Teen Hyde (High School Horror Story #2)(30)

I thought about taking a seat there with the stack of magazines, but decided I didn’t have time to waste pretending to be patient when what I needed was to be a patient. Like now. So instead, I walked over to the vacated desk and strummed the strange wind chime that was hanging like an upside-down xylophone.

I kept on strumming the instrument until at last I heard a cough from a back room and a short man with a concave chest and round tortoiseshell glasses emerged dabbing his mouth with a crumpled napkin.

“Do you have an appointment?” he asked, unnecessarily pushing the glasses against the bridge of his nose. His voice had a nasal quality as if he were suffering from terrible allergies.

“Not exactly,” I said. “No.”

He made a high-pitched noise that I couldn’t recognize with any assurance as either a sign of annoyance or a hiccup. I leaned over the counter to watch him flip through an appointment book that appeared to have more blank slots than filled.

“Can you fit me in?” I asked.

He looked at me over the top of his glasses. “Today?”

“Right now,” I answered.

Dr. Crispin—I presumed—furiously flipped through the appointment book. “But the website specifically says no walkins.”

I sighed. “I took a gamble that the hypnotherapy business wasn’t exactly booming in Hollow Pines. And what do you know?” I made a show of looking around the empty waiting room. “I was right.” I placed my hands on my hips. “So assuming you don’t happen to be booked for the next hour and it looks like you’re not,” I said, staring down my nose at the blank spaces in today’s date, “I’ll take right now. It’s urgent.”

Dr. Crispin blinked rapidly behind his lenses. “Fine, then, okay, if it’s urgent, as you say. I suppose I can fit you in.” He spread his palms over the page and picked up a ballpoint pen. “Name?”

“Um … Jessica … Faire,” I lied quickly, remembering a character in a romance novel I’d once stolen from my mom’s nightstand in middle school. This seemed a time to be better safe than sorry.

He printed the name in slow, methodical letters and snapped the book shut. “Well, then, Jessica, I suppose you can follow me,” the little man said.

I trailed him through a narrow hallway painted an ungodly hue of mustard yellow and together we entered a box-shaped room. My palms were sweating now and I wiped them on my jeans. Inside, a silk plant scraped against the wall next to an armchair. Water burbled over a bed of rocks down a fake waterfall and into a bucket-sized pond of lily pads. He gestured to a long black sofa with a decorative pillow propped in the corner. Wordless music with a Far Eastern flair trickled through a set of speakers balanced on a dresser. I took a seat and stared at my shoes, feeling more uncertain about the reasons I’d come.

I didn’t believe in hocus-pocus. I was a facts-and-figures girl. A former mathlete, for goodness’ sake. Was I sure hypnotherapy was the way to go? The place looked as if it’d been decorated from the dregs of a Chinese restaurant’s garage sale.

Of course I wasn’t sure at all. But it was a step. A way forward. And it had seemed like a good idea back in the library. Back before I saw how cheesy it was.

“You’ll need to be lying down.” Dr. Crispin waved his hand through the smoke of a newly lit stick of incense. Oh, brother, I thought. I was confident my problems were beyond what aromatherapy could fix. I considered my options. I could still turn back. I could tell him there’d been some kind of mistake. Or that I’d call back for an appointment after all.

Except then where would I be? I’d come to a point where the facts in my life no longer added up, where I couldn’t trust any of my usual instincts. So, instead of following the one I had right now, which was to run as far away as possible from this hokey hypnotherapy shop, I swung my feet up onto the couch and leaned back onto the pillow.

“Very good.” Dr. Crispin’s voice took on the tone of a massage therapist. I tried to relax. “Now, what can we do for you today?” We? I winced at the affected manner.

“I…” I took a deep breath and prepared to tell somebody something I hadn’t had the guts to tell anyone, at least before now. “I’m having trouble remembering certain … things. There seem to be gaps. Chunks of time that have just vanished. And I want—I mean, I need—to know what’s happening in those spaces that I can’t remember. I want to know why this is happening to me.” I wondered if this was a normal problem for a hypnotherapist or if I sounded certifiably insane.

“When was the last time you noticed one of these ‘gaps’ as you called it?”

I swallowed. “Two nights ago.” I avoided glancing at my arm. The skin around the black line on my wrist was raised and angry. If I was being honest, last night would be the last gap in my memory. But instead I chose the missing space two nights ago because that was what I most needed to know.

“When approximately in your day do you think you lost this memory?” I could hear scratches on Dr. Crispin’s notepad.

“At night,” I answered.

The scratching stopped. “At night. When you should be sleeping. What makes you think your memory is misplaced at all?”

“I’ve … well … I’ve woken up in places, seen evidence that I’ve been places at night that seem impossible if I weren’t awake.”