Psychopathia: A Horror Suspense Novel (27 page)

‘But it smells so good,’ he said, opening his eyes and crunching along on the gravel beside her. ‘I never thought I’d be a free man again.’

‘What an odd way of putting it! You were always going to get well enough to come back home.’ She tucked an arm around him and gave him a smacking kiss on the cheek. ‘I’ve missed you so much,’ she said.

‘I’ve missed everything. You’ve no idea what it’s like being shut up inside for years at a time.’

Tully blinked at him. ‘Months,’ she said. ‘It was only months.’

He was gazing at everything, drinking it up with hungry eyes. ‘It felt like years.’

There was bound to still be some confusion, some lingering disorientation. They’d walked together in the gardens plenty of times in the last couple of months, but it wouldn’t be the same as now. He was going to sleep in his own bed tonight.

‘I hope you like the house,’ she said, trying not to chew on her lip. It was scarred from past abuse, and she didn’t want to make it worse. She unlocked the car and got in, leaning over to unlock the passenger door for Toby.

‘I like the pictures you showed me.’

‘Yeah, but they were just small ones, on my phone.’ She put the key in the ignition and started the car. ‘Are you sure you won’t mind not being
right in the city?’

He shook his head. ‘Not even a little bit, as long as you’re there with me.’

She smiled at that. It was sweet. ‘You have to put your seat belt on.’

He gazed at her with obvious confusion and Tully rolled her eyes and laughed. ‘Here, let me,’ she said, and leaned over him, grabbing the safety belt and drawing it across his chest
. She plugged it in. ‘There. All set.’ Faltered as she looked at him.

He had the strangest look on his
face. She straightened up and cleared her throat. ‘Are you all right, Toby?’ she asked.

Blinking, he shook himself, and smiled. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’m just fine.’

‘Okay. Let’s go home then.’

‘Get the prescriptions first,’ he reminded her.

‘Yeah. Get them first.’ It wouldn’t pay to forget them. She didn’t want Toby to slide back into not knowing her. That had been scary. What do you do when the only person you really have in your life doesn’t recognise you anymore? Fortunately she hadn’t had to find out. By the third visit, Toby was treating her pretty much like normal. He’d quit staring at her like she was something he wanted to devour, at any rate. That had been extremely unnerving.

She tried to think of something to say, as they headed to the nearest pharmacy. Toby seemed content to gaze out the window though, and she subsided into silence with something like relief. He still wasn’t the brother she’d known so well; he was still a bit different. Some days she’d barely recognised him – even the way he spoke was different, but other times he’d been his old self again and she’d relaxed, knowing he needed her no matter how strange his behaviour was sometimes.

The house was perfect. As
he’d deduced from the photographs on the gizmo she’d called her phone, it was indeed a railways house. Could he have organised it any better himself?

No, not if he’d even tried
. He got out the car with a shudder of relief. Automobiles in his time had never travelled so fast; this one went even faster than the trains he’d worked on. He stretched, feigning ease, and looked around.

It was perfect. Almost identical to the one he used to live in. Where he’d had all his fun before…well, before he’d been stopped, dragged before a court of his peers – what a joke that had been – and then locked up in the looney bin for the rest of his life.

He smiled at Tully. And here he was with a second chance. A second lifetime all his for the taking. For a long while, he’d given up hope, living a half-life, hazy and insubstantial, stuck in the grounds of the building where he’d died. Then at last, a fortuitous meeting, a boy with cracks in his mind. Cracks that he crawled through and widened. It almost made the dying part bearable.

He knew he was dead. He was crazy, not stupid.

Tully interrupted his dark little reverie. ‘Let’s get in out of the rain. And have lunch – a special treat.’ She held up the red and white bucket which was apparently filled with some sort of chicken dish. He was glad her brother was as crazy – almost as crazy – as he was; it made it easier to disguise the fact that he knew next to nothing about the world he now lived in. Lived again in.

