When Rabbit Howls

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When Rabbit Howls Page 35

by Truddi Chase

Guilty of what?

  “I don’t know!”

  * * *

  Meanwhile, at the university, a student was raising her hand.

  “How long before the woman realises that the guilt stems from sex acts with her stepfather, not his murder which she never committed?”

  “First,” Stanley said, “she’ll have to believe fully that those sex acts ever took place. As of last night, she knows that he’s alive. I’m not sure how she feels about that.”

  “How can she not believe in the abuse?” the student protested, waving her notes. “These videos, that’s all the two of you talk about.”

  “The two of us?”

  “Sorry,” she said over general laughter.

  “Possibly one reason for her inability to believe is that the abuse didn’t happen to her; it happened to the other selves.”

  “How many of these ‘selves’ have you delineated now?”

  “Roughly fifty persons to date. Which gives her a lot to deal with; she’s moving so fast, partly due to the manuscript and partly because of some kind of inner drive, hers and theirs. By the way, a question has arisen, at least in my mind, as to who the ‘woman’ really is, inside the Troop Formation.”

  The student was taking rapid notes. She looked up. “I’m following you, Doctor Phillips,” she said, “but the first-born child has to be there somewhere.”

  “Perhaps,” Stanley said. “But when you look at what happened so early in its development, the state it’s in may not correspond to what we think of as ‘living.’”

  “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.”

  “Why,” the student asked, “is the Troop Formation’s structure so much more complicated than an Eve, or a Sybil?”

  “I’ve tried several times to suggest to the Troops that if measured on a scale of one to ten against many other cases presently documented, the degree of their abuse may well be a fifteen or twenty. But they don’t all share the same memories, so they don’t accept my suggestion.”

  “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.”

  “Those posthypnotic suggestions I hear you handing out on the tapes.” Captain Albert Johnson shuffled his own notes, like any other student. “They’re a lot like brainwashing, correct?”

  “Reverse brainwashing, Albert. In the woman’s mind, she’s so bad, so stupid and powerless, all messages implanted by a manipulative abuser and a reinforcive mother. Twenty years of positive stroking won’t take all that away.”

  * * *

  At home or in public, odours triggered recall. The shakes continued, but at least no Troop member screamed or dissolved in tears publicly. The woman knew what the time lapses meant now. She wanted to know what did go on when she wasn’t “there.”

  Stanley told her to trust the others. The woman replied that she couldn’t, and just would not go out or talk to anyone. Trust. He’d chosen the wrong word.

  “Norman and Page,” the woman said, “know things about the years I spent with them. I listen to what they say about our lives together and I nod and smile and at the same time, I’m scared. Because I don’t know specifically what they’re talking about, and I know they wouldn’t lie.”

  “Neither are your people lying about the abuse,” Stanley said.

  “You’re telling me I have to believe something I can’t see or touch; I can’t see what goes on when I’m not present.”

  “You can’t see the far side of the moon, either,” Stanley said, “but believe me, it’s there.”

  He’d never worked with anyone so frightened. She had to compete in the world, but at times he wondered how. If it were not for the other selves, she couldn’t. He’d noted, for instance, that the moment his client left the studio to walk back down the hall with him to the parking lot, she usually took on one of two tones: utter distraction, in which she appeared unable to locate any path through the building, to her car, or out through the university grounds to the highway; or, at other times, a casual but sharp bantering which suggested a mind capable of finding the way out of a foreign jungle unaided. He doubted that either of them was the woman.

  He’d seen the distracted, befuddled one in action many times—lost in the university hallways, or on the telephone at the head of the stairs trying to nail down miscellaneous business appointments. Once he’d studied her in the 7-Eleven, as she remained intent on purchasing coffee and his diet soda while neglecting eighteen dollars in change. Finding the soda behind refrigerated glass doors and pouring the coffee into a paper cup had been no problem. But she’d become uncertain the moment they approached the checkout counter. Without even looking into her purse, she’d yanked out a bill and handed it over to the cashier. She’d hesitated then, her face red. Whereupon Stanley had heard a child’s voice innocently requesting a paper sack for the coffee.

  He’d failed to see the big deal over asking for a paper bag. Then he did and anger gripped him. “Help” was a word his client couldn’t master. Asking for a second helping at the dinner table, pass the salt, do you have this dress in another colour, is this seat taken, can you help me? How many times in the sessions had he seen her avoid asking him directly for help? The well incident, when the stepfather had refused help, had terrified the Troops as children; subconsciously, it terrified them now.

  That day in 7-Eleven, it had been impossible to tell who stuffed the money into the purse after Stanley had nudged her.

