Malice (8 page)

That was when he remembered the dream he’d had last night. He was being attacked by a shark, its teeth gnashing the air inches from his face. He could see rotting flesh between its teeth, with a smell like a slaughterhouse on a hot summer’s day. But it hadn’t really been a shark. No, it had been a man, he was sure of that now—with pointed teeth, milky, pupiless orbs for eyes and his face, painted up to look like a circus clown.

Derek stopped before the door at the end of the hall and he pressed his ear against the decaying wood. Silence. He turned the handle and pushed the door open. He had the overwhelming feeling that he was being lured inside, that something had been conspiring from the moment he had ascended the staircase. Or maybe even before that.

The room was dark, lit by a single octagonal stained-glass window which bathed the room in a red glow. The corners were wreathed in cobwebs.

Doesn’t every soggy house need at least one dry room?
he wondered nervously.

On Derek’s right were the torn-out guts of an old bed. Near the bed was an old dusty fireplace. Furniture was piled everywhere. Derek found his attention drawn toward an old rolltop desk in the corner. He went to it and pushed the top up. It slid open easily enough. The desk was filled with papers, some of them see-sawing to the ground around him.

How old was this stuff?
he wondered vaguely.

Older than his parents had been when they died. His fingers registered something hard lying amongst the loose pages. He pulled it out. It was a journal of some kind. He fanned open the pages, kicking up a cloud of dust. Derek let out several violent sneezes. He wiped his hand against the back of his pants and peeled the cover back. When he saw who the book belonged to, it nearly dropped from his hands. At the top of page one, in highly stylized script, was the owner’s name.

James Andre Patrick McMurphy

A door somewhere slammed shut. The noise startled Derek so much that he nearly slipped on the loose papers piled at his feet.

Lysander? Sam?

He fought back the urge to call out their names. What if it wasn’t one of them? He crammed the journal down the back of his pants and crept along the hallway and down the stairs to where he kept his things. Someone was in the house. He could hear them clearly, shuffling about in the back somewhere. He gathered what little he had and threw the rest into the green sleeping bag. He tossed that into the closet by the foot of his bed. Derek was under no pretense that he was the world’s smartest person, but he knew enough to cover his tracks. He was pulling on his grease-stained jeans and shirt when he heard footsteps in the room next to him. He withdrew to the front door, his heart climbing into his throat. He pushed it open and closed it carefully behind him. Then he took off at a full run. Less than two paces away, his foot sank into the rotted hole in the front porch and sent him careening ass over teakettle. He tripped mostly because he had caught sight of the police cruiser parked out front, its engine still ticking down.

Despite the searing pain in his shoulder as he landed, he was on his feet a second later, racing past the cruiser. He was heading back to town. He’d rather take his chances there than spend another second in the belly of that rotting house.

“I don’t like to waste a lot of time,” Avery began, rolling up his sleeves. “Do you know how this works?”

Lysander nodded. “Uh, I start babbling incoherently and after an hour you scream Eureka! and tell me why I’m so messed up?”

Avery laughed. “Your parents haven’t told you?”

The confusion in Lysander’s face was obvious.

“Lysander, something happened to you a long time ago, something you’ve buried deep within your subconscious.”

Lysander’s face flushed red. His eyes darted away and he vaguely spotted a marble bust of Bach by the far wall.

“Oh, it’s perfectly normal. That’s the way the mind works. Call it, if you will, a survival mechanism. Everyone has bad memories, but when they’re, say, traumatic, you tend to deny them entirely.”

Avery brought his hands together as though he were squeezing a ball. “A kind of pressure begins to build, you see. In a way, thoughts are things, Lysander. You can’t keep them down. They need free rein—they need to breathe. You get me?”

Lysander nodded as Avery’s hands continued to press against the imaginary ball. “Now, if that pressure becomes too strong, something has to give.”

“Hence my seizures?”

“It seems that way.”

“Hmm.” Lysander scratched his chin thinking. “Other therapists accept this idea of yours? I could check the net, you know.”

Avery laughed again, this time a full and hardy laugh. “Some do,” he said. “But not all. I’m only here to release the pressure. I’m not here to make you a perfect person or to change who you are. I’m just here to help you identify what caused your attack.” Avery leaned back and rested his hands on the plush arms of the chair. “Once we do that, my man, we may have it beat.”

Now it was Lysander’s turn to swallow a laugh. “My man.”

Jack, the sixties just called. They want you back
.

He really was from the sixties, Lysander thought, remembering how he had found Avery in the garage as he arrived, working on his 1966 MGB. Blood red with white racing stripes. Lysander had run a hand along the car’s smooth surface, admiring the dedication it must have taken to nurse the dying beast back to health.

“I’m gonna put you under hypnosis,” Avery was saying.

Lysander was pulled right out of himself. “You’re gonna put me in a trance and then tell me I’m a chicken?”

But no sooner had he asked the question than another, more serious concern occurred to him.

“What if I can’t wake up again? What happens then?”

Avery was rubbing his hands on his knee, fighting a smile. “That doesn’t happen. Can’t happen. But let’s say I put you in trance and then I keel over with a heart attack. Eventually you would fall into a deep sleep and then wake up feeling fine.”

“Would I know what was going on?”

“You would have some awareness of events going on around you, yes. If I coughed, for instance, or if there was a fire—” Avery stopped short. “Like I said, I’m here and the process is perfectly safe.”

Avery leaned forward. His voice was deep and soothing, and Lysander couldn’t help but feel his muscles letting go. “Let me show you what I mean,” Avery said.

