Fury

by John Coyne

  Jennifer kept her eyes down as Kathy poured tea for both of them.

  “They’ve been lovers now for about three weeks. It’s wonderful to watch, to see their affection for each other grow and develop. Both of them have so much to give.”

  “I thought you said that you and Simon were

  “

  “Lovers?” Kathy glanced over at Jennifer as she set down the teapot.

  “Yes.” Jennifer tried to return Kathy’s gaze, but the woman’s steady, unblinking blue eyes unnerved her and she looked out the windows instead. Through the foggy glass she could see an edge of the frozen lake, and in the distance, farm fields, all bare and snow covered on the bright winter morning.

  “We are, Jennifer, and so are Nanci and Simon. It isn’t a secret, you know.” Nanci returned with glasses of orange juice and plates of scrambled eggs, then retreated quickly.

  “I’m sorry,” Jennifer began. “I didn’t mean to imply—”

  “Nor are we promiscuous here on the farm.”

  Now Jennifer looked across at Kathy Dart and simply raised her eyebrows. “What about AIDS?”

  “What about it?”

  Jennifer shrugged. “I’m sorry,” she said simply. “This is none of my business.”

  “But it is!” Kathy insisted, leaning across the table. She sat poised, holding her knife and fork above the heavy brown ceramic plate. “All of you, us, are connected. Nanci, Simon, you, me, and Eileen. We are all part of the oversoul, and therefore, there’s a natural attraction—a physical attraction —among us.”

  “Has Eileen slept with Simon?” Jennifer asked without thinking, then quickly added, “I’m sorry. That, too, isn’t my concern.” She stared down at her food.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t asked her. It doesn’t matter, does it?”

  “Of course not.” Jennifer lifted her fork and tried to eat. She wanted only to get through breakfast, but she realized she had suddenly lost her appetite.

  “It is your business, Jennifer, and that is what I am trying to tell you. I know you’re attracted to Simon. I know that he is attracted to you. I am simply saying that there is nothing wrong with that. It is normal! It is healthy! It is right!”

  “I’m sorry, that’s not the way I conduct my life.” Jennifer poked at her eggs with her fork, feeling better now that she had answered back.

  “Simon approached you last night, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. You know that.”

  “But I don’t know what happened between you.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Perhaps not.”

  Jennifer glanced over at Kathy, furious now. “Nothing happened, Kathy,” she insisted.

  “It is not necessary for Simon to physically sleep with you, Jennifer, for something to happen.”

  Jennifer dropped her knife and fork and pushed back her chair.

  “Don’t run away from yourself, Jenny.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I came here. I will not be

  I do not have to put up with this.” She would pack and leave, she decided. If she had to, she’d walk to the airport, anything to get away from these people.

  But Kathy seized her wrist and forced Jennifer back down into her chair.

  “I’m sorry,” she said firmly. “But I want you to carefully think about what you are planning to do.”

  “And what am I planning?” Jennifer shouted.

  “You want to leave. You want to run away,” Kathy calmly told her. “But you cannot escape. It doesn’t do you any good to flee from here. You aren’t going to escape your past—all those lives you have already lived, in other generations, at other times.”

  “I’m afraid of you,” Jennifer told her.

  Kathy nodded. “Of course you are. I would be afraid, too, if I were you. But it is only through fear and adversity that the soul is enriched. When we are totally happy, wrapped up in our own affairs, we float through life and nothing is impressed upon our souls. We do not gain in wisdom.”

  Fear swept through Jennifer’s body. “You are going to hurt me,” she said. “I know you are. I can feel it.” Yet she continued to sit there, unmoving. She had the sudden revelation that no one could hurt her, that she had conquered this woman before, in her past.

  “We have been connected, Jenny, I keep telling you this,” Kathy Dart said patiently, but there was an edge now in her voice. “And the only way we are going to understand the connection, see what the problem is, is to go back in time and look at who you were and how we are all linked. What is the cosmic connection?” She smiled softly. “In a way, we have already begun. Habasha has cast out the negative spirits in your body. The pain and consuming fire you felt last night when Habasha touched you through my fingers was his way of expelling the evil spirits from your body.”

