A Memory of Demons

by Ambrose, David

  There was a photograph of Lewis on his Web site that made him look rather solemn and forbidding. Tom recognized him at once from it, but found him animated by a much livelier spirit than he had imagined. There was a humour in his eyes and a directness in his manner that created a sense of immediate contact. But the voice remained as dry as on the phone, careful in its choice of words and sparing in their use.

  Tom offered him a drink, but he accepted only water. As they sat down, Tom became aware that the older man was watching the two of them closely, though discreetly. He must have sensed their unease, and began at once to reassure them that nothing he would be proposing would be likely to cause any disruption in their lives, or Julia’s. He was there purely to gather evidence, not even to assess it; that would come later. Above all, they should not think of him as offering any kind of therapy. He knew the child was in treatment with Dr Hunt and had no wish to interfere with that; he would be seeing Dr Hunt to make this clear to him.

  ‘You know there’s a certain irony I’ve come to see from those books I’ve been reading,’ Tom said. ‘In the East, reincarnation is so widely accepted as a fact that there seems little point in gathering further evidence to prove it. Whereas in the West, it’s so contrary to everything we believe that almost no amount of evidence will ever be sufficient to convince us.’

  What he was trying to tell Lewis was that, even though this stuff was new to him, he had made an intelligent stab at understanding it. Lewis smiled thinly in acknowledgement of the effort.

  ‘You’re right, there is quite a difference there,’ he said. ‘Of course Western sceptics dismiss all Eastern mysticism as, to quote one of the most prominent of their number, “no more than a device for reconciling people to a perfectly dreadful earthly life”.’

  ‘But surely the evidence we have, including what you’ve gathered yourself,’ Clare said, ‘can’t just be dismissed out of hand. It has to be explained somehow.’

  ‘Or explained away,’ Lewis said, with a hint of the weariness that comes with too long an acquaintance with the closed-mindedness of his fellow men. ‘The sceptics like to point out that even in the East, or especially in the East, a poor family giving birth to a deceased member of a wealthy one may have a lot to gain by the association.’

  ‘But surely they can’t claim every case is a fraud,’ Clare said with a note of exasperation in her voice. ‘That’s just absurd. We don’t know what’s going on with Julia, or how or why; but we do know for a fact that it’s not fraud.’

  Lewis nodded sympathetically. ‘Of course you do. Personally, in all the hundreds of cases I have investigated, there have been only a handful where fraud was even a possibility.’

  ‘So what is the sceptics’ answer to that?’

  ‘There’s a very useful word they have for occasions when they can’t explain something away either as fraud, unconscious bias, flawed procedures, or downright stupidity. The word is “anomaly”. Anything that cannot be accommodated within what we already know and believe is simply labelled an anomaly and left to one side – until, hopefully, we forget about it.’

  ‘Or,’ Tom said, ‘until what we know and believe expands sufficiently to include it.’

  ‘Which can take an awfully long time.’

  ‘I’ve been reading about birthmarks in one of those books,’ Clare said. ‘I don’t see how anyone can ignore the evidence for that.’

  ‘Well, their first line of attack is usually coincidence,’ Lewis said. ‘And, of course, the fact that a child is born with a birthmark that resembles the gunshot or knife wound that killed the person he remembers having been in a previous life . . . well, it could be a coincidence. Almost anything could be a coincidence. But you have to ask yourself which explanation stretches credulity further: that degree of coincidence, or the acceptance of reincarnation?’

  And the sceptics prefer coincidence?’ Tom asked.

  ‘Yes. In their perverse way, they think it makes more sense. Just as some of them end up claiming that memories of past lives, for which they grudgingly admit the evidence is considerable, is really just ESP.’

  Tom remembered what Brendan Hunt had said about the possibility that remembered lives might well be some form of telepathy or ESP that we didn’t understand yet. But somehow, from the way Lewis had put it, he found something very strange about that idea now.

  ‘Just ESP?’ Tom echoed, with a deliberate note of disbelief in his voice. An ordinary, everyday thing like ESP?’

