CHAPTER FOURTEEN

... DISTURBED.

What does “disturbed” mean?

Dr. I. Luther peered over the tops of his half-glasses at Chandal Knight’s folder. Case history number 33236. It was late Friday afternoon. Outside the narrow lead-paned window of his office, which faced the huge expanse of lawn that encompassed most of the front grounds of Lakewood Sanitarium, it was raining. Soft rain. Steady rain. A rain filled with many thoughts. The word “disturbed” passed through his mind once again.

Over the years he had hoped that the word would take on new meaning for him, that it would change or that some other word would appear to clarify its meaning so that the word could be transmuted into an absolute.

He thought—of that frightened young girl. A February night. She had cried herself sick. Fainted. Found herself surrounded by windows laced with steel net. Lakewood. He had gone to her. Had helped her relax. She had screamed suddenly: Fire!... A quick series of injections. Then sleep.

Commotion became stillness.

And soon a year had passed with Chandal progressing from “mental illness” to “health.” It had been a startling recovery which began in September of that same year. Her confusion had suddenly vanished. Overnight, it seemed, she had everything under control. She was no longer “disturbed.” It had happened too suddenly to please Dr. Luther. Not, unfortunately, too suddenly to please the Board of Examiners.

He glanced again at the folder before him and remembered how the empty pages began to fill. Notes doubled. Full chords filled the binder. Notes written below the allotted space. Hurried notes. Sudden thoughts that had seemed important to him at the time.

His fist curled tight now as he tried to extricate himself from thought. It was one of his concentration tricks. Tense a part of your body to get the brain’s attention, to get it off whatever particular treadmill it had begun to pace at a given moment. This afternoon it wasn’t working.

Beyond his window clouds shifted, causing yet more shadows that changed the day. An overhang supported by four round pillars that extended to the edge of the walkway continued to shield people as they waited for cars to pick them up. Others decided in sudden fits of frenzy to make a mad dash for it.

The door to his office opened abruptly and he looked up, momentarily squinting.

“Dr. Luther! I didn’t know you were still here.”

It was Nurse Sharp, one of the hospital’s part-time medical secretaries, a registered nurse with more of a penchant for clerical work than for patients. Nurse Sharp was assigned to Luther whenever he found himself with an excessive work load. She was wearing a dark blue suit, suede and expensive.

“I’m afraid so,” he sighed.

“I just finished a few letters for Dr. Hess. I thought I’d check your file. To see if you needed something done.”

“I’m all caught up at the moment. Thank you.”

She shook her head and frowned. “You look tired.”

“Just restless. I’ll be all right.”

“Well, have a nice weekend.”

“You too.”

“Bye.”

Without looking back, she departed quickly.

Luther sat for a while with quiet thoughts. Then he stood up and removed his lab coat. He looked taller without it. Broad shoulders. Narrow waist. He pushed his arms through the sleeves of his sports jacket. Now he stood behind his desk, with an apprehensive sense of things disassembling. He was uncertain how to react to Chandal’s sudden return to New York.

He had had many strange cases, but out of all his many patients, he had always felt there was something unexplainable about her recovery. She had appeared totally healthy upon her release from Lakewood. Yet... something didn’t fit.

Over the many months that followed her release, he had tried to put all doubt out of his mind. But somehow he had never freed himself from her bewitchment, or had freed himself only temporarily, then had found himself once again drawn to her file. Drawn again to listen to the tape recording of her voice that he had listened to so many times.

On sudden impulse he withdrew a small tape machine from his desk drawer, dropped quickly into his chair and pressed the start button. There was no need to check the label to ascertain the tape’s contents. It was the voice recording of Patient 33236, C. Knight, a 26-year-old Caucasian female.

The click of the machine echoed abrasively against the walls of his almost airtight office. A brief silence followed before her words filled the room.

“Because I have seen what I have seen,
Because I have been where I have been,
Because I have communed with those who know...
I am who I am.”

Chandal spoke dully, without emphasis, her voice deeply unhappy. There was desolation in what she was saying, a darkness, as if laced with eons of medieval superstitions.

He punched the button. There was no impulse to rewind the tape and listen again. He knew the words by heart. He knew, too, that Chandal had never remembered saying those words. And that she could not explain their meaning.

Were they part of a dream she had once had? A hallucination? A fantasy of sorts? Or did they have meaning? Were they part of and the cause of her amnesia?

He dug into her folder. Turned pages until he found what he was looking for. He took the note away and read it silently.

Chandal’s expression, appearance, and the impression she makes are all fairly normal now. She is about seven-eighths of the time young-looking, facial features relaxed. She has almost completely lost the disoriented quality which plagued her throughout most of her sessions. Yet there are fleeting moments when she slips into a much more prudish posture. Restricted and somber. In these moments she refers to herself as WE, fluctuates from poor to fair contact, and speaks very little and shyly. During these unusual brief periods, her eyes change from wide-eyed and normal to a more dreamy and introverted expression. Eyes become narrow slits.

Seven-eighths of the time, Luther mused. It had always been the remaining one-eighth that had left him feeling vaguely uneasy.

Luther now took a breath deeper than usual as he wished that he had gotten more information from Ron Talon. He hoped that he had left Ron with the right sense of urgency. He found himself thinking it imperative that Ron call him once he’d reached New York City.

Carefully he placed the note back into Chandal’s folder and closed its cover. He had closed the cover once, thinking it was over. This time he wasn’t quite that sure.