by Truddi Chase
“I started to argue with Norman,” the woman said, “because I just couldn’t believe him. Then he asked me, ‘Why are you doing that with your hair?’ At first I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then I could see a black shape above the front of my forehead. It moved. I didn’t get scared, Stanley; it was happening at a distance, too far away from me in my mind. Later I made sense of it. Because of the distanced, removed feeling, and since looking at Norman through my bangs caused a distortion of vision anyway, the black shape may have seemed to belong to someone else . . . except that it wasn’t my hand that was moving. How do I explain this to you? At that moment, I didn’t seem to have appendages of my own: no feet, no hands, just my mind!”
Abruptly, the woman’s face relaxed and took on a smoother line. Her eyes brightened. Stanley heard a child’s voice.
“Norman got angry,” the young voice said. “We gave him our teddy bear and we said, ‘Isn’t the bear cute?”’
It was the voice of a child and yet it was not. Stanley didn’t think he’d heard it before.
“We told Norman that it was our bear. He didn’t know what to do. He just sat there and held it and said, ‘Oh, jesus christ,’ over and over. And we sat back down on the floor and giggled and the look on Norman’s face was so silly. We told him how the little bear’s tummy was stuffed with ground nut shells instead of cotton and that we liked the bear a lot. We couldn’t stop giggling, no matter how angry Norman looked. We told him Page had taken the bear to sleep with her the other night. Norman just said, ‘Whose bear is it? Who am I talking to now?”’
“Charlie,” Elvira’s more mature voice broke in, “nobody here is going to tell Norman their name. He’d laugh.”
At Elvira’s words, there were different voices and, interwoven with them, there was the cadence, heavy with sadness and then umbrage. Some of the voices were testy and argumentative, dealing with immediate problems. Others were weighted with remembered pain. As things grew more confused for Stanley, the woman still sat there, empty-eyed and seemingly oblivious.
Stanley felt energy surging through the studio. It didn’t surprise him, with the number of Troop members appearing and reappearing. Again, a child spoke.
“Norman put his head in his hands then, and his eyes looked funny, as if he would cry. We felt very bad about that, we don’t want to make anyone cry. Norman sat pinned to the sofa, unable to look away from us all, not even knowing what he was looking at. Will he ever? Will people always think we are one?”
“Does everyone want to remain separate?” Stanley asked.
“Would you want to be mushed up with your next-door neighbor or your own brother?” Twelve’s voice was faint and then the woman surfaced, shredding Kleenex in her lap. “The bear,” she said, “was in my hands, that’s all I know. Norman seemed anxious to change the subject, steer it away from the bear. He went into something about mind relaxation. He thinks we need it. He said that some people are so good at it that they are able to see a white light. I told Norman I’d already been there. I never told you, Stanley, but in one of the sessions, I went up into the white light. It was blinding, fierce, like the center core of my being. All of a sudden I wasn’t here, but truly, in the center of my own brain. It was as if I wandered around up there, content and laughing to myself. I knew that I didn’t have to come back.”
Stanley stared at the woman, who was explaining how she’d attained, alone, what religious scholars and others down through the ages had yearned for. Most of them had failed.
“Tell me,” he said, “more of what it seemed like.”
She shrugged. “First of all, there wasn’t any ‘seemed to’ about it. It was quite real, it was happening to me. Or rather I was a part of it. A space, without beginning or end. So vast, so empty . . . so bright. White. I was completely alone up there, inside the essence of myself. Under the circumstances, I should ask you if I’m crazy.”
“Do you know what that white light you encountered in the session is associated with? Do you know what many people believe it means?”
“Norman told me what he thinks it is. I have another view. Norman says it’s ‘spiritual.’” The woman spit the word out. “Putting yourself in touch with the almighty.”
“Or,” Stanley prompted, wanting to hear her view.
“It’s got nothing to do with god, but the power of my own mind. I have to save me, no one else can do it for me.”
“People have experienced what you’ve just described. Do you know what was done to some of them?”
