Indeed, when debating with Barnaby, it was I who became Devil's Advocate, purposely arguing with everything he said, as if to pull out more information, more knowledge, to enrich my own search.
'So prove that fate is inevitable,' I said - yet if I knew then what I know now, perhaps I wouldn't have been so keen to take up the challenge.
'We'll try scrying,' he said, reaching into a cupboard and taking out a crystal ball.Lighting a candle for effect, we faced each other from across a small, circular table, our heads almost touching.
He felt the crystal ball and channelled his mind upon it, and as I stared I was convinced that ghostly images could be found within.
'You will have an accident,' he said with a sense of relish on his face.
'An accident?' I asked.
'Oh, nothing serious,' he continued. He looked deeper into the crystal ball. 'You will break your leg.'
'Go on.'
'It will begin when you follow a red car. The car will take you to a beautiful girl - a brunette. You will not speak, but she will be going in your direction. But after a while, you will come across a building site. And it is in here that you will break your leg.'
I left Barnaby Jones with an intense sense of scepticism.
To be honest, I don't think I'd ever heard anything so ridiculous in my life. Even the thought of me entering a building site was ridiculous, I knew. So for once I considered that Barnaby James may have been more eccentric than enquiring.
The next morning I left my home to go to an appointment. Yet I found myself following a red car.
Initially I was shocked by this, but I soon began to understand where Barnaby was coming from. For the simple fact was the chances of me following a red car were quite high. I had no doubt done so many times, but not even thought of it. We only notice things when we are looking for them.
Eventually I parked my car, and as I walked out of the car park I found myself following an attractive woman with dark hair. A smile came to my face as I did so, and I wondered how many beautiful brunettes had I followed in my life without even knowing I was doing so? Certainly dozens. Possibly hundreds.
Half way to my appointment, however, we began to approach a building site. And again I found myself being sceptical. Building sites existed all over every town in the world, and I must have passed thousands of them. But at the back of my mind a thought occurred. What were the chances, the thought said, of following a red car to a brunette woman to a building site?
Ah, fate. What a strange thing it is. Or is it just egotistical curiosity? Was it that - my own choice - that made me walk into that building site?
Whatever. The plaster comes off in six weeks.
ANY BODY WILL DO
What is mind? Is it a form of energy, whirling around the body, or even the world? Or is it a spin-off of the physical body?
To most scientists the latter is clearly the case. Without a physical body there is no vehicle through which mind can activate. As for mind itself, it is simply the result of chemical reactions within the brain. Yet, to mystics, to religionists, this is a fallacy. Mind is a product of soul and is separate from the body. It may animate the body, but it is separate, higher, and able to move away from the body at will.
I'd always been worried about such a concept. Surely the scientists have the truth! But with my early researches into the out of body experience, or OBE, my mind began to change, and I began to accept a more spiritual base for mind. But nothing nudged me more towards this idea than my experiences with Hyram Nash. If indeed, it was Hyram Nash I met.
He walked into my office one day, having heard about my research, and said: 'I need your help.'
He looked a clumsy kind of man, as if he wasn't sure of his actions. Indeed, as he told me his predicament, this turned out to be a bit of an understatement:
'I'm an astral traveller. I've learnt, over the years, how to detach my soul at will, and disappear into the spirit world, or walk, as a spirit form, on the Earth.'
I'd heard tales of such people, yet I admitted my doubts to him.
'You don't understand,' he said. 'It's all true. We can do anything. At times, we can even take over the bodies of other people.
Which was, for me, a claim too far. 'Who's put you up to this?' I asked, aware that many sceptics wanted nothing better than to rubbish my work.
'No one. I'm genuine; I promise you.'
He seemed emphatic enough, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt; although retaining my scepticism about his claims.
'So what, exactly, do you want me to do for you?'
He adopted a serious air. I was astral travelling last night, when suddenly I was unaware of where I was. Maybe it was a momentary lapse of consciousness - I don't know. But when I woke up, I was not in my body.'
'I don't understand,' I said.
He sighed. 'I was in this one.'
It was becoming too much. 'Let me get this right,' I said. 'You are saying that the body you are presently inhabiting is not your own?'
'That's right.'
'So who is it?'
'I don't know. All I know is that I woke up in this body in the morgue.'
'In the morgue?'
'Yes. I'm afraid I've animated a corpse.'
Suddenly, I found an interest in this case; not regarding his claims, but for what I considered a unique delusion. 'Okay,' I said, 'suppose I believe you. What do you want me to do?'
'I want you to help me find my real body.'
So that is how I first became acquainted with Hyram Nash. And it was soon clear why he needed my help. For as soon as he attempted to do anything too complicated with his purloined body, his co-ordination collapsed, and all too often, so did he. Hence, in such a condition, he needed someone to guide him round his usual haunts in the hope of finding just where he had left his body.
The whole episode was, I have to report, bizarre in the extreme; and if anything was likely to make me change my mind about my work, it was Hyram Nash himself - if, indeed, it was him. But the eventual repercussion of the episode did, I'm afraid, leave me in no doubt whatsoever regarding the abilities of the astral traveller.
I took him around all his usual haunts, but we simply could not find the sleeping body of Hyram Nash. However, as we approached the very last place it could possibly be, he suddenly became excited, jumping up and down in what was, quite frankly, a rather busy street.
'It's in there,' he said, pointing up to a flat above a shop, attracting much attention.
'Calm down,' I said, 'let's go inside.'
