Writer's Group discussion

This is just a short story I had to write for my fiction writing class at school. Please let me know your honest opinion of it.
Please note: this story is kinda dark and discusses things that not everyone may be comfortable with. I believe that I followed the rules as posted in the Rules folder, but I also know that I may have accidently crossed one. I'm sorry if this offends or upsets anyone.

The room was bright, a combination of overhead lights and white walls giving one the sensation of being locked in a light bulb. The only elements of darkness were the oak table and two chairs in the center of the room and the two-way mirror adorning a single wall.
On the other side of the mirror in the darkened observing room was Dr. Greg Turner, a psychologist who specialized in sociopathic tendencies. Inside the room, being carefully observed by Dr. Turner, was Carolyn Read.
Dr. Turner looked at the girl before him who had come to the police only six hours ago and turned herself in. Immediately she was brought to the mental ward of Pardoins Hospital, and since that time had been a mystery he was anxious to solve.
Dr. Turner looked down at his notes a collection of her school records, extracurricular activities, everything from her birth to her blood sample test taken only yesterday that had come back clean. Nothing that could explain what this girl was thinking or why she would murder her entire family, there was no clear motive, and she didn’t seem insane like many others he had observed during his tenure at Pardoins.
He looked up from his notes. She was standing there, when she had moved he wasn’t sure, but it unnerved him. Her green eyes focused on his gray ones as if trying to weed their way down into his soul and destroy him from the inside out. Her eyes held no warmth, no kindness, nearly devoid of any life. They were almost like dark voids that once held a spark of hope and love in them. Unknowingly, Dr. Turner stepped back from the glass, and her eyes almost seemed to follow him as he moved about the small observing room.
His eyes remained fixed on the girl before him. She tilted her head slightly, mimicking a predator hunting its prey in the darkest night. A small smile appeared on her face, a smile that caused the minimal amount of hair on Dr. Turner’s head to stand on end. He lifted his hand to try and smooth them back down, and those eyes followed his movements through the darkness.
Dr. Turner looked towards the door, finding himself anxious to leave the small room and run from the fear he was feeling. He closed his eyes and began to concentrate, years of meditation washing over him. “I am standing on my yacht,” he said in a slightly shaky voice. “I am miles away from here.”
He opened his eyes and discovered that Carolyn had moved away from the glass window separating them and back to her small oak seat. He wondered if it had all been in his imagination. However, as he started to move about the room, gathering his notes, he couldn’t help but feel she was still watching him.
Dr. Turner moved to the door and out of the small observation room knowing that to find the truth he would have to get into her head. There was no other option to get the information he needed.
Two male nurses stood outside the room Carolyn was residing in for the moment, dressed in blue and carrying small sticks used for self-defense against unruly patients. Dr. Turner knew them both well and nodded and smiled at them. They responded in kind and one moved to open the door. After flashing his I.D. badge at them for regulation purposes, Dr. Turner entered the room, fear being his only companion.
“Good afternoon, Carolyn,” he said walking forward to the seat across from her, but not daring to look at her just yet. He could still feel her eyes following him as he moved. “I am Dr. Turner.” He sat and looked up at her knowing eye contact was essential to establish trust.
She just stared at him, her eyes narrowing slightly expressing confusion and perhaps even slight anger. Carolyn didn’t want him around that was for sure.
“I’ve come here to talk to you about what happened.”
She raised an eyebrow. “I doubt that is what you really want,” she said, her voice sharp and deadly, like a knife.
Dr. Turner placed his hands on the table, his fingers folding over each other creating a woven pattern he felt made him appear more trusting. “Of course I do. A young woman like yourself that is so highly accomplished. What else would I want to know?’
“My reasoning for murdering my family is not one you would want to pretend to know,” she said. “In the end you will lock me up and throw away the key, filing me under a psychopathic or sociopathic killer that will never again see the light of day. I’ll be kept calm through the use of drugs and forced to relay all my past deeds to a bunch of lost souls in a room where you, as mediator, watch as we slowing submerge ourselves in our own dark insanity.”
