by Noel Hynd
“Still want to give it a try?” Dr. Lim asked. He gave her a wink and a smile. Both sparkled.
“I’m ready,” she said. Dr. Lim directed Rebecca to lie on a nearby couch. He asked her to clasp her hands together and to close her eyes. Sonya Lim remained in the room, adjusting the lighting.
“You will be inclined to open them again from time to time,” the doctor said, “and if that makes you feel more secure, that’s fine, okay. But you want to enter the state of mind we need, so you need to keep them shut. Primarily.”
“That’s all right,” Rebecca said again.
“What I’m going to try is have you clear your conscious mind, Rebecca,” he continued. “You do that by concentrating on something so small that it will be akin to clearing your mind completely. In this case, the ‘thing’ will be an attempt to fall asleep. That, and how tired you feel.”
Rebecca nodded slightly. She nestled her back into the sofa and felt the room lights dim around her.
“Once your conscious mind recedes, I will bring up your unconscious,” Lim said. “Then we take a trip. Through your memory. Your past. We’ll take it as far back as possible.” He paused. “You are willing to go there with me, Rebecca?”
“I’m willing.”
“Then we begin.”
Rebecca held her eyelids tightly shut, then allowed them to relax. She felt a rush of comfort coming over her, like a big warm frothy wave.
“Just think of sleep now. Think: you are getting tired and falling asleep,” Dr. Lim suggested. “You are tired, your eyes are heavy, your body is limp, Rebecca. And your head is heavy.”
He paused, working on the cadences and rhythms of his approach.
“You want to sleep,” he continued. “You want badly to sleep. Your body is heavy and you are falling, falling, and falling asleep.”
Rebecca’s eyelids flickered. She wanted badly to follow the doctor’s suggestions.
Her eyelids flickered a second time, and the last thing she remembered was Sonya Lim tiptoeing out of the room in clogs. Tiptoeing in clogs: The sight was so absurd that it broke her concentration and almost made her laugh. But instead, it eased her. She plunged through the boundaries that Dr. Lim had set for her, and she drifted into a light trance.
“Think of this, Rebecca. A tunnel,” she heard the doctor say. “Think of a long, familiar, friendly tunnel.” She obeyed. There was an image before her of her life running in reverse, from the present day quickly back through that horrible incident in Connecticut and then, rapidly accelerating, through college and into her high school years.
“Go backward,” Dr. Lim said. “Take your mind backward in time…”
The inconsistency of Dr. Lim’s voice and grammar superimposed upon events of her past didn’t bother her. She felt as though she were passing rapidly through a tunnel, soaring through darkness. She was a girl again, with her mother and father in the old family home.
“Relax and go. Travel…”
Scenes from her life were like billboards passing into her view as she voyaged on a speeding train. She was on an express tearing through all the stations. Image after image shot by. She arrived at her own birth. Then went into a deeper and more troubling blackness.
She struggled with something and didn’t know what it was. It was some sort of barrier. Physical. Psychological. Some sort of impediment to the exploration of her past.
“Hey! What is this?” she asked herself. She felt the vibrations of her own voice in a high whisper, speaking aloud.
“Your own birth.”
She grimaced.
“Maybe a previous death, Rebecca…”
She flailed on the psychiatrist’s couch. She uttered a short low scream of horror.
“I’m dead. But I’m alive,” she blurted. Dr. Lim’s voice soothed.
“Yes. Very good, go! Keep voyaging backward. See if you again can come across visions in the tunnel.”
Absurd, that idea, she caught herself thinking. There is no life before birth. The blackness attested to that.
“I am in uncharted territory,” she thought to herself. “I’ve been here but I haven’t been here.”
“Come back to me,” a beckoning male voice said. It was warm and friendly. Familiar. She heard herself whisper aloud to the doctor.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked.
“Have you passed your own birth?” Lim’s voice, inquiring. His tone was less dream-inducing now. More clinical. Rebecca, answering. “Yes. I’m in darkness.”
