Chapter Text
He was just trying to help.
“I’m not going.”
“Lydia, please. It’s for your own good. I can see that something is wrong. You need help!”
He wanted to be a better father
“ Nothing is wrong with me, dad!”
“You’ve been through things no child should have to go through!”
He just wanted her to be happy.
“I’m NOT a child!!! I can handle it!! Everything’s done. It’s over. And I’m fine .”
“Lydia-...”
He had no idea what to say to her, and she needed someone who could help her talk.
“Besides, what would you want me to tell them? I’m being tormented by a demon who’s fucking up my life?!”
“-language!”
“They’d send me to some asylum!!”
Charles Deetz took a long deep breath. She had a point. Any sane therapist would think she was crazy. But that was part of the reason he needed her to go.
Lydia had always experienced emotions strongly. After her mother’s death, she had thrown herself into a period of mourning. However, ever since they had moved into their new house, Lydia had been especially strange. Speaking to so-called ‘demons’ and ‘ghosts’, that the house is ‘haunted,’ that a demon wants to marry her.’
“You know I’m right.”
Charles was silent.
“I won’t let them send you anywhere. But you need to talk to someone.”
“I’ve been trying! I’ve been trying to tell you! But you don’t listen !”
“I’ve tried to, Lydia, but this is something that’s- it’s just too much– I- I’m sorry, Lydia. But you’re going. Tomorrow morning at 9am. And that’s final.”
“But DAD”
“That’s final!”
The door slammed as she stormed out of the room. He heard the stomping of her boots as she ran upstairs to the attic, to her ‘ghosts.’ Charles sighed deeply and put his head in his hands, rubbing his temples. He hated raising his voice at her. He missed how things used to be. But now, they’d fallen so out of touch.
They didn’t talk like they used to. Him barely leaving his office except for work and Lydia spending all her time in her bedroom or the attic. She really had tried to tell him, but Charles was a hard-edged skeptic. Sure, he enjoyed the occasional ghost story around the campfire, but at the end of the day he knew he could come home and know that it was fiction. Yes, there were the occasional odd sounds around the house that one could argue to be footsteps, or a door closing; and true, now and then he would find his keys or his phone in a spot that he was sure he hadn’t left them, but it was surely just his imagination. It was an old house, it made strange sounds, and his memory wasn’t what it was before.
The stories he could work with. Emily made up stories and role-playing games all the time when she was alive for Lydia and his amusement. But it was the screaming, at night that frightened him. The increasing frequency of Lydia’s experiences of night-terrors. He’d tried to wake her from them, but was either met with a violently terrified teenager or with a trembling form of a girl who couldn’t speak.
He’d also found her, occasionally, suddenly frozen still with panic at something only she could see or hear. “ It was him, Dad. The demon… ” she’d try to tell him when she finally regained herself. But he couldn’t help but worry that it was much more than that.
Charles could hear her now through the floorboards, conversing with who Lydia had identified as the ghosts that died in the house. Adam and, what was it….Barbara Maitland. She spent hours, sometimes entire days in the attic. Laughing, playing games, talking about him or Emily…. Or fretting to them about the demon.
He shook his head and took a sip of his whiskey. He wasn’t an alcoholic, but he had known this conversation with Lydia would require some liquid courage. This wasn’t normal. He had heard about and researched maladaptive daydreaming, but this was different. Lydia swore to him it was real. Charles had humored her at first when it was just about the Maitlands. He thought maybe she just needed some friends. But then the demon showed up before he could begin sending her to school. In her state, with sudden inexplicable panic attacks, insisting she was seeing and speaking to beings that weren’t real, he couldn’t feel safe or confident allowing her to attend a school just yet.
Charles stared at the bottom of his empty glass and glanced back at the name written on his desk planner, Maxie Dean, and silently prayed that this doctor could help his daughter.