The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [194]
I knew what he was talking about with that “reminder of the past” business: when he was only eight, the Doctor’s left arm had been smashed by his own father during the worst of their many fights. The older man had then kicked his son clear down a flight of stairs, aggravating the injury and making sure that the arm would never heal properly. The recurring pain in the scarred bones and muscle, along with the underdeveloped state of the arm, served to keep the trials what the Doctor’d been through during his childhood pretty constantly in his mind. But as for what he meant by the arm “serving some purpose,” I couldn’t tell, and I said so.
“I was referring to Clara Hatch,” he said, taking his eyes off the arm and glancing up and down the street. “From our first meeting, I naturally felt some empathy with her having lost the use of her right arm, quite probably because of an attack by her own mother.”
We both turned when we started to hear the quiet sounds of a shovel digging into dirt; but it’d been a wet summer, and as the shovel reached deeper, softer ground, the sound died away altogether. The Doctor continued his story:
“Today I decided to use the coincidence of our injuries in my effort to make her feel safe enough in my presence to start to allow images of what happened to reenter her thoughts.”
“Images?” I asked. “You mean, she doesn’t remember the whole story?”
“A part of her mind does,” the Doctor answered. “But the greater portion of her mental activity is directed at avoiding and erasing such memories. You must understand, Stevie, that she is emotionally hobbled by the fact that her experience makes no apparent sense—how could her mother, who should have been the source of all safety and succor, possibly turn into a mortal threat? Then, too, she knows that Libby is still alive and could return to strike again. But the combination, today, of the set of colored pencils I gave her and the story I told her about my father and my injury seemed to at least plant the idea in her mind that she might begin to confront such confusions and fears, and perhaps even share them with another person.”
I smiled. “She really went for the pencils, hunh?”
The Doctor shrugged. “You’ve seen such things at the Institute. It’s remarkable, what seemingly mundane objects can achieve in such situations. A toy, a game—a colored pencil. Not surprisingly, the first one she reached for was red.”
“Blood?” I asked quietly, figuring that, in her position, I probably would’ve made the same choice.
“Yes,” the Doctor answered, shaking his head and hissing. “Imagine the savagery of that scene, Stevie…. It’s no wonder she can’t speak of it, that even its memory has been exiled to the farthest corners of her conscious mind. And yet from that corner it presses—it cries—for release, but only if that release will be safe for her.” The Doctor paused, thinking the matter over. “A red stream … you remember the picture of the Westons’ house that she showed Cyrus? There’s a brook that runs behind it, and she added that brook to the picture today. But she drew in red—gushing torrents of red. And beside the stream she drew a dead tree, a tree whose roots reached down into the red water.” The Doctor shook his head, then held up his left hand, clenching it into a fist. “I tell you, Stevie, if we do no more while we are here than help to mend that poor girl’s mind, the trip shall not have been wasted.”
I thought about that for a few minutes, and then asked, “How long do you figure it’ll take before she can start to communicate with you about it?”
“Actually, I’m fairly optimistic, based on her behavior this afternoon. It should only be a matter of days before we can discuss the incident through pictures and simple questions. But as for getting her to speak—for that I will have to come up with some new strategies.”
We didn’t say much more, for a while. I guess I was just absorbing the idea of little Clara living out there on that farm, among people who’d once been strangers, trying desperately day and night not to think about why