by Jean Rabe
O O O
A few decades before that—1760, he placed it—he was in the Royal Navy, stationed on the coast, working to enforce British Colonial policy. He recalled protecting a school teacher and her charges. There was an explosion, a sensation of red-hot pain.
Then the fog came for him.
What was in its icy depths that robbed him of the memories of one life and let him take on a new role? Like slipping off one pair of shoes and putting on another, he became someone else.
O O O
In 1702 the fog took him before the fire did. It was November 10 in St. Augustine when Governor Moore burned down the city. Most everyone had successfully hid in the Castillo, but not him and a handful of others. He saw the flames bearing down and knew he could not escape them.
O O O
In the next vision he saw the face of a woman.
Sarah?
And behind her were the snarling visages of her tormentors.
“Hang her!” someone hollered.
“Drown her!” shouted another.
This dream snippet was even stronger than the others, the images tumbling at him in a cluster that robbed his breath.
It was 1648, Charleston. How did he know that … where he was, when he was?
“Hang her right next to Margaret Jones!”
Sarah!
“No! Stone the woman! Him too!”
Him, they were talking about him … Carl/John … no, in this time he was called Samuel.
Samuel Duncan Ross.
Everything was so ghastly vivid! He felt fear crawl into his belly and take root.
It was as if a window had suddenly snapped open in his mind, unlocking a memory he’d tried to bury with the passing centuries.
Carl/John/Samuel remembered coming to this Colonial town, little more than a village, attracting the attention of the village toughs because of his odd appearance. It wasn’t the way he was dressed; he was careful to look like most other people. It was his eyes.
They had noticed his yellow eyes. In all the other “lives,” people had thought his eyes merely odd. But here …
“Witch!”
The toughs taunted him, their repeated curses drawing the attention of elders, who in turn shouted at him as they gathered in their clapboard meeting house.
“Witch!” someone sneered louder.
A gob of spit struck his cheek.
His arrival had coincided with a distemper that had nearly wiped out the parish livestock before it ran its course.
“Witch. Witch. Witch,” the elders confronted him.
Sarah—his lovely wife Sarah—tried to defend him, only to be accused—first, of being a victim of his spells, then of being a witch herself, then shunned. Sarah, lovely Sarah, tall and with a face that looked so much like Ellen’s.
If only the villagers had left them alone.
Or if only they had picked up and moved elsewhere.
But one sultry summer night when the leeches and herbal decoctions of the local doctor had not saved the life of one of Samuel and Sarah’s chief accusers, the villagers grew poisonous. The elders accused him and Sarah of cursing the man and causing his demise. They were dragged from their bed to the stocks in the town square.
And when the stones began to smash at them, the fog had closed in and he had grasped her hand and pulled her with him—
O O O
The calliope music was bawdy and loud. Petey liked it that way. He was just finishing up for the day, they all were; putting last-minute touches on acts. He was refining a routine that included Freida hoisting him up, trunk wrapped around his waist. He got on well with the elephant. His next routine would include a few bears. The Divine Bear? he wondered.
Petey was the tallest clown with the Cole Bros. Circus; he’d been with them since he graduated from high school in 1930. Ten years later he hadn’t lost a step. He was as agile as he’d been when he first signed on and—
Wake up, Carl!
O O O
“I said, wake up. Are we going to dinner, or what?”
Jerrah stood over him, balled fists set against her waist. He heard her toe tapping against the plank floor of his bedroom.
“She said five. And it’s five. Are we going to dinner or are you going to stay in bed?” A look of concern crossed her face before she regained her stoic mask. “You okay? You sick?”
Carl was trembling from the memories. In the fog he’d recalled Sarah screaming, cursing him and alternately begging the forgiveness of the mob hurling stones. She wore Ellen’s face.
“Are you all right?” Jerrah persisted.
“Fine.” Carl sat up and wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. “I’m fine.”
How old am I? he wondered. Who am I? What am I?
“Well …” Her foot tapped faster.
“Yes, we’re going to dinner.”
O O O
Jerrah didn’t stay long, eating two helpings of spaghetti, sloshing down a tall glass of milk, then scurrying back to the cabin without so much as a “thank you.” Carl suspected she was trying to be polite to give him some time alone with Ellen, as polite as she could muster in any event.
“Dinner was good.” Carl wanted to say something else about it, ask how she spiced the sauce, if it was her own recipe, but the thoughts died, warring with the images still clinging from his afternoon dreams.
“John …” Ellen covered her hand with her mouth. “Sorry … Carl. You just look so very much like my John.”
I was your John, Carl thought. It was all he could do to keep from throwing his arms around her aged body and begging her forgiveness for going to buy that wood boat, for drowning and leaving her alone. But he knew it would do more damage than good. She had, it appeared, managed all right. She had long since accepted the fact that her husband died. To tell her now that he wasn’t really dead, would only make her think him mad. And even if, at some deeper level, she believed him … what would it do to the both of them?
“You eat like him, too, the sort of backwards way you hold the fork.”
