DreamChild

Dream Child: Alex Praigorn

(Revision of Case Study # 1026)

The parents sat across from me in the small, darkened room. The light from the other side of the mirror cast highlights across their faces. The mother, a middle aged woman still clinging to the youth of her past, sat with a hopeless look of confusion. I predicted that she was the type of woman to panic over small details of rust on cookware, believing that things are made to last forever.

The father had a hopelessness of his own. He had already raised the white flag on a war that must have started some forty years ago. His eyes were dry and moved methodically, as if he had become a machine that was meant to serve only one function. What a pair the Praigorns made. It was no wonder that Alex was in this situation now.

I was feeling a little uneasy myself, but had to put up the show that nothing was wrong now. Perhaps my negative views of the boy’s parents originated from the disgust of my own confusion about Alex.

Across the mirror from where I sat with Mr. and Mrs. Praigorn was a young boy with tussled brown hair and a slender, pale figure. He was just shy of his eleventh year and appeared perfectly normal from across the glass. He had a serene smile playing on his lips as he stared blankly at a white wall. The only abnormalities I could perceive from my seat in the darkened room were the dark lines under his bloodshot eyes. His first psychologist had labeled him an insomniac and given him some pills to help him sleep. It was true that he had stopped sleeping, but that seemed to be only one of the symptoms of his condition and didn’t help explain his one-eighty shift in personality. My fingers began to run along the side of the manila file folder that sat on the table in front of me as we continued to observe the child in awkward silence.

The experiment was a simple procedure, only slightly off from standard textbook examinations. The child was placed in a white, well-lit room with only a chair and a table as myself or one of my assistants observed his behavior. He was informed that anything he desired would be brought to him, but he had to ask for it. It had now been three hours and he seemed perfectly content on maintaining the silence. After all, the silence had become his standard several months ago when the change occurred.

Alex Praigorn, although I had never met the boy, had been described as a ten year old boy who loved to laugh, talk to strangers, and was always into some sort of mischief. However, nine months ago he had become withdrawn and refused to communicate with anyone quite literally overnight. The next morning at breakfast, he had only scratched a single word into the wooden table with a fork prong. ‘Isolation.’

The parents suspected it was a phase, but when his teachers called them in for a conference, they were forced to face the truth behind what was going on. He refused to participate in class, having acquired an ‘attitude problem’ as the head counselor phrased it. They recommended he be sent to Burgess, a school for troubled or slow students, but the mother wouldn’t have it. She firmly believed that her child was too good for that, although I suspect she was more worried what the neighbors would think of her parenting skills rather than concern for her child. She confessed to me that, before the incident, she was proud to say that she had the brightest child on the block. Today, she seemed busier watching me and the notes I was pretending to scribble on a blank sheet I had tucked into his file instead of watching her child in the other room.

“What are you writing in your notes?” Large brown eyes were glued to my illegible handwriting.

“What do you think I’m writing,” I responded with my typical psychologist tone.

She sat quietly for a moment and I hoped that I had scared her away from her curiosity. I was wrong. “Don’t speak to me like I’m one of your patients! That’s my baby boy in there and I want to know what you’re writing about him!”

“Please lower your tone, Mrs. Praigorn. I wasn’t writing anything about your son.”

“Then what are you writing about in his file?”

“I was playing tic-tac-toe with myself.” Once again I had shocked her long enough for a brief return to silence as I turned my head to see that the child had become preoccupied with the mirror. I didn’t think much of it, seeing as how it was one of the very few areas of interest in the room, but it was comforting to see him look away from that damned wall. My attention became more focused when I realized that I was meeting his gaze. Large brown eyes that seemed to be one of his more attractive qualities had locked onto mine with a firm grasp. There was a nature about them so sinister that I felt as if thousands of living organisms entered my skin through my fingertips and crawled rapidly beneath the surface to my shoulders and down my spine. I was so engaged by this stare that I dropped my pencil, having completely forgotten that the child couldn’t possibly see me. Instead, the gaze was at his own reflection in the mirror. He slowly stood from his seat and began approaching us.

