by Zoe Drake
Her thumb went into her mouth, and she stared fiercely at Kid’s BBC.
“Jenny, can you really see angels? What do they look like? Can you talk to them? Do they talk to you?”
Jenny slowly turned her head from side to side. “Promised not to tell,” she mumbled through her thumb.
“Who? Who did you promise?”
Caroline breezed into the room, and Jenny took her thumb from her mouth and broke into a huge grin. She held her arms out for a hug.
“You see, Gareth?” Caroline said with a knowing smile. “I knew Jenny would take your mind off things.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Wednesday April 17th
Something had changed.
Gareth could feel it as soon as he got within smiling distance of Dr. Bhaskar’s receptionist. There was something about the expression on her face, the way it flickered for a second when she saw him at the door.
She ushered him in, and he noticed that the wiry doctor seemed more animated than usual; almost – agitated.
“Gareth, there’s something you and I have to discuss,” he said without preamble. “I think it pertains to the sessions we’ve been having.”
From a drawer, he produced a newspaper, and opened it to a certain page. He spread it out on the desk and Gareth leaned closer to peer at it.
It was the article about himself – from the Cambridge Evening News.
“Ah,” Gareth said.
“Yes – ‘ah’, indeed,” Bhaskar mimicked. “Did you think people wouldn’t realize? With the details down here, did you think they wouldn’t recognize you?”
“Maybe it was a bit naïve,” Gareth said with a sigh. “But I’ve got a message to give to people.”
Bhaskar snatched the paper up and threw it onto a side table, and Gareth started to realize how annoyed he really was. “No, it doesn’t work like that. All the sessions have been ruined. All the work we’ve done together has been thrown out the window!”
“Now wait a minute,” Gareth said hastily. “I thought that if I didn’t tell you, it would make things clearer. If you didn’t know about the Skywatch, you’d be more impartial!”
“Oh good God, don’t you see? That’s not the point. You knew about the Skywatch, not me. You were doing research into UFOs before the accident happened – and you didn’t tell me!”
“But that doesn’t change the fact that something happened to me,” Gareth maintained.
“Oh yes it does, Mr. Manning.” Bhaskar stalked over to a filing cabinet and pulled out a cardboard folder, then handed it to Gareth.
Inside were photocopied newspaper clippings – about social workers and teenagers, in the Orkneys, the USA, other places. The words ‘Satanic abuse’ appeared in many of the headlines.
“Have you ever heard of False Memory Syndrome?” Bhaskar continued, his voice strident. “It screwed up a lot of social workers and amateur hypnotherapists around the world. Basically, it means that a lot of the ‘memories’ recalled under hypnosis are not memories at all, but fabrications of the imagination. People have run into serious trouble when they tried to treat them as genuine memories and have them admitted as evidence in court proceedings.”
“If you’re saying–” Gareth tried to finish the sentence but there was a tight, choking feeling in his throat stopping him. “If you’re saying – that I’ve made all this up–”
“No. No, I’m not. Don’t panic, Gareth.” Bhaskar paused to switch on some of his old friendliness. “Leaving aside the accident itself – which did happen to you, and you’ve got the scars to prove it – we’ve been trying to get to grips with your other experiences, which are objectively real, to you. The essential question is, are they real recovered memories, or are they fantasies. From the evidence of this…” He waved a hand at the article. “I’d say that your experiences related under hypnosis have been confabulated.”
“What does that mean?” Gareth snapped.
“Sorry. It means, at the time of your accident, you were involved in a UFO investigation. That is something which involves a major suspension of disbelief on your part, to begin with. You then saw something that you couldn’t explain in terms of your own value-system, but the people around you were ready to class it as a UFO encounter. After an accident which endangered your life, in your nightmares, and in the hypnotherapy sessions, I think you unconsciously interpreted your trauma in terms of an abduction experience.”
Gareth blinked, his mouth working. “You mean I did it… without realizing I was doing it? Under hypnosis, my mind was kind of… improvising?”