'What's going on?' said a policeman as he approached.
'No need to do that,' said Hyram.
'I beg to differ,' I said, the policeman getting closer.
'No. Thank you very much,' said Hyram.
Then, before my very eyes, the man by my side turned a funny colour, closed his eyes, and collapsed, totally and absolutely dead.
Confusion appeared on the policeman's face; and sheer panic on my own.
Suddenly not knowing what to do, I turned round to the policeman and said: 'What?!'
IT STALKS ME
Contagion. A simple word. A medical word. Someone catches a cold. They pass it on. You suffer from closeness to the person. Contagion. Nothing simpler. Nothing more obvious. But what about contagion of the mind? Can we suffer the nightmares of others? There were precedents, I knew. Laughter, for instance, is contagious. It seems to spread through many minds, as if a contagion. Virulent. So why shouldn't the nightmares of others do the same?
Ridiculous, I know. But for so long the possibility of such an event was with me. I lived in a world of cranks, of malign forces, of mind sickness unimaginable. And it was always a fear that a little of it could rub off on me. But I do not fear it now. Fear is of the unknown. Now, I know it can occur. So I do not fear. I raise mental armour to defeat it, and realise that at times things must be done that at no other time would be acceptable.
I won't give his name. To do so could implicate me. I will s
imply call him the Murderer.
He had served his time. It was a typical murder, born out of hatred. The Murderer had waited for his former friend in an alley, and when he came, he beat him to death. You could even argue that murder was not the intent. But murder it became. Why, is of no consequence to the events that followed his release. And I only tell you the details to show you that it was nothing unusual. At least, not in terms of what murderers do.
'I killed someone,' he told me when he came to my office.
'You did?'
'Yes. Ten years I served. And now I'm free.'
'So what do you do now?' I asked.
'I suppose I exist. What else can I do when the man I murdered has been with me for so many years.'
'With you?' I asked.
'Yes. He's with me always. I see him now, stood next to you, looking down at me in judgement.'
The hairs stood up on the back of my neck at this. I could see the hollowness in his eyes, and in their depth it was almost as if this apparition of his conscience was reflected in them.
'I need your help,' he said. 'I'm free from prison, but how do I become free of him?'
The answer was simple, in theory. 'You must come to terms with what you did. He will not leave you until you do that.'
So over the following weeks the Murderer and I went into deep therapy, analysing his life, the event, his feeling of redemption. Yet all the time his eyes would dart to my side and I sensed the existence of the murdered man brushing against me.
By the third session I did, however, seem to make progress. For the first time since we met, I saw the Murderer smile.
I pointed this out; congratulated him; attempted to raise in him joviality at his success, and I have to admit a second smile did appear. But a couple of hours after he had gone; as darkness was beginning to invade my room, the telephone rang.
Picking it up, a deep, gutteral, other-worldly voice said: 'You will not succeed. I will haunt him for eternity.'
That night was horrible. My guard had slipped, and throughout the night I had nightmares, reliving the murder in my own mind. And at one point, half awake, I looked to the side of my bed and saw the victim before me, his face blooded and pulped. And through the blood, he smiled, as the Murderer had smiled.
That was only the beginning, of course. From that point on, whenever I was alone, phenomena would erupt about me. In the morning furniture would be moved; messages would appear on my walls, written in blood. 'An eye for an eye,' they said, or, 'do unto others as they would do unto you.'
I was losing my mind. I KNEW I was losing my mind. And as the sessions continued, and the Murderer became more and more content with himself, his haunting was transferred to me.
Eventually, I had no choice. It was late at night when I entered the Murderer’s flat, and with gloved hands I approached his bed, lowered my body and throttled him to death.
How I will live with myself now, I have no idea. I had crossed the divide between good and evil. But in a way, how do we know, in the ultimate scheme of things, where good and evil are? WE seem to class evil, today, as those things the law decrees as evil. Yet law is rational, and rarely takes other-worldly things into account. So yes, we must live by the law, and I pray I never have to do such a thing again. But as I went to sleep for the first time in an age, I looked by the side of my bed and an apparition said 'thank you'; and the thought struck me that maybe I had been the agency of a higher justice.
About the Author
1955 (Yorkshire, England) – I am born (Damn! Already been done). ‘Twas the best of times … (Oh well).
I was actually born to a family of newsagents. At 18 I did a Dick Whittington and went off to London, only to return to pretend to be Charlie and work in a chocolate factory.
When I was ten I was asked what I wanted to be. I said soldier, writer and Dad. I never thought of it for years – having too much fun, such as a time as lead guitarist in a local rock band – but I served nine years in the RAF, got married and had seven kids. I realized my words had been precognitive when, at age 27, I came down with M.E. – a condition I’ve suffered ever since – and turned my attention to writing.
My essays are based on Patternology, or P-ology, a thought process I devised to work as a bedfellow to specialisation. Holistic, it seeks out patterns the specialist may have missed. The subject is not about truth, but ideas, and covers everything from politics to the paranormal.
I also specialise in Flash Fiction in all genres, most under 600 words, but also Mini Novels - 1500 word tales so full they think they're bigger.
Connect with Anthony
Smashwords Author page: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/anthonynorth
Anthony's Website: https://anthonynorth.com/
Anthony's Blog (inc current affairs): https://anthonynorth.com/blog/blog
Twitter: https://twitter.com/anthonynorth
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/anthony.north.330
I, Horror Page 6