The Astral

by V. J. Banis

  Gabronski listened attentively, only nodding his head occasionally to encourage her. When she had finished, he graciously refilled her cup and contemplated the fire for a brief moment.

  “And you’ve come to me,” he said, his eyes going from face to face and settling on Chang’s, “to see if I can give you any insight into this, what did you say his name was, Paterson?”

  “Well, yes, that too,” Chang said. “But, mostly, we wanted to see what you made of Mrs. Desmond’s magic act.”

  “Oh, not magic, certainly,” Catherine objected quickly. “Though I’m not quite sure what to call it either. Doctor, you don’t think I’m crazy, do you?”

  His eyes twinkled with amusement. “Crazy? No, absolutely not. But it is a singular story, isn’t it? I don’t think I’ve heard one like it before. Tell me, if you will, what do you think has happened? Is happening? You must have given it some thought.”

  Catherine nodded and thought for a minute. “First of all, I think that I did die when I was shot, or very nearly died, at least. And I think I was sent back by someone—something—to try to stop these men. What I don’t understand is, why me? I’m no kind of hero and I haven’t any weapons to use against them. Even the astral projection, it doesn’t accomplish much, does it? I mean, yes, I was able to interfere on one occasion, but there must surely have been others I didn’t even witness. And when I am there, I have no physical presence. What I mean is, why was I picked for this? Why not a man, someone physically strong? Or a police person? Why not Agent Chang here?”

  “Agent Chang would have had herself committed before this point,” Chang said, and added quickly, “Sorry, Doctor, I don’t mean to be flippant.”

  “The point is, why did she choose me?” Catherine persisted.

  “By ‘she’,” Gabronski said. “I take it you mean this individual who appeared to you, first at the hospital, and later, you think, in a flower shop.”

  “It was a woman, both times. At least, she appeared as a woman. But I have sort of thought...well, do you think...might she be an angel?” She couldn’t help feeling a little silly asking such a question, and she was aware that Chang stiffened slightly when she heard that word, but the Doctor took it in stride.

  “An angel?” He spread his hands. “I couldn’t say. That’s a fairly modern concept, in any case, that of the sweet-voiced angel, the smiling cherub. The Old Testament angels were warriors, mostly, quite fierce and not at all sweet. When Abraham’s angel revealed itself, Abraham swooned in terror. And the cherubim were set outside Eden like a swarm of wasps to guard against Adam and Eve’s returning. As for Lucifer, well, we need only recall that he was an angel himself before he fell from grace. Nothing cute about any of them. I shouldn’t think your visitor was anything like those. But, spirit, yes, someone from beyond this existence, I think that’s evident. Someone, it would have to be, very concerned, someone who loved you very much on this plane, and carried that love, that concern, through to the other side.”

  Catherine took a sip of tea that had grown cold and thought about what he had said. “A woman who...,” she started to say, but he interrupted her.

  “Not necessarily, that’s the point I was getting to. You are here before me at this moment, a woman, a young woman. If I may be permitted, a beautiful woman. But your soul is neither woman nor man, young nor old, beautiful nor ugly. Those are perceptions of our senses. We live in a physical world and it is our senses that make that world what we call ‘real’ to us, but this visitor is not a sensory reality, she is only an illusion projected to you by, as I say, someone who carried great love for you into the beyond, or someone with a powerful need to see these crimes redressed.” He thought a moment. “Is your mother alive?”

  “Very much so,” she said with a smile.

  “Father, then?”

  “No, he passed away about ten years ago.” She had a sudden, bitingly vivid memory of her father, sitting with her in a little boat on a summer afternoon, fishing without any great purpose, and telling her stories of his wartime adventures—mostly fictitious, as it turned out, but entertaining nonetheless. Yes, there had been a great love there, back and forth. She could see that he might well come from beyond to guide and protect.

  She frowned. “But, if my father wished to come to me, to give me messages, help, why not simply project the image of himself?”

