“You are trying to tell me you didn’t see it?”
“Yes,” she replied. “I did not see it.”
“You were staring right at it.”
“I was?” She didn’t seem to be kidding with that response.
“What happened to you, were you in some sort of a trance?” I asked, not expecting an honest answer.
I didn’t get an answer but she said, “You will see familiars again. Their message has been delivered and you know what you are allowed to know.” She said as she got up from her chair and moved it a little. I noticed that she seemed heavier than she had appeared during her trance.
“What you looking at? Do I not look as slim as ten minutes ago?” she asked with a knowing laugh.
“I’m confused, Teresa. What just happened?” I realized that this was a question I was asking much more frequently of late.
“You been allowed to see what lies beyond. Why you? Who knows? But it is you who has been chosen for a… mission.” She paused searching for a word, then went on, “Someone wants you to find something that he or they believe only you are in position to learn.”
“Does this all come from my near death experience? Is it something that happens to everyone who has a near death?” I needed to know.
“I cannot answer that. All I can do is help open window to what may lay on other side. I wish I could do more but all I can do, is done.” She said with some resignation.
“You said that I will see the familiars again. Who are they, the familiars you mentioned?” I was pressing her for an answer.
“They are those who came to you from your past. Those you knew, and those you didn’t know but they come from your past.”
“Brother Scheible; is he a familiar?” I asked pointedly.
“All I can tell is that they are those who are familiar to you or who you are familiar. They are dead as we understand it. That’s all I can tell,” she said as she walked with me to her door and bid me goodbye with a firm handshake and a knowing smile in her eyes.
* * *
The moon was full and hung low in the sky as I exited her house and made my way home… I forgot to pay her. Shit!
CHAPTER NINE
The next day I called Doctor Keough’s office. I had dialed his number all day and there was no signal that would indicate the phone was ringing through, at his end. I thought that maybe it was out of order and though I didn’t entirely trust him, I did want to speak with him about where we’d left our conversation last time — and where we would go from here.
I was able to bring myself to the point of the discussion I’d had with Doctor Keough with my wife. Kate and I discussed it over dinner and her reaction to what he had said was a great deal less hostile than mine. It was troubling to me that she seemed so flexible with his assessment of my condition.
“So you really think I need to go through these series of tests, whatever that means?” I said after there was a period of awkward silence between us following my expression of distaste, regarding Doctor Keough’s advice to me. I believed that he was acting in my best interest but I couldn’t get my arms around the fact that he had no idea of what was really wrong with me. Although he was a psychiatrist he was not figuring me out on a level that could help me and it pissed me off that he had also had a near death experience and would not or maybe could not empathize with me on this subject
“Can I go with you to your next session with him?” asked my wife.
“Sure, but don’t expect to hear any solutions from him. He seems to constantly open doors to things that don’t offer solutions. I guess that maybe that’s all he can do but I sometimes feel he can do more and knows more, but…”
The next day I received a call from the Martin Diagnostic Clinic coordinator telling me that there was a request for a series of tests for me prescribed by my cardiologist (who probably had been consulted with by Doctor Keough). I agreed to a time but the coordinator said it would take a full day to get all the tests run so I should plan devoting that amount of time.
It was three days later when I walked through the doors of the Martin Clinic and was directed to the reception desk where I was given a series of forms to fill out. It took me almost an hour to get this done and I was bit annoyed with the process. Then I was ushered into the area where I’d be tested. It was a dreary-looking lab where quiet people worked silently. A nurse approached me with a needle and several vials for my blood. Then I was given a tasty drink which I finished quickly because it was so good, “I like this. What is it”? I asked the nurse who chuckled and said it was a fruit mixture, featuring rain forest fruit.
“Oh great, now they even have rain forest fruit to go with melted ice soup, featured at the arctic ice melt stand.” Was I being cynical as I commented?
I was placed in a dimly lit small room and had monitors placed all over my chest, legs and arms. Music was piped in as I sat in a comfortable chair and eventually fell asleep. When I awakened two hours later I was escorted to a treadmill where I was wired up again and an oxygen measuring mask was placed over my face. I stayed on the machine until I reached a point of discomfort. There were more tests on my heart; was it causing these weird events? Maybe my oxygen supply was being limited and affecting my senses. At this point almost anything would seem reasonable as an explanation of my state of mind.
* * *
A day later I tried calling Doctor Keough again in order to set up a session. I was curious as to what the tests showed and what Kate would think about his prognosis. There was no answer, but I left a message hoping he would call me back. He was probably a little miffed at me and trying to get a point across.
After a week of hearing nothing from Doctor Keough, I decided it time to just drop by his office and see why he was acting so juvenile. With my wife at my side I wove through traffic and parked my car across the street from the building where the good doctor had his office.
“You ready?” Kate asked with a smile and a wink.
“You bet. Let’s go.”
We crossed the street at the corner and walked into the lobby of the building and got on the elevator to the third floor. When the door opened we were facing the doctor’s door… except that we weren’t. It wasn’t where I expected it to be. Thinking we were on the wrong floor we backed into the elevator before the doors closed. It continued to rise. I quickly pushed the third floor button but the next stop was the fourth floor and clearly not the floor of Doctor Keough’s office.