  Lewis seemed pleased that Tom had picked up on the absurdity of the idea. ‘They argue,’ he said, ‘that since there is at least some experimental evidence, however slight, for ESP, but absolutely none for the existence of a soul independent of the body, then ESP must be accepted as the likelier explanation.’

  ‘But they spend half their time proving that ESP doesn’t exist,’ said Clare. ‘They can’t have it both ways.’

  ‘I’m afraid they can, and most of the time they do. Not that I’m against sceptics or scepticism. In fact, I’ve always been something of a sceptic myself. Otherwise, one is liable to be a gullible fool – an accusation I have spent quite a number of years attempting to refute.’

  There was a silence, which Tom broke with the only question he could think of.

  ‘So what’s your own belief, Dr Lewis, assuming you have one? What do you, with all your experience of this kind of thing, think it adds up to?’

  Lewis settled further back in his chair and gave a cryptic smile. ‘If I knew that,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t still be gathering evidence and cataloguing case histories. And, frankly, I have to face the fact that perhaps it doesn’t add up to anything. I have no theories.’

  Tom thought back to what Brendan Hunt had said about loose ends, and how pulling on them didn’t guarantee you would unravel the whole ball of wool. It crossed his mind that Brendan Hunt and Oliver Lewis might share more common ground than he had thought they would. He found that somehow reassuring.

  23

  He had been there many times, he told himself. It was a dream he knew by heart.

  Yet still it made no sense to him. Each time it began in that same cellar. Each time he sensed the hand of death close by. Each time he closed his eyes, then opened them to see her – that girl’s lifeless body. Each time panic overwhelmed him, and he began the breathless, stumbling sprint down twisting passages, towards the broken wooden door with the jagged halo of light around it.

  The next thing he knew, he was scrambling and slipping through the tangled, muddy undergrowth, cutting himself on stones and thorns. Each time he fell and looked back at the strange, half-ruined house with its mock-Gothic turret. It sat, as always, on the far side of the scooped-out hollow that had once been a garden; as always, it made him think of a worn tooth in a decaying gum, as though the whole bleak landscape was grinning at him evilly.

  And then the thought occurred to him, and each time it seemed it was occurring for the first time, that maybe this was not a dream at all. This was too real to be a dream. He could feel the earth, cold and coarse, beneath his hands as he slipped and fell. He could hear the hum of tyres on the damp road surface that he could not see from where he was, but down which he knew he was about to run.

  Time does not flow, he told himself. It is a landscape that we move through, something fixed and preordained. Free will is a lie. The things we do were always there, awaiting our arrival, as this moment had awaited him. He had not dreamt it in the past; he had merely glimpsed what lay around the corner. If there was any dream at all, it was the dream of his happiness with Clare and Julia. Now he had woken to reality.

  This living hell was his real life . . .

  Tom awoke, as always, with a cry of terror. He was breathless and perspiring, sheets and blankets tangled around him.

  He reached for the light by his bed, remembering as he did so where he was: in the hotel in Niagara Falls that he and Oliver Lewis had checked into the previous day. He looked at his watch. It was 4:20 in the morning.

>   For a while he lay still, trying to calm himself, trying to throw off the feeling that he was a fugitive in fear of discovery. Then, as his terror began to fade, he swung his feet to the floor and crossed the room to get a fresh bottle of water from the mini-fridge. He sank into an armchair and put the bottle to his lips.

  What did it mean, this hideous repeated dream? Was that supposed to be Melanie Hagan in that house? And why had he cast himself as her murderer? He knew enough about dreams to know they were not literally true. They worked obliquely, using symbols that you had to decipher.

  But what was the meaning of these symbols? The dead girl had not been part of the dream at all when it began. First, there had been only the house, and the sense of dread that sent him running from it. It was only on that recent night in New Orleans, just before Clare’s phone call from Niagara Falls, that he had dreamt of the girl for the first time. There was some significance in that connection, the phone call and the dream. There had to be.

