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“Mr. Montgomery, I’m afraid I have to tell you that the therapy hasn’t been successful. We can’t restore the damaged areas of your brain, but look at it this way… you’ve been living with it and have grown accustomed to it, and it was worth a try. You can be proud of yourself for taking this step.”
His therapist’s soothing words barely reached him, faint and distant. For a decade, he had clung to the illusory hope that newly developed therapies might provide relief, and now he had to accept that all the effort, the endless conversations, the electrodes on his head, and the time had been wasted. He should have known better, even science had its limits, and some advice was nothing more than rambling nonsense. But he had never wanted to end up as a guinea pig, putting his head on the line for others, only to find out it was all for nothing.
A smoldering rage boiled within him, sending out more and more impulses until it finally anchored itself at the top of his skull. A dull pounding, adrenaline that completely threw his system off balance, and unrestrained hatred toward everything and everyone. If there was one thing he couldn’t handle, it was losing control, and at that moment, he felt completely at its mercy.
For a few minutes, he sat there in silence, trying to reflect on himself and regain control of his senses with various mantras, but nothing seemed capable of stopping the escalation. Clumsily and unsteadily, he hoisted himself to his feet, paced a few laps in the small, light-filled therapy room, and let his gaze wander over every plant meant to radiate calm and peace. When he finally lost his composure, his therapist gave him a mild smile. One of those typical, rehearsed he’ll snap out of it, just suggest pity and the patient will submit to the situation expressions. With his bare fist, he punched a hole into the cold wall and ignored the soothing words of the man in his mid-fifties, who was slowly gripping his designer desk, looking slightly irritated.
“And who’s going to give me back the time I’ve lost? How long have you known that this so-called therapy is a dead end? Did you at least use my payments to treat yourselves to a few nice days in Thailand to satisfy your perfidious urges?”
His words were anything but rational, they were soaked in a rage that Cas had thought he had under control, but which suddenly imploded and spilled out in bursts. Even before he could continue his tirade, he felt a strange dizziness that threw his senses into disarray and cast the situation in a shadowy, almost drunken haze. More and more, he lost control of his body, his mind, and his discipline, until he finally awoke in a dark, empty room and realized he no longer had any influence over what was happening.
“Dr. Delaware… 10 years ago I stood at your door, begging to be let in… for help, but you turned me away because I couldn’t pay for my suffering. I just needed a conversation, reassurance… understanding, but your greed led me to my death. Theodore Conner… do you remember?”
The voice sounded different now, lighter, rougher, more piercing, and laced with a thirst for revenge. Psychologists were prepared for almost anything, they went through tough training to handle even the most severe cases, yet this shift seemed to overwhelm the older man.
“Now, please sit down and calm down, Mr. Montgomery. You seem to be in a state of emergency right now and experiencing manic psychosis. We can talk about everything.”
Talk? A trigger word for the lost soul, which could now finally make itself heard.
“Talk? It’s too late for that now… you destroyed my life, and now I’m destroying yours!”
What happened next would likely send a cold shiver down the spine of even the most jaded profiler, for the physically manifested presence made short work of the psychologist and ended his existence. When Caspar opened the gate to his consciousness and left that damp, dark place, a bloody fiasco revealed itself to him. It didn’t shock him, he didn’t even raise an eyebrow, for he was already familiar with such situations. His aim now was to ensure that this act could not be traced back to him. The rage had passed.. instead, his mind steeled itself for calculated damage control. He deleted his appointment, along with all other traces, from his therapist’s computer, from the patient’s bathroom, he took caustic cleaning agents to cover his tracks, then he used the back exit and casually wrapped his battered wounds in ordinary tissues. He was emaciated and hungry, which is why he treated himself to a meal at one of those unhealthy fast-food chains for the first time in a while. He gave no further thought to the possession... even the failed therapy faded from his mind. His facade rebuilt itself again and again, pity or even a guilty conscience would not accompany his life.
He might have been an involuntary vessel now and then, but his will to live was stronger.