Southern Belle by Stuart Jaffe Page A

private investigator's license and such. Nothing too telling, though. Until he found reference to a book called The Driving Darkness: One Psychiatrist's Look into the Roots of Mental Illness.
    The book made sure to change all the names of the patients as well as identifying features — sex, weight, hair color, eye color, etc. However, Max noticed that the author, Dr. Paul Clarkson, had worked at the West Carolina Insane Asylum at the time when he wrote the book. A while back, Drummond had confided that he once entered the care of that facility under his own volition.
    Drummond had been a beat cop when he encountered a ghost who needed his help getting hidden money to a niece. Talking of the supernatural experience led to his removal from the police force and the start of his career as a private investigator. It also led to a mental breakdown.
    An hour into reading the book, Max thought for sure he had found Drummond's case. The book had changed Drummond into a young, pretty girl named Daisy, but only that case matched the tone of Drummond's experience. Max, of course, knew he could be wrong, that he might be finding the outcome he wanted to find, but the other cases in the book either bore no sign of reality or bore signs of too much reality. They were people disturbed by abusive, tortuous childhoods or mystic delusions. Only the case of Daisy spoke of the reality Max had come to know. She had to be Drummond's case.
    According to the book, Drummond's therapy session uncovered that the ghost he had encountered was not, in fact, his first touch with the supernatural. His mother, Eunice Drummond, had suffered periodic seizures her entire life. Her parents had taken her to several doctors, but no cause could be determined. When she left home, she stopped seeking out doctors. As she once told her son, "I had no need for them. I've always known what causes my seizures."
    She then explained that she believed angels and demons would possess her body while she slept. Even if she nodded off for a quick nap, her soul opened to them. She had no way to prove it. Nothing beyond the seizures happened. But she promised her son that she knew this to be the case — because while in that state, she saw what they saw, she knew what they knew.
    She refused to tell little Marshall Drummond the specifics. "If I told you half of it, you'd never sleep again."
    Churches became prominent in their lives. She would take Marshall to a new church for weeks on end until she decided whether to move on to another church or to speak with the reverend or priest or whatever title that church used. When she spoke with the man, and it always was a man, he either thought she was evil or crazy. Then Marshall would be taken to a new church as Eunice kept searching for one that believed her.
    "But don't think ill of them or their church," she told him on numerous occasions. "A church, the actual building, is like a living being itself. So, you respect those who worship there and you respect the building itself. Otherwise, bad things'll happen."
    When Marshall was nine, they joined yet another church but something went wrong. Eunice thought they might have finally found people who understood her, and she excitedly went off late one night to meet the pastor at his home. She came back, bruised and disheveled, spewing hatred towards them and threatening to burn down their church. Marshall tried to remind her that churches were alive, and she struck him across the cheek.
    Two months later, at Marshall's tenth birthday party, she suffered a seizure that would not stop. His father and the other adults did all they could, but she died. An autopsy showed that she had a massive tumor in her brain, one that had been growing for years. Marshall then understood that his mother had been imagining the possessions, that she could have been saved if she had seen the right doctor, and that all the stories she had told him concerning the supernatural world were nothing more than the