When She Was Bad: A Thriller (8 page)

The door opens, revealing a large tiled room dominated by an enormous padded table in the shape of a cross; it looks more like a medieval torture device than a piece of furniture. Beside it, seated behind a gray metal desk, is a plumpish, bespectacled man in a white lab coat, his reddish-brown hair combed back in waves from a high round forehead. He gestures toward the empty wooden chair across the desk, politely asks her to take a seat. She shakes off the hands of her escorts, puts a little extra hip swivel into her walk as she crosses the room.

“Do you know who I am?” is his first question.

She draws the hospital gown tightly around her, shrugs noncommittally.

“Ever seen me before?”

“Not that I know of.” A seductive smile. “You are kinda cute, though.”

He’s not biting. “What’s your name?”

“Lilah.”

“Last name?”

She frowns prettily. “Sorry—sometimes I have trouble remembering things.”

“Do you know where you are?”

“Some kind of mental hospital?”

“Do you know what day it is?”

She shrugs, causing the hospital gown to fall open. His eyes flicker downward—only for a moment, but a quickening of his breath gives her a sense of power. She leans forward provocatively. “Look, whoever you are, could we talk in private for a couple minutes?”

“No, we can’t.” He breaks eye contact, types something onto a laptop computer on the desk, then looks up again. “Just a few more questions. You were right about this being a mental hospital—do you have any idea
why
you’re here?”

Both the room and the man are too chilly for her to go around with her boobs hanging out. Lilah pulls the lapels of her hospital gown closed again. “Because your goons over there wouldn’t let me leave.”

“I mean why you were brought here in the first place.”

“I don’t know. Amnesia, maybe?” She waits for him to finish typing another note into the laptop. “Well, am I right?”

“You’re experiencing some loss of memory, then?”

“Yeah, I got CRS—can’t remember shit.”

“Tell me the last memories you do have—before coming here, that is.”

“Well there was this biker, he picked me up in Seaside, I was pretending to be a hooker—I do that sometimes, just for the fun of it…. “

She tells him the rest readily enough—Lilah feels no sense of shame where sexual matters are concerned. When she finishes, he closes the notebook, then does something that takes her completely by surprise: he leans earnestly across the table and stares hard into her eyes, saying, “Lily? Lily, if you’re there…if you can hear me…if you’re in any way conscious…if you have any conscious control over any of this…if any of this alter switching is in any way voluntary to any extent, now’s the time to speak up. Believe me, nobody here is going to think less of you.”

Lilah draws back, tearing her eyes from his searching gaze. “He’s the crazy one, not me,” she tells Mullet Woman over her shoulder.

But Mullet Woman’s not looking at Lilah, she’s looking over Lilah’s head at the crazy doctor, who sighs, blows the air out like a man who’s just made a tough decision, then nods toward the cross-shaped table.

“No way,” says Lilah. “No fucking way.”

Yes fucking way. Hulk and Mullet Woman each take an arm and lift her onto the table as easily as if she were a scarecrow, then force her arms away from her sides and fasten her wrists to the crosspieces with fleece-lined clamps. “Help me,” she screams, kicking futilely as strong arms yank her legs out straight and clamp her ankles to the table. “Please somebody, help—”

Something is forced between her teeth, cutting her off in mid-scream. She tastes rubber. Another fleece-lined clamp swings over her forehead, clicks into place to immobilize her head. Out of the corner of her eye she glimpses the man in the white coat fiddling with the knobs of a machine about the size of a metal briefcase. Then he turns back from the machine and holds a syringe up to the light.

“You’re going to be taking a little nap now,” he tells Lilah, patting the inside of her elbow for a vein. “That’s all, just a little nap.”

She feels the needle sliding in, then a burning sensation in the crook of her arm. Please, somebody help me, she thinks. Somebody, anybody….

5

Once the short-acting sedative had taken hold, Alan Corder injected his patient with an even shorter-acting neuromuscular blocker known as succinylcholine—brand name, Anectine—to prevent her from breaking any bones while her body was convulsing.

