Psykosis

By Aaron Pitters

When the newly appointed District Attorney is summoned to prison by the man he helped condemn to death, he is warned of an unnamed peril that shall soon befall him.

After the execution, the mentally exhausted DA is reluctant to bring his stress and worries back home. He decides to visit a local hypnotherapist’s office.

Soon his life is turned upside down. Who he was is no longer who he is. The DA’s waking life and his dreams become muddled, and he finds himself mixed up in the activities of a murderous criminal underground.

Desperate to find an escape, he begins a search for the mysterious doctor behind it all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aaron Pitters
• Release date: Oct 31, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310918247

Aaron Pitters

Aaron resides in Atlanta, Georgia.He is a fiction writer of literary works of all shapes and sizes. His debut Monarch is a unique four-part series that follows an unsettled housewife who fears the world will end in less than a month. His subsequent follow-ups delve even further down a dark psychological tunnel of uncertainty.Psykosis tells the tale of a lawyer who visits a hypnotist that uses his patients to commit heinous crimes.While Michaelmas ventures back to 18th-century England where the end of the age of magic and the dawn of science collide.House Fly lands a recent divorcee a lucrative position in a new town without realizing the true extent of his new commitment.Aaron is also a writer of a wide variety of film and television screenplays. His unique voice blends the mundane with the sublime as he tackles difficult subject matters using tone and inflection to accentuate the light and dark in all of us.

Book preview

(A Novella)

Aaron Pitters

Copyright © 2014 by Aaron Pitters

10-digit ISBN: 1-310-91824-4

13-digit ISBN: 9781310918247

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Edited by SaraBeth Huntley

Cover photo by Erik Jorgensen (Flickr: Six Flags New Orleans) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

*The original image was altered for the creative purposes of this book.

To keep up with Aaron Pitters go to twitter.com/aaronpitters

or facebook.com/authoraaronpitters

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Aaron Pitters

"When others asked the truth of me,

I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted,

but an illusion they could bear to live with."

Anais Nin (November, 1933)

1

Tuesday evening snuck up on the city. Only a few retreating wisps of clouds remained from the thunderstorm that had rolled through in the late afternoon. The stifling mid-summer air had mercifully cooled and thousands of stars twinkled in the heavens.

On such a lovely evening, all can feel right in the world. This is an illusion. All is never right in the world. Every precious moment is experienced through one’s own perception of a situation in a localized environment, and thus makes each individual subjective to the stimuli received. This allows the blissfully ignorant to be willingly persuaded into believing a lie, when something else is all too true.

Harper Dunleavy was the head psychiatrist for the state and worked long hours. Tonight was no different. While all the others in the office went home to their families around five or six, Dr. Dunleavy almost always stayed until nine. He was sixty-eight years old and had served the people of the city well for over thirty years. The humble practitioner had been honored numerous times for his work in the field of psychiatry and for his charitable donations.

Even though he regularly worked late into the night on active cases, the doctor did not stay simply out of dedication to his career. He worked late hours because there was no longer anyone waiting at home for him. His wife died of cancer nine years earlier, and since then he had not been eager to return to a dark and empty house. The doctor would go over papers of importance and do research in the hours after everyone else had left. This made him a brilliant and astute mental health expert that both politicians and law enforcement officials relied upon heavily. He worked those long hours in order to make himself tired. When he got home he usually went straight to sleep, not wanting to sit around and think about his beloved Bernice. The loss of her had devastated the doctor. They met and fell in love when both were still in grade school, and were inseparable up until her death.

At nine o’clock the doctor packed up his briefcase as he prepared to leave. He made his way out into the parking garage and disarmed the alarm system on his light gray S65 AMG Mercedes.

At 9:15 p.m., on an overpass to the freeway that runs through the city, a man with a dark hoodie slung over his head emerged from a rundown dark green Honda Civic. A smiling white skull was emblazoned across his chest, the logo of the punk band The Misfits. He calmly moved around the vehicle and mounted the curb. The solitary figure stood in darkness on the bridge and gazed out at the city, the illuminated buildings shimmered in the distance. At that hour only light traffic circulated through the heart of the city.

