The Ice House

by Ray Ouellette

  "Yes...Okay," Lynn interrupted. "I'd like that."

  Frank breathed a silent sigh of relief. He wasn't in any hurry to get home. His schedule for the evening included a phone call from Allison to let him know about her plans for the weekend. Allison was born with maybe a not-quite silver spoon in her mouth but at least a silver plated one, so she had never needed a job. Frank didn't blame her for that. Her parents had her rather late in life, in their forties. A heart attack took her mother, a heavy smoker, when Allison was three and when Allison was four, her father followed from the same cause. The history of early heart disease in both sides of her family formed the basis of her philosophy of life--eat, drink, be merry, and always, always, get your way. What passed as reasonably wealthy for her parents translated to only well off for her when the inheritance was divided among four resentful children, and numerous relatives. Her trust fund left her comfortable, not wealthy, but close enough. Allison's uncle and aunt were trustees for the estate and were reluctant guardians, and were equally as wealthy as her parents had been. They continued her upbringing in Boston's North Shore social circles.

  Her father's will stipulated that Allison was to attend public schools through high school. No reason was given, but it was suspected that her father had remembered his own beginnings and thought it would do Allison good to keep a bit in touch with the common folk.

  After high school she abandoned any required contact with the common folk and enrolled at Wellesley, the female equivalent of the Ivy League, but after her freshman year she transferred to Endicott College on the North Shore. It satisfied her criteria of being close to home but not too far away from the social scene along the coast, north of Boston.

  Allison met Frank at Danvers High School and they spoke from time-to-time. She had taken a liking to him but she was dating a prep school student from some academy and anyway she wanted to see in which direction Frank would evolve before she showed an interest in him. She did try to influence that direction by making an effort to convince him to apply to an Ivy League school...Brown, Dartmouth, Princeton. But he applied to a local four year college. Having played on the football team at Danvers, he had admired the football tradition where he applied.

  After graduation they met once-in-a-awhile in the next four years at events where the Ivy League occasionally rubbed up against the rest of the New England schools. At their Danvers High reunion, she liked what she saw and decided it was time. Four years later she was still trying to get him to take some reluctant steps up the social ladder. His degree in business administration with a minor in accounting had landed him a job at the accounting firm he now worked for.

  Allison's plans for Frank for the weekend were that he accompany her to an acquaintance's daughter's coming out party at the Regency Hunt Club.

  Allison had already obtained permission to borrow her uncle's Mercedes. She had two sports cars, neither of which would be appropriate for this affair. Every limousine from the local limo rental services would stick out like a hammered thumb. 'Oh, look, Allison has rented the same limousine that Amanda used for the Peabody Foundation benefit last week' A big gray Mercedes was needed to motor up the curving drive past the golf course, tennis courts and polo field to the circular drive outside the main entrance where Frank was required to casually toss the keys to the attendant like he couldn't care if the guy got in it and entered it in a demolition derby before returning it to Frank.

  Frank could picture the scene and he winced as he and Lynn walked away from the office building in search of the happy hour at the pub that Frank had mentioned.

  Lynn noticed that the sign identified the establishment as "The Plough". The laminated planks of wood hung out over the sidewalk on a metal scrollwork bracket. The letters had the look of hand carving but were probably done with a router from Sears. Beneath the name was a painted landscape of a thatched roof cottage and above the horizon hung the Big Dipper in a twilight sky. Lynn wondered about the significance until she remembered that in Britain the Big Dipper is called The Plough. They sat at a wooden table made from thick walnut planks. "Two pints of your finest," said Frank.

  After nothing was said for a while and after Lynn had looked around at the inside of the pub, she said, "I like pubs. There should be more of them in this country. It's someplace you can go during the day.” The beers arrived and Lynn took a sip. “There's too many nightclubs. Not enough pubs. Every neighborhood in England has a pub, someplace to go and relax, usually a family room too. I think it contributes to a more relaxed society."

  "I'll drink to that," he said, clinking glasses with her. "Now about that dream."

  "Let's hear it," she said. He related the dream. She watched his eyes as he spoke and her eyes took on a focused, everything-else-excluded, appearance as what she heard dominated her attention.

  Part way through Frank's account of the dream her lips parted and she lifted a finger as if to make a point. He stopped.

  "No, go on. I was just going to say that your dream seems a little more than just a dream." She averted her eyes and suggested, "What about alien abduction? There are a lot of reports about people thinking they've been abducted by aliens. But the voices were in English, right? Did they sound normal? I mean, any accent?"

  "No...They sounded American I think."

  Lynn thought then said, "Some kind of psychic phenomenon? I'm interested in psychic phenomena. It's sort of a hobby of mine."

  "How did you get interested in that?"

  "I was always interested in it but my interest took off when I spent some time in England. The stately homes, the castles, the pubs that are hundreds of years old. I've read everything there is on psychic phenomena."

  Lynn continued, "And your dream sounds familiar. I've heard descriptions of after-death, or actually near-death experiences and this dream is similar to what people have reported. The tunnel, being outside your body, seeing yourself recede from it. All that. It's common. Tell me the rest of it."

