Heart to Heart: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective

by Don Pendleton

  But... you are giving me palpitations. I mean you don't know what you're saying! Love is Godly! If I put love in there...oh I think I see what you're getting at. Yes. But uh...that's a lot of power. How can we be sure that one of those deputies won't just keep it all to himself? I mean, you know, hoard the aspect and refuse to share it with the other delegates.

  Give them sex.

  Oh come on now! We can't give them sex! Creative I could allow, okay but not procreative!

  Why not? That makes mortality part of the package, so it minimizes the power plays and keeps love flowing along. I'm your higher-self aspect; trust me.

  So God gave love and sex to his creation.

  So why is it so damned hard to find a little sometimes?

  You tell me why.

  I am sure that everyone who may read this report has encountered the term déjà vu, and most have probably had the experience; many however do not fully understand what may be happening there, so let me take a moment to discuss it. Translated literally from the French, it means "already seen." But what the term was designed to describe is a phenomenon involving seeing, hearing, or even thinking something—often accompanied by a shivery feeling—that has already happened and appears to be happening again in the precisely same way.

  Say that you are on the streets of a strange city and you approach an intersection where you know you have never walked before; you round a corner, and in the split second before you can see around the comer, you already know what lies beyond. Everything you then see comes at you with a rush of familiarity—perhaps even the odors and sounds peculiar to that particular street scene.

  Or you may be seated in your own home in casual conversation with old friends (or new acquaintances); one person makes a statement, and as another replies you suddenly know that you had heard the reply before it was uttered; that moreover, you have been through this entire experience before and it all seems to be happening again.

  That is déjà vu. It is really a very common human experience in its simpler forms, but there are also deeply complex forms of déjà vu, which we shall see later.

  These simple déjà vus are explained in various ways

  depending upon who is pontificating at the moment. A view popular in psychology would explain the phenomenon as a trick played on us by the brain. In this argument it is theorized that sensory stimuli scattering through the gray matter at light-speed and organized into a perceptive bundle at some point is sometimes organized twice and therefore perceived twice, the second time almost like an echo following very closely on the heels of the first. We therefore get a "double print," the second perception arriving before we have had time to assimilate the first and blending into it in a most deceptive way.

  To my knowledge no one has yet demonstrated the echo effect in a laboratory, so the theory is no more valid than any other.

  A parapsychologist would probably tell you that your déjà vu was a precognitive flash, while the metaphysician would prefer that you think of it as having something to do with past-life recall or a momentary hole in the mystical curtain that separates you from omniscience. None of that has been demonstrated under wires either, so you can come to your own conclusions without fear of being soundly contradicted.

  The reason some people connect déjà vu to past-life recall is that there are certain similarities in the more complex forms. Take the case of an eight-year-old girl who arrives in a certain neighborhood or a certain village or town for the first time; upon seeing it, she becomes highly excited and begins pointing out familiar scenes; perhaps she leaps from the car at a certain point and begins running from house to house searching for someone she could never have seen before in this lifetime—and finds them!

  Whoa...

  That's pretty heavy, sure, but numerous similar experiences have been reported in the record of our times.

  I have my own theory about déjà vu, but I'm keeping it to myself for now.

  I bring it all up at this point merely to try to provide some perspective on my experience with Francesca Amalie on the beach below Pointe House. I didn't know what happened there. I did know that the whole mind-blowing happening unfolded as a sustained spine-tingling sense of déjà vu such as I had never before experienced; I mean from the moment I stepped off the elevator until the moment we lay gasping for breath twenty feet off the blanket and shivering in the cold spreading fingers of the Pacific; I was reliving, not living, the experience on a frame-by-frame basis, and not just with the mind but with the whole crazy body vibrating to the double-print sensations and girding itself hungrily for the spectacular double-print climax that had to be approaching in two worlds at once. Oh God, what beauty! What peace with frenzy and what frenzy with peace! What utter adoration of another living being!—both ways, that adoration was flowing both ways between the bodies.

  Call it an act of love or merely an act of sex; call it what you please; to me it was a mystical experience broadcasting through the flesh, and I had intimations of things during that frantic mating that cannot be expressed in mere human terms. I knew momentarily the pure bliss that is Godly love in its finest essence, and I learned meaning of rapture. I believe I also learned something about sexual love.

  But I didn't know what the hell was really going on there. At the moment I did not particularly give a damn.

  When we found the strength to do so, we returned to the blanket and bundled on it, shivering not just from the cold but also in the memory of that sexual union.

  After a while, quite a long while of snuggling and quiet rumination, Francesca whispered to me, "I'm sorry that I lied to you."

  I asked, "When did you do that?"

  She replied without pause, “I did not come to Pointe House one year ago."

  So I had to ask her, "When did you come, then?"

  "I came," she told me, in a flat, matter-of-fact reply, "the first time, in 1872."

  Okay. I thought about that for a second or two, then observed, "It was built in 1921."

  She said, "This is the third Pointe House. The first was built in 1798."

  Uh huh.

  “Who built it?”

  "Valentinius built it. It was destroyed by fire in 1820. He again raised it in 1871 and brought me here a year

  later."