“Look, Ellen …”
She stepped away from the table and started gathering the dishes, setting them next to the sink and running hot water. Carl noticed the kitchen was large enough for a dishwasher, but didn’t have one. He watched her, his thoughts whirling madly, senselessly. The kitchen was so familiar, the lodge room downstairs, too. During the spring and summer the cottages were always rented, and hardly an evening went by that the downstairs wasn’t filled with chattering, singing, dancing folks. Sometimes this little kitchen would be crowded, too. Somehow even the strangers, the ones renting a cabin for the first time, knew that Ellen’s invitation to “drop over for a chat or a cup of tea” was not simply an empty formality, but was real.
And during the late fall and into winter, when the tourists were gone, there had been only the two of them.
He swallowed audibly, forcing down the ache that had centered in his throat. Nothing had changed … except Ellen’s age.
He shouldn’t tell her. He shouldn’t! But how could he not?
“Ellen.” He swallowed hard. “You’re going to think me mad as a hatter. But I think … somehow … I think I was John Miller. I have these dreams, and in them I’m … John. I believe I really was John, am John in some sense. I think …”
She tied on an apron, turned and wiped her hands. “I know.”
They stared at each other for several moments, sounds from outside drifting in. A boat motor purred softly, and there was the gentle crunch of gravel to signal someone driving up to the lodge.
“I’m expecting a beer delivery,” she said, heading for the stairs. “I have to see to this.”
“Ellen …”
She glanced over her shoulder.
“I’m not mad, Ellen. I really think …”
“I know,” she said more firmly. “I know you’re my John.”
“Ellen …”
“I have dreams, too.”
***
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Chapter 26
Ellen
“I used to pick up those tabloids at the grocers.” Her laugh sounded musical. “The ones talking about Elvis sightings, Sonny and Cher gossip, miracle diets—thirty pounds in thirty days. Oh, and carnival rides that were secretly spaceships sent here to abduct Earth’s children. I still buy The National Enquirer to this day.”
Carl raised an eyebrow.
“Big headlines and obviously doctored photos,” she went on. “Filled with stories about aliens running for president, near-death experiences, and reincarnation. Remember how you used to call me silly for wasting our money on them?” She sucked in her lower lip. “Though back in those days they weren’t quite as fanciful, and they weren’t called tabloids, were they? I think they were … oh, broadsheets … that’s right. And my favorite was just called The Enquirer then, and it wasn’t so sensational. Mostly just propaganda in those years, true stories with a bad slant. The spaceships and ghost tales came later. Don’t you remember me—”
“—buying them … let alone reading them? Yeah, I remember. The Enquirer used to run editorials against the military, demoralizing the troops fighting in Germany.”
“Yes. World War II. Back in the day. You called my papers birdcage liners.” Ellen shivered. Seeing him here, being so close to him—her John—she wanted to hold him tight and bring back her youth and their marriage. It had been a happy one. This was her John … even he admitted it, though what real proof was there? But there were too many years gone, and too many years between them. She kept her distance.
How could this be possible?
It wasn’t possible. But it felt right.
“You know, maybe they had it right, my birdcage liners. Or some of it right anyway, about the reincarnation.” She rubbed a thumb against an age spot just above her wrist, working at it like it was a worry stone. “The notion of a person’s soul finding its way into another body, that death isn’t the end, just a path to a new life.”
She realized John … Carl … was studying her. She turned away and rearranged spices on her counter, picking up the last of the dinner dishes as she continued. “I was raised Baptist, you know.” Or at least that’s what she remembered. The First Baptist Church, choir practice.
“I recall, yes.”
“I had an old friend who was a fire-and-brimstone preacher and had me terrified about the fires of hell and eternal damnation.”
“We were married in his church.”
“Kept me on that old straight and narrow when I was young. So there’s something … oh, I don’t know … something comforting in seeing you, John … Carl. Death isn’t final. But there’s something—”
“Uncomfortable, too,” he finished.
She shrugged and opened a drawer, moving silverware around. “Then there’s karma.”
“Karma?”
“Karma and reincarnation.” She shut the drawer and turned, leaning against the counter and looking at him without meeting his gaze. “You reap what you sow,” she explained. “If you’re bad in one life you come back as something less, like a beggar or a rat. And if you’re good and kind you come back as something better, or—”
“—something that’s the same?” His voice was so soft she had to strain to hear him. Louder: “That doesn’t sound very Baptist, karma and reincarnation.”
“It’s Hindu, I think.” During the winter months when business was slow, she’d taken some classes offered at the public library: music appreciation, Egyptian symbolism, comparative religions. “And it holds that if your life is easy, and you’re … say, rich … it’s because you were a good soul in a previous life. But if you’re sick and poor, you—”
“Weren’t very upright?”
“Something like that.” She shivered again. He was finishing her sentences, just like he used to decades ago. “The Hindu notion is that the souls of animals can come back as humans, and vice versa.” This time her laugh was clipped. “Maybe your father took a turn at being a cocker spaniel. And maybe that tabby I had—”
“—before we got married—”
“—was Grover Cleveland.”
