing ever changed. The bookshelves, rounded perfectly to hug the curvature of the walls, held the most revered and mind-popping psychological periodicals and references of the time, stuffed together by the most elaborate and abstract bookend that he had been able to dig up. On the walls, between the odd photos or award for scientific distinction, hung an entire array of challenging artwork, the kind that moved with the observer, or seemed to swirl if you leaned to or fro. A few, if you could master the art, portrayed entire city scapes hidden beneath intricate and colourful patterns, and would only appear after several eye-straining minutes of staring at it cross-eyed. The floor, although smooth, was constructed of different sized blocks of glass and mirrors, so that, when well polished, it looked as though there were no safe place to step. The doctor said that it acquired trust in the patient, and that when they were ready to walk, they were ready to talk. The ceiling, on the other hand, he said was just for his sheer amusement. On the top floor of the building, it was made of glass and shaped symmetrically jagged, imbedded with prisms so that when the sun shone the room lit up with a million dazzling colours, beautiful but blinding.

The room was gray today, and though the rain pored drizzled off the glass, it housed its own beauty. Tiny prism-shadows danced upon the walls and distorted the art, creating a special effect that the doctor referred to as ‘the dance of his demons.’ Together they shared a special delight in this gloomy shadow dance, both secretly fascinated by the demons that jumped through the air and mimicked their own.

‘Do you not think so? For all we know, this might be hereditary. Personally I doubt it, but I would like your input. I want you to think back, Emily. Did you ever notice anything, off, about your mother? Anything, our of the ordinary?’ the doctor asked in an I’m-trying-to-wean-hard-to-reach-information-out-of-you-with-gentle-force voice. He stared across the table at her, patiently. Those were his best attributes, in her opinion; both his penetrating stare and his absolute, unwavering patience.

Of course I can’t remember back that far, Emily thought, I wasn’t even three years old when my dad killed her. She’s been dead for ninety-eight percent of my coherent life. Still, she scrunched her eye brows together and made a rather poor attempt at what she believed to be a look of retrospect. ‘Nope, sorry. It’s all gone.’

Doctor ‘The Brain’ Brinkley, sighed and looked down at his notepad, the only piece of stationary, office supply, or earthly matter on his large desk. It was covered in minute scrawl that looked as if a fledgling second-grader were practising long hand for the first time. The lines were crooked and written in the famous indecipherable scratches unique to doctors and psychiatrists alone. Though disorganized, the book was chalk-full of notes and moments that he felt might one day link together and bring forth a fleeting ray of light onto an increasingly dark and hostile case. Looking across at the girl before him, he felt a guilty attachment. She had not been his first case, originally seeming unimportant, dare he say an easy fix, but over the years he found himself attached through more than just his professional incapability to ‘fix’ her. He found himself personally involved. Her case was not only a project that captivated him for their bi-weekly three hour sessions, but also that which nagged at him first when he awoke in the morning and haunted him as he fell asleep at night. Even his wife, usually understanding and accommodating, had grown irritated of this particular constant obsession and set their work-stays-at-the-office policy, but still occasionally found him secretly puzzling over a tattered notebook in a far corner at obscure hours of the night and morning. He somehow felt that Emily’s feelings were his feelings, her weaknesses were his weaknesses, and that her failure to stabilize, to recover — to fix was somehow his failure, totally and completely. If he could not solve a seemingly simple case, continuing into its eleventh year, concerning one sixteen-year-old specimen, then what was the point of all of his study? His breakthroughs? His awards? If he could not help one teenage girl, then why the hell was he the top paid psychologist in all of Manhattan?

‘Now you know that’s not true, Emily,’ he said in his adopted science-is-truth voice, ‘memories, strong ones, are always banked into a safe-keeping portion of the brain. Traumatizing memories, even those collected before the development of coherent thought, are buried deep for safe keeping, and the more that these memories are hidden and willed-away, the harder they are to resurrect. Hard, but not impossible. It will just take time.’ And a minor miracle, he thought.