  He continued, and later, a simultaneous sound of glasses clinking on the table top indicated that they had both finished their beers. "My turn this round," she said. She gestured to the bartender and he acknowledged her. "Two more of the same, except make mine a half this time."

  Frank was amused and put on an exaggerated look of surprise. "You know your pub terminology then, do you?"

  "As I mentioned, I spent some time over there," she said. "I was an Air Force brat. Two hitches in England. Spent eight years at Lakenheath Air Force Base. I loved it. England, I mean, not the Air Force Base."

  Frank said, “Is that why you don't have a Boston accent?”

  “I never lived here long enough as a kid to pick it up. Always in some other part of the world as my father was reassigned.” Then a smile. “You'll just have to say enough pahks and cahs for both of us.” A playful look in her eyes. “Come on. Come on.”

  “What?”

  “Say it. Let's hear it.”

  Frank said, “Okay. Park your car in Harvard yard,”, but it came out as, “Pahk your cah in Hahvahd yahd.”

  “Well done. I love that Boston accent.”

  There was a moment of silence, watching the bartender get their next round of drinks. Lynn's thoughts drifted back to her childhood, drawn there by her earlier explanation of how she had gotten interested in psychic phenomena. It was a partly made-up reason. She didn't want to talk about the real one, not wanting the conversation to take on a negative tone, but her mind ran over the events thinking back many years.

  Lynn's real interest in psychic phenomena began when her cousin Karen drowned when the two girls and Lynn's uncle were on a trip to a New Hampshire lake where her uncle had a cabin. They were to be joined by Lynn's parents early in the week and Karen's mother that weekend as their military and work schedules permitted.

  Lynn and Karen sat on a dock reading comics. Karen's father worked on a boat nearby and he took a break to go get some soda at the cabin.

  "Want a drink?" he yelled to the girls.


  Lynn got right up and walked along the dock to join her uncle.

  "Karen?" Lynn had turned and said to her cousin to inquire if she was coming along.

  "I just want to finish this story. Almost done. I'll be right there."

  "Want me to bring one back?"

  "Yeah, okay," Karen replied. "Thanks." She leaned back against a piling that held up a section of pier and finished her story. While waiting for Lynn to return she decided to balance on the top of the piling, so she got on top of it and balanced on one foot.

  Lynn and her uncle headed for the house. They got a cola each and Lynn took an extra one for Karen.

  When they reached the dock it was empty. A comic book was floating nearby.

  "My comic!" exclaimed Lynn before it sunk in what might have happened. Her uncle was on the run down to the end of the dock. He came to the end and yelled for Karen but there was no sign of her and no answer.

  He looked around back toward the cabin then at Lynn. "What? Did she come back to the cabin? Did you see her?"

  "No," Lynn said in a barely perceptible voice, the fear beginning to sink in.

  Her uncle jumped in, searching, as Lynn cried. The movement of the water from her uncle's searching sent ripples under the dock.

  Lynn gasped. Her uncle heard it and looked over towards her and saw what Lynn saw in the water, sticking out from beneath the dock. An arm. He rushed over and pulled Karen from beneath the dock.

  "Oh God...Oh God. Help!...Help! he yelled at a man about a hundred yards along the shore. The man came running over. Lynn's uncle turned Karen over and pushed on her back.

  The man arrived and saw what was happening and said, "I'll phone the ambulance." He ran back to his cabin.

  Minutes later the man ran back to say, "They're on their way. They said to continue CPR, breathing and compression of the chest."

  "I've been pushing on her back. Water has been coming out."

  "We've got to breath into her and compress her chest from the front," the man said.

  They turned her over. Her lips were blue. The man began the breathing and Karen's father pushed on the chest every five seconds or so. They kept this up until the ambulance arrived. The EMTs took over and got her into the ambulance and rushed her to the hospital but she couldn't be saved. There was no brain activity.

  Lynn and her uncle rushed to the hospital where they were given the bad news. She stood there in a daze as her uncle sobbed.

  Lynn walked out of the room and told the nurse at the counter, "I need to call my daddy in Massachusetts. My uncle will need help and my aunt will need to be told."

  At the funeral service Lynn heard her mother tell her aunt, "We'll see her again some day. She'll be waiting for us. Karen and Lynn will be together again some day. I'm sure of it. And all this sadness will be gone." They were both crying.

  "I'm sure her granddad was there to be with her...to welcome her," said Karen's mother.

  Lynn found herself wondering what it was like for Karen to be dead. Where was she now? What was she seeing? Was she there watching the funeral? Lynn looked around the cemetery grounds but she only saw the living.

  Back home, she asked her mother about dying, death, where dead people went. Would she go there when she died?

  Lynn read about ghosts, spirits, books from the elementary school library at first, but as the years went by she read books way beyond her years, watched anything on TV about the subject and she kept a picture of Karen in her room. She had asked her aunt for it and her aunt was pleased that Lynn would keep Karen's memory alive in that way.

