Edgar goes that same afternoon. Lawrence seems to be directing him to this mind doctor and he needs to know why. The moment Tiger and Lucy are in another room, he slips out the door without telling them and heads south. It is just past noon and the sun is straight above in another unusually hot London day. The heat feels positively unnatural. Edgar does not want to encounter Lawrence, so when he gets to the hospital, he sneaks up to the third floor and knocks on the alienist’s door, perspiring inside his black suit coat and trousers. She opens it immediately, almost as if she had been expecting him.
“Edgar Brim,” she smiles. “How nice to see you. Come in and lie down.”
He goes into the room without comment, but when he gets to the sofa, he sits on it instead of reclining. It is cold in here again.
Berenice stands at the door for a moment regarding him. Then she strides across the room in her silent way, swaying her wide hips under her tight brown dress, the same one she had worn the last time Edgar was here. If it is a uniform, it is a very strange one. Her face looks even older today, but her body somehow younger. “How have you been?”
“Not well. There are more problems.”
“I see.” She looks at him intently. “So, you do not want to lie down and tell me. You want to sit?”
“I have come here as part of seeking the truth about myself and my situation. In order to do that, I must ask you some questions first.”
“Are you sure you would like the truth, even if it is difficult to bear?”
He clears his throat. “Yes.”
“Ask me what you will.”
She sits on the sofa beside him, very close. He can smell her perfume again, but this time it is different, or at least, much stronger. It is unlike any he has ever smelled before.
He gathers himself. “Tell me more about yourself, who you are and how long you have known Sir Andrew Lawrence. He has not been entirely honest with me and I believe it is part of his plan to have me speak to you again. I want to know why. I need to know more about both of you before I can allow you to probe my mind or before I do anything more with him. A mysterious caller murdered my colleague and good friend a few days ago without laying a finger on him…” He regards Berenice. “I believe you met him.”
“Oh?”
“A young man, late teens, dark-blond hair, came here looking for me?”
“Oh…yes, I recall now. Handsome young man. He was murdered? How terrible.” She says it without much emotion, a doctor’s clinical response, fixing her hair as she speaks.
“Things are becoming awfully strange and desperate,” says Edgar, “and suddenly, Lawrence is offering to help me find the creature. In fact, he seems extremely interested.”
“A creature? The devil?”
“Yes. I will say it no matter what you think of me. Lawrence is going along with that idea, came over to my side without giving it much thought, in my opinion.”
“Your side? You really should lie down.”
“Tell me who you are.”
“I am Dr. Hilda Berenice, as I said. I was a neurologist first, studied at the London University. I have always been fascinated by the human brain.”
“The top of your class?”
“Yes. Did Lawrence tell you that?”
“He made that clear.”
“Well, he had the final word in hiring me. It was a bit of a risky thing, though, bringing me in to head up a psychiatry department, one dedicated to the sort of new work beginning to be practiced by the likes of Professor Freud, involving psychoanalysis and investigating repression, the unconscious and dreams.”
“Where did you practice neurology?”
“I never did. I met someone while I was in school and he influenced me to take up psychology. He was a marvelous man, with the most powerful brain I have ever encountered. I am gifted, but he is more so. He was an explorer, not afraid to look into things that others feared to investigate. He was magical. He and I became…very close.” She runs her hands along her thighs and her mind seems to drift. “Have you ever met someone you feel you have known for a long while, since before you met, before you were born?”
“What was his name?”
“It is immaterial. He showed me that psychology was the proper field for someone in search of the absolute truths about life.”
“And Lawrence?”
“I likely know little more about him than you do. He is a wealthy man, a kind man, who has built himself up from humble beginnings in Ireland. He is of an open mind too. He has submitted to psychoanalysis.”
“With you?”
“Of course.”
“So, you must know more of him than you are saying.”
“I cannot—”
“What did you learn when you analyzed him?”
