by Peter James
Charley began to tremble. ‘There’s something bad.’
‘What do you see?’
‘Sharon Tate. People murdered. It’s horrible.’
‘Are you there?’
‘No.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m reading a paper. We’re going out. To a movie.’
‘What are you going to see?’
‘Easy Rider.’
‘Is Tom your boyfriend?’
‘Yes.’
‘When did you meet him?’
‘On my birthday.’
‘On your sixteenth birthday?’
‘Yes.’
‘Let’s go back to your sixteenth birthday. Can you remember it?’
‘Yes.’ Her voice sounded slurry.
‘Are you having a party?’
‘In a pub — with Laura — other girlfriends, to celebrate. I’m really pissed.’
‘What are you drinking?’
‘Cuba Libre. He’s laughing at me.’
‘Who?’
‘The fella. With the Beatle haircut.’ She giggled. ‘He thinks he’s so cool. Joe Cool! He’s laughing at me. I’m feeling sick now, going to be sick.’ Her head spun.
Silence.
‘Go back to your tenth birthday, Charley. Can you remember your tenth birthday?’
Images of childhood drifted past her, flashed at her briefly and floated away like roadsigns at night. Packing bows into plastic bags, her mother stitching stuffed toys, the television on loudly. Emergency-Ward 10. Vietnam. Hancock. Alf Garnett. Juke Box Jury. Bonanza. Peyton Place. Kennedy was shot. Churchill was buried. Screeching Chinamen burned books. Man landed on the moon. She could smell the carpet of the sitting room floor where she lay for hours, dressing her doll, tending it, making it better when it was ill, the doll that needed her, depended on her, rolled its eyes obediently, gratefully. Florence Doll. Princess Margaret married Anthony Armstrong Jones. Florence Doll got married too. The ceremony was even grander. Florence Doll married Binky Bear who was the Head of the World.
‘Your tenth birthday, Charley.’
The memory was indistinct. She was becoming aware of the room, aware of the hypnotist, and felt a trace of disappointment. She lay in silence for a moment, ‘I think I’m awake,’ she said.
‘Your tenth birthday, Charley,’ he repeated.
Damp animal smells filled her nostrils. ‘The zoo. London Zoo …’ Her voice trailed off. She floated in silence again. She opened her eyes. The microphone was a blur and her whole body seemed weighted down with sandbags.
‘Can you remember your fourth birthday?’
‘You careless girl! You stupid, stupid, careless girl.’
‘He’s shouting at me.’
‘Who is shouting at you?’
‘My dad.’
‘Why is he shouting at you?’
‘I rode — bicycle — I got a red bicycle — into a bush. He’s going to spank me and lock me in my room. My mum’s crying. She’s telling him it’s my birthday, but he’s still going to lock me in. It’s the pills he’s on. Mum says the pills for his illness make him angry.’
Tiredness drained her. Time faded. She was floating. It was pitch dark. She was scared. She tried to wake. She could not. She tried to sit up. Nothing moved.
‘Relax, Charley.’
Her body and the darkness seemed to merge together.
‘We’re going back now, Charley, we’re going back a long way further.’ His calm voice drifted around her, seemed to fill her like air. ‘We’re going to go back now to before you were born. You are floating in darkness, floating in space, in the void, all is calm, peaceful, you have no worries, Charley, you are in spirit now, free, weightless, free of life.’
Dark silence carried her.
‘You are in spirit now. You have a complete set of memories. The clock is running backwards. You are free to search for a memory in all time.’
The darkness swirled.
‘Think about your previous life now, Charley. Remember your death. Remember how you died.’
Fear tightened around her. She began spinning, helpless, spinning in draining water, faster and faster like an insect being drawn down to the plughole; she was fighting, flailing, arms slithering, spinning faster still, being sucked down, down.
Then she was in brilliant white light. Sunlight, beating down, hard, tormenting her, sunlight pressing her against the hill, trying to crush her into the hill, to stub her out on it. Sadness filled her. An immense weight of sadness, and despair.
‘Where are you?’
‘On an ’ill.’