  "Brought you here from where?"

  "I had been staying in Vienna."

  I said, "That makes you at least a hundred years older than me."

  She said, "That is not impossible."

  I said, "I see."

  But I did not see, and I did not wish to see. So I tried to lighten it up a bit.

  I asked, "Are you then the bride of Dracula?"

  She laughed. Just laughed.

  But I, pal, was anything but laughing.

  Chapter Eight: Reverse View

  I should have pursued the question while the mood was there, but I was not emotionally prepared to do that at the moment, and the whole thing had slipped away by the time we returned to the house. I mean, the whole thing. We were back to where we'd been at our first meeting. It was as though there were two Francescas, one for frolicking on the beach and the other distant and absorbed in the preoccupations of a totally different life.

  "Can I take you to dinner?" I asked her as we left the elevator.

  "I'll probably just have a bite in my studio," she replied noncomittally, but it was a clear signal.

  I told her, "I like your work. Checked it out before I went below. Good stuff. How long have you been at it?"

  "Obviously not long enough," she said, turning back the compliment and evading the question with the one response.

  Different girl, yeah.

  So I left it there, for the moment, and went on to my suite. I heard water running in my bathroom and went through to check it out. Hai Tsu was in there, drawing a bath in the sunken tub. I backed away before she could see me and went to the bedroom window to collect my thoughts.

  But it was a difficult collection.

  Look, I'm no amat
eur at intrigue. I was raised in it, got a couple of damned degrees in it, and I'd practiced it as a professional in some of the toughest theaters on earth. But I did not know what to make of this present situation.

  Sure, you're probably thinking at this point, what's the big deal? Some guy pulled a stage magician's trick on you at Malibu, got your attention in a way designed to lure you to Laguna and involve you in a conspiracy to defraud the state of California, further bedazzled you with some worthless papers and a ridiculous story of a man who would not die, then cinched the con with a dazzling seductress who fucked more than your body. She's playing the game, Ash; she's part of the con, and she has scrambled your brains.

  So okay, I take all that under advisement.

  But why me? And who could concoct such a bizarre con?—and how could anyone smart enough to concoct such a scenario not be smart enough to concoct one with a better success factor built into it?

  Sure, I go to the movies, just like you; I've probably seen all the ones you've seen. I know, I know. So if it's not a con, then it's a nut house. I've joined the inmates. But is

  insanity contagious? Did I catch it from Francesca down there at Pointe Beach a while ago? Or was I already lost even before I went down there?

  Had I been crazy all my life?

  Was that the answer to Ashton Ford or Ford Ashton or whoever the hell I am?

  I opened the little overnight kit I'd brought to Laguna from Malibu and took another look at that ten grand. It was real money. I'd brought it with me, in the thought that I could give it back if I did not like the case.

  I did not like the case.

  Frankly, I was scared of the damned case.

  I wrapped the money in the power of attorney and returned it to the kit. I would give it to Jim Sloane. Not tomorrow. Tonight. I would take that bath which Hai Tsu was presumably drawing for me, shake the sand out of my clothes, and get the hell away from Pointe House while the getting was good.

  I would take the bath, yeah, but it was not to be alone.

  Hai Tsu had come up behind me. I knew she was there even before I turned around to confirm with the eyes what I already knew by some other avenue. Another dazzling seductress, yeah. I guess I knew at that very moment that the getting had already gone.

  She wore a black, sheer, hip-length negligee, and that was all she wore other than a delicate red carnation in her hair. I had never cast eyes upon such a divine female form. This was almost a comic-strip body, calling up images of Terry and the Pirates and the Dragon Lady, except that this lady was definitely no dragon; this lady was God's own idea of feminine perfection.

  She said to me, with that deliriously secretive joy in the quiet voice, "Bath is ready, Shen."

  I was gawking, I know I was, but I was trying to at least gawk coolly. "What's that you called me?"

  "Bath is ready," she repeated, reaching for me with a graceful gesture available only to women of the Orient.

  Her hands were at my belt buckle and I was reaching for cool.

  I said, "No, I mean, what name did you call me by?"

  She was kneeling, withdrawing my pants, gazing up at me from across cosmos. "Call you Shen. Are you not Shen?"

  I got it then. It had tickled a tendril of memory when Francesca told me earlier that Hai Tsu referred to Valentinius only as Shen, and explained, "I believe that is some kind of Oriental title of respect."

  Now that tendril was flaring, and I knew that Shen was quite a bit more than a title of respect.

  It has to do with the yin and the yang of Taoism, the interaction of which produces the created world and all that occurs within it. Yin is the passive, feminine principle and yang is the positive, masculine energy. Good spirits, collectively referred to as Shen, are full of yang.

  Lao-tzu founded Taoism in the sixth century b.c. As a religion it lost much of its vitality after about the second century a.d. when it was combined with various elements of Buddhism, but survived strongly into twentieth-century China as a philosophy and also as a form of ceremonial magic.

  In its magical forms the Tao is thought to be a route to immortality in the flesh. Early Taoist magicians were alchemists who compounded various substances in a search for immortality through chemistry (sort of like our modern medical researchers?), developed various potions and pills and combined it all with meditative disciplines designed to prolong life.