“And you’re still traveling?”
“I am. The darkness is moving.” It was like looking out of an airplane on a pitch black night. Nothing visible, but a clear sense of forward motion. Lim again:
“Excellent. That means there’s a place to go to. There’s something there.”
“How will I find it?”
“It will find you, Rebecca. Be available. Wait for it. Let yourself sail into the light.”
Her hands clasped each other tightly, almost painfully as she wrenched her fingers. She was in darkness. The darkness swirled. She had a sensation of plunging. Then that, too, stopped.
“I’m coming to lightness,” she said.
“Keep going,” Dr. Lim said. “Face the brightness. Welcome it. It’s another world.” “It’s what? It’s what?“ she asked.
“Don’t question,” he urged softly. “Voyage.”
Rebecca had the image of sailing up over a horizon and bursting upon a brilliantly lit landscape. She felt like a bird, soaring euphorically, and gliding upon a sunlit reality.
Then she felt herself coming to earth. And with reality, her spirit became heavy. An unbearable sadness was upon her. Some great tragedy was pulling her downward, reaching up to her soul and retrieving it in its grasp, and guiding her down into the sorrows of the world.
She fought it. She cried out. “No! Stop it! No! Please.”
“Go to it, Rebecca,” the doctor said. “Go to it so that we understand.”
“No. It’s horrible!” she spoke aloud in a normal voice. Her own words echoed in her ears. “I don’t want to go!”
She felt the doctor’s hands upon hers, calming and reassuring as his voice continued to narrate her voyage.
“You have to, Rebecca Moore,” he said. “You have to see it and accept it to know where you are today.” Crying out, resisting it, she answered,
“I don’t want to! I can’t! I can’t!”
“You have to,” he answered. “You’ve gone all this way. Don’t turn around.”
“I can’t do this!”
“You have to meet your own ghosts,” Dr. Lim said. “Locate your own children.”
The children! Patrick and Karen. Where were they in this? Rebecca turned back toward the imagined light. On the couch, her body contorted. It was as if her feet had hit the ground with a thump.
She was on the ground. Looking around. People around her slowly came into focus. She blinked. She was in a black dress, and she stood among many people near a grave. There was a casket in place waiting to be lowered.
“Oh, my dear God,” she murmured. It was a prayer more than a profanity. Rebecca started to cry. Dr. Lim’s hand reassured her again.
She felt as if her children should be at her side, but they weren’t. She was alone.
Her eyes came up.
Of course! The tragedy! Now she knew what it was. The actor, Billy Carlton, was being buried. A doleful Protestant minister was completing the ceremony, but his voice, his words, were only a dull hum under the wind.
“This place,” she whispered aloud in the doctor’s office. “I recognize this place.”
She was in the Cemetery of Angels. It was seventy years earlier.
A few words caught Rebecca’s ear. They were the thoughts of the friends of Billy Carlton, assembled at San Angelo at the moment of his interment.
“Murdered…” one said.
“Poisoned,” said another.
“… never convict anyone… though we all know who
did it…”
Rebecca found herself looking around, searching the faces of friends. They were all looking at her. She watched the casket being lowered and felt a sense of grief far more intense than she might ever have imagined.
She felt as if love itself was being lowered into the ground. And when the coffin disappeared from view, the minister turned in her direction.
“Mrs. Carlton?” he asked. He gave a slight nod to a rose she held in her hand.
“Mrs. Carlton?” he asked again.
It was only then that Rebecca understood what was being asked of her. So she, as the widow of the deceased, approached the grave. In silence she threw the rose after the coffin. She watched it disappear downward into the ground, followed quickly by other roses from the aggregation of Billy Carlton’s friends.
Her last image was that of the roses tumbling downward to where they would join Billy. Then Rebecca turned.
