Boy Who Could See Demons Read online

  Ruen picked up the ball and balanced it on his head.

  “You can’t see everything, you know,” he said. “You never see angels. They’re so annoying.”

  I was thinking about what a farm might look like when I realized he was right, I’d never seen angels. I’d never even thought about it until Anya mentioned it before. How come you don’t see angels? she’d asked. And what about God? And the Devil? I said God was a man with a white beard and a red suit and a jolly face and the Devil was red, too, and he also smiled but was inherently evil.

  “Is that what you think you are, Alex?” Anya said, and I asked her what she meant and she said never mind. I told her angels had long golden hair and huge white feathery wings and usually lived on top of Christmas trees.

  I told Ruen about this and he wrapped an arm around his waist and chuckled. “Oh, you are thick, Alex,” he said. “Angels don’t look like that at all. In fact, angels keep trying to hurt you.”

  That’s the thing with Ruen when he’s Ghost Boy. He’s always trying to prove he’s smarter than me but sometimes he says stuff that makes me think and think. “I thought angels were good and they protected people.”

  Ruen reeled off the bed and staggered across the floor dragging his feet and holding his stomach and making hacking noises as if my brain-deadedness had stunned him to the point of death. Finally he slumped to the floor and gave a big sigh as if he’d actually died.

  “Ruen?” I said, and I felt a sharp pain in my chest in case he’d actually died.

  He jumped up to his feet and gave a big stupid grin. “It’s me that’s been protecting you!” He walked up to me and leaned very close. “They know you have a gift to see into our world. And they don’t like it.”

  “Why?”

  Ruen looked around again in case someone saw us talking. The nurse that sounded like a pig was still snorting and I started wondering what it would be like if a cow wandered down the corridor. Ruen jumped up and sat on the bed beside me.

  “Because everyone thinks angels are beautiful. When in fact they’re hideous creatures. And they’d rather everyone believed the opposite.”

  “So angels are trying to attack me?”

  “Haven’t you seen the white lights appear every now and then?”

  I shrugged with one shoulder, which meant maybe I had but who cared? But really, I had seen white lights. They happened sometimes when I was getting scared or when Ruen was trying to make me do something and they looked like a bit of sunlight had drifted out of the sky and into the room. Ruen picked up his bat and ball and looked like he was going.

  “You off, then?” I said, trying not to sound like I could give a rat’s backside whether he did or not.

  He turned and grinned. “You want me to stay, don’t you. You’re scared.”

  “Am not,” I said, but when he turned and sat back down and put his arm around me, I gave a big sigh of relief.

  When I started to fall asleep Ruen said I was boring as an old lady and left. Then I had a dream that was really lovely and really horrible at the same time. It was horrible mostly because I didn’t want it to be a dream, and when I woke up I sat with my palms pressed against my eyes and sang the only song I could think of over and over again which was “Away in a Manger.”

  My dream was about Granny. Granny reminded me of a Doberman, which sounds funny but I mean that she was really snarly and people were scared to say the wrong thing to her but when she liked you she’d protect you and scare bad people off. One time two men called bailiffs knocked on the door of her neighbor Doris because they wanted Doris’s sofa. Granny ran out with a broom and whacked the men until they left because she said Doris hadn’t done any harm to anybody, though I wonder why they wanted Doris’s sofa ’cos it had cat hairs all over it. Granny lived a bus ride and four and three-quarters’ minutes of walking away from us and everyone called her Granny, like she’d been born with that name. She was short and the skin on her face shook when she laughed and most of her teeth were metal stubs screwed into her gums like a pirate and she smoked so many cigarettes that her voice was deep like a man’s. Sometimes she lit one while another one was still making spirals of smoke in her ashtray. She was ill for years and years. I remember she said she’d rather burn out than fade away and at the time she was holding a cigarette in each hand.

