Now she lay in bed, the sun in her eyes. What would she say the next time she saw Zack? And what would he say?
Special. The words kept nipping at her.
You’re too special.
She fingered the tiny stone pendant around her neck. “What’s so special about me?” she muttered to herself. A tear formed in her eye.
«« — »»
The hospital videotaped all preliminary admittance interviews. It was protocol. Dr. Harold pressed the Play button and sat back. Erik Tharp looked quite different back then. He looked scary. Long hair. Beard. Slim but muscular, a physique honed by hard work.
Yes, of course. Digging graves was very hard work.
There was an aura about him on the video tape, a presence that five years of inactivity and starchy psych ward food had drained. Erik Tharp waited at the interview table. Every so often he looked up at the hidden video camera and smiled.
It was Dr. Greene who sat down across from him.
“Good morning, Erik. That’s your name, right? Erik?”
“I’m called brygorwreccan,” Erik Tharp slowly replied. His voice sounded corroded, unearthly.
“Okay. Is that what you’d like me to call you?”
“You can call me Erik. They call me brygorwreccan.”
“Who’s they?”
Erik stared, stone faced, through long strands of hair.
“What happened to your voice, Erik?”
“Doctor said I only got one vocal cord left.” He smiled vaguely. “They always had a hard time controlling me. Said it was because I used to do drugs.”
“What kind of drugs, Erik?”
“Crank, dust. Dust, mostly. Coke sometimes.”
“And they couldn’t control you because you used to use drugs?”,
“That s what they said. The other peows, they could control them easy. Sometimes I got out of hand, though. They thought I was gonna blow the whistle on them. So they’d punish me.”
“How?”
“Sometimes they’d tie me up, burn me.”
“They burned you? How?”
“They’d lay a metal rod in the fire.” Erik stood up and raised his black T shirt. Several long scars could be seen along his abdomen. Self induced, Dr. Harold concluded. He was sure Dr. Greene had made the same conclusion.
Erik sat back down. “I could handle that, though. Sometimes they made me look in the mirror. And they always made me watch the hustig.”
“The what?”
“The rituals. Watching those was worse than torture.”
“Why didn’t you just leave?”
“Couldn’t. The closer you are to them, the more power they have over you.”
“I see,” Dr. Greene said. “But let’s backtrack a minute, okay? We were talking about your voice. What exactly did they do?”
“Oh, yeah. They stuck an awl in my throat.”
“As punishment for insubordination?”
“Yeah.”
“Erik, the night you were arrested, you told the police that muggers stuck an awl in your throat.”
“I lied.”
“Why?”
“I was scared. I didn’t know what was happening. But I know now, so I can tell the truth and it won’t matter.”
“Why doesn’t it matter?”
Erik laughed. “Because I’m in a mental hospital now. They don’t care what I say because they know no one will believe me. They’re the ones who got me put here.”
“Erik, the police caught you burying bodies in a field off Route 154. Do you deny that?”
“No,” Erik Tharp said. “That was my job. After a hüsl, I had to bury the bodies. They decided I was too hard to control, so after the last hustig, they told the cops where I’d be. The whole thing was a setup.”
“Okay, Erik. Tell me more about the bodies. Some of them were children, babies. Why did you kill them? For the hüsls?”
“No, no, I didn’t kill any of them, I just buried them, and, yeah, I snatched some people, sure, but I never killed anyone.”
“You snatched people?”
“I abducted people for them, that was my job too. Hitchhikers, runaways, people like that, people who weren’t local.”
“What about the babies, Erik? Did you abduct the babies too?”
“No.”
“Then who did?”
“No one. They weren’t abductions.”
“Then—”
“I don’t want to talk about the babies anymore.”
Dr. Greene nodded. “All right, Erik. Tell me about the—”
“I don’t want to talk about anything anymore.”
Erik Tharp put his head down on the table and began to cry.
Dr. Harold ejected the tape. Now he knew exactly what Dr. Greene meant. Erik Tharp displayed no signs of story-mixing, referencing, or even lying. Most clinical psychiatrists could spot lying in a matter of minutes by gauging facial inflections via question structure. Only a pathological mind set could repress such inflections, and Erik Tharp clearly was not pathological.
Next were transcripts of a court authorized narcoanalysis, a process in which all conscious mental barriers were dropped with hypnotic drugs. “T” was for Tharp. “G” was for Greene. A light dose of a drug called scopolamine maintained unconsciousness without dropping most brain wave activity. It was even harder to lie under narcoanalysis.
G: How many people did you kill, Erik?
T: None.
G: Why were you burying bodies?
T: Bludcynn.
G: Erik, were you part of a satanic cult?
T: Dohtor.
G: What?
T: Dother fo Dother.
G: Erik, tell me about the cult.
T: Hüsl. Blood. Bludcynn. Dother fo Dother. I am peow. I am wreccan. We are all wreccan for the face in the mirror.
G: What do you see in the mirror, Erik?
T: Hell.
G: You see hell?
T: Her.
G: Who?
(patient begins to convulse. A waves erratic.)
T: They make us wreccan for her. I am wreccan. I have no soul.
G: What happened to your soul, Erik?
T: They gave it to her. They fuck.
(A waves still jumping. Heart rate 121.)
T: They fuck us and make us wreccan. For her.
G: Erik, who is her?
T: Dohtor.
G: Erik, what is dohtor?
T: Dother fo Dother. Liiiiii… Liiiiii… Liiiii
(Patient’s eyes are open, lacrimation evident. Heart rate 148.)
T: I am brygorwreccan, I am digger. Scierors cut, cokkers cook. We are hüslpegns. We work for them. They eat, they fuck, they kill—for her.
G: Who is her, Erik?
T: Liiiiii… Liiiiii… Arrrrrrdaaaaa—
(Patient screams. A waves cessate to REM levels, heart rate drops steadily, Narcoanalysis suspended as patient no longer responds.)
Two weeks later they’d attempted hypnosynthesis: hypnotic vocal commands in conjunction with fluctuating doses of sodium amobarbital, which kept the patient’s subconscious accessible without inducing high autonomic responses. The idea was to solicit the patient in the first or second stage of sleep, which weren’t dream stages.
T: They practiced these rituals.
G: What kind of rituals, Erik?
T: They worshipped this…thing.
G: Yes?
T: This…demon.
G: Tell me about the demon, Erik.
T: They made me watch, they made us all watch.
(Patient’s voice is regulated, monotonal. Heart rate 67.)
G: What did they make you watch, Erik?
T: They cut people up alive. They hate all outsiders.