“My dear boy that is none of your business. I could never divulge such things, but I can assure you he is a good man and you have nothing to fear, directly, from him. Might you lie down now?” She speaks the last sentence in a different sort of voice, a quiet, almost husky one, somehow soothing. Her perfume is now engulfing Edgar. He lies down.
“Let us seek the truth and see if we can help you.” She gets up, shuts off the lights, and returns in the dark to turn on the lamp above the sofa. She sits in her chair behind him and says, “Relax.” The word seems to take five minutes to leave her mouth. Edgar feels himself drifting. He hears her voice as if it is coming to him from a great distance, though it is clear and warm. “The last time I saw you, you left out important things, didn’t you? You mentioned your parents but you did not say anything about how you felt about them. Nor did you say a word about your dreams. I sense that dreams are very important to you.”
“Yes.” He pauses. “Dreams. My parents. I lost my mother on the day I was born.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“I hate it.”
“You hate your mother.”
“No.”
“I believe that, in some way, you may. What about your father?”
“He was everything to me.”
“Both mother and father to you?”
“Perhaps.”
“He looms large in your mind and in your unconscious.”
“He told me not to be afraid.”
“But it was he who brought fear into your life. You told me last time that he read dark, sensation stories to you. It was he who first brought into your mind the idea that the monsters were real.”
“Yes. It was not his fault though. He did not know I could hear the stories. He read them out loud in his room up above and they came down the heat pipe—”
“Into your brain.”
“Yes.”
“So, he put them there. You have issues you need to resolve with him. You need to encounter him, psychically, and chase this fear. Do you dream about him?”
“No, I dream of monsters.”
“So, you have nightmares.”
“Yes, many.”
“For how long?”
“Since the day I was born, it seems.”
The alienist does not say anything for a while. Edgar lies there under the dim light, hoping for her voice to appear again out of the darkness. She has done this before.
“Dr. Berenice?”
“I am here. I am here for you.” Her voice sounds almost seductive. “The monsters in your dreams are the incarnations of your fears. Do these monsters ever start out as friendly and then turn against you, attempt to kill you?”
“Perhaps once or twice but—”
“Then, it is evident that you perceive your friends, at least some of them, as your enemies, as monsters. Do you have friends, close friends, whose loyalty you have recently begun to doubt?”
Edgar thinks of Tiger’s strange behavior at the devil-worship room on Thomas Street, of the hatred in her voice for him after Jonathan’s death, of Lucy’s willingness to tell all their secrets to Lawrence and immediately take his side.
“Yes.”
“I suggest, then, that you investigate that concern. You must stay away from these friends until you are sure about them. It will not help your state to fear them.”
“I don’t think I—”
“You must protect yourself at all costs. We do not want to increase your paranoia. A paranoid mind is a diseased one.”
“Paranoid?”
“Now, let us address the devil issue. As long as you are calm and intelligently questioning your fears and keeping away from those who in some way frighten you, you should be able to differentiate between the devil inside you and one that might actually exist in flesh and blood and be in pursuit of you.”
“The one inside?”
“Your mind turning on itself.”
The thought terrifies Edgar. A devil inside him—living in his mind. He thinks of Satan in the Bible trying to infiltrate the soul of God.
“I am sure you have no evidence of an actual living devil pursuing you…do you?” Her voice seems closer, as if she is leaning down toward his head from behind.
He thinks of the big black feather he found in the devil-worship room, the sounds of the hooved footsteps. He thinks also of Grendel, the vampire creature and Dr. Godwin, made by the hand of man, all monsters alive in flesh and blood. He thinks of Shakespeare saying that something worse, as real as the others, will come for him.
“Edgar? Do you?”
He wonders if Tiger, Lucy and Lawrence, if Professor Lear and Shakespeare are all in this together, always have been since the start, taking his mind apart, slowly leading him into the arms of Satan, their final goal. He wants to see his father.
“No. No, I do not. That would be madness. And I am not mad.”