The man checked his watch. The light on his Rolex GMT Master II illuminated: 9:16 p.m. He coolly turned and walked to the trunk of the car, unlocking it with his key.

The doctor drove his car past the capitol building, its gold dome spotlighted for all passersby to see. He merged onto the freeway, starting his thirty minute northbound journey home. Classical music played on his Bose sound system, Brahms’s Intermezzo, Op. 116, No. 4. He checked his mirrors, flipped his turning signal, eased over into the middle lane, and then set the cruise control to the 55 mph speed limit.

Back on the overpass, the hooded man stood staring out expectantly at the approaching traffic. He held something bulky in his hands between his body and the waist-high cement handrail of the overpass. When he spotted the doctor’s gray Mercedes approach, the mysterious man lifted the thirty-five pound cinderblock he had been holding at his waist. He groaned as he heaved it up onto the railing. As the Mercedes drew near, he slid it off the edge.

The cinderblock smashed into the doctor’s windshield. The car lost control, fishtailing until gravity took over and propelled the vehicle into the air. The car rolled over onto its roof and continued to tumble again and again before crashing into the concrete divider. The Mercedes’ back end lurched into the air, then slammed back down with such force that it burst into flames and exploded.

2

It was at that moment that Lawrence Larry Mayer woke up. His wife Dianne was not in bed next to him. Dianne always seemed to get up before he did to help their teenage son, Andrew, get ready for school. Larry’s eyes were merely slits as he strained to see the beeping alarm clock on his nightstand—6:45 a.m.

He had fifteen minutes before the alarm would rouse him for good. Larry smacked the snooze button hoping to relax and enjoy these last few minutes before he had to face what the day would have in store for him. But he could not close his eyes, not with what lay ahead. A man’s life was about to be extinguished in less than eight hours.

Larry lay there staring up at the ceiling as the mid-March winds whistled against the house. At least it’s Friday, reconciled Larry. He listened to his wife and son moving about the house—not wanting to immediately join them. Over the past few weeks, they had been judgmental of his work on this recent case and he was tired of hearing their condemnations. He waited, mind swirling and eyes wide open, for the annoying alarm to sound.

The shower was where Larry felt most relaxed. He had begun taking longer and longer showers over the past few months, like he had when he was in law school. He allowed the water to wash over his forty-three-year-old frame. His body’s burgeoning aches and pains made him wonder if he could lose the extra weight he’d recently put on, and if that might help diminish the constant pain. Talk to the doctor about it, he reminded himself. Until then a shower and some acetaminophen would have to suffice. Maybe that would help his body, but what of his mind? He was beyond exhausted.

Larry was a lawyer who prided himself on his attention to detail—especially on this case. And by doing so, he’d left little time to think about anything else. As Larry rinsed off, there came a rapping at the door.

Hurry up, Dad, said his son. I have to brush my teeth.

Larry and his wife were in the process of remodeling their bathroom, and all three of them had been sharing the only other bathroom on the second floor since work had begun. The new shower would have dual shower heads and could be entered from the bedroom or from their walk-in closet—a feature his wife had insisted upon.

I’ll be out in a minute, replied Larry.

Larry turned off the water and wiped his face with his hands. He pushed aside the shower curtain and reached for his towel. Feeling a twinge of pain in his left shoulder, Larry winced in irritation. Awh, shit! He stretched his arm up over his shoulder several times before toweling off.

Standing in front of the mirror, Larry wiped away a swath of condensation. He drew a sigh, catching a reflection of the broken down shell of a man who stared back at him. What happened to the fiery young buck of yesterday? His body heaved with disappointment as he allowed his self-scrutiny to end and went into hurry-up mode. After slapping shaving cream on his face, a now focused Larry—the one that everyone had come to rely upon—squinted in concentration at his reflection as he deftly dragged a razor down one cheek and then the other.

3

Dianne sat at the kitchen table and wrote a list of necessities to pick up during the day on her personal stationery. With things being out of the ordinary recently, her mind was too distracted to be relied upon to remember it all. Having turned forty two months ago, Dianne’s everyday life consisted