Dr. Turner said nothing. Her depiction of what would occur was quite accurate. Once the case was solved to his satisfaction she would be filed, drugged, and at best be able to return to society as a fully functional individual someday. However, the isolation draws some deeper into the darkness of their own souls until they are forced to be removed from the group altogether. These patients end up in solitary, never to receive human contact again, except for their few sessions with him a month.
He leaned back in his chair, his hands falling from the table into his lap. “Perhaps you would like to talk of your life before everything that has happened?” he said, ignoring her dim talk of her thoughts of her future there.
Carolyn said nothing at first. Her eyes staring at him as if he wasn’t even in the room, giving Dr. Turner the feeling of talking to a puppet when he needed the puppeteer.
“Life is a lie,” she said suddenly making Dr. Turner nearly jump at the sound. He focused on her. Her expression didn’t change; the bored look upon her face that had been there since he walked into the room, unaltered from any conversation they had. Only her eyes changed, switching from light and dark, lifeless to lively, unsettling for one attempting to understand her.
“A lie?” he said. “I’m not sure I understand.”
Her head twitched slightly, as if his statement had annoyed her, however, her facial expression didn’t change. Her green eyes stared at him in mild annoyance. On some level she seemed to be studying him more than he was her, looking for a weakness he refused to show.

“We are born to die,” she said. “What we call a life is merely an illusion. Humans slowly moving closer to death and trying call their constantly failing health something else. We humorously attempt to slow it down through drugs and good eating habits, but it does not change facts. In the end, everyone dies.”
Dr. Turner watched as she turned her head to the side, her eyes staring off into the abyss, almost as if the brightness of the room didn’t affect her.
“All my so-called achievements and fantastic grades, things that parents can gloat about at the next get-together or neighborhood barbeque,” she said. She turned her eyes back to him. “They only matter to the parents, never really to the children. It never matters what we do during this so-called life, eventually we are all nothing more than food for the maggots that crawl over our decomposing flesh deep underground.”
She turned her head and looked directly at Dr. Turner. A smile began to appear on her face, one that looked like it belonged on Norman Bates rather than a 17-year-old girl.
“Death is all that is needed to know. It is ingrained throughout our history,” she said. “Wars are fought and people die, serial killers go out and murder others, children are kidnapped and never seen again, people are abducted and their bodies show up down the Mississippi River six months later completely deformed from who they used to be.”
Carolyn’s smile faded as she focused back on Dr. Turner’s face. “What you want to know Dr. Turner,” she said, “is easily explained, but not very satisfying. I didn’t kill my family because they were already dying as we all are. I just sped up the process and got them to their natural end a little faster.”
She stood, staring down at the older man. Her presence filling the room with something Dr. Turner could almost not describe, a kind of black hole sucking in all the life.
“Now that you have what you want,” she said, “I think you can file me away now.”
She sat back down, her face once again becoming one of boredom, her eyes staring at him as if he wasn’t even there. Her brown hair hung loosely about her face, cut short after most of it had been drenched in blood only hours ago. The blood of a family she seemed to feel nothing for.
Dr. Turner stood and walked over to the door, careful not to turn his back completely to the girl, a lesson he had learned when he was a much younger man. He knocked three times and turned back to Carolyn.
She hadn’t moved, almost like she hadn’t noticed he had moved. Her eyes stared directly ahead, at the chair he had recently vacated. Her eyes like dark orbs consuming her entire body and soul.
The door opened and the two nurses from outside entered. They stood, waiting for Dr. Turner’s instructions as they had done hundreds of times before.
“Take Miss Read to her room and make sure she gets comfortable there. Let Nurse Writmen know she has a new patient and to give her the appropriate dosage for a good night’s sleep,” he said, never taking his eyes off the girl. She didn’t seem to hear him, but when he had mentioned dosage the corner of her mouth seemed to twitch up slightly into a sort of deranged smile.
