This is what happened last week after I found the picture under my bed. It’s here in Part 1.
I screamed so loud I think all the neighbors heard me. My parents came in and I showed them the picture and they didn’t know what to say at first, but then they called the police. Soon the whole house was filled with police officers. They showed the police the picture, and they took a lot of notes and asked a lot of questions.
One of the bigger policemen gave me a blanket and I sat in the corner in the blanket kind of rocking a little bit. It made me feel safe. I don’t know why. The police asked my parents a lot of questions and I listened to them. They wanted to know if they’d gotten any weird phone calls or emails or anything like that, but they hadn’t. Nobody wanted to hurt them, as far as they knew.
The big policeman wrote all of that down in a notebook and said some things into a radio. I couldn’t hear what they were but I think they were numbers. Other policemen looked at the picture and tried to get fingerprints off of it and figure out where it came from.
I talked to Rosie while they were doing this. She wanted to know everything but I couldn’t tell her everything. I didn’t tell anybody about the blood on the wall or the scary things I saw in my head. They wouldn’t believe me. Daddy hadn’t believed me before.
The big policeman from earlier came over to me and smiled, then leaned down to whisper to me. I looked at him, curious what he was doing. Then I saw his face go black and cloudy and his eyes disappear and he said to me: “You broke the rules Charlie. No running to Daddy. You really are a stupid little shit aren’t you? You’re a fucking joke and you never should have been born. I’m everywhere Charlie. You think you can run away from me? If you do this again I won’t kill your Daddy, I’ll make you do it, cutting off pieces of him until you beg me to let you take his place.” Then his face went back to normal.
I stood up and screamed and screamed, and everyone in the room looked at me like I’d lost my mind. I pointed at the policeman and said “It’s him! He did it! It’s the Gratitude Doctor! Please you have to listen to me!” But he was gone.
The other police officers looked at me sadly and told Daddy that this kind of thing happens to kids who have been through trauma. I didn’t know that word. One of them handed Daddy a business card and told him to call the number and set up an appointment for me.
I went to see Dr. Schumann after that. She was a nice lady. She was young and pretty. Her wall had a picture of a sailboat on it and I looked at the sailboat while we were talking.
“Can you tell me a little about yourself, Charlie?” she asked me.
“Well… I’m 7. I like watching TV…” I ran out of things to say about myself really fast.
“Okay, well, your parents tell me that you’ve been scared a lot recently. Can you tell me why?”
I looked up at her and I tried to figure out what she would think if I told her the truth. It was almost like she read my mind.
“You can tell me anything you like Charlie. I can’t tell anybody else, and I won’t think you’re crazy. I promise.”
I nodded and looked at the sailboat again. It made me feel better. I didn’t know why. Maybe it was because of the colors in the picture. “A bad man is trying to hurt me,” I said, quietly.
“Who is the bad man?” Dr. Schumann asked.
“He says he’s called the ‘Gratitude Doctor.’ He says he’s going to hurt my parents and my sister because I don’t appreciate them.”
Dr. Schumann nodded and wrote something down. “When was the first time you saw the Gratitude Doctor?” she asked.
“I saw him at the mall a few days ago,” I said. Then I told her all about the mall and my friends and the walk home and the picture and seeing him with the police. Doctor Schumann made a lot of notes and looked at me when I was done, and I could tell she was sad.
“Charlie, I don’t think you’re crazy. I think you have a big imagination, and I think a lot of scary things have happened to you. Do you think it’s possible you don’t remember all of these things right?”
I looked at my feet. That was what I was afraid she would say. She wasn’t going to help me figure out a way to get rid of the Gratitude Doctor. She didn’t know what was happening to me.
She wrote something down on a piece of paper and handed it to me. “This is a prescription. I think this medicine might make the Gratitude Doctor go away. Try it and tell me what happens, okay?” I nodded and looked down at the paper.
When I saw Daddy in the waiting room I handed him the paper and he looked at it and his forehead wrinkled.
“She wants you to go on Clozapine? Is she sure about this?”
As Daddy was going to talk to Dr. Schumann, I turned to look at the people in the waiting room. There were all kinds of people there – young people, old people, women, men, short, tall. One man looked up at me from the paper he was reading. I looked back at him, curious.
“Are you being a good boy, Charlie?” the man asked.
I didn’t know what to say.
“I said are you being a good boy, Charlie?” the man asked again, and his face became dark and cloudy and he stood up and up and up from the chair until he was standing way over me, like a skyscraper.
“Yes!” I shouted at him, shaking.
“You ungrateful little bitch!” he shouted, spitting the last word out at me like a piece of pork he’d bitten into before waiting for it to cool down. “You don’t deserve a family. You don’t deserve a home. Everyone’s given you everything and you’ve fucked it up. You’ll grow up alone and nice, normal people will all avoid you or want to beat the shit out of you, just like Paul! You think Paul’s a bully? Paul’s doing the world a favor. Next time he should just beat the living snot out of you and not stop until you die right there!” He was shouting all of this at me, but nobody seemed to notice. He was so angry it was scary, because I didn’t understand what I’d done to make him so mad. Why did he hate me so much?
“I’m sorry!” I shouted at him. “I’m so sorry!”
Daddy came running back into the room, and put a hand on my shoulder. “What is it, Charlie?” he asked, frightened.
“The-the-the” I stammered, but I couldn’t say a whole sentence. By then, the Gratitude Doctor had disappeared. Dr Schumann came back out and tried to calm me down too. She tried to tell me the Gratitude Doctor wasn’t real. She had me breathe real deep and slow, and I started to feel a little better. But, then, I saw him over her shoulder. He was standing right behind her and Daddy, smiling and holding Rosie’s bloody head. In his other hand he held a sign, written in her blood, that read: “Are you being a good boy?”