‘How old are you?’
‘I dunno.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘I dunno.’
‘Do you have brothers or sisters? Parents?’
‘I dunno.’
‘Do you recognise the hill?’
‘No.’
‘What’s the colour of your hair?’
She pulled some strands out with her fingers. ‘Brown.’
‘Are you working? At school?’
‘I dunno. I don’t want to be here.’
‘I presume you’ve had education? Where did you go to school?’
She looked up. She could see clouds through the trees. Tears were sliding down her face.
‘Why are you crying?’
The ground was soft under her feet, too soft. She was sinking in. She stepped forwards and her left foot came free with a squelch. Her right foot was stuck. She pulled and it came out of her shoe, leaving that behind. She knelt down, put her hand into the boggy mud and pulled. ‘My shoe. I’m wearing the wrong shoes. I oughter be in boots.’
‘Why are you crying? Where are you?’
‘Dunno.’
‘How old are you? Tell me how old you are. When was your last birthday?’
‘Dunno.’ She pushed her foot back into the shoe, and stumbled on. Something bit into her hand, something sharp, hard-edged, something she could not let go. She fell and there was a sharp pain as it cut into her palm; she transferred it to her other hand, a small metal tin, and stood, forcing herself upwards, pushing the sky off her back as if it was a tent that had collapsed on to her. Something rattled inside the tin. Above she heard running water, splashing, cool water and she forced herself to go on, into trees, squelching on upwards.
‘What are you carrying?’
The voice was distant in the sounds of the woods. She paused and stared around at the darkness of the trees. A rabbit was watching her. A crow. There was sudden complete silence as the chatter of the birds stopped. As the water stopped. It felt as if the whole animal kingdom was watching her. The track forked here, and she knew the way was to the right. She went on through thick bracken which crunched under her feet.
The rock loomed out of the trees, blurred through the tears that filled her eyes and streamed down her cheeks.
She reached the base of the rock, and the path was dry here, easier to walk on. As she carried on up around it she saw another rock, a strange upright rock indented in the centre, shaped like a heart.
She climbed towards it, puffing from exertion, sobbing gently. The huge granite rock at the edge of a small bluff looked as if it could topple over at any moment.
The track went underneath the overhang then around the back of the bluff on to the top. The rock looked heart-shaped from this side too, although less distinct, and even bigger than from below. It was a good eight feet high and six feet across. She knew it well. It was covered in carvings, initials, and she knew them too. P loves E. Chris l. Lena. Mary-Wilf, Dan-Rosie. Arthur Edward loves Gwennie. D loves BJ.
‘Do you recognise any of the initials?’
She swallowed, stared down at D loves BJ, and squeezed the tin harder between her hands. Then she walked to the shrubbery behind the rock, knelt down, and for a while was blinded by her tears.
She scraped away the dead leaves and began to scoop a hole in the damp sandy earth. When it was nearly a foot deep, she laid th
e tin in, scraped the earth back over and spread the leaves out on top.
‘Why are you burying it?’
She stood up and patted the earth down with her foot, then walked on through the shrubbery and down a steep bank towards a small waterfall. She began to feel spits of water on her face, her arms, her legs, and as she got closer, holding out her dirty hands, the spits turned to a fine continual spray that got heavier and wetter until she was standing in the waterfall itself, the fine spray drenching her, tiny needles of water coming harder and harder, so hard they were hurting now.
She tried to move away, but crashed into a wall. She spun round. Her face stared back from a mirror. ‘Room,’ she mouthed, but it was strange. Her face in the mirror did not move.
‘I don’t like this room,’ she said.
‘What room are you in?’
‘I don’t like this room. I don’t want to be here.’
‘Where is it?’
‘I don’t like it. I don’t want to be here. Please, I don’t want to be here. Please take me out.’
A figure loomed in the mirror behind her.
‘No!’
The mirror exploded into spidery cracks. A jagged shard landed at her feet.
‘GET ME OUT! GET ME OUT! OUT! PLEASE GET ME OUT!’ She hammered with her fists. Terror throttled her, strangled her voice. ‘OH QUICK, OUT! PLEASE GET ME OUT! PLEASE! OH PLEASE!’
