Obscure Parodyverse Moments #12: I Am John’s Psychosis    

This story continues from Obscure Parodyverse Moments #7: Amnesia,
Obscure Parodyverse Moments #8: Monsters on the Loose,
Obscure Parodyverse Moments #9: The Black Chapel,
Obscure Parodyverse Moments #10: The Cabinet of Dr Morningstar,
Obscure Parodyverse Moments #11: Flesh and Blood


    “Hello there, Johnny,” the jovial-looking man in the white coat began. “I’m Doctor Leinster. I’d like to talk with you for a little bit.”

    The nine year old sat on the corner of the leather couch and said nothing.

    “Can we chat, Johnny?” Leinster persisted. “There are some things we really need to say.”

    “I’m not Johnny,” the boy replied. “They called me Johnny. I’m not.”

    Leinster glanced at the nurse in attendance. “What shall we call you, then?” he asked gently.

    “Call me John. Not Johnny. John.”

    “Right,” agreed the doctor. “John, do you know why you’re here?”

    “Because I don’t have anywhere else to go now.”

    Leinster nodded. “Well that’s true – John – but can you tell me why you don’t have anywhere else to go?”

    The boy looked at the psychiatrist as if he’d been asked a dumb question. “Because I killed my parents, of course,” he answered.

***


    “Hello, John. How are you today?”

    “I’m locked in a mental institution on a court order, Doctor Leinster. How about you?”

    The psychiatrist wasn’t yet ready for those old eyes in that child’s face. “Er, yes. Well I thought today we might talk about life before the, um, incident that brought you here to us.”

    “Your life or mine?” the boy asked.

    “Yours, John. I’ve brought along some things that belong to you. Things from your house.”

    “My house burned.”

    “Yes, it did, John. But we’ll talk about that another time. These are things you brought out of your house before you… before it burned. Some toys of yours. This Barbie and Ken, for example.”

    “That’s not Barbie and Ken,” John sneered with contempt. How could the psychiatrist be so stupid? “That’s what Kevin thought.”

    “Kevin your stepfather?”

    “He said I was too old to play with dollies like a girl. They’re not dollies.”

    “They’re action figures?” the psychiatrist suggested.

    “Are you supposed to lead me when you’re interviewing me?” the boy chided. “Children can be very susceptible you know. It’s in the literature.”

    Leinster stifled a desire to find out how the subject knew about that. He had to keep charge of the conversation, not let a nine year old run away with it. “Then who are they?” the doctor asked, notebook poised.

    “That’s Lisa. Lisa and Jarvis.”

    “I see. And who are Lisa and Jarvis?”

    “Superheroes,” the boy replied. “From the Lair Legion.”

    “I see. Your superheroes? In a team with, ah, with all these other toys?” Leinster indicated other shabby toys in the cardboard box. There was a broken Transformer, a stuffed dragon, a plastic McDonald’s giveaway Batman figure, a 1960s big-hair Sindy with a black domino mask glued to her face, a painted plastic assembly kit of a Norse god, even an old-fashioned rag doll in a yellow felt coat.

    John looked at the collection. “Not anymore,” he answered. “Now they’re just old junk.”

    “They’re all broken,” the psychiatrist agreed. “The police found them where you’d left them. Where you’d nailed them to the door of your burning house.”

    The boy nodded. “That’s where they were,” he agreed.

    Leinster examined the rough wound in Barbie’s plastic hand where she’d been pinned to the wood. “You crucified them,” he noted. “Why, John? Why did you do that?”

    John sneered again. “Because they’d been defeated” he replied.

***


    “When we spoke before,” Dr Leinster said, “about your… Lair Legion, you said your father didn’t like you playing with the action figures.”

    “I said my stepfather didn’t like me playing with dolls,” the child replied. “You need to keep better notes.”

    “Right. Of course. So how did your stepfather show his disapproval?”

    John shrugged. “The usual. Make something up and write it in your case notes. Abuse. Violent rages. All the things that help to explain what I did.”

    Leinster wasn’t comforted by how easily the subject had adapted to the conventions of therapy. A nine-year-old shouldn’t be able to manipulate that well. “Perhaps if you tell me a few examples,” he suggested. “I’m interested in what really happened, not what the textbooks expect.”

    “Because I’ll make a good case to write up?”

    “No, John. Because I’m interested in making you well again.”

    The boy didn’t seem impressed. “Kevin wasn’t a very nice man. Then again, my mother deserved him. She was weak, a victim. She invited her own destruction.”

    “You thought she deserved to be killed?”

    “You can use the word murder,” the child replied. “It won’t upset me.”

    “You know what you did, then?” Leinster checked.

