Her reflection puzzled her. Her hair seemed longer than it should be, trailing down across her breasts. Her finely chiselled features, prominent jawline, straight nose – her face, except the expression, was not hers: lips fuller, more sensual, redder than her lip-gloss, glinted; teeth fine and white. Her green eyes, intense beneath level brows, cat-cruel, yearning.
Lisette released the hem of her gown, raised her fingers to her reflection in wonder. Her fingers passed through the glass, touched the face beyond.
Not a mirror. A doorway. Of a crypt.
The mirror-image fingers that rose to her face twisted in her hair, pulled her face forward. Glass-cold lips bruised her own. The dank breath of the tomb flowed into her mouth.
Dragging herself from the embrace, Lisette felt a scream rip from her throat . . .
. . . And Danielle was shaking her awake.
III
The business card read Dr Ingmar Magnus, followed simply by Consultations and a Kensington address. Not Harley Street, at any rate. Lisette considered it for the hundredth time, watching for street names on the corners of buildings as she walked down Kensington Church Street from the Notting Hill Gate station. No clue as to what type of doctor, nor what sort of consultations; wonderfully vague, and just the thing to circumvent licensing laws, no doubt.
Danielle had lent her one of his books to read; The Self Reborn, put out by one of those minuscule scholarly publishers clustered about the British Museum. Lisette found it a bewildering mélange of occult philosophy and lunatic-fringe theory – all evidently having something to do with reincarnation – and gave it up after the first chapter. She had decided not to keep the appointment, until her nightmare Sunday night had given force to Danielle’s insistence.
Lisette wore a loose silk blouse above French designer jeans and ankle-strap sandal-toe high heels. The early summer heat wave now threatened rain, and she would have to run for it if the grey skies made good. She turned into Holland Street, passed the recently closed Equinox bookshop, where Danielle had purchased various works by Aleister Crowley. A series of back streets – she consulted her map of Central London – brought her to a modestly respectable row of nineteenth-century brick houses, now done over into offices and flats. She checked the number on the brass plaque with her card, sucked in her breath and entered.
Lisette hadn’t known what to expect. She wouldn’t have been surprised, knowing some of Danielle’s friends, to have been greeted with clouds of incense, Eastern music, robed initiates. Instead she found a disappointingly mundane waiting room, rather small but expensively furnished, where a pretty Eurasian receptionist took her name and spoke into an intercom. Lisette noted that there was no one else – patients? clients? – in the waiting room. She glanced at her watch and noticed she was several minutes late.
“Please do come in, Miss Seyrig.” Dr Magnus stepped out of his office and ushered her inside. Lisette had seen a psychiatrist briefly a few years before, at her parents’ demand, and Dr Magnus’s office suggested the same – from the tasteful, relaxed decor, the shelves of scholarly books, down to the traditional psychoanalyst’s couch. She took a chair beside the modern, rather carefully arranged desk, and Dr Magnus seated himself comfortably in the leather swivel chair behind it.
“I almost didn’t come,” Lisette began, somewhat aggressively.
“I’m very pleased that you did decide to come.” Dr Magnus smiled reassuringly. “It doesn’t require a trained eye to see that something is troubling you. When the unconscious tries to speak to us, it is foolhardy to attempt to ignore its message.”
“Meaning that I may be cracking up?”
“I’m sure that must concern you, my dear. However, very often dreams such as yours are evidence of the emergence of a new level of self-awareness – sort of growing pains of the psyche, if you will – and not to be considered a negative experience by any means. They distress you only because you do not understand them – even as a child kept in ignorance through sexual repression is frightened by the changes of puberty. With your cooperation, I hope to help you come to understand the changes of your growing self-awareness, for it is only through a complete realization of one’s self that one can achieve personal fulfillment and thereby true inner peace.”
“I’m afraid I can’t afford to undergo analysis just now.”
