Die Again

by Thompson, Bill

  Cate and Tiffany came down the long hallway with Henri Duchamp right behind them, and Landry greeted them. Dr. Little took Tiffany to the recliner where she’d be during the session, and Phil asked her to say a few words so he could adjust the volume on his equipment.

  In all the activity Landry had forgotten about Jack. He glanced at his watch. Where was he?

  At eight minutes to ten there was a commotion at the front entrance. The clerk raised her voice, but she was no match for the man bellowing that he certainly did have a right to be here. Landry ran down the hallway and saw a handsome African American man who looked like something sent over from central casting. He wore a white three-piece suit, a red bow tie and a bowler hat. He carried a walking stick with the golden head of a dog on top. As unusual as it was, his attire wasn’t his most striking feature. It was his height — the man was over seven feet tall.

  “What’s going on?” Landry said.

  The flustered clerk replied, “I asked him for his name and ID. He’s not on the list and he says he has no identification.”

  The man’s words flowed smoothly. “It’s no problem, my dear. Identification is something I have no use for. I don’t own a car or ride on airplanes. I don’t travel overseas or have a bank account. Well, I mustn’t hold up the crowd. Shall we go inside?”

  Landry stepped in front of the man. “Who exactly might you be?”

  “Empyrion Richard’s the name. This is my building. I presume I‘m allowed to observe the session.”

  Empyrion Richard? What on earth was the man talking about?

  He heard the director call, “Places, everyone!” The session was about to begin, and Landry wished he’d hired a security guard.

  Landry was out of time and the man seemed harmless enough. He wished Jack were here to babysit, but instead he called to Cate, explained and asked her to keep an eye on him. She found him a seat with the others.

  Precisely at ten, Tiffany lay back in the recliner as Dr. Little sat on one side of her and Doc Adams on the other. Phil did one last mic check, said he was ready, and Landry’s director asked if they were good to go.

  Landry nodded and wondered again about Jack. He’d been so excited last night. Surely he hadn’t…

  The director shouted, “Quiet on the set!” He raised his hand and began a countdown.

  Five-four-three-two-one.

  As he dropped his hand, Dr. Little began to speak.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  "Tiffany, are you comfortable?"

  "Yes."

  "Are you ready to begin?"

  "Yes."

  In a low, soothing voice, Dr. Little asked her to relax and stare into his eyes. He leaned in close as his voice became a whisper, and in less than sixty seconds she closed her eyes. He backed away and used his normal speaking voice.

  "Tiffany, are you asleep?"

  "Yes."

  "Lift your right arm for me, please. Raise it straight up into the air and keep it there."

  She raised her arm until it was straight. He turned to the assemblage and said, "This is a test to be sure our subject is in a hypnotic state. If our guests want to see how it works, raise your own arms into the air and keep them there until I ask Tiffany to lower hers."

  The observers lifted their arms toward the sky as Dr. Little turned back to Tiffany. "Now I will ask you a few background questions," he said. She gave her name, birth year and place — Denver in 1973 — stated the names of her parents and a sister and said where she lived and worked now.

  "Do you know where you are this morning?"

  "Yes. I'm in New Orleans."

  "Where in that city are you?"

  "I'm...I'm in a building. A scary one. I don't like it here."

  "There's no reason to be afraid. You're among friends. Let’s take a trip now. We will leave this place and travel back in your mind to places and things you may not have thought about for a long time. Every so often I'll ask you to tell me what you see. Are you ready to take a trip?"

  "Yes."

  He glanced at his watch and then looked back at the people behind him, none of whose arms were still in the air, although Tiffany's was as straight and rigid as before. "It's been twelve minutes," he said to them. "You couldn't hold your arms up that long. No one could unless you're in a trance." To his subject he said, "You may lower your right arm now, Tiffany." And she rested it at her side.

  "I want you to open your mind and see things that have already happened in your life. What do you recall about your fortieth birthday party?"

