The Secrets You Hide: A Mind-Blowing Thriller (The Psychosis Series) Read online

  “Girlfriend or Friends?”

  Once again he did not respond as if he was denying the very existence of anybody close to him…of anybody who knew him for the person he was.

  I waited, letting him think in silence and hoping that his thoughts would eventually boil over. But I wasn’t sure if he was thinking of anything at all. It seemed as if he was in a state of blankness. He seemed to be comfortable with the feeling of not having to think…the feeling of having an empty mind.

  He turned to me a few minutes later signaling that he was ready to take the conversation forward.

  “Do you ever feel lonely, Jack?”

  He nodded. “Sometimes. Yes.”

  “Maybe you should meet more people…outside of work. People can help you feel more connected…more involved.”

  “People?” he smirked, mocking my suggestion.

  “You disagree?” I asked.

  I saw him take a deep breath before he continued.

  “The only thing people are good at, doctor, is…disappointing each other. It is as if the only thing we have gotten better at through thousands of years of evolution…is that one single ability…the ability to break each other’s hearts, torment each other’s souls and tear each other apart at every opportunity we get.”

  He shrugged. “Evolution gave us intelligence. It probably intended for us to grow together using our collective abilities…Instead, we have just grown apart.

  “People, doctor...they never help. People never make you feel connected or…involved. They only make you feel more disappointed in what we have become. They only make you feel alone…fighting your own lonely battle. Have you never had that feeling, doctor? You are standing in the middle of a crowd…waves of unending humanity flowing all around you…but you know no one. And no one knows you. There is no connection, no bond. We are all together…and yet we are all alone.”

  He fell silent, staring right at me.

  “That’s umm…that’s a very grim way of looking at the world, Jack.”

  “That’s the only way to look at reality, doctor. The only way you can look at the world unless you want to delude yourself that people actually care. Because they don’t.”

  Silence.

  “Have you been hurt, Jack? By someone close to you…someone you would like to talk about?”

  Once again he did not respond. I felt as if he was concealing every detail about himself that really mattered. We were looking straight at each other and yet there seemed to be an invisible wall that he had carefully constructed to hide his real self from me.

  I moved to a different question while at the same time making a mental note to return to the topic once he became more comfortable with sharing details of his personal life.

  “Why do you think people don’t care, Jack?”

  He shook his head in disappointment. I wondered if he was disappointed in me for asking that question or if it was an expression of disappointment at every human being he had ever met.

  “Because we are all obsessed,” he said, “…we are so obsessed with ourselves and the things and the people we want to have in our lives…Each of us is so convinced that his or her story is the story of the world. Like we are the protagonists and everyone around us is a side-character that just…that just fades into a blur the moment we look away. And we forget, that there are billions of such stories in the minds of every person around us. And we forget, that at the end of it all…only one thing matters…the reality that we all conceive together. And in our ignorance, we have filled that reality with lies, betrayal, selfishness, greed, hurt, and hatred. A reality that is so scary that everyone of us…every single one of us…refuses to acknowledge it for what it is. We instead choose to live within the walls of our own limited perception, unbothered about what we are doing to the people around us.”

  Jack’s words seemed to be churning a mixture of emotions inside me. I knew that what he was sharing was just a simple point of view, a way of looking at the world. But at some level, almost unconsciously, I was feeling a strange psychological resonance. It was as if he was describing the very thoughts that were buried deep inside my head, breathing life into them and suddenly making them come alive. I felt as if my self-control was slipping away. It was one of those moments when I needed my training to kick in. I knew exactly what I had to do when I found myself in situations like these. It was a conversation I needed to walk away from. Next time, I would be better prepared to deal with the ideas that Jack came in with. Next time, I would come with a mental armor ready to shield myself. But at that moment, I had to live to fight another day.

  I looked at the clock from the corner of my eyes. It was 5:56 pm. The appointment was almost coming to an end.

  Jack continued to say something but nothing registered. I had completely switched off. I remember nodding like I was processing his words, while in reality, I was just letting the words bounce between the walls of the room till they died away.

  Prompted by the ring of the alarm clock at 6 pm, Jack immediately stood up and walked up to me to shake my hand.

  “We should schedule another appointment tomorrow, Jack…to finish this conversation. Would that work for you?”

  He nodded. “I will find some time tomorrow,” he said. Then he turned around and left.

  I stopped the recording app on my cellphone and wrote down a quick summary of the interview into Jack’s file. After I had finished writing, I turned to the first page of the file and made a small star mark on the top right of it. It was a symbol that I had assigned to a few rare patients over the years. It was a symbol which served as a warning to me…a warning of a resonance of thoughts that could harm me if I did not handle them with care.

  Then I walked to the door to usher the next patient in–a seventy-year-old lady suffering from clear signs of rapidly advancing dementia.

