44. imagine

Dr Royce looked down at her page of scribbled notes and tried to make sense of the last hour. She set aside her disbelief that anything like this could possibly happen and attempted to distil what she had heard into facts. The man in front of her had, at one time, been Daniel Harlow, who had been given the ability to possess other people and inhabit their bodies. He had done this multiple times, mostly with severe consequences for the poor person. She was fascinated and repulsed by him in equal measure.

“You’ve stolen lives, Daniel,” she said. “This is not a gift. It’s a curse.”

“Don’t call me that,” he replied, “I’m not Daniel anymore. I don’t know who or what I am, or how to stop the darkness from taking over. I could be using this ability for good but instead I use it for evil. I don’t need your judgement, Doctor; I do enough of that myself. I need you to tell me how to control this.”

“Why do you think you gravitate towards evil?”

He was frustrated by this need for self-reflection and introspection because at his core he did not like who he was nor did he like his life to this point. He set his jaw. “Because evil is all that life has given me so far.”

“You need to look into this,” she said. “You need to identify the root cause and label it. Once you label it, it loses some of its power. Is it anger? Frustration?”

He continued her sentence. “Sadness. Self-hatred. Believing that I am a good person yet if I truly am good then why does all this evil happen to me. Resentment. Why does everyone else get to have parents, a loving family?”

“You’re not special, Dan-. You’re not special. Evil happens to everyone. Bad things happen to everyone.” She leaned forward. “And, more recently, you have been the evil which has happened to these people. You have done these things with no thought to how it would impact them, the consequences of your actions which they will have to deal with. You relish it at the time and yet feel guilt afterwards.”

He glared at her. “I get it: I’m sinful. This doesn’t seem to be helping. Are you going to help me or not?”

She felt a knot of fear wrap around itself in her gut. Those cool eyes held such rage and yet such power; he could inhabit her at any time. The only thing stopping him was a diminishing belief that she could help him. She changed tack.

“I will help you,” she reassured. “I will. You are unique. We can figure this out together.”

The knot of fear loosened as she saw the man’s features soften and in its place a dark thought unfurled within her like petals from a blooming flower. She thought about the bills she could not pay. She thought about her standing with her peers, those who turned up their noses and scoffed when she said she was starting her own practice; those sneering faces, mostly from older men, who said nothing but implied she would never amount to anything more than a small-town therapist who dished out relationship advice and well-meaning platitudes. But in the chair opposite sat someone – something – she had never seen before, whom she could study and examine and whose boundaries and limits she could push in the name of science and who could make her work more famous than any of those preening chinless old duds could ever dream of.

She continued: “Let me work with you on this. This ability, this power you have, I don’t understand it, but it could change everything. Imagine what we could achieve if we mastered this.”

He looked at her and read her face and thought carefully and when he spoke his expression remained firm but within he felt a swell of excitement, of promise. “Imagine,” he said, and for a while they both looked at each other and said nothing.

---

Later that day he walked the streets of the city as the sky darkened and Christmas lights shone from lampposts and great gantries strung between buildings, lattices of white angel wings, strings of colour, stars and snowmen and he walked under them with his hood up and his head down. He had left the man and instead inhabited a beautiful young woman with long tight braids and as he wandered down pavements and past bus stops and through arcades of shopfronts a hundred years old he looked at the ground and once again felt very lonely. Nearby a mature man in a smart black overcoat struck a match and lit a cigarette and the smoke billowed about him in the cool air and for a moment he was silhouetted by a bright storefront window and then he disappeared into the shadows. The sky was full of dark grey clouds whose edges were bleached by the setting sun and the tall buildings shone with squares of yellow and amber where rooms or floors were inhabited and traffic flowed through the streets in an obedient stream.

He came upon a Christmas market where temporary wooden stalls boasted trinkets and sweet treats and hot food and friends huddled in tight circles holding steaming cups of mulled wine or coffee in gloved hands and beneath their woollen hats and behind their scarves they smiled and laughed with one another and as he weaved his way almost invisibly through them he caught snatches of conversation and he wondered what Hannah and Alex and Elliot were doing right now and he felt great envy for what they had.

For a while he stood in front of a huge Christmas tree, ablaze with lights and decorated with baubles, and peered beneath the rim of his hood at the world around him. Passersby threaded in and out of stores carrying great fistfuls of bags: nearby a throng of people huddled together and sang carols whilst being conducted by an elderly gentleman in a hat and festive jumper standing atop an upturned box, and as he stood with his hands in his pockets the city ignored him and between a couple of buildings he could see the great spokes of a ferris wheel wrapped in white lights as it turned slowly.

Dr Royce had told him to be patient; she would give his situation some thought and he was to return to her office in one week. He did not know if he could trust her but felt he had little choice; he needed to find a way to control his darkness, to curb the thoughts which even now snaked through his mind, clawing at his discipline and willpower. He felt as if he were the only one in this godforsaken city who was so isolated, so alone, and as such he naturally resented these smiling faces around him, and as he stood in the light of the tree he fantasised about snatching mugs from hands and throwing them to the floor where they would shatter into a thousand pieces, about setting fire to the ferris wheel, about getting behind the wheel of a car and mowing down the carol singers, and he could picture it perfectly and the knowledge that he would not be the one suffering the consequences both enticed him and drove him to resist these black urges. He was instead just deeply sad and bitterly angry at the same time and amongst the chatter of people and the noise of the market he heard a laugh which he recognised instantly and snapped his head towards it and saw Hannah walking with Alex, her hand holding the crook of his elbow as they strolled past open-fronted cabins selling hot chocolate and churros and miniature snow globes and she had her head tilted back with laughter and he was smiling broadly at something one of them had said.