  She and some friends drove to Santa Monica and partied at a hotel on the beach all weekend.

  "Now instead of remembering, I want you to actually go there. Let's return to the day you turned forty. Now you're there. You're in Santa Monica. What year is it now, and what's happening around you?"

  "It's...it's 2013. Kayla and Michelle are over there at the bar. They're trying to get those guys to come to our table." She cracked a wide smile and held out her hand. "Hi, I'm Tiffany." The onlookers tittered. It was humorous to watch her acting a part, but unnerving at the same time. No one was more fascinated than Landry as she described what she saw. Although she was talking about a day seven years earlier, she was there and she knew even the smallest details.

  Last evening Dr. Little said that during the session he would include certain specific, verifiable questions. "When I cross-check answers later, I find my subjects answer accurately. It will surprise you the first time you observe a session, so keep in mind that Tiffany really will be going back in time, even if only in her mind."

  He took her to age twenty-two when she married and divorced within seven months. Angry and hurt, she described two immature young people who had a lot of sex, fought over money and everything else, and ultimately gave up. It was an emotional time in her life, but apparently it had nothing to do with her obsession, so he kept going.

  Over the next thirty minutes he took her further and further back. Everyone smiled when Tiffany's voice became that of a child and she gleefully recalled her father taking her to a farm for a pony ride on her tenth birthday. He asked her the name of the farm, and she replied, "There's a sign right there. Can't you read it?"

  "I want to see if you can read it," he urged, and she said she knew some of the words.

  "C-H-A-P-M-A-N Farm, A-U-R-O-R-A, Colorado. That's the name, and Starball is my pony's name. Come here, boy. Do you want to pet him?" Dr. Little jotted notes on a pad.

  At every stop along her journey through time, the hypnotist probed her memory about interactions with her parents, sibling and friends. He tossed out specific things — New Orleans, Toulouse Street, the LaPieres, their servants — but they meant nothing to her. Tiffany's life sounded like many others, with ups and downs, good times and bad ones, anger at her parents one day and happiness the next. She was a typical child of the seventies with no major crises or traumas.

  Dr. Little also asked often about the dreams, and he pinpointed their beginning shortly before her eighth birthday. Even knowing when they started, he could find no indication why. They had begun as rare occurrences, but as she grew older, the dreams became more frequent. Today they invaded her mind several nights a week.

  After she described her second Christmas in baby-talk that made the others smile, the psychologist told the observers that now they'd go even further back — to moments after birth. There would be no more intelligible communication since she was too young to talk.

  He added, "I expect nothing from this early age to be helpful in solving her issues, but I always take my subjects back to the start because I believe it's cathartic."

  He guided her thoughts further and further back. She squirmed on the recliner and moved into the fetal position as they approached April 19, 1973, the day of her birth.

  Dr. Little told her to rest and turned to Landry. "As you know, she's consented in writing to further regressive study. I want your consent now. Do you want me to try it? As I told you earlier, successful attempts to
pierce the veil of time are very rare. One in many tens of thousands."

  Doc and the psychologist had talked with Tiffany at length last night about past life regression. She had listened closely, asked almost no questions, and said she trusted Dr. Little to help her. She had signed a release, and now it was time for Landry to make the call. If he said yes, the regression would continue.

  "We don’t have answers yet," Landry said. "If you say it's safe to proceed, I'd like to see what happens."

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  A ray of sunlight peeked through the clouds and rested on the fountain next to Tiffany’s recliner. The courtyard was silent except for Dr. Little’s whispers in his subject’s ear. He was taking her into a deep, deep sleep.

  “Tiffany, you are one day old right now. You cannot speak, but if you are one day old, I want you to move your finger.”

  She raised her right index finger a millimeter.

  “Okay. Now we will continue our trip. We will go back even more. Go back two days. Now it’s April 17, 1973.” Her fetal position tightened. She pulled her feet up and held her breath.

  “She’s in the womb,” he whispered to Landry.

