“Can you tell me when you first became aware of this delusion?” Johnathan said.
“Oh, um, it’s been a very long time. As long as I can remember,” Sophie said.
“Tell me the oldest memory you have, then,” he suggested. Sophie pursed her lips in thought, taking a moment to reply.
“Okay, well, the earliest memory I have of my monster would be-” she began, but Johnathan interrupted her.
“Call it what it is, Sophie,” he corrected sternly, holding up a hand to stop her. “Delusion, hallucination, phantasm, I don’t care what term you use, but calling it your ‘monster’ only feeds into this fantasy of yours that it is real.”
“Okay,” she said, nodding. “Right. Well, uh,” she stammered, having lost her train of thought.
“You were about to share your earliest memory involving your delusion,” he prompted.
“I think I was five or six,” she said, and then she was back there.
Sophie could picture it perfectly, sitting on her bed, her bedroom a mirror image of what it had been when she was in early elementary school. Her parents’ disappointed faces were in the doorway, her mother’s arms crossed as she looked down at her. In her memory her parents towered over her. She remembered them as being freakishly tall, and she supposed when she had been this age they had been, but in modern-day she was actually an inch or two taller than her mother now that she was fully grown.
“I can’t sleep,” she whined.
“Don’t do this tonight,” her mother said, frustration dripping from her voice.
Now that she was an adult she had sympathy for her mother’s position. She was physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted. She just wanted Sophie to go to bed so she could sleep, too. But, as a little girl, Sophie didn’t comprehend or care about the stressors of the adult world.
She didn’t understand the complex difficulties of work and childcare and an endless list of household chores. She had no concept of how something as simple as ten extra bedtime minutes could feel like the end of the world when you just want a break from the responsibilities of parenthood. She just knew her mother liked to yell.
“There’s a monster,” was all Sophie got out before the yelling started.
“Under your bed,” her mother finished for her hotly.
“It’s actually in my closet,” Sophie said quietly, shooting an anxious side-eye to her closet door.
“You do this every night, I know what you’re doing. You’re just trying to push your bedtime back further, and I’ve had it. I’m tired of having the same fight with you every night. We’ve crawled around every inch of your room, gotten you your new stuffy, you have two nightlights-”
“Just go to bed, I’ll handle this,” her father said, placing a hand on her mother’s shoulder. Her mother let out a noise of frustration before storming down the hall to disappear in their bedroom. “She’s just tired,” her father said in explanation, returning his attention to the little girl in the bed.
“I didn’t mean to wake her up last night,” Sophie said apologetically. She really hadn’t meant to. It had just sort of happened.
“You woke her up five times last night,” her father said. “You are going to make her sick if you keep crying out at night like that. Listen, Sophie, there is no monster. You need to stop fighting us at night and let us sleep. No more screaming tonight.”
“When I see the monster I scream, it’s not my fault it wakes people up,” she said, frowning as she pictured the creeping blackness lurking in the shadows.
She glanced at her closet again, and her father sighed heavily before walking over and throwing open her closet door, making a show of reaching inside and feeling the corners to show there was no monster present. She saw the shadow under her bed waver slightly and knew it was the monster’s new home, but there was no point in saying anything.
“If you scream when you see it, then keep your eyes closed,” her father said. “We’re out of patience with you. Your doctor said there is nothing wrong with you and you should grow out of the monster stories soon. I’m telling you you’re growing out of it tonight. No more screaming.” His tone left no room for argument.
“Okay,” Sophie said, and he leaned down to place a kiss on her head and he left her room.
She snuggled tightly with her new stuffy, a bear dressed as a knight that her parents had said would scare away the monster. She tried to keep her eyes shut tight as her father had suggested, but it was hard. Not seeing was almost worse than seeing, when you knew a monster was lurking. The nightlights illuminated her room in a good amount of light, but the corners of her room were still bathed in shadows.
Her little eyes flitted from shadow to shadow, looking for the monster. They were no longer under her bed, but she didn’t know which shadow they were hiding in. She thought she saw it and squeaked, only barely managing to hold in her scream at the last moment. Her brave knight bear went toppling to the ground, and it bounced a few times as it settled on her fluffy, pink rug. She wanted to yell for her parents, but they had been so upset, so she held it in.