“What’s he doing now?” the mother asked. Apparently she had found her voice again and added a frantic edge to it.

“It would appear that he’s walking towards the mirror,” I replied, trying to keep the cynicism from my voice. I hid my smirk behind a logical mask by the time her head shot around to give me a glare.

“Is that normal?”

I caught myself before I could respond with some reply about how much time she probably spent in front of the mirror. It couldn’t be an easy task to make a fifty year old woman appear thirty-five. Instead, I bent over and retrieved my fallen pencil, glad to have my vision diverted from both the child and his mother, even if only momentarily. I met her with a calm face as I sat back up in my chair and flipped to a true page of notes to record his recent activity. “I see nothing abnormal about it.” And in all honesty I didn’t. Yet there was something that I did find unusual. Every time I blinked, I saw the boy’s face staring at me. More specifically, I saw something else staring at me.

When I looked back to the window, the boy had reached the mirror. He was casually looking it up and down. He placed a finger on the surface and began to run it along the glass, leaving a smudge of oil from his skin for us to see. Once again, his face was calm and seemed innocent, even when he looked in my direction. I was beginning to curse myself for having a weak moment when he met my gaze again. His finger was stopped on a location, pointing at me when his eyes went dark. Dark is the only word I can use to explain it. His eyes were distant in the sense that they seemed to be looking through me, and distant in the sense that they didn’t seem to be inside of his head.

For the first time in my three week study, I heard the child speak. He asked a question, only three words. “Do you see?”

From Dr. Joshua Spencer, child psychologist: Amberland, Colorado. August 18, 1989…

I have found the child, Alex Praigorn, to have little more than a slight sleeping disorder. It is my belief that, due to a recent experience with recurring nightmares, his body refuses to sleep as a sort of over-excited self-defense mechanism. It is my belief that his lack of sleep has led to his lowered body functions and flux in personality. The patient merely needs to get some sleep. I recommend withholding him from his studies for a period of no longer than a week and prescribing bed-rest along with 500mg of Zolpidem to be orally ingested daily with dinner for two weeks.

I was the fourth psychologist in the area to have Alex as my guest. I was also the last resort as far as Amberland had to offer. After that I assumed they would try and send him to some psychiatric ward 30 miles north in Denver. The only files that had been passed down to me were those of Dr. Spencer. I found this odd, but I could only assume that the other two both agreed with the first.

Alex seemed typical enough on his first visit. I am quite accustomed to the shyness associated with patients on their first visit. He was led in by my nurse and continued to stand where she left him as I attempted conversation with the boy.

“How are we today, Alex?”

Discomforting, but not unheard of, the boy ignored me and proceeded to gather his surroundings, looking around my office. He began to move to the bookshelf and stopped at my football trophy from high school. He watched it curiously before tracing his finger gently across the golden surface.

“Do you like football?”

He continued to ignore me, but didn’t leave the trophy.

“I was the quarterback for our football team back in 1975. We won state that year.”

I was going to continue, but he had already moved on to a series of books that I left around the office for effect. I hadn’t read a single one of them in the series. To be honest, I didn’t read most of the books I kept around my office, but near empty bookshelves seemed dull to me.

“Do you enjoy reading, Alex? Who are some of your favorite authors?” My eyes began to drift towards the clock. He had only been in my office for three minutes and twenty-seven seconds and I was already counting down until our half-session was over. Unprofessionally, I slid his notes to the bottom of the stack on my desk and began working on a grocery list for after I left the office. My wife, Heather, was out of town for the weekend at a teacher’s conference in Denver and I had to fend for myself. I was struggling with how to properly spell ‘bologna’ when I realized that he had taken my old chess set from the shelf and began setting it up.