“That’s exactly what I mean, Gareth. What you have to understand is that hypnosis is a state of extreme suggestibility. You can take any kind of mental cues, or preconceptions, and weave then into what feels like a totally convincing reality. To fill in the gaps between the accident and waking up in hospital, your mind has confabulated a story… which means, made it up. Made up from the details of what was happening immediately before. You didn’t pick up the ideas from me, and I tried not to give you leading questions, that’s true. You were influenced by what happened before the accident.”
Gareth felt as if he were drunk. The room was flickering, rolling a little before his eyes.
He sat down heavily in the armchair opposite the doctor’s desk, gripping the armrests tightly. Bhaskar’s voice was still in his ears, but sounding hollow, as if the man were speaking through a funnel. Now he was saying something about Vietnam veterans… after returning to the States, and being treated in mental hospitals, some of the medical staff had started experiencing flashbacks of combat in Vietnam. Hideous, realistic flashbacks… but the doctors, nurses and orderlies involved had never been to Vietnam in their lives, and most had never been in the army. All they had done was treat the veterans day and night for several months, and that was enough to…
“Hold on.” Gareth was suddenly on his feet, pacing to the bookshelves. “I see you what you mean, but it doesn’t make sense. What about the things I told you about? The things after the accident?”
“Yes. Now again, similar things have happened to other people in what you might call, abduction scenarios. Lets take the Night Visitor incident you reported to me. There is an altered state in the medical textbooks called akinesia. It’s a form of self-hypnosis; the body becomes paralyzed, even though the brain seems perfectly conscious, in a condition between waking and sleeping. It’s usually accompanied by a feeling of extreme panic.”
“Yeah, tell me about it,” muttered Gareth. He stood by the bookcase, looking nervously up and down the shelves. “Got an answer for everything, haven’t you? What about the Men In Black? I’ve seen them twice now. They’re watching me. They’re following me!”
“Well, I think we’re… won’t you be more comfortable sitting down, Gareth?”
“I’m fine.”
“I think instead of talking about Men In Black following you, Gareth, we should be trying to find what’s making you hallucinate.”
“You mean all of this has a physical cause? I’ve got my wires crossed?” Gareth was hugging himself, physically trying to hold himself together. “You mean something’s gone wrong in my brain, like a burst blood vessel or something?”
“Gareth, I do wish you would sit down.” Bhaskar was himself rising to his feet.
“I don’t want to sit down, I want to get this sorted out. I’m not asking for attention, I just want to be normal!” He pressed the sides of his head with both hands. “Please, can’t we go back and… start again? Try another course?”
Bhaskar sat down again and grimly shook his head. “I’m afraid not. A course of hypnotherapy is usually determined by what happens in the first regression. If I put you under again…”
“The same story would come out,” Gareth finished for him, wearily.
“Let me ask you another question.” Bhaskar paused before speaking, looking at Gareth intently. “Have you ever taken LSD?”
“No!”
Gareth said indignantly. “You’ve asked me that before. Who do you think I am? I might have had a bit of weed when I was at college, but I didn’t do trips!”
“All right, Mr. Manning, all right. I’m not making any kind of value judgment, I’m just going through possibilities. There are a number of ways we could find out what’s causing your problems. There are psychological tests, and we can also look for physiological causes too. A temporal lobe EEG… perhaps a CAT scan, an MRI…”
“A what?” An MRI. The huge machine, closing in on him like an iron lung. Electrodes. Mum. Mum’s face. Bewildered. Confused all the time, singing and talking to nobody.
“God, what’s wrong with me?” Gareth was aware of two things at once – one, how loud his voice sounded in his own ears, and two, that Bhaskar was suddenly by his side and holding him, one arm around his shoulders and the other hand gripping Gareth’s right wrist.
“What’s wrong with me?” Gareth’s voice shook as he spat out the words through clenched teeth. “What happened to me?”
