The Face and The Girl: Part Four
By SW Carter
Edited by EnvyMachinery
Soft clouds full of nightmarish intent; that was the only way one could describe Dr. Lea Deirdre. A voice like a race of ancient bird-winged, halo-wearing goddesses hid behind her tone, and yet the feeling she produced felt more like the sharp side of a hammer scraping rusted metal walls. The witch’s trick seemed to seep into every muscle, and an innocent patient looking to cure their minor seasonal down mood might find themself addicted to her eternal presence. If only I knew then, but at the very least you know now.
“So what brings you in today?” Lea’s voice sent shock waves through me as it snapped me back to reality. I meditated on the words of the plaque behind her couch. They seemed to pull my mind inside another dimension. Wailing screams coated the covers of my subconscious.
With a slow turn of my head, I responded “I’m sorry, I seem to be somewhere else.”
“I tend to have that effect on people.” Lea’s smile colored the room with an all-too-familiar spread that simply reached too far.
Sweat began to bead on my forehead. Lea’s words were gentle, jovial, but corrupting. She handed me a napkin, and I dabbed the excess moisture from my face. I used a mental strength that I thought once lost to me and pushed my fears to the back of my mind. I told myself that insanity simply took hold of me, and I must trust the doctor in front of me to break the taloned grasp of terror. “I-I have been having these dreams.” I watched as she immediately began jotting down a few notes. “They’re quite disturbing in nature.”
Dr. Deirdre nodded in understanding and prodded for more information, “In what way?”
Something overcame me then. It seemed my mind produced an excess of ecstasy to break through my anxieties. Feeling overcome with rising nerves, I announced “About a girl, if you can believe it.” An uneasy laugh escaped the prison of my strained and dried lips, and then rose into a continued bellow, endorphins finally arriving after weeks of pained dispare.
Lea looked towards me, the smile never leaving her face. Taking a pause from her notes, she reached out with her hand and gave me a pat on the knee in jest. Sitting up straight and tall, and rolling her shoulders back to appear tenacious, she announced “Don’t you worry, I can handle those. We get a lot of men tortured by such creatures in here.”
Continuing to be overcome by my laughter, punctuated by a short phrase and sparse breaths, I responded, “Well this one happens to be a little different, doctor.”
“They all tend to be a little different. I got you covered.” Lea gave me a wink and put her pen back to her paper to continue taking notes. Her skin glistened when coated by the last touches of daylight seeping through her window. “Now, how is this one different?”
“I am not even entirely sure she is real, to be honest.” I spoke and the doctor gave a serious, brief hum in reply. I observed her brows begin to narrow and lower, a more stern expression conquering her gentle face. “Quite honestly, I am not sure what I am imagining. It’s like I am being haunted.”
Lea lifted her chin and turned her gaze from her notebook. A smile crossed her face again as she attempted to bring a comforting aura to the room of rapidly-fading daylight. “Hey, I am here for you,” her words caused a disturbing and inexplicable chill to invade my spine, “I am always here for my patients. Are these both aural and visual hallucinations?”
I took a brief pause, trying desperately to feel out what I found so disturbing by the gentle woman in front of me. Eventually, the long silence dragged me back into the cold light of reality and I spoke, “Yes, it’s strange, and they just started up fairly recently.”
“Do you know what caused them?” Lea leaned forward in her chair, as a mixture of interest and determination coated her face. Her body movements were well-rehearsed, something only a therapist who still cared might practice.
“Yes, in fact, I approached the bus stop by the mall and I saw this girl,” I broke my look from Lea’s face, fleeing in the ease of looking towards my feet instead, embarrassed by my loss of insanity and my fear of a doctor so seemingly harmless.
“It’s possible this girl, real or fake, pulled something out of your mind’s recesses.” She began rapidly scribbling notes down on her pad while instructing me, “Tell me everything you know about this girl you met.”
“Well, she wore dark colors.” My stare finally left my shoes and returned to studying her face as she took notes. The odd smile continued to haunt the visage, as if she enjoyed her job far too much. When her pen began to slow down, I began talking again, “Well, you see, she was like the type of girl you would see at a nightclub. She wore sloppy makeup, and dressed in black.”
“Did you interact with her?” Lea’s voice took on an inquisitive tone. She expressed a genuine interest, but it was nothing out of the ordinary for someone of her profession.
“Y-You could say that.” My voice broke as I remembered the day of the bus stop encounter. The feeling of a cold shadow crept over me, and soon I felt eyes from all corners of the room bearing down on my position. I continued, attempting to ignore the paranoia. “She, well, her face melted.”
Lea suddenly stopped taking notes and turned her face to me with a piercing look of confusion in her eyes. “You mean, her makeup was running? Was she crying?”
“She was crying!” I spoke, with slightly lifted spirits. It felt relieving for my story to be out in the open. “But, it wasn’t her makeup. It was all of her facial features.”
Lea took a long pause, closed her notebook, and gingerly set it aside on the table next to her, joined by her pen. “Just to be clear, this was part of the dream you mentioned earlier?”
“No, this actually happened!” I desperately responded, the words coming out in a choking insistence with an intense terror of rejection. I wondered to myself why the doctor would stop taking notes as she paused for several moments and glanced about the room.
Lea got up from her chair and paced around for a brief few seconds before turning her attention to the plaque behind the couch. “It sounds like some kind of paranoia. I assume you ran away?”
“No, I was pulled into her! I shut my eyes, but a kind of portal appeared. A hand reached out and left some kind of scratch that healed immediately afterwards, and I haven’t been able to sleep soundly since.” At my response, a deafening quiet filled the volume of the room. I wiped my head again, gave another short, mad laugh to break the anxiety, and then fell into tears. “I’m insane.”
