Die Again

by Thompson, Bill

  “Most of my colleagues would agree with you. Think of an archaeologist who makes a stunning discovery, one that goes against traditional scientific thinking. Professionals are quick to call it a fake.”

  Cate laughed. “You always have been one to go against the grain, Dad.”

  “Honey, I’ll take that as a compliment. I have a healthy respect for the unknown. The more time I spend working with psychiatric patients, the more I understand that the brain is an incredible thing. I refuse to dismiss something because it’s unexplainable. There are cases of hypnotic sessions during which a patient crossed from his own life into another’s.”

  Landry said, “I’ve seen a lot of unusual things, but this is too bizarre even for me. Do you believe it’s true?”

  “It is true. The facts are indisputable. How do you explain a 1940s case where a housewife from Indiana regressed to a previous life as a housemaid in Elizabethan England? She lived in a village and saw William Shakespeare in person. She gave facts about her life — her name, place and date of birth, her family and the house she lived in, facts about her death and where her grave was. It all checked out, Landry.”

  “But it could have been something she read about a woman from the past.”

  Doc disagreed. “That’s not what happened. If you believe that, then you accept that she created a massive, elaborate hoax and kept it quiet for years, until someone convinced her that hypnotism might cure her psychotic episodes. The patient had never been out of the United States, but she knew the most intimate details about a woman from the late fifteen hundreds, and every verifiable detail was correct. The person’s grave was in the village cemetery where she said it would be. They couldn’t find a gravestone, but in parish records there were the names of the woman, her husband and son, her date of death and roughly where in the graveyard she was buried — next to a tall tree by a rock wall. Everything they could check was factual.

  “I may be a medical doctor, but I’m not bound by convention. The woman I described lived a previous life. There’s no other explanation for it. None. I believe it happened to her.”

  Landry said, “How does this relate to Tiffany? Are you suggesting she lived before, and going into a past life will explain everything?”

  “No. Professionals perform age-regression therapy frequently, and it’s usually a straightforward trip into the patient’s past. I’m just telling you the very odd results that have happened a handful of times when a hypnotist takes control of a human brain and finds out there’s far more there than he expected. Has your friend lived before? We won’t know until Dr. Little hypnotizes her, presuming he’ll accept her as a patient.”

  After the call, Landry and Cate talked for a while about the amazing story her father had related. When they turned off the lights, Tiffany tiptoed away from their door and returned to her room. She had eavesdropped because she wanted to find out if a doctor could free her from this living nightmare.

  It scared her that Landry was talking about hypnotizing her before even asking how she felt about it. Things were moving fast — maybe too fast for her. As much as she wanted to end this nightmare, the potential risks frightened her.

  Instead of providing relief, listening to that phone call had unnerved her. She kept the lights on all night, stayed dressed and huddled under her covers, quivering at every sound in the night. She was afraid of what awful things someone might find inside her mind. When she slept, she dreamed of a tall woman who laughed as she beat prisoners in chains.

  One of those prisoners was her, and in her nightmare, she felt every lash of the whip and every blow of the baton.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Landry showered and dressed as quietly as possible. He tiptoed into the living room and made sure Tiffany’s door was closed. He kissed Cate, told her he was leaving, moved the furniture from the doorway, and went to work.

  Jack was already there, bright-eyed and eager to finish his progress report from last night. Landry would have preferred to spend the next hour preparing for the conference call with Dr. Little, but he had promised his new assistant a forum.

  As eager as a schoolboy, Jack read the police blotter for a fall night in 1820 when passersby on Toulouse Street witnessed a scene on the LaPieres’ second-floor balcony. A young black man ran through a doorway onto the balcony with an older woman brandishing a whip close behind. “Get back in there,” they heard her scream as she raised the lash. “Get inside or I’ll kill you!” Cowering, the frightened man obeyed. Although they were out of sight, through the doorway the people on the street heard lashes of the whip and a man’s awful screams for mercy.