    “Premeditated. That means planned out before. From the Latin premeditatus.”

    “You planned to kill them. Because Kevin wasn’t nice and your mother was weak.”

    “It was planned.” John pointed to the box of discarded fire-damaged toys. “Can I get something from there?”

    Dr Leinster lifted the collection over. “What is it you want?” he wondered.

    John rummaged through the broken heroes and fished out a dark grey rag from the bottom of the pile. It was the size of a handkerchief, an offcut from some old tea-towel or something similar. It was stained and torn and frayed around the edges. Leinster hadn’t even noticed it amongst the toys. It wasn’t on the inventory.

    “What’s that?” the psychiatrist asked.

    “A comfort blanket,” John replied with a little smirk. “It’s how I learned Latin.”

***


    “John, I want to talk about the night you… murdered… your parents. What was going through your mind when you did what you did.”

    “The trap?” John asked. “That was easy. Simple manipulation. Once Kevin saw what I’d done to his gun collection he fell into a massive rage. He was always abusive when he was drunk, of course. It was easy to push his buttons.”

    “What did you do to his guns?” Leinster had read the police report but there was nothing in there about that.

    “I hammered the barrels flat and carved peace symbols on the hardwood stocks,” the boy replied. “Isaiah 2. 4. I guess Kevin wasn’t very religious.”

    “Kevin came home after a visit to a local bar.” That much was in the investigation notes. “And he found you’d damaged his things.”

    “Give peace a chance,” John said. “I guess Kevin wasn’t a big John Lennon fan, either.”

    It was the first time the boy had been willing to talk about his actions and motivations that night. Leinster was quite excited. “What happened then? You actually wanted to make your stepfather angry. Why?”

    “So he’d fight with my mother. So he’d threaten me. She had to have a chance, you see, to change her mind and stand up to him. She could have lived if she’d made the right choice.”

    “You set up… a test?”

    “She failed. She caved as usual. When he shook me and questioned me she tried to convince me to co-operate.”

    The psychiatrist noticed that as the boy spoke he was still clutching the grey rag from the toybox. The child was never without it now. “What did he ask you, John?” he went on.

    “His Lafaucheux 12mm pinwheel revolver was missing,” the box explained. “Serial number 30585, within forty numbers of one documented as issued to Company D of the 2nd Kansas Cavalry March 27, 1862. A total of ninety-eight were documented issued to that unit so it probably belonged to someone in the same company. It was valued at around $800.”

    “You destroyed his gun collection, but hid the prize of it?” Leinster summarised.

    “In the basement,” John explained. “I told him after he’d hit me a couple of times. He wouldn’t have believed me before that.”

    The medical reports suggested the child had been struck.

    “Besides, if I wasn’t crying in a heap on the floor they might have dragged me down there with them.”

    “They went to the basement to find the missing weapon.”

    The boy nodded. “That was the trap. The plan. There were other contingencies, of course, in case they didn’t react the way they were expected to. But they were very predictable people. Kevin stormed down there. Mother chased after him, running attendance, trying to calm him. The usual. Neither of them noticed the new padlock and hasp on the door ready to be used once they were down there.”

    “You locked them in the cellar,” Leinster prompted. “What were you thinking?”

    “I was wondering whether the gas main was opened enough to do its job,” John replied. “For obvious reasons that had to be a purely theoretical mass volume calculation.”

    According to the fire marshal the boiler pilot light had been extinguished and the pipe had been pierced to flood the basement with gas.

    “You wanted to gas them to death?”

    Again the boy looked at the psychiatrist as if he was stupid. “Of course not. Where’s the irony in that? Where’s the class? Where’s the statement?”

    “You wanted to make a statement. What statement?”

    John laughed. “That when you’re locked in a cellar full of gas, don’t use your newly-retrieved Lafaucheux 12mm pinwheel revolver to try and blow the lock off the door.”

***


    Dr Leinster laid the scorched pierced toys in front of his patient. “You told me before that these were superheroes,” he reminded John. “You called them the Lair Legion.”

    The boy shrugged.

    “You also said they were defeated. You nailed them to your house door when you blew it up.”

    “I didn’t blow it up,” John sniffed. “That was Kevin. It wasn’t a victory unless he had a chance.” He sat back and folded his arms. “Kevin blew it.”

    “You said these heroes were defeated,” Leinster pressed. “How? By whom?”

    “By the archvillain, of course,” the child answered simply. “Who else fights heroes? Who else could beat them?”

    “The archvillain? What archvillain?”

    Kevin leaned forward again. “There’s always got to be an archvillain,” he confided. “That’s how the stories work. The heroes can’t be heroes without an archvillain. There’s no way they can conquer evil otherwise.”

