A Visit from Isabelle
by Zoe Arzuman
Sometimes, in the dead of night, after the other students stop whispering and the lights go out, the darkness starts to whisper back.
Someone’s knocking on the door… someone’s knocking on the door… an old man’s raspy voice says tonight, over the incessant blabber of Brad Pitt talking about his time on set while filming Ocean’s 11.
“Shut up,” Angelina mumbles into her pillow, after determining that her roommate’s asleep. There’s no reason for someone to come knocking at 2:00 AM at her dorm, and the Brad in her head is probably confusing Angelina for his ex-wife again.
He’s at the door, the old man rasps. The Devil is at the door.
“Shut up!” Angelia hisses.
Angelina’s roommate, Li-Ming, stirs.
“What?” she asks, full of sleep.
“What?” Angelina parrots.
“Did you just tell me to shut up?”
“No. Some people were talking in the hall. Drunk probably.”
“Ugh, who even drinks on a Tuesday night? Don’t they have class to get to in the morning?”
Angelina shrugs. Li-Ming turns over.
Liar, says the disembodied wheeze of the old man. Liar, liar, pants on fire. Brad Pitt finishes a story about Philip Seymour Hoffman on the set of Moneyball, and then asks Angelina if she can tell their son Pax Thien to text him sometime. Something gurgles in the background. It sounds like the old pedestal sink in their shared bathroom, but she knows better than to believe it’s real.
Angelina ignores it all, and decides that she isn’t sleeping tonight.
She lies there for twenty minutes to make sure that Li-Ming is asleep before crawling out of bed.
***
It’s quiet outside. Not too hot and not too cold (a statement that makes the old man chortle about Goldilocks’ stolen porridge, which Angelina ignores, too). A light breeze glides over her skin. The beat-in flannel thrown over her shoulders is overkill, so she ties it around her waist. All-in-all, it’s a pleasant night, unusually warm for early April.
Whitney Hall’s quad is empty, except for one other night-owl Angelina has seen around campus a few times. They share a statistics class together. Dave or Dan or something is his name. Like her, he’s dressed in cotton pyjama bottoms with wool socks and a tee, the go-to outfit for a strung-out, over-studying, under-sleeping U of T student like herself. He asks to use Angelina’s lighter when he sees her pull out a beaten pack of Marlboro Reds.
Their hands touch when she gives him the lighter. Real, she thinks, not a hallucination.
They small-talk while he pulls out his own cigarettes. Turns out his name is Derek, and he’s majoring in Computer Science. Derek thanks her profusely for the light, saying something about how nicotine addicts have to stick together.
Angelina fakes a laugh, and is secretly grateful when he meanders off to another corner of the quad. Now, her only company is the Romanesque stone of the dormitory buildings, which is what she prefers. She lights her own cigarette and takes a drag.
Option A: you talk; we listen; no pain. Option B: You don’t talk; I remove your thumbs with my pliers; it will hurt. Option C… Brad says before fading away. Angelina wishes she’d never binged on Brad Pitt movies as a kid with her mom. It only fuels the fire.
When Angelina first started hearing sporadic voices at the age of six, she thought nothing of it. She thought it was her make-believe friend, Mimi, a teapot from her mother’s china collection. But as Angelina grew, so did the voices. They would talk about everything and anything. God, playing football, new movies, sex, or all of it at the same time. They would scream, shout obscenities, and bully her until she cried. Though nobody ever heard them but her.
As well, Angelina became increasingly more delusional. To the point where she was convinced that her ninth grade geography teacher, Mr. Nichols, was following her home from school everyday, and that Sidney Crosby had sent her multiple letters confessing his undying love for her. None of that was true.
She was diagnosed shortly after turning fifteen. It felt as if Angelina’s world had been rocked by an earthquake, and she felt the aftershocks for weeks.
She cried for what felt like years in that small doctor’s office on Dundas Street. What could she do? It was social suicide if anyone found out, not that she had many friends already. It gave other students a reason to ostracize her even more. Because high school kids are so cruel, so quick to latch onto any vulnerability they find. Psycho… serial killer… crazy bitch, she could imagine hearing other girls whisper as she passed in the halls. The voices are probably telling her to stab us right now… kids would say, even though the voices never tell her to hurt people.
Angelina couldn’t blame them for thinking that way, though, not when the movie industry sold characters like Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad. That portrayal isn’t even close to reality, but people eat it up like their grandma’s cookies. It isn’t fair, but life never is.
Even though Angelina was convinced that her life was over, the doctor just insisted that it was going to get better. And it did—after time, a fifth year of high school, and fourteen different types of antidepressants and antipsychotics until the right combination with the fewest side effects was found.
It’s manageable now. It’s easier to tell fact from fiction. Sometimes, she can’t help it, and she ends up losing all focus in class. But when that happens, all she has to do is put a bright pink sticky note on her notebook, which signals her professors not to call on her, without saying a word.
It’s manageable, but she doesn’t dare tell a soul about her condition besides the professors. Li-Ming doesn’t know; none of her other friends know. It’s better that way.