As Avery started talking Lysander glanced over his shoulder, wondering idly if the man had ever been married. He hadn’t seen a wedding ring. But his eyes began to grow heavier, his mind spinning in slow circles, and it soon took some effort to follow Avery’s gentle instructions. He was to walk along a flowing stream, Avery had said, and watch the water as it sparkled with bits of sunlight. The water was so serene and peaceful.

Fifteen minutes later, Lysander could barely feel his arms and legs. Within thirty he had reached the deepest parts of his subconscious.

In his mind’s eye, Lysander could see someone up ahead shrouded in mist. Avery’s voice came again, telling him the figure before him was the Wellman—an egoless reflection of Lysander. The well was a bottomless reservoir filled with every thought, desire and emotion Lysander had ever known, and it was the Wellman’s job to draw the pail to the surface, bringing forward whatever was asked for.

“Lysander, I want you now to remember the seizure. I want you to go back to the cause of your seizure. When I count to three you will be there. One…two…three. Tell me what you see?

“Blackness.”

“Lysander, I’d like you to tell me if there is something responsible for your seizure?”

He hesitated. “Yes.”

“Is it okay if we revisit that memory?”

Lysander’s head shook even as the question was being asked.

“It’s important that we do so.” Avery’s voice was calm but insistent.

A crease of tension ran down Lysander’s face. Avery sighed and leaned forward.

“Lysander, you will be completely detached from the images before you. You are an observer. You are a guest. You cannot be harmed. Now, I would like you to go to the earliest incident that is responsible for your seizures. When I count to three, you will go there. One…two…three. Tell me what you see.”

Avery could see the balls of Lysander’s eyes rolling around under his closed lids. In a monotone Lysander said, “I see a village. There are people in the streets. They are yelling. There is a woman in a cart. She is tied with rope and the crowd is yelling at her. She has been tortured. A young girl throws rotten cabbage and it strikes her in the head. The woman turns to shout at the girl and more food is thrown. An older woman tries to stop them. It is her daughter they are hurting, but blood is what the crowd wants and they push the old woman away.”

“Lysander, where are you?” Avery asked, surprised.

“I am in Millingham.”

Avery wiped a handkerchief across his forehead. The muscles in his face were twitching nervously. “What year is it?”

“It is the year of our lord sixteen hundred forty-eight.”

A thin sheen of perspiration started bleeding through Avery’s shirt. “Say again, Lysander. What year is it?” In Avery’s voice: a touch of incredulity mixed with desperation.

“It is the year of our lord sixteen hundred forty-eight. I told you.”

“All right. Thank you.” Out came Avery’s handkerchief again. “Tell me, why are the people so angry with this woman?”

“Children in town have died and she was responsible.”

“How so?”

“She is a midwife. She lives on the edge of town. She has treated several people who took ill. Many of the children she treated have died.”

Avery hesitated. “What is her name?”

“Rebecca Goodman.”

Avery’s jaw slowly came unhinged. “She’s in a cart right now, you said? She’s being brought to prison?”

“No, she will be burned at the stake for witchcraft. The council of elders has already determined her guilt.”

“Not hanged?”

“Hanging’s too quick.”

Avery leaned forward intently. “Lysander, I want you to move forward now to the next important event. Again, you will be an objective observer. Nothing you see can affect you in any way. When I count to three, you will go there. One…two…three. Tell me what you see.”

Lysander squirmed in his chair as though the seat itself had become intolerably hot. After several calming suggestions Avery asked the question again.

“Rebecca Goodman is tied to a wooden pole. Sticks and brush are piled at her feet. She faces the council.”

“Council? The ones who condemned her?”

Lysander nods.

“Go on.”

“Guards ignite the brush underneath the woman. Her face contorts with panic. The heat is unbearable.” Lysander writhed in his chair again. “The flames are rising. The crowd stops hollering. Some look away. The pain…The pain is …”

“Yes, go on.”

“Tiny fissures on the witch’s arms and belly. Her skin is cracking, yawning open and closed like hungry mouths waiting to be fed. Blood! It’s shooting out from the holes in a violent stream. Covering everyone. Oh the smell is awful.”

The piercing scream sent a jolt of electricity up Avery’s spine. The sound had come from Lysander, there was no doubting that, but whether his vocal cords had the range to make such a shriek was uncertain.

Lysander came awake with a violent shudder, gasping for air, his hands clutched tightly about his throat. He fought to control his breathing. A thick layer of mucus rattled around in his chest.

Avery sat in silence while Lysander continued reeling.

“What the hell was that?” Lysander asked.

“Your imagination,” Avery said coolly. “A fantasy. Nothing more. Hey, if we spent time on every flight of fancy the human brain was capable of conjuring up, we’d never get anywhere, would we?” Avery looked at his watch. “Listen, that’s it for today. We’re making progress, though.” He stood up, walked briskly to the office door and held it open. “Next week?”

Lysander stood on wobbly legs, feeling like a guest ushered out before dessert. He stepped through the door and headed up the stairs, alone. When Avery remained in his office, the door closed firmly behind him, Lysander knew for sure that something was wrong. His sense of smell had been the one to register it more than anything. That acrid odor on Avery as he whisked him out of the office so abruptly, the same smell of fear that had emanated from his father that time that Sandy had kept him at bay, growling from little Lysander’s side. Plain old fear, though, didn’t explain it all. Avery was hiding something.

Back at home, Lysander sat in bed with the lights out. He still didn’t feel completely whole yet. A residue from his deep hypnotic state remained. Visions of that woman’s flesh as it turned black and peeled away seemed to be on a looped reel inside his brain.

The idea of a past life had occurred to him, that he couldn’t deny, but he had squashed it mercilessly before it had a chance to germinate. The mind was a complex place that spoke in symbols buried from deep within. You couldn’t take these things at face value. Shirley MacLaine had past lives, not Lysander Shore.