‘You wait until summer,’ Toby’s sister was saying. ‘We’re right near the beach. I
bet the surfing will be wicked.’

He didn’t know what surfing was, and he had no desire to find out. By summer, he would have begun his little games again, and how he looked forward to that. Starting with the ravishing flower in front of him.

Maybe. He hadn’t quite decided yet, if he would start with her. If she disappeared, people might well notice, despite how isolated they were, cut off from the twin’s family. But there were doctors, and that was annoying. He had therapy sessions booked for him already, and he didn’t fancy his chances driving the complicated automobile. Perhaps he needed Tully for a while. Just a short while though. There was an old, familiar excitement singing in his blood, and he knew he wouldn’t wait too long.

It wasn’t the chicken from the cardboard bucket that had him salivating. He sat at the small table, grease smearing his chin, and grinning like a…well, like a loon. That made him laugh.

‘What’s so funny?’ Tully nibbled at her food, holding it between sharp little fingers, and taking delicate little bites. It all added to his pleasure, to watch her.

He shook his head. ‘It’s just so good to sit across this little table to you and eat this…whatever it is.’ He sucked at a bone. ‘You have no idea of the slop they used to feed me.’ The memory had him grimacing, until he remembered poor old Toby, held tight in the pincer grip of his memories, a tube forced down his throat, sour, curdled milk siphoned down until his stomach overflowed.

‘You’re grinning – really, what’s so funny?’ Tully added another slim little bone to the graveyard on her plate and dabbed at her lips with a paper napkin.

‘You wouldn’t believe the food they gave me in there.’ He could almost taste the curdled milk. ‘You know they force-fed me for three years?’

Too late, he realised what he’d done. Tully’s eyes were round coins in her face. Then she blinked, and looked away.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I forget.’

But she snaked a hand over the table and latched onto his. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s all right.’ Her face crumpled. ‘But was that really one of your hallucinations?’

He wanted to tell her it was worse when they catheterised him and left the bag unemptied for days. He’d had so many infections he was surprised his dick hadn’t rotted and fallen off. And now her brother was enjoying the same pleasure. Just wait until he reached the electric shock therapy. That had been stimulating to say the least. He giggled.

‘I had lots of hallucinations,’ he said, making it up as he went along. He wanted to poke and prod the innocent girl in front of him. If he couldn’t use a knife on her – yet – he wanted to slice her skin from her body with word and pictures. ‘Once,’ he said, ‘I was left in the soft room – that’s what they called the padded restraint room – for so long, I tore a strip of canvas off the wall and ate the straw padding. When they finally came and got me and took the straightjacket off, I laughed and laughed because it was the first time my stomach had been full for years.’

Her mouth hung open. He could see the little pulse jumping in her neck, and imagined getting a knife from the kitchen drawer and pressing the tip of it to that little line of blood, and slicing it open. Delicate work, but he’d always had a steady hand. She made a squeaking sound and he shook himself back into the present.

‘Electric convulsive shock therapy was my favourite though. For us special ones, they turned the juice up extra high. One of the inmates broke his spine – snapped it right in two – because the spasms were so bad.’ He looked down at his plate and picked up another piece of chicken, peeled the crunchy skin off it, and bit down on the soft, white flesh. ‘I stole his shoes. He wasn’t ever going to need them again.’

The sound of rain was loud on the roof. He chewed on the chicken, glad Toby, the dear boy, had all his teeth. In fact, Toby had quite a lot more going for him than a mouth-full of perfect white
chompers. Tobias allowed himself a glance down at his new body and felt a quiver of something very close to lust. He grinned and thought how amusing the situation was. Here he was, blessed with a body that once he’d have been delighted to take a knife too. Toby was, you could say, just his type. Flanks a little skinny, but that was hospital food for you. He wondered how Toby was getting on in the wilderness of his head. He’d been nothing as angelic as Toby, but that hadn’t stopped a couple of the burliest assistants dropping their trou and doing a bit of back door breaking and entering. Smelly bastards they’d been, and hairy. He liked his boys smooth and sweet. Not that he only did anything so vulgar as force himself between the firm round globes of their buttocks. He preferred to let his knife have a good deal of the fun.

