Again, almost before Helen’s voice had a chance to fade, Felicity’s finger was on the move.
“That was a short staircase,” I whispered.
“Sshhhh,” Helen shushed me softly, then whispered in return, “There are only as many stairs as the individual requires. No less and no more.”
I still thought it was a short staircase even if it was only a visualization. Either that or Felicity had mentally taken them two at a time and at a dead run. But, I kept my mouth shut; Helen was the expert on this, not me.
She paused for a moment after Felicity’s finger had fully lowered. I’m not sure whose benefit the brief respite was for, but I desperately needed it myself. As relaxed as my wife appeared to be, in contrast, I was just as tense, if not doubly so. I took the opportunity to draw in a deep breath or two while seeing to it that my own ground was intact and solid.
Finally, Helen began to speak again. “I still do not want you to speak, Felicity, but I want you to open your eyes.”
Slowly, her eyelids fluttered upward, but the hypnotically imposed distance was evident in her glassy stare.
“You now see a movie screen in front of you,” Helen told her. “Playing on the screen there is a documentary. I want you to watch it closely. I want you to notice every detail… Every nuance… No matter how unimportant it may seem. While you will remember that this documentary is something that was once seen through your own eyes, you are now separate from it. At this moment, you are simply an observer.
“The subject of this documentary is an experience you had earlier this evening when you were teaching a class to your Coven mates. Something happened that only you were able to see but you have now repressed. You will see it once again as you watch this documentary before you. Remember that you are only an observer. Watch… Listen… Remember… Do not speak… When it is over, you will raise your index finger again to let me know.”
I watched Felicity’s expressionless face as she stared, unblinking into the dim room, looking not at, past, nor even through Helen. For all intents and purposes, we did not exist for her at this moment in time. The mental picture playing out before her was all that occupied her world.
After a long moment, there was a thin, nasal whimper. At first I glanced around, looking to see if one of the dogs had migrated from the bedroom and wanted to be let out. But, when it sounded again, slightly stronger this time, I easily pinpointed it as coming from my wife.
I focused my attention solely on Felicity as I watched her respirations steadily increase. They were coming as a series of rapid, shallow breaths that soon became the palpitating rhythm of loosely harnessed panic. I shot a concerned glance at Helen, and she gently shook her head.
“It is all right, Rowan,” she whispered. “This is to be expected. She is fine.”
Without a word, I returned my gaze to my wife and watched her shallowly puffing out the breaths as she continued to whimper. Still, she stared straight ahead, attention fixed upon a horror only she could see.
Her eyes were glistening with dampness, and a single tear broke loose from where it had welled and began trickling down her right cheek. It was rapidly followed by another, and then a second stream began flowing from the left. Her body tensed, and the whimpering grew into what sounded like a stifled scream that was repeated not once, but twice.
I was just about to turn to Helen again when Felicity let out a sudden heavy sigh that bespoke relief. I watched on as her body relaxed and her breathing slowly returned to the earlier slow, even rhythm that had accompanied the onset of the trance.
In a single, easy motion my wife stretched her finger upward into the air.
CHAPTER 18:
“Thank you, Felicity,” Helen said. “Lower your finger now and relax.”
Felicity’s face remained slack, but her finger levered back downward without so much as a tremble. Her tension had more than just visibly ebbed; all evidence of it had disappeared but for the tear trails that still dampened her cheeks. For me, however, the expectant silence that fell into step behind her muffled display of anguish was causing my hairs to bristle.
“You should relax too, Rowan,” Helen told me.
“Easier said than done,” I replied. “Something doesn’t feel right about this.”
“What’s up, white man,” Ben asked, still sitting at the dining room table. “You goin’ all la-la?”
“No.” I shook my head. “Something just feels strange.” I paused for a moment and then let out a forced sigh. “I don’t know… It might just be me. It seems like nothing ever feels right anymore.”
“Well,” Helen spoke up, “from a clinical point of view, the session is going very well. In fact, what you just saw should have been the worst of it.”
“Should have been?” I asked. “The word should doesn’t exactly evoke an air of extreme confidence for me, Helen.”
“Yes, I understand that,” she replied. “Let me explain. What she has experienced will certainly still have emotional consequences tied to it, but at this point it is merely information. She is no longer watching the repressed memory play out; therefore, the connection with it is somewhat dulled. It will not be as intense as re-experiencing it.”
“Okay,” I replied, trepidation still evident in my voice. “So what now? Do you wake her up?”
“No, not yet,” she shook her head as she answered. “Hypnosis is no more perfect than the supernormal incidents that you are prone to, Rowan. While I have given her a post-hypnotic instruction to remember what she has now re-witnessed, some detail may still be lost upon awakening. What we do now is attempt to retrieve the information by having her recount it to us while still in a trance state.”
She leaned to the side and reached for her purse, which she had stowed beneath the edge of the coffee table. After rummaging around for a moment, she withdrew her hand, and in it was a micro cassette recorder. She quickly popped it open, checked the tape, then closed the cover and tested the buttons.
