Over the next several minutes, I’m completely seized by the panic gripping onto me like a leech. Until finally, I feel my chest loosening and my breathing evening out.
This isn’t the first time I’ve found myself in this position in Dr. Rosie’s office. It’s why I hate coming here.
“You’re wrong,” I gasp, my breath still erratic and choppy.
Dr. Rosie sighs and makes her way back to her chair. “Sibel, you’ve had enough today. Let’s continue this next week.”
“No!” I roar, my spine snapping straight. It makes me dizzy but I power through until my doctor’s blank face comes back into focus. “Tell me what you mean. Now.”
She stares at me, seeming to contemplate if she should continue. She sighs again, but humors me. “All of the men that match the description of your henchmen—they’re mannequins. They are mechanical mannequins that move, but they're not… living.”
I shake my head, the tears I tried so hard to hold in are now streaming down my cheeks. She’s lying. She has to be. I’ve seen them with my own two eyes. Touched them. Kissed them. Talked to them. For five years! Zade… he saw them, didn’t he?
“But we… we were together,” I insist, wiping snot from my nose. “I felt them.”
Dr. Rosie keeps her face neutral, but something like sympathy shines in her blue eyes. I still want to stab them. Now more than ever.
“There were traces of your DNA found on the mannequins, Sibby. Along with sex toys.”
I rear back once again. “I have never used those in my life!” I exclaim, aghast by her implications. I feel the blood rushing to my cheeks, and I’m angry that she’s seeing me embarrassed. I’ve never been embarrassed in my life.
“You think people wouldn’t have noticed me carrying around mannequins and fucking them?” I snap, disgusted by her implications.
She sighs. “You have a very complex condition. It’s impossible to say exactly what your actions looked like, but it’s safe to say that the majority of your interactions with your henchmen were hallucinated. I suspect after fair hours, when you wanted to feel a bit more of a connection is when you physically interacted with the mannequins.
“Otherwise, there’s no evidence of you carrying them around. They weren’t found in the cop car you stole, nor did any of the staff ever see the mannequins go missing during operating hours.”
I shake my head. The memories, they are so real. So vivid. There’s no way I imagined it. Flashbacks of all the ways they touched me. We laughed, cried and killed together. And she’s telling me those memories are all fake. She’s telling me I fabricated every single interaction. That’s just not fucking possible.
“You were experiencing auditory, visual and somatic hallucinations,” she continues, her tone clinical. “You were seeing, hearing and feeling things that weren’t actually there. You saw the mannequins and brought them to life in your head. You were alone, scared and very lost, Sibby.” I don’t correct her this time. What she’s describing is what I’m feeling right now. “So to bring yourself comfort in a time of loneliness, you created friends in your head, inspired by the mannequins in the house. They were just figments of your imagination.”
I blink at her, shocked by her stupidity.
“Then who buried the bodies? Who cleaned up the messes? My henchmen always did that.”
“You did, Sibel. Your henchmen were just an extension of you. Everything your henchmen did, was actually you. You completely disassociated from the acts you were doing because you were convinced it was your henchmen that was doing them.”
Flashes of meaningless things flicker in my mind. A shovel gripped in my hand, cutting through dirt and grass. Blisters lining the palms of my hands. Sweat pouring down my face and neck as I throw bags of human remains in holes.
More flashes. Knocking over a mannequin so the cops would get distracted, and then running down the stairs. Getting into the car—the driver’s wheel gripped in my hands. The foreign feeling of controlling a car…
Just small, sporadic glimpses that don’t make any sense. None at all. Those were my henchmen doing those things… She’s just trying to confuse me. She has to be. Trying to make me feel crazy so they can keep me locked in this hellhole forever.
I wipe more tears off my cheeks angrily, glaring at her through blurred vision.
“What else was fake then, huh? Were the people I killed fake, too? Are you saying they weren’t demons?”
Dr. Rosie shakes her head slowly. “They were very real people, Sibby. They were human. The smells you associate with people is called olfactory hallucinations, and the belief that they were demonic were delusions. I suspect the trauma from your father and his cult is what triggered this. Due to the extent of abuse he inflicted on you, we suspect that he caused severe damage to your brain. He was an extremely sick man, Sibby, and he subjected you to awful abuse. Your brain was protecting itself in the only way it knew how.
“By the time you killed your father, he had brainwashed you with his own delusions. With the combination of brain damage and his brainwashing, that ultimately led you to create your own delusions and hallucinations. That these people were demons and you believed that you could smell the evil on them, or the purity on the others. This was how you justified killing.
“And your father was evil, Sibby. So, when you killed him, you felt you were doing something right. You felt it was your purpose to continue that path.”
I shake my head, and keep shaking it, adamant she has everything wrong. The only thing she’s right about is Daddy causing severe head trauma. One night, he had beat me so brutally, I was bedridden for months, and he had to pay a doctor come see me on a daily basis. He had a niche for kicking me in the head, so Daddy causing some type of damage isn’t surprising.
But she is wrong about the rest. I know this just as I know that my henchmen are real.
“So, you’re trying to tell me the people I killed weren’t evil?”