Murder, Reality, and the Mind’s Truth

Tony turned pale.

I’d just told him everything—well, almost everything. He sat motionless, mouth ajar, lips drained of colour. “Well?” I asked.

“What can I say?” he stammered. “You’ve just confessed to murder. Murders. Plural.”

I smiled. “I never said I killed her.”

His eyes twitched. “Is she alive?”

“I never said that either.”

“Then who did?”

I leaned in. “He did.”

“Who—the Beast?”

“Exactly.”

Tony exploded. “You can’t blame a fantasy! That’s not how this works!”

“But you said a schizophrenic’s reality is their truth,” I replied coolly. “You said the Beast is real to me.”

“It’s still you,” he barked.

“You’re contradicting yourself now.”

He slumped back. I watched him drown in rationality.

I didn’t need him to believe me. I needed him to doubt himself. And he did. You could see it in his shifting eyes, the way he tried to separate Mitchell from the Beast—as if the two weren’t now one.

Tony had always claimed to understand his patients. That’s what made him a good counsellor, wasn’t it?

Now he was just another man out of his depth.

“Use your empathy, Tony. Isn’t that what you always tell us?”

But he couldn’t. Not anymore. He didn’t see a patient.

He saw a killer.

And worst of all—he saw that he’d been speaking to one all along.

[from SEETHINGS, downloadable and free for a limited time].