  In her late adolescent and early teen years in England, she read everything in the library and the used book stores about not only ghosts but also every other area of the unknown too. She purchased every new book that was published on the unexplained, that she could afford, including every fictional book about the unexplained and the afterlife to see what ideas the authors came up with about it.

  She had relatives send her books published in the U.S. and not available in England. She was on pen pal lists throughout the world, corresponded with English-speaking pen pals who had similar interests and through them received literature from Australia, New Zealand, and many European countries.

  In college, back in the U. S., she made use of the big collections of the area colleges to expand her knowledge of the subject.

  She would have liked to enroll in a major that involved parapsychology but nothing was available in New England at the time except isolated evening courses in divisions of continuing education. And anyway, her parents firmly advised her to study something she could get a job in, so she pursued her second area of interest, majoring in math, and to please her parents, there was a heavy emphasis on business math. She minored in art.

  But even this led to interest in another area of parapsychology. She had heard of a woman who could go into a trance and paint and draw in styles that were identical to some of the great masters. The woman claimed that certain great artists, dead of course, continued their painting through her. Lynn tried this, read more about it, learned meditation to improve her trance state, but had no results.

  Despite all her travels and studies, she never had a psychic experience of her own. She was an expert on the subject with nothing to apply it to and this was always a source of frustration. She longed for a member of her family or a friend or even a distant relative to say they had a ghost or had a psychic experience and ask her to help them out with it, to understand it or resolve it. But the chance never came. She enrolled in an evening course on New England ghosts and visited a few haunted houses on field trips that the class took but felt absolutely nothing while in the houses. She concluded that she wasn't the least bit psychic, another source of frustration. She resigned herself to her interest in psychic phenomena having to remain just that, an interest. There was no way she could apply her knowledge. Maybe someday she'd write, but until then she'd have to be satisfied to just learn all she could. But now Frank Tilton had asked her about his dream.

  Frank continued telling her about the dream and finished, waiting for her comment.

  A blast of wind picked up some street debris and pelted the windows, a malevolent spirit taking offense at something they had said. Lynn glanced out. Two leaves were chasing each other in mad circles as a dust eddy made its way along the sidewalk. The cyclical nature of the dust eddy brought something to mind. "You know, maybe this has got something to do with a past life. Maybe memories from a previous life breaking through to this one.

  "You mean reincarnation?"

  "Yeah, there's a lot of evidence for it," she said.

  "But isn't that just people who have been hypnotized, telling a story that could have been something they read or something they saw in the movies?” He gave a shrug, then said, “I mean they always seem to claim to have been someone famous or someone interesting, never anyone boring. And most lives are pretty boring aren't they?" He gave her a 'Come on now, agree with me on this, okay?' look. He had just about admitted that he considered his life one of the boring ones.

  She caught the look and sidestepped that part of the question, responding instead to the part about people recalling information from books and movies. "I've read about some children," she said, " who started talking about another family they want to see and be with, right from the moment they're able to talk.”She shook her head. “No hypnosis, just a child who feels that they're not with their real family. They keep talking about their other parents, and some stories seem to have checked out.”. She told how she had heard about a few children in India who were taken to visit the town that they said they had previously lived in and the children knew their way around without ever having been there and the people they named as being their parents were found and they did have a child that died before this child was born."

  "So you think I'm dreaming about some kind of past life, that I'm reincarnated and actually remembering something that happened in that past life?"

  "You can remember the
name you hear in your dream and also other information. Maybe it would be possible to check it out...like with the Indian children."

  "Well, let's see. I hear the name Lowell, Mr. Lowell. and I hear men talking about brain activity and losing him again."

  "What else is there? Did you see anything or just hear things?"

  Frank put his finger to his mouth and made an indentation in his lower lip, thinking. "There was also the name Lawrence, or an impression of hearing the name Lawrence. Yeah, Lawrence I think it was. Maybe a memory of the name Lawrence from that possible previous life you mentioned.” He taped on his chin. “Yeah, I'm not sure where the name Lawrence came from but I'm sure it's the name that goes with Lowell. I can also remember seeing things before I heard the voices. I feel myself being dragged or pulled from my body and trying to fight it and while this is happening I can see things.” He nodded. “A wide, bright tunnel and then a blurry image of a scientific-looking place and I feel a sort of jolt and I'm no longer moving. Then I can't see anything but I hear voices around me."

  "You mean they're standing around you, like doctors around an operating table?"

  "Right. It's as if I'm lying down on something. I can feel my back against it...a table maybe." He shrugged. "And I hear the voices above me, like they're looking down and talking."

  Lynn leaned forward on her elbow, and wobbled the glass in her hand a few times. She was elated at the chance to be able to put her years of study of the paranormal to use. To finally be asked for advice from someone, and from someone she felt attracted to was a realization of her dreams. She wanted to help him and would do her best but she felt concerned, realizing that she desperately wanted something more. What if his problem was eventually resolved and that was it? A pleasant thank you? A warm friendship? What if it didn't go beyond that? This contact was the perfect opportunity for them to get together and if it didn't happen now it probably wasn't going to happen at all. She got her thoughts back to Frank's problem.