  “Tiffany, you can breathe. Now I want you to go back even further. I want you to go back to 1971. It’s 1971 now, two years before Tiffany Bertrand will be born.”

  Some people gasped as Tiffany’s body went rigid. With arms pressed against her sides, she lay like a soldier at attention. There was no fetal position, because Tiffany was no longer a baby.

  “What do you see?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Can you see anything at all?”

  She murmured, “Just darkness. Darkness is everywhere.”

  “Where are you?”

  She paused and furrowed her brow. She was thinking. “Nowhere. I’m not anywhere.”

  Dr. Little glanced at Landry and shook his head. Then he asked her to go back to 1950, but she gave the same answer. 1940, 1930, 1920. Everything was the same. There was nothing in her mind.

  “It isn’t working,” he said at last. “I’m sorry.”

  “Take her to January 1832,” Landry said. It was the month before Prosperine LaPiere murdered her husband and his mistress.

  Dr. Little moved her back in time in thirty-year increments, and each time they stopped was the same. Then he told her to go to the time Landry wanted.

  “Tiffany, I want you to go to January fifteenth, 1832. Tell me what you see.”

  Tiffany sat bolt upright in the recliner, opened her eyes wide and yelled, “You stop that, suh! You get yo’ hands off me right this minute!”

  Pandemonium broke out in the courtyard as the astonished onlookers reacted. A startled Dr. Little fell backwards out of his chair, and one of Phil’s cameramen fainted dead away, his camera clattering on the stones as he collapsed.

  “Keep filming!” the director yelled to his men. “Quiet, everyone!”

  The hypnotist righted his chair and sat beside her. Agitated, she held one hand in the air with a finger pointed at something only she could see. In a voice nothing like Tiffany’s, she shouted, “Get back, I tell you!”

  “It’s all right, Tiffany,” he said, and she looked at him with fire in her eyes.

  Her words carried a distinct Creole accent — the same accent Landry and Cate had heard from her lips at the coffee shop earlier.

  “Tiffany? Who the hell you talking about? Ain’t no Tiffany here.”

  “I’m sorry. Tell me your name.”

  “Name’s Caprice. Name I took when I came here, anyways. Ain’t my real name, but to them folks it is.”

  She’s a spunky thing, Landry thought. Much different from Tiffany.

  “Where are you, Caprice?”

  “Here. Why you asking me a stupid question like that? I’m here.”

  “Here in the courtyard?”

  She looked at him as though he was a simpleton. “Yassuh, right here in the courtyard.”

  “Who else is here with you?”

  “Nobody, now that he’s gone. She’s gonna kill that bastard sometime when she catch him messin’ around.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “You don’t know him? That’s the boss man. Massah Lucas.”

  “Lucas LaPiere?”

  “The very one. That bastard.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Try to mess with my body, that’s what. Same thing he do with all the house girls. Thinks he can have his way with everybody like he do with Elberta. He even tole me he’d lock me upstairs with the others if I didn’t pull up my dress.”

  Aha! Landry flashed an OK sign to Dr. Little. That was their first solid connection. Elberta was Lucas LaPiere’s mistress, the girl who died with him here in this courtyard.

  “Does Elberta let him do things to her?”

  “Her? Whatever he want. She thinks herself high and mighty, that one. She thinks Massah Lucas gonna marry her someday. Just leave his money and his wife and run off with her. She a crazy girl, that one. They better be careful. They show out too much and Madam gonna put a stop to things.”

  “Who is the woman you call Madam?”

  “Massah Lucas’s wife, Prosperine. She meaner than a alligator, that one.”

  Dr. Little paused, consulted his notes and ordered his subject to lie back on the recliner. “Caprice, I want you to move forward in your mind a little bit. Just a few days. Let’s go to February the second, 1832. It’s early. Seven in the morning. What are you doing?”

  “The laundry, don’t you know. I’m washin’ the clothes. That’s my job in the mornin’s.”