“Let me begin by emphasizing to you that I am not suggesting psychoanalysis; I do not in the least consider you to be neurotic, Miss Seyrig. What I strongly urge is an exploration of your unconsciousness – a discovery of your whole self. My task is only to guide you along the course of your self-discovery, and for this privilege I charge no fee.”
“I hadn’t realized the National Health Service was this inclusive.”
Dr Magnus laughed easily. “It isn’t, of course. My work is supported by a private foundation. There are many others who wish to learn certain truths of our existence, to seek answers where mundane science has not yet so much as realized there are questions. In that regard I am simply another paid researcher, and the results of my investigations are made available to those who share with us this yearning to see beyond the stultifying boundaries of modern science.”
He indicated the book-lined wall behind his desk. Much of one shelf appeared to contain books with his own name prominent upon their spines.
“Do you intend to write a book about me?” Lisette meant to put more of a note of protest in her voice.
“It is possible that I may wish to record some of what we discover together, my dear. But only with scrupulous discretion, and, needless to say, only with your complete permission.”
“My dreams.” Lisette remembered the book of his that she had tried to read. “Do you consider them to be evidence of some previous incarnation?”
“Perhaps. We can’t be certain until we explore them further. Does the idea of reincarnation smack too much of the occult to your liking, Miss Seyrig? Perhaps we should speak in more fashionable terms of Jungian archetypes, genetic memory or mental telepathy. The fact that the phenomenon has so many designations is ample proof that dreams of a previous existence are a very real part of the unconscious mind. It is undeniable that many people have experienced, in dreams or under hypnosis, memories that cannot possibly arise from their personal experience. Whether you believe that the immortal soul leaves the physical body at death to be reborn in the living embryo, or prefer to attribute it to inherited memories engraved upon DNA, or whatever explanation – this is a very real phenomenon and has been observed throughout history.
“As a rule, these memories of past existence are entirely buried within the unconscious. Almost everyone has experienced déjà vu. Subjects under hypnosis have spoken in languages and archaic dialects of which their conscious mind has no knowledge, have recounted in detail memories of previous lives. In some cases these submerged memories burst forth as dreams; in these instances, the memory is usually one of some emotionally laden experience, something too potent to remain buried. I believe that this is the case with your nightmares – the fact that they are recurrent being evidence of some profound significance in the events they recall.”
Lisette wished for a cigarette; she’d all but stopped buying cigarettes with British prices, and from the absence of ashtrays here, Dr Magnus was a nonsmoker.
“But why have these nightmares only lately become a problem?”
“I think I can explain that easily enough. Your forebears were from London. The dreams became a problem after you arrived in London. While it is usually difficult to define any relationship between the subject and the remembered existence, the timing and the force of your dream regressions would seem to indicate that you may be the reincarnation of someone – an ancestress, perhaps – who lived here in London during this past century.”
“In that case, the nightmares should go away when I return to the States.”
“Not necessarily. Once a doorway to the unconscious is opened, it is not so easily closed again. Moreover, you say that you
had experienced these dreams on rare occasions prior to your coming here. I would suggest that what you are experiencing is a natural process – a submerged part of your self is seeking expression, and it would be unwise to deny this shadow stranger within you. I might further argue that your presence here in London is hardly coincidence – that your decision to study here was determined by that part of you who emerges in these dreams.”
Lisette decided she wasn’t ready to accept such implications just now. “What do you propose?”
Dr Magnus folded his hands as neatly as a bishop at prayer. “Have you ever undergone hypnosis?”
“No.” She wished she hadn’t made that sound like two syllables.
“It has proved to be extraordinarily efficacious in a great number of cases such as your own, my dear. Please do try to put from your mind the ridiculous trappings and absurd mumbo-jumbo with which the popular imagination connotes hypnotism. Hypnosis is no more than a technique through which we may release the entirety of the unconscious mind to free expression, unrestricted by the countless artificial barriers that make us strangers to ourselves.”
“You want to hypnotize me?” The British inflection came to her, turning her statement into both question and protest.