  Lao-tzu is reputed to have possessed the secret of long life, and the Tao tradition speaks of the Three Isles of Immortality and the Eight Immortals who achieved immortality by ingesting certain substances.

  See where I'm at now?

  I'm a sunk duck, that's where I'm at, Shen or not.

  Hai Tsu gently undressed me to the skin, then escorted me to the bath. But she did not put me in the tub right away. She first lay me down on the massage table, removed her negligee, uncoiled a hose from the bath fixture, and wet me down for a couple of minutes under a warm, gentle spray, both sides, then she used a large sponge and delicately perfumed soap to cover me front and back with a thick layer of foamy suds before she went to work on me with those incredible hands.

  Yeah, I know where heaven's at.

  I got a full body massage under delightfully slippery suds by trained hands that knew all the sensual paths to a man's heart; then I got a full body massage under the same delightfully slippery suds by another full body that knew how to fit all the opposing surfaces together in the most captivating maneuvers.

  Ten minutes of that, pal, and you just don't give a shit anymore—not even with the enchanting Francesca less than an hour behind you. The yin is firmly in control of the yang, and all you have to do is lie back and let it happen.

  It just went on happening for a greatly extended period of utter bliss—nothing explosive going on, you understand, just that same slow, sinuous, sensuous rubbing of flesh upon flesh. I couldn't even tell you if I had an erection during any of that; I wouldn't know and wouldn't care, wouldn't have given it a thought one way or another and it wouldn't have mattered one way or another.

  Later, yeah, it mattered.

  She knelt astride me on the table and thoroughly rinsed the suds from both of us with the warm spray; then she went to work on me with lips, teeth, and tongue—all of me, the whole extant surface area of me, nibbling and licking and kissing in that same slow, deliberate rhythm—and a whole lot of things quickly began to matter a whole lot.

  This was the flip side of the Francesca experience. I mean that it was a reverse view—an opposite angle, so to speak—like the difference between inside and outside or topside and bottomside. It was a reverse view also in intensity. Where the one had been frantic, demanding, consuming, this one was languorous, lazy, a giving up and giving in, capitulation to the sense and immersion in pleasure.

  Hai Tsu did not allow me an orgasm. She would lick, nibble, blow and tickle right up to the boundary of no- return then clamp and hold and divert sensations elsewhere, over and over—I don't know how many over and overs—just endlessly it seemed, until it gradually dawned on me that I was no longer straining to leap that boundary, or for anything whatever, and I slowly descended into the most relaxing peace I have ever known.

  She wet me down again, turned on the whirlpool in the tub, and softly announced, "Bath is ready, Shen. Dinner in one hour."

  Then she quietly withdrew.

  And so did I. I fell asleep, and dreamed miraculous dreams, and visited the Magi in a beautiful reverse view of the meaning of life and of death.

  And knew in those dreams that both are the same.

  Chapter Nine: The Echo and The Omen

  The angel looked exactly like Valentinius but said his name was Valory, which I understood to be another cover identity for St. Germain. He told me that names are abstractions anyway, and serve their chief purpose as a legal convenience—hinting darkly that the human world is overly preoccupied with legalities—and suggested that I just call him Val for short.

  I replied that I thought names were rather importan
t abstractions at any rate, and that set him off on a long dissertation about the origin and customs of names and naming, implying that the thing had gone overboard and lost much of its meaning in the modern age.

  He said look, in the beginning, before anyone had a

  name, people had no trouble recognizing or dealing with one another. One look at a guy and you knew where he stood in the pecking order, whether he was boring or interesting, threatening or reassuring, and whether you'd care to dine with him. But then in order to communicate that attribute to a third person, you had to be able to refer to the guy, and you did so by his attribute.

  Thus a chief may be referred to as Great One and a lackey as Kisses Ass, a rebel member as Hates Authority and a Lothario as Screws All.

  See these are purely utilitarian abstracts of a personality—direct and to the point and descriptive in a way that leaves no doubt as to whom is being referred to since everyone in the tribe knows everyone else intimately even before the names are given. It is the knowing that determines what is given.

  So names began as descriptions of personalities. All of the traditional names in use today owe their origin to that same idea but lost their directness when people started giving names to babies, before any definite attributes of character could be identified. The name given then became a hopeful attribute or a flattery to some other member of the tribe. So today we have Michael, which is from the Hebrew for Who is Like God, and Avery, Germanic for Courageous, or how about Boyd, Celtic for Yellow-haired.

  I told Valory that I really did not give a damn about any of that, I just wondered why he had to have so damned many names and why couldn't he settle on just one?

  He talked about names as titles and titles as names, like calling a judge "Your Honor" or a king "His Majesty"—how in this country we address our political leader as "Mr. President"—and how those titles remain the same even though different personalities assume them—how church leaders assume new identities as they ascend to the papacy. He then returned to the earlier example and had Kisses Ass topple Great One and take over the tribe. Should their names remain the same? Or should they exchange names also, as they exchange roles?