A friend’s arm comforted her. And then, as Dr. Lim summoned her, she began her return trip to the consciousness of the present day, arriving back after forty minutes of hypnosis, blinking her way back into a reality, which may have been no more or less real than several others.
“More people should seek out their past lives under hypnosis,” Dr. Lim said later, as the session of hypnotherapy ended. “A lot of people would be surprised.”
“I’m sure,” Rebecca said.
“Souls have to come from somewhere,” he added. “Why shouldn’t they have their own recycling process?” he asked. “Why shouldn’t the spiritual have the same qualities of creation and destruction as the physical?” He paused. “Eastern thoughts. Sorry. You are free to share or dismiss. But then, you have traveled, so maybe now you believe.” Dr. Lim raised an eyebrow and shrugged.
Deeply shaken, Rebecca spent only a few more minutes in conversation. Then she wrote out a check and hurriedly departed.
Chapter 40
One hour after leaving Dr. Lim’s office, Rebecca Moore stood in the upstairs landing of her home and waited. She waited for the visit that she knew, if she willed it, would now come.
She walked first into Patrick’s room then continued to Karen’s. She moved in a slow stroll, feeling the emptiness of the house around her. She tried to picture her children and where they might be. In the custody of the ghost? What did that mean? Were they living? Dead? She wasn’t sure. She only knew that she wanted to join them.
Join them and a man she had once loved.
Somehow. Some way.
In some manner their lives had been intertwined once before, hers and the actor known as Billy Carlton. And somehow now he had come back.
To take her? To protect her? She didn’t know.
Unless, of course, she had somehow gone insane. And none of this was happening. She went into the turret room and tried to feel Billy Carlton’s presence. “I’m ready for you,” she whispered. “I want to see you.”
She waited, and the ghost of the actor did not come. Several minutes passed. She listened for the piano music, the tune that she had dreaded a short time ago. She couldn’t find it. She tried to will it to come forth. Now, its absence pained her, like a lost love.
She wanted to hear a creak in the ceiling or in a nearby floorboard. No dice there, either. She badly wanted a visitation, and none was forthcoming.
She went to the window that looked toward the cemetery. She opened it slightly. A breeze wafted through as it so often did.
Her gaze stayed with the cemetery.
Then her senses gave a little start. There was a shadow moving from Billy Carlton’s fallen marker. And it was moving directly toward her house.
Rebecca smiled like a madwoman. She glanced upward. In the sunny sky above Southern California she saw no cloud. And still the shadow moved.
She turned. She walked calmly from the turret room and across the upstairs landing. She went to the master bedroom of her home. She loosened her blouse and sank into a chaise lounge in the master bedroom. She looked at the doorway. For several seconds the open door framed nothing. She waited for the ghost and it did not appear.
She clutched her hands together and brought them to her chin. She wanted to know if this spirit would follow her into the bedroom she shared with her husband.
Still, nothing appeared. She wondered now, had he vanished? She craned her head slightly and gazed beyond the door.
There was a creak in the hallway, and her heart gave another tremor. She felt a cold draft and then a telltale dropping of the atmospheric pressure. She was sure that he would appear. She was certain. She spoke.
“Billy?” her voice was barely a whisper.
No answer.
Then, “I’m here, darling!”
Simultaneous to his words, there was a touch. Unseen, the ghost had appeared beside her. His fingers settled on her shoulder and gave her a shock; not an electrical shock, but a surge of physical excitement.
And his fingers. They touched her as if they were able to pass through the fabric of her blouse. She recoiled, but his hand followed her. He laughed gently, a rich warm laughter. A stage actor’s trained voice in merriment. And then he was behind her and both hands were upon her shoulders.
“Please…” she said. But she had no idea what she was asking for.
“Please don’t? Please be gentle? Please go ahead?”
She didn’t know.
“I would never harm you.”