“With your fullest cooperation, of course. I think it best. Through regressive hypnosis we can explore the significance of these dreams that trouble you, discover the shadow stranger within your self. Remember – this is a part of you that cries out for conscious expression. It is only through the full realization of one’s identity, of one’s total self, that true inner tranquillity may be achieved. Know thyself, and you will find peace.”
“Know myself?”
“Precisely. You must put aside this false sense of guilt, Miss Seyrig. You are not possessed by some alien and hostile force. These dreams, these memories of another existence – this is you.”
IV
“Some bloody weirdo made a pass at me this afternoon,” Lisette confided.
“On the tube, was it?” Danielle stood on her toes, groping along the top of their bookshelf. Freshly showered, she was wearing only a lace-trimmed teddy – cami-knickers, they called them in the shops here – and her straining thigh muscles shaped her buttocks nicely.
“In Kensington, actually. After I had left Dr Magnus’s office.” Lisette was lounging in an old satin slip she’d found at a stall in Church Street. They were drinking Bristol Cream out of brandy snifters. It was an intimate sort of evening they loved to share together, when not in the company of Danielle’s various friends.
“I was walking down Holland Street, and there was this seedy-looking creep all dressed out in punk regalia, pressing his face against the door where that Equinox bookshop used to be. I made the mistake of glancing at him as I passed, and he must have seen my reflection in the glass, because he spun right around, looked straight at me, and said: ‘Darling! What a lovely surprise to see you!’”
Lisette sipped her sherry. “Well. I gave him my hardest stare, and would you believe the creep just stood there smiling like he knew me, and so I yelled, ‘Piss off!’ in my loudest American accent, and he just froze there with his mouth hanging open.”
“Here it is,” Danielle announced. “I’d shelved it beside Roland Franklyn’s We Pass from View – that’s another you ought to read. I must remember someday to return it to that cute Liverpool writer who lent it to me.”
She settled cozily beside Lisette on the couch, handed her a somewhat smudged paperback, and resumed her glass of sherry. The book was entitled More Stately Mansions: Evidences of the Infinite by Dr Ingmar Magnus, and bore an affectionate inscription from the author to Danielle. “This is the first. The later printings had two of his studies deleted; I can’t imagine why. But these are the sort of sessions he was describing to you.”
“He wants to put me in one of his books,” Lisette told her with an extravagant leer. “Can a woman trust a man who writes such ardent inscriptions to place her under hypnosis?”
“Dr Magnus is a perfect gentleman,” Danielle assured her, somewhat huffily. “He’s a distinguished scholar and is thoroughly dedicated to his research. And besides, I’ve let him hypnotize me on a few occasions.”
“I didn’t know that. Whatever for?”
“Dr Magnus is always seeking suitable subjects. I was fascinated by his work, and when I met him at a party I offered to undergo hypnosis.”
“What happened?”
Danielle seemed envious. “Nothing worth writing about, I’m afraid. He said I was either too thoroughly integrated, or that my previous lives were too deeply buried. That’s often the case, he says, which is why absolute proof of reincarnation is so difficult to demonstrate. After a few sessions I decided I couldn’t spare the time to try further.”
“But what was it like?”
“As adventurous as taking a nap. No caped Svengali staring into my eyes. No lambent girasol ring. No swirling lights. Quite dull, actually. Dr Magnus simply lulls you to sleep.”
“Sounds safe enough. So long as I don’t get molested walking back from his office.”
Playfully, Danielle stroked her hair. “You hardly look the punk rock type. You haven’t chopped off your hair with garden shears and dyed the stubble green. And not a single safety pin through your cheek.”
“Actually I suppose he may not have been a punk rocker. Seemed a bit too old, and he wasn’t garish enough. It’s just that he was wearing a lot of black leather, and he had gold earrings and some sort of medallion.”
“In front of the Equinox, did you say? How curious.”
“Well, I think I gave him a good start. I glanced in a window to see whether he was trying to follow me, but he was just standing there looking stunned.”