“They were burned as witches,” she said.
“The church, religious leaders in past centuries, were afraid of those who could reach such a state. But they weren’t all burned. There were those who, having finally achieved it, the white light you speak of . . . do you know what happened to those people?”
“They became fanatics? Religious fanatics?”
“No,” he said, “those who weren’t burned were later canonized as saints.”
“You couldn’t pay me to be a saint.”
“Do you,” he asked, “know what a medium is?”
“Yes. Someone who communes with spirits.”
“Aside from that, a medium is someone who does consciously what you do subconsciously.”
“I don’t understand.”
The voice suddenly was alert with a child’s innocence. Stanley and Marshall had discussed the phenomenon of the quick and fully developed changes. They’d agreed that aside from that, one or more specific adult Troop members of undetermined identity could at times speak through certain other Troop members.
“The yoga positions,” Stanley said, ignoring this change as he had the others, “your ability to withdraw so totally from the world around you. Your powers of concentration, of complete focus; they’re all a part of the same general abilities. Some might even call them gifts.”
“You’re saying I do subconsciously, what mediums and yoga practitioners do consciously. I do all those things without being aware of it?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. Some researchers feel that such a gift may be the basis for multiplicity.”
He didn’t add that he’d begun to suspect that Twelve, not the woman, was the source of the “gift.” Such an identification could drive Twelve into deeper cover, and he needed her, up front and verbal. If his powers of detection were working, Twelve had been very verbal tonight.
He called for a break and went down the hall to the lavatory, thinking of Lisa and Jeannie and the Troops. Similarities and differences. Jeannie had had three selves. Lisa would probably finish therapy with nineteen. After tonight, with the unknown voices and the newest manuscript pages, the Troops were probably around ninety in number. All three subjects were super-achievers with either superior or superintelligence. Jeannie had wanted, sought, integration. He didn’t know what Lisa would decide. The Troops, steel backbones and iron minds to the fore, would never agree to it. Jeannie, Lisa, and the Troops all had the same problems with electrical energy. Lisa’s friends claimed she was a “hands-off” TV repairman, that she could “command” perfect picture and sound, or static and blur. All three subjects evidenced precognitive “gifts,” but tonight’s “white light” had come as a shock.
Intelligence aside, was there one, indisputable commonality among the three women? His mind fastened immediately on a single element: immense rage.
Stanley put cold water on his face, unbuttoned his shirt-sleeves and held his wrists under the faucet for a long time.
Back in the studio, the woman was seated on the floor cushions, her face blank, and the small sound just then was not quite a giggle. But right away, Twelve’s slightly older laughter echoed, over a pleased, unfrightened smile.
“Oooh,” Twelve said. “My head, my head.” She turned her head to the left and pointed to her nose. “My head is filled up to here, Stanley. I feel so light, so floaty. Drunk. I feel drunk.”
&nbs
p; Twelve had often tried in the past to describe the feeling of imbalance the woman complained about. Stanley recognised Twelve’s voice now, even if she wouldn’t give him her name.
“There are so many of you here tonight, it’s no wonder you feel that way,” Stanley said.
“Yes.” Twelve smiled and swayed on the pillow, trying to acclimate herself.
Stanley caught brief glimpses of the woman, confused and obviously frustrated, as she heard Twelve’s voice.
“Stanley,” Twelve whispered. “The barn. I sit behind it, facing the fields, the apple orchard. Against my back there are splinters and the heat of the barn’s old wood planks. It’s August, a very hot day. There’s sunlight on my knees, I see it, my kneecaps look polished, tanned. The weeds next to me, we used to call them elephant ears, their leaves are huge and green. I want to hide under them, where the earth is thick and black. I’ve been out here a long time, the stepfather is calling again. I don’t want to go.”
Twelve’s voice was replaced by another, just as young but less feminine in tone and more “reportive” than “experiencing.”
