Dave Zeltserman - The Caretaker of Lorne Field

“I still don’t think you should be talking to me until I’m off the morphine,” he complained.

She smiled at that. “Jack, rest assured that your being on pain medication won’t have any effect on my evaluation.” She paused for a moment before continuing again in her soft lisp. “I am curious about something,” she said. “It seems to me that you’re the only person in your town who believes that these weeds are monsters. Is that true?”

“I never said they’re monsters,” Durkin muttered indignantly. “Monsters are unknown imaginary things. Aukowies have been well documented.”

“Excuse me for my mistake. Are you the only person from your town who believes Aukowies grow out of Lorne Field?”

“Used to be the whole town believed that.”

“But how about now?”

Durkin’s jaw muscles hardened as he thought about it. “My son, Bert, believed it,” he said finally. “He came down to the field the day he died to help me with my weeding. He could see their faces. He told me he could hear the cries they made when I killed them.”

The psychiatrist nodded gently. She pulled her chair closer to Durkin’s bed so she could hold his hand with both of hers. He didn’t fight it, just turned his head away from her, his lips pressing into two thin bloodless lines.

“Do you think your son might’ve been telling you that to please you?”

“No, Bert believed it. I could tell. He wasn’t humoring me.”

“Maybe he made himself believe it as a way to please you?”

“It wasn’t just Bert,” Durkin said. “Hank Thompson told me he believed it, too. He told me how he snuck down to Lorne Field when he was a kid and watched my grandpa weeding the field. He heard the Aukowies scream when they died. He told me how he was afraid his ears were going to start bleeding from the noise.”

The psychiatrist patted Durkin’s hand. He kept his stare fixed on the opposite wall.

“Jack, as you said before, when Mr. Thompson was younger everyone in your town believed in these creatures. Naturally, Mr. Thompson would be predisposed to believe in them also. He knew he was supposed to hear them scream, so he heard them. This type of behavior is really the basis of group hysteria. Think of how a cult works. Everyone knows they’re expected to believe, so they try hard to, and in the end they do believe, regardless of how irrational the beliefs are.”

“I thought cults used brainwashing,” Durkin muttered.

“That is all part of the psychology behind brainwashing,” she said. “Think of what your town underwent for several hundred years as collective brainwashing.”

Durkin shook his head slowly, his eyes still fixed on the opposite wall. “I know what I’ve been seeing my whole life,” he said.

“Jack, think about it. The two most important male role models in your life were your father and grandfather. They both believed in these weeds being creatures, so you had to make yourself believe. You were going to see what you had to see and hear what you had to hear.”

“It ain’t like that,” he said. “No, that ain’t it. It don’t explain why no animal, bird or insect goes anywhere near that field. It don’t explain what I saw those Aukowies do to my son, Lester, or to Dan Wolcott.”

“It does, Jack, if you think about it honestly. With everyone else in town doubting the existence of these creatures, you needed to believe, Jack. You needed to create those memories so you could continue to believe.”

The muscles along Durkin’s mouth and jaw bunched up as he shook his head. The psychiatrist waited patiently for him to speak. When he didn’t she gently patted his hand again.

“What if Dan Wolcott’s body still exists?” she asked.

“It don’t. I saw what the Aukowies did to him.”

“But what if it does? According to your statement, you waited forty minutes after Dan Wolcott stepped into the field before you set fire to his jeep. What if you used those forty minutes to drive his body somewhere?”

He shrugged. “If that happened, then I guess I’m crazy.”

“Why don’t I try to find out?”

Durkin looked back at her, his eyes staring unfocused into the distance. He nodded glumly.

When the psychiatrist met later with McGrale and Goldman, she explained to them how she couldn’t hypnotize Durkin.

“I thought I had him under,” she told them. “But I guess I couldn’t get him under deep enough.” Sighing, she added, “Not everybody can be hypnotized.”

“What makes you think you couldn’t get him under deep enough?” McGrale asked.

“Because I couldn’t tap into his unconscious. I was stuck in his false memories of watching the victim being torn apart by the weeds, and then with him spending the next forty minutes trying to figure out how to deal with the weeds. I couldn’t budge him away from the field. I couldn’t get him to remember what he did with the victim’s body.”

“Would additional hypnotherapy sessions work?” McGrale asked.

“Not in my professional opinion, no. He either can’t be hypnotized and is faking, or the false memories are locked in too tightly.”

McGrale rubbed his jaw. Goldman asked whether she’d support his client being declared incompetent.

“Absolutely not. He’s lucid and, outside of his fantasies about those weeds, quite rational. I would oppose any attempt to do so.”

“How about whether he’s criminally insane?” McGrale asked, a pained look spreading over his face.

“He could be. He does believe these weeds are monsters. I have no doubt about that, and it’s possible he murdered and disposed of the victim without any conscious awareness of it for no other reason than to erase self-doubts he may have been having about the true nature of those weeds. It’s equally possible that this could be a calculated act to convince others of the existence of these monsters. This is a man who badly needs other people to believe this. The lack of respect he has been receiving in his Caretaker role has been devastating for him, especially since he feels as if he has been sacrificing his life for the world’s sake. For that reason, and because I find it curious that his only supporters are both dead, I’m leaning more towards the latter explanation.”

McGrale stood up, walked around his desk to where Goldman was sitting hunched over, and clapped the younger attorney solidly on the shoulder.

“Well, counsellor,” he said. “For better or worse we’ll be bringing this three-ring circus to the courtroom. Charges will be filed tomorrow.”

That night Goldman visited Durkin to tell him about the arraignment hearing the next day and also that he went to see Jeanette Thompson, but that she claimed she never saw either the contract or book, and doubted whether they even existed. The news devastated Durkin. He sank back into his hospital bed an old man. Goldman was going to ask him for names of anyone else who might’ve ever seen either of those items, more to satisfy his own curiosity than anything else, but one look at Durkin and he knew it would be worse than beating an already whipped dog.

The next day Durkin was taken to the District Court in an ambulance and wheeled into the courthouse with a blanket covering the lower part of his body. The reporters and photographers lined up outside pressed towards him, but he stared blindly ahead and gave them no notice. Inside the courtroom he was charged with manslaughter in the first degree and remanded without bail. When the trial date was set for April tenth, Durkin grabbed Goldman by his oversized suit jacket and pulled him close.

“That’s too late,” he croaked frantically. “That’s going to be at least two weeks after spring thaw. If the Aukowies are left alone for that long-”