Authors: Nicholas Wolff
The reeking fumes were choking him. His vision began to spin.
He tried to call her name, but his voice was a groan in his ears. He saw her get up and move toward the candle on the desk. It was guttering in its holder.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
T
he sounds picked up, more voices and more urgent. The snapping of branches quickened, and John sensed the blurred, ragged line of men to his right surging ahead.
What do they see?
John ducked his head and peered ahead, upslope. All he could see was the bluish glow of snow and trees, ranks of bare trees.
He started to run. His heart felt like it was being stretched out, and a stabbing pain was making itself felt underneath his collarbone.
God, please don’t let me have a heart attack now
, he thought.
Baying. Movement. Flashlights bobbing. They had to be getting close.
If Charlie was dead . . .
He felt the wind drop away and shift direction. It was coming downslope now, and he immediately picked up a scent. It smelled like meat charring on a grill.
The pitch of the bloodhounds’ baying went one note higher.
He saw the flames through the trees, a lick of orange and then another. He turned toward them, fifteen degrees right, and began to run, spraying snow up to his face as his boots clomped through the icy crystals.
“Charlie!” he shouted. “
Charliieeeeeeee!
”
The flashlights darting in the black. The fire was growing. And the smell—oh, no, it couldn’t be. He’d never smelled anything like that before.
The trees were parting, giving way. He was coming up on a
clearing. Shouts from behind him.
The bonfire was roaring, the flames thirty feet high. John’s eyes strained to make out the black things in it. There were logs and then on top of them . . .
Oh God. Oh, please no.
He saw a dark figure outlined against the hot orange flames, staggering toward the bonfire. John froze and reached for his gun, crying for the man to stop. But as he jerked the Glock up, the man went toward the blaze without stopping and leapt into it, his hoarse cry being sucked into the roar of the flames.
Another black figure emerged and followed him. A shower of red sparks blossomed up toward the dark sky as the body dropped into the bonfire. There was a loud popping sound and John thought,
Was that a skull or a branch?
He ran forward the last few yards to the clearing.
Nat woke up, feeling heat on his face. Pain shot along the length of his neck at the spine. He breathed out once, then again. The air was clean and cold, but it choked him. His throat felt as though it had been crushed.
Nat lifted his head up.
Oh, you’ve gone and broken your neck
, he thought. He reached up, his eyes closing in pain. On his face, heat, flames. He sank back down, but in the little glimpse around him he’d recognized where he was.
The Prescott backyard. He was splayed out in the snow just under Becca’s window.
He felt the heat again and forced his eyes open. He saw Becca’s window open and black smoke pouring out. The smoke would billow and then part, and he saw flames then, white-orange, and he heard them beginning to roar like a wave far off but coming toward you.
He tried to raise his head, and pain screamed up from the
base of his skull.
Did I fall?
“Becca,” he called weakly. He tried to turn his head, but bright stars appeared behind his eyes. He knew she wasn’t with him. He could feel her absence, and a dawning horror overcame him.
He saw a hand on the window frame, the fingers pale against the dark green paint, the Dartmouth trim. Becca was standing just to the side, as if the fire and smoke weren’t there. Her eyes were on him.
Behind the roar of the flames, he heard screams. Jimmy Stearns and the other
nzombes
—whoever was in there—burning, surely.
Becca caught his gaze.
Oh, no, don’t look at me like that
, he thought. No accusation in her eyes, only love.
In the place where her right hand would be, he saw a glint of silver. His knife, rising through the billows of smoke toward her neck. Nat’s eyes went wide, and five words echoed in his head from far away.
And . . . off . . . came . . . her . . . head.
The knife was turning in the smoke as she brought it up fast.
He cried out her name, but the blackness washed over her.
Chapter Fifty-nine
Six-month case review.
Patient: Nathaniel Thayer, 34, Caucasian male. Admission number 01876.
Supervising psychiatrist: Dr. Jennifer Greene.
