― M. Scott Peck
Have you ever heard the cool, calm voice of madness? Well, I have—it’s soft like velvet and scares the hell right out of you.
I’m an over-worked psychiatrist in a provincial hospital and deal mostly with the criminally insane. When the cops are stymied, they come to me—Doc Prynne, they call me—make me sound like a cheap patent medicine, as in Doc Prynne’s Little Yellow Liver Pills, or something lame like that.
Anyway, if it’s true that you become what you do, then I am one helluva walking occupational hazard.
Counselling depraved serial killers and rapists can ruin your whole day—and that’s why I see Howard Stern.
He’s not really the Howard Stern, but looks a lot like him. He’s a shrink like me—a kind of shrink’s shrink and keeps me sane, or at least tries to. His real name is Nate Granger.
“So, you’re handling the Tucker case?” Nate leans back and puts his feet up—puts his soft leather cowboy boots right up on his five thousand dollar oak desk. I cringe a little, but try to ignore it.
“Yeah. It’s a weird one all right. This little girl, no more than eighteen, butchered and dismembered her mother.”
Nate whistles softly. “O tempore, O mores.”
Nate can do stuff like that. Just when you figure you’re dealing with some country hick, he’ll surprise you with a little Cicero, right out of The Catiline Orations.
I stare at him hard as if to say, Get serious, Guy, but relent and continue.
“It gets worse," I tell him, "she took eighteen months to get rid of the corpse. Cut her up into little pieces and flushed her down the toilet.”
Nate just shakes his head. Like me, he’s heard it all before...
The banality of evil.
“How are you doing,” he asks.
I knew it was coming—I just didn’t know what I’d say, so I tell him the truth.
“The other day on the way home from work, I saw a raccoon lying dead on the side of the road. I cried about it for hours afterwards.”
He clunks his boots off the desk, gets up, comes over and puts a fatherly hand on my shoulder. “Nobody understands what we go through.”
“Yeah, but we do it because we get paid the big bucks.”
It was sick—not even halfway funny, but we chuckled cynically and shared a brief moment of camaraderie—the loneliness of the long-term shrink, I reckon.
I didn’t want to ask the next question, but it just came out. My mouth kind of moved all on its own.
“Have you ever dealt with a case of suspected demonic possession?”
Nate takes a deep breath. “Is that what you think is going on here?”
He saunters over to the liquor cabinet and takes out two tumblers.
Yeah, it’s going to be a long night.
“I don’t know—I’m asking you, goddammit.”
Alright, I snap. The case has gotten to me more than a little.
Three or four hour-long sessions with that dark-eyed vixen wore down my nerves. My right eye is twitching slightly and I blink, hoping it’ll calm down.
Nate has poured me about two fingers of Glenfiddich —he now adds two more and slides the glass across the desktop to me.
“I recall an instance a few years back when a colleague—who’ll remain nameless, for obvious reasons—suspected the same thing. Of course, in his case, he went looking for it.”
I knock back half the scotch. “How do you mean?”
“You’ve got to understand this fellow, Tom.” He was calling me by my first name, so I knew he was in earnest. “This man hated religion—saw it as a source for all the world’s ills. He figured God was just a big father-figure in the sky—kinda like Santa for grown-ups.”
I nodded. I knew the type.
Nate goes on.
“Anyway this fellow puts out an ad in the psych journal looking for suspected cases of demonic possession. As you might expect, the first three or four were typical schizophrenics—but the fourth one—that was the real deal. Scared the hell right out of him. Left the profession—never been the same since.”
The room suddenly gets darker. Nate notices it too and turns on his desk lamp.
“What makes you think this one is real?” He asks the question nonchalantly, swirling the scotch in his tumbler, but I can see he’s spooked.
“She talks backwards in Latin.”
He raises his eyebrows.
“She’s got a grade ten education, Nate, and tests out at a hundred I.Q.”
“Not exactly what you’d expect from a high school drop-out, eh?”
He looks as if he’ll throw up. He’s sitting in the half-light of the lamp—his mouth and jaw lit, but his eyes and the top of his head in shadow.
I hate talking about it, but I have to get it out.
“It gets worse. I had this dream last night—never had one like it before. It was so real. The door opened and she walked into my room and started talking in this soft, velvet voice.”
“What did she say?”
“She told me she was going to kill me and how she was going to do it.”
“Jesus!”
“The worse part was she said it so matter of factly—as if reciting a laundry list or something.”
Nate gets up and start pacing. He stops in front of the window and stares out at the jumble of lights from the nearby office towers.
“She’ll never get out to hurt you,” he says. “You can count on that.”
I know he’s right…but there’s another thing I know.
In the realm of the spirit there is no distance—walls are not a barrier. I’m vulnerable and helpless. She has been in my room. I heard her voice.
Nates suddenly grows earnest.
“I want you to take a vacation—effective immediately. I’m not suggesting, Tom—I’m ordering you to get the hell out of town—leave the bloody country, if possible. Go away and don’t come back for a long time.”
He looks at me imploringly. “Will you do that?”
“Yeah, Sure. Maybe I’ll go to Mexico and check out those ruins—always wanted to, but never had the opportunity.”
“Well, now you do…and Tom, like I said, stay the hell away and don’t come back for a good long time.”
I shake his hand—even give him a hug. He watches me all the way out to the elevator and stays until the stainless steel door slides shut.
I like Nate and he means well—he just doesn’t understand.
All the time he was talking, she stood there in the corner—her dark lips moving and velvet voice talking.
I either go with her, or she takes him—a plain and simple transaction—kind of like reading a laundry list.
The banality of evil.