'I'd like to start today by talking a little about your teenage years. Would you like to tell me a bit about them?'
Emily Hogan tightened her grip on the threadbare arm of the uncomfortable sofa. She had been pulling on a loose thread from the moment she had sat down and she couldn't help but wonder how many others had sat here, tugging on the fabric and balding the sofa in the process.
The therapist's office was a sparsely-furnished room, with a neutral wash of paint that bubbled here and there over cracked plaster. The stale odour of old cigarette smoke clung to every surface, as if the room's occupant had chain-smoked his life away before the smoking ban had come into place. Behind where Emily sat, three tall bookcases stretched from one side of the room to the other and it was crammed with neatly-labelled files and alphabetically-organised books. Emily felt the weighty judgement of a hundred bastions of modern psychological theory pressing down upon her back, no doubt all raising quizzical bushy eyebrows at her every word.
Her therapist didn't have bushy eyebrows, but he was the epitome of a walking cliché nevertheless, from the suede patches on the elbows of his tweed blazer to his closely-cropped college professor beard which he often stroked when deep in thought. Whenever he stopped to smooth down his moustache with thumb and forefinger, Emily knew that was the cue for him to broach a subject that he knew Emily was going to resist. She'd been here tugging on loose threads often enough to know the signs.
'We've been over this before,' Emily responded tersely, feeling the knots above her brow tightening.
The therapist smiled and rubbed his digits over his moustache again. 'If I recall rightly, we didn't get very far. I'd like to know a bit more. Gather a mental picture, if you like. Did you like school? Did you have any favourite subjects? What were your friends like? That kind of thing. No biggie.'
Emily hated when he tried to go all youth-speak on her. He was barely a few years older than her, for goodness sake, yet for some reason he seemed to think if he chucked in a few supposedly down-with-the-kids words, she'd relax and see him as a friend she could open up to, as opposed to the paid professional he actually was. His lame efforts were wasted though because Emily wouldn't have given a damn if he'd screamed YOLO at the top of his voice. She didn't want a friend. She wanted a miracle. She wanted a life-line. A chance to break through to the surface and breathe.
Glancing over his shoulder through the small window that offered her a view of the wide expanse of car park and the grey concrete jungle of the city beyond, Emily sucked in a breath and felt the beginnings of a headache creeping into the base of her skull. These sessions always meant the same thing. Migraines and pills. Codeine and convalescence. The convalescence thing suited her just fine. Inside her cottage, curled up on her bed, she felt safe. Outside made her increasingly tense, just as she was feeling now.
'I liked school. My favourite subjects were English and Home Economics but I hated Science and Mathematics. I had two close friends and got on with the rest okay. I wasn't Miss Popularity but I wasn't the kid everyone threw science experiments at either.' She chanted robotically, knowing full well that she wasn't telling him anything he wanted to hear. He didn't give a damn about what subjects were her favourites or particularly who her friends were. He wanted the grizzly stuff, the drama, the traumatic stories of extreme bullying or childhood abuse. He wanted to know if one of her teachers had ever groomed her for extra-curricular activities or whether she'd been bullied so bad she'd started cutting into her skin just to ease the pain. He wanted dirt and she had none, which was why she was here after all. She wanted answers more than he did, but so far, after ten sessions and a big hole in her bank balance, she was still no closer to the root cause of her depression.
The therapist smiled. Damn, she was starting to hate that bloody half-smirk of his. Even when she was being so obviously difficult, he still just kept on smiling.
'And what about your college years? You've said before that you loved university?'
Emily bit into an old ulcer inside her mouth, stoking the embers of the wound with her tongue.
'Yes.' She sighed in irritation. 'I loved uni. It was fun; I enjoyed the freedom you didn't get at school. I enjoyed picking module subjects to make up my course. The library was incredible. I definitely made the most of my time there.'
'In what way?'
She rolled her eyes. 'Well it wasn't all study, study, study. The night life was amazing, so much to do and get involved in. We used to go to the band nights and to the comedy events too.' Emily allowed herself a small smile. 'There was this one guy who used to the regular Friday night slot, he was hilarious. You know the kind that would make tears roll down your face until you could barely breathe from laughing.' She stopped when she caught him making notes.