Dr. Thayer is a former clinical psychiatrist at this facility who was brought in on 1/31 exhibiting symptoms of catatonia. During his initial admission, the patient was fully awake but unresponsive to external stimuli, including pain stimuli. He exhibited signs of waxy flexibility, and appeared to be mumbling a phrase repetitively, though he would not answer the team’s questions. There were no signs of echolalia or echopraxia. His admission followed a traumatic incident with Thayer’s patient, Ms. Rebecca Prescott, since deceased in Massachusetts Memorial Hospital. This six-month report summarizes the patient’s course of treatment, response to care, and the extenuating circumstances that have attended this unusual case.
As the colleague of the patient who perhaps knew him best, I was asked to supervise his treatment strategy. I was at the facility the night Dr. Thayer was brought in, and have been leading the team for the past six months. Despite our friendship in the past, the patient exhibited no recognition of me or his former colleagues on that night or in the subsequent period.
The relevant backstory to the patient’s admission begins with his treatment of Ms. Prescott in an unofficial capacity on or near 1/5. After he arrived in-unit, the facility conducted an extensive round of interviews with Dr. Thayer’s friends and colleagues to determine the details leading up to his intake. Det. John Bailey was the most informative of the witnesses, though he has lately become nonresponsive to further inquiries regarding the relationship between Dr. Thayer and Ms. Prescott.
Ms. Prescott was apparently suffering from a case of Cotard delusion, first reported by her father, which worsened into apparent full-blown psychosis in which she imagined she was possessed by an evil spirit. Diaries found in the partially destroyed Prescott house have been conclusively shown to be those of Mr. Prescott, and they record his daughter’s progressive descent into the belief that she was, in fact, already deceased. The diary states his intention of seeking help at the Northam Psychiatric Outreach Office on or about 1/4.
Mr. Prescott apparently first encountered Dr. Thayer in that time period, and the patient continued to see Becca Prescott in a professional capacity, as well as a personal one, up until the incidents of 1/17. Dr. Thayer’s failure to report Ms. Prescott’s case to this or any other Massachusetts facility of mental health, and his failure to admit her to any psychiatric facility, are now a matter of record, but the reason for these lapses in judgment has not been revealed in our investigation. We will not be addressing any professional misconduct on the part of Dr. Thayer in this report.
(Soon after Mr. Prescott came to him for the first time, Dr. Thayer consulted me on the parameters of Cotard, and I volunteered to assist him with the treatment of his then-unnamed patient. Dr. Thayer declined and discussed the matter only one more time with me. I sensed then that he wished to divulge the details of the case, but apparently the strangeness of the circumstances prevented him. Our two brief conversations represent the only interactions between Dr. Thayer and other Mass Memorial staff regarding Ms. Prescott’s case.)
Several days after his admittance to this facility, Dr. Thayer still presented many symptoms of a classic catatonic state. His eyes were open and fixed; his face showed a marked lack of affect, although not the usual flat or blunted appearance but one of fixed attention, what would be classed an “agitated” state but without the usual resistance and violence. The repetition of the meaningless phrases had ceased. Initially, the cause of the catatonia was believed to be the shock of seeing Ms. Prescott perish in the house fire at 96 Endicott Street, especially as Dr. Thayer has no history of schizophrenia or epilepsy and subsequently tested negative for encephalitis. The initial evaluation of post-traumatic stress reaction has subsequently proven problematic, however.
The standard recovery time for such a PTSD-related episode is several days. But after six days at the facility, Dr. Thayer showed no improvement. The only change in his condition came when he was given reading material by one of the orderlies during the normal course of his fourth day at the facility. Dr. Thayer immediately grabbed a pen from the attendant and began to draw obsessively a series of pictures (see Appendix B-1). The first set of pictures can generally be described as showing the events of the house fire, and Ms. Prescott pictured in the window of the upper story of the Endicott Street house. Other images he produced included the face of a thin woman, an older Caucasian male with a lacerating wound to his neck area, and a small hut or wooden house on fire in a heavily forested area; these Dr. Thayer drew obsessively when he was provided with more paper.
