Read The Boy Who Could See Demons for Free Online Page B

time.
    ‘I’ll come and see you again tomorrow,’ I said, rising to my feet, my hands trembling.
    But he was engrossed in his drawing, touching up the wings above the house.
    ‘How did it go?’ Michael asked as we headed down the corridor towards the front entrance.
    I kept three paces ahead of him so he couldn’t see the strain on my face. I could feel my phone buzzing in my bag with text messages from my friends who were all probably out of their minds with worry. I was training my thoughts on a series of numbers that scrolled in my mind backwards from ten, but I had already reached zero and still my heart was pounding in my chest, tears pricking the corners of my eyes. I felt the wounds of Poppy awaken in their deep places. I had only so long before I broke down.
    ‘I’ll compile my notes this afternoon and meet you and the others in the morning,’ I told Michael quickly.
    We had reached the hospital foyer. Michael stopped me as I approached the entrance.
    ‘Dr Molokova,’ he said, his voice terse. I looked up sharply, rattled by his tone. He combed a hand through his long blond hair, visibly perplexed.
    ‘Look, please just tell me you’re not going to split up that family. I have one of the best therapists in the country working with his mother …’
    ‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘But—’
    ‘But what?’
    ‘I think Alex may be a danger to himself. I’d like to book him into MacNeice House for sustained assessment.’
    Michael’s face fell. ‘Alex’s aunt Beverly is on her way up here from Cork as we speak, he can be assessed in his own house with his own flesh and blood …’
    I felt suddenly exhausted, full of regret at breaking my resolve to stay indoors. ‘In my opinion Alex could seriously harm himself if we don’t keep an eye on him. Frankly I’m appalled he’s not been given proper treatment until now.’ A scene of Poppy flashed before my eyes. She was holding a knife at a table in a restaurant, the people around us beginning to turn and watch. The soft light from a chandelier danced on its blade.
    I made to walk away but Michael grabbed my arm. ‘I want what’s best for this boy.’
    I stared at his hand on my bicep, my blood boiling. Finally, I pulled my arm free. ‘Then let me do my job,’ I said quietly, walking past him to the exit and towards the taxi rank.
    Many of the parents I encounter in the course of my job tearfully confide in me that they worry in case their child is possessed. It is a very real and terrifying possibility to confront: you may never have given the notion of God or Satan the time of day, but suddenly the bizarre, frightening and occasionally violent actions of your son or daughter force you to ask yourself questions you never dared believe would cross your mind. Such questions haunted me every day for most of Poppy’s life – and, if I’m honest, I don’t think I’ve ever found the real answers. After many years of watching her behaviour deteriorate, I had grown tired of specialists telling me that my beautiful, intelligent, and sensitive child was merely ‘hyperimaginative’, a label which progressed as she got older through the spectrum of apathetic and uninformed childhood mental health diagnoses: attention deficit disorder, disassociative identity disorder, bipolarity, Asperger’s syndrome. All wrong, and with these wrong diagnoses, the wrong meds, the wrong kind of treatment. So after medical school I trained in child psychiatry, doubled up by a PhD based on a hunch about Poppy’s condition: childhood schizophrenia.
    Like Michael, I had wanted us to stay together as a family. But it had cost her her life.
    As I pulled through the busy streets of Belfast in a taxi, I heard her voice. I love you, Mummy. I love you . And then I saw her, clear in my mind. Her coffee-brown eyes curved with laughter, her thick black hair swept across one shoulder. She was turning to me, the white sheen of a curtain brushing against her face. The hole is gone , she