Borderliners, page 2
My grandfather still visited me in my dreams, as real as ever. Nonna Rosa too, sometimes. If they were just figments of my imagination, then the real world didn’t match up. As revenge for my treatment, I decided to study psychoanalysis at university. In the future, people like me would be treated by those of us who had a more open mind, who didn’t believe the brain was a simple mechanism which had to be wired up either one way or another. There were so many permutations and varieties of normal, so many differences in the way people thought about things and their experiences of reality. I was determined to qualify as a psychotherapist so that I could treat people in a different way. I would be gentler and more careful with people’s precious minds. I would try to help them, and I wouldn’t tell them they had got it all wrong. Sometimes it seemed a tall order. Being so close to people who walked on reality’s borderline kept me close to the edge too.
The gentle floating descent of something outside reflected on my computer screen as I waited for it to power up. It reminded me of snow until I saw the drifting items were large, wispy and flat, a reminder that the nights would draw in further and the trees lose all their leaves before winter was truly upon us. Born at the very beginning of January, I smiled at the thought that my favourite season was just around the corner. It was a shame my patients didn’t feel the same way and it was with some trepidation that I scrolled through my schedule for the day, knowing I would get busier as winter approached.
I was glad I’d chosen not to look at my cards the previous night. Julia’s hawk-eyed presence played on my mind so I’d decided to leave it for another day. What I’d found in the diary needed investigation - and not of the type any police officer could carry out - but I needed time to think before I started delving into card readings and all that it entailed. As desperate as I was to check my hunch, it could wait another few hours. I shivered, despite the heating in the surgery building, which had been turned up full in anticipation of bad weather. I didn’t want to open up that can of worms again, but I was afraid I had no choice. Maybe I would read through the notebook again first. This time more slowly, so I could take in every word and consider its meaning.
My first patient shuffled in, eyes on the floor, hair unkempt and thinning with an inch of grey showing at the roots where she hadn’t bothered to redo her normal rinse. I caught a hint of mental fragmentation, one I was beginning to notice more frequently.
I reached for my glasses as I gestured for her to take a seat. ‘Good morning, Joan.’
She started talking as soon as she sat down, her voice low and her eyes on the door. 'It's as if I've been thrown out of the community. I've been a member for twenty years - since the beginning - and now I've been cast out. Like a demon, the ones she told us to beware of…’ She looked around, her eyes darting this way and that until they came to a halt on a point somewhere beyond my window. ‘I don't know what to do with myself. All my friends are active members, and I was too, with the prayer group in particular. As was my late husband.’ She crossed herself twice, spindly fingers shaking as she did so.
I was taken aback by the change in her appearance, by the lost aura around her, which made her appear at odds with the bustling, busy Joan I’d seen around before.
‘Nobody will speak to me anymore. I don't know what I've done. That's why I'm here, Dr Lewis. I don't know if I can cope.’
A tremor ran through me but I watched her, calm and still.
‘I'm scared, Dr Lewis. I want you to help me. I don't understand what’s happening. Julia came to my house to discuss our stall at the village fair which I help with every year - you know the one Dr Lewis?’ There was a pause as she shifted in her chair.
‘What do you think happened, Joan?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘With the community. What happened? When did it all change?’
‘I think it was when I asked Julia about the Rapture.’
‘The Rapture?’
‘Yes, yes…,’ she nodded. ‘We - the Charismatic Community - believe it will happen in our lifetime.’
She looked through the windows at the sun, already low in the sky. ‘This world of ours, Dr Lewis, its days are numbered. Our days are numbered. Or so we believe. Or so I believed, at least.’
I waited, and as I did so, Martha grew from the lengthening dark shadows of my consulting room, her eyes bright. My hands clenched as I closed my eyes to banish her.
‘Dr Lewis?’
I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry, keep going Joan.’
‘Julia said…’ She shifted in her chair again and continued. ‘Well, now everything has changed. I had a note from Julia saying that Mary was going to take over the fair as they knew I was busy this year, but I'm not. If anything, I enjoy doing it. I'm all alone now Jim is dead and Lisa is away.’