One of the nurses replied before walking over to the girl. Both men lifted her out of the chair and carried the nearly comatose girl out of the room. Dr. Turner kept his eyes on hers as they moved her, finding himself drawn into the darkness that seemed to emanate from her. As she passed by him, Dr. Turner was sure that her eyes flashed over to him suddenly, now filled with the bright light her yearbook photo in his notes had portrayed, watching him as she was removed from the room.

Later, Dr. Turner sat in his darkened office, using the small desk lamp for light and staring at Carolyn’s file upon his desk. A picture of his wife and son stared up at him from a frame on the corner of his desk next to a picture of his daughter and his new son-in-law on honeymoon in Hawaii. Their lively eyes a stark contrast to Carolyn’s unfeeling ones.
He continued to study her file, but nothing suggested any sort of violent tendencies toward her or others in the past. Her father had been a manager at the local Barnes and Noble and was well known as a hard working guy who loved his family, her mother had been a stay at home mom who had been working on a children’s book, and her younger brother had been about to go into high school next year. There was no history of violent behavior that would lead him to understand why she would have gone after her family in such a way. There was nothing, but the story of a girl who enjoyed her life to the fullest.
Dr. Turner sighed to himself as he sat back in his chair, rubbing his eyes with his fingertips. There had to be more here than just a girl gone crazy over the amount of burdens placed on her. On some level she believed that she had saved her family, not killed them, but what exactly would put her in such a mindset? It didn’t make any sense.
He stared down at the yearbook photo. She had a bright smile and sparkling eyes, a complete opposite to the girl he had seen only a few hours ago. What had happened between this photo and now?
Two days later, unable to come up with a reasonable explanation, Dr. Turner entered the bright room again, this time determined to discover what had caused such a grievous crime to be committed, and what exactly was going on in Carolyn Read’s head.
She sat there, as she had like the last time he saw her, staring at her reflection in the two way mirror, almost as if her own appearance fascinated her. Her expression was as before; bored with a hint of aggravation.
The door shut behind him, giving Dr. Turner the feeling of being locked in a tomb. He walked over to his seat and sat down across from her.
“Unwilling to file me away just yet Dr. Turner?” Carolyn said, her eyes focusing in on his.
Dr. Turner smiled, one he used to invoke kindness and understanding towards his difficult patients in the past. “I don’t think we are done talking just yet Carolyn,” he said. “I want to know more about your family.”
Carolyn raised an eyebrow. “My family is six feet under by now in their natural place. Ashes to ashes, Dust to dust. To talk about them would be very unproductive.”
Dr. Turner nodded, his hands folded in his lap as he listened to her. “That may be, but humor me.”
Carolyn moved slightly as if uncomfortable, the handcuffs on her wrists bouncing against the oak chair, the sound softly echoing off the solid, white walls.
“I humor no one but myself,” she said, “and it is not in my humor to talk of my family.”
Dr. Turner shrugged. Feeling more confident now that he had a few days before when he first encountered her, he leaned forward and placed his hands on the table, one resting upon the other.
“Well,” he said,” what would humor you?”
Carolyn said nothing for several seconds, almost as if contemplating what to say to the man before her. For the first time her eyes began to have some sort of spark in them, as if she was finally excited to talk about something she cared about.
“My best friend, Susanna, had her birthday last week,” she said unexpectedly. “The big 1-8. My boyfriend, Jeremy, and I went to the party, but it was pretty boring.”
Dr. Turner was surprised. He hadn’t expected such a teenage response, but decided to see where it would lead him. “Why was it boring?”
“Well,” she said before going off on a long list of problems with her friend’s 18th birthday celebration. Carolyn dissected everything from the decorations to the cake, almost like she was still there looking at all the details.
Dr. Turner listened, trying to find something that would give him any indication leading to the death of her family. Her boyfriend, Jeremy, could be the cause of violence that would lead to her violence toward her family. Perhaps she had been raped by him and feared what her parents would say? Perhaps he put the idea in her head to kill them? There was any number of answers stemming from that line of thinking.