'What was his name?' he asked without bothering to look up from his pad.
'H-His name?' Emily frowned, feeling the deep scars ripple across her forehead in troubled concentration. 'I....I don't know. Can't remember.'
He looked up. 'You used to go and watch this comedian every Friday night but you can't remember his name?'
'No.'
His pen hovered just above the page. 'And your friends at university? What were they called? Tell me a bit about them.'
Emily didn't like the way he was looking at her, it was as if his eyes were burrowing under her skin, rooting around in her flesh like some kind of parasitic bug.
'Why are we even talking about this?' she snapped sullenly. 'What does it matter what they were called or what he was called? None of this has anything to do with why I'm here.'
'You're being purposely evasive, Emily. We've talked about this before. You might not see or remember anything from your past that could have triggered your depression, but I'm trained to spot holes in history and little idiosyncrasies that could actually mean something. After all, that is why we're here, is it not? To find something. No matter what that might be.'
The books behind her were sniggering now, Emily was sure she could hear their reedy little snickers whispering up her spine. You can't fool this guy, they were saying, he's one of us, he's an expert.
Screw you, thought Emily, if he was an expert, he'd have bloody found something by now, instead of making me sit here week after week, taking my money and coming up with jack-shit.
'But there really aren't any holes or idiosyncrasies as you say,' Emily insisted. 'You know when they say school days are the best of your life? Well my college days were mine. Things were...easier then. I didn't feel like this. I was happy. I really was.'
Emily's protests were met with a few awkward seconds of silence. She knew this trick too. He wanted his silence to prompt her to keep talking and then maybe, just maybe, he'd find some tasty morsel as he scuttled around under her skin and finally he would say there, you see, I was right!
Instead, he said nothing and so, neither did she. Stale-mate, Mr Smarty-Bloody-Pants.
Finally, the therapist spoke, slicking his tongue across his bottom lip before he began. 'This is good. It really is. We've established that your college years were pleasant, enjoyable. You were very happy. And yet, at some point since then, something has changed in your life. You've admitted to some agoraphobic tendencies. You're struggling when you leave your house. You find no enjoyment in your life now, and yet can remember times when you were happy. Now the question is, has something happened since you were at university or was that part of your life as wonderful as you say?'
Tears of frustration pricked at Emily's eyes. 'I've told you. I was happy. I had a good life back then. I did. I really truly did.' She pulled at the loose thread so hard that it came free from the arm of the sofa and she had no choice but to screw it up into her tight fist, noting with dismay that he therapist's eyes had flickered to where her hand was and had raised one of his not-so-bushy eyebrows.
'The lady doth protest too much, methinks.' He smiled. Again.
'What?' She was confused, exhausted. She just wanted to go home.
The therapist chuckled softly and raised his hands in a placating gesture. 'Sorry, it's Hamlet. You know Shakespeare?' He shook his head, almost as if he was answering his own question. Of course she couldn't know who Shakespeare was, could she? She was the one sitting in the chair with the balding arm. Whoever sat in that chair was only worthy of words like YOLO and no biggie. He uncrossed his legs and leant forward, resting his elbows on his knees. Emily could see the saliva glistening on his lower lip where he had licked it. He was close. Too close.
'I'm not the enemy here, Emily. But this is.' He tapped a finger against his skull. 'The mind is a wonderful thing. It can be our greatest friend, allowing us to remember beautiful, treasured memories. Times with beloved family members who you've lost and still hold dear. Precious days with your first love. Christmases, birthdays, anniversaries. All these incredible bookmarks carefully placed in pages we don't ever want to forget. Yes, the mind can be wonderful. But it can also be our biggest enemy. It doesn't mean to be of course, it thinks it's protecting you. Something terrible happens, something so completely traumatic that the mind automatically triggers your self-defence mechanism. And whatever that terrible thing was, the mind locks it away, buries it so deep that you don't remember it.' He leant back in his chair and crossed his legs again, stroking at his moustache.
'So you're saying that whatever happened to me, whatever has made me feel like this, is locked away in here somewhere?' Emily tapped at her own skull this time. 'And that my mind has just made me forget?'
