The Rhymer

by Douglas Thompson

  What the devil is he talking about? –Stockbridge interjects in a sympathetic whisper into Mrs Meek’s ear.

  Oh, she says, almost smiling sadly, he’s been like this for years. Pay no attention to the generalities, they’re invariably jumbled up, but the details sometimes mean things, well, half of them, and the other half are bollocks, pardon my French, gentlemen. Fumigator men for example, he’s seeing them right now, as if you are them, but they came here five years ago and upset him because he had to vacate his room for two days. To him, this incident is real, still happening right now, he has no sense of time. His memories are not packed away, but constantly replaying, in an art gallery, permanently on display.

  Quick, Sir Nigel! Meek leaps to his feet and raises his hand as if hailing some passing dignitary. Down by Whitman’s Farm, the enemy are nigh! But what a roguish trouncing we might yet bring them too were we to be the better harriers this day…

  Ahh now this is his medieval phase. He sees knights riding through here apparently, something to do with the Wars Of The Roses, right across the living room. He often complains that I don’t shovel the horse dung up from in front of the telly or that his feet are sliding on the cobbles, but our living room is fitted carpet as you can both see. Oh deary me. I’ve grown quite used to all this I’m afraid, strange and harrowing to you as it undoubtedly might be. Can I get you both a cup of tea?

  When Mrs Meek goes to leave the room, Stockbridge gets up and sits beside Meek on the settee, passing a hand in front of his eyes as the man goes on muttering. Mr Meek, Gerald… Gerry… can you hear my voice, are you aware of the two of us, two visitors sitting in the living room with you? Do you know where you are? Sitting in your living room at home? Can you see us?

  I hear you… the voice replies at last, tired and cracked, as if from far away through layer upon layer of quilts, a man deeply asleep or imprisoned beneath the weight of his own eyelids. What seekest thou in this land? I have more motives for men than hats and gloves, but none for you to hand.

  Did you know a Doctor Thomas Leermouth twenty years ago? Did he harm you in some way…?

  Phhhhhh… Meek lets out a violent expulsion of air, purses his lips then paces about the room with disturbing velocity then bangs his head into the fireplace wall. His mother returns holding the tea pot high in her hands and as she pauses in the door for a moment, Meek lets out a deep guttural animal wail then grabs the poker from beside the fireplace and runs with it flailing around his head and swings it majestically as Excalibur into the teapot’s side with an almighty boom, sending it skidding and spilling right across the room.

  Stockbridge and I seem a good deal more shocked than Mrs Meek who takes it all somewhat philosophically and decidedly in her stride, returning to her kitchen to fetch a bucket and cloth, while the doctor and I restrain her son on the sofa as his mouth pours with froth.

  What? What heresy didst thou quoth? Leermouth stuck me in the goalmouth then aimed a thousand bladders at my nuts. Penalty time. Sick to the death and walloped in the guts. Guinea pig served raw I was with mighty sore baws. A fiery little homunculi fetched out of the foundry with red-hot glowing hammer and tongs. Ah the voices voiceless that throng my hiddenness. It was he that opened up the hatch in my head, set a batch of twelve-inch singles playing on my turntable then left me there for dead. Ahh, ah’m fair fucked lads, it’s time we packed me off to bed.

  As Meek quietens down, Stockbridge goes to help his mother with the mop and broom and I feel some idiotic obligation to break the silence in the room. How did he do it, this experiment? Drugs, hallucinations and suggestions?

  Meek breathes a long rasping noise, harrowing and horrible and I suddenly become terrified that I have been left alone in the room with him. It’s you! He screams aloud, scrabbling backwards on the sofa, crab-like, his eyes staring unseeing, roaming wildly across the room. That voice! Keep your paws off my hair, it’s all growed back so you can’t touch me anymore. How did you find me, you fiend!? I’d sooner have had leukaemia than this temporal anaemia. You wicked emissary of perverted academia. Call this toxic intoxication life then I’d sooner choose abstemia! And with that he takes one last run and launches himself headfirst straight through the living room window.

  *

  That went well… I reflect to Stockbridge, as we hasten away from Meek’s tearful mother, the ambulance doors closing behind her son. A good morning’s work done.

  He’ll be fine… the good doctor muses, –just a few bruises and flesh wounds. His mother seemed to think it was time they took him in for review anyhow. And we swept all the glass up nicely didn’t we? It should be making eye-catching ballast in her shrubbery by now. What did you say to him though? I caught only a snatch of it while I was fetching a new batch of Hoover bags. You seemed to send him right over the edge, and indeed the hedge and the petunias.

  Loony logic as only a loony has. And come to think of it, the moon is full today and will hold full sway across a regal night too soon if we go on squandering our wanderings to expedite your theories in this way.

  Nithna… Stockbridge turns to look at me as we pace down leafy noonday streets again, If I didn’t know you better I’d swear you were trying to change the subject or indeed the sport to some game that you were better placed to play. Could that fellow have recognised you with his wrecked eyes, even though you’ve been through a face or two?

  I doubt it seriously, don’t you? The present seemed to make less impact on him than the price of oil in Timbuktu.