Alone and scared she shut her eyes, telling herself over and over again there was no monster, trying desperately not to scream. She didn’t think she would ever fall asleep, filled with fear as she was, without her brave knight to keep her safe. She had to have fallen asleep eventually, however, because when she woke up her bear was lying beside her on the bed, thick strands of drool still drying on its leg.
“I’m sorry, did you say drool?” Johnathan interrupted, cutting into her recollection. She blinked a few times, remembering that she was an adult in a therapist’s office, not a little girl in her bedroom.
“Uh, yeah,” Sophie said. “Drool. The leg of the bear, it had ropes of drool on it. From when my mons- I mean, from when I imagined my monster putting it back on my bed.”
“Did you have a dog, by chance?” Johnathan questioned.
“I mean, we did have a dog named Franklin, but he wouldn’t put the bear back on my bed. He would have just shredded it, if he got a hold of it.”
“Dogs can be incredibly intelligent creatures,” he said.
“Not this dog,” she said flatly. “He used to chew on our shed, and it had lead paint. I think the lead really did a number on him. He wasn’t very smart. Anyway, the drool wasn’t like dog drool. It was like viscous ropes, and it bleached the color out of the bear when I rinsed it away, like something out of a horror movie.”
“Perhaps that was your inspiration for the hallucination,” he suggested. Sophie wanted to argue further, but she wasn’t here to bicker with him. She wanted to get better, it’s why she had reached out to the office.
“Maybe,” she said, trying to inflict her voice in a manner that suggested she thought this was a possibility.
“Let’s move on,” Johnathan said. “You don’t mind if I take notes, do you?”
“I don’t mind,” she said, although she kind of did. It felt rude. He scrawled a handful of words on a notepad, and her ear twitched as it honed into the sound of his pen scratching across the smooth surface of the page. She didn’t like it.
“So I’m just trying to figure out a timeline here,” he said. “These hallucinations started somewhere around the age of five or six, but they didn’t peak until the disappearance of the Meyer’s girl?”
“I mean, they didn’t really peak, they never… there was no peak. They’ve just always been there. They don’t get stronger or weaker, they’ve just always been about the same. I just think they were never really paid attention to until then.”
“So you continued to regularly hallucinate until that point? How often?”
“I don’t know,” Sophie said. “It wasn’t really something I paid attention to, after the stuffed bear thing, I just stopped caring about my mons- the hallucinations. I realized the, uh, the hallucinations wouldn’t hurt me. I actually kind of learned to like them.”
“You liked picturing a monster living in your room?” he clarified, sounding disbelieving.
“I mean, my, uh, the hallucinations don’t just stay in my room, they follow me wherever I go.”
“And what does this ‘monster’ look like?” he asked, his question punctuated by more scraping of his pen across the page. The sound sent shivers down her spine, but she tried to ignore it.
“I don’t know, they live in the shadows, or I mean, I imagine they live in shadows. So I can’t really see them.” The movement of his pen paused, and he gave her a pointed look.
“You do hear yourself, right? You understand how this sounds?” he questioned. Sophie grimaced.
“I know how it sounds. I don’t know why it’s this way, it’s just how it’s always been. I’ve never gotten a clear look at the hallucination.”
“It’s probably nothing deeper than you formulating this delusion at a very young age. You didn’t know enough about what a monster would look like, so your mind just blacked out the visual appearance of the hallucination.”
“It’s more than just visual, though.”
“There can be many different manifestations a hallucination can take. Any sense can be affected,” he said. She didn’t like the sound of that.
“If I can’t trust any of my senses how do I know if anything is real?” she asked, frustrated.
“Well, a good hint that something is real is if it is a thing that another person can perceive. You say this hallucination has followed you around your whole life, from your early childhood to now, and nobody else has ever witnessed it. This is a good sign that it is not something that exists outside of your body.” It was difficult to argue with his logic.
“I guess you’re right,” she said. “I’ve heard similar things, from doctors and stuff. But, it’s just, I feel like my hallucination is real.” Johnathan nodded gravely.