“For an actual forensic hypnosis session, I would have been better prepared,” she informed us. “We actually should have been videotaping the entire process, from the initial interview through termination of the session. However, for our purposes, I believe a brief audio recording will suffice.”
“This ain’t goin’ into court if that’s what you’re talkin’ about,” Ben offered from across the room.
“Precisely,” Helen returned, then momentarily shifted her focus back to me. “Truly, Rowan, you can relax now.”
“I’ll relax when this is over,” I told her.
She gave only a knowing nod as a reply. She was no stranger to the inner workings of my brand of emotionally imbued logic, so she knew she wasn’t going to be able to talk me down.
She activated the recorder and laid it on the end table with the microphone directed toward Felicity.
“Now, Felicity,” she began. “I want you to speak now, and tell us what you have just seen. Start at the beginning and take your time.”
“Candee is arguing with RJ again. She just isn’t working out.” Even though her face remained blank, Felicity began speaking as if she had been carrying on a conversation with us all along. I immediately noticed a thread of reluctance running through her voice. “There’s simply too much friction between her and the others. She doesn’t even seem to care how a Coven works. I don’t want to talk to her about this, but I’m just going to have to. I need to tell her she should seek another group. Row, I wish you were here to do it. You’re so much better at letting people down easy than I am.”
I opened my mouth to respond, but before I could get a word out, I felt Helen’s hand on my arm. I looked over my shoulder, and she was shaking her head.
I nodded and remained silent.
“Felicity,” Helen began. “I want you to move forward in time. You were teaching your class, and by all accounts, you had some type of seizure.”
“Yes,” Felicity replied, calmly switching the subject. “The class was about Dark Moon mag
ick, and I was going over one of my favorite Dorothy Morrison spells with the group. I had just recited the last line where you call to the Crone of Darkness and ask her to allow you to feel the unseen an…”
Her words ended without warning. No stutter, no sound, no nothing. They simply halted mid-breath, leaving an expectant silence in their wake.
“Go on, Felicity,” Helen prompted. “It is okay. Just tell us what you remember.”
My wife’s head tilted forward, slowly at first and then simply fell as if she’d lost consciousness. As her chin touched her chest, her head lolled to the side, and she creased her brow in a display of pain. She rolled her head back upward and allowed it to tilt back, bringing her face up toward the ceiling, then let out a heavy breath.
“Jesus I hurt.” The words came out of Felicity’s mouth, but the voice was completely unfamiliar.
I turned a hard stare back to Helen and she held up her hand, motioning for me to wait.
“Felicity?” she asked.
I turned back to my wife and watched as she blinked her eyes several times.
The voice came again, louder and defiant. “What, you can’t turn on the goddamned lights around here?”
She grimaced visibly and then ran the tip of her tongue across her teeth.
“Fuck,” she said. “My tooth’s broke.”
I felt a sudden closeness and looked up to find that Ben and Constance had moved into the room with us and were watching intently.
“Larson got hit in the mouth,” Ben whispered, then canted his head toward Felicity. “Is she doin’ what I think she is?”
“If you mean is she channeling Brittany Larson,” I returned, “yeah, I think she is.”
I shot another glance toward Helen and then turned back to Felicity. I knew something hadn’t felt right about all of this, and now that feeling was starting to get worse. Much worse.
My wife’s hands were resting on the arms of the chair, and she began to physically jerk and tug as if trying to lift them, but they barely moved. She rotated her wrists as she struggled- stretching her fingers outward and then doubling them back into fists. She pushed herself slightly forward and twisted her shoulders while wriggling in her seat, groaning as she pulled against the unseen bonds. No matter how hard she tried, her forearms remained planted on the rests as if they were actually tied there. She finally let herself fall back into the seat and let out a frustrated shriek.
“Fucking asshole!” the voice burst from her lips as a defiant shout. “Do you have any idea who I am?!”
“Jeezus,” Ben muttered. “She’s got a pair.”
Felicity suddenly jerked her head to the side, pulling it away from something unseen as she sent her eyes searching.
“Don’t you touch me,” the voice growled. “My father is goddamned Mayor you idiot. Every fucking cop in the state is probably looking for me right now.”
Her head jerked backward, and her jaw clenched as her neck began to stretch. A nasal whine came from her nose amid the sound of her choking.
“Bring her back,” I demanded, whipping around to face Helen. “Now.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “I think so. Felicity, return.”
My wife’s head instantly fell forward then began to slowly tilt back upward. Her chest rose with a deep breath and then settled into her earlier relaxed rhythm. Once again her face was slack.
“No,” she said after a moment, her own voice issuing from her lips.
“One… Two…” Helen began counting.
“No,” Felicity spoke again, sharpness in her tone. “Not yet. I can’t remember it all.”
“…Five… Six…”
“NO,” my wife insisted, still staring off into space. “We have to know where she is.”
“…Nine…” Helen continued.
“NO!” Felicity barked. “I have to go back. I have to…”
She finished the sentence with an agonized cry, which caught in her throat only to be cut off mid scream. Her face suddenly contorted into a pained grimace as her body stiffened, and her hands began posturing inward.