  Indeed, or 1462. I suppose you’ll be contemplating consulting a library to see what historical realities he was viewing with his psychic telescope.

  No need. I could see the man was quite deranged, estranged from reality, in actuality. Let us give our attention to the neglected sport of punctuality.

  *

  So in time we come to a yet sadder clime, a melancholy bungalow amid an avenue of limes. And more and more now in Sylvia I find my feet and mind atremble as fragments of vistas resemble memories all jumbled up and pushed away out of sight in my cognitive attic. Does Horace Stockbridge know I’m at it? –Pretending to him that I am in all respects a mental white sheet, when in fact I am gaining unwelcome self-knowledge with every sorry street? Who can we trust on this earth? A dearth of friends is what the truly honest man would all too quickly find, were such a fool creature to exist upon this world. Oh yes, remind me, there was one once, and they crucified him for his trouble. Or a wise man, yes, of genuine and total perspicacity and sagacity, I wonder if he would have much taste or capacity for friends and time among his fellow men, when every second he could see their writhing thoughts recoiling and contriving to bend each other to their ends. I put my hands up to my dishevelled hair and am amazed to realise how much time has idled by since I last used the rusting wires concealed there. With a kind of panic I part the buttons of my tunic to make sure the dial upon my chest is still extant and has not been stolen by some harlot or footpad who caught me unawares. I sigh with relief. It’s there, it’s there. But why do I care? I seem not to have made much use of it of late. Do my otherworldly powers at last abate?

  We ring the doorbell, and in a while a middle-aged man stands there puzzling at us in the bright light of afternoon, and cordially invites us in to talk and soon we find we three are freely discussing the lost life of his late wife Rachel Blackwell. He makes us tea and leads us to his study, ushering us to sit opposite him on a large leather settee. The house is modest but drab, with an air of something indefinably sad and male, the absence of a woman’s touch, somehow cold and pale. He has not re-married, and photographs of her lovely face are scattered about the place amid, atop, tasteful hardwood shelves and armoires draped with Turkish cloths. A grandfather clock ticktocks somewhere in an echoing hall, and dust feels just a little too undisturbed in this solitary future whose occupant given the choice, one senses, would not have chosen this at all.

  Blackwell begins: Rachel and he, Professor Leermouth, they became friends you see, quite close
for a while, sometimes I even wondered if there might have been something between them, the way she talked about him, but she always denied that. Him a neuro-scientist, her still an impressionable student. He exploited her you see, her trust, the rat. At first she was just a volunteer, imagine that. That’s how enthralled she was to his appalling theories.

  What were his experiments? Stockbridge prompts compassionately, stirring his tea.

  Well, she signed a secrecy agreement, I wasn’t supposed to be told anything, but Rachel, bless her, extended that circle of confidence to secretly include me. But was that any blessing, I wonder? Well at least I knew, know, why she died and who was responsible. It was all about hypnotic retrogression. Most scientists dismiss it, excommunicate any heretics who dare to even sniff at the supernatural. But he was shrewd and careful. Had been quietly going to performances and interviewing practitioners for years, befriended a few, got them to teach him the basic techniques. It’s not like swinging a pocket watch and ‘are you feeling sleepy?” you know, that’s all just popular myth stage show stuff, it can be done with more subtlety and control than that, so Rachel reported. Leermouth started practising it himself, on a few subjects, Rachel and some others, sworn to secrecy. Said he’d taken them back to their childhoods, that sort of thing. But he’d invented this gizmo, “the hairnet” Rachel used to call it. A grid of wires and sensors he fitted over the head of the hypnotised subject, used it to measure exactly the electric field patterns of the brain. But it wasn’t just a measuring device, it was an inducer. He didn’t need to hypnotise anyone anymore you see, after the first session to map their brain. He just turned the dial up, induced the same currents again in their brain and they went to sleep and started voyaging through their own memories.

  At this point, Doctor Stockbridge is unable to resist casting a glance over at me, with eyebrow raised, his face animated with fascination. Blackwell continues: But according to Rachel things got stranger after that. Leermouth discovered that if he kept going with subjects, right back to their birth, they could go beyond, they would find themselves inside the body of another person, someone who had lived before in a previous generation.

  Reincarnation?

  Yes, ridiculous isn’t it? He had film recordings he showed Rachel apparently, of what she had said under hypnosis, speaking in strange accents and archaic languages, that sort of thing.

  How far did he claim to be able to take her back? –I ask now, unable to maintain my restrained composure in the face of such mysterious disclosure. James Blackwell looks towards me curiously, his eyes unfocussed, his mind far away.

  Oh… way back. The middle ages, then even before the Romans. Crazy stuff. Rachel said they verified some of it, or tried to. Historical maps confirmed the location of some cotton mill she had “relived”, that was the term they invented, not “remember”. She had relived being a woman working in a cotton mill, and they found the site and supposedly neither Rachel nor Leermouth could have known its existence beforehand. But they would have said that, wouldn’t they? Perhaps it was all baloney. Oh yes, and other things, an ancient fort, a stockade built in the water somewhere in some remote loch. They drove away there together one weekend, which I wasn’t happy about… maybe the whole thing was just a cover for him hitting on her. But of course they claimed they found the landmarks she had seen in her “reliving”… lost standing stones buried in the peat up to their tips, not marked on any map, ancient stepping stones under the water in a pattern you could run across at speed if you memorised them, but which outsiders and attackers would never master. It was utter madness. I felt I was beginning to lose her by then, as if she was coming under that man’s spell, like a warlock.