  The Professor shrugged. “Perhaps to make it easier for you to accept initially what he had to say. If your dead father had appeared to you, you would have been sure immediately you were hallucinating, you would have rejected out of hand whatever he had to say, attributed it to your injury, or the drugs you were being administered. That he was real, that his message was real, was probably the last thing you would have credited.

  “But a woman...we tend to trust women more, I think, than we do men, logically or not. And a doctor...well, we put confidence in what a doctor tells us, don’t we? If I were making a visit from the other side, and wanted you to take me seriously, I think I might very well have chosen the same appearance. Mind you, I can’t know. I can only offer what seems to me an explanation.”

  “All very interesting,” Chang said, “But I can’t see that this helps us any, other than your endorsement of Mrs. Desmond’s experience. The question is, what do we do now? How do we make use of this...well, what would you call it, this gift she’s been given. I’m not saying I buy it altogether, but if you’re both right, then it had to have been given to her for a purpose, to use. But how?”

  Gabronski studied Catherine carefully. “I think I should like to see you do a projection.”

  Catherine’s throat went dry. “If you feel it will help,” she said. “But, I can’t always do it at will. It sort of comes and goes.”

  “I was thinking....” He hesitated. “I wonder if under hypnosis...if you would not object?”

  “I’m not sure that’s wise,” Jack said quickly. He did not voice what was really troubling him: if Catherine’s phantom stalker were really only a figment of her imagination, what might it wreak upon her in a hypnotic trance, the conscious mind and its protective capabilities lulled to sleep?

  “You’re concerned for her well-being, of course, as I am also. The advantage of hypnosis is, if there is any kind of threat to Mrs. Desmond, I can simply and immediately bring her back. Safer, I think, than what you have been doing. And there are some suggestions I can plant, for making this easier to do in the future, for instance. And most especially, for protecting herself.”

  “In that case, yes,” Catherine said with determination, swallowing her anxiety.

  “Catherine,” Jack started to say, his personal fears not at all lessened, but she shook her head firmly.

  “Let’s do it,” she said.

  Jack bit his tongue. More and more he felt as if he were on the sidelines in a game he little understood, with rules unknown to him.

  His heart ached for Catherine; he wanted to take her away from this whole business, so far away that it could never reach her again, help her to mend, to forget the past. Only—and this thought came unbidden to mock his fears—he knew perfectly well that she would not go. And that, he thought, was where the real problem lay. There was something not altogether innocent in Catherine’s alleged connection to Paterson; a passion beyond what was altogether rational, something that instinct told him was dangerous.

  Gabronski took a few minutes to set the stage. He closed heavy draperies over the windows and dimmed the already dim lights further, and brought a footstool for Catherine’s feet. “No need to lie down, the chair will be fine. So long as you’re comfortable?” He lifted an eyebrow.

  “Quite.”

  “What about us?” Chang asked. “Do we hold hands and concentrate, like at a séance? Or what?”

  He smiled tolerantly. “Just move your chairs back a bit, there, that’s fine,” he said. “And try to remain quiet, please.”

  At the Doctor’s instructions, Catherine closed her eyes and began to breathe deeply. His v
oice was low and coaxing. She found herself going under easily, naturally, her tension fading.

  “You will cloak yourself in the light,” his murmuring voice told her, “The light will protect you. And you will remain invisible to all eyes. You will be only a witness. You will see, and remain unseen, safe within the shielding light.”

  She drew the light around herself as he instructed, felt its protective comfort invade her, relieving her anxieties. Her breathing deepened.

  “In the future, you will do this yourself whenever you choose, easily, naturally...in the light....”

  Help me, help me...the cries came from a great distance; not just Becky’s voice, an entire chorus of young voices calling to her: Help me...help...help....

  “...Cloak yourself in the light....”

