The Boy Who Could See Demons: A Novel Read online

  I stared at him. ‘Ruin?’

  ‘Ruen’s my friend,’ Alex said, with a hint of confusion in his voice, as if he already expected me to know. ‘My best friend.’

  ‘Ruin,’ I repeated. ‘Well, thank you. Hello back to Ruin. Can you tell me who Ruin is, though?’

  Alex chewed his lip, his eyes dropping to his feet.

  ‘Ruin’s an unusual name,’ I said. Then, after a long pause: ‘Is Ruin an animal?’

  He shook his head, his eyes focused beyond me. ‘Some of them are, but Ruen’s not. He’s … we’re just friends.’

  ‘Some of them?’ I asked. He nodded but said no more. Imaginary friends, I thought.

  ‘Can you tell me a little bit about him?’

  Alex looked up, thinking. ‘He likes my granddad’s piano. And he loves Mozart.’

  ‘Mozart?’

  Alex nodded. ‘But Ruen can’t play the piano.’ A pause. ‘He says you do, though.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, my smile withering. ‘I’ve played the piano since I was a little girl. Mozart’s not my favourite composer, though. My very favourite is Ra—’

  ‘Ravel,’ Alex said, matter-of-factly finishing my sentence. ‘Ruen says Ravel was like a Swiss watchmaker.’

  ‘A Swiss watchmaker?’ His accuracy shocked me. Ravel had been my favourite composer for decades. I set down my pen and folded my arms. This kid was full of surprises.

  Alex leaned sideways, as if he was listening to something. Then he straightened up and stared at me. ‘He means Ravel wrote his music like he was making a really expensive watch.’ He lifted his hands and twisted imaginary dials. ‘Like all the cogs fitted.’

  It wasn’t out of the question that he might know about Ravel, though still fairly astonishing. I was intrigued. ‘And how does Ruin know all this?’

  Alex didn’t blink. ‘Ruen is over nine thousand years old. He knows lots of stuff, though most of it is really boring.’

  ‘Does he tell jokes, too?’

  Alex raised his eyebrows and started to laugh, his head arched right back. When he recovered himself he said, ‘No way, Ruen thinks my jokes are stupid. He’s more serious than the Terminator.’

  I must have looked puzzled, because Alex read my face and told me, ‘You know, the film? With Arnie?’ He put on a surprisingly decent Arnold Schwarzenegger voice: ‘It’s in your nature to destroy yourselves.’

  I gave a sufficiently generous chuckle though I note his interest in films older than he is as unusual. ‘Does Ruin look like Arnie, too?’

  ‘No, he …’ His eyes searched the room. ‘He says you are delectable.’

  Alex’s voice had a tone of surprise to it, and he pronounced ‘delectable’ in a lowered tone and slightly English accent.

  ‘Do you know what that word means, Alex?’

  He searched his mind. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I skipped most of D.’ He started to reach for his collar again. ‘Can we talk about something else now, please?’

  I nodded, but when I looked up I realised it wasn’t me he was asking. He was still addressing the empty space in the corner.

  ‘We can talk about anything you like,’ I said, but he was starting to shake his head furiously. ‘Stop it!’ he shouted. I felt Michael rise to his feet behind me, and I raised my hand to prevent him from intervening.

  ‘Take it easy, Alex,’ I said calmly. His face was pale, his eyes wild. ‘Is Ruin bothering you?’

  He was rocking back and forth now, rubbing his hands together as if he was trying to start a fire from the friction. I set a hand lightly on his arm and he snapped out of it.

  ‘Sometimes he does,’ he said, when he had calmed. ‘He says he’s a superhero but really he’s just a pain.’

  ‘A superhero?’

  Alex nodded. ‘It’s how he describes what he really is.’

  ‘And what is that?’

  Alex hesitated. ‘A demon,’ he said innocently. ‘My demon.’

  I thought back to the notes Michael had showed me in my office. A mention of demons, though I was certain the note was dated three years ago, when Alex was seven. I paused, noting the lack of fear in his tone. A mention of ‘demons’ is usually accompanied by aggressive or angry behaviour, but Alex said it calmly, as a matter of fact.