“Mom never much cared for Jeremy, always thought he wasn’t good enough for me. But then again Mom never did like anything I was into.”
Dr. Turner’s attention was caught and he was pulled back to the conversation. She had brought up her family on her own in a slightly negative tone, perhaps indicating trouble that could have lead to her eventual murder spree.
“That’s interesting,” he said. “What else was she against?”
Carolyn’s eyes instantly lost all the life they had previously regained. Her whole body became limp and colorless; so much so she began to blend into the wall behind her.
“If you think that you’ve found a hole in my frame, an answer to my deranged and altered attitude you’re mistaken,” she said. “My mother was a wonderful woman, she just didn’t always see eye to eye with me, but then again most mothers don’t get along swimmingly with their teenage daughters.”
Carolyn stared at him, her eyes empty and soulless. It was almost like she didn’t know why she had started talking in the first place. Dr. Turner smiled and nodded, attempting to ignore the fear growing within him. “I understand that. My wife and my daughter didn’t always get along either.”
Carolyn raised an eyebrow. “I wouldn’t have thought you one to have a family,” she said. “You who spend so much time in the company of lunatics and murderers.”
Dr. Turner sighed. “Yes, it is hard on them,” he said. “But we aren’t talking about me. We’re talking about you.”
Carolyn leaned as far forward as she could without standing, her arms trapped behind the chair. Her eyes stared at him, laser beams bearing straight into his eyes, down into his very soul. She tilted her head slightly, as if getting a better angle on him. Her lips curled up slightly in a devious grin as she stared at him.
“But they are far more interesting than me,” she said, her voice taking on a tone that indicated something scary and unpredictable being planned in her dark and twisted mind.
Dr. Turner was feeling uncomfortable, almost completely exposed to this girl before him and yet he could find no way into her barrier, no way to find out the truth behind her unforgiving view of death.
For several moments the two sat in silence, one simply staring at the other in a twisted version of the staring game, and it seemed as though Dr. Turner would be the one to turn away first.
“If you love your family so much,” she said in a tone almost too soft for Dr. Turner to hear, “why do you continue to let them suffer?”

Dr. Turner said nothing. This staring match was taking him on a journey into her mind, a place he desperately wished to go and understand in order to help her, but was turning out to be more dangerous than he had anticipated.
Somehow Carolyn found a way to move closer to him without moving the chair. It seemed as if her entire being surrounded him as she stared into his gray eyes with her cold, unfeeling green ones.
“They are suffering in this purgatory known as life,” she said before tilting her head in the other direction. “Why don’t you release them from their suffering?”
The atmosphere in the room had changed drastically from the time she was talking as a teenager to the girl in front of him now. The lights were no longer as bright, the walls faded behind her and the room was growing darker and darker with every passing second.
The only light Dr. Turner could acknowledge was the light directly above him, placing him under a spotlight within a dark room and surrounding him was nothing but Carolyn’s voice, whispering her darkest desires.
“You need to be released, Dr. Turner,” she said softly. “Your family does too.”
Carolyn sat back in her chair and returned to the bored expression with the lifeless eyes she had before. The room seemed to instantly fill with light and Dr. Turner had to blink several times to adjust to the sudden brightness. He stared at Carolyn in shock.
It had been a long time since a patient had gotten into his mind as Carolyn had just done. Several had tried and all had failed. After the first and only incident where a patient had bettered him in what the patient had referred to as “mind games,” Dr. Turner had taken great time and effort to not allow that to happen again. Meditation and concentration had become a daily ritual for him, every morning he spent hours blocking his mind from the minds of his patients. He prided himself on being able to keep them out.
He stood and walked over to the door, not caring that his back was to Carolyn. He had to get out of there, out of the room, away from the girl who had somehow broken down his barriers within seconds. Fear pulsed through his veins, a sensation he had not felt in over ten years. She wasn’t just trying to get into his mind, she was trying to invade and conquer. Carolyn wanted him to be under her control.