***
Angelina is stamping out her second cigarette with her Birkenstock when a little girl materializes out of the darkness. Only a couple of meters stand between the two. The little girl looks about six, and wears a pink dress and pink Converse high tops with the laces wrapped around her ankles because they’re so long. Her blonde pigtails sway in the easy breeze. She is missing two front teeth. Angelina stares, and she stares back.
“Hello,” the girl chirps.
Angelina sweeps the courtyard with her eyes. Derek has left and now there’s nobody around. So much for nicotine addicts sticking together.
The little girl persists. “I’m Isabelle! What’s your name?”
“Shut up,” Angelina mutters. She hasn’t had a visual hallucination in months; she doesn’t need one now.
“That’s a mean thing to say, lady,” Isabelle pouts, clenching her fists and stomping her little foot into the cobblestone.
“You’re not real. Go away.”
“Yes, I am!”
“No.”
“Yes!”
“I’m going to turn around, and I’m going to leave. Don’t follow me.” Angelina shoves her pack of Reds and her lighter into her pocket.
Something tugs on her flannel. Angelina turns around to find that Isabelle has grabbed her flannel in a tiny fist. She insists,
“I am real, Angelina! I am!”
Suddenly, it feels cold. The hairs on Angelina’s neck stand straight. None of her hallucinations have ever tried to touch her before. Never. She tries to pull the flannel out of the little girl’s hands, but can’t. Isabelle is too strong. She doesn’t even budge as Angelina tries to shove her to the ground.
For a moment, Angelina is convinced that this isn’t a hallucination after all. But why would there be a child hanging around a university campus in the dead of night? Why does the kid know her name?
“I am real, Angelina,” Isabelle murmurs, and her voice is distinctly lower than before.
Angelina closes her eyes. “Shut up!”
“Let me prove it to you.”
“Just leave me alone.”
“No, Angelina, I can’t.” Isabelle tugs on the flannel again. “I need to borrow your body for a while.”
Angelina screams, “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Isabelle just laughs, but it’s strangulated, ferocious, and not meant to come from a little girl’s body. The girl releases Angelina’s flannel and steps back, laughing all the while.
Isabelle’s tiny fists transform into red claws with needle-like black nails, and she sheds her innocent pink dress to reveal ashen skin underneath. Her eyes start to glow red and she grows until she’s taller than Angelina. Saliva drips from her fangs and horns sprout from her skull.
Isabelle no longer stands in front of her. Instead, it’s a demon, the Devil.
It raises its hand, splays out its fingers.
“Don’t worry, Angelina. Just let it happen.”
Angelina’s suddenly pushed through the glass door to her dormitory by an unseen force. She lands on her rear next to a cherry wood side table. The creature slithers through the door, cackling. It nears Angelina and drags its claws along both walls of the narrow hallway, peeling the pale blue wallpaper as it passes.
Angelina screams and grabs the nearest thing to defend herself with: a potted cactus on the side table. She launches it at the creature.
The plant smashes into its chest, knocking it back. Angelina stumbles to her feet and runs around the corner. She barrels into someone and falls down.
“Angelina? Are you okay?” a voice asks.
She looks up. It’s Derek from the quad. He offers a hand down to her, which she accepts. When she’s on her feet, she takes a look behind her, watching for the creature to lope around the corner. It’s not there.
“Angelina!” Derek shakes her.
Her eyes widen at him as he waits for an answer. She realizes how stupid she must look, running through the dorm alone at 2:45 in the morning.
“I’m fine… I just stumbled is all.”
It’s a poor excuse, but she has no way of explaining what just happened. She tries brush past him.
“Are you sure you’re alright? You look pale.”
“Yes, I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, Derek, I’m sure! You don’t have to worry about me. I’m just tired.” Angelina fake laughs.
“Oh, ok. Get some sleep. I’ll see you in Stats,” he says.
“Later.”
Angelina sprints back to her dorm once Derek is out of sight and slams the door.
Li-Ming jumps underneath her covers.
“What the hell!” she shrieks.
“Sorry, Li. Sorry.”
“Where were you?”
“Nowhere.”
“You sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure!”
“Fine, suit yourself. You’re so strange sometimes.” And with that, Li-Ming rolls over and falls asleep.
Angelina slides under the covers. Brad resumes his monologue, this time about World War Z, and Angelina doesn’t even tell him to shut up this time. Eventually, he’s pushed out by her own thoughts.
Not real, not real, not real, not real.
***
In the morning, while on her way to History 250, she sees students crowding at the door. They’re gawking at the eight-foot long claw marks on both sides of the hallway, and the smashed potted cactus on the floor. Nobody can tell what made the marks in the wall. Everyone stands back, afraid to touch.
Angelina strolls by. Real, she thinks, not a hallucination.
She’s not frightened. Not one bit. That thing last night, whatever it was, was real. Concrete. And reality is easier to conquer. This way, people won’t call her crazy behind her back, because they’re all going to be crazy together.
Real, she assures herself, not a hallucination.