  She slipped effortlessly downward—and found herself standing in a playground. In the distance, two young boys tossed a baseball back and forth, but closer to where she stood, the small carousel, the teeter-totter, the swings, were all empty of children. There were only two men nearby, seated on a bench, watching the boys play, and...her heart skipped a beat. The two men were Paterson and The Bear. For a moment she hung back, her fear resurfacing and then she heard the Doctor’s voice within her, and did as he instructed, reaching again for the light as if she had known all along how to do this, wrapping it once more about herself.

  “Here he comes now,” The Bear said. They looked at her. No, she realized, through her, at someone approaching from behind. For a moment, though, she thought Paterson looked directly into her eyes.

  She shrank away from him, and was back in the Doctor’s cozy room, the fire crackling beside her, that moment of terror like a scent lingering in her senses.

  The sudden opening of her eyes gave Gabronski a shock. He had been in control, fully expecting to bring her back in due time on his instructions. It was rare, almost unheard of for a subject to awaken on her own. That, more than anything else, told him how frightened this woman really was, far more frightened than she had admitted or shown. He ought to have realized that, he scolded himself.

  “You are fine, you are safe,” he told her quickly, and reached to take one of her hands in his. It was ice cold.

  “Are you okay?” Jack demanded, kneeling by her chair and turning her face toward him.

  “Yes. I....” She hesitated, still disoriented, trying to collect her thoughts. “It was them: Paterson and The Bear. They were in a park, a children’s playground, watching two little boys play, and waiting for someone. The Bear said, ‘here he comes,’ and then I woke up back here.”

  “Did they see you?” Gabronski asked, still distressed, and puzzled, by her sudden awakening.

  “I...I don’t know. I thought not, but, then, Paterson looked at me, as if he were looking into my eyes. It...it startled me. I’m sorry. I panicked. That’s what brought me back.”

  “That third person you said you sensed,” Chang said in an excited voice. “Did you see who he was?”

  Catherine shook her head. “No. He was approaching from behind me. They looked toward him, looked through me I thought, only, as I said, Paterson might have glimpsed me, or maybe he only sensed me. He seems to do that.”

  Chang jumped up from her chair, clenching her fists. “We need to know who they were meeting.”

  “I’ll go back,” Catherine said, but her voice was tremulous, without conviction.

  “No. You can’t,” Jack said firmly. He understood how Chang and Gabronski felt; but Catherine’s safety was his first concern. When she looked as if she might argue, he appealed to the others. “Look at her, she’s white as a ghost. I’m not going to let her go there again.”

  Catherine started to reply, but Gabronski gave his head a vehement shake. “I think he may be right,” he said. “There’s something else: I’ve been thinking about this, and I don’t like it. You say that this person has only recently begun to, as you put it, to stalk you? And that he has quickly grown stronger at it, his presence more real with each occasion?”

  “Yes. At first, it was only a vague feeling, but each time it gets worse. Even now, wrapped in the light as you instructed me, I had this sense that he knew I was there, that he could step right up to me, could take me in a stranglehold....” She gasped with the memory and buried her face in her hands. “It’s horrible, I can’t describe it.”

  Gabronski nodded. He at least seemed to have quite accepted Catherine’s stalker as real. After a moment, Jack asked, “If it is true, if he really is stalking her on some invisible level, what can we do about it?”

  Gabronski’s jolly demeanor of a little while before was gone entirely. He frowned while he considered the question, and was silent for so long that Jack was about to ask it again, when finally he spoke. “I have an idea that perhaps this individual, this Paterson, that perhaps he too has psychic abilities, abilities that may even have been heretofore untapped. He might have been totally unaware of them until recently, though probably he used them from time to time without thinking about it, or maybe he simply considered them hunches. Many people have these gifts, even use them, without being consciously aware of them.”

  He looked directly into Catherine’s face. “But there is some powerful link between the two of you, on the astral plane. I very much fear that your visits to him may have been what awakened whatever gifts he possesses, may even be feeding them.”

  “You mean, every time I see him, I am making him stronger, leading him to me?”

  “It would appear so. I think to visit this individual again may be to place yourself in grave danger.”

