“I see,” says the psychiatrist.
“Do you?” Ellison asks, still watching the drapes. When she arrived for her appointment almost forty-five minutes ago (she’s usually early), the sky was hidden behind a blanket of blue-grey clouds, much as the drapes now hide her view of Arbor Hill. The air had smelled of ozone and the promise of rain. She’ll probably get soaked on the way home, bus or no bus.
Now the psychiatrist is looking at the drapes, too, as if he’s afraid he’s missing something, as if there might be something here he ought to see, but doesn’t. He says, “What I mean is, I understand the point that you’re making, about the occasional usefulness of things most people would find monstrous.”
“A lot of people wouldn’t understand,” she tells him, then looks away from the window, looking back at the psychiatrist and the framed seashore. “Or, I don’t know, maybe they would, if they ever had a reason to stop and think about it.”
For a few seconds, neither of them speaks, and then the psychiatrist asks her, “How old were you, the first time you saw this monster?”
It’s not too late to make a bad joke of the whole thing, Ellison thinks. It’s not too late to go back to lying and chalk it up to being in a worse mood than usual. He’d believe that. But then she reminds herself that the psychiatrist possibly doesn’t live in a universe that permits the existence of monsters—not real monsters, anyway—and besides, by the unspoken rules of their game, everything she tells him is a lie, every confidence a deception. So it really doesn’t much matter what she says.
“I was almost eleven years old. No, wait. That’s not right. I was already twelve. I’d already started junior high school. I was in sixth grade the first time I saw the hound.”
“The hound?” he asks her. “So, the monster was a dog?”
“No,” she replies. “No, it wasn’t. It really wasn’t anything like a dog. But I always thought of it as ‘the hound,’ right from the beginning. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now. But I had to think of it as something, you know, and I guess thinking of it as a hound was a lot easier to deal with than acknowledging that it was a monster.”
She expects the psychiatrist to make a note of that, but he doesn’t. He just watches her, instead.
See, now he’s sitting there waiting to hear a proper story. His favorite lunatic has whetted his appetite, and now he wants to know some more. He wants a ripping good yarn. Now he’s got a rock-solid hard-on for a scary story from a crazy lady, a story that he can diagnose and dismiss and make not the least bit scary at all. Here, in this office, be no monsters whatsoever. Have another few pills, Ms. Nicodemo. You’ll feel better in a day or two, and it’s all covered by your insurance, naturally.
“We’ve talked about how my stepfather beat my mom,” she says, and now she keeps her eyes on the painting on the wall behind the psychiatrist. Ellison hates the painting, because of all the awful things it dredges up—Jehosheba and the shark and all the rest. But even those horrors, a danse macabre to put Edgar Allan Poe and all his ilk to shame, are somehow easier to face than what she’s about to tell the old man with the bushy white eyebrows.
“Yes,” says the psychiatrist. “Yes, we have.”
“And I told you that he finally stopped. I told you that he stopped after that time he beat her so badly that he put her in the hospital with broken ribs and a concussion.”
“You did.” The psychiatrist nods.
“Well, that wasn’t the truth.”
“He didn’t stop hitting your mother?”
“No, he stopped, but that isn’t why he stopped. He stopped after the first time the hound came. It was a Friday or Saturday night. I’m not sure which, but I remember I was up late because I didn’t have school the next day, and my stepfather came in drunk. My mother said something to him. I don’t remember that, either, just what it was she said, but it doesn’t matter. Probably something she should have known was gonna set him off. I imagine by then she didn’t much care anymore. By then, she probably knew she’d get hit no matter what she did or didn’t say. Anyway, she said it, and he knocked her down. We were in the living room. I was on the floor in front of the TV, and when he hit her, she stumbled backwards and tripped over the coffee table. Mom landed right next to me. Her lip was bleeding. She lay there staring up at him, sort of smiling, like she was daring him to keep it up. She didn’t even look at me. It’s almost like I wasn’t there.”
Ellison is quiet for a moment, concentrating on the painting of the sea, the waves battering that rocky shore, the white cottage that seems as if it’s about be swallowed up by the tide, shivered and dashed apart and washed away.
“It’s fine if you’d like to stop here for now,” says the psychiatrist, but she knows he doesn’t mean it. And even if he does, she’s gone too far to turn back, and wasn’t that always the way of it? Isn’t that something the Signalman said to her once, ages and ages ago, that she had a way of getting in too deep too fast, like she was afraid if she didn’t jump in both feet first she might never jump in at all?
“It’s okay,” she says. “I’m fine.”
“Then continue,” says the psychiatrist, as if Ellison needs his permission.
“She was lying there, and he was standing over her, and I sorta think he really meant to kill her that time. And so maybe he’d have had to kill me, too, because I would have seen him do it, and my stepfather, he was terrified of going to prison. His own dad had—never mind, that’s a different story. There was my mom, and there I was, and suddenly I heard this sound, and I smelled something like—well, to tell you the truth, it wasn’t like anything I’d ever smelled in my life. But it was a cold sort of smell, you know? That night, sitting there on the floor waiting for him to kill her, I thought how it was a smell that could have only come from some very cold place, like Antarctica or outer space or”
. . . the bottom of the sea . . .
“someplace like that. And then the hound was there, standing over my mom. It was big. I mean fucking huge. One minute it hadn’t been there, the next it was, but I thought maybe it had come in through an open window, and I was so scared I just hadn’t noticed.”
“The hound?” asks the psychiatrist.
“Yeah,” says Ellison. “The hound.”
“But it didn’t look like a hound.”
“Not even a little bit,” she tells him, not taking her eyes off the painting. “Back in 2005, when the agency headhunter recruited me, they already knew about the hound. That’s why they recruited me. But still, they’d never seen it for themselves. They would, later on, soon enough, but they hadn’t yet that day. Anyway, I honestly tried to describe it for them, until I realized that I might as well have been trying to describe the color pink to Stevie Wonder.”
“But that night, your stepfather saw it. And your mother.”
Ellison nods. “Yeah. He shit himself. I mean he literally shit his pants. And then he ran away and we never saw the son of a bitch again. He didn’t even call or come back for his stuff or anything. He was just gone.” And Ellison snaps her fingers for extra added emphasis. “Mom, she lay there on the floor, and she didn’t really look scared. Me on the other hand, I was plenty boo coo scared, because I figured this thing, this monster, that had jumped in through the window and frightened off my drunken stepfather was about to devour the both of us.”