  Did you ever meet him? –I ask, with no inconsiderable trepidation.

  Again, that turn of the head, and the slightly startled look from Blackwell. No… strangely enough, although I tried to. Tried to ask questions at the university he was attached to, to launch a complaint against him if necessary, although I didn’t want to make trouble for Rachel, just to try and extricate her from his spell. I think I saw him once at a distance getting into his little yellow sports car, but he drove off at speed. He had longish dark hair turning white, an ageing hippie, you know the type. Do you know he got Rachel to shave all the hair off her head? All her lovely long blonde locks. She cut it all off for him and she wore wigs instead, like she was a flaming cancer patient. Just so his ‘hairnet” would work better on her. Can you imagine how I felt about that? She said it was worth it for the money he was paying her for the experiment sessions, but I couldn’t see that anything was worth that. I don’t think it was about money after a while anyway. She believed it all, and believed in him and wanted to find out how it would all end. We disagreed and argued about it a lot, began to fight.

  What did happen in the end?

  Leermouth said he wanted to go public with his results, that there might even be big money in it one day, a company selling voyages into past lives, “Heredyssey” he planned to call it, hereditary odyssey, he probably even registered a domain name. But before that he said he needed to test his “Forward Hypotheses”.

  What did that mean?

  He discovered he could reverse some of the currents in the brain patterns and induce the subject to go forward.

  Forward?

  Yes, so if Rachel was in the 18th century and he wanted to bring her forward to the 19th, he turned a dial. But of course, the question occurred to him after a while: what would happen if he kept her going forward to the present day then beyond? Into the future in other words.

  Did that work?

  Blackwell shrugs his shoulders. It was probably all hogwash. But she believed it apparently.

  What did she, or he, see?

  She would never tell me. But a look of pain and terror entered her eyes that day, that never left her until she died. She came home shaking and crying, a nervous wreck. She said she’d seen the future, ours and mine, and that it was better not to know, that nobody in fact, nobody should ever want to know the future, that it was the worst kind of curse imaginable to have that knowledge. She said she wanted to lose her memory, to be lobotomised even. She started drinking heavily, taking pills to get to sleep. Leermouth destroyed her, whatever it was he did, whatever it was he convinced her that she’d seen. And that’s how she died you know… a cocktail of prescription drugs, as they said. A cocktail… doesn’t that sound chirpy? –Like a wild party. But she was so alone towards the end, inside her head, no matter how I or anyone else tried, you couldn’t reach her. She didn’t even leave a suicide note. I don’t suppose she needed to. Her life had become a suicide note, our every conversation, for the final few weeks.

  I’m sorry for your loss, Mister Blackwell. Stockbridge says at last after an appropriate silence.

  Oh? So was he apparently, Leermouth. Tended to confirm my theory that something had been going on, or that he’d had a crush on Rachel at least, unrequited, an older man and a beautiful young woman. Or maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe it was remorse for what he’d done. But he phoned here repeatedly, in distress, wanted to come to the funeral, but I told him I’d break his legs if he came anywhere near. He began sobbing like a child down the phone. I told him I had told the police what I knew about his experiments and that he should expect a knock on the door soon. That seemed to shut him up. I heard he went on the run after that… and well, you probably know the story, he shot himself. But tell you what… I remember something else he said on the phone, maybe the last thing he ever said to me. He said he was going to “go back and change things”. Maybe he just meant trash his lab and destroy the evidence, or maybe something else, something weirder to do with all his creepy ideas about time and memories. I suppose he changed the future at least, for the better, by removing himself from it. Maybe we should all be grateful for that, one fragment of redemption. I don’t think I’ve ever wished anyone’s death. But the news of his, after everything, God forgive me, was a relief.

  Thank you, Mister
Blackwell, for sharing all that with us. I realise the memories must be painful, even after all these years… As Stockbridge talks, I find I have stood up, bewitched as in a trance and danced across the room to face into the photo-portrait of Rachel above the mantelpiece, her eyes like dark tunnels into which my consciousness funnels, slips and trips and drips in runnels.

  The police closed the case a long time ago, how come someone’s interested in this again? –I dimly hear Blackwell asking, as if he is a hundred miles away across a sea of spray.

  My colleague, the esteemed Swiss Doctor Erno Schwitzer believes he has a patient with memory loss who may have been involved with Leermouth, is showing similar symptoms to those you have so kindly and helpfully recounted to us as Rachel’s. The man is very ill apparently, mentally, and any kind of light on his history could be most revealing.

  Then I am glad to have been of some assistance. There was some sensationalist news coverage at the time of course, but after that people lost interest. It hurts me sometimes to think that Rachel has been forgotten.