A face looked at her anxiously. ‘Charley. Wake up now. It’s all right.’
The terror still surged. She was thrashing wildly.
‘Charley, it’s all right.’
The strange face. The centre parting. Mutton chops. Eyes like pinheads through the thick lenses. He disappeared. There was a click. Bright light flooded around her, then his face was over her again.
‘It’s all right, Charley. You are safe.’
She felt as if she was lying in the water. Rivulets ran down her face, over her neck, her shoulders, her stomach. She pulled her hands out and pushed away the blanket and immediately felt cooler. She lay still, exhausted, and looked up into the myopic eyes. ‘What—?’ It was an effort to speak. ‘What happened?’
‘Your past life. You were reliving something unpleasant, some bad experience,’ he said gently. ‘That’s a good thing. It is only by reliving bad experiences in previous lives that we free ourselves of the traumas we have in this carnation.’
There was a choking lump of fear in her throat. ‘It was awful,’ she said. ‘Horrible. It didn’t make any sense — like a bad dream.’
‘It wasn’t a dream. You were in a past life.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to stop there. We’ve run over, and I have another appointment. I’ll give you the tapes.’
‘I thought … I thought I had two hours.’
‘It’s three o’clock,’ he said.
‘Three? Impossible! Nearly three hours? I’ve only been a few minutes — ten minutes — it can’t be —’
‘It takes time, going into past lives; you were there a long time.’
She shook her head, bewildered, and tried to move, to get up, but she felt completely drained.
‘We need to have another session,’ he said. ‘We should not leave it like this, with the wound open. We need to find out more.’
She stared at him, her mind jumbled.
‘You were talking in quite a different voice. We need to find out who you were, what you were burying in the tin. We need to know what terrified you.’
‘Why?’ she mouthed. It came out a squeak of terror, like a hunted creature in the woods at night caught out in the open, away from its nest, its lair, its mother.
‘Our past lives are part of our psyche, Charley. When we regress to them we stir that up, transcend the time bands. We don’t want you start having trace memories, or suddenly being frightened and not knowing why. You may find that a lot of your fears now relate to this incident in your previous life. If we can see what happened, find out what caused it, it might help you.’
‘And if we don’t?’
‘We shouldn’t leave it,’ he said. ‘Not like this. I don’t think that would be wise.’
He smiled with a smugness that disturbed her. She shivered as fear coursed through her veins.
‘I still don’t understand.’
‘You will,’ he said. ‘You’ll understand.’
Chapter Thirteen
‘We’ve met before,’ she said. ‘In a previous life.’ She tilted her glass towards her lips and stared into his eyes. ‘We were lovers.’
He blushed, glanced away, then back; she was still staring. He raised his own glass and grinned. ‘When?’
‘It’s lovely wine,’ she said, the words running into each other.
‘You’re only thirty-eight once.’
‘Are you sure?’ She clinked her glass against his.
Charley watched Tom and Laura in the shadows of the hurricane lamps, at the end of the two tables they had joined together, and wondered what they were talking about so deeply. Laura in a white jacket, with a large quartz brooch, leaning towards him, her elbows on the table. Beautiful. She looked beautiful and Charley felt dowdy in comparison. She had been putting on weight since the move, just a little, and it annoyed her.
Smoke from the barbecue drifted over the table and Bob Dylan’s voice sang softly from the speaker Tom had run from the drawing room. He always played old records on his birthday.
‘Bats bonk upside down. Did you know that?’ She heard Richard Howarth’s voice, dimly, through the chatter.
‘You’re very brave, entertaining so soon,’ said Michael Ohm, sitting on her right. His Zapata moustache seemed to be getting thicker each time she saw him, as if to compensate for the widening bald patch in the centre of his head. He pushed his red-framed glasses back up his arched nose. One of Tom’s partners. Trendy. Lawyers were starting to look like architects. Architects were looking like bankers. Change. Life shifted silently beneath you like sand.