  Was Melanie reaching out to him from wherever she was? Just as she was reaching out to Julia? Or was this whole phenomenon, as Lewis had suggested and Hunt obviously agreed, without any purpose or hidden meaning or pattern of any kind? Nothing more strange than a car radio picking up interference from overlapping signals?

  Tom and Clare had talked into the night about whether or not he should pursue further research into the life of Melanie Hagan. The first thing on which they both agreed was that if he did so, then Julia must not be directly involved in any way. All that mattered was for her to get well under Brendan Hunt’s care. Their job, as parents, was to help that process.

  As Lewis had pointed out, the most remarkable thing about most of the cases he had investigated was the lack of connection between the dead person and the child who had inherited their memories. So why investigate the life of Melanie Hagan at all? Lewis wasn’t pushing for it, but he was willing to help if Tom wanted him to. So what did Tom hope to achieve? In many ways it was a hard question to answer. Finally the most he could say was that he felt he had no choice. Whichever way he looked at the situation, and however much he made an effort to avoid the word ‘possession’, with its chilling overtones of devilry and witchcraft, the fact was that the consciousness of another child, disappeared and possibly dead, had somehow returned through the mind of his own child. That alone sent a shudder down his spine that he could not ignore. It was at the very least an extraordinary invasion, a frightening brush with something it was hard to define as anything other than the supernatural. However much he told himself that he was not a superstitious man, he could not just pretend this wasn’t happening, or treat it as something neutral and wait for it to go away. He felt the need to understand.

  Perhaps that was the meaning of his dream – the house he was running from was the secret he was after. He was running from it in the dream because he was afraid of what he might discover – ‘strange forces’ that human beings should not tangle with, and so on and so forth. And the body of the girl inside, the body of Melanie Hagan, if that was who she was – was she the dark secret at the heart of the mystery? If so, why? And how?

  A glance at his watch told him it was past five. Outside it was still dark, but he knew he would get no more sleep that night. He had been slumped in an armchair for the past forty minutes, facing a television screen that flickered into life only now as he pressed the remote. He watched for a while, flicking through channels, but it was hard to concentrate. In the end he gave up and got dressed.

  It was becoming light as he left his hotel and stepped into the chill morning air. He walked for an hour through the sunless grey streets with their rich green foliage and trimmed hedges. The traffic had been just stirring when he set out; now it was a constant steady buzz. He turned around and started back for the hotel, where he and Lewis had arranged to meet for breakfast at eight. The previous day he had spoken with Jennifer Sawyer on the phone and arranged for her to be at the hotel at nine thirty, after her husband had left for work.

  Joe Sawyer’s hostility to these enquiries worried him. It wasn’t simply that Sawyer posed a threat, though he undoubtedly did; more importantly, Tom was anxious to understand why. He could not free himself from the feeling that Sawyer knew something that the rest of them didn’t, and which he was anxious they should not discover. Tom was aware that he had no real reason for thinking this, just instinct; by and large, he had always found, people who are disproportionately angry about something usually have something to hide, if only their own fear.

  Tom had his suspicions about what Sawyer was hiding. The problem was going to be finding proof.

  24

  Oliver Lewis’s room at the hotel had a sitting area separate from the bedroom, and it was there that he put his detailed questions to Jennifer Sawyer and got her answers down on tape. He asked if she minded him taking a photograph as a record of the session. She had no objection, and he produced a miniature camera from his jacket and snapped off a couple of shots.

  Tom sat in on the session, putting questions of his own from time to time. It was not what Lewis described as a ‘scientific’ process. Ideally, he should have collected each family’s side of the story separately; but as this was already a ‘contaminated’ case, he was relaxing the rules. For his part, all Tom cared about was getting as much information as he could as fast as possible. The more he could learn about Melanie Hagan’s disappearance, the more he felt he might understand about her mysterious intrusion into their lives.