  Little made another note. Like Elberta, Caprice was a house servant and not a slave being held for a future auction.

  They knew the day but not the exact time Prosperine killed her husband, so Dr. Little cautiously moved the hours forward to see what developed.

  He went ahead two hours and then two more. Now it was ten.

  “What’s happening now, Caprice?”

  “Madam went to the square. They having a sale over there today. Massah Lucas and Elberta went scurryin’ upstairs the minute she left. They better watch out, all I got to say.”

  One hour later, Madam LaPiere returned from the Place d’Armes. Caprice described her walking into the courtyard, looking up to the balcony and hearing voices through the open doors that led to her husband’s bedroom. Caprice was frightened; she had never seen Madam so angry. She ordered Caprice and another servant to go to their rooms while she sneaked up the wrought-iron stairway to the balcony.

  “I didn’t obey Madam. I’m watchin’ through the window,” Caprice whispered. “She gonna git them good, she is. Here she go, right into the bedroom. Oh my God, the screamin’s somethin’ awful. I tole Elberta. I warned her. It’s her own fault, and that’s a fact.”

  Without warning a dark cloud settled over the courtyard, and the film crew scrambled to adjust the lighting. Where the day had been warm and still, a stiff breeze now whipped down the corridor, turning the courtyard crisp and chilly. The guests looked at each other in surprise.

  A foggy mist swept up from nowhere and blanketed everything in a thick haze. Through the vapor they saw a balcony that hadn’t been there before. Along a side wall a stairway ran from the balcony to the courtyard.

  As a loud bang came from above, the already jittery observers cried out in alarm. The noise came from a bedroom door that someone tore open and slammed against a wall. The room behind it was dark.

  Landry asked Dr. Little if he could see the balcony. He replied, “Yes. This has never happened to me before. It seems we’re viewing the same things she is.” He spoke to her in a soothing voice, asking her to remain calm and close her eyes. He called her Caprice, not Tiffany, and she obeyed his command.

  Landry confirmed both his director and the guests could see things unfolding too. Everyone began talking at once, and the crew looked to their director for answers. Since Landry had asked the guests here, it meant Channel Nine was responsible for their sa
fety. He asked Ted if it was okay to continue, and his boss asked the hypnotist.

  “What’s your take on it, Doctor? In your opinion, is it safe to keep going?”

  “I can’t guarantee anything. We’re in uncharted waters now, dealing with something far outside the realm of traditional hypnotherapy. The sudden change in the weather, the balcony and staircase that don’t exist — I have never even heard of a session like this before.”

  “Bring her out. It’s not worth the risk to her.”

  Disappointed, Landry knew it was the right call. Tiffany’s welfare was all that mattered. He wondered if they’d all succumbed to some kind of mass hypnosis. And he hoped all the strangeness — the weather, the balcony, the girl Caprice — had been recorded by Phil’s crew.

  As Dr. Little began the words and process of bringing her back, the ones watching left their seats and moved closer to watch.

  “Caprice, let’s move forward in time now. Come with me —"

  Her eyes flew open and her body became rigid as she screamed, “There she is! I tole you somethin’ bad was gonna happen, Elberta! Look out, girl!” As one, the stunned observers looked up.

  In the mist above the patio, a girl with milk-chocolate skin wearing nothing but a lacy white camisole stumbled through the darkened doorway onto the balcony. She was strikingly beautiful, but her face was a mask of terror. She caught herself on the railing and screamed. Another woman, a taller, older one, stepped through the doorway, shouted, “Die, you hellion!” and pushed the girl over the railing.

  Tiffany lay still on the recliner as everyone else reacted instinctively to a body soaring through space toward where Doc Adams and the psychologist sat. The men jumped up, knocking over their chairs as shouts from those assembled echoed throughout the courtyard.

  Landry jerked back and fell against a six-foot tripod that supported a stage light. It crashed to the ground and shattered as he tumbled hard against the fountain.