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If you’ve ever been into a bookstore, you’ve seen a book by Neil Everest. Once he begun as a science fiction / horror wunderkind in the 1970s, his career took off with an endless parade of writing awards and prestige. His works were hailed as groundbreaking and earth-shattering, and literary snobs fawned over him at galas and wooed him with enormous advances. Neil’s personal life managed to stay primarily out of the spotlight, the focus deflected by his public relations team to his work--- and for good reason. Neil was paranoid and harbored delusions that his work was real, that the nightmares he had which lent themselves to his stories were actually prophecies or transmissions from nonhuman beings. He was not allowed to do interviews after telling a Publishers Weekly reporter that he had received the idea for his latest novel from a beast that lived in the walls of his Victorian home in New England.
Shut off from the world, Neil forgot how to do anything but write. His young wife Patricia, who had met him at an artists’ retreat a few months before where he’d been a guest speaker, became frightened of his intensity. She couldn’t get him to eat dinner or come out of the house; he barricaded the door to his study when she interrupted him one too many times. Finally, Patricia relented, realizing that if she couldn’t beat him, she could join him. She began to write with him, the two of them collaborating on a series of stories they came to call “Valerie on the Stairs”. The story was about a beautiful young girl who was trapped in a great rambling house with a savage beast caught in its walls. The girl would run and hide and fight him off, but nothing could stop him once he’d caught her scent, and he would ravish her until the dawn. Sometimes the simple act of writing, the religious fervor that overtakes a true writer when his craft seizes upon him and won’t let him go, would sweep through Neil and he would forget to turn off the typewriter as he made frantic, brutal love to Patricia in the study, on his writing desk. She never complained about how rough and impersonal the sex was; it was clearly a way of relieving pent-up stress and aggression harbored by malnutrition and his hermitic lifestyle.
Still, when Patricia realized she was pregnant with his child, she was overjoyed. She thought that Neil would break out of his shell and step up to the role of father, that the baby would be a good distraction for him and persuade him to set aside his manuscripts. They had plenty of money because the books sold like hotcakes the second they hit the shelves. Fanmail poured in. People were ravenous for more stories. Enough was never enough. They always requested that the stories be more cruel, more sadistic, more sick--- they wanted Valerie to suffer, and ate up every word.
Patricia gave birth to a beautiful, healthy baby girl, a midwife present because Neil refused to leave the house for the length of time a hospital delivery would take. He insisted that they name their daughter Valerie after the books which had made them so successful, and Patricia agreed, though she found it disturbing given the content of the stories. If they were bedtime stories about princesses and knights, sure, but these were far from it.
When Valerie was three years old, she was a bright, sweet little girl who adored her mother. She desperately sought attention from her father as well, but he was too distracted to notice her most of the time. She was often left to her own devices, but if she ever got into mischief, Neil would be there with another story custom-tailored for her. One afternoon, she was climbing up the steep staircase from the kitchen while Patricia cooked dinner. She was halfway up when she lost her footing and nearly fell; she managed to stop herself, but began to cry from scraping her knee. Disturbed by the sound of her sobbing, Neil burst from his study and stormed down the stairs toward her, scolding and shouting that she knew she wasn’t allowed on the stairs by herself. In an effort to punish her, Neil put her in her room and made up a terrifying story, telling her that the beast lived beneath the stairwell and if she ever tried to climb it again without an adult present, it would come up through the floorboards and gobble her right up. Valerie stared at him with enormous eyes and never questioned a thing.
Encouraged by this form of learning, Neil began to take sadistic pleasure in tormenting his daughter with tales of the beast. He knew it frightened her by the way she clutched her blankets and slept with a light on, but he couldn’t stop himself. His creative juices were dammed up inside him and had been since she was born; the novels were a struggle now where they’d come easily before, and he blamed Valerie as a distraction to his work. He began to take it out on his young daughter relentlessly. At first it was just the mental anguish of the Beast, a cautionary tale that had a profound effect on Valerie. As it progressed, however, Patricia noticed that Neil became increasingly disturbing in his behavior. He forced Valerie to read out loud when he got writers' block, calling her his 'muse'; she would be made to read until her mouth ran dry, until she could taste blood on the back of her throat. Sometimes he lashed out, screaming at her if she so much as came out of her room. Other times, when the writing was going well, he became almost too tender, holding her on his lap and crooning into her dark hair as he promised to keep the Beast at bay, that he'd never let anything harm her.
Patricia desperately wanted to send Valerie to public school to get her out of the house for awhile, but Neil would have none of it. Frustrated and frightened by her husband's behavior and worried about the effect it would have on Valerie, Patricia filed for divorce and custody. She moved to her mother's house to await the custody hearing. She called home every day to speak to Valerie, but the girl was distant and never spoke much.
Two days before the custody hearing, Patricia headed over to the house to see for herself how things were going. No one had answered her phone call that morning, and she knew that the two of them never left the house. When she walked into the foyer, she was greeted with the sight of her twelve-year-old daughter, clad only in a threadbare white nightshirt and covered in blood. Neil was in his study, pants around his ankles and a dozen knife wounds spanning his chest, belly and throat.
Investigations proved that Neil had been molesting Valerie for quite some time; Patricia was horrified to learn that the inspiration for some of the more inventive 'tortures' Neil had used in his Valerie novels were in fact things he'd inflicted for real on their own daughter. Unspeakable torment of the physical variety, always careful not to leave marks where Patricia might see them. Valerie sat stoically during the entire ordeal, except when they asked her what had happened to her father.
"It was the Beast," she'd say quietly, her eyes getting huge and fearful. "He didn't like Daddy touching me... it made him angry."
It was soon discovered through court-ordered psychiatric evaluations that Valerie was so severely damaged by Neil's psychoses that she was actually living under the illusion that she was the Valerie of the stories her parents wrote. She believed herself to be a fictitious person, willed into being by her father's creativity; she thought that the Beast of the stories was absolutely tangible and truly did live in the walls, waiting for a chance to snare her and claim his prize. Valerie was terrified of the dark and kept vigil most nights, sitting up in her bed with the dogged determination of a lifelong insomniac. She wrote obsessively in journals--- when asked why, she told one psychologist that if she stopped, she would cease to exist because she only lived through the stories. Occasionally, she suffered blackouts of her conscious. One enterprising psychologist decided to try hypnotherapy and pretended to 'summon the Beast', hoping to provoke her into realizing that nothing happened when he invoked it. Instead, he wound up with scratches furrowed down his cheek and a letter opener pinning his left hand to the surface of his desk. Valerie didn't speak for a week when they brought her out of the hypnogogic state.
Horrified and wracked with guilt over what she'd allowed to happen to her beautiful little girl, Patricia Everest signed her daughter over to the state for psychiatric care. Valerie was kept in a juvenile facility until she turned eighteen, then transferred to a unit in upstate Maine for several years. She showed relatively small progress given the variety of treatments her doctors tried. She was unresponsive to most medications and more drastic methods showed no long-term effect. In frustration at their lack of success, the doctors applied to transfer her to a more progressive center in New England called Cheshire Crossing. None of them were sad to see her go, only defeated. Whatever had happened to Valerie Everest as a child had broken her for good--- in truth, her ruin had begun the moment she first stepped on the staircase.
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