I was very confused and my wife picked up on that.
The elevator then started down and stopped on the third floor again and we got off this time. I took her hand and as we walked to the door, I let out an astonished gasp. Looking through the glass on the door it was very obvious that this office was abandoned… and what was left behind was tornadically messy. Paper strewn about, broken chairs in the center of the reception room in a pile.
“Small wonder that he’s not answering his phone. He’s gone… flat out gone,” I said turning to my wife who was standing there just shaking her head.
“It’s only been a week since you’ve seen him. Right? This makes no sense, Honey. Was there any indication that he was looking at other space? How long was he here?” she asked.
“I have no idea. He seemed like this was almost his home.” My thoughts wandered as I tried to recapture the last thing we said to one another. We didn’t part on the greatest of terms due to my unravel but it wasn’t anything that would have caused him to move and not let me know that he was moving and where he was moving to.
“Let’s go find building management and see if he has a forwarding address.” My wife grabbed my hand as we started to walk and continued, “I think this Doctor Keough of yours has behaved in a very strange way with you.”
“You think?” I said as we got on the elevator again.
When the elevator stopped on the first floor we got off and started looking for the manager’s office. We found it across from the bank area and walked in.
; There was a middle-aged man with nicely trimmed moustache in a gray suit who looked up from his desk with a greeting smile. “Good day. How can I help you?”
“Hello, we have a question about where Doctor Keough has moved. Do you know his forwarding address?” I asked.
“Doctor Keough? I’m afraid I don’t know who that is.” He looked as if he were searching his mind to place the name.
“He was in suite 301 across from the elevator.”
“And when was that?” he asked.
“Last time I saw him was last week.”
“In this building?” he asked.
“Absolutely.”
He started to move his hands around as if creating a sand painting as he struggled with what he said. “That office has been empty for eight months and unless he had a desk in there without us knowing, there has never been a doctor who practiced in this building. It is occupied by that bank.” He gestured toward the bank and continued, “And the rest of the building is filled with communications companies. I’m very sorry sir, but could you be a little confused about him maybe being in another building that looks somewhat similar to this building?”
I was stunned and my wife was looking at me like she was very worried.
We thanked him for his time and left.
“Honey, what is going on here? Were you really seeing this doctor or just telling me you were to appease me?” Kate said as we got into the car.
“Yeah, I think I need to check into an asylum. What can I say to you? Please, please don’t go thinking that I have been lying about this, There really is a Doctor Keough,” I said defensively. “This all has something to do with my near death.”
“But how can you say that you have been coming here to this place for your sessions when there is no evidence of him in this building?”
“So maybe he’s a hallucination,” I said sarcastically. But my head was spinning trying to come up with an explanation that I myself could believe, before asking my wife to do the same.
I called Doctor Lester my cardiologist from my mobile and was surprised to get him on the phone. Leaving it on speaker I asked him if he had gotten the results of my tests. He said he hadn’t received all of them but what he had gotten looked very good. Holding my breath I then asked, “Have you had any calls from a psychiatrist named Doctor Keough?”
He laughed when he responded. “Doctor Keough? Come on, not another one. So you’re in on the joke, too.”
“Joke?”
“ Well, maybe I should say legend,” he responded.
“What do you mean?”
“Surely you were in this hospital long enough to have heard the campfire stories about the ghost of Doctor Keough.” His tone was slightly mocking and I was curious as to just why he was letting his hair down on this. After all, he didn’t really know me well enough to relate to me what he went on to say. He continued. “Why, last Halloween I scared the living shit out of a nurse’s aide by walking out of the shadows dressed as the macabre Doctor Keough, on a lonely floor in the hospital.”
“How were you dressed then?” I asked.
“I had a wild-haired blond wig on with round glasses and I used a pillow to fill out my mid section. I had to operate on information about his looks from the stories I heard about this supposed ghost who haunts the mental ward on the top floor. That was right near where I scared the aide. I had to bribe her to keep her from filing a formal complaint against me. She wet herself she got so frightened.”
“Nice going.”
“What?”
“Nothing; so he haunts the hospital,” I said.
“I’ve never seen him, but I don’t go near that ward either.”
“Afraid they might keep you?” I asked, trying to make light.
“Don’t want to take the chance.”
Then a crazy thought popped into my head; could he have impersonated Doctor Keough?
“Thanks, Doc. Thanks for staying on the phone with me, to take time to tell me about Doctor Keough.”
“You got it… or maybe someday you’ll get it,” he said as he hung up.
“What’s that supposed—” My question was cut short by him. I didn’t like his last comment.
“What’s the matter, Hon?” My wife was looking at me intently.
“Nothing,” I said, “but I’m wondering why he would be so chummy with me telling me about scaring the nurse’s aide and all.”
“Then that strange comment he made about you getting it,” she said, “doesn’t make sense.”