The feeling of relief in being held was a huge surprise. To be held close by someone. Anyone. The physical contact with Bhaskar was something to cling to. The psychologist must have known that. Must have been expecting it. Gareth squeezed the doctor’s arm, his legs weak and shaking, his breath coming in ragged sobs, his eyes stinging and smarting.
“I think you’d better sit down now,” said Bhaskar.
Back in the armchair, Gareth put his face in his hands, trying to control his breathing. The sense of anger and shock was now being compounded by the rising shame of letting anyone see him like this, even though the other person was a doctor.
“I’m not going mad,” Gareth said tiredly. In a way, the idea was almost a disappointment. If he were going insane, there would be no point in worrying. Everything would be taken care of. Food. Medicine. Someone would be there to take care of him, and make sure he didn’t do anything too stupid, like try to hurt himself. Is that what it’s like for Mum? Nothing can touch her now. She’s not even bothered about the family she left behind. Maybe she found something better.
Gareth felt something pressed into his hand. A glass of dark brown liquid that smelled like brandy. So Bhaskar did keep a drinks cabinet for emergencies, after all.
“Of course you’re not going mad,” said Bhaskar, his familiar toothy smile back in place. “If only it were that simple!”
Once more behind the desk, Bhaskar regained some of his former brusque manner. “I do apologize, Gareth,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to scare you. The cause of this is probably simpler than both of us think. After all, there are an awful lot of people out there, claiming to be abductees.”
“Yeah.” Gareth sniffed and wiped their eyes. “They can’t all be head-cases, can they?”
“I’m not saying that any of them are head-cases. What I am saying is that a great many individuals have personalities that seem to… predispose them towards an abduction experience.”
Gareth frowned. “So you mean that nobody has actually been inside an alien spaceship?”
“If we start arguing about that again, Gareth, we’ll never stop.” Bhaskar swung round in his chair and pointed towards a model of the globe on top of one filing cabinet. “Think about it. Assume there are real aliens, coming to the earth in real spaceships. They meet up with human beings, take them aboard their craft, and have conversations with them about what they’re doing here. If one abductee came to the press with a message given to him by an alien, a message that said “Aim your telescopes at a certain point in the solar system, at a certain time, and you will see our mother ship,” and the telescopes did actually see what the message said they would see, then that would be all the proof people needed. But instead of that, what’s the big wisdom that our abductees and contactees are actually bringing back? ‘Nuclear war is bad’, they say, or ‘You are destroying your own environment’. Well thank you guys, but I think we figured that out for ourselves.”
Gareth snorted with mirthless laughter. “So what really is affecting all these people, then? Affecting their minds?”
“Oh come on, Gareth. If I could answer that, we wouldn’t be sitting here. We’d be dining with our agents in Hollywood. Either that, or tucked away in some secure ward, pumped full of anti-psychotics.”
Bhaskar paused, and poured himself some water from the pitcher on the nearby table. “Do you want some water? Or a drop more of the hard stuff?”
“The hard stuff, please.”
Bhaskar sat, sipping his water, and Gareth drained his second brandy in one shot, feeling it burn through his throat and sinuses. The liquor brought with it a strange feeling of calm, as if a thunderstorm had passed overhead and moved away into the distance. They had gone beyond a professional relationship. Technically speaking, Gareth was no longer a patient. Bhaskar could have kicked him out of the office. Instead, here he still was, downing the doctor’s reserves of brandy.
So one more possible explanation had collapsed in front of Gareth’s eyes.
Or had it?
Was there something that eluded even Bhaskar? If this thing, this invisible something that plagued Gareth, could muck about with reality, perhaps it could also bend the doctor’s argument, turn it back on itself…
“Let me put it to you another way,” Bhaskar resumed. “Imagine you’ve gone to the theatre to see a really famous magician. In the show the magician performs a trick so grand, so fantastic, that there seems no possible way it could have been done, other than magic. The trick is so preposterous that the audience thinks, ‘How could he possibly do that? He’s making fun of his audience. This magician is not entertaining us, he’s laughing at us!’”