After the two-week quarantine period, it was thought that perhaps Dr. Thayer would benefit from seeing his friends and coworkers in a casual setting. But the results were disappointing. Dr. Thayer maintained his “thousand-yard stare,” only breaking from this posture to work on his drawings. The pictures themselves didn’t seem to the treatment team to be efforts to communicate with the outside world, but simply a phase in an internal narrative that Dr. Thayer was working through.
After the initial shock of his experience was thought to have worn off and Dr. Thayer still showed no signs of improvement, a course of medications was decided upon by this doctor, in consultation with the director. We began on 2/5 with 40 cc’s of carbamazepine and continued it for a week, then increased the dose to 60 cc’s, given by injection every morning. The carbamazepine had no discernible effects, positive or negative, on the patient’s affect or behavior. The treatment was discontinued on 2/15, and after a period of three days, clonazepam was administered in a dose of 40 cc’s every morning, also by injection. The clonazepam had the effect of making Dr. Thayer drowsy for large parts of the day and prone to bouts of shallow breathing and dizziness, but no improvement in his catatonic symptoms was observed. The drug was given a two-week course of treatment, and was discontinued on 3/1. The treatment team then tried dantrolene, with similar (negative) results, and finally olanzapine, both in similar courses as with the other two drugs. The dantrolene increased the agitation of Dr. Thayer without decreasing the catatonic symptoms, and was discontinued after only five days, as Dr. Thayer had twice injured himself, the second time seriously, by banging his head against the door frame of his room. He was treated for those injuries and returned to the facility on 3/23.
The most remarkable incidents in the last six months were the two visits by Det. John Bailey, on 4/14 and 4/22. Det. Bailey had been urgently requesting to see Dr. Thayer, but it was thought best to deny those visits, as he was intimately involved in the patient’s relationship with Ms. Prescott and any reliving of those experiences could have had a negative impact on Dr. Thayer’s condition. After being interviewed several times, Det. Bailey confirmed what had been rumored in the Northam community for many weeks, especially after the interview with the local historian, Wilbur Atkins, published in the
Northam News
on 2/21. Mr. Atkins detailed Dr. Thayer’s obsession with some local families and their connections to a long-dead soldier, Capt. Thomas Markham, who was hanged in the town square in the early part of 1920. Det. Bailey explained that Dr. Thayer—and he, for a time—had come to believe that local individuals had become possessed or controlled by the spirit of a man Capt. Markham had killed in Haiti during the American occupation of that country.
Det. Bailey explained that he and the patient had initially connected a series of disturbing events with this Capt. Markham: the deaths of Walter Prescott, Margaret Post, Elizabeth Dyer, Jimmy Stearns, and Charles Godwin—in addition to the disappearance of their bodies. But the detective stated to the treatment team that those deaths had been solved in the aftermath of the events of 1/17. For example, it was determined by the Northam police that Margaret Post had been killed by Walter Prescott. In the diary found in the Prescott home after the fire, Prescott confessed to the murder, saying that Margaret Post had come to visit his daughter and that he feared Margaret meant Becca harm, so he followed her back to her college and attacked her just outside its walls. Walter Prescott had apparently killed himself subsequently, out of guilt. The deaths of Elizabeth Dyer and Jimmy Stearns remain unsolved, but Det. Bailey reported confidentially that police were questioning an employee of the morgue, Claude Roke, who had a difficult work relationship with both victims.
As for the disappearance of the corpses, subsequent to the death of Ms. Prescott in the house fire, all the missing bodies were found—as has been reported widely in the
Boston Globe
and elsewhere—in two locations: deep in the Raitliff Woods and at the Prescott house (including that of Mrs. Stephanie Godwin). The clearing in the Raitliff Woods, where some of the bodies were recovered, was later determined to be the original burial site for the executed Capt. Markham. He was interred in this spot after his 1920 execution, as no church graveyard in Northam would accept his body and the authorities at that time wanted him buried as far away from the city as possible. The missing bodies were found the morning after the Prescott house fire, some of them burned in a bonfire that had been built over the grave of Capt. Markham. The newspapers have connected this gruesome fact to some kind of ritualistic or possibly even satanic activity in the area, which Det. Bailey gave some credence to. Officials at the morgue are investigating the original disappearance of the bodies.