It takes Dr. Berenice a long time to respond. “Good,” she finally says. “To finish, let us do something called free association. I will not belabor it. I will merely ask what comes to your mind when I say a few different words. Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
“Your mother.”
“Love.”
“Your father.”
“Love.”
“Fears.”
“Do not be afraid.”
“Dreams.”
Edgar says nothing.
“Dreams?” she asks again.
“The hag.”
“Pardon me?”
“I have not told you about my most important dream, a recurring one that I have had since I was a child.”
“Well, that omission is itself interesting. Does this dream contain an old woman who sits on your chest when you try to wake in the morning? Do you feel paralyzed and cannot move your limbs?”
“How do you know that?”
“Surely you know why, Edgar. You know that such a dream simply has to do with sleep paralysis, an easily explained phenomenon where the subject wakes suddenly and the body, doing its job in the way it should, has merely put its functions to sleep too, so that the subject does not get up during a dream and injure himself. This sleep paralysis, known to some as the hag phenomenon because it sometimes involves the fear-induced delusion of someone, often an old woman, sitting on the chest, is actually nothing to fear.” Edgar glances up at her: her old woman’s face and her intense black eyes. “The only thing you have to fear in this situation,” she continues, “is the fear itself. That, in the end, is really all you have to combat. Our bodies are helping us in these moments, keeping us safe. Again, it is only when our minds turn on us that we have true problems. Our bodies are generally wonderful things, Edgar. It is a good idea to explore your body and its potential too, as well as your mind. I was taught that by my mentor.” She says the last word as if she were speaking of God.
“The man you knew in school, who pushed you into psychiatry and magic?”
“A great man,” says Berenice, and her voice sounds distant. “You have nothing to fear, as long as this hag does not come to you in situations other than waking from a deep sleep. She never does that, does she, Edgar Brim?”
“No,” says Edgar quickly. “No.” He thinks of the hag appearing on the boat on Spitsbergen Island in the north, of it attacking him before he can fall asleep in his room at home. He thinks of it calling out to him, telling him that it is the devil, seeming as real as his own flesh and blood.
“I have one last word for you in our free association exercise.”
“Yes.”
“Satan.”
It takes a few beats before Edgar replies. “Nothing,” he finally says.
“Well, that is an interesting response indeed. I should tell you that we psychiatrists understand that patients often answer the opposite of what they really know is the truth. They repress the truth. Take care that you have not done that. As I have said before, it is better to battle your fears than to run from them.”
She switches off the dim lamp, walks silently across the floor and turns on the bright lights. Edgar has to put his hand over his eyes to shield them from the glare. He sits up. Dr. Berenice is standing close to him. He can smell her perfume again, like an intoxicant in the air. He feels almost giddy. He looks up and sees that aging face, obviously once beautiful, dark featured and exotic, sitting on top of her young body.
“Perhaps Satan is real, Edgar Brim, as real as my hand.” She places her left hand on the side of his head at his temple, its soft, warm surface feeling as though it is touching his brain inside his skull. She runs it down his cheek to his chin and removes it. She smiles.
“Life is to be embraced in all its possibilities. Perhaps the things we think are evil are not so terrible, and the things we think are good are not so wonderful. I was taught that too and I keep it close to my heart to this day.” She puts her hand on her chest and moves it to a place over her heart. “Go out now and grapple with these fears, avoiding those whom you suspect, and embrace the devil if you must.”
When Edgar reaches the street, he has no memory of leaving Berenice’s office, though he thinks he can still smell her perfume. He is sure he was on the lookout for Lawrence as he came through the hospital, trying to avoid him, and certain too that he was being followed or at least watched, but that is all he remembers. It is as if he wakes up on Whitechapel Road. He actually considers, for a moment, if he was ever in Berenice’s office, ever spoke to her, or if she even has an office at the London Hospital…if she exists at all. He still feels a little lightheaded, and surprisingly, very good.
Edgar walks all the way to Kentish Town. Just as he turns into the Lears’ street, he sees his father walking toward him.