Bhaskar took another sip of water. “‘But wait!’ says the magician. ‘Let me show you how the illusion was performed.’ So he shows you. After that, you feel relieved. ‘It was only a trick,’ you say, ‘which we suspected all along, and now we know the secret behind the trick.’ So everything seems okay and the world is still as it should be. Then you get home, and you think about the trick a bit more, and then you suddenly realize that the magician’s explanation doesn’t make sense. The trick couldn’t have been done the way he said. He was lying. He fooled you once, then he fooled you again, because the apparent answer wasn’t an answer at all.”
He paused. There was silence in the room, apart from the soft ticking of the clock.
“The phenomenon always negates itself,” Bhaskar said with a sigh. “I’ve got a feeling that the abductions and sightings will keep on occurring, until the media get bored and start to ignore them, moving on to the next spectacle, and they eventually fade into the background. Society will be stuck with a problem that is, at our current level of knowledge… unsolvable.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Thursday, February 8th
When the three men left Laura’s house, a harsh wind and the first signs of a gathering frost were crystallizing the air around them. Littlewood said his goodbyes, because there was some shopping for supplies he needed to do in Cambridge. Gareth and Bennings sat in the warmth of the Land Rover for a while, in silence, listening to the radio.
“So where do we go from here?” Gareth asked eventually.
“Back to my hotel, if you don’t mind,” said Bennings. “I’d like to pick up a few more things before tonight’s Skywatch.”
“You know what I mean, Doug. What do we do about… the things Dr. Bardini and Brian said?”
“Ah.” Bennings grimaced as he started the engine. “Yes, I was thinking about that. The Earthlights hypothesis is getting a bit complicated, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know if you can call it an Earthlights hypothesis anymore. What’s going on in the Fens seems to be something different.”
“Perhaps not… the spirit of scientific enquiry, yada yada yada.”
Bennings waited to let another motorist pass by the narrow road, then pulled the vehicle away from the curb. “The hypothesis rests on why
these things are happening here, instead of in another part of England.”
“I’d like to know why these things are happening here – full stop,” muttered Gareth.
Traversing the early evening darkness between Coveney and Witcham, they stopped outside Bennings’ B&B and walked down the short path to what the American had said was the front entrance – which was, confusingly enough, around the side of the building. The large open hallway had a staircase and several doors leading away from it, and Gareth could hear a TV set, and the sound of plates being stacked together.
“I think that’s the family that runs this joint,” said Bennings in a low voice.
Up the stairs, Bennings unlocked the door to his room and Gareth followed him inside. The room seemed a little sparser than Gareth’s own: less tacky reproduction paintings, and no rugs curling up at the edges. The central heating was full on, and a large TV sat on top of the dresser.
“Okay now, Gareth, I won’t be a minute. Just got to get my act together, huh huh.”
Gareth sat on the bed, and yawned hugely. The euphoria of the early morning Skywatch had faded, and he was aware of stiffness in his neck and a few twinges in his back. Surely, they wouldn’t have such luck again tonight, he thought. It was enough to spend one winter night waiting for the UFOs and be rewarded; it was crazy to expect them to appear a second time. Bennings seemed dead keen on repeating the whole proceedings, however. He’s ready for action, Gareth thought to himself. Lights… cameras… flying saucers!
“I wonder if I can get hold of a theodolite tomorrow,” Bennings muttered, while pulling a fisherman’s sweater over his head.
“Oh, yeah.” The pictures, Gareth remembered. “Doug, did you send me a few prints before we started this business?”
“Did I send you what?” Bennings asked, as his head emerged turtle-fashion from under the wool.
“Prints,” Gareth said. “Shots taken at churches in the Fenlands. Sightings of UFOs – or things like what we saw last night, anyway.”