  “You admit that you’re going to hurt me,” Jennifer insisted again, staring at Kathy.

  “The truth hurts, yes,” Kathy agreed, nodding. “But it’s also the only way that you can overcome this rage that is within you.”

  “Are you talking about acupuncture?” Jennifer asked. “Maybe that’s how you’re going to hurt me.”

  “It does hurt a little,” Kathy said, nodding, “I won’t lie to you. But the pain dissolves quickly once the needles are absorbed by the body. It’s like a pin prick, nothing more.”

  “Then what happens?”

  “I use what is called periosteal acupuncture, placing the needle deeper into the body. It is hardly more painful than the simple tip contact, and it goes only an inch into the skin. I use a collection of needles, either silver or gold, but I do not use as many needles as, say, a normal acupuncturist. I am seeking other answers.”

  “The body remembers, Jenny. You’ve been told this, I know. But it’s true. Your spirit carries forward, from one generation to the next, the history of your lives on earth.”

  “You just put these needles into me and I start sputtering out past lives?”

  Kathy Dart shook her head. “No, it’s done much more subtly. I twist the needles as my spirit guides instruct me, and this in turn stimulates your recall. You’ll ‘see’ what lives you have lived, as if you were watching a movie.”

  “Will you be watching the movie, too?”

  “Well, I won’t see your lives, but we can discuss the images, if you like. We are set up to record what is said in the sessions—you’ll want to listen to yourself again afterward.”

  “It doesn’t seem possible,” Jennifer said.

  “Yes, I know.” Kathy Dart sank back in the chair and looked across the frozen landscape of Minnesota. Her customary confidence and poise had slipped away, and Jennifer thought she saw a flash of fear in those brilliant blue eyes. “The truth is,” Kathy admitted, “that I don’t understand my own ability, but I fear it. I never wanted it.”

  At that moment Kathy Dart looked lost, a slender, delicate young woman overwhelmed by her life. She was very beautiful, Jennifer noticed again, in a way that had nothing to do with style or fashion. She was blessed with pure white skin and fine small features, and ironically, her clarity of expression hid her very heart and soul. Jennifer knew she could never fathom what Kathy was really thinking.

  “Once Habasha walked into my life,” Kathy went on, “nothing stayed the same. I left my husband. I left my friends and my teaching career. When I moved back here with my daughter, who was just seven, I had no money, no plans of any kind, but Habasha told me to go home to Minnesota. I was to build a new life, here on the banks of the St. Croix River.”

  Kathy glanced over at Jennifer. “This is where I was born, you know,” she explained. “My grandparents and parents farmed this land. Then my brother, Eric, took over and mortgaged all the five hundred acres and lost the place. I was able to buy just this old barn and the outbuildings at a public auction four years ago. I used all the money I had from my divorce settlement to buy back my home. I had to do it. Habasha told me I would only find real happiness by being close to my roots. In the spring I love to go outside
when the fields are being plowed and smell the fresh earth as it turns. It’s all so wonderful and right.”

  Kathy Dart stopped talking and Jennifer reached over and took hold of her hand.

  “None of this is very easy, Jenny, I know. But we have to go where our hearts tell us. We have to listen to our own spirits and respond to their directions. We are not alone. That’s what you, what I, what we all have to remember. We have each other. You must know that. You came here to the farm in search of the truth.”

  “The truth can be very frightening. Sometimes, I guess, I’d rather turn my back on it, walk away.”

  “But you don’t feel that way now, do you?” Kathy asked, searching Jennifer’s face with her eyes.

  Jennifer nodded. “I don’t think I fully realized I couldn’t hide from the truth until last night, until Habasha touched me. When I felt the burning—”

  “His energy hurt you. He was casting off the evil guides that had surrounded your aura. Jennifer.” Kathy squeezed Jennifer’s hand, “He has set you free, Jenny!”