    “Was Kevin the archvillain, John?”

    The boy was disdainful. “Kevin called me Johnnie. Kevin was a moron. Morons can’t be archvillains.” He picked up the half-melted Barbie and examined it. “Do you want to know something about stories of heroes and villains?” he asked.

    “Tell me,” urged Leinster.

    “You can play them over and over, a hundred different plots, a thousand times. The heroes can triumph over evil again and again and again.” John popped the doll’s head from its neck. “The archvillain only needs to win once.”

    “When the villain won,” the doctor ventured, “was that when you set a trap for Kevin and your mother? When the heroes couldn’t stop the villain any more?”

    “A good villain knows that defeat with honour is merely victory delayed,” the boy explained. “Heroes reset everything to default, for better or worse. Archvillains conquer the world.”

    Leinster looked down at the collection of battered toys in the cardboard box. “Is one of these the villain?” he asked.

    “The archvillain,” John corrected him.

    “The archvillain, then,” Leinster said.

    John shook his head. “A few of them might have been, given the right stimuli. But they weren’t.”

    “Then who is the, the archvillain?” the psychiatrist puzzled.

    A sly smile shifted across the boy’s face. He held up his grey rag. He pleated it along one side, folding it so it draped from his hand as a cape, pinched together at the top to form a kind of cowl. The cloth was suddenly transformed into a caped figure with a hood.

    “Here’s the archvillain,” said John. “Say good evening.”

***


    “I want you to relax,” Dr Leinster said. “Your whole body is feeling heavy and you just want to sleep. Concentrate on the light from the pen-torch and listen to my voice as you sink down. Your body is going to sleep and your mind is listening to my words. Five, four, three, two, one…”

    John lay on the sofa, his eyes shut, his breathing shallow and regular.

    “Are you relaxed, John? Are you ready to answer some questions?”

    “The boy is asleep, doctor,” came the reply. The voice wasn’t John’s. It was deeper, and it spoke with an Eastern European accent.

    “John?”

    “I think not, doctor,” came the reply. “Congratulations on the breakthrough for which you were hoping.”

    “Who… who am I speaking to?” Leinster tried to keep the excitement from his voice. There was a book in this. Fame and fortune. This was the key to the boy’s illness.

    “Why doctor, you wanted to learn about the archvillain. It seemed only reasonable to allow you to converse with me in person.”

    “You’re inside John, then?”

    “I’m inside everybody, Doctor Leinster.”

    The psychiatrist checked that the tape recorder was still turning. This was gold. “Was it you who killed John’s parents, then?”

    “Does it matter? I instructed the boy. He made his choice. His adversaries made theirs.”

    “You seem very different to John. You speak differently. Are you the source of his Latin translations?”

    “I am very different to John. Do you believe me a second personality in the boy’s mind? Are you hoping for a multiple personality disorder?”

    “I’m not making any premature diagnosis. What do you claim to be?”

    “I am an archvillain. I am creating myself, from the ruins of a thousand childish attempts at villainy that no longer exist, from deep roots of madness you could never comprehend, from a thousand defeats that have taught me a thousand lessons. When I am complete I shall be unstoppable, and the multiverse shall tremble.”

    “But for now you’re living inside a nine-year-old boy?”

    “Not for long,” the Latvian-accented voice replied, “now that you have let me out.”

    “So you’re not, say, a figment of his imagination, a personification of his suffering at the hands of an abusive stepfather to rationalise his act of homicide?”

    “Not any more,” agreed the voice. “Now I am… the Hooded Hood!”

    Things were getting out of hand. Leinster needed time to think, to discuss this alarming new twist with colleagues. “John, when I count to five you will awaken and open your eyes. You will forget our conversation today. One, two, thee, four, five.”

    John’s eyes opened wide. His pupils glowed with an eerie green light.

    Leinster screamed.

***


    “That’s very good,” Doctor Valium said, putting down his notepad. “Very helpful, Michael. I think we’ve made a real breakthrough here today.”

    “So you believe me!” Leinster said, reaching out to seize the doctor’s arm. “You see that I don’t belong here. I’m not mad. I was in my office, talking to the boy, talking to that personality he manifested, and then his eyes just flashed and…”

    “We’ll discuss it at our next session, Michael,” Dr Valium assured him. “For now you need to go back to your room and take your meds. You’re doing very well.”

***


Next: The Romance of Heresy
    
***

Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2007 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2007 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.




Post By
UT#306 is still being written, so in the meantime here's a little more mystery from... the Hooded Hood.

Fri Mar 09, 2007 at
09:20:53 am EST
Posted from United Kingdom
using Microsoft Internet Explorer 6/Windows 2000

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