  * * *

  Stanley’s calm teaching style and his casual handling of the sessions helped both his students and the woman to accept and even at times understand to some degree what was going on. More often than not, he wondered if he understood anything at all. There were pieces of the puzzle still unaccounted for and perhaps never to be fully answered. He placed a call to Marshall.

  “Marshall,” he said, “my client complains that nothing electrical—lights, stereo, radio, television, even her car motor, is ever entirely free of . . .”

  “Interference?” Marshall laughed. “Stanley, after watching those tapes, I’d be amazed if there weren’t interference. Nobody in our field, with a few exceptions, wants to talk about it publicly, but there are experiments going on. I don’t know if anyone is working with a multiple in this field, but our bodies, our minds, are made up of energy. Your client is more than one. Think about it.”

  “She’s only got one brain, Marshall.”

  “That brain operates independently for each one of the selves. They generate different energy levels, some of them pretty high. When more than one of them is out at a time or you get a number of them coming and going at once, the overall energy level soars. When one of them tries to repress an emotion like anger or rage, it just heightens the energy level, like built-up electricity with no outlet.”

  What Marshall was saying made sense. Stanley told him about the woman’s dream several years ago, how she described what he’d known to be that sharply receptive alpha state, between waking and full sleep, wherein she’d seen the name of a small town in another state printed on a pack of cigarettes, the same brand she smoked at the time. When she’d repeated the dream to a male friend who’d just returned from a trip, he�
��d looked amused and said how funny that was, because he’d just bought a house in that same small town.

  “I don’t want to be melodramatic, Marshall, but behind the amusement, he told her that his blood ran cold. He’d been keeping it a secret, even from his wife, for reasons I won’t go into.”

  “Is there any way at all that she could have known?”

  “No. I ran her through it many times; she just sat there looking bemused but casual, as if it were no big deal. There have been other things all along, but they’re adding up lately . . . the way the Troops seem to read my mind, for instance.”

  “She survived those two farmhouses,” Marshall said. “Extreme intelligence, the paranormal; one is usually the foundation for the other. It’s hard to say which one creates the most denial in an observer. Did you know that few shrinks, for instance, want to give credence to their own enormous energy highs when working with a client like that?”

  “Let me tell you,” Stanley said, “about those energy highs.”

  “You don’t have to. You get charged up in the sessions from a transference of her energy—and drained afterward. Perfectly normal. If the Troops can interfere with electrical appliances, they can interfere with the energy in your brain.”

  Afterwards Stanley reflected on Marshall’s reinforcement of the same thing Jeannie Lawson had described to him. Some of Jeannie’s biggest problems still centered on trying to hide not only a gifted mind but extrasensory perception and the same kind of electrical problems the woman evidenced. People, Jeannie had told Stanley bitterly, ran from the notion of multiplicity, but they bolted outright at the idea of anything to do with the paranormal.

  * * *

  The words she was about to say felt like her own and yet borrowed. She felt wonderful and relaxed and free . . . and she did not feel anything, except through the other Troop members. Through a wave of euphoria, she approached Page with what the child might consider ridiculous.

  “Page,” she said, “before this thing goes much further, I have to talk to you.”

  “OK.”

  The waitress brought a huge plate of chocolate chip pancakes smothered in sweet butter. Page raised her fork, looking grown-up in a beige knitted dress and three-inch heels. She flipped her strawberry-blond hair back over her shoulders and gave the busboy the eye. He gave it back to her. Page was fourteen. The busboy looked eighteen.

  “Too old,” Page informed the woman in a whisper. “Yuch.”

  The two of them raised their glasses of water and toasted in unison. Their booth was at the back of the International House of Pancakes and the other breakfast patrons had their heads bent over their own food. Still, there floated just out of the woman’s reach a hope that all the voices inside her would be lowered this morning.

  “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?”

  The woman noticed the humming in her veins and a pulled-back feeling as if someone were reading a story aloud, through her, not as if she, herself, were saying anything at all. “Page, you have a lot of friends, right?”

  Page agreed.

  “Well, try to imagine that they all share your body, while each one of them is still him- or herself.”

  Page thought about that. She laughed.

  “Hey,” she said. “Anne in my body. I’d get to do everything she does, stay out late and wear all her clothes.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. Because Anne would be staying out late, not you, and you might not like her clothes. Once you became aware that Anne shared your space, then you might stay out late, even if you didn’t want to. But you wouldn’t always be there to make the choice.”

  “It doesn’t sound like fun,” Page said.