  ‘Is Ruin a character, like the one you’re playing in Hamlet?’

  He shook his head, then paused. I allowed him time to consider, but he remained adamant. ‘Ruen is real. He’s a demon.’

  ‘You’re an excellent artist,’ I said, nodding at the picture of the house on the whiteboard. ‘Could you draw a picture of Ruin for me?’

  ‘What, the way he looks right now?’ Alex asked, and I nodded.

  He took a few breaths, pondering. Then he stood up and reluctantly removed the picture of the house with the eraser. When the whiteboard was clear, he began to draw a face. As he sketched, I made a few notes on the environment, my thoughts during the interview, and a memo to investigate superheroes named ‘Ruin’.

  ‘There,’ he said, a few moments later.

  I looked at the image on the sketchboard and frowned. It was a self-portrait of Alex, replete with sunglasses.

  ‘That’s Ruin?’ I asked.

  Alex nodded.

  ‘But he’s very like you,’ I said.

  ‘No, he’s much different. He’s the bad Alex, and I’m the good Alex.’

  This gave me grave cause for concern. I opened my mouth to ask, What makes the bad Alex bad? but then I closed it, aware that I had reached the core of Alex’s issues, the root of this ‘Ruin’. I needed to tread carefully in understanding how Alex conceived of himself as ‘good’ and ‘bad’.

  ‘Has Ruin ever hurt you, Alex?’

  He shook his head. ‘Ruen is my friend.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ I said. I struggled silently to come up with ways to find out why Alex had chosen a demon to project his emotions, whether Ruin was the imagined figure responsible for his mother’s episodes of self-harm, and if Ruin had plans for Alex to harm himself. Alex’s conceptualisation of ‘bad’ might well involve self-punishment.

  Just then, Alex walked right up to me and pointed at the scar swirling over my cheek.

  ‘Who gave you that scar?’ he said.

  I opened my mouth but no sound came out.

  He blinked. ‘Ruen said a little girl did that to you because she was angry.’

  I glanced over at Michael, but he was looking out the glass door at a couple of doctors walking up the corridor, too distracted to notice what had just happened. I looked back at Alex, my heart racing.

  How the hell does he know all this? I thought.

  ‘Ruen said you hurt that girl,’ he persisted, his tone questioning, puzzled.

  I struggled to retain my focus. ‘Does Ruin say how I hurt her?’

  Alex glanced to his right. ‘Ruen,’ he snapped. ‘That’s not nice.’ Then he turned back to me. ‘Ignore him.

  I swallowed. ‘What did Ruin say?’

  Alex sighed. ‘Rubbish, really. He says she was trapped in a dark, dark hole, and there was a ladder there but you pulled it up so she got stuck.’

  ‘Is that how you feel, Alex?’ I asked, though my voice had shrunk to a distant whisper, as if there were two of me: one asking the questions I’ve been trained to ask, the other a grieving mother, my arms suddenly aching to hold my little girl again.

  But, too late. Alex withdrew, closed for business. I watched him as he walked over to the whiteboard, beginning to draw his dream house a second time.

  ‘I’ll come and see you again tomorrow,’ I said, rising to my feet, my hands trembling.

  But he was engrossed in his drawing, touching up the wings above the house.

  ‘How did it go?’ Michael asked as we headed down the corridor towards the front entrance.

  I kept three paces ahead of him so he couldn’t see the strain on my face. I could feel my phone buzzing in my bag with text messages from my friends who were all probably out of their minds with worry. I was training my
thoughts on a series of numbers that scrolled in my mind backwards from ten, but I had already reached zero and still my heart was pounding in my chest, tears pricking the corners of my eyes. I felt the wounds of Poppy awaken in their deep places. I had only so long before I broke down.

  ‘I’ll compile my notes this afternoon and meet you and the others in the morning,’ I told Michael quickly.

  We had reached the hospital foyer. Michael stopped me as I approached the entrance.

  ‘Dr Molokova,’ he said, his voice terse. I looked up sharply, rattled by his tone. He combed a hand through his long blond hair, visibly perplexed.

  ‘Look, please just tell me you’re not going to split up that family. I have one of the best therapists in the country working with his mother …’

  ‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘But—’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘I think Alex may be a danger to himself. I’d like to book him into MacNeice House for sustained assessment.’