She wanted to relax into his clasp, but didn’t have the courage to do so. She started to relax then caught herself. Somewhere inside her, some distant warning bell sounded. Something about women who yield to advances from intruding males in the bedrooms they share with their lawful spouses.
She pulled herself away. Then she felt a pair of strong arms upon her shoulders. Billy’s hands secured her. She felt a passion rise within her, a physical drive for lovemaking, unlike anything she had felt for years.
She felt his body behind her. No longer was he a flitting figure at the edge of her consciousness. No more was he a shadow in the most remote corner of her mind. Now he held her as strongly as any man had ever held her. And then his arms closed around her.
He kissed her at the back of her neck, and again she recognized his touch from long ago. His hands went to work on the buttons of her blouse. And she felt the urgency continue to rise within her.
A reunion. Yes, Rebecca felt herself thinking, it seemed like a reunion. And she knew that it was. She wondered if he was going to take her to the grave with him, to rejoin her children. And she barely cared.
She turned to face him and looked into eyes that she felt had been watching her for a lifetime. Or perhaps they had only been upon her since she had moved to this place. There would be a lot of time, she reasoned, to learn which.
He was no longer cold, but now was warm, as warm as her feelings and, for that matter, as warm as any man who had ever held her or intimately touched her.
She closed her eyes, let him kiss her, let his hands continue to help her out of her clothes, and she gave herself to a passion that seemed to come from another lifetime.
She woke up two hours later on her bed, the covers pulled across her naked body. No Billy. He was gone the way a nice dream is gone when one opens one’s eyes in the morning. For a moment she did not know what had awakened her then she realized: it was the sound of an automobile engine.
The identity of the engine was unmistakable. It was her husband’s car. Then the thoughts came flooding back to her. The ghost, first in the hallway, then in her bedroom.
Then inside her. If it had really happened. She took stock of herself, and how her body felt, and concluded that it had. Another moment passed. For an instant she was happy. She felt loved. She felt that somehow she was that much closer to a permanent reunion with a man who loved her and then a second reunion with her children.
Would they all be buried together in San Angelo, she wondered idly? Would they lie together for eternity: Rebecca, Billy Carlton, and her two children?
Th
e thought didn’t disturb her in the slightest. The specter of death was no more fearsome than an old swinging gate in a country churchyard, to be passed through with great ease. An easy trip from one place to another.
She lay in bed for another moment, thinking. The late afternoon sunshine was flowing in the bedroom window like honey. It was a brief pure moment, sweet as fresh cream.
Then it vanished. She heard her husband enter the house downstairs and call her name. Her heart felt heavy. Bill Moore was the intruder, she felt. An intruder in her heart and an intruder in her body for too many years now.
“Becca?” he called. “Hey! Becca! Answer me if you’re here!”
She didn’t answer.
She scrambled for her clothes, pulled them on and straightened the bed, all in the same movements. He was at the foot of the steps. “Becca!” he called a second time. The normal ring to his voice. Surly, impatient.
“Up here,” she called back.
She heard him trudge up the steps. Why was the creak footfall of the ghost now so welcome, and the step of her husband so repellent?
She thought she knew the answer.
Moore came into the bedroom and cast her a glance. No affection. No nothing. Not even — thank God! — suspicion.
“Napping?” he asked, as if to suggest that she shouldn’t have been.
“Yeah,” she said. “I felt real worn-out.”
“Any word from the police?” he asked.
“No. Is there ever?” she answered, trying to act normal. “Of course not.”
As was his habit, he emptied his pockets onto the dresser, loosened his dress shirt, and disappeared into the bathroom. She watched him with a new sense, a new awareness that had been brought on by the events of the afternoon.
She felt like a longtime adulteress and, like those new to the activity, wondered if the word was written right there on her face. She even looked in the mirror to see if she looked the same as she had an hour ago.
She did. Or at least she thought she did.
But nothing else was clear or reasonable or unencumbered. There was no straight explanation for anything. And she had the feeling that there never would be again.