When Rabbit Howls

by Truddi Chase

Before she realised what had happened, a simmer began at the injustice of their place, or lack of one, in the world. Sewer Mouth was raging. Catherine couldn’t step in quickly enough to siphon the anger to Black Katherine.

The woman would have sworn that she sensed more than one small child—one who was sticky and one who was not; one who spoke words, and one who conveyed thoughts only.

The one whose voice sounded like a duchess reclined in a chair at the kitchen table, with no sense of humour. She watched them all, unsmiling and offended. She announced her full and proper name to be Lady Catherine Tissieu and, over roars of protest, loaded her plate with cauliflower,

The others heard. The silence in the kitchen was palpable. And when the woman looked into the mirror over the sink, her eyes were strange: apple-green with a thread of black around them and in the center of each, a tiny, dead-black iris.

“Any mind,” he said, “has a limit to how far it can be pushed. Those two farmhouses would have blown the average mind sky high. You have recalled a lot, but I’ve a feeling your subconscious knows the upcoming layers will be far more frightening. Hence, partially, the extreme panic now and the need for Mean Joe when you were growing up. If Mean Joe retaliated with violence back there he’d have been dealing in what I call ultimate ways. Sometimes that’s what saying the final ‘no’ boils down to. Ultimate ways.”

She turned to face him, squarely. “It’s got to do with energy, the energy of the mind, doesn’t it?” “Yes,” he said. “It does.”

“The woman I mentioned to you the last time,” she said, “scored an eighty percent on her test.” “She could have scored twenty-five percent and still be a multiple,” Stanley told her. “The process has revealed almost no absolutes. Observation is your best tool. Watch the facial and body movements, the figures of speech, the attitudes toward established social and moral values, the habit patterns. Particularly in the case of my client, anyway, watch for someone distracted, bemused, who gets lost easily, can’t follow directions. And then look for just the opposite, and all the variations thereto.”

Click. There was an instant image of a long, dull black robe . . . something white at the throat of it, and something black covering the head. Sister Mary Catherine had evidenced.

“How do you differentiate ‘persons,’ as opposed to emotional behavior alone? How have you arrived at this present body count of fifty?” “Different emotions don’t give a person different handwriting, eye colours, brain waves, intelligence quotients, or memories. Catherine, for instance, never had a child and can’t relate to the suggestion that she was ever married. Catherine was never part of those experiences.”

“Are you saying the high body count represents the degree of abuse and damage?” “No one knows, as yet. Fifty isn’t a high count, but then we’ve barely scratched the surface of the Troops’ childhood. The degree of abuse, the intelligence of the original child, the degree of secretiveness within the family—perhaps these things all come into play, and perhaps none of them, in some cases at least, applies at all. There is a very small percentage of multiples who were never abused as children.”

“I know what you want to tell me, mother. I asked daddy why he has a family and you don’t. He started to cry. He said to me, ‘I knew you were going to ask me that someday. I don’t know what to tell you.’ Then he said you have multiple personalities and he told me about the incest, sort of.” “Page, do you understand, I mean really understand, any of it? Do they ever mention child sexual abuse in school?” “My friends talk about it. What I don’t understand is the multiple part. I mean, I do but I don’t, you know?”

There would be no running. Before she could even try, the Weaver blocked the way. The Irishman leaned down and he laid her in the dead center of her own being. He held her buoyant so that she floated in the space that was her own and she received because the space was so vast and empty and therefore allowed it—the total essence of those who surrounded her like an army, and their cries were hell itself. The woman had just evidenced. Do y’ see now, what y’ are and do y’ see y’r purpose? She saw. Existence in y’r case, and he was laughing but it was not unkind, has nothin’ t’ do w’ y’r specific presence. Y’ exist because y’ d’ not.

On one of the stepfather’s excursions, looking for spare parts for the cars he repaired, he used to stop at many junkyards. The Troop member evidencing seemed to rise slowly from the juxtaposition of texture on texture, his body bent to meld with the various objects blanketing him. “Junkman.” The name lay in the woman’s mind. She caught a sense of him, as being the essence of all hiding, all “removal” from the world. She smiled, accepting him and all that he was, for he asked nothing except his right to stay hidden. That right seemed to be protected in some way, by Mean Joe.

“DO I know you?” Stanley was polite. “Sure you do, Charlie.” Elvira stared him in the eye for the first time since he’d entered the warehouse loft. She seldom called anyone by their correct name because doing anything according to the book scared her.

It’s October. Do you know it’s been two months since our last session?” “It can’t be more than two weeks!”

“Where’s the time?” she screamed. “Where’s the time? The farmhouses, there was never a clock, I never saw a clock! Did we have a clock, we must have, but I never saw it, where’s the time?”

“Most incest victims,” he said quietly, “most multiples, have a support system of friends and family. You don’t. I want you to understand that from now on, I’m your support system. Is that clear?” It was the closest he’d ever dared to come with her to being parental, authoritative, and nurturing. He waited for the explosion. Instead, something suspiciously like gratitude crept into her eyes. The woman was incapable of expressing it verbally. She nodded.