‘What did Julia say?’
‘Oh. It doesn’t matter really. It’s just that I’ve been having doubts about the…the end times. I don’t know if I believe it. You know, the idea that only the believers will be saved.’ She paused. ‘Well, you see, it’s my daughter, too. She’s become an atheist, but she’s a good person. Heart of gold. I just can’t accept the idea that I would be saved and she wouldn’t.’
‘Can you explain why?’
‘She’s a better person than me.’
I tried to smile my best, comforting smile. ‘Don't you think you're a good person, Joan?’
‘It’s not that, dear. You’re still young and you’ve not been here that long, but I’ve seen so many people come and go. Not everything is as it seems. You begin to doubt yourself, you know? I’ve been thinking a lot about them. About Julia and Iain. They’ve been here a fair few years now - I can still remember when they first arrived.’
‘When was that?’
‘About twenty years ago. They were quite young when they came. And they were different from the start. It wasn’t long before they started the Charismatic Community up and started recruiting people. Julia can be very persuasive. So many joined. It was a way of life, it gave you a sense of belonging. I can’t describe it. But then, over the years. All this.’ She stopped, a red flush creeping up from the base of her neck to her chin like a nettle rash.
‘This what?’ I risked prompting her.
‘All the compulsory donations and prayer groups. Over the years it seems to have got worse. We have to pay them so much now, it’s getting ridiculous. Julia says they need it to prepare people for the Rapture.’ The red patch on her neck grew angrier, but I prompted her again.
‘Are you afraid?’
‘No, no.’ She paused and coughed. ‘Well, maybe a little. I hadn’t thought of it like that before.’
I let her talk for a bit longer, allowing the tension to fizzle out as she moved onto more mundane topics: her sleepless nights, bad eating habits and smaller niggles. She talked, I listened. That was what I was there for. But as I did so, shivers travelled down my back. When I tried to feel my way through hunches and half-formed ideas, it struck me that her words echoed those of Martha just before her death.
Back home that evening, my post was waiting for me on the mat along with a small envelope. After dropping most of the junk mail into the recycling, I turned my attention to the Basildon Bond envelope, its old-fashioned, creamy texture as affected as the writing scrawled across the middle. Inside was an invitation to a drinks party for ‘Friends of Julia and Iain’. They made it sound like a charity. I tutted and dropped it onto the table whilst I rummaged in the fridge for the leftovers from the giant salad I’d made the previous day.
The TV sat, blank and mute in the opposite corner as I sat down in the living room and started to pick at my food. It was as tasteless as ever - food for one had never been my forte. As I forked through my dinner, a scent of heavy perfume caught my nostrils. I sniffed the air, trying to locate where it was coming from, but it came and went, as if eluding me on purpose. Looking round, my eyes fell on the bookshelf next to the fireplace on the back wall of the room. Propped up, in the very centre of shelves, sat Martha’s little black notebook, its pages splayed open as if on display.
I slammed down my fork and cast my plate aside before grabbing it off the bookshelf and flicking my thumb across the pages, a cloud of dust hit my nostrils. I coughed, gulping back a rising sense of nausea as an odd scent sunk into my lungs. It was musky with something retro about it, like a perfume from another age. The brand Samsara came to mind, a heavy scent I remembered from my childhood. My stomach contracted, just as it had the previous night but I was like an addict. I knew what was in the diary, and I had to read it again. Just to be sure.
Turning to the beginning, I started to read.
Chapter 3
While I was skimming through the diary I was interrupted by a knock at the door. If it was Julia again, I wasn’t in the mood. But the shape on the other side was small and hunched: Mrs Dobson from next door. I hesitated for a second before opening the door to the old lady. Well over eighty, she and her husband were surprisingly independent, but every so often they needed help. Sometimes it was shopping, other times they needed assistance with household items which broke down. The boiler, a leaky tap, a drawer which had got stuck. Occasionally it was worse than that, but so far I’d never had to call an ambulance or drive them to a doctor. Most intriguing of all, they managed to get by in the village despite not belonging to the Charismatic Community.
