by Mike Voyce
Chapter 1 – The Beginning
(Past)
First there was the light, warm and scintillating, then the courtyard, with its dirty earth floor. To my right was the massive dressed stonework of the castle, in front the lower wall and the heavy oak door leading to the kitchen garden. In the village below was bustle and noise and the stench of life, I paid it no attention. Facing me, not ten paces away, stood my tutor, Sir Thomas, sword in hand.
Everything had a sharp, more than real quality, and there was something strange in me, an excitement, an exhilaration. The jerkin I wore was of the best leather our tanners could make, ‘t wasn’t fear sent the blood rushing through my veins.
I re-balanced the sword in my own hand, trying to get the pressure grip Thomas taught me, to stop the blade flying away when I came to the attack.
Circling cautiously, that I not be pinned to the castle wall, I stepped forward - and the image faded.
My hand shook as I lit a cigarette. My whole world had gone, sliding sickeningly away, to leave me pitch-forked into the vision of that courtyard. Not a jot of the car I sat in, or anything of the Real World, had remained. Coming back was easier; at least I knew where I was.
The smells and sounds and the sharp clarity of sight of it stayed with me. I don’t know how long it lasted; its power filled me all day. I kept noticing little things like the wicker basket behind Thomas. Everything stayed with me: as I started the car and drove on, as I stopped at Scotch Corner to telephone my apologies and give instructions, as I drove through the increasingly heavy traffic on the A1, and as I worked through the back-logged messages and appointments when finally I reached my office.
It must have been tiredness; maybe some strain from driving that caused such a vision, something in the harsh light of that August morning, or the previous night’s wine and the effort to understand Sarah.
It wasn’t like daydreaming, in that there’s always some sense of unreality, so you know there’s an ordinary world still waiting. This was like some vision of the saints, yet there was no hint of religion in it. I’d seen such images before, but not since childhood.
I remembered, of that childhood, one particular timeless image. I thought of that morning, lost in a dream, almost lost in time.
I must have been eleven years old; I awoke with a silent scream. All the house was in perfect stillness. My parents, in their room down the landing never stirred.
(Past)
Sharp at the front of my mind was the scene of my own death; sharp as the axe man’s blade, with the trace of my blood on it. Slumped and still oozing, my torso lay over the block at the executioner’s feet. My head lay face down, I could see no features. As the dull ache at the back of my neck receded, I departed, to the right, ever higher above the ground. The scene at Tower Hill remains clear in every detail, just like the scene in that courtyard.
As my spirit drifted off some whimsy caught it and drifted it along the river, to Holborn and the Law courts. There were lawyers rioting, there were gowns flapping and stones flying and buildings burning.
“They’ve killed the Duke! There was no pardon.”
My soul smiled for I knew all had been made well.
And the image faded.
But even in my childish state, as I woke from that dream, I knew all had not been made well. There was a terrible rot that survived that day and was now eating the World. A sense of dread took hold of me, and has never quite been dispelled.
How did I know it was Tower Hill? I never questioned it. At the time the sight of my own death hadn’t frightened me; it made me think death needn’t be so bad. There was nothing of near death experiences, where the departing spirit leaves through a tunnel. For me there was only that gentle drifting off in the clear morning air.
I still could make nothing of it. But now it wouldn’t leave me alone, spinning in my head with the vision of the Courtyard.
There was so much the same, about these two. The style of dress, the very feel of the air, even the quality of the light was the same. Isn’t it strange how the mind works? I’d not thought about that dream in so very many years.
What would have happened if I left the lid on this Pandora’s Box?
How would life have gone if I let the Courtyard drift away as once I let slip the vision of my death?
But I couldn’t do it.
The weight and power and speed of the sword were things I touched and felt. It was an extension of my own arm, a creature in its own right, like a bird ready to fly. I’ve never worn a sword but it was days before I got used to not having one at my side. I even bought a cane to compensate, but it wasn’t the same and I rapidly discarded it.
I was in shock, sitting in my office, the day of that vision. Please don’t think me foolish, I didn’t dare admit the enormity of my feelings. For this was something I really didn’t understand. I had to find out, why? Why it so shook me and what it meant.
So now it’s time to tell you about myself, and about Sarah.
I didn’t know what to make of her, like a gypsy from a bygone age, almost mystical. Her eyes would fix on far horizons, and then she’d look at you, with that trick of opening her great, green eyes wider still.