“Of course you do, that’s why I’m here to help you sort out what’s real from what’s not real. I believe some of these examples you gave here,” he paused for a moment to locate a paper from the manila envelope on his desk with her name written on it. He held it up and she recognized it as the questionnaire she had been required to fill out before her appointment. “Have perfectly logical rationales,” he finished.
“Maybe,” she said.
“Let’s start with an easy one. You wrote here that you regularly used the hallucination throughout your childhood to dispose of food?”
“Well, just the food I didn’t like,” Sophie said. “You know, if my parents wouldn’t let me get up before I finished my plate. I’d sneak pieces of the broccoli or whatever it was I didn’t want to eat under the table.” Johnathan shot her an incredulous look.
“By your own words there was a monster under your family’s dinner table and not only did nobody else notice it, but you fed it broccoli?” She shrugged.
“I, uh, I didn’t imagine them to be a picky monster, I guess,” she said. “I understand how it sounds, but it’s how I got rid of food for years. I even still do it, sometimes, to give my monster a little treat.” He was too busy fussily scrawling notes on his page to catch her use of the forbidden term ‘my monster’.
“‘A little treat’?” he clarified, looking up from his notepad to meet her eyes.
“You know, just because,” she said, feeling uncomfortable with the way he was looking at her. His professional composure seemed to have slipped, and he was looking at her as if he believed her to be wholeheartedly insane. After a moment he readjusted his glasses and his sympathetic smile was back on his face.
“And your family dog,” he paused for a heartbeat as he briefly consulted his notepad. “Franklin. Your dog Franklin wasn’t the one eating the food you were sneaking under the table?” She shook her head.
“Definitely not. He wasn’t allowed inside the house while we were eating. He was let out while we ate.”
“Right, to chew on the lead-painted shed,” he said, and she gave a sheepish smile.
“I mean, he did other things, besides that,” she said in a small voice, but this was a lie. Really, that’s about all the dog had done when he was let outside, was chew on the shed. He was a very strange dog.
“Okay, so there was no dog in the house while your family ate dinner. Wouldn’t a simpler explanation be that your food you didn’t want to eat was just ending up on the floor, instead of a fabricated monster eating it?” His question was not openly hostile, but his tone was bordering agitation, such as one an adult would use when repeatedly explaining a basic concept to a fussy child.
“There’s no way my mother would let me throw half my food on the floor. She’d be livid.”
“Perhaps your mother thought you were an exceptionally messy eater and never brought it up,” he said.
“Maybe,” she said, not wanting to be argumentative. Johnathan let out a sigh.
“I feel like you’re not trying hard enough to think through this with me logically. I’m here to help you,” he said.
“You’re doing a good job,” she said, although she wondered if perhaps he was in the wrong line of work. He didn’t seem very patient, but she couldn’t write off the possibility that she was an exceptionally frustrating case. She was frustrated, too. It’s why she was here.
“I’d like to talk about the Meyer’s girl now,” he said, and she shifted uncomfortably.
“I don’t really like talking about that,” she said.
“It’s important for me to know your perspective,” he said. “You have to be willing to do things you don’t want to do if you want to get better.”
She found it odd that he used the term ‘do’ and not ‘talk about’, but she chose not to comment, because she really didn’t know a lot about this stuff. She also didn’t really feel like it was her place to question him. She was crazy, after all. It’s what prompted him to call her in for this emergency late night appointment, as soon as he had become aware of her questionnaire answers.
“Okay,” she said.
“Now, this was a huge event in your formative years. I personally remember the news coverage. It was a big deal. How old were you?”
“I was nine.”
“Nine years old, that’s young, very young,” he said with a nod, his pen scrawling across his notepad. “By your own admission you had been experiencing these hallucinations for three or four years by this point?”
“I guess,” she said before falling into an awkward silence.
“So, tell me what happened,” he prompted, his tone growing impatient.
“I mean, whatever you saw in the news is pretty much what happened. She invited me up to her treehouse to show me something, and, uh, I went up there with her.”
“But you weren’t the only two people in the treehouse, were you?”
“I mean, you’re not going to believe me, but it was just us.”
“Her neighbor was tried and convicted for the crime,” Johnathan said, giving her a skeptical look.