He nodded enthusiastically. 'Look, I quoted Hamlet and was being facetious, I know, I apologise. But here's something to think about. You talk about your university years in a completely different way to the rest of your life's events. You were happy. You said that. And yet in all the time you've spent here, you've never said that about any other time in your life. You've never said anything has made you unhappy, of course, but everything else is just... grey in comparison, which makes me wonder if that particular time of your life was really as wonderful as you make out.'
'I'm not lying.' The words came out in an angered hiss, coiling around her and squeezing, squeezing until she couldn't breathe.
'And I'm not implying that you are. Not intentionally anyway. I'm quite sure you believe everything was wonderful. But what if that's your mind telling you what to believe? What if behind the smiles, the happiness, the joy, lies something that your mind doesn't want you to remember?'
Emily said nothing. She couldn't. The pain in her head was so excruciating now that if she opened her mouth to speak, she knew she would vomit all over the cream carpet.
'Like I said,' he went on. 'The mind thinks it's helping you. It thinks it's protecting you. But do you know the problem with burying something that's not dead?'
Emily shook her head.
The therapist grinned. 'It always has a nasty habit of clawing its way back to the surface.'
**********
By the time Emily reached her cottage on the outskirts of the village, the snow, which earlier that day had been nothing but delicate frosting dancing in the breeze, was now coming down thick and heavy, blanketing the countryside and concealing the fields and roads.
Shutting the front door firmly behind her, she shook her head to dislodge the snowflakes in her hair and began removing her boots, placing them by the door where she always kept them. Her coat was hung up to dry, as were her hat, scarf and mittens and she busied herself by heading straight to the small kitchen and starting the fire in the stone hearth. When the tinder was lit and the fire was crackling away nicely, Emily made a cup of tea - white, one sugar, a dash of milk - in her favourite mug and sat herself down at the kitchen table, staring into the flames as she intermittently sipped on the hot tea.
She didn't want to think about today's therapy session. More often than not after therapy, she would return home afterwards and train her mind to focus on other tasks, but today, for some strange reason, she felt more rattled than usual. Stupid, smarmy bastard!
The annoying thing was that her therapist really was neither of those things. Actually, he was ...okay. In fact, in another lifetime, she'd probably ask him out on a date. He was good-looking enough in a preppy kind of way and he had a nice, deep voice that made her tummy flip just a little the first time she met him. She imagined that they'd probably do something cultural. An art gallery maybe. He seemed the type. Unfortunately, her therapist fantasies had died quite early on in their relationship, because the stupid, smarmy bastard wouldn't stop making her regurgitate the same old crap over and over again. Well, Emily thought, if he gets his kicks from that kind of thing, he can stick his art gallery where the sun don't shine.
And as for today's session.....
Reaching out, she grabbed one of the crossword puzzle books neatly stacked on the corner of the table and with a pen in hand; she concentrated on the puzzle that had been bothering her for the past two days.
Do you know the problem with burying something that's not dead?
The words came rushing into her head. In frustration, Emily scratched out the answer to 2B across, scribbling over her usually meticulous handwriting and tearing a hole in the page. She stared at the torn paper for a few seconds, before getting up and chucking the whole book into the fire, watching the brightly coloured glossy cover shrivel to nothing.
Making another cup of tea, she took a deep breath and wandered over to where her latest one-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle lay half-completed. She'd already made quicker progress on this one than the last, having spent more time at home recently and she'd come to look upon it as free therapy. Plus this therapist didn't make her head hurt. Instead it just challenged her to fit those pieces into the right places, whether it was a field of sunflowers or a stretch of sea. Emily picked up a piece and began trying to match it to the picture on the front of the box.
It always has a nasty habit of clawing its way back to the surface.
It was no good. No matter what she did, no matter where she tried to seek refuge, that damn therapist's voice refused to leave her be. How could a living breathing person haunt you so much?
Finally, Emily realised she had no choice. The only way to drown out the constant whispering was to go to bed. Only sleep would silence the bastard into submission.
Crossing over to the living room area, Emily grabbed hold of the floral-patterned curtains and began to tug one across, cursing as it stubbornly resisted the ride along the curtain pole. As she was fighting with stubborn drape, Emily glanced through the window. The skies were still full of snow yet to fall and they cast an ethereal grey light onto the undulating fields that bordered the village.
