Page 160 of Corpse Roads
Even from us.
CHAPTER 30
HARLOW
EYES ON FIRE - BLUE FOUNDATION
Sat opposite me in the comfortable interview room, Doctor Richards is taking meticulous notes. He’s sporting another bright scarf, this one in an ugly shade of mustard yellow.
I enjoy his constant revolving door of crazy outfits. It gives me a distraction as he tortures my mind on a weekly basis. Given recent events, our sessions have been moved to HQ for the foreseeable future.
We’ve been at it for an hour, but he’s resolutely ignoring the ticking clock. My throat aches from talking for so long and choking the emotions that want to overwhelm me.
“What happens next in your dream?” he prompts.
I anxiously pick at a loose thread in my sweater. “Mrs Michaels often hummed choir songs while cleaning up the basement. In my dream, I saw her dismantling a woman’s body with a hacksaw. She was too heavy to carry out in one piece.”
“What are you doing?”
“Nursing a broken wrist for refusing to help her cut apart my friend. I can still hear the sound of the woman’s bones splintering. It felt so real, then I woke up.”
“Use your senses. Describe it to me.”
“Why?” I rub my tired eyes.
Richards places his pen down. “We have to open up all these tightly wrapped boxes, inspect the contents, and repackage them. It’s the only way through.”
My stomach hurts so much, I want to curl up in the corner of the room. These sessions are always intense. We’ve been wading through fragments of memories for a while, piecing together odd dreams and flashes of information that paint a harrowing picture.
The dream I had last night made me vomit when it startled me awake. I haven’t eaten since. The sound of skin and bone being sliced keeps reverberating through my head like a broken record player.
“I don’t want to talk anymore.” I fiddle with my hair, battling the urge to pluck strands out in front of him.
“We still have fifteen minutes.”
“Then we can sit in silence!” I snap back.
Lips pursed, Richards jots down some notes. I want to steal his notepad and throw it out of the window. He looks pointedly towards my leg. It’s still sore, but the doctor said it’s healing well. I was lucky to avoid any tissue damage.
“When confronted by your real family, you ran and placed yourself in danger. Does that seem like a healthy coping mechanism?”
“It was that or risk something worse,” I say through clenched teeth. “I couldn’t sit there for a second longer.”
“Which is perfectly understandable,” he combats. “But the way you chose to deal with it wasn’t safe or constructive. That’s why we’re here. You can’t keep running from what’s going on.”
“I’m not running.”
“Perhaps you’d like to discuss your self-harming instead. Either way, we need to talk about what’s going on. I’m not the kind of therapist that will sit here and let you spiral.”
I gape at him. “My… s-s-self what?”
Richards removes his glasses to clean them. “Why don’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It may feel good in the short-term.” He replaces his glasses and smiles reassuringly. “Using pain to cope with overwhelming feelings.”
Linking my fingers, I ignore the screaming voice at the back of my mind. I know what he’s talking about. The bald patch underneath my hair has grown bigger and more violent in the past week.