  “Fun? It may sound funny at times, but it’s never fun, Page, no matter what.” The woman gritted her teeth because her mind was empty. What had she been going to say? She waited for help and it came, through a voice she listened to, saying words she’d read in books or had heard other people say but in much softer tones. The words sounded good. They raised her above herself. “You know I love you, Page. Always have and always will. My leaving your father was something I had to do. My anger toward everything had risen to such a pitch, I was so afraid it would rub off on you and be a bad example. But leaving him didn’t change the fact that you’re my daughter, that I’d kill for you.”

  Page grinned. “I know,” she said. “Do you think you could make one of your persons come out for me, I mean we three could have breakfast together? Do any of them like chocolate chip pancakes?”

  Nails drove Page back to her father’s house, and her skin crawled the whole time. It was as if somebody had unleashed a force way beyond anybody’s power to deal with it. The woman had sat at the booth, watching Page with the eyes of the one directly behind her. Those eyes had held bemusement and agony and, worse, had reflected an awful yearning to be linked more closely to Page. The one behind the woman was no more Page’s mother than the woman was. The yearning would never be realised.

  Nails knew why the flesh on her body crawled. She could feel the one in the Tunnel, gathering himself to correct things. She did not look forward to what was only hours away.

  * * *

  “I’m going to kill you.” The woman said it aloud, with the taste of pancakes still in her mouth. The stepfather’s phone number lay on the page of the address book, a threat, a taunt. How long had it been written there? She didn’t know. Was there no way to beat him? He was still big as a mountain and she was still guilty.

  I’m going to kill you. Aside from that one thought, her mind this afternoon was as empty and as silent as the house around her. Only the steady ticktock of the grandfather clock in the foyer broke the quiet.

  Page was growing up overnight. There was no time to waste if she was ever going to share . . . inside the woman’s mind, one of the selves screamed in protest at the threat of the closeness to another human being. Someone else lashed out at the protest and spit on the floor. The woman gave up trying to delineate voices.

  Like a student in a classroom with an invisible teacher, she listened to what skipped through her head. The voice was friendly, uninvolved.

  She had put up with a lot of people, the voice said, bending over backward, as Stanley often pointed out, to be perfect in their eyes. So they would accept her. And all the time she’d struggled to be perfect, silent about her own desires and needs and blaming her lack of satisfaction on those to whom she never voiced them. Then she’d tried harder to be more perfect, demand less and less so they would love her more and more. It had been a vicious cycle.

  She was, the voice said pleasantly, a doormat.

  Another thought from another mind: things would be different from now on, she would become a person in her own right. The woman grabbed the thought and hung onto it. A desire to have it for her own, lodged firmly as if it would never leave. Just as quickly, realising that neither thought nor desire was hers, she looked for her own. There was none.

  On the night of the twelfth August moon, the Irishman moved through the Tunnel. Like silent water he went, straight into the woman’s sleeping mind—until the tide lapped at the edge of wakefulness and she stirred and fought to keep the dark.

  Darlin’, he said, as if he offered nothing and everything beyond, ’tis time. The third one must evidence.

  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 hel
d 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.

  She absorbed what lay to one side of his unspoken thought. Separate from all the other Troops, the silent, far-off figure of the adult core and her mirror-image came to hover just inside the woman’s mind. What stood far beyond them made her want to run, but again the Weaver blocked the way.

  The woman found herself looking out of her mind and at the same time, looking into it and beyond. There was no sound except that of a faint, faraway wind that chilled her to the marrow of her bones. The Weaver seemed to have her pinned, rooted in some fashion she could not describe, and so she just stood there, hearing the wind and feeling nothing except the coldness.

  The Irishman then showed her the other place, constructed of time alone. The child core and her mirror-image hung inside it, in a space that was not a space because they were contained by nothing. The first-born child and her mirror-image shared that same space and shared nothing because there was nothing left. But the silence surrounding the four small figures was like a wall, universe-deep and eternity-wide.

  The second skin of memory, comprising all that had happened so far in the Troops’ lifetime, as recalled by the selves who had evidenced, was folded. Nothing showed. The skin lay cradled in the Weaver’s hands.

  When you give that to me, and the woman seemed to have shrunk into herself, will I have to wear it every day?

  No, darlin’. Only when the denial sweeps in.

  Who denies?

  All o’ us. ’Tis the nature o’ the thing. Too horrible, I suppose. Y’ see, denial is only a balm, a false one t’ be sure. In our case, we need somethin’ else a good deal more. We need, without harmin’ the sleepin’ cores, a recognition o’ all o’ it.

 

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