  Jennifer stared back into Kathy’s eyes and said firmly, resolve in her decision, “I’m ready, Kathy. I want to know who is trying to reach me. I want to end my misery. I want to know the truth, whatever it means for my life.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  IN A SMALL, ENCLOSED room off the living room, Jennifer slipped behind a screen and took off her clothes, then draped herself in a warm flannel sheet.

  “This used to be the birthing room on the farm,” Kathy said. “When a mare or cow went into labor, she was brought into this section of the barn. It was always the warmest, because it was in the center.”

  She was carrying a small tray on which a dozen silver and gold needles floated in alcohol, next to a package of gauze. She set it down near the wide, padded massage table in the middle of the room.

  “Would you prefer it if someone else were here?” she asked, as Jennifer emerged. “Eileen, for example?”

  “Oh, no. I’d be too frightened.”

  Kathy laughed. “Well, some people are frightened to be alone when they go through the treatment.”

  “What’s it going to be like?” Jennifer asked as she approached the table. There was very little furniture in the clinic: a few white steel cabinets, a wash basin, and open shelves filled with flannel and cotton sheets and stacks of white towels

  “It’s a different experience for everyone. For me, it went very slowly. Each vision, each lifetime took several hours to view; it took me a month of past-life treatment to complete my history. For others—Eileen, for example—we went through centuries in a matter of minutes. She could only get a glimpse of herself, she said. Often, it was just a suggestion that she had been there somewhere—among the Romans, or the Irish.” Kathy shrugged. “It depends. A man named Howard, who is doing research on the right side of the brain, has a thesis that the more creative you are, the more vivid your recollections will be.”

  “Also, you might not recall anything during this first session. Your defenses may try to protect you, keep you from knowing. It might take several sessions before we break through the median points and reach what I call the Core Existence, the center of a past-life experience. Think of it this way, Jenny. Your past lives are like blisters. Once I prick a blister with my golden needle, you’ll be able to ‘see’ the lifetime that you have already lived.”

  “How can you find the right blisters?”

  “Oh, that’s easy. My spirit guides will tell me where to place the needles. They know where your past lives are recorded in your body. Ready?” She smiled reassuringly at Jennifer. “I want to meditate before we begin.”

  “What will I feel?” Jennifer asked, delaying.

  “It depends. If you feel, for example, a sudden rush of warmth, you’re getting a negative reaction from hostile spirits. I call them the little devils.” Kathy Dart smiled down at Jennifer. She had moved a tall stool closer to the massage table and was perched on its edge.

  “What if we don’t find anything?”

  “Is that what’s worrying you?” Kathy asked. “That you won’t recall?”

  Jennifer shrugged. “That there won’t be anything, period! No past lives.”

  Kathy Dart nodded, then said thoughtfully. “It’s never happened. I have never had a patient who didn’t recall a previous existence. Some, of course, are much more vivid than others. Some are lives of great importance, but the majority, I’d say, are ordinary lives: farmers, serfs, one or two adventurous types, a bandit in one generation, a thief in another.”

  “Have you had any patients who share my experience?” Jennifer asked. “That strange rage and physical power?”

  Kathy Dart picked up a silver needle from the white towel and replaced it carefully. “That’s what frightens you, isn’t it? That somehow I’ll tap a certain cell in your body and you’ll become—”

  “A raging primitive, yes.” She looked directly at Kathy Dart.

  “That won’t happen.”

  “How do you know?” Jennifer challenged.

  “Because nothing like that has ever happened to me, or to anyone I have treated. You will ‘see’ your past, but you won’t become it. No one ever has.”

  “No one else is me. I’m the one who has the out-of-the-blue surges.”

  “But they are not out of the blue. They only occur when you’re threatened. Do you feel threatened now?”

  Jennifer shook her head, remembering how she had even tried to summon up her rage in the dark hallway the previous evening.

  “Perhaps what has happened is that you feel safe on the farm. You’re not in a hostile environment, and your senses intuitively know that.” Kathy shrugged. “It’s really as simple as that.”