Mrs Dobson had small dark eyes in a sharp little face which reminded me of a weasel’s. She held a neat, cloth shopping bag in one hand and had a small, red handbag over the opposite shoulder. Explaining that the grocery delivery hadn’t arrived she asked me if I had any fresh basil I could give her. I fetched some for her from the basil plant I kept on my kitchen windowsill.
‘I noticed His Nibs by your back door yesterday,’ she said as I handed her a handful of basil. I considered my response. ‘His Nibs’ was her nickname for Iain.
‘Really?’
‘Yes, bold as brass. I thought I’d better tell you. I’m sure you invited him over, didn’t you dear?’
‘No, but Julia came round later on in the day - there was something she wanted to ask me.’
‘Of course. I just thought I’d mention it.’ She held up the hand with the basil in it. ‘Thanks for the basil, dear.’ She stuffed it into her shopping bag, turned and made her way back up my driveway.
‘Bye,’ I called after her and shut the door.
Once back in the house, I sat down again to look through the black notebook, more slowly this time. It fell open on the first page.
Dream journal, September
All was silent except for the sound of a clock ticking. I hate the marking of time, and the sound made me uneasy. It was dark, murky, but gradually that lifted. I saw there were bookshelves right ahead of me, so I moved over to them, as if being pulled by a string. Bit by bit my surroundings revealed themselves: a turgid, black interior, dirty, oak shelves lined with crystals, ancient symbols and wooden carvings, statues of hands with lines chipped into their wooden palms. It was difficult to tread a clear path through all the junk heaped on the floor.
There were no voices or sounds of any kind. A relief, but a sign I was not in the real world.
I kept going. A glint caught my eye and I jumped at the sight of a woman propped up on the wall. She looked just like me – all long black hair and pale introspection, and blue eyes which didn’t look right. She was flanked by turquoise crystals and fragmented light - an emerald hue of split spectrum behind her. My heart beat time now, the clock no longer prominent as I looked again. It was a reflection, some kind of mirror.
Then the scene changed. I was heading to the noticeboard again. I knew it then, knew I was trapped in the dream. I went over to it as I always do, but when I got there, it swam around in front of my eyes, refusing to reveal its secrets, no matter how hard I concentrated on its cork outline and hazy contents.
At this point the noticeboard never does.
I looked up from the diary, turning the page which was dirty and smudged in places. A sense of disquiet hovered as I cast my mind back a few years to my younger self. In my mind’s eye I saw myself knocking on the heavy wooden door of an establishment in my student town, known for the sale of occult items. My primary interest at the time had been its large selection of astrology books and, reckless as I was then, I hadn’t given much thought to the taxi driver’s warnings on the trip over. Once inside, the shop owner - an unsmiling gangly man clad from head to toe in Gothic black - had pushed a large bolt across the inside of the door. When I’d asked him why, he’d said it was because locals kept attacking the place and they couldn’t take any chances. That was when I’d seen the skulls and chains on the opposite wall.
I shook myself. I was a grown adult, no longer a vulnerable teenager, and one who needed to get on with the task in hand. On the next page I had to squint to decipher the next couple of entries which were partially obscured by the ghost of a ringed tea stain.
Dream journal, September
This time, I dropped through an open door into a dark pit. It felt like one of my episodes coming on, as unseeing and unfeeling, I fell as the world around sped up. Dreary colour blurred at my side before exploding into fireworks as my head hit the floor. When I got up, there was a cloaked figure floating through to the glistening gravel beyond me. I remembered the noticeboard and tried to hurry over to it. But my legs wouldn’t move and the floor beneath dissipated.
No voices, no sound of any kind. The same signs, but worse. The same message, unseen.
There was a shop assistant this time, unaware of my presence. Like real life where people just don’t see me.
