My Name Is Lydia (Jack Nightingale short story) Read Free Page A

one.”
    “Not quite,” said
Nightingale. “Though today I’m a priest’s assistant, I suppose. Nice to meet
you, Christine.”
    The girl left the
room, and her mother turned her attention to Father Mahoney.
    “Was that it?” she
asked. “That was the exorcism? Surely there’s more to it than that?”
    “That wasn’t an
exorcism, Mrs Warren,” said the priest. “And I won’t be performing one.
Whatever’s wrong with Christine is nothing to do with demonic possession.”
    “But how can you
tell?”
    “She took the Bible
and read it aloud, I crossed her with Holy Water and she accepted Jesus. No
demon would ever do any of those things, much less all three. There’s no grounds at all for recommending an exorcism. It’s
not a priest you need, but a doctor.”
    The woman slumped
forward and buried her face in her hands. “But what am I going to do? I’m at my
wits’ end. She killed our dog. Killed her and mutilated her. What 11-year-old
behaves like that?”
    This time it was Nightingale
who spoke.
    “Why don’t you tell me
a little more about what has happened, Mrs Warren. Perhaps I could offer some suggestions. When did these episodes start?”
    The woman raised her
head and looked over at him as if she’d almost forgotten his presence. She took
a deep breath before answering him.
    “She’s always been
prone to nightmares, ever since she was a toddler. Maybe once a month or so,
she’d wake up screaming in the small hours, never anything coherent, just
babbling nonsense. Once she woke up properly, she never remembered anything
about it. In fact the nightmares got less frequent after about the age of
eight. But all of this new stuff started about four months ago.”
    “Did anything seem to
cause it?” asked Nightingale.
    “Not directly. Though,
it was around the time of her first... well, when she reached puberty.”
      “So what exactly has been happening?” he
asked. I’ve heard about the self-harming. And the dog. But what else has happened?”
      “Well, about three months ago, she
started having nightmares again and would wake up screaming, but this time
there was a pattern to it. One of us, Matthew my husband or I, would go into
her, and she’d sit bolt upright in the bed and start cursing us. Really foul
language, stuff we had no idea she knew. And wishing such
awful things on us. That was bad enough, but what really drove her to
hysterics was when we used her name. She’d scream torrents of bile at us, and
insist we called her ‘Lydia’. Then after half an hour or so, she’d slump back
exhausted and sleep through till morning. In the morning she’d have no
recollection of anything, and just be her normal self again. As sweet and
caring as ever.”
    “Have you seen a
doctor?”
    “My husband is a
doctor...but neither of us want...want to have her labelled. As you can probably
tell, she came to us late in life, and she means the world to both of us. We
don’t want to involve psychiatrists.”
    Nightingale found that
a little hard to believe. If a much-loved child was showing evidence of a psychological disorder, then surely the parents would
seek professional help?
    “But your husband
would know specialists, surely? Him being a doctor.”
    “Matthew says it
wouldn’t be a good idea.”
    “But it hasn’t just
been nightmares and hysteria, has it?” he asked.
    The woman nodded.
“That’s right. We were told by a family friend that
they’d seen Christine hanging around with a group of older boys on her way back
from school. They even thought she was smoking.”
    “What did she say to
that?”
    “Denied it absolutely.
Said she didn’t have any friends at school except the ones in her class, and
she hated smoking. That part’s true, she nagged Matthew for months until he
gave up. But after...after the time she cut herself, we found a packet of
cigarettes in her room...and her breath smelled of smoke. It’s just not like
her. It makes no sense.”
    “And the car?