If he had remained lost in the darkness, it was possible she could have persuaded him to her desires.
He raised his hand to knock when he was pulled back from the door violently by his shirt collar and dropped into a chair. He looked up and saw Carolyn standing over him, her arms somehow now in front of her body. Her eyes darker than he had ever seen them before.
“Allow me,” Carolyn said walking behind him. Dr. Turner looked at his reflection in the mirror and watched as Carolyn stood behind him, staring down at his baldhead, those dark orbs piercing into his skull and invading his mind.
She didn’t move for several seconds and Dr. Turner opened his mouth in an attempt to call out to the nurses on the other side of the door, but found his voice wouldn’t let out any more than a small squeak, like a mouse caught in a trap.
“Allow me to release you Dr. Turner,” Carolyn said before placing the chain of her handcuffs around his neck and pulling as hard and as tight as she could. It had taken a nanosecond for her to begin and another second for him to realize what was happening.
The chain was cool and tight against his skin as Carolyn pulled harder and harder, giving him no room for breath. His eyes widened as he watched her choke him, his death being played before him as his reflection attempted to fight back.
He grabbed her hands, trying to pull her away and remove her from him, but as air became less available, so did his strength. Slowly he found himself not fighting back, his arms becoming limp by his side. He could hear people yelling, but they grew fainter and fainter. He found himself drifting off into a darkness he hadn’t known before, surrounding him at the edges of his vision and working inward.
Was this how it felt to die? He thought.
“Trust me,” Carolyn’s voice said, seemingly farther away than she could really be.
His eyes shut, allowing the darkness of death to take him, feeling no fear as he began to feel like he was floating away. The last thing he heard was the door bursting open and footsteps rushing towards him.
Three months after Carolyn’s attempted murder at the hospital, Dr. Turner walked down to the mental ward again. He had to speak to Carolyn one last time, understand her reasoning for things. His close encounter with death had opened him up to her philosophy that death was a lie, but a lie worth living for.
She had been moved to the high-level security wing since the attack. He would have to talk to her through a glass window using a telephone system, making her seem more like an inmate than a patient.
He sat in the small chair and looked through the glass at Carolyn, the girl who haunted his nightmares. Her hair was longer being the only difference in her physical appearance. When her eyes locked on his, he felt the same pulsing darkness he had before, only now he wasn’t afraid. She smiled her unnerving smile as she picked up the black phone from the side of the small booth; Dr. Turner did the same.
“Hello Dr. Turner,” she said. “Long time, no see. I was hoping that I had succeeded in releasing you from this prison known as life.”
Dr. Turner raised an eyebrow. “I’m afraid I can’t leave just yet. You have opened my eyes to a new understanding of life and death.”
Carolyn shook her head. “You still don’t understand,” she said, “Life is purgatory, death is freedom. Why do people wish to remain in such a place?”
Dr. Turner leaned forward, his arms moving closer to the glass separating the two of them and his gray eyes filled with hopefulness. “You are wrong,” he said “This may be purgatory, but it’s worth staying if one person cares for you.”
Carolyn smirked and shook her head. Whatever medication the girl was on now had loosened her up both verbally and physically. She was not her usual stiff self as she had been in the past.
“I killed my parents and my brother who cared for me,” she said. “There is nothing that can make purgatory worth it.”
Dr. Turner blinked. He lowered his head as the words she had uttered mulled around in his mind. Was purgatory worth it for only one person? Was he wrong? He thought of his wife and his family and how happy they were when they saw him wake up in that hospital bed, and when the doctor told them that he would be okay.. He shook his head at such doubts; Carolyn was wrong.
He looked back up at her. “Why did you kill your family? The real reason.”
She smiled, for once a real smile that held no forms of hidden motives, devious ideals, or thoughts of death. A true smile that only one with nothing to hide could smile. Dr. Turner didn’t believe she could smile like that and hoped he would now find out the truth about this whole dark situation.
“You’re the doctor,” she said. “You’re supposed to figure it out.”