I screamed so loud everyone in the room turned to look at me. I didn’t even notice and I kept screaming and pointing at the Gratitude Doctor. But he wasn’t there anymore. There was just a bloody stain on the ground where he’d been. I fell onto the ground and curled up into a ball, holding my hands over my ears and eyes and shaking so hard I thought I might pass out.
“Yes!” I shouted. “I am being a good boy! Yes! I’m being grateful! What more do you want from me?” I was screaming at the top of my lungs and I kept screaming until my throat hurt too much to scream anymore.
***
We picked up the medicine at the pharmacy on the way home. Dr. Schumann made Daddy promise we’d get it as soon as we could. The pharmacist was a nice man who smiled at me and offered me one of the lollipops they give kids who get a shot. I tried to smile back but I was still so scared it was more like a weird kind of half-smile. The pharmacist handed me the lollipop and I tore it open and started sucking on it. That calmed me down a little bit.
On the ride home Daddy asked me questions about the Gratitude Doctor. He was asking me what he looked like and what he wanted and things like that. I didn’t want to say too much about the Gratitude Doctor because I knew Daddy wouldn’t believe me, just like Dr. Schumann. I just told him he was a bad man and that he was scary.
When we got home, Daddy talked to Mommy for a long time. I stayed with Rosie. She was sad because her boyfriend had decided to stop being her boyfriend. Like I said, most teenage girls don’t talk to their little brothers like Rosie talked to me. But she told me what was happening. It was because of Daddy. Teenagers are bullies too, and when they heard about Daddy being short and working in the circus they made fun of him for dating Rosie. So he stopped.
I felt sorry for Rosie. She’d liked Sam a lot. I think Sam probably liked her too but he was tired of hearing people call him mean names. I understood that. I was tired of it too, but I couldn’t just break up with my family. I felt mad at Daddy again. It was just for a second, but I had the bad thoughts again about wanting him to be dead.
I was in my room when it happened, and as soon as I thought that I had another movie play in my mind like when I touched the picture. I saw the things the Gratitude Doctor had told me would happen if I ever called the police again. He was standing over Rosie holding a knife and yelling at me. In my hand there was a little screwdriver and it was shaking right in front of Daddy’s eye. The Gratitude Doctor was screaming at me to put it in, to kill Daddy’s eye.
“I swear to almighty God in heaven if you don’t do it she’s dead!” the Gratitude Doctor yelled at me. He pressed the knife into her neck and a little red line appeared on it and dripped. I screamed and begged him to stop.
“Please don’t make me do it! Please don’t! Why are you doing this? Make it stop!” I was crying so hard I couldn’t see.
“I’ll give you three fucking seconds!” the Gratitude Doctor shouted at me and pressed the knife harder into Rosie’s neck. “1!”
I screamed and I cried even harder. My whole face was covered in tears.
“Please don’t make me! Please! Please!” I screamed.
“2!” he shouted.
“Please, no!” I screamed again.
3!” he shouted.
“Please!” I screamed, with a long “a” that went on for a long time, long after he’d sliced open Rosie’s throat and she started choking on blood. I watched her choke for a long long time, before I woke up in my room, shaking and covered in sweat. I was so cold.
I looked down at my hand and saw that I was holding a screwdriver. I dropped it so hard I almost threw it on the ground.
I was shaking so hard I couldn’t even get up when Daddy called me for dinner. He called me two more times before I could get up and go in to eat.
***
At dinner I was very quiet. Everyone else talked about their day but I didn’t have anything to tell them. I didn’t want to say anything about the Gratitude Doctor, and I definitely didn’t want to talk about how lonely I was at school now that I’d stopped hanging out with Paul and his friends. Rosie was quiet too, and we both knew what we were doing. Daddy and Mommy didn’t push us too hard.
After dinner, Daddy gave me my pill. He took it out of the bottle and put it in my hand. He told me to swallow it and gave me some water. I nodded, but before I could I heard a loud voice in my head.
If you take that pill you’ll watch your entire family die. You’ll watch them screaming and suffering in ways you’re too young to even imagine. I swear to God if you take that pill they’ll suffer more than anyone has ever suffered before I let them die.
I stopped, frozen.
“Charlie?” Daddy asked. “Why aren’t you taking the pill?”
I knew I couldn’t tell him the real reason. But I couldn’t take it either. What was I supposed to do?
“Charlie?” Daddy asked again, a warning sound in his voice. “Take that pill.”
I put it in my mouth but I hid it in my cheek.
“Good boy Charlie.”
I nodded and went to the bathroom. I spit it in the sink and washed it away. It left a really bad taste in my mouth but at least I hadn’t swallowed it. That was good. The Gratitude Doctor hadn’t lied about any of the terrible things he was going to do so far. If he said he’d hurt my family so bad I couldn’t even imagine it, I believed him.
***
That night I had a dream that I was back in my old school. My old friends and I were playing and laughing. There was a girl I liked, Terri, and she was there too. In the dream, we were going on a hike and looking at worms and things in the dirt. She was scared of getting hurt but I told her that I’d protect her.
After a while, we were so far away from everyone that nobody could hear us. She stopped me and pulled me over to her and kissed me. It was a hard kiss, like she’d been waiting to do it for as long as I’d been waiting for her to do it. I kissed her back, and I held her. This warm feeling started in my chest and I was smiling so much my face hurt.
Then, a big man jumped out of the bush and tackled her away from me. He started to hurt her and I yelled at him to stop but he just pushed me away. He kept on hurting her and I had to watch. I was crying and trying to get him to stop but nothing I did worked. He was so much bigger than me it was like punching rocks.
Finally, when he was done hurting her, he turned to look at me and I saw that he had a dark, cloudy head.
“Time to wake up, Charlie,” he said.