But Tully, bless her heart, was still gaping at him. Maybe he’d taken it too far. Didn’t want the sweet flower running to the doctors after all, bleating about how her brother couldn’t even get his hallucinations straight.

He’d never suffered from hallucinations, of course. Some of the doctors had played around with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, but really, he’d known exactly what was real and what wasn’t. The splash of red blood against his bare skin – it didn’t get any more real than that.

‘Toby, are you all right?’

He blinked at her. ‘Yes, why?’

She nipped her lower lip between small white teeth. ‘You
kinda blanked for a minute there.’

‘I want to go out,’ he said,

‘But it’s raining.’ As if a bit of rain made any difference. He’d watched it rain blood; he loved the rain. ‘And you’ve only just gotten home. Aren’t you tired?’

‘Not a bit,’ he said. ‘And the rain doesn’t bother me.’

She gnawed on that lip like a rabbit. ‘I guess we can,’ she said. ‘Go out, I mean.’

The girl misunderstood. ‘I didn’t mean
we
,’ he said. ‘I meant me. Just me.’

‘On your own?’

Yes, on his own. Wasn’t that rather what
just me
implied? ‘On my own.’

‘But…’

He took pity on her, and tried to curb his impatience. ‘Just for half an hour. Just to walk around a bit, feel normal again.’ He reached out to touch her this time, just the same way she’d reassured him before. Except, of course, she needed the reassurance. ‘I won’t be long. I just want to feel normal again. Just for half an hour.’

There wasn’t much she could say. Even if she had her doubts, there was no doctor-mandated house arrest, nothing she could do but stand by the door as he shrugged into a jacket and pulled on a strange woolen hat she called a beanie. It sounded like something a child would wear. But then, they both dressed like children, and boy children at that. He wasn’t sure what to make of this new fashion for females to dress like boys, but he did have to admit it acce
ntuated everything there was to accentuate. Even his own clothes hugged his figure. Disconcerting. He expected he’d get used to it, even to enjoy it.

She let him go, of course, and he ducked outside, wound his way down the overgrown path to the road,
stood there, sniffing the air, a curious mixture of salt and something he couldn’t place. Exhaust, perhaps. Several of the cars that went by left plumes of noxious gasses behind them. They still moved too fast for his liking, and everything felt slightly unreal, as though he was one step out of line with the rest of the world. Which, really he was.

But there were pretty young men and women in this world too, and he stepped out onto the path behind a gaggle of them, and followed in their wake. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and tried to ape their gait. Just another young man in a world of them. No one would notice him.

And this new world was so much more crowded. Everywhere he looked, houses, commercial buildings, automobiles, and people everywhere, flocks of them, surging up and down the roads. No one would ever notice him here. He would walk unseen among them, just one more face in a crowd.

His blood sang. He was invincible. When he smiled a
t a lovely little thing, the tousle-haired fella grinned back at him. Elation flooded through him – he was a wolf walking unremarked among the sheep. With a face like his, they would embrace him, welcome him into their lives, and they would never suspect what his blond good looks sheltered under the skin. They would never know until he decided to introduce them to his knife.

But of course, he needed a knife.

The ones in the girl Tully’s kitchen would not do. He knew he was particular about his knives, but every good craftsman was that way about their tools.

The rain glistened on the black tar of the road. When he’d been alive – almost exactly
seventy years ago, the roads hadn’t looked like this. Nothing had looked like this. He lifted his head and hunted around the buildings. Out here on peninsular, he could overlay his memories of Port Chalmers with the reality, and there weren’t too many differences. A smile quirked at the edges of his mouth. Sailors. Sailors made for excellent pickings. They were strong, but always a few were looking for a bit of company that didn’t involve a girl in every port. He rubbed his fingertips together and tendrils of electric excitement snaked through his body.