“Might have been an honest mistake. Remember the old fellow at Midge and Fiona’s party who kept insisting he knew you?”
“And who was pissed out of his skull. Otherwise he might have been able to come up with a more original line.”
Lisette paged through More Stately Mansions while Danielle selected a Tangerine Dream album from the stack and placed it on her stereo at low volume. The music seemed in keeping with the grey drizzle of the night outside and the coziness within their sitting room. Seeing she was busy reading, Danielle poured sherry for them both and stood studying the bookshelves – a hodgepodge of occult and metaphysical topics stuffed together with art books and recent paperbacks in no particular order. Wedged between Aleister Crowley’s Magick in Theory and Practice and How I Discovered My Infinite Self by “An Initiate,” was Dr Magnus’s most recent book, The Shadow Stranger. She pulled it down, and Dr Magnus stared thoughtfully from the back of the dust jacket.
“Do you believe in reincarnation?” Lisette asked her.
“I do. Or rather, I do some of the time.” Danielle stood behind the couch and bent over Lisette’s shoulder to see where she was reading. “Midge Vaughn assures me that in a previous incarnation I was hanged for witchcraft.”
“Midge should be grateful she’s living in the twentieth century.”
“Oh, Midge says we were sisters in the same coven and were hanged together; that’s the reason for our close affinity.”
“I’ll bet Midge says that to all the girls.”
“Oh, I like Midge.” Danielle sipped her sherry and considered the rows of spines. “Did you say that man was wearing a medallion? Was it a swastika or that sort of thing?”
“No. It was something like a star in a circle. And he wore rings on every finger.”
“Wait! Kind of greasy black hair slicked back from a widow’s peak to straight over his collar in back? Eyebrows curled up into points like they’ve been waxed?”
“That’s it.”
“Ah, Mephisto!”
“Do you know him, then?”
“Not really. I’ve just seen him a time or two at the Equinox and a few other places. He reminds me of some ham actor playing Mephistopheles. Midge spoke to him once when we were by there, but I gather he’
s not part of her particular coven. Probably hadn’t heard that the Equinox had closed. Never impressed me as a masher; very likely he actually did mistake you for someone.”
“Well, they do say that everyone has a double. I wonder if mine is walking somewhere about London, being mistaken for me?”
“And no doubt giving some unsuspecting classmate of yours a resounding slap on the face.”
“What if I met her suddenly?”
“Met your double – your Doppelgänger? Remember William Wilson? Disaster, darling – disaster!”
V
There really wasn’t much to it; no production at all. Lisette felt nervous, a bit silly and perhaps a touch cheated.
“I want you to relax,” Dr Magnus told her. “All you have to do is just relax.”
That’s what her gynecologist always said, too, Lisette thought with a sudden tenseness. She lay on her back on Dr Magnus’s analyst’s couch: her head on a comfortable cushion, legs stretched primly out on the leather upholstery (she’d deliberately worn jeans again), fingers clenched damply over her tummy. A white gown instead of jeans, and I’ll be ready for my coffin, she mused uncomfortably.
“Fine. That’s it. You’re doing fine, Lisette. Very fine. Just relax. Yes, just relax, just like that. Fine, that’s it. Relax.”
Dr Magnus’s voice was a quiet monotone, monotonously repeating soothing encouragements. He spoke to her tirelessly, patiently, slowly dissolving her anxiety.
“You feel sleepy, Lisette. Relaxed and sleepy. Your breathing is slow and relaxed, slow and relaxed. Think about your breathing now, Lisette. Think how slow and sleepy and deep each breath comes. You’re breathing deeper, and you’re feeling sleepier. Relax and sleep, Lisette, breathe and sleep. Breathe and sleep . . .”
She was thinking about her breathing. She counted the breaths; the slow monotonous syllables of Dr Magnus’s voice seemed to blend into her breathing like a quiet, tuneless lullaby. She was sleepy, for that matter, and it was very pleasant to relax here, listening to that dim, droning murmur while he talked on and on. How much longer until the end of the lecture . . .
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