“I know, but really. It’s what I told the police when they questioned me all those years ago, too. It was just her and I, and, well, my monster. They just called me a traumatized girl and nobody listened to my side of the story in the end.”
“What was in the treehouse that she wanted to show you?” he asked.
“I don’t know. When we got into the treehouse she had me close my eyes, and it was dark out, besides that. I couldn’t see well,” she said, and he sighed again. He seemed to like to sigh.
“I’m noticing a pattern here, when something happens that scares you, like the hallucinations or whatever happened in the treehouse, you say you couldn’t see what happened. It’s like you’re consciously suppressing the things that scare you. It’s okay, you can tell me what really happened.”
“I really had my eyes closed, but there wasn’t anyone else in there, I know that much. The police were just like you, they really wanted me to say something happened in the treehouse, but nothing did.”
“Were you particularly close to this girl?” he asked. “Did you have significant interactions with her or her neighbor before this?”
“Not really, I mean, she was a lot older than me. She was fourteen, five years is a big difference when you’re a kid. I had never met her neighbor before, and I swear, he wasn’t there.”
“There was a five year difference between you two, and yet you were friends?”
“Not really, she actually was kind of a mean girl. Well, really, she was horrible, but after… you know, after what happened, people only said good things about her.”
“Do you believe her intentions with leading you into the treehouse were malicious? Perhaps she was hoping her neighbor would get you, instead?”
“I told you, it wasn’t him, he wasn’t there. My monster did that to her.”
“Sophie, there’s no way a nine year old could be responsible for what happened to the Meyer’s girl. They only ever found splintered, cracked bones of hers scattered throughout the woods, and her neighbor was a known taxidermist.”
“I told you, my monster, their drool is like a chemical. It’s like, bleach, or acid or something, I don’t know. I just know I closed my eyes and then she sort of screamed. I opened my eyes but I only saw her getting pulled out of the window of the treehouse, and like I said, it was dark out.”
“Do you know what I think? I think that this was a scary, horrifying event, and your brain used your hallucination to make sense of it.”
“It just doesn’t feel like a hallucination,” she said, shaking her head, beyond frustrated. “It’s real to me, just as real as you are.”
“If something bad happened to you right now, would you convince yourself it was your hallucination’s doing?”
“No, I wouldn’t, because my monster’s never hurt me before,” she said. He observed her for a long moment.
“So it’s a good monster, then?” he asked.
“Well, they’re definitely not a bad one,” she said.
“So it will protect you, if something bad were to happen to you?”
“I suppose they would,” she said.
“Or, perhaps you’re just so deranged that you can’t remember the bad things that happen to you. You cover up anything that upsets you with this monster fantasy of yours.”
“Maybe,” she said, her eyebrows knitting together. “It doesn’t feel that way, but I guess anything is possible.”
“Do you want help, Sophie?” he asked, his question throwing her off. She nodded.
“That’s why I’m here.”
“Perfect. I have a way to provide definitive proof to you, proof that even you yourself can’t deny.”
“Okay,” she said. Johnathan lifted up the manila folder with her name on it on his desk, revealing a pair of metal handcuffs hidden underneath.
“I’m going to handcuff you to the chair,” he said, watching her closely for her reaction. When she didn’t react he got up and did just that. He knelt at her side and took her hand in his, applying one of the cuffs to her wrist and the other around the chair. She looked down at her cuffed wrist, feeling as though this idea was unconventional.
“Do you do this often?” she asked, lifting her hand to see how far she could move it. She couldn’t get it very far. The metal links of the short chain connecting the cuffs jingled faintly as she tried.
“This is my second time,” he said, standing up and looking down at her. “You can’t do this to just anyone. I look at the questionnaires at night, trying to find the craziest new patients. Most aren’t good for something like this, you need someone really out of their mind. Someone who won’t question why you call them to get them to come in late at night.”
“I did find that kind of odd,” she admitted.
“But you didn’t report me. Even if you did, though, they wouldn’t believe you that someone from the office tried to call you in after hours. They get weird phone calls from raving patients all the time. I still can’t believe you actually came in, though.”
“Well, you did say that it was an emergency,” she reasoned. “But it is pretty late, even for that, I guess.”