  Jennifer nodded. Perhaps that was it. She remembered the computer salesman at the motel. She would never have touched him if he hadn’t threatened her.

  “Look, you’ll be fully conscious,” Kathy explained. “If you begin to feel that you’re losing control in any way, I’ll stop.” She hesitated. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like Eileen to be with you?”

  Jennifer shook her head. “No, thank you. I better go at this alone. Aren’t you afraid my monster self will attack you?”

  Kathy Dart laughed. “Not me! I’ve got Habasha, and he’s king of the jungle. He told me so.” She swung Jennifer’s legs up onto the wide table. “Now, relax,” she instructed.

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Try,” Kathy Dart insisted. “I’ll spend a moment in meditation and channel my spirits.” She moved around to the end of the table and out of Jennifer’s line of sight.

  Jennifer closed her eyes and took long breaths. She would try, she told herself. She would try to surrender herself; maybe Kathy Dart could find out what was happening to her body.

  “Try not to think,” Kathy whispered. “Just let your mind flow. Be at peace.”

  Jennifer took another deep breath. She felt a wave of cold air cross her body, then a hot flash. She listened to Kathy sitting behind her at the head of the table and tried to match her steady breathing. Then her thoughts shifted, and Jennifer let herself go with them. She was listening to the house, but only occasionally did a muffled noise filter into the room. The acoustic tile on the walls told her the barn was soundproofed. She felt far away from the world, far away from time. And happy. So safe.

  Kathy had moved around the table to her side.

  “I am ready,” she whispered to Jennifer, but her voice had changed, become more confident. “My guides have told me where to seek your lives.” She reached up for the edge of the flannel sheet and pulled it off Jennifer’s shoulder, then tucked it in at her waist. Jennifer did not open her eyes.

  “I will place the first needles at pressure points on your shoulders and chest,” Kathy said calmly, “and later in your third eye, which is the center of your forehead. You will experience some pain, as I mentioned, but it will pass. Also, you will feel that the needles are warm. That is because I am taking a ball of dri
ed wormwood—it’s an herb—and I’m placing it on top of the needle’s handle. Then I light it when the needle is inserted. The warmth will aid in the stimulation of your memory cells.”

  “Tell me when you’re about to begin,” Jennifer asked.

  “I’ve already begun.”

  Jennifer opened her eyes and saw two long needles protruding from her chest.

  “Jesus,” she whispered.

  Cathy smiled sweetly and asked, “Do you want to watch?”

  “I don’t know. Do I?” She felt better now that she had actually seen the needles in her body. “Ouch! What happened?” Jennifer blinked back tears.

  “Nothing. I stimulated your cells by twisting the needles, that’s all.” She reached across to select another needle, slipping it behind Jennifer’s right ear.

  “I don’t feel a thing,” Jennifer whispered. At that moment she felt wonderful, warm and comfortable.

  “Of course not. You’re doing just fine.” She smiled down at Jennifer. “Soon you’ll begin to see your lives unfold. Take another deep breath.”

  She did.

  “This will help stimulate your memory.”

  “I’m getting excited,” Jennifer said, smiling.

  “I’ve turned on the tape recorder, so speak up when you notice anything. Sometimes it’s only an odor or taste that comes back to us from another time. Anyway, speak up, talk to me, and we’ll have all the memories recorded for you.”

  Jennifer waited, her eyes closed again. She felt Kathy’s soft hands on her body, felt another fine needle pinch the skin between her breasts, but there was no pain. Then Kathy drew the sheet up over the tops of the half dozen needles, and when Jennifer opened her eyes, it looked as if she were enclosed inside a tent.

  “Your spirits are arranging themselves, battling for position, so to speak,” Kathy explained as Jennifer felt another wave of cold air. “Do you see anything?”

  Jennifer shook her head. “No,” she giggled. “I feel as if I’m waiting for my life to begin or something.”

  “Well, you are. But don’t be afraid. You won’t see anything that you don’t want to see. Our bodies protect us in that way.” She fell silent.