  One of the concerned pedestrians walked to the police station around the corner on Royal Street and reported the incident. Two officers were dispatched to the LaPiere building at 12:25 a.m. They knocked for some time before “Mr. Lucas LaPiere, a man known to the officers as the owner of the property” opened it. As before, he assured them everything was all right. He explained that a house servant had raised his voice against the mistress, but he dealt with the matter. There had been no whip and no death threat.

  Unconvinced, this time the officers insisted on looking around the premises. They asked to go to the upstairs room with the balcony where the pedestrians claimed to have seen the incident. According to the report, despite the late hour Madam LaPiere sat on a couch dressed “as if going to a party” and said nothing while the officers poked around. They found a “possible bloodstain” on the floor, but Lucas told them one of the house servants had cut her finger on a broken glass earlier while serving drinks.

  The policemen reported muffled sounds coming from above. When asked what was on the next floor, Lucas LaPiere replied an attic and storeroom. The noise was perhaps a rat, he explained, since the house had a problem with large rodents in the fall months. Hearing another noise — “the sound of something being dragged” — the officers asked to see the attic, but the gentleman declined. He said there were sleeping houseguests, and he did not intend to disturb them.

  That was the end of the investigation, and so far as Jack knew, it was the last time the police went there. For the next twenty years, the LaPieres lived there without incident.

  Something Jack discovered gave him a hunch why the police left them alone. He unearthed a cache of political information at the historical museum. Beginning in 1820, just around the time of the second visit by police, Mr. LaPiere began making substantial donations to police and fire department charities. He contributed generously to campaigns of the mayor and local politicians. An article in the Louisiana Advertiser newspaper also lauded the couple for donating three fine horses to the police precinct right around the corner from their establishment.

  He concluded nothing had changed in two hundred years. Bad actors sometimes made major political contributions. To them it was an insurance policy.

  Just then Cate’s father texted with a number to join the conference call. Landry hadn’t had time to brief Jack on last night’s revelations about past life regression, so he told him to close the door, sit down and listen while he called on his office phone and turned on the speaker.

  Dr. Little seemed an affable, friendly man as he joked with Doc Adams for a few minutes about some conference they’d attended in Las Vegas. Then the conversation turned to Tiffany’s situation. Landry told the psychologist everything he had witnessed, and Tiffany’s compulsions that interfered with her sleep and work. She feared this mystery would ruin her life if she couldn’t get past it.

  The psychologist focused on the recurring dreams and was interested to learn she’d been having them since childhood. He added that a long-forgotten event could trigger her compulsive behavior about visiting the building.

  Doc didn’t understand. “How do you explain her lifelong obsession with a building in a place she’s never been? That can’t be from her childhood. It seems impossible to me.”

  Little replied, “It would seem so, given what she told Landry, but that doesn’t mean there’s n
o explanation. That’s the brilliance of age-regression therapy. We can open the closed boxes in her mind and bring out things she doesn’t remember. You know better than I how patients can repress things until they’re forgotten. It’s a mechanism that allows us to erase traumatic events, things we’ve done or said that we wish we hadn’t, and so forth. I’ve taken thousands of patients back to a particular thing that’s behind a problem. We identify, we dissect, and we overcome. At least that’s my hope.”

  While the psychologist was talking, Landry’s phone buzzed twice, both times from Cate. The first was a call, the second a text. “Call me ASAP!” Cate knew what time this conference call was, so he ignored the text for now.

  Just then Doc interrupted, “Sorry, Dr. Little. Landry, I got a text from Cate. She needs you. Tiffany’s missing.”

  “Tiffany, our subject?” Dr. Little asked. Landry said yes. Everyone agreed they’d speak later.

  Cate was in the living room when he and Jack arrived. She chastised herself for sleeping in once again. When she awoke, she checked on Tiffany, but neither she, her clothes nor her phone were there.

