Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5)
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FORTY-ONE
Lord Harrelson found himself and his wife being ushered to their seats for the magic show by one of the staff.
Seconds after settling into their chairs, and making sure they were presentable to roaming eyes, Lord Harrelson heard a familiar sound, being an avid watcher of the Execution Channel. He gazed to his left and found one of the house maids dangling from a rope. He clenched his wife’s arm for moral support. When Lady Harrelson looked over, she gasped. “What’s that about?”
“I’d say one of the staff has a penchant for high drama.”
Lady Harrelson straightened her hair. “With enough practice, she could pass for a royal.”
They returned their attention to the show that was commencing.
***
The basketball-size sphere hovered before Lady Harding at eye level, two others floated slightly above the first one to accommodate those seated in the second row.
Anyone close enough to the sphere to see into its mirrored surface clearly, saw their past just as clearly; though only the most emotionally charged highlights, the people, places, and things they hadn’t been able to let go of, which haunted them. The longer they stared into the sphere, the faster the electrical charge on those prior incidents, either too horrific or too splendid to forget, dissipated, the quicker they were free of them and able to move on.
By the gasps emanating from his audience, Rupert realized, the magic trick was working better than ever. The instant the spheres drifted out of range of the onlookers, the spell broke, and they erupted in thunderous applause.
As this was Lady Harding’s party, Rupert hesitated before his host, unwilling to move on just yet. The trick was straight forward enough. It required priming the audience’s minds with prior tricks that coaxed them to shift dominance to the right side of their brain, the pattern recognition part. From there, the hypnosis could be heightened greatly, the rational mind no longer dominant, no longer policing to protect the subject from suggestion. Rupert had trained himself to talk in such a manner as to hypnotize those in the room even before the spheres came within range. He could judge the depth of their trance by how much they were blinking. The vacant look in their faces. The hushes in the room. The stilled breaths.
But this time was different. He could see in the spheres what his subjects saw. Maybe he had managed to hypnotize himself, as well, and was either hallucinating a psychic connection with them, or had opened the door to psychic abilities in himself not accessible from his normal waking state. Either way, the effect was spectacular. He would have to remember to hypnotize himself along with his subjects from now on.
He was slightly ashamed to be peeking into secrets never intended to be shared. Mercifully, anyone else who looked into the spheres saw only their pasts and futures, never anyone else’s. Would this window to their souls give him leverage with these affluent people, now that age was robbing him of his riches, or just turn them against him all the faster now that he depended on their kindness more than ever? Certainly, he would have to play his cards right.
Rupert held his expression in check as if it was all he could do to levitate the spheres, as if he didn’t have energy or concentration for anything else, in order not to alert his audience he was seeing what they were seeing. With Lady Harding, this proved especially difficult. The woman’s mind was filled with electrically charged incidents. If she let go of them all at once, she’d overload the electrical grid for the entire country.
Electing to help Lady Harding focus in on one episode, Rupert guided her to the item she might be able to let go of today in the timeframe with which they had to work. He struggled to settle her mind after the sphere had set so many particles of mud adrift in the waters of her unconscious. Right before his own eyes, he was becoming a very unique kind of psychic healer, using magic tricks to focus the mind and shut down the rational dimension of the psyche, and hypnotic suggestion to boost his healing prowess, having never thought to do so before. Maybe he had a healthy retirement in store for himself after all.
Rupert steered Lady Harding’s psyche towards infancy, showed her screaming for a mother that refused to breastfeed her in any predictable way, and whose breast-milk, once delivered, failed to satisfy. The baby spit out the bitter extrusions laced with alcohol and stress hormones. He showed her how her inability to get satisfying oral gratification at such a young age had led to her current habit of always having to have something in her mouth. The eternal hunger could never be sated, no matter how many fine foods and fine wines she brought to her lips. The overloading of her liver and kidneys, moreover, made it hard to maintain homeostasis. She surged amid violent mood swings, swung pendulum-like between sanity and insanity, dream and reality, the bitterest and sweetest of lives. Lady Harding wept with realization.
She clapped as Rupert continued down the row of mesmerized faces, making sure to include the higher hierarchy of help who gathered in the kitchen to discuss their battle plans for the day: Irene, Frumpley, Rumfeld, Aggie, Wilder, Thornton, Dyspepsia, Minerva. If he intended to make his way on to the Harding staff, he’d have to go through them as much as Lady Harding. Best he had something on each of them.
“What’s that, sweetheart? Stop distracting me when I have my balls dangling in the breeze.” He got laughs from those outside the hypnotic radius of the drifting spheres. The senile Rupert Red-Nose was surfacing when he least expected it. He was doing so well, too. He was in the zone. Surely, he was immune from madness during these times, if at no other. But he couldn’t make the illusion of his wife standing behind him, nagging him, disappear. He couldn’t stop turning from regarding her in his peripheral vision to addressing her head on. She was just so beautiful, and he hadn’t been able to remember her this vividly since she was alive. He couldn’t waste the opportunity to be close to her again simply to hold on to sanity. The crowd was laughing, what’s more. It gave the ones outside the radius of the spheres something to do besides await their turn again. Maybe he’d incorporate the interludes into the act, come to think of it. He’d go with it, and hope for the best. He turned to face Aida, his dead wife, looking more radiant, more alive, more present than ever.