Slim and supple, full of energy, she moved with a conscious grace, but something about her troubled me. I learned, long ago, to tell affectation; the disarranged hair perfectly placed the casual clothes it took hours to choose. When I was young I loved such a woman, a ballet student, modelling in her spare time. It was a stormy relationship and I hardly wanted to be reminded of it now. But it wasn’t fair to make such a comparison, and besides, it was something more than affectation which troubled me. It disturbed me that I couldn’t put my finger on it, till I realised; it was she who caused me to see the courtyard.
I’d driven 250 miles, from Peterborough to Cumbria, to see her. Then I had to drive back; nothing settled, nothing decided, my mind no clearer.
You see, I’d devised a research project,
“An Enquiry into Guilt, Motivation and Dangerousness of Serious Offenders Using Examination under Hypnosis.”
I had once been an academic, but at the time all this happened I was senior partner in a law firm. In fact the project grew out of a case in my office, a very difficult, unhappy case, the conviction for murder of an innocent boy.
I undertook that project out of guilt that I’d refused to act in the trial, simply advising the boy’s father how it should be handled. The defence team didn’t handle it that way; all the obvious, effective things I’d recommended were left undone, and the boy was convicted. That’s when I agreed to act.
But at that stage it was too late, the judge had made a good and workmanlike job of it, and you could only win an appeal if the judge made a mistake. But the boy was innocent; I proved it by hypnosis, using one of the country’s most respected hypnotherapists, a Home Office consultant and a fellow of the Royal College of Medicine. It left me with a problem, my client had been fairly convicted and neither the courts nor the government would accept evidence from hypnosis.
I remembered the friends I’d known in university, I made phone calls, and took advice. Why shouldn’t we create a framework, using hypnosis, to test the guilt of a defendant’s mind? Even more, we could use it to tell whether convicted criminals had changed enough to be safe to release back into Society. I was sure I could prove, by research, how you can use hypnosis to do this.
Given how much it costs to keep ‘lifers’ in prison, the Home Office was interested. If I proved my case they might, indeed, change the rules and listen to evidence about my client. But I needed a hypnotist to help me.
It was our mutual friend Angharad who introduced us. I’d known Angharad for years, first as a client, later as a friend. I’d come to trust her opinion. I listened as she praised Sarah, giving her excellent credentials; Sarah the hypnotherapist who worked with disturbed criminals, Sarah, the bright star at the cutting edge of trauma therapy, Sarah who could meet my most demanding needs. Eve
n then I was unsure.
It wasn’t just that my mind had been so much taken up with Sarah when I saw the courtyard. There had been a crackling tension all around me ever since our dinner the previous night. It had built into a blinding headache as I drove up into the Yorkshire Dales. It had been this that made me pull the car in to the side of the road, and when I covered my eyes to shield them from the sun, it had been then the vision struck me.
We first met at Angharad’s house for lunch. But it seemed Sarah had wanted to talk to Angharad privately, some personal problem, with her partner, a cinematographer. It sounded most exotic. I’m sure she resented my presence, an intrusion into their friendship. I excused myself, faining an interest in Angharad’s collection of art.
When I did get the chance to explain my project the conversation strayed to many things. Lunch stretched into the rest of the day, as we adjourned to a pub.; it’s not the way I choose to deal with serious subjects.
Sarah was good at her job, and at raising support, but I had to put a brake on her talk of “curing” offenders, her job wasn’t to cure anyone; it was to show whether the minds of murderers and rapists can be tested, to see if they would commit such crimes in future. To see if they committed the crimes for which they were convicted in the first place.
I remember my exasperation,
“Why do you think you can do so much better than the Prison Service?”
I hadn’t wanted to take the shine off her enthusiasm but it worried me. Some very good work is done by prison psychiatrists, what made Sarah so confident?
Perhaps I should have been more on my guard. I tried to keep her mind on the picture of an innocent boy, sitting in prison, a boy who needed no cure, a boy who would only be released if we persuaded the Government to change the rules. Despite my best efforts, somehow, she just didn’t come to terms with it.
Sarah needed to write up a methodology; how she proposed to test offenders, a competent assessment proposal for referees appointed by E.S.R.C. (a major research funding council), but she wouldn’t do it. It left everything down to personal charisma, Sarah has plenty of that. I met her this last evening to find out why she hadn’t written the proposal, to get her moving.
She took me out into the country, to a restaurant owned by friends of hers; leading me darting and skittering over the narrow fell roads to get there. We came to an old and picturesque farmhouse, in spectacular scenery and full of ancient beams and shadowy spaces. In the flickering romance of candlelight we dined excellently; but it wasn’t why I’d come to Cumbria. How much better to have eaten a simple sandwich in Sarah’s surgery; there I could have held her to the point of my visit.
She was evasive, yes, she would put “something” in writing, but I was left to guess exactly what. I wanted a simple set of questions for each offender, but she couldn’t even do that. She assured me; each person is different and needs to be treated individually.
