- A psychiatrist has the ability to absorb people's mental illnesses, but can he help a seemingly possessed child? / An unhappy wife comes to believe that the used car her husband bought her is possessed by the spirit of a young woman.
- In "Now He's Coming Up the Stairs", Dr. Michael Sears is a renowned psychiatrist with a unique talent. He's able to read people and see what their mental issue is and then transfer the illness onto himself. After years of doing this, he's having more and more trouble overcoming the illness once he absorbs it and he's using some pretty disgusting techniques to pull it off. His doctor warns him that if he doesn't quit these practices, he will die. Michael decides to take a long vacation, but he's immediately recognized by a young woman, who begs him to help her son. This proves to be Michael's strangest case yet, since the boy seems to be in some sort of a trance - all he does is move back and forth while repeating four phrases about how someone is coming for him. Michael realizes that the spirit of a man, who got killed in a car accident when he stumbled in front of the boy's mother's car, is seeking revenge from beyond the grave and this curse or trance is somehow his doing. Michael decides to take the case and absorb the curse. Will this be his greatest triumph or the last case he'll ever work on? In "Used Car", Charlotte is unhappy with her housewife status and wants to have a baby. Her husband buys her a new car. The car turns out to be haunted by the spirit of a girl who committed suicide. She has a strange effect on Charlotte and she starts investigating the dead girl's death. Is Charlotte going insane or is she really communicating with a ghost and if so, is the ghost a friend - or a foe?
- Michael Sears is a psychiatrist blessed and cursed with the unique ability of absorbing patients' illnesses into himself, although the personal cost is staggering: he takes on an anorexic girl's illness and has to deal with her visions of maggot-ridden food while eating. Worse, it takes him longer to purge the effects each time. A friend of Sears, another psychiatrist, suggests that Sears take a break, as the effects of his work are beginning to take a toll on his body.
Going on a vacation, Sears is besieged by a desperate mother with a catatonic boy who can only chant "Now he's coming through the woods, now he's coming through the yard, now he's coming in the house, now he's coming up the stairs" while rocking back and forth in his room. Upon questioning the mother, Sears determines that "he" refers to a man that the mother accidentally hit and killed with her car while the boy was in the passenger seat. Ever since the incident, the boy has been traumatized, seeing the face of the dead man and believing that he is coming after the boy and his mother.
Sears decides to help the boy and tells the mother to go downstairs and close the bedroom door, leaving the two alone. He talks to the boy, telling him to run down to his mother so that he will be safe from the dead man; Sears absorbs the illness and the boy runs to his mother, just as he was told, seemingly free of the curse. Sears appears weakened, and he takes some medication in an effort to rid himself of the illness without going through his usual and painful purging process. It doesn't work, and he has a vision of the dead man walking through the yard and up the stairs. He calmly and rationally talks his way through the situation, convincing himself that he's just having a psychotic episode. Eventually, the hallucination ends, and he wakes up in the boy's bedroom.
Sears calls his friend, telling him that the medication didn't work but that he was able to purge himself of the illness by reasoning his way out of the situation. He walks downstairs, only to find the mother and boy horrifyingly slain. The dead man pounces from behind, ready to kill him.
Suddenly, it is revealed that everything that occurred after Sears cured the boy was part of a larger psychotic episode. The boy was indeed healed, but after he ran downstairs, the family's nanny walked upstairs to check on Sears. She found him rocking back and forth in the boy's room, trapped in his own hallucinations, muttering the same phrase the boy was saying when he was still ill.
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content