Circling the bike to the front of the lot, I slow on my approach, hoping to catch sight of the hot guy across the street. The red Jeep is gone, though. Was he the new owner? Even if he was just a contractor hired to fix the place up meant he would be there a long time. Years, probably. Just enough time for me to work up the nerve to talk to him at least once.

  But my new therapist is awaiting me on the porch, holding a pitchfork that looks vaguely familiar. It takes me the entire journey up the front walk to recognize it.

  “Where did that come from?” What I actually mean is Why is that here and not in the graveyard stabbed through the heart of a scarecrow? But Doctor Malphas doesn’t notice the difference.

  He looks down and shrugs. “I found it on the walk up.”

  “I meant to tell you about that,” Wrath’s voice floats up from the porch. “The scarecrow got loose again. No doubt he’s running amok through town, trying to find some birds that want to play with him.”

  Doctor Malphas doesn’t react, which is the normal response to when someone else’s imaginary friend talks to them. Wrath is lucky other people can’t hear him. Half the time I meet someone new I shove my foot in my mouth.

  I school my expression into indifference and continue walking casually up toward the porch. “What are you doing here? Did I miss our first session?” A spike of anxious energy shoots up my spine, and well-honed instincts of panic surge to life under my skin. Missing the first appointment even though we hadn’t scheduled it yet? That was certainly something I would do. I never even knew that was something I should worry about.

  “Oh, nothing like that,” the doctor says soothingly. He’s wearing a cardigan even though it’s the tail end of summer. He seems very much the cardigan-loving type. We’ve chatted on the phone a few times, and had an initial session when I filled out the paperwork, but we haven’t had a full, normal session just yet. I canceled the first one after a surge of nerves at being rejected by another therapist, and he cancelled the second. We hadn’t arranged a makeup date yet. My nerves ebb away and let me catch my breath.

  I climb the stairs to the porch with the doctor following a moment later. Wrath’s stuffed animal form is tucked into one of the rocking chairs, which bobs lightly forward and back, as though someone has been rocking it. Malphas notes it as well.

  “I see what Lowenthal meant,” the man murmurs to himself and I flush.

  None of my therapists have ever shown me my file, though by this point I can’t imagine it’s anything but a long read. The average therapist doesn’t get through more than six sessions with me before they’re suddenly recommending a colleague they think can “better speak to my issues.”

  Malphas moved to town a few months ago, just in time for my relationship with Doctor Lowenthal to fizzle and for him to suddenly stop returning my calls.

  “I just got back from registering for my fall classes,” I say, suddenly feeling like I have to explain myself, despite the fact that Malphas just showed up on my doorstep unannounced. That’s weird, right?

  It feels like that’s weird.

  “He looks like he has cats,” Wrath says from his plushy state. “Not just a couple, either. He probably gives them zingy names.”

  Doctor Malphas peers over his half-rim glasses and offers me a warm smile. “That’s great. You must be so excited to start digging into your major. Excavation is always such a laborious process.”

  Last semester, I took Repossessed: Reclaiming the Possession Narrative in the Modern World which was all about stories of people consumed by otherworldly forces in the pursuit of the world’s destruction. I’m slightly concerned about anything I might discover from the coursework associated with my degree. Maybe I should have applied to Miskatonic U after all. “Remind me again,” the doctor continued, “what are you majoring in?”

  “Biology,” I say immediately. I don’t know why I don’t say Accounting, but something about this conversation puts me on edge.

  “Ah, excellent. The life sciences. There is so much that can be learned about our lives, and so much still left to uncover, don’t you think?” The warmth in his tone doesn’t match the laser focus in his eyes.

  Ugh. I chose Biology because I thought it was boring and not worth talking about. I should have known the doctor wouldn’t let us just move on.

  “I saw the sign across the street. How do we feel about new neighbors?”

  I think again of the boy climbing out of the Jeep from earlier and feel my skin start to flush. He’s probably not a boy, right? He’s a man. Older and more mature than me. Way too good.

  “Have you stopped over? Introduced yourself?” The doctor had a way of asking questions that almost sounded like commands. I push the thoughts down quickly, embarrassed to be so easily figured out.

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  “Did Doctor Lowenthal send you my file?” I ask quickly as a distraction. “He said in an email he was going to send it right over.”

  It’s odd that Doctor Malphas showed up at my door, but Doctor Lowenthal did say he was ‘quirky’ and did things his own way. Maybe after two cancelled appointments, he thought this to be a better option. Is it my fault? Am I bad patient?

  Malphas smiles slowly, and it gives an edge to his otherwise consoling face. “Indeed. He nearly…fell to pieces getting it to me.” Then he begins to laugh quietly to himself, about some joke I don’t understand.

  I can only imagine what my file says about me. Afraid of leaving the house. Afraid of being inside the house. Afraid of people. Terrified of being alone. Anti-social but desperate for attention. Depressed. Crippling anxiety. Paranoid. Cautious. Nail biter. Bed wetter (only that one time and I’d had a Big Gulp).

