The Last Thread

Admittedly, I haven't posted many of my stories. That's mainly because I'm mostly writing fanfiction now, and haven't had any really good, fresh story ideas for a while now. It's really frustrating, but I think I just have a bad bout of writer's block. Maybe the story I wrote for English that I'm posting here will help me. Pray that it's so!

*Note: These are not from my personal experiences. I am not a psychiatric consultant. I have never had a boyfriend and most certainly have never been raped. This story was entirely created out of my head, helped along by the various Edgar Allan Poe stories I have been reading recently.

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I am beginning to go insane from flashbacks of the traumatic incident I have witnessed recently; as a psychiatric consultant specializing in recovery from traumatic happenings, I know this. Therefore, the police are encouraging me to record my experiences as quickly as possible, and thus I have shunned a pen and am currently typing this.

Despite having graduated at an early age, I quickly became a renowned psychiatrist both in and out of Detroit, where I worked. I had never met a case I couldn’t help in less than a year—that is, never before I met Cheryl Robinson.

Cheryl had been date-raped by her boyfriend of two years.

“When I was young, it was absolutely unheard of to have a boyfriend before you were eighteen, let alone fifteen!” my sixty-seven-year-old receptionist had tutted when sending in Cheryl’s profile.

She wasn’t much different from my other cases—a young teenager going through shock after a traumatic event. “Okay,” I sighed as I finished flipping through the file and put it into my drawer labeled Current Teenagers. “Send her in.” Fully prepared for a girl clothed completely in black and wearing only black makeup, imagine my surprise when I saw a perfectly normal-seeming, happy-go-lucky fourteen-year-old walk in.

“Good morning,” Cheryl smiled. “How are you, Doctor?” I quickly ran my eye down her outfit: green—the color of peace; sleeveless—unafraid of her sex being noticed; jeans—casual and unworried.

“I’m great,” I smiled back. “You?”

“School’s been a hassle,” she laughed, bright blue eyes dancing—dancing somehow too merrily. Knowing that these things should not be dismissed as simply something wrong with the eyes, I jotted down a note about it.

“I remember the feeling; all those teachers trying to be your overlords!” I joked, eliciting a giggle from my patient. And thus we passed the allotted two hours, laughing and joking like old friends; I was careful to steer the conversation in areas that had nothing to do with romance or recent events.

Our half-year meeting was slightly different from the others. Cheryl had seemed to try to stay away from any subjects relating to rape in any way; she hadn’t done that in the first meeting. Hoping to put her at ease, I gave her a questionnaire containing questions about what she liked to eat, what movies she liked, who was in her family, etc. After she left, I went through the questions and answers. One of her answers intrigued me. “Have you ever seen a psychiatrist before?” I had written on the sheet.

“Not that I know of!” she had written in what was clearly meant to be a joking way.

Something was wrong there. Why hadn’t she simply written “No” and been done with it? I played back the recorded notes on her handwriting I had and noticed immediately that she had written in a sinuous stroke, meaning that she redirects the questions to ignore the facts. Had she been in therapy once and simply blocked it out of her mind? For the first time since I’d begun this career, I wished I hadn’t signed a confidentiality form; I wanted desperately to talk to this girl’s parents about her.

As our meetings progressed, Cheryl became further and further drawn in and wearing steadily lighter clothing. She had taken to wearing yellow—a sure sign that she was trying to pretend she was all right. The only conclusion I could draw was that something was going on that she didn’t feel she could trust anybody with. She also acted happy rather convincingly; had I not given her a questionnaire to fill out each time and analyzed her handwriting each time or had I not been a psychologist, I would have believed she was recovering from the shock very well.

Eventually, after an entire year of biweekly sessions, I began losing sleep over this girl. She wasn’t the Cheryl I had gotten used to after the first three sessions.

Once, after she had taken to wearing white, she had interrupted me when I called her Cheryl. “Doctor, please don’t call me Cheryl anymore. My friends and I decided that Hunapo would be a much better name for me.”

“Hmm that’s interesting… Do you think I should get a new name?” I knew not to ask her a direct question pertaining to why she had decided to change her name. But, for once, Cheryl—or rather, Hunapo—chose to ignore me, and I became increasingly worried at her unusual behavior. As shown by her wearing light clothing to persuade everybody that she was happy, it was quite obvious to me that she was uneasy about her self-identity.

After about a year and a half, I was beginning to give up on my Cheryl-Hunapo case; perversely, I began sleeping better. Quite ashamedly to say, I once recorded, “I fear I cannot hold onto this case for much longer; she is simply changing too strangely and too oddly, and she refuses to trust me with any information at all. Nothing she says gives me any insight into her and neither does anything she does. Everything is always perfectly neutral with her. And I am afraid that I am becoming neutral about her case as well.”

“Doctor, don’t call me Hunapo anymore,” she said after two years. “My name is Enola now.”

Personality problems, I scribbled onto my notes and began to worry, but outwardly I laughed and said, “I love that name! The main character of one of my favorite books had that name!”

Cheryl-Hunapo-Enola looked at me angrily, and demanded, “Why do you always act like you don’t care? I know you do; it’s part of your job. If I know and you know I know, why do you still act like you don’t care about me? Why do you act like you don’t care about me changing my name?” Before I could answer, she got up. “This is wasting my time and money. I don’t need someone who pretends she doesn’t care about me while trying to worm her way into my trust. How can I give you my trust when you don’t even trust me?” she hissed. “When I come back, I expect treatment worthy of the money I’m paying.” She left.