Then an oxygen mask was placed over her nose and mouth, a conducting jelly rubbed on her temples, and the electrodes attached. “Let’s clear now,” Corder said quietly. Patty and Wally stepped back from the table; Corder pushed the green button on the front of the MECTA device, and silently, without drama, one hundred joules of electricity—about enough current to light a 110-watt bulb—passed down the leads into the electrodes, and thence to the patient’s brain, for a duration of one second.

The resulting grand mal lasted thirty endless seconds. Patty looked as though she wanted to throw herself across Lily’s thrashing body to keep her from hurting herself. Corder put his hand on Patty’s arm and smiled reassuringly. “She doesn’t feel a thing, she won’t remember a thing.”

“I know, it’s just…“

“I know.”

Then it was over—nothing to do but wait.

Most laymen, and many mental health professionals, think of electroshock therapy, formally known as ECT, or electroconvulsive therapy, as barbaric and archaic—
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,
and all that. But for some psychiatrists, ECT is a valuable tool for treating major depressive and bipolar disorders: it’s estimated that despite the opposition of a well-organized, patient-led anti-ECT movement, one hundred thousand patients a year receive electroshock treatments in the United States alone.

Alan Corder had first discovered the efficacy of ECT in treating dissociative identity disorder in the accidental fashion common to so many other scientific breakthroughs. Four years earlier, treating a severely depressed, medication-resistant female patient with several suicide attempts behind her, he decided to try electroshock as a last resort. The results were immediate and spectacular—the patient came out of the anesthetic feeling absolutely
chipper.

But she was also an entirely different personality. At first Corder was afraid that what appeared to be a case of iatrogenic (therapist-induced) DID was an unwanted side effect of the electroshock. In a follow-up hypnotherapy session, however, he was able to determine that the depressive personality had been an alter all along—it wasn’t depressive disorder the patient had been suffering from, but rather dissociative identity disorder. And after the electroshock, that particular alter never appeared again.

That was the breakthrough Corder been hoping for. He didn’t pretend to know exactly how or why it worked—but then, nobody knows exactly how ECT worked on those other disorders, either. So he continued to treat his patient for DID—every time another alter surfaced, it was back to the ECT table for her. And shortly after Patient One had been discharged as cured, Patient Two, Ulysses Maxwell, arrived at Reed-Chase.

In many ways, Maxwell was the perfect guinea pig for Corder. He arrived with a definitive diagnosis of DID from Irene Cogan, one of the country’s leading experts in the field, and had no relatives to ask questions or raise a fuss. Nor was there much difficulty identifying Maxwell’s alters—each was clearly defined and easily delineated, and one by one, as soon as they appeared, they were dispatched to the cross-shaped table in the ECT room to be shocked out of existence.

That’s how it worked with the first several alters, anyway—the malevolent host alter who called himself Max proved strong enough to resist the initial treatments. But Corder, to whom alters were not people but symptoms, was pitiless, stepping up the voltage with every successive treatment, until finally, after a bilateral jolt of close to 150 joules (roughly the equivalent in foot-pound energy of a 110-pound weight being dropped on a person’s head from a height of twelve inches), Max gave up the ghost—or whatever alters did when they ceased to manifest. Then there was only Lyssy.

Obviously, with such a complete remission, there was no point in treating him for DID. Corder could of course have attempted to treat Lyssy’s amnesia, could have regressed him to foster recollection. But for what benefit, and at what risk? The only benefit, if one could even call it that, would have been to instill a sense of remorse in Lyssy; the risk would be inducing a recurrence of the DID.

So Corder made the decision to treat the developmental rather than the dissociative disorder, to progress Lyssy rather than regress him, and the results spoke for themselves. Over the course of the next two years, using a modified homeschooling Internet curriculum augmented with outside tutors, Corder brought Lyssy forward from kindergarten through high school, until by now he was operating at an adult level, intellectually if not emotionally or socially; it was in furtherance of Lyssy’s social development that Corder had initiated the visits with his own family.

Following his success with Maxwell, Corder had treated two more DID patients with ECT, without asking permission, but with equally spectacular results, and eventually word began going around the DID community, via websites and chat rooms, that something important was going on at the Reed-Chase Institute.