“Yeah, I only have access to the building at night. There’s no cameras, because of patient privacy, so there’s no record you’re here.”
“Are you not really a therapist?” she asked. He shook his head.
“No, I’ve always wanted to be one, though. I’ve read a lot of books about it,” he said. “I recognized your name from the Meyer’s case and wanted to do a little impromptu session first, before we got started. Was I convincing?”
“You did an alright job, but you kind of started slipping up a bit at the end,” she commented.
“Yeah, I got kind of eager when I realized you were absolutely nuts, sorry,” he said with an apologetic grin.
“It’s alright,” she said. “So what happens now? You said something about proof?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, his eyes lighting up. He grabbed his notepad off the table. “You said your monster will protect you from bad things happening to you. I’m going to prove to you that isn’t true. I wrote down a few examples of bad things I could do to you, but I’m open to suggestions.”
“You weren’t really taking notes?” she asked, relieved. She hadn’t liked the thought of him jotting down notes about her.
“No, I don’t think real therapists actually do that, it’s like, just something that happens in the movies.”
“Yeah, I don’t think they should, it was very unnerving,” she said, settling back in the chair. He looked up from his notepad and considered her for a moment.
“You’re, uh, you’re cool with this, then?” he asked.
“I mean, you’re the professional,” she said.
“I told you, I’ve only read a few books about this,” he said. “And they were fictional.”
“Oh, right. Well, you said you were here to help me.”
“I mean, that was a lie, I’m here to hurt you,” he said, scrunching up his eyebrows as he looked at her more closely. “Wow, you really are crazy.”
“Well, I told you, my monster is real to me.”
“Then where is it now?” She looked around the room.
“I don’t know, hiding in one of the shadows, I suppose. There’s a lot of shadows in here. It’s not so bright.” He snorted with amusement.
“I’ll take those odds,” he said.
“I guess we’ll see,” she said.
He shrugged and tossed the notepad back down on the table. He smiled widely and reached for her throat. She stared back at him and didn’t flinch, even as she could feel the warmth of his fingers just nearly grazing the flesh of her neck. In the millisecond before he made contact he yelped, his hand flying up away from her neck and up into the air as his feet were sucked down into the shadow under her chair.
He flailed and let out a guttural noise of pain, his torso twisting violently as he was pulled under the chair a few more inches. Sophie looked down with interest, watching as he was sucked down to his hips into the small amount of shadow her chair cast. He clawed at the carpet, and she heard loud crunching and fleshy, tearing sounds reverberating around the walls of the office.
He was pulled down to his chest, and he opened his mouth to scream, but he was unable to produce any noise. His eyes were wide in terror or pain or a mixture of the two, and she watched as a shudder ran through him. His eyes visibly dulled and all emotion left them, whatever spark of life that was contained within going out in an instant.
The speed in which he was sucked into the shadow slowed significantly, his glasses sliding off his head as it dragged slowly across the ground. After a moment his neck disappeared into the shadow, his face creeping closer and closer in. He was swallowed up to his nose, only his rolling eyes visible for a moment before those too were engulfed. She watched with interest as the last of his hairs disappeared.
She looked down at his glasses, remembering he had said he would give her proof. They were hard to argue against, anyone could say that they were glasses. They could actually be perceived by other people, and they were not hers. They would be good proof that he had existed. She reached for them but stopped, the chain of the handcuffs clinking gently as she extended it out to its maximum length.
She frowned and jingled the chain, looking pointedly at the shadow. The shadow wavered slightly as her monster shifted, and a little noise sounded in the quiet office, like a ‘speh!’. A ball of fluid flew up from the shadow as her monster spit at her, and it landed on the chain of the handcuffs. After a moment the metal started smoking and sizzling and she gave it a jerk, the links of the chain separating.
“Thanks,” she said, reaching down for Johnathan’s glasses and pocketing them.
On her way out of the office she noticed a jar of colorful hard candy on the counter. She reached into it and pulled out a piece, tossing it behind her shoulder as she walked out the door. The candy bounced off the ground and rolled across the carpet, until it reached the shadow of the chair, where it disappeared with a crunch.
Under the Wisteria Tree 