Free Echo Boy by Matt Haig

old when she died, was entirely understandable. She wore long dark clothes, and a few wisps of white hair sprouted out of her chin and cheeks. The room was all metal, a kind of dark steel, I think. In the middle was a strange-looking couch with a helmet attached to it. As soon as we entered, Mrs Matsumoto smiled a thin smile from her chair beside the couch. On the palm of her left hand there was a circular metal disc. Smaller metal discs merged into the skin of her fingertips. She also had a picture of a large open eye tattooed to the middle of her forehead that had probably been there for a century. Her actual eyes, when I got close to them, had milky cataracts over them. She was blind, I realized.
    ‘They brought five out of six senses back to life,’ she said in her slow voice, after telling me to lie down on the couch.
    She turned to Uncle Alex. She seemed to know exactly where he was in the room. ‘How are the nightmares?’ she asked.
    Uncle looked at me nervously. He obviously didn’t want me to know he had nightmares. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Much better.’
    Then she pushed the helmet-thing away. ‘I prefer to use my hands,’ she said, and she touched the side of my head with the cold metal fingertips and brushed against the pads.
    ‘They’re neuropads,’ Uncle explained. ‘They’re a new invention. A kind of tranquillizer. I’m a bit concerned about them, actually. I would prefer her not to need them.’ He explained what had happened in the car. He then asked for a word with Mrs Matsumoto on her own, and they went into a small side room, and spoke for a bit.
    When they came back, Mrs Matsumoto told me that the therapy would only work if I took the pads off, so I did.
    My heart began to race straight away. I suddenly wondered what I had agreed to. I wanted to get off the couch.
    ‘Grief and terror are twins,’ she told me. ‘They arrive together. Now . . . I want you to hear nothing except my voice.’
    ‘I don’t think I’m ready for this,’ I said. ‘I think I should go.’
    ‘It will help you,’ Uncle told me as I wondered what he had just been saying to Mrs Matsumoto. ‘She is the best in the world.’
    Mrs Matsumoto was now whispering something in Japanese. Uncle Alex handed me some info-lenses.
    ‘You’ll need these,’ he said.
    I put them in. The translation soon arrived. ‘Now, listen to me,’ she said. ‘I am picking up all kinds of intensity from inside your mind. You cannot go on like this. You will need to come to terms with what has happened. The only way to get over horror is to face it. The only way you can do this is to think about what happened. To visualize it in your mind. Your body is going to become paralysed, rigid, to intensify the mental activity. I am going to channel all these thought-waves, all this negative neural activity, and you are going to experience all that emotion, all that grief, all at once. But after that you will be able to move on with your life. Now, think about what happened to your parents . . . Think about what you saw . . . Picture your house. Picture her. Picture Alissa—’
    How did she know Alissa’s name? I suppose Uncle Alex must have told her. But it unsettled me. And I don’t know what was inside those metal fingertips, but I was rigid, and memories and emotions rose like lava in a volcano. I was suddenly seeing my dad’s office, and Alissa, and my parents. I was feeling it all at once. All that undiluted terror and grief. It felt hot. It felt like I was burning with memory from the inside. It was singeing my parents away from me, like I was losing a limb. And it was too much. I started screaming. Or I tried to scream, but my jaw was locked. I was in total paralysis.
    ‘Stop it!’ Uncle said to Mrs Matsumoto. ‘It’s not working. You’ve got to stop it. It’s too much for her.’
    She took her fingers away. My body was released. I could scream properly, and I did. I screamed too loud, because a moment later there was a