Emily smacked her gum down between her jaws with more force than was necessary. She had heard this before, several, even hundreds of times, but no matter how hard she willed forward disturbing and violent memories of her past, she could remember none. It seemed to her to be a good survival technique though, the ability to turn down the guilt of violent moments by tossing away the entire memory of the act. Sheer natural brilliance.

‘And now shall we talk about what happened at school today?’ Doctor Blinkey asked. Emily recognized it as merely an invitation, not a command. She shrugged.

‘I don’t remember.’

It was enough. The Doctor picked up his pen, scratched a little on the paper, and mused.

‘Nothing?’

‘Just waking up in the nurses room with Auntie Dot and Mr. Cameron. He looked pretty mad to me. It’s a pity ‘cause I liked him better than the other teachers.’

‘But you attacked his daughter, didn’t you.’

Emily hesitated. She couldn’t remember, that much was true, but she hadn’t really liked Rebecca anyway. If she really had done what they told her she had, then poor Becky probably had it coming. She hoped.

‘Your school report says that you, and I quote, “swung her face first into the lockers by her hair.” Do you deny this?’ he asked it as a rhetorical question and went on without much of a pause, never raising his voice above a passive coo. ‘Emily, I hate to say it, but I’m getting increasingly worried about you. Not the violence, which happens frequently in schools, but about your blackouts. Can you remember nothing? It seems like an awfully fresh incident to be so deeply buried. Can you recall what angered you?’

This seemed likely the most reasonable demand on her memory yet, and Emily thought back to the days earlier events, to fifth period, to the end of the day bell, and, most importantly, to the crowded hallways. Alive with crawling human pestilence, the halls of Teimour High seemed to have been built to accommodate a mere fraction of the robust student body, who, due to the climb in obesity and rough-play, threatened to rip the walls off their foundations. Personal space was a privilege, given only to those few souls who called home sick and cleared out before the bell. Emily reclined back into the plush leather office recliner (a commodity for the patients of the well endowed) and let the repugnant stench of two-thousand sweaty, hormonal teenagers come wafting back.

The day had been hot. Not sunny and clear, but that sort of cloudy, muggy hot that could not be closed out by shutters or thrown off by a cold soda. The heat penetrated into every fabric and being, and when enclosed in a space such as a classroom it seemed to enervate and press down furiously until the occupants were no longer in a sane state of mind, considering the inconceivable. She could blame the heat, she thought, but she knew it wouldn’t stick. Fourth period had been uneventful, she remembered, but fifth period had been something else. It wasn’t in a classroom. It was in the gym, she thought, which null and void her theory of heat-induced-madness. The gym had been cool. Thanks be to god and bless the high ceiling, the gym had been an oasis.

Dodge Ball again. The greens versus the reds. Same as it had been since, well, second grade. In the beginning the opposing team, composed of mostly jocks and nerds, rallied up to The Line, cat calling to the wimps who tried inconspicuously to blend in with the out-of-bounds line. Her team, made up of a few remaining athletes and her best friend, Miranda, just grinned back. With the balls dispersed and the teams poised on the brink of war, the pressure was audible. Mr. Cameron, who revelled in such moments, held the whistle a little longer than usual, drawing out the anticipation until, like anything tempered too thin, it threatened to snap.

The whistle blew. It was kill or be killed, catch or be caught, dodge or die. The game, always ferocious, took out casualties with enviable speed. It was a matter of seconds before the floor was cleared of wimps, and all that remained were the die-hards. Only three remained on Emily’s team, matched roughly to the last four on the other side. Emily, sweating from the brief exertion and blinded by battle lust, reached down to grab a nearby rolling ball when—

‘I black out in Dodge Ball. I just get to this point when, I dunno, I can’t remember anything else. Sorry.’ Emily went back to chewing her gum.

The Doctor wrote down a few more things and looked at his watch. ‘Then I suppose were done for today.’ It didn’t carry a biting remark or sarcastic tone at her inability to produce information, but was simply a statement. ‘And on Friday I think we should have a review. I look forward to it actually.’ He watched as, without a further remark, Emily stood up, smiled, and showed herself out as she had innumerable times. He marvelled at how so passive a creature could inflict so much damage. But no, he caught himself as he had on so many occasions, I am wrong for it is not her who commits those deeds, but rather her demons