  I don’t recall specifics from the conversation with her because I had spent a large part of that appointment fixated on the thoughts that Jack had expressed earlier. I felt an increasing urgency to get my mind away from that and as soon as the lady left, I picked up my cellphone and called Annie. Almost simultaneously, my secretary peeped into the room through the door. With the cellphone in my hand, I made a gesture to her requesting for a couple minutes before she sent the next patient in. She nodded and disappeared.

  “Hey you,” I said into the phone.

  “Hey. So…we are just driving out of the garage” said Annie. She and Sarah were heading out to visit Annie’s parents in San Francisco. I had planned to join them a couple days later over the coming weekend.

  “Oh, okay. Drive safe. Call me when you get there.”

  “I will. Can you tell your daughter to stop being a bad girl? She is jumping all over the backseat.” I could imagine Annie looking at Sarah with a fake expression of anger on her face. I heard a disturbance over the call as Annie handed the phone to Sarah.

  “Daddy…” Sarah shouted into the phone.

  “Hello. How is Sarah Walker today?”

  “Sarah Walker is happy and smiling and jumping…Sarah Walker is the princess of this world.” She giggled on the phone.

  I smiled, staring out into the street. “Yes, you are indeed Princess Sarah Walker. But do you know the secret of the most beautiful princesses?”

  “No…no…what is it?” she snapped.

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “Yes! Tell me.” she exclaimed impatiently.

  “The most beautiful princesses listen to their mommy. Are you going to do that?”

  She chuckled. She understood my trick. “I will sit down. Happy?”

  I laughed. “Call me when you are with nanna. And take care of mommy. Will you do that?”

  “Yes. Bye daddy.”

  “Bye sweetheart.”

  I put the phone down and walked to the glass wall. Alone in the room, I spent a few seconds in silence, still recovering from the conversation with Jack. I was trying to compartmentalize it out of my active memory. Outsid
e the room, there were a couple more patients waiting in queue.

  I reached home a couple hours later at around 9 pm and parked my car in its usual place next to the house. I walked up to the door and knocked at it by habit before realizing that there was no one home. I laughed at myself before unlocking the door with my key.

  As I closed the door behind me and entered the house, I found myself stepping onto a light blue envelope that someone had slipped in under the door. I picked it up and left it on the center table in the living room. I forgot all about it till I was forced to acknowledge its presence some time later.

  I spent another twenty to thirty minutes freshening up before I returned to the living room to have dinner in the company of the television. I glanced at the clock, trying to estimate how far Annie and Sarah had reached. Maybe, I thought, they had stopped for dinner somewhere. Maybe, I debated, I should wait a bit longer before calling them to check.

  I headed into the bedroom and switched on my laptop. I figured I could finish writing my journal for the day before I called Annie. I sat in the chair staring at the cursor that blinked incessantly on the screen almost drawing me into a state of hypnosis. It had always had a calming effect on me–a thin black line blinking on an empty white background, a clean digital slate waiting to be used. I rummaged through my memories of the day trying to decide what had had the deepest influence on me. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that it had to be the conversation with Jack. It filled me with anxiety because I did not want to remember how it had made me feel but I also knew I had to write it down to get it out of my mind. I placed my fingers on the keyboard and was just about to start typing when the phone in the living room rang, destroying the silence of the night in an instant. The ring of that phone, even though it had felt harmless in that moment, marked the beginning of what is the most significant memory I have of that day.

  5: Robert’s Journal – Of Day 8

  I stood up from my desk, abandoning the laptop on the table, and walked to the phone in the living room. The room was illuminated only by the thin streams of yellow from the street light which was sneaking in through the windows. The ring of the phone became louder and louder, sounding like the cry for help from someone who was drowning away in the darkness.

  “Hello,” I said into the receiver. No response.

  “Hello,” I said again, trying to elicit a response from the caller.

  A soft, husky male voice was on the other side. “Hello doctor.”

  I looked down at my feet randomly. “Umm, who’s this?”

  “You don’t need to know who I am, doctor.”

  I said nothing for a second, wondering what was going on. “I am sorry, sir. You seem to have dialed the wrong number. Who do you want to talk to?”

  The voice took its time to respond. “This is not a call made by mistake, doctor. It is you I want to talk to. I have your wife and daughter.”

  I squinted my eyes in the dim light of the room. It was more an expression of doubt than anything else…I was not sure if I had heard him right. But, almost simultaneously, my mind told me that whatever I had heard was unmistakable. I felt a surge in my pulse and stood frozen for a few seconds, saying nothing, thinking nothing. I recovered quickly, deciding that it must all be a prank–a fake and empty threat. Annie and Sarah were away, safe.

  “Who is this?” I said, finally. “This is not funny. If you keep messing with me, I am going to put down the phone and call the police right away.”

  There was another pause, perhaps only a second long, before the call disconnected. I felt my nerves calming down, surprised at my own aggression in dealing with the caller.

  I put the receiver back down and stood by the phone for a few moments. Then I walked away to the kitchen and extracted a bottle of water from the fridge. I took two huge gulps before heading back towards the bedroom. As I approached the door of the bedroom, my cellphone, which I had left next to the laptop, started ringing. I rushed to it and looked at the screen. It was a call from Annie. About time, I said to myself.