The room filled with the sound of arcing electricity as it started to buzz and snap, and at the exact instant of the first pop, I felt the ethereal defenses I had erected begin falling away. Upon the second, they collapsed inward upon themselves as if caught in a gale force wind.
“RETURN,” Helen announced once again, this time with far more urgency.
Blind agony hammered me between the eyes, and I blinked back tears as it screwed inward toward the center of my brain. I felt my own motor control begin to slip as I flopped sideways, almost falling from the armless chair in which I was seated. Something grappled my shoulder in a tight hold, and I looked up to see Ben steadying me.
“Twilight Zone?” His words rushed past me in a distorted stream and then began repeating in a hollow echo.
A heavy bass thrum droned inside my head as I reached up with trembling hands in an attempt to contain my exploding skull. I shut my eyes tight and tried to will it away. The one clear thought that kept running through my mind was just let me die.
“ROWAN!” Ben’s voice struck my ears again, forcing their way through the heavy metal crescendo that was building in my brain.
“FELICITY! RETURN!” I heard Helen’s voice again, and it was edging toward frantic. “RETURN!”
Helen Storm was the calmest, most even-tempered person I had ever met. She didn’t get frantic.
Now I was frightened.
“Oh my god!” Agent Mandalay’s voice joined the jumble of noises. “Felicity!”
I pitched forward and forced myself to open my eyes. My wife was in the full throes of a seizure; her face was a horrid mask of pain as she shook uncontrollably, gnashing her teeth into her tongue. Pinkish froth was running from the corner of her mouth, and she bucked hard against unearthly restraints. However, that was but one of the torturous images to greet me.
Small, circular wounds had appeared randomly along her bare forearms. They were red and blistered. Oozing and charred. I’d seen pictures of wounds just like them in a brochure from a local women’s shelter. The information was about spousal abuse, and the photos were of cigarette burns.
A linear splash of blood suddenly appeared on Felicity’s t-shirt just across her left breast, spreading outward as it soaked into the cloth. I watched in horror as yet another burn mark sizzled into view on the back of her hand, appearing right before my eyes.
“JEEZUS FUCKIN’ CHRIST!” Ben was yelling. “Helen! Do something!”
“She isn’t responding!” Helen returned. “She is pushing herself into it on purpose!”
I was struggling to maintain my own connection with this world, and the visual horror of the torture my wife was now going through only steeled my resolve. I forced a tenuous ground to form once again between the earth and me in an attempt to rebuild my shattered defenses. But, even as I connected, I could feel it making and breaking in a vicious cycle.
Fear was boring upward from the pit of my stomach as I fought simply to keep from slipping any further across the veil myself. I didn’t want to think about how far this could go, but my brain rifled through the scenarios anyway. I was intimately familiar with the dangers that came along with channeling those on the other side. At this very moment, each and every one of them was present and accounted for. And, leading the pack, as always, was Cerridwen. The Dark Mother, Goddess of death and rebirth. A deity to whom I had called out on many a Samhain night when celebrating the lives of loved ones long past.
But, in recent years, I had come to despise her and that for which she stood. I knew that I should not, but emotions run deeper than logic, and I could not change the way I felt.
As much as I had denied it earlier, I knew full well that my heart had stopped. Death was something I cheated every time this happened, and I would continue to duck her gelid embrace for as long as I could. But right now, as in times before, the cold bitch was waiting at the other end of this path with open arms, and Fel
icity was running full speed toward her.
What the darkness offered so freely was meant for me, not my wife, and I simply couldn’t allow her to get there first.
CHAPTER 19:
I had a problem, and it wasn’t a small one.
The problem being that there was absolutely nothing to stop both of us from dying if this was allowed to progress. Throwing myself into the arms of the Dark Mother, noble as it may seem, did not guarantee Felicity’s safety on this plane or any other. Given the situation, she could easily follow me right into death without so much as a pause. There was far more at work here, and while I didn’t know exactly what it was, I was determined to win out over it.
This wasn’t the time for sacrifice, and I knew that.
What I didn’t know was how I was going to make it all stop. Felicity was hell bent on finding an answer, and because of that, she was now caught up in a vortex of her own creation. She had plunged directly into this on purpose, and now I was not only fighting an overwhelming ethereal force, I was pitted against her willful determination as well. The fact is, her doggedness was probably feeding whatever it was she had connected with.
Out of pure reflex, I reached for her hand and clasped my fingers around her gnarled fist. I felt the thread of pure agony arc along my nerve endings as it raced up my arm and exploded through my body. My teeth began to involuntarily gnash as my jaw grew tight, and the sensation of holding onto a bare extension cord ripped into me just as it had the day before.
Amidst it all, however, was a new and different feeling. At first I thought it was my imagination. Nothing more than my senses thrown off kilter by the intensity of what was now happening. But, when the feeling struck for a second and then again for a third time, I knew it was more than a phantom sensation. It was real.
It came first as a tug. Next, it was a sharp jerk pulling against my arm and flowing through to the base of my skull as if some internal wire connected them to one another. Then it became a fierce pull, undulating in time with my on-again off-again connection to the earth.
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