She shivered. The heat of the Indian summer day had gone and a damp chill filled the darkness. People were putting on pullovers. Rubbing their hands. They would have to move inside soon.
Richard Howorth, Tom’s best man, was here and his girlfriend, Louisa, an interior decorator. John Orpen, Tom’s accountant, and his wife, Sue, were trying to prise conversation out of an extremely drunk Julian Garfield-Hampsen. Charley had suggested inviting Hugh for Laura, and Tom had thought it a good idea to invite Julian and Zoe as well; she was glad he was keen to make friends with the neighbours.
Laura was ignoring Hugh. Matchmaking for her was always difficult. She did not seem to know what she wanted herself. She had chucked away a marriage that could have been salvaged without ever really explaining to Charley why, and had fought fiercely for custody of her two girls, yet sent them to boarding school because she needed to concentrate on her shop.
Michael Ohm wiped soup from his moustache. ‘How do you find it here compared to London?’ he asked.
‘Strange,’ Charley replied. ‘But it’s nice getting to know Mother Nature. We actually had our own eggs for breakfast this morning — well, egg — but it’s a start. We’re planting all sorts of vegetables. Some of the local shops are hysterical. The grocer in the village sells only one kind of bread — sliced white. Can you believe it?’
‘Geller is a con man! He’s a complete fraud!’
The outburst came from Hugh Boxer at the other end of the table. He sat up in his chair, shoulders hunched inside his crumpled linen jacket, his eyes blazing fiercely, black crevasses scoring the gaunt skin of his face.
‘How can you say that?’ Zoe Garfield-Hampsen piped heatedly in her little girl voice, her breasts almost popping out of her low-cut dress in indignation. ‘I’ve seen him with my own eyes. I’ve seen him do it!’
One hurricane lamp flickered, died for a second, came on again roaring fiercely, then Bob Dylan stopped abruptly in mid-chord; the table dimmed. Charley looked at the house. The lights had gone out. Then both the hur
ricane lamps went out as well, plunging them into darkness. She felt a blast of cold air as if a freezer door had been opened behind her. Someone howled; a ghostly wail.
‘Mains trip,’ Tom said. ‘I’ll do it. Won’t take a sec.’ There was the sound of a glass smashing. ‘Ooops, bugger,’ he cursed.
John Orpen clicked on his lighter and lifted the glass lid of the hurricane lamp in front of him. ‘The wick’s too low.’ He relit it and turned it up.
Bob Dylan started singing again, several lights in the house came back on together and everyone cheered. Tom reappeared. ‘We’ve had the place rewired,’ he said, ‘but they’ve done something wrong.’
‘The trip’s probably been set too sensitive,’ Michael Ohm murmured.
‘The soup was absolutely brilliant,’ Sue said. ‘Can you give me the recipe?’
Charley stood and began clearing the table.
Laura followed her into the kitchen with an armful of plates which she balanced precariously on the stack Charley put down. She looked at the clothes rack on the pulley and tugged the cord. The rack rose up and down, then wobbled above them. Charley noticed she looked sloshed, and was surprised: Laura rarely drank much.
‘S’beautiful place. You’re so lucky! I’m incredibly envious!’ She pulled the cord again, mildly irritating Charley, and the rack rose up and down with a creak. ‘So tell me, how did it go with Ernest Gibbon? What did you think of him?’
Shadows from the rails of the rack swung across the floor as Charley loaded plates into the dishwasher. ‘I thought he was a creep.’
‘He’s sweet!’ Laura slurred indignantly. ‘S’lovely man!’
‘Tom’s listened to the tapes — bits of them anyway. He says he was feeding me with thoughts.’
‘He’d never do that. He’s got a terrific reputation.’
‘It struck me as a good con. He leaves you feeling terrified, so you want to go back to find out what happens next.’
Laura tugged the cord once more. ‘No, I don’t think he’s like that.’
There was a wailing screech then a bang like a clap of thunder in the room.
Laura jumped back and crashed into the fridge.
Charley stared in shocked silence at the clothes rack; it was lying on the floor between them.