“Cows are exalted creatures in India.” He stood and pushed in his chair and took a step toward her. “Ellen—”
“I remember an article in one of those tabloids about a near-death experience researcher who claimed that when our bodies give out our spirits go into this cosmic cauldron, some universal consciousness, where we all swirl together waiting to be ladled out. No need to fear the fires of hell or eternal damnation, nothing so horribly cruel as all of that, or …”
He took another step, reached forward and touched her cheek.
She hadn’t realized she’d been crying.
“John … Carl … if you’ve been reincarnated. If it’s really you … why—”
“—do I look the same?” He retreated to give her breathing room. “On our first anniversary I took you to this little French restaurant. It wasn’t really French, but it had scenes of Paris wallpapered in the dining room.”
She nodded.
“You gave me a Zebco casting reel, all big and shiny.”
“Too big for the pole you liked to use.”
“So I bought a new pole just for the Zebco reel.”
“Yes, you are my John. But why … if you died, drowned—”
“I don’t know that I really died, Ellen.”
“Why do you look—”
“—the same?” He shook his head. “I always look the same. In every life, I look the same.”
She finally met his eyes. “I don’t under—”
“Look, Ellen. I was John, am your John, but I recall being a lot of other people.” He stared at her, his eyes holding her in place like daggers. “I’ve never told anyone that, not Jerrah, not … I always look the same. Every life. From the Civil War to the Gold Rush to—”
She raised a hand to her mouth.
“Say it, Ellen. Call me mad.”
“I don’t think you’re mad.” You’re my John, she mouthed. But how was this fair? How could he have been ripped from her? She’d buried him … or at least his memory. No body had been recovered from the swollen river. There was a stone at the cemetery, and an empty plot next to it where she’d made arrangements to be buried when it was her time. She’d gone on with her life, growing old and acquiring the aches and little pains and maladies the years heaped on. And here he was in front of her, young and whole, looking like he did the day he left to look at that boat. Younger than that day. “Where have you been?”
He told her again about the office he worked in, and this time he mentioned the movie theater and Shelly, and his run-in with her brother Mike. “That’s where I’ve been. I just didn’t remember before … remember I was John. I wouldn’t have stayed away.”
For several moments neither said anything. She heard the putter of a boat coming in and hoped whoever was in it had caught a nice mess of pan fish or a big bass; the thought distracted her.
“I don’t understand it, any of it,” he said. “At least not yet. If I’m making you too—”
“Of course you’re making me uncomfortable. But, no, I don’t want you to leave.”
There was more silence. This time she broke it.
“John … Carl … I’ve never had one of those déjà-vu experiences. No out-of-body episodes, past life recollections. Certainly nothing like you’ve, like you’re … but, God, you look exactly like my John. Dreams. I have dreams, though. I am different in my dreams.”
“We both realize that somehow I was your—”
She waved her hand to cut him off and opened her mouth to say something, then thought better of it. She busied herself moving more things around on her countertop again for a few minutes, and then went to the refrigerator and took out a beer and a Fresca.
“It’s all I have up here. It’s what we sell the most of.” She tapped a finger to the Hams label and handed it to him. “Vacationers still love the stuff from the Land of Sky Blue Waters.�
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She sat the soda in front of her and did not sit down. She steepled her fingers to the sides of the can and let out a long sigh before she popped the top open and let it breathe.
“Ellen, it’s like … I’ve been thinking of it as dreamtime, one life fading and another growing in its place. Except, until recently, I couldn’t remember any of them, my other lives. I was just Carl Johnson. But in the past few days I have been remembering, pieces anyway. And one of those pieces brought me here.”
“And Lord knows where else they’ll take you.” Ellen picked up the soda and took a sip. “I said I’ve not had any of that déjà-vu stuff. And I haven’t. I believe in God and heaven … or want to believe. But I think there are things that can’t be explained. Call it unnatural or supernatural.” She watched him drain half the beer in one long pull, just like he used to. “I believe in precognition.”
He raised both eyebrows this time. “Precognition?”
“Big word, huh? Somehow I can tell when someone is in danger, at least someone I’m close to, a friend or relative.” She took another sip, her mouth feeling so dry. “I knew you were in danger, John … Carl. Oh, hell, what do I call you? That day when you went to look at that boat of Oscar’s, I had this feeling.” She touched her stomach. “Right here. I knew something bad was going to happen. All that rain. You had to have that damnable boat. In all the years since I was angry at myself for not stopping you, for not putting up a fight and saying you didn’t need the damn thing. So many boats here at the resort. Why did you need one more?”
“It was a beauty,” Carl whispered.
***
Chapter 27
Jerrah
She’d taken forty-six dollars out of Carl’s wallet while he was napping before dinner. She knew he’d miss it, but it wasn’t his last dollar; she certainly wasn’t leaving him with no chicken. But it would be enough to buy her bus fare to someplace, maybe back home, a few meals … though after Ellen’s spread, she didn’t think she could eat another bite for days.
Jerrah had left the tiny out-of-date kitchen as soon as she’d finished dinner, and she ignored the friendly waves of a fisherman coming in. Part of her had wanted to stick around to watch the Carl-and-Ellen freak-show. But the courteous corner of her brain actually wanted to give Carl and Ellen time alone.