by John Coyne
“Jenny! Jenny, you don’t understand!” Kathy was saying. She spoke softly, as if to reason with her voice.
The museum guard glanced back and forth between the two women.
“What the fuck,” he swore, standing at the edge of the exhibit. “What in hell’s going on here?”
Jennifer squatted in the green underbrush. She felt the heat of the day, the wet air, and smelled the pungent odors of tropical evergreens rotting in the steamy heat of the equatorial jungle, mixed with the sweet smells of fruit and flowers. She could hear the jungle, too, the incessant noise of birds, flying squirrels, and monkeys swinging through the heavy overhang of vines. She saw the hippos wallow in the deep water and a dozen crocodiles slip off the muddy bank and slap the mucky water as they disappeared from sight.
Jennifer was not frightened by the crocodiles or a small herd of woolly mammoths thrashing through the trees and down to the water. She sprang out of the dense wood and, running forward, screeched again at Kathy Dart, startling her.
“Jenny! Jenny!” Kathy screamed, holding out her hands with her palms down, gesturing, whispering, and trying to placate Jennifer. “It’s not me. It’s not me that you want.”
Jennifer bared her teeth, hissed again.
“Jesus H. Christ!” The guard stepped over the low railing and reached for Jennifer.
“Get back!” Kathy Dart told him. “She’s out of control. She doesn’t know where she is.”
“But I know where the fuck she’s going,” the big man mumbled, approaching.
Jennifer hit the guard with her right forearm, knocking the man off his legs and sending him tumbling. He fell backward, hitting one of the poised figures of an early Australopithecus afarensis, knocking the plaster-of-paris hominid into the plastic lake.
In that moment, as she hit him, Jennifer saw Phoebe coming at her from the early morning mist. She had been hurt in a fall from the cliffs and was using now the short branch of a tree to support herself as she dragged her lame leg across the ground. Jennifer spun around to face the other channeler.
“Jennifer, come with us,” Kathy ordered. “We know about Phoebe. We’ve been trying to save you from her. Habasha was there. He knows.”
“Her!” Jennifer thought to herself. “Her!” She did not at that moment remember how to talk, and her anger and anguish came screeching out in the terrified sound of an animal of the jungle. She leaped forward, to the edge of the diorama, and turned on Phoebe Fisher, hooting and screeching, frightened and enraged, inside the prehistoric diorama, in the midst of the jungle heat, Jennifer recalled those moments of her very first life. She knew who she once was, realized, too, what had happened millions of years ago at the dawn of time.
Phoebe raised her steel-tipped cane above her head and rushed Jennifer.
“No!” Kathy Dart shouted, pushing forward and trying to stop Phoebe. The raised cane, like a primitive club, whistled as it cut through the air and struck Kathy Dart. The cane’s sharp point sliced across Kathy’s right cheek and dug itself deep into the thick muscles of her throat. The channeler, gasping for breath, grabbed her own neck in a stranglehold. The blood from her jugular squeezed through her fingers.
A woman screamed. Her screams kept coming and coming. They filled the gallery, echoing, gathering strength, as she ran in hysterical, blind bursts of speed, trying to escape, to flee the gallery like any frightened animal would.
Jennifer remembered. She had come scrambling out of her rubber tree, out of her high nest in the jungle, stirred by the needs of her swollen sex. She had come to mate on the forest floor, followed by the other females of her family, including the mother who had once nursed her from breastless teats, and her own child. She danced off from the first male who came after her, but watched over her shoulder while scrambling quickly on all fours. He kept advancing, screeching and waving his long arms. It was Habasha, Jennifer realized. It was Habasha in his first incarnation, and then, with a speed that she had not anticipated, Habasha mounted her from behind, entered, and ejaculated.
The other males were on her next, fighting with each other to be first. They were screaming, hooting, and dancing in a circle, sniffing her sex. The fig fruit was forgotten as the males kept after her. Pushing and shoving each other, they mounted her again and again, until, exhausted from their efforts, they slipped away into the heavy shade of the trees and slept. They had no fear. They were with their own kind.
None expected that one of their own would attack.
The old female had been chased away from their band for fighting with the others, and now suddenly she had returned. