Thought Forms

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Appalled and quivering at this challenging insult, Ray defiantly reached inside his windbreaker, withdrew his .357 Magnum and aimed it down at the bulging eye and bulging tongue and blasted once. The goat was once again dead.

  ««—»»

  People repeat experiences and particular moods that they’ve enjoyed before, trying to capture the old mood and only creating a new one to imi-tate later, and on and on. Next summer you’d be trying to relive this summer but this summer you were trying to relive last summer. Tonight Ray tried to repeat the mood of the night he had buried himself in the medical anomalies book; he had his mandatory coffee by his side at the kitchen table, the fluorescent desk lamp the only light in the house, and had just a half hour ago finished watching a gory, special effects laden werewolf film he had on videotape. He had gathered up some books from various spots about the house, a few he had borrowed months ago from his cousin Paul.

  He had decided to haunt himself tonight with the occult, the paranormal, the so-called supernatural. He would savor his own fear, like a child who enters the haunted castle at an amusement park, safely confronting his own nightmares so he can perceive them as so much papier-mache.

  Ray found that tonight he wasn’t so much interested in reading about actual ghost stories, demonic possessions, poltergeist cases, the mysterious

  “devil” hoof prints in the snow of Devon, England, in 1855—a trail one hundred miles long, continuing over walls and roofs. He had read already about the French werewolf-demon, the “Beast of Gevadun,” which from1764 to 1767 killed forty people and attacked over one hundred and ten, the most memorable victims being children. Ray had read about human beings who believed themselves to be vampires, and that mentally disturbed people who believed themselves to be werewolves were called zoanthropic paranoiacs.

  Tonight he was more interested in the general horizon of the “paranormal,” the protoplasm, as it were, that composed the body of the supernatural. Not the individual cities but the planet of mysteries as seen from space. The ocean, not the fish. The psychic realm, and how all that was spiritual, including himself, related to it.

  Assuming the concept of the soul, the spirit, was not ultimately some dismal illusion, the biggest and cruellest joke played by humankind on itself. Assuming the spirit was not simply personality, and personality just the random by-product of the biological machinations of the organic brain.

  That dizzying, Sahara-desolate possibility terrified Ray, made him feel insignificant, made all existence seem insignificant—all based on sad self-deceptions, all of humankind’s greatest beliefs and institutions painted on a stage backdrop, every cathedral no more than the western facades on a street in Universal Studios.

  He had to contest that hideous, blackly comedic possibility. There had to be a God of some kind, not the random, deaf and dumb and non-sentient Destiny of Thomas Hardy. A Tess Durbeyfield would transcend, or reincarnate, or merge—not simply revert to chemical soups and gases.

  That was the difference between angels and garbage.

  Ray read tonight to confront his own fears.

  He read about the age-old, desperate belief in afterlife. Ghosts, spirit levels, planes. The author Colin Wilson suggested that man’s conscious mind was but the ground floor of a towering skyscraper with a many-lev-eled basement as well. Why should the lights go out on each floor when the time came for the lights to go out on the ground floor? Which floors did split personalities and so-called possessing demons originate from?

  asked Wilson. Ray thought again of the young “possessed” girl who had starved to death, unsaved by the rites of her exorcists.

  From which floors of this department store, this haunted Macy’s, did poltergeists come, and telekinetics, and those who saw the future? And why did most people have no stairs, no elevators with which to communicate from level to level at will?

  Ray read about astral projection. He remembered, as a boy, with his cousin Paul, seeing an afterimage of Paul’s apparently somnambulistic sister follow her into the bathroom. Further, Ray read about doppelgangers, which meant “double-goers,” how the mirror image was once thought to be a doppelganger, how once doppelgangers were believed to exist in the umbilical cord or placenta, like an unformed identical twin. What were siamese twins, then, Ray thought idly—man and doppelganger united?

  Magic might be used, it was said, to form a fully developed doppelganger from the afterbirth that would accompany the original throughout his life, shadow-like, clone-like. He read of the Egyptian “ka”—the “divine essence” of the soul—how after death the placenta would be buried with a king that he might rejoin his ka, or spiritual double, in the eternal afterlife.

  Ray realized much of this umbilical cord stuff was Freudian mother-dependance, mother-linkage, womb-fixation, but funny how it related to astral projection and the planes of existence. Briefly he wondered about conjoined twins again, imbecile heads growing out of active heads. One spirit, or two? Did the drooling, close-eyed face belong to the head to which it was attached, or to itself?

  Ray read about the Egyptian khaib—a “shadow” that might depart from its human owner to pursue an independent existence.

  From these subjects Ray drifted to tulpas.

  Tulpas. He was superficially familiar with the word, having chanced on it in books before. A tulpa, in Tibetan mysticism, was a thought-form given an apparently material life through magical mind power. A seemingly physical projection of the mind, as with doppelganger cases. Colin Wilson suggested that UFOs and the Loch Ness Monster might be tulpas recorded by the imaginations of primitive peoples on the very fabric of time and space, as some suggested ghosts were, the heavenly UFOs and dragon lake monsters (and prehistoric Bigfoot, Ray added) coinciding with primitive symbols and archetypes. He was reminded of Jung’s book on flying saucers and how Jung couldn’t claim that people weren’t actually seeing these forms in the sky, only that they coincided with symbols important to man—the disc, or circular symbol of wholeness, the disc as female symbol and cigar-shaped UFO as male symbol.

  Ray read about a respected authoress who studied the Tibetan tech-nique and manifested a tulpa monk, which became increasingly visually solid to the point of resembling an actual human, and “he” began taking on an independent life, performing actions she did not (consciously) order him to make. When she no longer desired his company it took six months for her to reabsorb him. Ray reencountered a familiar story—a group of psychic investigators who “invented” an invisible ghost with their minds in seance-like sessions, inventing a name and history for him. Again, he began taking on his own existence, relating to them information from his past which they had not consciously programmed into him. Possessions, poltergeists, sexual attacks by incubus-like phantom lovers were all no doubt created by the mind, inflicted on a person by himself. These

  “tulpas” could physically influence their surroundings, moving tables, as with the “invented” ghost, dashing plates, appearing to rape a woman.

  Tibetan yoga disciples participated in a test in which the subject would pick a lonely area and there proceed to summon up with his imagination a ka-like double of himself and a swarm of hideous tulpa demons to confront the double. The demons would rip and slash and rend the double-tulpa, consume it , while the disciple watched and remained calm.

  If the disciple were able to both visualize this episode as if it were absolutely real but at the same time understand that it was an illusion, he would succeed—but if he came to believe that what he was seeing was

  “reality,” he might die. There were many times, it was said, that dead men were found in the lonely battlefields they had chosen for the ritual, slain by the terrors from their own minds. Not physically torn, not consumed, but beaten all the same.

  Ray didn’t believe that if he mounted a hill and looked into a hollow to see such a man participating in such a ritual that he would also see the demons murdering the doppelganger—it was only a dangerous mental exercise, a potentially lethal
hypnotic autosuggestion. But what of the

  “invented” ghost with its dancing table, and poltergeists? The monk created by the author of the Tibetan mysteries book was seen by another person.

  What of a trail of weird hoof prints in snow a hundred miles long? What of a bipedal, wolf-like blazing-eyed demon that murdered forty people, attacked one hundred and ten, many of whom could no doubt describe it, only ten years before the well-documented and thoroughly believable American Revolution? Not in Bullfinch’s Mythology. Not a Biblical story or an Aesop’s Fable. In 1767, during the life of George Washington.

  A self-inflicted tulpa, generated by Jung’s collective unconscious, by the townspeople on whom the creature preyed? A subconscious con-spiracy against themselves? A demonic archetype made tangible? What of John Smith’s visitation by the angel Moroni? What of many things?

  The Tibetans believed all the world we see, hear, smell, taste and touch is, in effect, a very intricately conceived tulpa. A reality of unreality.

  Ray sat with a stack of books before him, the last one shut, his coffee gone, a first bird chirping outside though the sun hadn’t yet risen. After a moment he got up and carried the books to the livingroom. Setting them down, he withdrew another volume and opened it. He found what he sought: an example of the varied writings of David Berkowitz, the .44

  Caliber Killer—the Son of Sam—formulated during his confinement.

  This one piece had strangely wound its way into Ray’s mind:

  “I am never happy

  Rather I am sad

  Very often I cry when alone in my cell

  I am very nervous

  I can never rest or relax

  I am going to have a nervous breakdown

  I am possessed!

  I sleep restlessly

  I feel like screaming

  I must be put to death

  Demons torment me

  I am not going to make it.”

  Demons had told him to kill. There was no doppelganger, no Beast of Gevadun, but there didn’t have to be—David and the Son of Sam were one. Whether tangible or abstract, Ray thought, demons were real.

  ««—»»

  Heidi called Ray Friday after he’d gotten home from work; she said that her mother had told her he’d called but she hadn’t had a chance to answer last night, as her boyfriend had been with her. They chatted a little, laughed, were nervous. “My mother said you wanted to show me some artwork or something?”

  “Yeah, well—ahh. I thought it’d be nice if you could come over sometime and see my paintings…whenever you had some time…”

  Hesitation. “I could stop down for a little while tomorrow, but not for long—I’ve got things to be doing. I’m already home right now.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Mm-hm. Did you get my postcard?”

  “Oh yeah, I love it. Thank you.” In this morning’s mail: a map of Maine with an inked circle where she had stayed. (Hi Ray, the little penmark on the front is where I’m spending the week. See ya Mon. Heidi.) No Love, Heidi, he had lamented.

  He offered to meet her somewhere and take her on to his house from there, but she said she was good with directions so he gave her the information. Tomorrow afternoon—for “a little while.”

  ««—»»

  Before he could begin to possess himself with fears that he would wait and wait and she wouldn’t show, Heidi came—his dog’s barking alerting him. No sooner had her car crunched to a halt in his drive in the great shadow of the chestnut tree than Ray had stepped outside to greet her, grinning with bashful excitement. She came out from behind the car smiling as well.

  They took a walk down the wooded road in the shadows, heads down, eyes on their feet, a car passing only every five minutes or so—and Heidi had taken Ray by the hand. To walk in rhythm with a woman and be holding hands was the height of Ray’s aesthetics—spiritually, even more so than sex (perhaps).

  Heidi told him about her trip, how she had gotten a little tan (very little, he noticed, and mentioned—she seemed a bit hurt but he looked closer at her neck and said, “Oh yeah, yeah, you do.”) About a rock con-cert she’d gone to during the week—all the fun she’d been having while his heart had been writhing.

  He lifted their joined hands and looked at her engagement ring, wanting to call her attention to it as well. He was reminded of Hardy’s Tess—how on her wedding night, before the first stroke of her doom,

  “each diamond in her necklace gave a sinister wink like a toad’s.” This tiny stone looked benign enough. But it did seem to wink at him in the dappled light.

  “I told Tim maybe he should take it back,” Heidi said softly. “I don’t now if I’m ready for it. I tried to give it back really but he told me to keep it for now and think about it some more.”

  Ray glowed inside, hardly feeling his legs work under him and not noticing that they had walked past the spot where the goat had lain.

  ««—»»

  They made their way back toward the house, down the drive to her car. Ray leaned his back against the driver’s door, hands in pockets as they talked. Heidi stood facing him, and after a joke they laughed and she unexpectedly began tickling hm. They laughed harder but they grew quiet simultaneously as their eyes linked and their grins became soft meaningful smiles. Heidi stepped closer and they embraced to kiss.

  She made sure to take her glasses off sooner this time, laying them on the car. They wrestled tongues again, Ray’s hands sliding up and down her back, cupping the back of her head. Their bodies pressed close, her weight pinning him against the car door. Heidi drew her face away a moment several times during their kissing to stand on her toes and press her body harder against his, smiling into his eyes, before resuming. Ray didn’t take it for accidental that standing on her toes aligned their crotches perfectly for the grinding of her hard pubis against his What made him curious, in a detached analytical way as they kissed, was that actually his penis wasn’t hard, but he was too numbed and confused by all this to speculate on that in depth. He hadn’t had an erection last time either but he had had to urinate then…he didn’t now.

  She withdrew from him again, her large breasts unsquashing, this time withdrew all the way A half hour of closeness had passed. “I don’t ever want to leave you,” she cooed gently, sounding so much like she meant that “ever,” “but I should be going.”

  “Oh well,” Ray said, hurt coming back. She squeezed his arms, looking at him, trying to look in. Averting his eyes, Ray joked, “That put hair on my chest.”

  “Oh? Can I see?” Heidi hooked a finger in his shirt, peered in at his pale bare chest.

  “Just a little fuzz and some hair on my nipples.”

  “Oh.” Heidi smiled. She turned, slipped her glasses on, moved her hair with her hands. She sank down into her car and Ray leaned in the window, watching her dig up a pen and scrap of paper. “I’m going to give you my address at home and school so we can write each other. I’m not good at writing letters and I only wrote my mother once all last year, but…” She handed him the scrap.

  Ray reached in and fondled her hand, pocketing the scrap with the other. Heidi smiled up at him. “I’ll see you on Monday.”

  “Yup.” They kissed goodbye. Ray straightened up away from the car.

  “Next time you’ll have to let me in your house,” Heidi said.

  “Okay,” Ray said. He wanted next time to be now.

  He walked to his door, glanced back and waved. She seemed to linger a moment at the head of the drive—he sensed it—but he didn’t look as he turned the knob. Inside the hall, closing the door, he did look around and was disappointed.

  Standing at the door glass, his mind drifted to some bruised suction marks he had noticed on her neck and called her attention to with a wan joke. She had only smiled in acknowledgment. He had felt a poison sickness in his gut at the sight of them but had suppressed it, ignored it, ignored them. But now his mind called them back up—sinister wounds like brands on a cow skin. A menacing
vandalism. Only, he was the one who felt vandalized.

  ««—»»

  Monday at work Ray surfed much of the day on a frightening and exhilarating wave of adrenalin—he was cockier, funnier, noisier than cus-tomary. He felt conscious of Heidi’s eyes on his back at times, but when he looked she always seemed otherwise absorbed. However, an opportunity came for them to be alone a moment in the stock room and Ray’s fear was soothed when he asked Heidi if she’d like to come over for a while after work and she said yes. She rubbed his arm with her hand. They both smiled.

  It was a confidential, secret smile that linked the two of them like conjoined twins. They had passed each other at the start of the day and smiled at each other, said hi, Ray raising his eyebrows and Heidi imitating him—there was an intimate, furtive excitement in the air. A clandestine tone, a shared aura.

  Ray had never felt so invited into another being’s romantic aura—had never met someone who so obviously desired his physicality. After she agreed, the rest of the work day was like an opium dream.

  Her car followed his. If he lost her in the rear view he became afraid that she had changed her mind, or had only been teasing him, but she would reappear.

  Their cars parked side-by-side in his driveway, and were soon empty.

  ««—»»

  Ray had to raise his voice to keep Kelly from excitedly jumping up on Heidi. “Some watch dog, huh?” he joked—though he didn’t mention how alert and dedicated she was when night fell, even if most of her alarms seemed false.

  Ray toured Heidi, ending, to no one’s surprise, with his bedroom. He closed the door after him as if there were someone else here who might walk in.