But secrecy was still of paramount importance. The anti-ECT lobby was not just vocal, it was loud and growing increasingly influential—the city of Berkeley, California, for instance, had officially (and illegally, as it proved) attempted to ban electroshock therapy within city limits. And by employing ECT for a disorder other than the ones for which its use had been approved by the American Psychiatric Association, Corder knew he was risking not just his reputation, but possibly even his license.

Fortunately, neither Lyssy nor the other patients Corder had successfully treated with ECT had any idea how their cures had been accomplished—that knowledge had disappeared along with the alters who had undergone the procedure.

And that was the way Corder intended to keep it until he had compiled such a demonstrable record of successes that even the most virulent ECT critics would be unable to deny the efficacy of the treatment—and even then, he expected there would be a hell of a battle when word finally did get out….

Patty and Corder were alone with the patient when she regained consciousness. Thirty minutes had passed—the clamps and electrodes had been removed, the telltale goo wiped from the girl’s temples, and a Band-Aid covered the puncture on the inside of her elbow.

“Lily?” Patty said softly, as the girl’s eyelids fluttered open.

Corder put his hand on Patty’s beefy arm to get her attention, and shook his head forcefully. “Don’t want to plant any suggestions,” he whispered, then tugged her back from the table and took her place in the patient’s line of vision. “How are you feeling?”

“My head,” she whispered, “Oh God, my head.”

“We can give you something for the pain in just a second. First though, I need you to tell me your name.”

A moment of panic; Lilith felt the seconds ticking by as she searched her memory—or rather, searched
for
her memory. Then it all came flooding back to her—the tent, the circle of ogres, Mama Rose and Carson, the coffee shop, the psychiatrist, the photos, the tape recorder—and somehow, though confused and disoriented, Lilith understood that her very survival depended on these sadists thinking she
was
that poor little rich girl the shrink had told her about. “Lily,” she whispered, in a rough approximation of the girlish voice on the tape recorder. “Lily DeVries.”

“Is it?”

It is as far as you’re concerned, asshole, thought Lilith, nodding her head gingerly. But even that slight motion sent nauseating, purply-black waves of pain sloshing against the inside of her skull. “I think I’m gonna—”

“Hasten, Jason, get the basin,” recited the mountain of mulleted flesh at Lilith’s side as she slid a curved metal pan under Lilith’s chin.

Lilith turned her head and vomited clear bile into the receptacle. “Better out than in,” said the other woman, tenderly wiping the clinging strands from Lilith’s chin.

Fuck you and the ox you rode in on, thought Lilith, closing her eyes to hide the murder in her heart. Just a little closer, she thought—just bring that nose a little closer….

6

Lyssy was in love. Lily had been his last thought before he fell asleep and his first upon awakening. Picturing her—those eyes, so big and dark; that rich dark hair, like midnight and cream when the light hit it just so; the soft voice; the shy smile; the promise of a luscious figure under that too-large bomber jacket—filled him with emotions he’d only read about before. He took all his meals that day in the dining hall and wore the psych techs out with repeated requests to visit all the places he might run into her—the arboretum, the library, the pool, the game room. When she wasn’t at any of them, he realized why people said love hurt—and why five minutes of that hurt was preferable to a hundred years without it.

But the timing! Falling in love just as his life was beginning to crumble around him struck Lyssy as profoundly unfair. He tortured himself with wild schemes and improbable hopes, even allowing himself to consider, for the first time, the possibility of escaping from the Institute before the deputies came to take him away. Then when Dr. Al dropped off the invitation to Lyssy’s own birthday party, hand-lettered and decorated by Alison with birthday icons—balloons, a cake with candles, packages tied up in ribbons and bows—he realized with a heady sense of guilt that that would be the perfect opportunity: freedom would be as close as the front door of the director’s residence.

But Lyssy couldn’t think of anywhere to escape
to,
even if he had been able to convince Lily to come with him—nor could he think of any reason she’d want to. Outside of Lyssy’s fantasies, they scarcely knew each other. Perhaps, though, that could be changed—when Wally brought him down to the director’s office for his weekly therapy session that afternoon, with his heart beating like a rabbit’s from the strain of trying to sound offhand and casual, he asked Dr. Al how the new girl—what was her name, Lily?—how Lily was doing.