“She lost control a second time,” Hilary said as the plane bobbled through a patch of turbulent air.
“Yeah,” Joshua said. “When she told Mrs. Yancy that she’d been raped by a demon.”
“If my theory’s correct,” Tony said, “Katherine was going through incredible changes after the birth of the twins. She was moving from one severe psychotic state to an even more severe psychotic state. A new set of delusions was pushing out the old set. She had been able to maintain a surface calm in spite of her father’s sexual abuse, in spite of the emotional and physical torture he put her through, in spite of becoming pregnant with his child, and even in spite of the agony of being girdled in day and night during all those months when nature was insisting that she grow. Somehow she maintained an air of normalcy through all of that. But when the twins were born, when she realized her story about Mary Gunther’s baby had come crashing down around her, that was too much to bear. She flipped out–until she conceived the notion that she’d been raped by a demon. We know from Mrs. Yancy that Leo was interested in the occult. Katherine had read some of Leo’s books. Somewhere she had picked up the fact that some people believe twins born with cauls are marked by a demon. Because her twins were born with cauls … well, she began to fantasize. And the idea that she had been the innocent victim of a demonic creature that had forced itself on her–well, that was very appealing. It exonerated her of the shame and guilt of bearing her own father’s babies. It was still something she had to hide from the world, but it wasn’t something she had to hide from herself. It wasn’t something shameful for which she had to make constant excuses to herself. No one could expect an ordinary woman to resist a demon that had supernatural strength. If she could make herself believe that she’d really been raped by a monster, then she could start thinking of herself as nothing worse than an unfortunate, innocent victim.”
“But that’s what she was anyway,” Hilary said. “She was her father’s victim. He forced himself on her, not the other way around.”
True,” Tony said “But he had probably spent a lot of time and energy brainwashing her, trying to make her think she was the one at fault, the one responsible for their twisted relationship. Transferring the guilt to the daughter–that’s a fairly common way for a sick man to escape his own sense of guilt. And that sort of behavior would fit Leo’s authoritarian personality.”
“All right,” Joshua said as they fled northward into the yielding sky. “I’ll go along with what you’ve said so far. It may not be right, but it makes sense, and that’s a welcome change in the situation. So Katherine gave birth to twins, lost herself for three days, and then got control again by resorting to a new fantasy, a new delusion. By believing that a demon had raped her, she was able to forget that her father was the one who had actually done it. She was able to forget about the incest and regain some of her self-respect. In fact, she probably hadn’t ever felt better about herself in her whole life.”
“Exactly,” Tony said
Hilary said, “Mrs. Yancy was the only person she’d ever told about the incest, so when she settled into the new fantasy about a demon, she was eager to let Mrs. Yancy know the ‘truth.’ She was worried that Mrs. Yancy thought of her as a terrible person, a wicked sinner, and she wanted Mrs. Yancy to know that she was only the victim of some irresistible supernatural thing. That’s why she babbled on about it for so long.”
“But when Mrs. Yancy didn’t believe her,” Tony said, “she decided to keep it to herself. She figured no one else would believe her, either. But that didn’t matter to her because she was positive, in her own mind, that she knew the truth, and that truth was the demon. That was a much easier secret to keep than the other one, the one about Leo.”