“Somebody’s finally figured out a term for what your client’s going through,” he said. It’s called the ‘revolving-door syndrome.’ Probably the most frantic, confusing time of all for a multiple; it happens when the going gets really rough. The people come and go rapidly, yet the changes, while almost constant, are fully formed.”

“Why,” the woman asked, “couldn’t you two have had different names?” “She’s not original,” said Catherine, studying her image in the glassware. “She copied me.”

“People like Sharon and Norman are confused. They insist that to a degree, everyone has multiple personalities, that everyone has different sides, and sometimes they can’t remember things either.” “In your case,” Stanley said, “we’re talking about a continuum. The opposite end of the spectrum. Other people remember what their different sides or personalities do. They don’t have extensive memory blanks. Researchers feel that inside any one multiple group, there’s someone who knows everything. I don’t know if that’s true in your case, or if everyone in the Troop Formation may be said to have extensive memory blanks.”

Suddenly the words weren’t hers or Sewer Mouth’s, but Rachel’s. Rachel, having evolved from Sewer Mouth over a nine-year period, had finally been born at the second farmhouse, exactly what she would always remain; a fifteen-year-old with the knowledge of a whorehouse madam. Rachel conveyed her nature today without her usual sensuous movements; an acknowledgement, perhaps, that many in the Troop Formation considered her overt sensuality an affront. The woman sat there, hearing Rachel’s voice, young and very far away.

A cup of hot chocolate belonging to Me sat by the bed. Me seldom came out. The woman sensed that the child did not find things fun. The woman crawled under the blankets, too tired and confused to feel the terror. Except that she knew it was there.

“They’re going to bring further recall. In order for them to do that, you must get to know each one. You see, in view of all that went on, you still don’t have enough memory. Perhaps it’s not that they’re stronger,” Stanley forced himself to be more direct, “but that you are more aware of them.”

This will be fun, Me said. Do we get to stay up and watch or do we have to go to bed? Sleep is not so beneficial as instruction, said the Irishman. Watch if y’ will. What are you drinking? Me asked. Nothin’ y’d be interested in. There’s not a bloody drop o’ chocolate in it.

Stanley laid down the clipboard. “Let the chips fall where they may.” “Thank you, Stanley. For whatever reason, I find more courage in those words than any others, except maybe, ‘Let the devil take the hindemost.’ I love it. I really do.”

Someone brand new to the woman’s complete awareness laid a hand on her arm, then brushed away the tears. The woman felt the smile; tender . . . and uncontrollable. She felt the innocent youth and kindness that was the essence of this new person. Wrapped in all of that, yet standing above and beyond it, the woman became enmeshed in the soaring intelligence of a brilliant mind. She had just met Twelve.

“Stop calling me ‘the little one,”’ said a small voice. “My name is Lamb Chop. It was the only thing I liked to eat on the first farm. Lamb chops with mint jelly.”

had made it possible to do a mind-boggling number of mundane, routine chores in a relatively short time span, thus freeing them for more esoteric pursuits. The movements were unbelievably quick as the newly emerged Troop member went through the purse, sorting out piles of loose change, makeup, money, sketches, and lists. She could not seem to sit still, he could see her mind working as fast as her hands.

“Mable. She can clean a whole house in forty minutes, from top to bottom. She can apply a full makeup in three minutes flat. She sews, irons, cooks, organises the closets, buys the groceries, and keeps the manuscript files straight.”

“She doesn’t hire out,” Catherine said wryly. “There are others behind Mable, each one with her own specialty. One of them does very fine stitching, one of them is a gourmet cook, one has the ability to endure, for more than three or four hours, a roomful of Clorox,

“The Outrider is her own person,” Catherine said, “the only one of us to have two identities. Half of her duty entails creating . . . a certain atmosphere, to disguise our unhappiness and pain, and perhaps even her own, no one knows. The other half is to ride herd, to acknowledge and bind our wounds without drawing attention to the blood. She is the essence of all camouflage.

She taught the Junkman to survive by hiding, when he thought all was lost. Others live in her shadow, too: Twelve, until she became a Front Runner; some of the sexual ones, Sixteen and Rachel; Brat and Me and a few of the more literarily creative ones, to mention just a few. Surprises you, doesn’t it?”

There is something else. You mentioned integration. Whom would you choose among us to live beyond that integration? Whom would you kill? The whole Troop Formation is up in arms. For them, contemplating integration is like living back at the farmhouses when the daily threat of death hung over their heads. Do you think we survived the farmhouses only to have you convince us of the advisability of mass suicide?”

“Two, four, six, eight, we don’t wanna integrate!”