  “We all know where to look for her,” Landry said. “Come on — there’s no time to lose.”

  They jogged through the Quarter. When they reached the building, Jack glanced across the street and mused, “It seems like a year since I was living over there.”

  “You’ve come a long way,” Cate said, but Landry cautioned that it was still one day and one cautious step at a time. Jack understood.

  The padlock and key lay on the sidewalk, and the gate stood wide open. “How did she get in?” Cate asked, and Landry told Cate about reading her text with the code number out loud to Tiffany.

  “I just realized this is how she got in last time, and now she’s done it again. It’s my fault she’s in there!”

  Shouts came from the courtyard as they raced down the corridor. There came a shrieking laugh followed by screams. They ran to the back and looked up. In the window a tall woman wearing a long black dress stood with her head high and one arm raised defiantly in the air. She seemed oblivious to their presence as she shouted, “You’re going to die, Elberta. You think I don’t know what you did with my husband? I’ll kill you, you little bitch!”

  “Look at that!” Cate screamed as the figure in the window faded and someone else appeared. Now it was Tiffany standing with her arm outstretched. She roared, “You’re the one who should die, Madam! The devil lives within you!”

  From somewhere high above came a piercing combination of moans, wails and pleas for mercy. The three of them stood in the courtyard, unable to move. From the attic at the top of the ancient building on Toulouse Street came the sounds of hell itself.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  "Tiffany!" Landry shouted as she stepped away from the window to the darkness behind. "Come on!" he yelled to the others. "We have to go up there!"

  "You go," Jack whispered. "I'll stay here."

  "Jack, come with us! She needs help!"

  "No, she doesn't. None of this is what it seems. I'll find her."

  Landry stopped dead and turned to him. "What the hell are you talking about? I'm going up. If you're staying, call 911." He tossed over his phone, but Jack let it drop to the ground.

  Something was wrong with Jack. He spoke without looking at them, and his words were a robotic monotone.

  "There's no reason to call 911."

  Cate said, "Jack, what's wrong? We have to help her!"

  Jack had a strange look in his eyes. "It seems so, doesn't it? Appearances can be deceiving."

  "Come on, Cate!" Landry yelled. They rushed into the building and ran from room to room, searching for a stairway.

  They flew back into the courtyard. In the same monotone Jack said, "You weren't able to go upstairs."

  "How did she get up there? You know, so tell us now!"

  "She took the stairs, of course. How would anyone go up?"

  "Jack, you're not making sense. There aren't any stairs."

  "You're right about that." His voice was a singsong lilt now, and his head swayed to the left and right.

  Cate shook him hard, but it didn't faze him.

  Landry yelled, "Jack, listen to me. Where's the stairway to the second floor?"

  "It's gone." He pointed to a brick side wall of the courtyard. "It used to be right over there. It went up to the balcony."

  Landry thought about yesterday's lunch and his friend's description of a wrought-iron staircase leading to a balcony on the second floor, just as Jack was describing now.

  "There's no balcony, Jack."

  "But when everything you saw happened, there was."

  Cate said, "Quit talking in riddles! We have to call 911!"

  Landry said to Jack, "If you won't come with us, at least call for help. I have to find a way up there. She may be in trouble."

  "Or she may not be."

  "Come on, Cate! We're wasting time here." They left Jack standing beside the fountain.

  Because the grimy windows allowed little light, the rooms were gloomy. Landry knew there was an entresol above the first floor, but in the old days people would have used the outside stairway to get to the second floor. Now there had to be another way.

  They searched several rooms before finding a broom closet in what had once been the billiard hall's bar. It was filled with boxes, cans and debris, but an old ladder hung on its back wall. Above it was a trapdoor. Testing each old rung as he went, Landry scrambled up and gave the door a hard shove. It swung back and landed with a thud on one side, raising a thick cloud of dust that made Landry sneeze.