I glimpsed a sneer, but I did not fear her. In fact, I just wafted past her through the shop, until I got to the bookshelves. I noted, once again, the small window, the dark corners, the crystals, the incense and the wooden carvings. I passed through the purple sequined throws, the chains and the skulls until I got to the noticeboard and its newspaper clippings. They swarmed into focus as I read:
'Dramatic collapse in village surgery…'
I jumped to see a woman by my side. She was tall and dark and she, too, was silent as she stared at the clippings, her presence contaminating the air with menace.
Her long fingers reached out to touch a third clipping, which was pinned further along the cork board. The fingers caressed it for a moment and I strained my eyes until they wouldn’t stretch further from their sockets, but all I could see was:
'Disappearance of …'
'What are you doing here?' she said, and I felt my body faltering, as if the game was up.
Dream journal, October
The atmosphere was velvet and as my eyes got used to the darkness I saw that I was in an old farmhouse, or maybe a barn. There was a pile of hay in the corner and a scratching noise emanating from the rafters above. Another second and suddenly there was someone right behind me. I knew I had to run. I took to my feet and it felt like flying, more like gliding than running.
Again, there was a presence somewhere nearby. Faster now, I darted through a small door in the corner of the room and took to the stairs ahead of me. These were concrete, old and worn, twisting up through a narrow space. I was dimly aware that it was not wise to be travelling upwards, away from any possible exit, but instinct drove me. Panic drove my breath out of my lungs in short bursts as I turned to see a dark shape behind me on the stairs, a presence at once right behind and a few metres away. I saw a glimpse of dark eyes glinting; a sense of danger, a flash of metal and I felt my heart beating.
The air closed in on me, pulsating, thick. Where was the light? Arriving at the top of the stairs I did not dare turn around again. I could barely make out doors and a high-pitched roof above, indicating the end of the line. I had to go through one of these doors, and then what? A rush of air and just behind, a palpable sense of breathing and not breathing, tension and control. And then I began to run again.
A voice from above stopped me in my tracks:
‘Watch out! She’s behind you. We told you to keep away. Why didn’t you heed our warning?’
A faint whispering pulsed through a kind of tangible silence which closed in around me. Dank menace permeated the air and what little flat light was there glowed sickly and weak beyond the rafters above my head.
A card flipped through the air and fell into my lap face up. It was the High Priestess. Then another, Death followed by The Fool. A crack followed and all three cards burst into sudden flames which licked up towards my face and consumed my body.
And I felt as if I would never wake up again.
I put the book down. Puzzled, I went to get my laptop to check my personal notes on Martha’s case, specifically on what she’d said about fortune telling cards and astrology. She had been anxious about it and it seemed her interest in such things was frowned upon by many in the village. I squinted at the notes. But Martha had never mentioned being a member of the Charismatic Community; in fact, her apparent lack of friends and acquaintances had been my biggest worry. Why hadn’t she told me more about the people she had around her? She’d always been so vague. I’d assumed her woolly-headedness was a part of her depression.
Behind my eyes, a migraine had started to needle my sinuses and unable to read any more, I went upstairs to my bedroom and crawled under the covers where I lay for a long time, thinking. The image of Martha’s lifeless body flashed up again and again as she lay, prone, next to the book. I shivered. Before the police arrived, I’d been gripped by a strange desire to pick up the black notebook from the floor and take it home with me.
I looked down at the diary, its pages splayed open on the quilt, and one paragraph in particular jumped out at me. ‘…black interior, dirty, oak shelves lined with crystals, ancient symbols and wooden carvings, statues of hands with lines chipped into their wooden palms’. Wasn’t it the same place? The New Age shop I’d found Martha in? I thought of the shadowy barn nestling in that secluded clearing. On a previous visit I’d peered through the windows to glimpse wooden palm carvings and crystals, just like those described in the diary. My meeting with Martha there had been my second visit to the place. I didn’t think it would be my last.