“I don’t understand.” Twelve turned to Stanley. “We went through the same things they talk about, and more. But we never thought of Page as a sexual object. Why?” “You’ve had a lot of help from each other,”

“You’ve all mentioned loving your children. We have a child who is fourteen. We can’t honestly say we’ve ever felt an emotion like love. Hatred for various things, yes. Love, no. Incest is a thief; it steals more from its victims than you can ever imagine. Make no mistake—by whatever pretense—incest, child abuse, stinks out loud.”

“Black Katherine was waiting, you know,” said Twelve. “She’s part of the Big Three. They handle frustration, anger, and rage. If just one man had said

Twelve smiled. “Among us, there is a proverb. ‘When Rabbit howls, can Black Katherine be far behind?’ It’s like, Mean Joe protects Miss Wonderful and Lamb Chop and the rest of the little ones but Black Katherine moves in on anyone who hurts Rabbit. Black Katherine gives ’em the pain they deserve; she’s the strongest of the Big Three. But when you got stuck in Rabbit’s pain that night in the session, Black Katherine took it away for you.

“Look. You’ve just finished conducting real estate transactions in a rotten economy; you’re finishing the manuscript, illustrating and doing the camera copy for a five-hundred-page booklet, seeing your daughter, and having six hours of therapy a week. It’s all a strain and ninety percent of it involves a very draining creativity.”

She said that when the first-born died at two years old, she split into two cores: one potential child, the other potential adult. She explained how both cores slept and that mirror-images had been created for them, to absorb what happened to the other selves. The cores themselves, she said, absorbed none of the abuse. “The cores,” the woman said, “sleep on Mean Joe’s shoulder. I know, I can feel him protecting them. I just didn’t know what they were.” “Mean Joe is their safety,” Catherine said. “The cores may have the same kind of memory you do. Nothing more than a far-off sense of the abuse, and a daily apprehension.”

Unsure of herself, the woman folded. Sister Mary Catherine reached out and gently tapped the girls’ white knuckles with a black, felt-tipped pen. “It gets better,” she said, passing along Jeannie Lawson’s message to the Troops, months ago. As if to question the statement, Lisa looked quickly at Stanley. Tears lay along the edges of her eyes. Without a word to either of them, she turned and walked away.

“Victim and multiple,” the woman said, trying to believe it. “All the signs are there,” Stanley said. “I’ve tested her. I’m trying to tell her as painlessly as possible.” “Well,” Twelve said, “when she’s ready, we’ll give her crayons and a teddy bear. Do you think that will help? Does she have a lot of little ones? Is she very scared?”

“The yoga positions,” Stanley said, ignoring this change as he had the others, “your ability to withdraw so totally from the world around you. Your powers of concentration, of complete focus; they’re all a part of the same general abilities. Some might even call them gifts.” “You’re saying I do subconsciously, what mediums and yoga practitioners do consciously. I do all those things without being aware of it?” “That’s exactly what I’m saying. Some researchers feel that such a gift may be the basis for multiplicity.”

“I did it,” she said. “I got out of my bed one night and I set fire to the damn barn. Just like that. Good-bye, barn.” She waited for Stanley’s comment, but he waited for her to continue. “I wanted,” she said, “to drive the stepfather out into the open. The barn was too convenient a cover for the bastard. Sister Mary Catherine just stood there that night, watching the flames. The mother told her to go into the house, bring out anything she wanted to save. They were afraid the house would burn, too.” “Where was the woman, my client, all that time?” “When the first-born died at two years old,” Elvira said, “the woman started evolving. But it wasn’t until the night of the fire that she was actually born—Mean Joe’s shoulder is her birthplace.”

They offer a new option for resolution. After I became aware of the multiple persons I fully expected that the goal of psychotherapy would be to find the central person and to integrate the others into the process of that one. However, I discovered that the “core” was dead, and that the process of healing would most likely result in a number of persons who spoke through the “shell” of a woman. The task became cooperation of many, rather than the integration into one. This book has been the result of that cooperation and demonstrates the efficacy of this means of resolution. Increasingly, therapists who work with multiple personalities report more than one type of resolution.

A careful reading of those pages indicates that this passage is in fact the story that Ean reads to the children. The rage of the children cried out for revenge for the brutality many of them experienced. In effect the ending helped the children release their pent-up rage at the stepfather without putting themselves in legal jeopardy. Therefore Ean’s Christmas gift to the children is the story of revenge—their revenge.

For the most part, Ean is still a mystery to us, but in writing this book we were forced to acknowledge his power.

This reprise of the current state of the Troops gives me an excellent indication of the progress that has been made since I first saw them in September 1980 in the woman who I was told was Truddi Chase. There is evidence of increased functioning since that time and a greater acceptance of who they are and how their multiplicity works for them.

Fears are still present, and at times the experience is almost overwhelming, but when the resources of the Troops are called into play, they are able to overcome those fears and go on. The energy that has led them toward life and empowered them to survive, and then begin to thrive, will be a major asset in their decision to confront life and explore relationships. Trust will remain an issue for the Troops, but for good reasons. A positive note is that they are no longer as often paralyzed by their fears of others.