Having suddenly lost interest in my inability to comprehend common meat products, I dropped the list and approached the other side of the chessboard.

“Do you like chess?”

He nodded. My heart leaped into my throat. I had gotten a response from the boy. My mind began to wander. Rather than seeing a boy at a chessboard, I was seeing newspaper headlines reading, “Child Psychologist Nathanial Skies Makes Breakthrough with Wild Child Using Chess.” My intentions were silly now that I think about it, but I was still waiting for a break. Ashamedly, I was more interested in glory than good and this boy seemed my chance to prove myself above my peers in Amberland.

He moved a pawn out in the open and we began to play. I called checkmate five minutes later. I had little experience playing chess with ten year olds, but the child made many silly mistakes. I wasn’t entirely sure he had ever played before. He understood how the pieces moved, but had no talent for strategy.

He sat perfectly still on the floor across from me, staring blankly at the board. A very solemn expression hung on his face like a wet rag on a clothesline.

“Would you like to play again, Alex?”

He continued his statuesque poster, not even moving to blink. I set the board up again and waited. I must have lost track of time as I waited. I thought he was about to move when the door opened and the nurse entered, announcing that his parents were there to get him.

I pulled him to his feet and watched as the nurse walked him out of the room and down the hall to where his parents waited. “Maybe next week, Alex,” I muttered. As I turned to finish my grocery list, I could have sworn that he had turned around to grin at me. Not a child’s grin, but a malicious display of teeth as if to mark his return. I shot my head around to catch it. When I spotted him again, he was walking away normally, still being helped by the nurse.

Later that night, I received a phone call from my colleague, Sheryl Dumanski. She’d heard that I was Alex’s new psychologist and wanted to have lunch with me on Friday in order to share some information about her own discoveries. She had been his second psychologist, but never bothered enclosing a file of her time with Alex. Naturally, I was curious as to why and agreed to meet with her.

Sheryl was in her late forties. She suffered from childhood trauma that had been pushed back into the deepest folds of her mind and locked away where she couldn’t deal with it. Over the years, she also acquired a mild case of hypochondria. Dr. Dumanski was on her third marriage at the time and still had no children of her own. It was my own belief that, like so many of us, she chose to become a psychologist to deal with her own problems. It was as if working with children would help her recover her past and help her to move through the barrier of her own youth.

We met at a small café two blocks from my office. It was a nice place for cheap coffee and had a nineteen-fifties feel to it. She was dressed casually; I figured she had taken a little vacation.

“So what’s on your mind, Sheryl?” I asked once we had purchased our coffee and sat down on the red, vinyl seats of a booth near the window.

She fidgeted with her mug for a moment, suddenly distracted with the dark substance inside before grabbing a packet of sugar and shaking it gently between her thumb and forefinger. “Not much of one for small talk are you, Nathan?” she said with a half-cocked smile.

“Not particularly. I suppose we can chat about our home lives if you want. How are things with your husband… Bob was it?” It was a nasty trick to bring up a sore spot, but it was effective. I had heard that there were a few problems on the home front ever since she had released Alex.

“No, it’s fine.” She ripped the top of the paper package and dumped the sweetener into her coffee, narrowly avoiding dropping the entire package in. It wasn’t until she grasped for the spoon that I noticed that her hands were shaking. “So you’re Alex’s new doctor, aren’t you?”

“You could say that.”

“He’s quite a find isn’t he?” She was avoiding eye-contact; still staring at her coffee as she stirred it around with the spoon.

“He’s curious to be certain. There aren’t too many cases of children from good homes with good lives coming in to therapy, but such cases aren’t unheard of. I can tell you that I don’t suspect it’s from lack of sleep, however.”

“Oh I agree with you there.” She finally looked up at me with very nervous eyes. They moved around my face faster than I could follow and I was finally forced to look away.

“You didn’t attach a file. Didn’t you have any speculations of your own?”