  ‘Frankly the impression I got was the cops don’t give a damn when some teenage girl disappears – unless she’s the daughter of a senator, or some family with enough money to hire lawyers and private investigators.’ Jennifer’s voice was bitter as she recalled that traumatic time. ‘All they did after tracing her somewhere east of Rochester was put her name and photograph on a database, and wait to see if anyone responded.’

  ‘And did anyone?’ asked Lewis.

  She shrugged defeatedly. ‘Some. None of the leads they got led anywhere.’

  ‘What about your father?’ Tom asked. ‘You said he walked out when Melanie was four. Did anyone check if she’d made contact with him?’

  ‘The cops tracked him down somewhere in Ohio through his social security records. They said he knew nothing, and cared less.’

  ‘Did you yourself deal with the police, or your mother?’ Lewis asked.

  ‘My mom was a basket case. It was Joe who did most of it, talking to them, checking out what they’d got and so on.’

  ‘Were Joe and your sister close?’ Tom asked.

  She shook her head. ‘Not close, no. He was good to her and did his best, but she always resented him being in the house. She’d kind of got used to it being just her, me and our mom after our dad left. The last thing she wanted was another man in the house, running things.’

  ‘Was he doing that – running things?’

  ‘You’ve met Joe,’ she said, ‘so you know how he is.’

  There was a note of resignation in her voice, but also, Tom thought, a certain dry, if not grim, amusement.

  ‘I don’t know how he is at home,’ he said, ‘with the family.’

  She gave another of those little shrugs of self-protective indifference that Tom was becoming accustomed to. ‘He does the best he can, and back then my mom and I were both glad to have him around.’

  ‘But your sister wasn’t?’ Tom suggested, pressing the point.

  She sat in silence, as though the answer to his question had already been given and there was no need to say more.

  ‘Did Melanie ever say to him what Julia said the other day?’ he asked.

  She looked at him with a puzzled frown.

  ‘You remember,’ he said, making it a challenge as much as a question. ‘ “Fuck you, Joe!” Did Melanie ever say that to him?’

  ‘She might have. She had a mouth on her, for a kid.’

  ‘Did he ever hit her, the way he threatened to hit Julia?’

  Jennifer avoided Tom’s eye
s. ‘It happened a couple of times.’

  ‘A couple?’ Lewis was just watching now, leaving the questions to Tom. ‘Was that why she ran away?’ he said.

  ‘It was her fault,’ she said, her voice hardening with a note of defiance. ‘She rode him till he lost it. He shouldn’t have hit her. He knew that. He said so to my mom. He felt bad about it. He apologized.’

  ‘Did he apologize to your sister?’

  ‘I don’t recall. I guess.’

  Tom let a moment pass before he continued, trying to avoid the impression of browbeating her. Then he said, ‘So why d’you think your husband is so hostile to the idea that we reopen this question of your sister’s disappearance?’

  She looked at him suddenly with almost the same degree of hostility he had sensed in her husband. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I know what you’re getting at, but you’re on the wrong track. Joe has a lot of faults, but they don’t include putting his hand up little girls’ skirts. That’s not why she told him to fuck off, and it’s not why he hit her. I hope that’s plain enough for you. Because if it isn’t, we can stop this whole thing right here.’

  Lewis intervened, leaning forward in his armchair with a mollifying gesture. ‘Mrs Sawyer, no one is making any accusations. Like you, we simply want to get to the bottom of this matter – which means sometimes asking the kind of questions we would rather not ask, though we have to all the same. We appreciate the clarity of your answer to this one.’

  The thought ran through Tom’s mind that Lewis had done this often before, and was therefore skilled in handling people and their touchy sensibilities – Jennifer Sawyer certainly seemed reassured by his manner. Tom left it to the older man to wind up the interview, getting such details as she could remember about the days and weeks leading up to Melanie’s disappearance. There was little, so far as Tom could see, of any significance: nothing he hadn’t known already.

  ‘We shall need to talk with your husband,’ Tom said as they were finishing. ‘I hope that won’t be a problem for you.’