“We gotta go, when he calls you gotta go, there’s a narrow, worn flight of steps inside the barn at the back. It’s a long way up those stairs to the loft. There’s hay up there, the smell of it, dust floating in the sunlight that comes in from a big opening in the wall. The stepfather has the grey cat by the scruff of the neck, the kid under his arm. He walks up the staircase, his shirt smells sweaty like he hasn’t washed in a couple of days.”
“Harness,” Twelve whimpered, “I see the harness hanging on the wall up here, harness.”
For several moments, there was nothing but the sound of Twelve’s weeping.
“My tummy hurts,” Twelve said, “the way he yanks me up. The cat is mad, it’s yowling. I hate the cat. He’ll start doing things to it.”
“What will he do to the cat?”
“It’s hard for me,” Twelve said. “The words aren’t here.”
Stanley looked closely at her, recognising her voice and features, yet wondering why she seemed so different. Then he knew. Twelve was speaking as the six-year-old she’d been at the second farmhouse.
“He’s got the harness ready but he hurts the cat first,” Twelve said. “It’s a boy cat. When we say no, he sits on us so we can’t move, then he puts the cat on our chest. He makes the cat’s little red finger come out and then he pinches it. The cat scratches me. I’m bloody all over myself.”
“Dumb game,” Lamb Chop broke in. “I don’t like being buried in the hay up there in the loft, it frightens me when it gets up over my head and pokes my eyes! Oh,” she wept, “he’s got his foot in my back, he won’t let me up.”
“The floorboards are weak,” Twelve muttered, “and it’s a long way down. No one is supposed to go up here.”
“It’s really dumb,” Lamb Chop sobbed. “Sometimes when he’s got his foot in my back, he walks that way. Dumb!”
“What?” Stanley looked perplexed and Lamb Chop’s small face wrinkled in an effort to convey meaning.
“Like if you had a skate on one foot and none on the other,” she said. “The harness hangs on a hook on the wall. And there’s an old wooden chair.”
The sight of the chair made Lamb Chop cry and shake her head. “Hook,” she said. “There’s a hook in one of the timbers, way far up in the ceiling, over the center of the barn.” She was crying harder and Stanley knew that the terrified moans and softer voice were coming from Rabbit.
“The stepfather puts us in the harness. He stands on the chair, hooks the harness to the pulley. The pulley moves us, high up, swinging out over the barn floor. I hate him. It’s a long way down. Are all games like this?”
“That’s all,” Lamb Chop said firmly, but Stanley hadn’t spent over nine months with this client for nothing.
“Who comes out now?” he asked.
With a flurry of cheekbones, Elvira emerged. She opened her mouth wide. The words were those of the small child she had been, back at the second farmhouse.
“I donwanna, I donwanna, I donwanna,” she screeched.
“What does he want you to do?”
“The pink thing,” Elvira said more calmly. “I won’t touch it. I won’t touch the cat’s, either. The stepfather gets mad. When he goes in to lunch, I decide right then, ‘Good-bye, cat.’ I drowned it. The stepfather was too big to kill. I thought about doing it a lot, with the gun or the knife, but he was too big. So I drowned the cat.”
It was a child’s logic. Stanley accepted it. “And the one whom the stepfather forced to have sex?”
“She was here,” Elvira said, “but Catherine sent her away. Sixteen has been driving Sister Mary to the edge for weeks. It was too much. Sister Mary can’t stand anyone who says right out that they’re fond of sex.” Snap, snap, went Elvira’s fingers to an unheard beat.
“Sixteen can’t stay?” Stanley asked.
“No,” Elvira said. “Sixteen is scared. Sister Mary threatened to have Nails break her arms. What Sister Mary doesn’t know is that Sixteen is only camouflage for Rachel, who is more sexual than Sixteen ever thought of being. Rachel has disappeared, too. She knows that if Sister Mary won’t accept Sixteen, she’ll never accept her.”
Elvira’s features shifted and Twelve looked up at Stanley with a fuller face and younger eyes.