Instead of coming at the prescribed time for her session, Cheryl-Hunapo-Enola came when I was the only one still in the building on the day of her next session. The first I knew of her coming was a vague shadow on the dappled glass window and a rapid tapping on my office door. “It’s unlocked,” I called, lazy as I was to open the door myself, as I busied myself with shuffling papers in preparation for going home.

“Good evening, Doctor,” an abnormally low female voice issued from the growing crack in the doorway. “I apologize for not coming to my session today, so I am here now to make it up.”

Feeling the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, I struggled against the urge to panic, telling myself it was only a voice, and ran through the list of patients who hadn’t come for their session on that day. There was only one. “Enola, it’s so nice to see you,” I smiled, turning around and facing the crack in the doorway. “Can I do anything for you tonight?”

“I just need some help with my boyfriend, that’s all.” I inwardly breathed a sigh of relief; finally, a normal teenage problem!

“Of course; come in!” I walked over to the door, ignoring the growing dread in the pit of my stomach, and pulled it open, nearly fainting at what I saw there.

Cheryl-Hunapo-Enola—no; I knew this monster was not Cheryl, the bright-eyed, laughing teenager I had known, nor was she Hunapo, who, although having an attitude problem, was still just a teenager struggling to overcome the rush of emotions that come at this time—Enola was looking at me with madness whirling in her eyes. Her pupils were dilated to such an extent that her normally bright blue eyes became pure black rimmed with moonlight-pale blue. In her arms was the limp body of a strong young man with the build of a football player, looking to be roughly a year or two older than Enola.

Apparently she saw the horror and shock in my eyes, for her own eyes narrowed and she moved to cover my mouth, mocking me as she did so. “Are you going to scream and call for help, Doctor? Will you tell everybody to be brave and face what’s real, and then become a hypocrite when you’re alone?” She spat out the last word, bitterness barely disguised in each syllable.

In a flash, she dropped the body of the boy, and twisted my arm behind my back. I tried to scream, but Enola’s hand clamped down on my mouth even harder, and I could taste blood. “Now, now, be a good doctor and do as I say,” she laughed; it came out oddly high-pitched, considering the low voice she was speaking with. “I would hate to have to hurt you!” She laughed again, a low and nasty chuckle this time.

Someone was whimpering, and I realized that that someone was me. With a wicked smile on her face, she ignored me and forced me down onto my chair, tying my hands behind my back and tying my legs to the chair. She lifted her hand for a single moment, but before I had time to react, she slapped a piece of tape onto my mouth, effectually sealing it for the time being. I closed my eyes to stop the tears that were welling up deep inside me…

Apparently I fainted, for when I next opened my eyes, Enola was pacing the room with a whip in her hands while she poured forth a barrage of questions at the unfortunate boy she had dragged in, who was now tied to a chair as I was. “I hate you, you know that?” Enola was snarling.

“Don’t hurt me…oh God… Please don’t hurt me…” the boy babbled.

“That’s exactly what I said that night, but you ignored me, didn’t you?” she giggled in a sing-song voice. “Why should I listen to you now?” Suddenly, the boy’s eyes caught my own, and they lit up with a sort of savage hope. He mouthed the word help to me, but Enola whirled around to see what he was staring at so frantically and pleadingly. “Ah, you’re awake,” she smiled in satisfaction. “I’d like you to meet my boyfriend, Zane. Zane, this is my psychiatrist. I do hope you’ll be nice to each other now!”

“You’re crazy!” Zane shouted in a spurt of idiocy. “We won’t do anything to each other! We can’t! You bound us up!”

“That’s for your own safety, darling,” Enola laughed, carving a scar in his cheek with her elongated fingernails.

“Let me go,” he pleaded, wincing as scarlet began to run down his face. “Please! We can talk about this, Cheryl!”

I could almost see the strings inside her snapping; Cheryl, Hunapo, and Enola had all been cracking for a long time. Now, with her last thread strained to the breaking point, Enola snapped.

“I am not Cheryl, you moronic slug!” she shrieked, her eyes wide and hands tensed in claws. “No; you have made me so much more than that. You have made me who I am now!” Her voice softened to nearly a coo, but the madness never left her eyes. “Although I never thought I would say this, I have to thank you. You opened my eyes to what must be done to rid this world of such monsters as yourself!” As she screamed out this last sentence, Enola pulled a huge carving knife out from behind her back; from where she obtained such an object, I do not know.

At last, Zane proved that he did indeed have a brain as he began to work furiously on liberating his limbs from their bonds, which he should have begun doing long ago. To my surprise, he managed to free his hands rather easily, and began to work on his legs. All the while, Enola advanced steadily forward. “I will tell you a story of how a young girl was brutally hurt by the one she loved,” she smiled benevolently, as though telling a fairytale to little children. “As I speak, I will slowly carve your skin so that you suffer the same agony the girl suffered.”

Zane did not waste time on useless words and continued to work furiously on the ropes. Feeling that he would not be able to escape before Enola killed him, I tried to scream. Unfortunately, while the tape muffled my mouth, my struggles attracted the mad girl’s attention, and her head whipped around faster than lightning. “Now, now then, Doctor,” she crooned sweetly, putting the knife down onto a table and walking towards me. “I told you not to put up a fuss. I’m terribly sorry for this, but I’m afraid that I must make sure you are no longer a liability. I only came to make up my session, and I do believe I have already done that. There is no need for you to stay any longer.”

With that, her hand slammed the back of my head so hard that I immediately became unconscious. The last thing I remember is Zane springing up triumphantly as his bonds fell at his feet. I pray he escaped, although I do not have much hope of that; Enola drew remarkable amounts of strength from her psychosis, and she could have caught up with him despite his athletic physique. If she did not, good luck to the poor boy and may he have learned his lesson.