  “But I can’t stop, don’t you see?” Catherine said in a plaintive voice. “If this is what I was sent back for, I have to see it through.”

  “Catherine, you don’t even know that you were ‘sent back’ for any purpose,” Jack said angrily. “At best that’s just a guess on your part. And for what purpose? You said these voices told you there was something only you could do? How could that mean catching these two monsters? That’s what the police are for, isn’t it, people like Chang, here? How can you imagine that you’re the one, the only one, who could do that?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted with a shrug. “I don’t know what it is that only I can do. I only know I have no choice but to continue down this road.” Her voice dropped to a near-whisper. “This life that I was given back, it isn’t really mine to own, is it? It was only lent to me, as I see it. And maybe that’s the point: that I was killed, and the very worst that could happen to me is that I’ll end up back where I was when Paterson shot me.”

  Jack wanted to say, that’s the very worst thing that could happen to me, too, but her eyes pleaded with him for understanding. Understanding that he did not have to give. He swallowed his frustration and said nothing.

  “Anyway,” she said into his silence, “Whether I was given some heavenly mission or not, now that I know who and what he is, I could never rest until I see him brought to justice. I owe Becky that. I owe it to all those weeping children.”

  Chang shot Gabronski a quick look, but he only shook his head sadly. “Yes, I can understand that,” he said softly. He folded his hands across his belly. “It’s intriguing, isn’t it? You speak of an angel, but really, doesn’t it seem that you have two angels, the bright one, and a dark one? You are wed to both of them, I think, for reasons that we cannot yet perceive.”

  “Is there no way to protect myself from that dark angel?” Catherine asked.

  He sighed. “Only the light. It was the light, your bright angel, who sent you on this mission. We have to believe she will protect you. Of one thing I am certain. I know evil of this magnitude, I have experienced it before—and nothing on this mortal plane could protect you from it. There are no crosses, no silver bullets, no wooden stakes to kill such demons when they are within you.”

  * * * *

  They were quiet on the way back to Los Angeles. For once, Chang did not even turn on her rock and roll music. After a time, to relieve th
e somber mood, Jack said, “A charming man, that Gabronski.”

  “Yes, he’s a darling,” Catherine agreed with him, glad to be diverted from her morbid thoughts of Paterson. “Is he the chief of the hospital?”

  “That’s Ederle,” Chang said, “He’s the chief. He runs Happy Acres.”

  “In any case, the patients must adore Doctor Gabronski.”

  Chang started to say something, but on her left, a huge semi tried to bully itself into a too-small opening in front of them. She put a hand down on the horn and her foot on the gas. They shot past his bumper with a hair’s breadth to spare.

  “Doctor Gabronski is a patient at Happy Acres,” Chang said. In the wake of their astonished silence, she negotiated her way past a slow moving Toyota.

  “A patient?” Catherine finally managed to ask. “Not a Doctor?”

  “He’s a Doctor, yes, or at least he was.” She changed lanes with a blast of her horn and focused for a few seconds on the heavy freeway traffic.

  “You’re both too young to remember, of course,” she said after a moment. “I don’t personally remember it myself. It happened thirty or more years ago, but it’s something of a Bureau legend. Gabronski murdered a string of children. Five, I think, before he turned himself in. Claimed he’d been possessed by a demon. They found him insane, naturally. He’s lived at Happy Acres ever since. It’s a mental hospital, a very discreet one. He’s a model patient, they tell me.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Chang dropped them at Catherine’s apartment. On an impulse, Jack suggested a drive to Laguna Beach. “You need to get away from everything,” he said. “Forget all this business for one evening, at least.”

  The suggestion was a good one. The weather had turned warm, as it could do in the California winter and, off-season, Laguna was mostly empty of the tourists that in summer packed its sidewalks and restaurants. Except for an occasional roller skater, they had the Promenade that snaked along the beachfront to themselves. The turquoise water deepened to blue black where it stretched toward the hump of Santa Catalina Island just visible on the misty horizon.