“Aida, honey.” When they saw his hands outstretched to her instead of managing the levitating balls, they thought he was showing off, and clapped harder. They wanted to see him manage two dramas at once. They didn’t realize he was simply succumbing to one of his senile lapses. Maybe he’d hit on the one floor show that could accommodate his dementia in stride.
“I don’t want to hear about your affairs!” Rupert shouted at Aida. The laughs from all over the room sounded both louder and more distant as his mind telescoped him away from them, focusing in ever more tightly on Aida.
Rupert flopped down on a crate, unable to support his own weight under the crushing despair. (They clapped as much for the magic as the melodrama.) “How could you have so little heart?” he sobbed. “What do you mean the big-hearted are prone to heart attacks?! What kind of answer is that? I don’t care if you went to the doctor and he told you you needed to have a much smaller heart if you planned to live another month. I assure you, you misunderstood his directions.”
Wiping back tears with his knuckles, Rupert said, “What if I buy you a big diamond ring? What do you mean you’ll use it to cut the glass on the French doors leading to my safe? What could you possibly take from me that you haven’t stolen already?” Rupert looked up at his wife. “You don’t want my dignity, I never had any to give? You want my stocks and bonds to prop up your side of the sagging mattress? You want to kill me with lies! What do you mean, the truth will do just fine?”
He stood up, meaning to confront the woman he had so loved, and had lived to do nothing but torment him, but she was gone. So was the modest home that had served as a stage for their little drama. In their place was his beloved dog, and the park in which he was walking him. He strolled beside the mutt as it tugged at his leash, and he fought to control him. The animal yielded finally.
“Why doesn’t he listen to me?” Rupert said, speaking Lord Chumley’s line for him, pretending to be hard of hearing by putting his hand up to his ear. “It’s not a command, old man, I’m teaching him to relax to the mellifluous sounds of my alliterations. (Laughs). “Dreadful dog… drink… didgeridoo,” he said. “You royals are a bit dense, aren’t you?” (Laughs) “Oh, bugger you. You lords and ladies could learn to pull the plugs out of your asses, try a sense of humor on for size!”
Rupert winced as Lord Chumley kicked his dog. “Come here! Don’t let him treat you like that. If there’s anyone’s going to kick you, it’s going to be me. That right is reserved!” (Laughs.)
Rupert’s agitated mind settled, and he was back in the room, entertaining Lady Harding and the rest of the royal orchestra of regally clad fools, surprised to find them giving him a standing ovation. “Dear, dear. To think, Rupert, you feared your growing senility was going to hold you back in life.” The audience roared. Little did they know, he wasn’t kidding.
Later, Rupert pulled Minerva to the side, desperate for an explanation. “What just happened?” he asked.
“The vortex got a hold of you.”
“The what?” Rupert realized his questioning tone also conveyed far too much judgment.
“Don’t you feel the energy flowing through you, man? Overheating you from inside, until it burns through the blockages in your body?”
“I do feel like I’m burning up,” Rupert confessed, rubbing the sweat on the back of his neck with his handkerchief.
“Here. Take this.” She handed him a DVD with a tai chi master on the cover, advertising routines of two hours in length. “Practice every day until you can learn to control the energies flowing through you, until you can make the vortex work for you, instead of you working for it.”
As she ambled on, Rupert mumbled to himself, “Looks like you’re not the only one soft in the head around here.”
***
ONE HOUR EARLIER
“What are you doing in here?” Minerva used her finger the way a Catholic nun used her ruler. “You just can’t walk in as you please!” The man just kept carting in handfuls of DVDs with the picture of a tai chi master on the cover, advertising various routines. “Has everyone around this place gone entirely daft?” She turned the DVD over and read the label. “Hmm. Might help with my gout.”
The peddler came in and dropped his final pile of DVDs on the table. There must have been hundreds of copies. Minerva pushed the whole lot back towards him. “What makes you think I need a couple hundred copies of this DVD?”
“It’s to help you manage the vortex energies,” he said, breathing hard, but not missing a beat.
“How do you know about that?”
“Ermies Paragon, at your service.” He extended his hand for her to shake, which she refused.
“Get your dirty hands away from me.”
“Just think if everyone on your staff were properly trained with a few hours of tai chi exercise each day to manage the vortex energies flowing through them. Think how much less in-fighting and getting on one another’s nerves with the vortex amplifying your fears and anxieties, your hatreds and jealousies, instead of playing up your pleasures and joys.”
He could probably tell from the fire in her eyes he was getting to her, despite the stony façade. “Indeed, what might you be able to do working in harmony with it? During rehearsal, you saw what that old fool Rupert, the half-assed magician, could do. Imagine dusting without having to touch the duster, just by thinking about it. Imagine making a bed in another room with amplified telekinetic abilities, as you enjoyed a fire and a good book in the next room.”