“Could other hypnotherapists do this work? with concepts you give them? Can we create a scheme for other hypnotists to follow with all offenders?”
“Oh yes, if they know what they’re doing.”
I was relieved, but it was always this way with Sarah, verbal fencing, as if there were some hidden agenda, but I was left grasping at empty air whenever I tried to guess what it was.
Angharad didn’t understand why I wouldn’t take Sarah at face value or, doubting her, find someone else. She thought I must be attracted to her personally, even physically. What drew me wasn’t so simple. To be honest, I resented Angharad’s easy assumption. Underlying Sarah’s wide-eyed, extrovert appeal was a flexible mind, I really did believe she could make a difference.
That night she talked about reincarnation and past-life regression. Did she say it to startle me? I remember she spoke, as if quite casually. I listened carefully to all she said, I’m sure it was just that, I listened to help me decide about her. I’d asked, once, the hypnotist we used in the murder case, what he thought about past-life regression, and he scoffed at the whole thing. I’m sure it was no more than that, a way to help me decide.
“You’ve lived many lives before, we all have.”
Sarah looked distracted, her long, thin fingers playing with her wineglass, painted nails making tiny chinking noises as she turned the stem.
“You won’t remember them, but each time you learned something and the final aim is that you don’t ‘come back’...”
It was a surprise, her assurance; so diffident about procedures in the project; and now so confident over what most people feel foolish to mention.
“..You have to come back till you’ve learned all you need. Some souls are more developed than others and some are held back by old problems. That’s why hypnotherapists are interested. I’ve seen many, many old problems hold people back, life after life, in the same old karmic trap...”
Her glass was still now; she set it firmly back on the table.
“...Many problems come from your current life, say from early childhood, but there are older problems. You reach these by going back beyond birth; regressing into the life which caused them.”
Sarah was no longer distracted; she was looking at me directly with those penetrating green eyes. I smiled at her sincerity; it took away all the affectation, leaving a child, innocence shining in the candlelight.
“...How do you know where to look? Well, problems present themselves. The subconscious mind throws them forward - if you let it.
...Yes problems show up as illnesses or mental blocks, that’s why people come to me. But you don’t always know you’ve got a problem; people bury them - put them behind screens - so you don’t even know they’re there.”
Sarah was still looking at me and I said nothing. It looked as if she might be taking a professional interest in me, and that wasn’t what I wanted. As silence stretched on, embarrassment made me change the subject, but it didn’t stay changed.
“Problems don’t just go away. That’s the mistake. Problems will never be under control while they’re behind screens; they’ll always come back, till you’ve faced up to them. Once you’ve gone through them, once you don’t need them any more, then they go away.”
As she was leaving Sarah said just one more thing to stick in my mind. Her words, as I handed her into her light summer coat, lingered in the air as they still linger in my memory today.
“If you need to enough, with practice, you can pull the screens away. Once your eyes are open you’ll see.”
These last words wouldn’t leave me. By some inexplicable and ineluctable association they linked Sarah, my project and the courtyard together.
I realised, mortifying and improbable as it seemed, I’d been hypnotised. Had she done it to distract me from her methodology? Surely she realised how badly I react to being manipulated?
As I thought about it later it became certain, the chinking glass, the tone of voice, yes I’d been hypnotised. But why should she do it! I wouldn’t have given reincarnation a thought but for that night, now I couldn’t leave it alone.
Had she meant what she said about past-life problems? If these visions were memories of a past life, very well then, let’s make the first question, Who?
As to that, an immediate second question, how do you find out?
I could have asked Sarah, I felt a dark foreboding and abhorrence at the thought. She’d used her words like weapons. They’d done more than take away the pressure to explain her lack of performance. From now on I’d tread most circumspectly around her. If there were to be any more visions they would be at my choosing. Did I tell you I thought Sarah attractive? Did I say I thought her emotionally dangerous?
In Peterborough I lived alone. I used that now for quiet contemplation, going over and over that vision. Whenever I thought about it there was an excitement, a glamour. Whatever Sarah had intended, I was hooked.
The result of this was reading, a whole library of strange and arcane books; stumbling and inexperienced self-hypnosis, reading, divining with a
pendulum, which I copied how to do from a book, more reading and so on..
The date was the third of September. I came back to reality with a certainty.
Over the last several weeks I’d painfully, slowly, taught myself how to meditate. More than that, I learned techniques which would help me pull visions out of my head. Now, at last, my efforts had paid off.
I wrote the following names and dates on a piece of paper, I even made a copy and posted it to myself, just to prove I’d done it.