  Granny was very proud of her back garden because not many people we knew actually had back gardens and she’d always grown up with a yard made of concrete. So she decided to grow strawberries, which were red as postboxes and big as fat men’s noses. The only time Granny ever told me off was when I ate them because she said she needed them to make jam.

  “Jam keeps forever,” she used to say, “but strawberries only last a season, or a few minutes once you get your mucky paws on them.”

  So in the dream I was in her kitchen and she told me to go outside to collect strawberries to make jam. Outside it was really sunny, and the clouds looked like balls of wool in the sky. I walked down into the grass, which was really deep. There was a snake in the grass and at first I was really scared and backed away, but when I looked again I saw it wasn’t a snake, it was a shadow. Then I noticed that the shadow was really long and I couldn’t see what was making the shadow. I followed it all the way through the grass toward the end of the garden and when I looked up I saw Ruen standing in front of me. He was the Old Man. The shadow led right up to a thread hanging down from his suit which I thought was crazy.

  “What do you want?” I said. He looked down at the shadow. That’s when I saw that it split in two, like a fork. One of the forks led to Ruen, and the other led to me and it was wrapped around my chest.

  “What’s this?” I asked him.

  Ruen just did that thing where he flares his nostrils and wriggles his ears and I could see the tufts of white hair in them. It means he’s annoyed but I just stared at him. Then Granny called out the kitchen window.

  “He wants to hurt you, Alex.”

  This was weird to me because Granny had never seen Ruen and in the dream I wondered if maybe they’d met.

  I turned around and shouted back to her, “What do you mean?”

  She started waving. “Come on inside, Alex. He’s no good for you. Leave him alone.”

  I shook my head. “No, he’s okay, Granny. Ruen’s my friend.”

  She gripped the edge of the window ledge and looked very cross. “No he is not, Alex. He wants you to think you’re nothing. He wants to hurt your soul.”

  “My soul?”

  When I turned around again Ruen was gone, and then when I looked back at Granny the kitchen window was closed, though I could see Granny there doing the dishes at the sink, just as I remembered. I turned to the strawberry patch but beneath their green leaves they weren’t red and juicy as usual. They were like big fat blobs of shadow and they smelled like poo.

  I picked them anyway and brought them inside. I went to set the basket down on the table and tell Granny about the strawberries. I wanted to tell her it wasn’t my fault they’d gone bad. But she picked them out of the basket and they were red and beautiful and I thought I’d gone nuts, so I said nothing. Granny was humming and happy and there wasn’t even a cigarette in sight.

  “Will you stir these, Alex?” she said, plopping the strawberries into a big boiling pan on the stove while she got some sugar from the cupboard. I took a ladle from the jar on the counter and started to stir, and the strawberries bubbled and smelled delicious.

  Granny poured in the sugar and said, “memory’s a funny thing, Alex. Sometimes it can hurt us without us realizing.”

  I nodded but I had no clue what she meant. I figured this was what old people said when they were about to lose their marbles.

  But then I looked inside the pot I was stirring. The jam had already gone from being a big boiling mass of lumpy goo like something Woof had barfed to a cold stew that Granny could pour into the jars that she’d lined up on the kitchen table.

  “Now, Alex,” she said. “Y
ou have to hold each jar so I don’t knock it over as I pour.”

  I stopped stirring the stuff in the pot and walked over to the table. Granny nodded at the six jars on the tablecloth. “Hold it tight,” she said, so I did. Granny went and got the pot and slowly tipped it over the jar I was holding. The jam plopped out into the jar.

  Granny said: “You can make jam out of strawberries, but you can’t make strawberries out of jam.”

  I looked at her. “What do you mean?”

  She set the pot down and stroked my cheek. “Ruen wants to try to change you into someone you aren’t. I want you to remember who you are, Alex. Do you know who you are?”

  I nodded.

  “How do you know Ruen?” I said. She smiled and the room started to fill with a bright light. The light grew and grew until it squeezed everything out of view.