“Shush,” she said, conspiratorially, hearing footsteps coming. “How much for one?”
“One! I know you’re not thinking of making copies for your friends. The original will self-destruct at the first attempt; special technology. Besides, you wouldn’t deprive a man of his livelihood, would ya?”
“Don’t suppose I have time for them to learn the routine before sharing the disk, either. I have an alien invasion to prepare for.” She sighed. “Fine, how much for the lot of discs?”
“Twenty dollars apiece, times two hundred, now let’s see, what is that?” He made a show of calculating on his fingers, no doubt to give her time for the figure to settle in her mouth without choking her before articulating it himself.
“Four thousand dollars!” She exclaimed. “A king’s ransom. You take me for rich?”
“We have convenient payment plans.”
“How convenient?”
“Say, a hundred fifty a month? Besides, they’ll be paying out of their pockets for the privilege.”
“That they will, you can bank on that.” She hemmed and hawed; it was still a princely figure to put between herself and her sense of duty. But the damn footsteps were nearly upon them. “Quick, help me stow these. I can’t just fop them on everyone who comes into the room. I have to wait for the right time, for the window of opportunity. Not everyone’s up to discussing the vortex unless they get a good shock to their system. Then, maybe… when they’re desperate to try anything to settle their nerves.”
“We’ll stow them in the cabinet in the next room,” Ermies suggested helpfully. “The one with a lock and a key which only you have.”
“You’re remarkably well informed.”
“Just a lucky guess. Extrapolating from what I know of a woman in your position,” he said, playing to her ego. Well, she didn’t mind her ego being played to, considering her doubts about this big decision he was foisting on her.
“Done.” She grabbed one of the boxes and gestured for him to do the same. “Well, hurry, I’m not getting any younger.”
“Says you. You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever laid eyes on.”
“Stop that lying or I’ll think you really did sell me a bill of goods.”
They got the DVDs stowed in time for Rake to enter the kitchen, looking wild-eyed and worked up. Minerva shooed Ermies out the back door, and, straightened her hair, which just got worse the more she played with it, thanks to a hellish amount of static electricity coming off her all of a sudden.
She stepped in front of Rake as he was getting ready to poke his head in the next room. “What’s got your dander up?”
“Just keeping an eye on Irene. I want to make sure she has no more of her attacks all alone.”
“In this house, she can barely have one to any less than a packed room and a standing ovation for the unsurpassed histrionics. Now you get back to your duties, forget about this nonsense.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She swore she saw him smile as he turned his back to her. Maybe he was relieved to find Irene in no trouble. Considerate lad, for all his stupidity.
FORTY-TWO
“Pssst!”
“What are you doing here, you little rat? After a slice of cheese, I bet.” Irene reached under the butcher block table to one of the shelves, pulled out a rat trap with some cheese, and shoved it in his face. “Here.”
Jaap stole the cheese from the trap with a sleight of hand that would have impressed Houdini, and, after he swallowed it whole, smiled impishly back at her.
“Fine. I’ll poison you with the spoiled leftovers.” She stuck her nose in the fridge and sniffed the bowls covered in plastic. Satisfied, she shoved one of the bowls in front of him, a wooden ladle, and then went back to ferreting out even nastier concoctions towards the back of the fridge.
Jaap ate whatever she put in
front of him with a greedy relish. “I suppose you’re better than a dog for gobbling up leftovers,” she said. “Less shedding.”
“First I’m a rat, now I’m a dog. I see I’m coming up in the world.”
She huffed. “Surprised you can still wag your tongue after all that eating.”
He stuck his tongue out at her.
“A lot of tongue and a lot of cheek, I see,” she said. “Well, I can’t keep you. We aren’t allowed any pets.”
“Keep me? Well, I never. I expect to be paid for my company!”
Irene laughed so hard she had to reach for some water. “Well, any doubts you’re the male of the species under those baggy clothes have done flown the coop,” she crowed. Feeling light headed, she reached for one of her chocolates. But when she stuck her hand underneath the overhead counter, the slot was empty. Trying not to panic—but getting all red in the face and breathy all the same—she checked in the shadows between the tins against the tiled wall to the back of the counter. Nothing there. This wasn’t like her to not keep herself restocked for emergencies. She could forget her own name before she could forget to place a chocolate in one of those hiding places.
“Looking for your bonbons?” Jaap said.
“Why, you scandalous, scheming, sooty-faced scamp. You hid my chocolates?!”
“Now, cool down before you melt all that lard clear off you,” Jaap said, hands held out defensively. “Just so happens I have the perfect solution to all that sweet-toothed neediness.”
Irene held her broom like Thor’s hammer, fully prepared to unleash the wrath of the gods on him. Seizing the window of opportunity that was closing rapidly, Jaap reached under the butcher block table into a pool of shadow he’d utilized to his advantage. He pulled out what looked like a tightly rolled tablecloth.