Dave Zeltserman - Bad Thoughts

“Y-you deserved it! A-and t-the rest… nothing but a lie!”

“Keep telling yourself that. Which brings us to why I’m here. You created me, you little shit. I’m the image that you needed me to be in. I’m part of you. Buried deep inside you. I’m the monster you had to conjure up so you could go along with your little fantasy of what happened. In all truth, I’m you. The essence of you. And it makes me sick to my stomach.”

Shannon was overwhelmed with a sensation of vertigo. He squeezed his eyes tight as he felt himself spinning away. The invisible bond between him and Winters seemed to be weakening as he twisted upwards. He told himself that he was dreaming. That this was nothing but a bad dream. That he wanted to be far away.

“Not yet!” Winters ordered angrily, thick lines all of a sudden lining his stubby neck. “You don’t leave me now! I’ve got too much to tell you, you little shit! All about Phyllis Roberson. You don’t dare leave now-”

Shannon swung himself up in the easy chair, momentarily in free fall, his heart pounding, a cold sweat breaking over his face.

He was wide awake, Herbert Winters’s image vivid in his mind.

He was alone in his living room, but he could feel Winters’s presence. He could almost still smell the sourness of his breath. He could almost still feel it against his face. A draft from the window sill made him shiver.

Other than the one he had months ago with Janice Rowley, it was the first time he remembered any of his nightmares. In the past, there was nothing he could really hang on to except a vague sense of dread. If these were the type of dreams he was having, no wonder he’d been going nuts.

Shannon looked down at his right hand. He curled his fingers and felt the dull discomfort in his joints. In the cold weather the discomfort was closer to someone hammering nails into his bones.

There was no doubting they had been broken severely and worse. The torture he had undergone was real. The memories he had of that day were real.

So what about that dream?

Why was he conjuring up that murderer?

And what the hell did Winters mean about Phyllis Roberson? An image of the dead woman slid into his mind. In it he could picture the knife sticking out of the woman’s throat. He could see her eyes staring into oblivion.

Shannon forced himself out of the easy chair. He was surprised to find himself as shaky as he was. He moved slowly to the bedroom and lay down on the bed. He couldn’t keep from thinking about Phyllis Roberson. He couldn’t keep the image of her out of his mind. Of that knife sticking out of her throat.

Elaine Horwitz looked unnaturally pale, especially against the soft pink rim of her glasses. Part of the reason was her normally light complexion, partly that she had no makeup on; mostly, though, she was suffering from a wicked hangover. The type a cheap bottle of wine will cause. She sat staring at Shannon’s folder, her fingers impatiently drumming along her desk.

Sonofabitch.

The night before she had waited nearly twenty minutes before getting the message that Shannon had run out on her. The sonofabitch had even left his coat at the table. Horwitz took the news with a polite smile and then ordered dinner and a bottle of wine. She was too humiliated to get up and leave, so she sat there with her high-gloss lipstick and her Giorgio perfume and her tight, sexy evening dress and tried not to look like as big an idiot as she felt. And she drank every last drop of the wine. She had even put black lace panties on for him…

On leaving, she took his coat with her and shoved it into a Dumpster behind the restaurant. It seemed the least she could do.

Sonofabitch coward.

She wanted to call him now and tell him to go fuck himself. That he could find himself another therapist. She caught herself in the middle of the thought and let a bitter smile pull up the corners of her mouth. A woman scorned, she chided herself angrily.

Of course, she got only what she deserved. She never thought about getting involved with a patient before, well, maybe thought about it, but not seriously, at least not to this degree. And this was not only a patient but a married one. So what did she expect? You play with matches, you get burned. You play with married men, you get dumped. And, what she had to keep telling herself, you play with patients, you lose your license. So she got off easy… But what the hell was it with him? Why couldn’t she keep him out of her mind? Probably the pheromones he put out, making it completely physical and beyond her rational control. That had to be it.

He was already ten minutes late for his appointment.

Lousy, stinking sonofabitch…

Successful therapy requires both human interaction and caring, but she had let things go too far with him. Even going shopping to buy those black lace panties for the sonofabitch. From now on her relationship with Shannon was going to be completely clinical. Nothing else.

There was a knock on the door. She felt the butterflies rise up in her stomach as she stammered out for the person to come in. At that moment she felt more like a fraud than ever in her life.

The door opened and Mark Bennett, the hypnotherapist, shoved his face in.

“Sorry I’m late,” he apologized, out of breath. “Parking out on Beacon Street now is murder. I ended up five blocks away.”

“That’s okay,” Horwitz said. The butterflies settled back down like lead weights. “My patient hasn’t shown up yet.”

Bennett nodded, took his overcoat off and folded it over a chair and sat down, crossing his legs. With his fleshy face and receding curly hair and pear-shaped body he looked a little like Larry Fine from the Three Stooges. This is what’s always interested in me, Horwitz thought, fucking stooges.

“Maybe you could tell me about the patient,” Bennett asked, smiling pleasantly.

“He’s a thirty-three-year-old police officer. As an adolescent he found his mother after she’d been brutally murdered. It seems that repressed guilt has manifested itself into both clinical depression and extended blackouts.”

“What’s he guilty about?”

“He feels if he’d come home earlier he could’ve saved her.” Elaine Horwitz smiled joylessly. “He wouldn’t have been able to.”

Bennett settled back into his chair. “It sounds like you already figured it out. What do you need me for?”

“I don’t have it all figured out,” Horwitz said. “There’s something else. I have no idea what it is.” She sighed heavily and let her shoulders slump. “There’s a yearly pattern to his breakdowns. I want to dig deep and see what we can find.”

Bennett was frowning, making his long, rubbery face seem even more comical. “Yearly breakdowns? How consistent are they?”

“Very consistent. Every year around the anniversary of his mother’s death. Same pattern of symptoms climaxing to a prolonged blackout, usually lasting a week, and without the patient having any memories of it.”

Mark Bennett was frowning deeply and shaking his head, a perturbed look spreading over his features. “Lasting a week?” he muttered to himself.

Horwitz nodded. It sounded a lot worse when spoken out loud. Bad enough, actually, to make her regret not trying to have Shannon hospitalized. It made her wonder how much she’d let her personal feelings interfere with her treatment. A sick feeling crept into her stomach. She glanced at her watch. “He should be here by now,” she said uneasily. “He’s already fifteen minutes late. Let me try giving him a call.”

She dialed his number and let it ring until the answering machine clicked on. When she put down the receiver she offered Bennett an apologetic smile.