  And then everything changed. When I looked around I wasn’t in Granny’s kitchen anymore. I was in a street with shops and lots of people. I recognized the street but didn’t know how I did. The street was small with a black wet road in the middle with small stone shops at either side and there was a post office on the other side of the road. People were running on the pavement and I was outside a church. I think I might have been singing in a choir because I could hear singing and I knew the words.

  In front of me I saw a man in a black mask and a black jacket and jeans. He raised his gun in the air and pointed it right at me. And then it was like time went on hold. There were pigeons flapping in the air and they still had their wings outstretched so I could see the white feathers. Someone’s Coke can was floating through the air with Coke pouring out of it like a brown ribbon. A policeman next to me turned his face and his lip curled like he was afraid or angry. His face was blurry.

  I turned back to the man in the black mask. I could see his blue eyes through the holes in the mask and they looked right at me. I could see his gun, black and shining and wet. He squeezed the trigger and I heard a deep crack. Beside me, the policeman’s knees buckled and his arms flung up in the air like a puppet. As he fell to the ground the man lowered his gun and started to take his mask off. I watched, and my heart was pounding and my mouth was open.

  Just before I woke up, I saw his face.

  It was me.

  12

  THE PAINTINGS

  ANYA

  My mornings are filled with meetings with other inpatients at MacNeice House. Our youngest resident is a girl, Cara, aged eight years old. Autism spectrum disorder. She is also a gifted artist, and our visiting art therapist Iris seems to have made a lot of headway in developing Cara’s social skills and channeling a lot of her aggression through art sessions. Cara brings one of her paintings to show me.

  “Look,” she says, her gray eyes wide as she shows me a large painting on the wall of her room here at the unit. It is of four stick figures engaged in various activities, gardening, football, and ballet. One of them seems to be fixing a car. “There’s me, there’s my Mum and Dad, and that’s Callum.”

  “It’s beautiful, Cara,” I assure her, noticing the colors she’s chosen. They are telling: Instead of her usual preference for black, the painting features a mixture of sky blues, pinks, and yellows. Iris also points out that Cara has started drawing circles as complete wholes instead of never-ending spirals—another sign of improvement.

  Some of the other kids have more severe problems that refuse to be easily resolved—fifteen-year-old Damon had been on a self-imposed hunger strike for four days before his parents brought him in. When I visit him in his room he refuses to make eye contact, let alone open his mouth to speak, and when he strikes another consultant I am forced to have him restrained and put on a drip. Psychiatric assessments have indicated psychosis, and his medication had seemed to be working. This sudden relapse is quite out of the blue; there are days when I feel the human mind is a jigsaw puzzle that I will never be able to solve.

  The morning after Alex’s transfer to the hospital, I call the review meeting of Alex’s case in the conference room that involves Michael, Ursula, and Howard Dungar, the occupational therapist. I needed to present my findings and to get a variety of expert perspectives on the best program of care for Alex.

  Michael is already in the conference room when I arrive, warming his hands on an old radiator by the window.

  “How’s the garden?” I ask, noticing his posture. He is stiff, frowning, ready for battle.

  He turns and leans on the windowsill, thrusting his hands deep into the pockets of his tweed trousers. The corners of his mouth twitch. “My runner beans are four inches long,” he says blankly.

  “I love it when a man says that to me.”

  His mouth makes it all the way to a half smile and I blush, hearing the flirtation in my retort.

  Ursula arrives, surrounded in her usual cloak of self-importance and wearing jeans for the second day in a row. The day before yesterday an advertisement was posted for a replacement clinical psychologist, so her noticeable distancing from Alex’s case is understandable. Howard shows up a minute after the hour, a white ring of sugar around his mouth and his fly undone.

  When everyone has taken their seats, I begin the meeting with a brief commentary on my assessment of Alex to date.