Sheryl sighed and rested her chin daintily on her knuckles as her gaze drifted out the window. “My first meeting with Alex seemed rather uneventful. He wandered around my office for a while, ignoring all of my questions, or my presence in general, for the duration of the hour. He eventually came across one of my favorite stuffed toys, Mr. Winks, which I keep for the children to play with. He picked it up and took it to the couch with him. He sat down and held the toy for the remainder of the time. Alex seemed so sweet towards it that I lowered my guard for the patient and decided to allow him freedom in my office until familiarity with both me and my office came to him and he would begin to respond.” She glanced over to me again. “You know, make him feel at home?”

I nodded slightly, recognizing the behavior. “Go on…”

She shook her head and her face moved to the window more viciously this time. “His second visit proved more eventful, unfortunately. I still don’t know the exact words to describe exactly what happened. I greeted him warmly as he entered my office and he began to roam again, completely ignoring me. I drilled him with meaningless questions about school and home as he walked around.” Her lips curled into a smile that I could only guess was an inside joke. I wasn’t fond of being ignored, even by children. “I asked him something else then, following up on the previous doctor. I asked him what he dreamt about at night. He stopped his journey and turned to look at me with those big brown eyes.” She started to choke and I noticed dampness around her eyes. “Those big, misleading, beautiful, brown eyes. I felt feverish, as if drunk off of those eyes if a look can do that. He made his way behind my desk and reached for a drawer before I realized which drawer it was. I stalled from stopping him because I assumed I had kept it locked, but it opened easily in his hands and I was frozen in place.”

She took a sip of coffee without removing her gaze from the window. I doubted if she was even tasting it. “Inside the drawer, the child found the revolver that I keep for safety precautions in the instances of an aggressive patient. Then he turned on me, pointing the barrel of the gun to my face. His thumb toyed with the hammer of the gun until it clicked backwards and locked. Three words I remember him asking, and then everything goes dark.” She began to choke again, dabbing a napkin gently beneath her right eye.

I stood dumbly for what seemed like an hour before I finally prodded her on. “What were the three words?” I admit I was a little nervous at this point. Certainly I didn’t keep firearms around the office where a patient might grab it, but paranoia is sometimes contagious. I had reassured myself that I could handle a small child by the time she finally said anything again.

“I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“What were the three words, Sheryl?”

She turned to meet my gaze again and spoke in a very dry voice. “What haunts you?” It was a simple question but still made the hairs on my arms stand up straight.

“Well obviously he didn’t shoot you,” I managed to say after clearing my throat.

“No. I awoke on the floor a short while later. The drawer was closed. I tried the handle, it was locked. Carefully, I peered over the table to see Alex sitting on the couch again, holding Mr. Winks in his arms and staring blankly out the window. Terrified, I fumbled for my keys and unlocked the drawer. Inside was the revolver, resting as if it had never been touched. I pushed it closed and locked it again.”

I was once again sitting dumbly. “So you dreamt the whole thing?”

“I don’t know, Nathan. I just don’t know anymore. It’s feasible that I dreamt the whole thing, but it seemed so real.”

I added delusional schizophrenia to her list. “And that’s why you released him?”

“I couldn’t bear to see him again. I sent him home early, before our session finished. I never took my eyes off of him as he walked away and it was like he was still watching me the whole time. I can’t even sleep at night now.”

“Why’s that?”

“In my dreams, I still see the boy’s face, staring at me and holding the gun.”

I reached into my coat pocket and fished out a few items. I threw a five dollar bill onto the table for the coffee and handed a card to Dr. Dumanski. “Give me a call sometime, we’ll talk further.”

Alex and I continued our chess games for the next two weeks. He came to me on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 4 in the afternoon and stayed for a half an hour. He showed great improvement in his game at every session. He studied my moves closer, almost as if he was studying me through the game. The games lasted longer, but every time he lost, he would sit there frozen in front of the board.