  “Hey,” I spoke into the phone, “You won’t believe what just happened!”

  There was a long bout of silence from the other side.

  “Annie?” I asked.

  “Yes, doctor”, said the same voice which I had spoken to a few moments earlier on the landline phone. It sounded different, maybe due to the change in the phones I was using, but I was sure it belonged to the same person.

  “You are right, doctor. Beautiful Annie cannot believe what just happened. She was surprised by your composure on our previous call. Now…she and I are both wondering what other tricks you got up your sleeve.”

  I pulled the phone away from my face and looked down at its screen. I was confirming if the call had actually come from Annie’s number. It had.

  “I hope this will stop you from calling the police anytime soon. The only thing they can help you find, doctor, are the dead bodies of your wife and daughter.”

  The voice sounded like it was reading those words out of a book. It sounded flat, emotionless. There was no effort by the caller to express anger, to try to establish domination or even sound threatening. It was just a cold, calm voice. And that is where its effectiveness lay. It made everything it said sound like a statement of facts that could not be discarded.

  A piercing silence followed the threat as both the caller and I tried to measure each other, guessing what was going on in the mind of the other person.

  “Who are you?” I asked, “And what do you want?”

  I felt my pulse surging again. I could feel my heart pumping fear into every vein of my body.

  “I have very reasonable expectations, doctor. You will be surpri…”

  I interrupted him. “How much money do you want? Just give me the num…”

  “Don’t you dare interrupt me, doctor.”

  There was silence again.

  “Okay,” I recovered, trying to be patient and controlled. “I apologize. But what do you want?”

  The response came immediately. “I want you to know right now that this…none of this is about money. There is nothing you have that I need. There is nothing you can give me to stop this. That would be the easy way out, doctor…for me to ask you for something that you can give me. But that is not what this is about. This…this is about me taking something from you…something that you cannot let go of yourself. That and that alone is my sole intention.”

  Nothing that he had said made any sense to me. The same question lingered in my head with no obvious answer in sight. What does he want?

  “I don’t understand.” I said.

  “You will, doctor. In time…you will.”

  There was a pause again. This time it seemed as if the caller was waiting for me to say something to continue the conversation.

  “And how is that?” I asked.

  “Did you get the envelope that I left for you?” he questioned me back.

  My mind responded to that question with a series of flashing images from earlier that evening. I remembered smiling foolishly at myself outside the door of the house. I remembered stepping on a light blue envelope as I had entered the house. I remembered picking it up and leaving it somewhere…but I could not recall where. The caller waited patiently as if he knew that I did not remember…as if he wanted me to feel the panic arising from the lack of knowledge about where I had left that critical piece of evidence.

  “Yes…” I said finally deciding that I must have left it in the living room, “but I have not opened it yet.”

  “I know that, doctor. Now is a good time to look inside it. I will call you again in a few minutes. You better hurry. But make sure of one thing, doctor. Follow the script.”

  The call disconnected, leaving that cryptic command hanging in the air. Follow the script? I put the mobile phone into the pocket of my trouser and dashed to the living room. I switched on the light and spotted the envelope on the center table. I picked it up and tore it at one end, walking back
to the bedroom with it. I paused for a second in the corridor and asked myself if I should call my in-laws to check if they had heard from Annie. Maybe, her phone had been stolen. Somewhere deep in my mind I still had the faint hope that this was all fake…that none of this was happening…that, at worse, this was nothing but a practical joke intended to embarrass me. But–my mind argued against all hope–Annie would never agree to be a part of something like this. She knew me and she knew of my severe discomfort with anything as serious as this.

  I rushed back to the table in the bedroom and extracted the contents of the envelope. It consisted of a stack of white pages, neatly held together by a couple of clips on one side. I pushed the laptop away to the further edge of the table. Then, I sat down on the chair and examined the pages closely. The top-most page was empty, except for three words that had been perfectly placed right at its center. Follow the script the words read–the same cryptic command that the call had ended with.

  As I turned to the second page and read through it, I slowly realized what I was holding in my hand. It was a script of some kind–the script that the caller wanted me to follow.

  I read through the second page which began to describe the life and actions of the protagonist of the story–me. As I continued reading, it started to feel like the script was looking back at me, accusing me of being fake, of being an impostor, of hijacking the identity of its protagonist. My memories of the previous week were vague at best but the script was like a recollection of it…a mirror forcing me to look back at the past which I had nonchalantly forgotten. As I read further, I was gripped by the intimidating realization that someone had been watching me very closely. Somebody had been observing me for the past week…maybe longer.

  A few pages later, the script started to describe events from earlier that day. It spoke of the different patients who had been sitting quietly in the waiting area of my clinic, awaiting their appointments with me. There was no mention of the conversations I had had with any one of them. Maybe, I guessed, the person behind this did not have access to the conversations I had inside my cabin at the clinic. Images of the cabin came flashing…and it felt like the sole refuge from the attack that I was under.