One Blood

Chapter Sixty-One

Chapter Sixty-One

 

Monday

Lake City, LA

 

Karen couldn’t move. Her muscles weren’t responding to her commands to sit up, get up, and get out of Uncle Bill’s office inside the Lake City Police Department’s main branch. Even stranger, she’d been hearing soft drums keeping time in her head. The drums reminded her of something. Something she desperately needed to remember.

Say hey!

Flashes of the Penguin came back to her. The delicious feeling that came after the needles, as her cares floated away. The odd sexual encounter with Shorty. The blood that came after. Nearly being run over.

Seven stabs of the knife, seven stabs of the sword.

Big salty tears dropped from her eyes. Karen hadn’t felt this helpless since Kristopher’s death. She had a sense that her brother was very close to her. She closed her eyes, letting her mind wander back to those dark days.

Karen was tormented by horrific nightmares after Kristopher’s burial. She’d see his bloody corpse in her closet and hear his feet thudding about in his bedroom. She started avoiding sleep altogether; then the visions started torturing her days as well.

It was her father’s idea to send her to Dr. Gerard Faustus, the child psychiatrist of choice for Lake City’s affluent. Faustus offered psychiatric immersion to cure everything from early signs of homosexual behavior to eating disorders. Even at her young age, Karen had heard horror stories of normal kids going to Dr. Faustus and morphing into blabbering lunatics locked inside padded chambers where no one could hear their screams.

Her father drove her there that first and only time. It was one of the few moments of her childhood where she could remember being alone with him. She idealized her father and it was easy to understand why. He was tall and strong, with a laugh that could make anyone smile. When he looked at her, it was like staring in the mirror.

He could also be playful, but that day he was sullen and brooding. Karen begged him not to leave her there alone, but he just kissed her forehead and turned her over to a smiling female attendant.

After checking in with a pretty, dark-haired receptionist, another attendant led Karen down a dark, narrow hallway lined with doors. Each psychiatrist’s domain had a nameplate identifying him or her. A much wider door with no nameplate stood at the end of the hallway. The other doors were painted white, but this last entrance was a deep brown mahogany.

It looked like the kind of portal that people got lost behind.

The attendant rapped on the door. After a brief moment, it opened. The room that revealed itself turned out to be far less imposing. Several bookcases lined the wall closest to her. Child psychology books with titles like “Speaking to Children So They Hear You” and “Adolescent Depression” lined the bookshelves. Against the opposite wall was a steel square that Karen recognized as a vault. Artificial light emanated from an ornate crystal chandelier hanging in the center of the room. There were no windows.