“We’re growing up, you know, some of us. Not Rabbit.” Twelve made a motion, belt-buckle high. “Rabbit will never be any taller than that. Her nose will always be pressed . . . right there.” Twelve made another motion, at crotch level.
Suddenly Twelve burst out crying. “The swallows. They nest in the barn. Beautiful, free-wheeling things they are, with long tails. What happens to them if there’s a fire?”
Again, the flurry of cheekbones and Elvira’s older eyes. “I did it,” she said. “I got out of my bed one night and I set fire to the damn barn. Just like that. Good-bye, barn.” She waited for Stanley’s comment, but he waited for her to continue.
“I wanted,” she said, “to drive the stepfather out into the open. The barn was too convenient a cover for the bastard. Sister Mary Catherine just stood there that night, watching the flames. The mother told her to go into the house, bring out anything she wanted to save. They were afraid the house would burn, too.”
“Where was the woman, my client, all that time?”
“When the first-born died at two years old,” Elvira said, “the woman started evolving. But it wasn’t until the night of the fire that she was actually born—Mean Joe’s shoulder is her birthplace.”
After the session, they started out through the snowy parking lot where their respective cars sat covered in ice.
“There’s something I’ve wondered about for a long time,” Stanley said. “A number of you seem, at times, to read my mind. How do you do that?”
“It isn’t very nice, is it?” Twelve smiled. “At least that’s what Sister Mary Catherine says. When one of us starts to do that, she says, ‘Get out of there.’ Because we don’t read minds, Stanley. We get right into them. We’ve been in yours.”
THIRTY-SIX
CHRISTMAS Eve. The night had come.
“Isn’t the snow lovely?” Lamb Chop stuck out her tongue to catch the flakes falling past the open warehouse window.
“Hurry up,” said Rabbit. “I’ve got to wrap my last package. Twelve is going to help me.”
“Close the damn window!” Sewer Mouth yelled from behind them.
“Do yours wiggle?” Lambchop struggled with the window sash. “Mine wiggle and I’m worried the trip will hurt their brains.”
“Twelve says they don’t have brains, any of them.”
“Good,” Lambchop said. “Then the stepfather won’t feel lonesome.”
Brown wrapping paper and cord littered the loft as the small ones hurried to fetch their treasures from all the hidden corners. They were reminded of the
old silver thimble the mother used to hide in so many places and the hours they’d spent looking for it.
“I was good at that game,” Elvira said.
“All games are not so simple.” Lamb Chop snipped the cord on a small package.
There were over ninety persons gathered in the warehouse loft. They did not all know each other. Milk meant for the little ones bubbled on the hot plate, fragrant and steaming. A bottle of scotch had been opened by one of the adults and the smell of it was potent in the air. Along the woman’s veins, something just as potent sang and hummed, alerting her to the change in the overall Troop attitude. Sister Mary was the most obvious part of that change. She sat on the floor, knees bent, working away on the last manuscript revisions. The beads were nowhere in sight.
Everywhere the woman looked, she saw concerted effort, heard the murmur of voices, everyone bent to a task she could not define. The warehouse occupants had divided themselves into two groups: adults and children. The woman struggled to catch what was being said, but what she heard was silence.
“Nails, what do you think of all this?” Catherine asked. “Such excitement. I can feel the ones who haven’t yet emerged. It’s like a stampede again, in the woman’s head.”
“You got it,” Nails said and flicked her ashes. She missed the ashtray.
Lady Catherine Tissieu, busy numbering pages, looked up, ready to object, and thought better of it.
Far back in the cavernous, dim loft, a weight shifted. Time was broken almost violently and then suspended for them all. In the far corner, where shadows cloaked him in a mighty darkness, one of the adults smiled and he raised his glass to the words. For they were his own.
“Do y’ know me now?”
Sister Mary Catherine’s hand paused over the manuscript pages. She tilted her head and listened. So did the woman. But while Sister Mary remained on the floor, wrapped in her black habit, the woman became intellectually galvanised. Slowly, she got up and moved through the loft, paying attention to none but the voice in her head.