A week had passed since my visit with Sheryl when I received a call at home from the local authorities. Alex’s former psychologist, Dr. Howard Caligari, had been found bludgeoned to death in the stairwell between the first floor and basement of the Amberland Correctional Facility. The prime suspect in the case was an escaped patient of his under the name of Allison Sarah Hunter, a twelve year old orphan who he had been keeping there. They had found some files locked away in his office and thought that I should come by the station and take a look at them.

From the private study of Dr. Howard Caligari, professional psychologist: Amberland, Colorado. October 26, 1989…

I am fascinated by my most recent specimen. Alex Praigorn seems to bridge the gap between dreams and reality. After the incident in early July of young Alex waking from what seemed to be a child’s nightmare, he has become a recluse from society. This incident keeps him in a constant state of lucid dreaming; hinting that his interactions with the world we know is an advanced form of sleep-walking.

I performed hypnosis upon the child and was pleased that it affected him properly. Once his screams subsided, he began answering questions about what he saw. To my delight, his recurring nightmare may be described not as a simple remembering of some tragic event or horror film that he was exposed to in youth, but rather as a gateway to the world of nightmares that I have read about in my studies.

Where as most people will dream within themselves, the child has suffered an abduction of some sort that keeps him forever linked to the nightmare realm. The boy’s reclusion seems to spawn from his inability to decipher whether he is asleep or awake, not knowing if the next corner will hold some other horrific image or other terror that the human mind is incapable of imagining. I curse my lack of information as very few sources may be found discussing this idea. It is for this reason that I wish to keep him under my personal supervision in order to learn more of this world and how the child is linked to it.

I am also considering the similarities of his case to that of Allison Sarah Hunter. Her case is also quite fascinating to myself and I am beginning to wonder if the two are linked in some way. I am tempted to bring the two together in order to observe their reaction to one another, but fear bringing in an outsider to my studies of Allison. She is precious to me, and I dare not risk exposure of her existence to others.

Perhaps I shall find some way of claiming Alex for my own and removing the traces of his existence as I did with the girl, and therefore be able to continue my studies without interruption.

It was already late by the time I finished looking through the file and there were only a few other people in the building with me, but they had left me alone in one of the offices with a desk lamp to illuminate my reading. I shuffled through the rest of his files looking for one labeled Allison Sarah Hunter. There weren’t any under that name, but I found a very thick folder with simply the name ‘Pandora’ written across the top. It was filled with milk-carton portraits of a young girl from the ages of 8 to 12.

The reports were filled with grotesque descriptions of his experiments on the young girl that were both illegal and nauseating at the same time. I was beginning to hope that she was the one who had killed the late doctor. The reports described her as the only child of a single mother who could now be found at the bottom of Northside Creek. The notes made many references to an event called the Thirteenth Hour, although the event itself was never described.

Caligari also believed that the girl had the ability to walk through mirrors to other worlds as if she were Alice from Lewis Carroll’s stories. I was beginning to think that he should have been the one locked up below the correctional facility.

I restacked the files on the desk to return them, but tucked the folder on Pandora under my shirt and left to go back home. I’m not sure why I took it, but I was intrigued. It was an odd feeling, as if I was holding some hint of truth in my hands. It wasn’t about a discovery and fame for once, it was simply about the knowledge.

The next morning I left home early after only a few hours of sleep and visited the facility where they had found Caligari’s body. It took one of my most impressive fabrications of a story and a hundred dollars just to get downstairs for a short tour. I even got to spy the dark stains on the handrail and corners of the stairs.

The hallway itself smelled as if some neighborhood brats had knocked over a series of port-a-potties in it. I covered my nose and mouth with the sleeve of my shirt as I made my way down towards the cell he had kept her in.

The doors were textured steel with cheap white paint peeling away to reveal the cold surface beneath. Each had a very small, rectangular window, covered by another sheet attached to a hinge. Towards the bottom was yet another door for sliding in trays of food. It was a wonder to me that anybody could be left to live in a place like this.