  He and Cate crawled into the entresol. He directed his light around and saw debris — rotting cloth bags lay all around, and dozens of wooden crates filled the cramped area.

  "Look for another trapdoor in the ceiling," he said. "There has to be a way to get to the next floor from inside the building."

  They examined as much ceiling as possible given all the trash but didn’t find an opening. They came back down and went outside where Jack and Tiffany huddled in a corner of the courtyard. She shivered as Jack held her tightly and whispered that she was safe.

  Jack seemed himself again. "I heard her crying in a room off the corridor. I think she's in shock."

  "I'm in shock myself," Landry muttered. "Jack, we'll talk to you later. Tiffany, do you have any idea what happened?"

  She shook her head, nestled closer to Jack and murmured, "Later. Talk later."

  Atypically aggressive, Jack told Landry to leave her alone and Cate suggested taking her back to the apartment, Landry padlocked the gate, and they walked down the sidewalk with Landry supporting Tiffany on one side and Jack on the other. They looked perfect in New Orleans — three partygoers, one of whom having had a bit too much to drink.

  Cate tucked her in bed with a cup of hot tea, closed the door and joined the men in the living room. Landry told Jack the odd things he had said, but he seemed mystified. After walking in with them, all he could remember was hearing Tiffany's cries from an interior room. He'd brought her to the courtyard and held her in his arms until they came.

  "Did you hear those sounds from up above?" Cate asked. "Screams — pleas. People begging for their lives. Some of it was in French. Did any of you hear it?

  Landry had. "There can't be people up there today. I believe we heard something from the past. Nobody's in the house now — not living people, anyway. I have to get into the rest of the building. I think the answers are up there. I need someone's permission to explore the place. Tiffany could have died in there. You too, Jack. You said you caught your jacket on the railing and saved yourself from hitting the pavement. Someone will die if we don't solve this fast. Get your research notes. I have some questions for you."

  Landry asked who owned the building today. Jack thumbed through his notebook and said that an entity named LaPiere Family Trust had owned the property since 1892.

  "And prior to that?"

  He flipped pages.
"Sometime before 1805, Lucas LaPiere bought the property. In 1832, it went to Prosperine."

  "No surprise there. That's the year she killed him."

  Jack said, "Okay, that makes sense. Prosperine deeded the property to Toulouse Holdings Trust in 1861, soon after Louisiana joined the Confederacy. In 1892 someone created the LaPiere Family Trust, and that entity has owned the building ever since."

  Landry had three questions — did Lucas and Prosperine LaPiere have children, did she remarry after his death, and who signed the 1892 deed? Jack didn't have those answers but said he'd go now and find them.

  Before leaving, he said, "How about fronting me the money for one of those prepaid phones? I'll pay you back when I get money of my own. It would help when I'm out working, and you can keep up with me."

  Landry laughed at that, gave him fifty bucks, and they agreed to meet again around five.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Cate stayed with Tiffany while Landry went to the station. Around three Tiffany emerged from her room, saying she felt great and was craving breakfast. Cate called Landry to meet them at Café Beignet, a tiny place that served breakfast all day. They took an outdoor table on a next-door patio that lay alongside the same police precinct station from which officers went to the LaPiere building two hundred years earlier.

  Jack called on his new phone, learned where they were and joined them. He smiled when he saw Tiffany looking much improved, ordered a soda and said, “Are you ready for your three answers?”

  Landry nodded.

  “Question one. Did Lucas and Prosperine LaPiere have children? Answer, not according to the records I found. She died after Lucas, of course, and apparently had no heirs.

  “Question two. Did Madam LaPiere remarry after she murdered her husband? Answer, no. After Lucas died in 1832, she ran the slave brokerage business until Louisiana seceded from the Union. I was surprised to learn that even though Southern states supported slavery, the auctions had stopped by then, thank God. In 1861 she closed the business and transferred the building to Toulouse Holdings Trust.”