  Michael’s face fell. ‘Alex’s aunt Beverly is on her way up here from Cork as we speak, he can be assessed in his own house with his own flesh and blood …’

  I felt suddenly exhausted, full of regret at breaking my resolve to stay indoors. ‘In my opinion Alex could seriously harm himself if we don’t keep an eye on him. Frankly I’m appalled he’s not been given proper treatment until now.’ A scene of Poppy flashed before my eyes. She was holding a knife at a table in a restaurant, the people around us beginning to turn and watch. The soft light from a chandelier danced on its blade.

  I made to walk away but Michael grabbed my arm. ‘I want what’s best for this boy.’

  I stared at his hand on my bicep, my blood boiling. Finally, I pulled my arm free. ‘Then let me do my job,’ I said quietly, walking past him to the exit and towards the taxi rank.

  Many of the parents I encounter in the course of my job tearfully confide in me that they worry in case their child is possessed. It is a very real and terrifying possibility to confront: you may never have given the notion of God or Satan the time of day, but suddenly the bizarre, frightening and occasionally violent actions of your son or daughter force you to ask yourself questions you never dared believe would cross your mind. Such questions haunted me every day for most of Poppy’s life – and, if I’m honest, I don’t think I’ve ever found the real answers. After many years of watching her behaviour deteriorate, I had grown tired of specialists telling me that my beautiful, intelligent, and sensitive child was merely ‘hyperimaginative’, a label which progressed as she got older through the spectrum of apathetic and uninformed childhood mental health diagnoses: attention deficit disorder, disassociative identity disorder, bipolarity, Asperger’s syndrome. All wrong, and with these wrong diagnoses, the wrong meds, the wrong kind of treatment. So after medical school I trained in child psychiatry, doubled up by a PhD based on a hunch about Poppy’s condition: childhood schizophrenia.

  Like Michael, I had wanted us to stay together as a family. But it had cost her her life.

  As I pulled through the busy streets of Belfast in a taxi, I heard her voice. I love you, Mummy. I love you. And then I saw her, clear in my mind. Her coffee-brown eyes curved with laughter, her thick black hair swept across one shoulder. She was turning to me, the white sheen of a curtain brushing against her face. The hole is gone, she said, smiling.

  She was only twelve years old.

  5

  ‘TELL HER WHO I AM’

  Alex

  Dear Diary,

  Today I met a lady doctor at the hospital who asked a lot of questions about Ruen. I felt very confused when she asked about him. I’ve never told anyone much about him because that was our deal. But then he asked me to introduce him and it confused me because usually he hisses at me like a cat to keep quiet and pretend that he doesn’t exist, at which I say something like, ‘But, Ruen, you’re such a charming fellow, surely you want me to tell the whole world about you?’ and he narrows his horrible eyes at me and says, Sarcasm only gestures at one’s impotence. Then I blow a raspberry and he disappears in a huff.

  When Ruen first came to stay, he said he was simply here to be my friend because I looked lonely. Then one day we had an argument and I told him to go away, and he said he couldn’t. He said he’d been sent to study me because he and all his friends had never come across a human being who could see demons like I did. He said I was very special. The most anyone had ever seen of demons was a glimpse, he said, and these people usually thought they were seeing things. I remember he was very, very excited that I could see him and said it was very important that he study me, like a lab rat or something. I said I didn’t want to be studied, that sounded like there was something wrong with me, and all my life people have been saying that there is something wrong with me. I hate it, because I am totally fine and want to be left alone. But Ruen promised me something if I let him study me. I’m not going to say what. It’s our secret.

  The lady doctor had a big Harry-Potter kind of scar, but on her cheek, not her forehead. She was pretty and smiley and had small dark brown eyes and long black hair that looked like chocolate sauce being poured out of a bottle. One of her teeth had a chip in it and sometimes I could see her bra through her shirt. Dr Molokova, she said her name was, but to call her Anya. Peanuts make Anya fall asleep. I ate some when she left to see if they’d make me fall asleep but they didn’t.

