House of Bathory(8)

“Tell me about riding.”

“I used to ride. A lot. I rode competitively, three-day eventing, horse shows.”

“But not now?”

“I don’t have a horse here and I—I’ve lost interest. It’s not my world now,” she said, turning away. She looked longingly back at Ringo.

“What is your world now, Daisy?”

“Goth.” She answered, her voice losing its softness. A pinched look took over the youthfulness that for a few minutes had shone through the white makeup.

Betsy called Ringo over. He laid his head in his mistress’s lap and she stroked his ears.

“What is Goth exactly?”

Daisy moved in the armchair, shifting her weight. “It depends who’s defining it.”

“How about you? How do you define it?”

“There’s the music. I’m not big into that, except Jim Morrison and the Doors, old stuff. The heavy metal, forget it. But it’s a scene for Goths.”

“What else?”

“Black clothes, edgy hair, makeup. All that. But the real thing is shunning the superficial world, trying to see past the surface. Embracing the shadow world, not shutting the portal like most humans do.”

The psychologist held her pen poised in the air.

“The shadow world?”

Daisy wound a strand of dyed black hair tight around her finger, just the way Betsy often did.

“Shining a light into the past—” she replied, the sheer effort of speaking seeming to torture her. She coughed, but struggled to finish her sentence. “—into the black tunnel. The darkness beyond, who we truly are. Who we may have been before.”

Betsy made herself look down at her notebook. She had expected to hear a tirade against the mainstream culture, a defense of an alternative lifestyle. Rebellion.

“Do you think you do it to annoy your mother?” Betsy asked.

Daisy smiled slowly, her tongue searching mischievously for that rebellious tooth. Ringo stood up and left his mistress for her patient’s outstretched hand.

“Not really.” Then she shrugged. “Well maybe, but that’s not the point. I’m just trying to concentrate.”

“Concentrate on what?”

Daisy dropped her hand from Ringo’s chest. He groaned as he made three circles, finally lowering his body and curling up by her feet.

“On murmurs, voices that have lived before. To hear ripples of the past. And…,” she said, the muscles in her jaw straining, “the search for my soul.”

Betsy nodded. Her heart was racing. Daisy sounded as if she were quoting Carl Jung himself.





Betsy made two cups of ginger tea with honey. Daisy drank quietly, looking around the room.

“Oh, I need to tell you that I have an upcoming trip. I’ll miss a week’s session with you, but we can try for two sessions the week before I leave or when I get back. I’ll take a look at my schedule.”

Daisy cast her an anxious look.

“You are going away?” she said, picking at her cuticles.

“Just for a few days,” said Betsy, noticing the effect her words had on her patient.

Daisy nodded, her movements stiff. Her eyes fixed on the cream-colored bookshelves, from floor to ceiling.

“You have a lot of books. Have you read them all?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“They look really old,” said Daisy. She stood up and ran her finger along the spines, inspecting the cracked leather with her fingernail.

Betsy winced, but didn’t interfere.

“Leather. Really dusty. Like these are ancient. Where did you get them?”

“I inherited them,” Betsy said, looking out the window at the trembling aspen branches.

Daisy tilted her head to the side to read the titles. She stopped at a slim, cloth-covered book. She began to pull it from the shelf and then stopped.

“Jung?”

Betsy nodded.

Daisy tried to read the title on the spine, but stumbled badly. “Synchronizitat…Akausalitat…What the fu—?”

“In English it translates to ‘Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle.’ We had a first edition of it once. But it disappeared.”

“What does that mean?” Daisy asked, pushing the book back on the shelf.

Betsy knew she had to redirect the conversation, but she didn’t want to risk having her patient shut down, reverting to moody silences.

“Synchronicity was a theory of Jung’s. It is the idea of two or more events that are apparently unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner.”

The girl wrinkled her white-painted forehead. “What does that mean?”

“OK. Let’s say you hear your cell phone ring four times in the morning, but no one is on the line when you answer. And then later in the day, you hit four stoplights, all turning green, right in a row, and that has never happened to you before. At school, there is a lottery and you pick the number 4444 and you win. There is no causal relation, but there may be a deeper meaning.”