If the world outside hadn't been aglow from the snow-saturated heavens, Emily might have missed the dark smudge that blotted the landscape outside her house. In fact, if the wind hadn't picked up a snow flurry that whirled and eddied, swishing it from one side to the other and creating a gap in the crowded air, Emily might not even have seen the smudge.
Of course, it wasn't a smudge at all. It was a person.
A dark figure stood right outside Emily's front gate and it wasn't moving. And what's more, as she raised a trembling hand to the lacy net curtain and slowly pulled it to one side, Emily realised that as she stared at the mysterious person, the mysterious person was staring right back.
There was a split second of free-thinking, of knowing that she didn't get visitors, of understanding this was wrong, but there was something about it that nagged in the base of her stomach, something about the dark figure that made her feet move towards the door, something about its....size....that had her reaching for the door handle.
The first blast of icy air and snowflakes stung her skin like a sharp slap to the face and made her blink furiously.
It was a child. A child stood outside Emily's front garden, hands curled over the top of the little wooden gate.
'Hello?' Emily called out. The wind rushed into her mouth and captured her breath. 'Hello?' she called again.
The child did not move.
'Damn it,' cursed Emily and grabbed her boots and coat from by the door.
Outside, the snow seemed more merciless than it had looked from the window and she tried to shield her eyes from the biting wind as she stepped carefully along the garden path. The closer she got, she realised it really was a child. It was a girl.
The girl, who looked about ten or eleven at a rough guess, wore a thin coat over her clothes, no hat, no scarf and definitely no mittens covering her hands that had turned almost scarlet from the cold. The snow had plastered her dark wet hair to her head, like a sodden stringy skull cap and she watched as Emily approached.
'Oh my goodness,' exclaimed Emily with concern. 'Are you okay?'
The girl did not answer.
Nearing the gate, Emily looked left and right up the lane outside her house, searching desperately for someone else, someone who must have been with the child, but there was no one else to be seen. 'Where are your parents?' She looked back at the girl, who just continued to watch her with big, calm eyes. 'Are you from the village?'
Still the girl did not answer and Emily lifted the latch, opening the gate and tugging it hard through the snow that had gathered at its base.
They stood staring at each other, the blizzard battering them both relentlessly and yet for a brief moment, Emily felt untouched as if they were held together in the eye of the storm.
Reaching out, Emily touched a hand to the girl's face. 'Are you lost?'
The girl blinked slowly, once, then again, the tiniest of snowflakes lingering on her lashes.
'I was,' she replied. 'But I found you.'
'Yes,' said Emily. 'Yes. It appears you did. Well, let's go inside and I'll get this all figured out, don't you worry.'
The girl slipped her cold hand into Emily's and smiled.
'Yes. Let's go inside now.'
As they walked up the path towards the amber warmth that radiated from the open door, the storm raged behind them, rushing into the space where they had just stood and soon covering their footprints, as if they had never been there at all
________
Many moons ago (I can say that because I'm knocking on a bit now), I started writing two completely unconnected stories.
One was about a heavily pregnant woman involved in a car crash who wakes up in hospital to discover her child gone and the doctors claiming that she was never pregnant in the first place and the second was about a young woman who develops agoraphobia and begins to isolate herself away from her loved ones and friends, without any explanation as to the cause of her condition.
Neither story ever really amounted to anything, mostly because I was a teenager and had discovered boys, music and hormones and so both tales were saved to a floppy disc (told you I was knocking on a bit) and are now gathering dust somewhere in a box in my attic.
So when Wattpad contacted me about writing a novella inspired by the new A&E series The Returned, I suddenly found myself thinking about those two stories again and wondering whether it was time to resurrect them from the Floppy Disc of Death.
Everything Will Be Dark isn't one of those stories, but it's definitely been inspired by both. It's a tale of isolation, paranoia and how our mind works in creepily disturbing ways when we've tried to suppress dark secrets and memories that were maybe better left buried.
My main character Emily Hogan might learn to regret digging up her past, but I'm incredibly glad to have been given the chance to resurrect some old bones of mine.
Thanks go to Wattpad and the A&E Network.
Be sure to watch The Returned when it premieres this March.