“You picked up on that, too. I thought I was just being paranoid,” I said as I touched her hand, thinking about how our minds worked so well together.
“Sometimes paranoia can keep you alive,” she responded, “so don’t sell it short, at least, not on this one.”
I thought about her comment and realized that it was coming from someone who had never demonstrated even a sliver of paranoia. She had even teased me once or twice about being paranoid, in a joking way, since irrational fear was something neither of us had ever possessed.
CHAPTER TEN
“So, at least we know at Doctor Lester did order those tests after all,” said my lovely wife.
“True, but Lester just said that Doctor Keough is a ghost story passed around the hospital staff, who believe it. How about other patients who were being treated by him? You know, come to think of it, I don’t remember ever seeing any other patients there. Do you realize that your husband was being analyzed by a ghost, Honey? Doctor Lester just described him as what he actually looked like: wild light hair, round glasses, short and stocky. That’s a pretty accurate description of who I saw. It is!” I was beside myself and my wife damn well knew it.
She sighed as she said emphatically, “Let’s just go home. I know you aren’t crazy, I know you, Baby, but something is going on here, and has been going on, and we have got to get it under control before it takes the both of us down.”
Almost as suddenly as they started things then began to settle down over the next few days. I saw no phantoms, ghosts of dogs past, nor did I have another near death experience. I actually was sleeping through the night and getting up fully rested. Maybe what had happened were all products of mind, brought on by the trauma of dying and being brought back to life — not once, but twice. Maybe the tests ordered by Doctor Lester would indicate that I was lacking oxygen and that was what was causing all this. Maybe so, but the words of the mystic, at times, ran through my mind ‘you will see the familiars again.’ And that would not explain why things suddenly went quiet.
And so as days turned into months our lives slowly went back to normal. My heart was behaving and my wife was busy with her specialty catering business. My latest article on weird weather had been warmly received, which opened some doors for me that I didn’t expect. One was an opportunity to join a research team that was doing a scientific study on dream patterns and their relativity to the cycles of the moon and the magnetic fields of the Earth. Based on the fact that the moon has such a strong effect on the oceans and the human body is composed of mostly liquid, and considering the magnetic pulls of the energy systems on Earth, this all seemed like a viable project. They needed a writer on the team who could put the project into a language that could be of use to academics, as well as lay persons. I came highly recommended by my friend Justin Timmins, the weatherman/physicist and the rest was easy.
Our team operated out of a lab about twenty miles from my town and was accessible by a back road system so picturesque it almost made my eyes tear every time I was on it at sunset. Life was making sense again and I was feeling confident about my health, mental and physical, and where my wife and I were at, and possibly going. We discussed an ocean cruise after my project was finished. She had recently hired a manager for her business and was experiencing more freedom from the day to day demands of the business.
“So you’re a boss now; please start acting like it,” I chided her, with a smile, as she made a face at me in response. “You’re s
o pretty and should be taking advantage of that by hanging out at the mall, trying on clothes and such. Isn’t that what successful beautiful women do with their time?” I was pushing her a bit with my humor.
“You are so biased or maybe you’re looking for something. Which is it, big boy?” She said with her hands on her hips in a knowing pose, smiling.
“I am looking for something… I want you to take me to dinner tonight. Are you good with that, Mama?” Kate liked being called mama even though our kids were grown and living in Chicago, Madrid and on a ship somewhere between Washington State and Alaska. Our boys were as opposite as two kids could be and our daughter was a perfect balance of yin yang. One became a high school teacher, the other a test driver for high-performance cars and Lucy who became a master chef at sea. Now in their mid and late twenties they were quite independent and not prone to lean on Mama or Dad anymore. They were still single although the teacher, John, was very involved with another teacher at his school. Dennis, the test driver, was a free spirit and not involved in anything but the cars he drove, but he did have a period in his life when he got very involved with drugs and alcohol. He checked himself into rehab in Tucson, Arizona; although it helped him, I suspected that he still played with drugs and that was why we so seldom heard from him. It troubled me to the point of stroke that he used drugs excessively but it troubled me even more knowing how it all affected Kate. She spent many sleepless nights over this. I heard her sobbing loud enough to awaken me from deep sleep.
We received phone calls from John with regularity but he wasn’t prone to visiting. My wife sometimes would tease him about leaving his poor old mom out in the pasture. She was hardly old or in any pasture but she still liked kidding him.
Dennis on the other hand seldom called or visited us and that was very hurtful. He was who he was, but it would have been nice if who he was tried being a little more considerate of those who loved him. Lucy had many of her mother’s qualities but seemed to keep the world and us at arms-length, as demonstrated in her professional lifestyle. Kate kept a lot of her disappointment and sadness within and masked it through her upbeat personality and natural optimistic approach to life. She also had the strength of her personal belief in a loving and forgiving God who she believed was prone to keeping the playing field level. Deep down she knew her children loved her. Deep down I wondered when Dennis would get his head out of his ass and treat his mom and dad like the parents who had raised him and his brother and sister in a loving and nurturing environment. What could I say other than we loved our children no matter what?
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