  When Anya asked me about Ruen I think I must have blushed and got twitchy. Ruen told me to tell her who he was. I was very confused. The lady doctor asked me what was wrong. Ruen said it again: Tell her who I am. So I did. She was very interested to hear about Ruen and Ruen must have met her before because he told me some things about her, like she played the piano quite well and that her daddy had been Chinese, though she never really knew him, and her mum had a lot of problems. Just like mine.

  When she left Ruen had a funny look in his eyes, the kind of look Woof gets when he sees Ruen. Worried. Afraid, almost. I asked him what was wrong and he said nothing and then started asking lots of questions about Anya and about love. I was so sick of questions by this point, though I was a bit freaked out by the fact that I had to stay in hospital when it was Mum that had something wrong with her, not me, and that no one had come to collect me yet. So I answered his questions, even though they were very strange.

  He said: ‘What does love feel like?’

  I said: ‘You’d have to ask a girl.’ And then I thought of Mum and how much I love her and so I said: ‘Like you’d do anything for the person you love.’ And then I stared at him for a long time and worked it out by myself.

  ‘You love Anya,’ I said.

  ‘I most certainly do not,’ he said.

  ‘You do,’ I said, laughing. ‘You fancy her.’

  I was having great fun getting my own back after he teased me mercilessly about fancying Katie McInerny just because I let her share my locker.

  He got all angry, then disappeared so fast he made a slight pop, and I laughed myself to sleep.

  When I woke up, it was really dark outside. All the rooftops of the houses across the street looked like a zigzaggedy dinosaur spine against the sky. I could tell Ruen was in the room because I was colder than frozen sausages even though it was May, and sometimes he does that. All the hairs on my arms were standing straight upright. I said, ‘What is it now, you creep?’

  He took a step out of the shadow beside the window and said, ‘I want you to tell Anya all about me.’

  I sat up in bed, trying to keep the blankets tight around me. ‘I was right, wasn’t I? You really do fancy that lady, Ruen.’

  And for some reason I thought of my dad just then. I saw his face in my head, all blurry, his eyes blue just like mine, Mum said. Then I saw the policeman, his face turning towards me in slow motion, angry and scared at the same time.

  Ruen scowled at me. I snapped out of my daydream and rolled my eyes at him.

  ‘Fine, Ruen. I’ll tell her about you, OK? Does that make you happy?’


  He gave a tiny nod and then he vanished and I thought, What a nut.

  I slept all night at the hospital and in the morning Anya came and said I could see Mum. She was more smiley today, though her eyes looked sad and she was wearing black square glasses. I didn’t tell her what Ruen had said because I was so excited to see Mum.

  ‘How are you today, Alex?’ she said as we walked through the hospital.

  ‘I thought of a new joke,’ I said, and I told her it: ‘How do you make a hot dog stand?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘You steal its chair.’

  She laughed, though she sounded like she didn’t find it funny.

  ‘I bet you’re excited to see your mum,’ she said, and I nodded. ‘She might not look like her usual self, though. Is that OK?’

  This to me could only be a good thing, so I gave a big grin and Anya told me to follow her. We walked down loads of hospital corridors until I thought my legs would fall off, and then finally we came to a small room where Mum was in a white bed.

  At first, when I went in, she didn’t look up. She was just lying there with white bandages around her wrists and a tube in her arm. Her face looked like someone had taken a rubber to it and erased Mum out of it. Then she turned her head and smiled at me, and it was as if someone had put all the colour back into her face. Her hair turned yellow again with black roots and her eyes changed from grey to sky-blue and even the tattoos on her arms and neck seemed brighter. Someone had taken out the hoop in her nose but that was a good thing because I thought it made her look like a bull. I wanted to ask if they’d taken the one out of her tongue as well, but I didn’t.

  ‘Hello, love,’ she said as I walked in. Her voice was hoarse. I felt nervous to go in, in case Ruen appeared.

  ‘Come here, Alex,’ she said. I stepped forward and she put her arms around me and squeezed me. Her arms felt cold and skinny.

  ‘Are you feeling better yet?’ I said.

  ‘I’ve had better days,’ she said after a long, long pause, and she smiled but her eyes were wet and small. ‘How have you been?’