All My Darkest Impulses (House of Crows), Lisa Unger [top 10 novels .txt] 📗

She knocked again, harder. “Get lost!”

This time he flapped away, cawing angrily. She stood a moment, watching the sun climb higher, painting the sky a cotton-candy pink. As she watched the pastel color show, she felt something she hadn’t felt in a while—a glimmer of hope. The combination of drugs Dr. Bold had prescribed had her sleeping better, seemed to be keeping visits from Archie at bay. She was feeling more solid—more herself.

The road back was long, she knew. Her license to practice had been temporarily suspended because of what Dr. Bold had diagnosed as her psychotic break due to extreme trauma. She was in twice-weekly therapy, her research all but abandoned. Her physical injuries were still troubling her, but she felt stronger. She saw the light at the end of the tunnel. Yeah, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel; it’s just that it’s an oncoming train. Archie had been relegated to a whisper in the back of her consciousness. She ignored him.

She made her bed. Put on her running clothes and headed out into the chill. The trees whispered, and her footfalls echoed in the quiet. By the time she hit the trailhead, she was in the zone, movements and breath in a synchronous pump. She’d do a five-mile loop, and when she was done, she’d feel calm, clear.

The days and weeks behind her were making a terrible kind of sense. She’d been viciously attacked by one of her patients. Unable to process the trauma, she’d created a dreamlike scenario to make it understandable—a kind of confabulation. Somehow, in that moment, her psyche had seen fit to return her to an unexplained, unresolved trauma from her childhood. The very reason she was studying men like Winston Grann to begin with. It all made sense to her now. The pressure of her work, the repressed memories of her past, the violent attack; it was like a psychic Molotov cocktail that had set fire to her life.

Physician, heal thyself.

And Archie was some dark construct, the shadow. Dr. Bold was a Jungian analyst as well as a clinical psychiatrist. They’d spent a lot of time talking about Archie, trying to understand what function he served in her psyche.

“When did he first appear to you, Claire?” Dr. Bold had asked when Claire had no choice but to admit to her what was happening.

“The summer I turned sixteen,” she’d said. “But that wasn’t his name. He didn’t have a name.”

“Where were you?”

“I had a friend named Matthew. He only came to town for the summer, to stay with his grandfather in this huge old mansion they called Merle House. It had a million rooms, and these crazy hidden passageways between, an attic filled with antiques, a basement that seemed to go on for miles, and acres of woods, and gardens that had gone to seed. And we spent so much time exploring it, discovering all its secrets.”

She still remembered those days, long and warm, filled with friendship and easy laughter. They climbed and explored, swam in the lake.

“We?”

“Matthew, Ian, Mason, and I—my friends then.”

They had been summer friends, really; when the days started to shorten and the air grew chill, Matthew went home. She might get the occasional email from him, or see him if his family came for Christmas. Ian lived in town, but he went to a different school so they almost never saw each other except at games and at the Halloween social.

Mason was at the same high school, but they moved in different circles, were on a different track—she was an honor roll student; he was in a vocational program, learning a trade.

Sometimes they passed in the hall, and each of them would give a low-profile wave. But it was like they all lived on different planets until Matthew came back, and the freedom of summer let them shift off their school-year selves.

“We were playing hide-and-seek,” she’d said. “And I wound up in the basement.”

“You weren’t afraid to go into the basement alone?”

“No,” said Claire. “I was never afraid at Merle House before that.”

The sky grew lighter as she ran, the trail seeming to rise up before her. Once she hit her stride, she could run forever, legs and heart and lungs working together to create a nearly effortless lift from the ground, her mind going blissfully blank.

“What happened to make you afraid?” Dr. Bold had asked.

Claire had gone down the stairs, planning to hide in the cupboard underneath the staircase. It was musty and filled with boxes; once they’d found a dead rat.

It was widely accepted that Claire was the bravest and the boldest among them—she always raced to the rope swing over the lake first, reached the highest branches, was first to crawl into the dark spaces. She wasn’t afraid of rats, or old houses, or really anything then. She had a flashlight and a magazine folded in her pocket. She was planning to settle in for a good long hide. But when she got to the bottom of the stairs, she saw a light coming from the far edge of the space, as if it was shining from underneath a closed door. There was a tinny strain of music—jazz.

They’d been in the basement lots of times before. Though it was large, there wasn’t much to it, and she didn’t remember a separate room with a door. It didn’t seem like the same place she’d explored with Matthew, Ian, and Mason; it was different, the way sometimes in dreams things were all turned around and confused.

She found herself walking toward the space, and as she went, that same strange fog descended, surrounding her. She breathed it and felt light-headed, high. She was lifted out, just like when she was inside the painting, as if she’d entered another world that was always right there but invisible, out of reach for anyone else. She moved through the fog, even though distantly she knew she shouldn’t. She could hear the boys thundering around upstairs, calling her