Covering my eyes in a desperate attempt to rub away the bursts of emotions, I continued to try to speak, but nothing sensical emerged. After some brief, painful seconds, I felt the couch cushion next to me give way to Lea’s supple form as she sat down and folded an arm around my shoulders. I failed to raise my head to meet her view, and my mind flooded with self-pity.
“It’s alright,” a gentle, joy-filled voice entered my ear. “I know what’s wrong with you.”
“You do?” A pitiable gasp escaped my sobs.
“Yes, I specialize in this particular type of madness, believe it or not.” Lea rubbed my back as she gave a quiet, mysterious sigh of relief. “You wanted something from her. Some kind of human connection lost or never achieved, correct?” Lea cut me off as I tried to choke out a response, “Shh, the girl appears in the minds of those like yourself. We have the cure.”
I finally managed to stop my outpouring of tears and wiped my eyes to turn my face up to hers. The wide smile seemed even more unnatural, and its close proximity to my face sent a new wave of anxiety through my body. I felt like a hamster in the eyes of a snake, “Who is ‘we’?”
“My family runs a special type of therapy for people like you. Although we haven’t seen someone of your kind in a long time, we are always prepared.” Lea’s gentle face now seemed more obsessed than anything, and the focus of her eyes faded as if my body was an empty vessel she stared through to grander things. “Let us make you better?”
“I...I’m not sure,” my sight felt pulled to her empty eyes, and I fell into a trance. I swam through an ocean of confusion as a strange whirlpool pulled me into a pit not of my own choosing. “You really make people like me better?”
Lea’s piercing eyes held me in place as her voice dropped to a low whisper, like a girl begging for a gift, “Of course we do. You won’t be the same man, you will be something very special. ‘Obtaining what I want loses who I am inside.’” She returned to me unwelcome memories of my dreams.
My heart rate skyrocketed, and the wailing in my head reached a crescendo. My mouth dropped, and fear colored my widening eyes. Suddenly, a shadow passed by the window, the sunlight that I found comforting before abandoned me to her clutch, and the image of a skull covered her face. I let out a loud scream and lept from the couch, stumbling to the ground, crawling with an inhuman speed in an attempt to escape.
“Stop!” Lea commanded in a strange, gruff tone which felt absent of any of her previous joy, and my entire body froze in place by a mental mechanism entirely foreign to me. Sunlight once again streamed through the windows and colored the room with its amber light. Her footsteps seemed to echo in the room as she slowly walked next to me and leaned down. I refused to look upon her face, as sweat began to bead off from my head and soil the carpet below. She placed a gentle hand on my back, “You are having another attack,” a jovial voice once again entered my mind. “Please...let me help you.”
My body’s tension released, and I found myself able to move once more. I turned my gaze ever so slowly back to her face, and her olive skin once again glistened and her smile appeared far more human. The idea invaded my mind that I was sick, and I nearly left the one person who claimed to be able to help me. My breath slowed, and my heartbeat returned to a steady pace, “What would I have to do?” I gulped, blinking my eyes slowly to try to maintain my sanity.
Lea’s smile widened unnaturally once more, although she appeared to do her best to fight it as she placed one hand across her mouth like a child unable to stop snickering. Quickly getting up, she made her way to her desk, opened a drawer, and pulled out a small, black box. She returned to my side, haunting me with her smile once more. “Inside this there are little packets of herbal tea. It’s a special blend of my own making, and your new medicine. I need you to go home, drink this, and sleep. You will feel better and-”
I cut her off with immediate protest, “Go back!? The girl is there, she will-”
“She is called The Ruiner, but there are other, older names for her,” Lea’s eyes locked onto mine, and unfocused once more. “She will be gone for a little while, plenty of time to drink this tea.”
“Plenty of time,” I agreed, my soul trapped in her sight.
“You will research, and make an appointment with, my sister for the next phase of your treatment. She runs a small yoga studio named Released Emotions. I will let her know to expect you.” Lea continued to fight her widening grin.
“I will make the appointment as soon as I wake up.” I no longer desired to escape Lea’s eyes. They didn’t feel safe, but at least she told me what I wanted to hear. Although, my pulse began to rise once more.
“Good!” Lea’s face returned to normal. She placed the box next to me and returned to the chair behind her desk. “I think that’s all the time we have for today. My sister will let you know when it’s time to see me again.”
I got up, my emotional captivity at an end, picked up the box full of herbal mixture, and began to head out the door. “Thank you doctor.” I felt unsure if she did anything worthy of gratitude. Confusion danced in my head, and I quickly open the door and let myself out.
As I left the building, I noticed the cop from before, Rachel Kester, across the street. She eyed me and the box suspiciously, but made no attempts to stop me as I made my way back to my apartment. I felt her follow me for a short time, but when I looked behind myself she was absent.
I stood at the door to my haunted home for a long time, my fear getting the better of me. Finally, I took a deep breath and threw open the passage inside. Like the good doctor assured me, no bus stop girl; simply a lonely apartment with candles scattered about the floor. I wasted no time opening the box. It indeed possessed ordinary-looking tea packets, but the inside shocked me with organized scratches that appeared like strange lettering I didn't understand. Worrying my time was short, I heated up some water, and began dipping the tea packet.
The water turned a sickly green, but my nose picked up rather pleasant smells. After a brief pause, I took a small sip. Immediately, I became overtaken with desire for the concoction. I rapidly downed the product, slightly burning my mouth and throat in the rush. After that, I remember nothing but waking up in my bed the next day.