  “Alex Connolly has witnessed his mother attempt suicide four times that we know of. He’s also been exposed to countless episodes of her self-harming. He has indicators of schizophrenia, including high vigilance, mild paranoia, bizarre behavior, and frequent and intense hallucinations. After an initial consultation at the hospital I arranged for him to undergo a series of physical tests to rule out any physical cause for his presentation. His brain MRI and EEG are normal and his blood tests proved fine.”

  I look up from my notes to check everyone is still with me. Michael has his head raised slightly, his wide palms pressed into the wood of the table. Ursula is studying me through her small reading glasses. Howard is picking at a shaving cut. I continue.

  “As we’ll all agree, there is a clinical consensus that it is often better to keep the family together, but because of Alex’s current state I feel it might be dangerous to let him remain at home. It’s my diagnosis that Alex needs constant assessment at MacNeice House. And of course I will do my best to keep the contact between Alex and his mother as regular as possible.”

  Howard looks up. “Can you explain what you mean by dangerous?”

  “My interviews with him have revealed that he has frequent perceptual disturbances and delusions, including a strong attachment to an imaginary friend named Ruin. It’s this delusion that I’m most interested in, because it tells me a lot about how Alex perceives himself.”

  Ursula laces her fingers and frowns. “How so?”

  “He tells me Ruin is the ‘bad’ version of Alex.”

  “So Alex isn’t saying he is bad?”

  “No, but I believe Ruin is Alex’s projection of himself. He also claims he can see demons, all the time, everywhere. I want to move him to MacNeice House for a period of at least one month for proper observation and assessment. Transferring Alex to MacNeice House requires his mother’s consent. Cindy refuses to give it. She is currently being evaluated to determine whether she is fit to make decisions for Alex as his mother. If she is found not to be, Alex will be moved to MacNeice House at the first opportunity.”

  Michael leans forward. “I think we ought to consider the fact that she is being treated at the adult psych unit. We’re told that she’ll be there for another three weeks. Wouldn’t it be better to wait until she gets out?”

  Ursula turns to him. “Why?”

  “Alex and his mother are very close,” Michael replies calmly. “If you wait until Cindy is released, she will be able to visit Alex here at MacNeice House. This contact will provide security and reassurance for both mother and son, and will almost certainly make it easier for them to receive treatment—”

  “What about the marks on Alex’s body?” interjects Howard. “Is the boy being abused?”

>   “Most likely self-harming,” Ursula offers loudly, folding her arms.

  “If Alex is self-harming,” I say, “we need to intervene as soon as possible.”

  I look across at Michael, noticing his jawline beginning to grow red. I feel sad that I have still failed to convince him I’m on his side.

  “Both Alex and Cindy will be distressed about their separation,” he insists. Nobody mentions the irony that Cindy’s suicide attempts have been efforts to separate the pair for good—Cindy’s mental state doesn’t perceive it that rationally.

  “This is a medical problem,” I remind Michael gently. “A medical problem requires medical intervention …”

  “… but you haven’t given a diagnosis!” he shouts.

  Ursula turns back to me. “Didn’t the notes mention Alex has ASD?”

  I shake my head. “Alex seemed to have been passed around psychiatrists like a guinea pig.” I barely conceal the acid in my tone. “One assessment pointed to Alex’s enhanced vocabulary and his social difficulties as a possible indicator, but I’m eager to rule it out altogether. Which is precisely why I need him transferred to MacNeice House,” I say, but suddenly Howard and Ursula are consulting loudly and I feel my suggestion has gone unheard. For a moment, Michael and I stare at each other across the long table, two forces on opposing sides. I am the first to break off his stare.

  I clear my throat. Ursula looks up. “Sorry,” she says, her tone brittle. “Howard and I are of the opinion that a holistic approach to this case is the better option. We need an approach that takes in the whole picture. Frankly, the boy’s mother is part of that picture.”

  From the corner of my eye, I see Michael nodding.

  Ursula continues. “For my part, I recommend a solution-focused approach to Alex’s case. Michael, you’ve been working with this family for several years now, haven’t you?”