Allison’s door was cracked open when I found it. The room was a padded cell and smelled more foul than the hallway. It had been organized by a series of corners. The farthest corner was her obvious dumping ground for excrement. The adjacent corner near the door held a high stack of plastic food trays, now resembling gothic chia-pets.

Opposite that corner was a large wad of rags. I approached it and lifted the rags. It was a straight jacket, still folded and tied off as if it were holding some invisible being. Of course there was no sign of the girl, but the fourth corner almost brought a smile to my face. The padding there was faded from the typical tan to a paler color, and it had sunken with the indentions outlining the form of a child. It must have been her sitting corner.

I left the room with a new realization. Despite my disgust for Dr. Caligari, I was going to need full observation of Alex if I was going to learn what was going on with him. While the unanswered questions and games of chess were amusing, they were only leading me in circles. I was going to need something else if I was going to crack his case. After I returned home, I telephoned his parents to set up a meeting in order to discuss full-time care of the patient.

“Do you see?”

The words still rang fresh in my mind as I collected my surroundings. I was lying flat on my back and my head was swimming and pounding. My lungs were raw to accompany a scratchy throat I could only imagine was from my own shouting. Both of the child’s parents still lay unconscious on the tiles across the room. Disoriented, I moved my way carefully to where my chair had spilled over and placed it back on its legs. My memories slowly returned.

Alex had been staring at me through the glass, his finger pressed towards me. My head began to swim, as if I were feverish or stoned. A warmth flowed through my body and my whole body went limp. Ripples became apparent around his finger and the entire substance of the window began to change. Somehow, the child had turned the one-way mirror into a projector. Visions came to me in flashes of all he had showed me. My nightmares from a child all came back to me with a realism that would make Hollywood wet with envy.

Suddenly I was four years old again, screaming soundlessly as boogey-men chased me down halls that stretched on for miles, taunting me with locked doors. My feet became putty and everything was in slow motion; everything except my assailant. I watched in horror as bodies spilled to the floor from its maw. Some I recognized, most of them I had never seen before.

Somehow in my scramble I had stumbled over a tree root and tripped into a forest scenario. I continued to run away from the horrid scraping and juicy sounds that followed at my heels. It wasn’t until I came across the piñata hanging from a noose that I realized there was no color. It was a horse piñata; blood red and emitting a shrill sound that almost resembled laughter. Its mouth opened to reveal rows of rotting teeth. Out of the corner of my eyes I could see Alex approaching the creature with a bat in hand. He also lacked color, but his blindfold was as red as the horse. When he arrived, he took a wicked swing at the piñata and it burst open, spilling a sea of blood that continued to flow, casting color throughout the scenario and rising higher and higher until it was past my knees. The current was strong and tried to wash me away, but I grasped onto a tree and turned to Alex.

The boy stood unphased by the blood and took the blindfold off. His eyes had been crudely sewn shut with a course wire. A sneer appeared on his lips and revealed his teeth to me. “What haunts you, Doctor?” he asked slowly. “Do you see?” The current was growing ever stronger and I was losing my grasp on the trunk of the tree, beginning to be swept away from the scene.

“I do.” He said wickedly. “I see everything.”

With that, he threw his bat at me and knocked me away from the tree. I was carried away by the blood through the forest before it engulfed me. Then everything was black.

Recovering my senses, I peered cautiously into the room where I had left Alex. I can’t explain if it was relief or horror that filled my heart at what I saw. Perhaps it was both. As I looked in, I saw Alex. He had a serene smile across his lips as he stared blankly at a white wall.

Something else caught my attention from the corner of my eye. I turned to look at the edges of the window and saw ripples dissipating into the edge of the wall. I watched in wonder, still trying to discern what had just happened.

In my peripheral vision I could see Alex, staring at me and smiling. His lips never moved, but I could almost hear him say, “Do you see?”