  “Last time we spoke,” the doctor says, abruptly regaining his composure, “you mentioned your mother.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “I have the notes, Theo,” he says with enough confidence that I naturally doubt myself.

  Why would I bring her up? Mom is difficult to explain. She was motherly in the same way as a guillotine, and if she’d had her way my nursery would have been built inside a mausoleum.

  “Have you been thinking about her a lot lately?Did she say where she was going?”

  “She…” I start to reply. This is why I don’t talk about her. People always sound so judgy, like it’s strange to abandon your child and disappear into the umbral depths in search of the empyreal secrets of the universe. It is not so strange to have a career these days.

  “Why is he asking about her?” Wrath’s voice is a whisper in my ear, a welcoming presence reminding me I’m not alone.

  “I don’t know,” I say after a moment, ignoring the question entirely.

  “You shouldn’t feel abandoned, Theo. Look how strong you are.”

  I open my mouth to protest, but realize that my justification relies on the existence of what Doctor Malphas would consider my “imaginary friend.” Since Wrath refuses to show himself to “ignorant chattel,” as he calls most humans, there’s not much I can do to prove myself.

  Did I feel abandoned?

  Something ugly circles in my chest: a flying serpent that wraps around my lungs like rope. My mother is a complicated subject even with the few memories I have left of her. Trying to remember a smile, or a compliment, or affection of any kind. I hate how desperately I wanted her to love me. She hated it, too. She was less nurturing than embalming.

  Doctor Malphas keeps going on, heedless of my personal struggle.

  “Every hero is someone else’s villain. You got your classes today, but that means someone else can’t sign up. What will they think, hearing that the class is full?”

  Thank god I get to keep my sanity for another semester, I think, remembering the fleeing Screamers with their bloody eyes.

  “This guy is an asshole,” Wrath interjects.

  “No, he’s not,” I say immediately. I don’t realize my mistake at first.

  “Who isn’t? What aren’t they?” Conspicuously, Doctor Malphas glances towards the stuffed animal on my rocking chair.

  “Oh,” I reply weakly, a moment later. “I was just thinking out loud.”

  “Don’t you worry, my boy, we’re going to get to the root of all these issues, and find all the answers we’re looking for.”

  “You mean that I’m looking for.”

  “That’s exactly what I said,” Doctor Malphas corrects. “The first step is going to be making sure you don’t keep running from your feelings. No matter how difficult they are, we need to embrace them.”

  Emotions have always felt weird to me. Sometimes it didn’t occur to me to feel things. It was moments of realization like: I should feel happy, this is cool! Then suddenly there’s a surge of adrenaline that brightens my day. Or it doesn’t occur to me to feel bad when I don’t leave my room for a week at a time.

  Most people just feel things, it seems like, but for me it’s like there’s always been an extra hurdle. Feelings just happened to others, like a nosebleed or a sneeze. For me it’s always been like a jacket I have to put on or take off. If I don’t remember, everything just starts to fade into a gray sort of nothing.

  The problem is that I never know how far to take it. If I put on the angry jacket, then I’m furious and consumed by the feeling. Sometimes it becomes too much and it’s easier not to engage. Not to feel.

  Wrath always insists that there’s nothing broken in me, but I’ve been to enough therapists to disagree. Maybe Malphas will be the one to put me back together.

  “Sometimes,” I finally say after thinking about it for a long time, “I feel like if I let my emotions out, they’ll keep going. Like I’ll start screaming one day and never be able to stop.” It felt sometimes like what was inside is an endless ocean of something but I can’t put a name to it. It just is.

  “Do you think it would really be that bad?” Malphas asks. “What’s the worst thing that could happen?”

  I don’t think you want to find out. The thought came to me so suddenly, and felt so calmly certain that I can’t say it out loud. I keep it to myself, tucking it into a drawer in a corner of my mind where I can think about it later.

  “Well,” Malphas says brightly, standing up and taking a moment to stretch. “That was a good first session, I think.” He pulls his cell phone out of his pocket. “You said you wanted to pay with a credit card, yes?”

  “I… what?” I shake my head. “I mean, yes. Sure.” I reach for my wallet, sliding the sickly yellow card out from the frontmost tab. My eyes linger on the triskelion design logo, and I can hear the commercial in my head. Hasturcard. Never leave home without Him.

  Malphas snaps a picture with an app on his phone, then hands me the card back. “You’ll see a bill from the service come up under Carcosa Mental Health Services.” That’s the same provider that Doctor Lowenthal worked for. Interesting that Malphas works with them, too.

  I walk him down to the gate because the last hour has been a whirlwind I’m still trying to wrap my mind around. Just as Malphas steps across the transom to the outside sidewalk, a Red Jeep flies down the street from town and veers into the driveway across the street, kicking up a trail of dust that follows it like a haunting. Malphas says something but I ignore him, my eyes searching for the boy, who doesn’t disappoint. He scowls in my direction, with sharp, hawklike eyes and a stern, unforgiving expression.

  “Is it a good time to mention that the owners of that house were always the mortal enemies of the Morecrofts?” Wrath croons in my ear. “Looks like he already wants to kill you. Yay!”