Mrs Clarke had wanted to leave, right then and there; Mr Clarke had seen no reason to disagree with her now their daughter was awake. While Mr Clarke was packing Mrs Clarke talked to Mary. From the way they told me I understood that they only left her alone for a moment. In that moment she got up, rummaged through the surgery cupboards and slit her wrists several times with a scalpel.
They found her quickly, in a small growing pool of blood on the floor. They bandaged her arms, but some of the cuts were so deep she needed stitches. Needless to say the Clarkes did not leave the facility that day. Mary's parents would never have left her alone in her condition, and Mary herself was in no fit state to be moved. She needed to be in a hospital, taken care of, and the nearest place was inside the facility. If someone tries to kill them self in a hospital are they ever transferred elsewhere because another organization shares part of the hospital building? Of course not, the Clarkes didn't object, Mary's actions were blamed on the proximity of the wave. As soon as she recovered, she'd be moved and a cure would be found elsewhere.
I bandaged her arms. I cleaned the cuts. I stitched the largest ones closed. Almost twenty stitches. Then I left her to recover with her parents sitting around her bed. For better or worse, she'd come to me with her delusion, she had strolled into my room in the dead of night to tell her strange stories. I worried that I was the cause of them that I had made her like this, and it seemed like natures vindictive irony that she should come to me. Part of me didn't want it to happen again, didn't want to be reminded of how she was damaged, how I had damaged her. Part of me wanted her to get better. Part of me didn't, those delusions, those stories were too interesting, they were full of too many unusual thoughts. Part of me wanted to know what they were.
I can't say I was surprised when she came to me again. It wasn't quite as late as the last time, so I did not wake up spluttering in the light with her wide eyes boring into me with their haunted look. I'm not sure how she left the clinic without being stopped. She slipped into my room as quietly as she had before.
"Did you know the Australians, the real Australians not the settlers, used to believe that we never die because we're never alive to begin with?"
I gave her a vaguely critical look and told her she should be resting. She ignored me.
"They believed that we were all dreams. That every time we fell asleep we were born again somewhere else, and every time we woke up we died. Do you see? So when we died, nothing happened, we just woke up somewhere else in another dream." She looked pleased with herself for this scrap of foraged information.
I considered telling her more sharply that she really should be in the clinic, but I suppose I was in no mood to argue with a sick child. "That's interesting. Where did you read that?"
"I didn't. I knew it."
She seemed a little offended, as if she was tired of dropping hints and wondering if I would eventually work out her meaning by myself or if I would have to be told. I sighed.
"Mary….."
"I can remember a lot of things now." Mary continued defiantly.
"Did you know that people used to worship the morning star as a goddess of sex?" I expected her to cringe at the word or snigger like any other girl her age, but she didn't. "Venus, Astarte, Ishtar, they were all the Lady of the Morning Star, except I think Ishtar was the Evening Star as well. So if the Morning Star is a goddess how come Lucifer is the morning star? How can something be a male devil and a goddess? It doesn't make sense."
She hesitated before continuing. "And I know they used to water proof circus tents with tar. That's why ours caught fire so easily and went up so fast. We couldn't get out because everyone rushed for the doors…"
She trailed off, starting again on a different note her voice taking on another degree of urgency. "I know there's a tree that grows in the rainforests of West Africa that was worshipped by the tribes there. They thought it was a gift from the gods, or may be a god, I can't remember. But when you eat the roots it makes you see things that aren't there, and it makes you sick, and it makes you see from through other people's eyes, it makes you feel like you're dying and it gives you a name….It begins with an 'O', obogo or something. It makes you see everything you've done wrong to someone else, then there are colours and shapes and lights." Mary sighed. "And then you wake up covered in vomit and you feel like you crawled through hell and out the other side."
"Mary," I interrupted her, not half as sternly I should have. "you should really go back to the clinic. You're sick and you're tired…." And you're going mad, I added silently.
She glared at me with those wide dark eyes as if she'd heard my thoughts. "I'm going to go back to the clinic, but I….I want you to promise me something. Promise you'll let Samalin go?"
I pitied her. I knelt bringing myself to her height and I spoke softly, gently, trying to keep her calm. "Mary, there is no Samalin. Not here or anywhere else. He doesn't exist."
She smiled a sad smile. "Mr Charlise, my shrink, told me that. I didn't believe him either."
"Mary…you made him up. You invented him because you were sick,"
Because I made you sick.
"And now the wave is making you worse, so you think you're remembering these things, but you're not. You're making them up."
She shook her head, making her brown hair fly across her face. "You're wrong Doctor. I saw him. He's in that room, the jasmine coloured room, with all the others."
She turned and slipped out as quietly as she'd come, leaving me alone and confused.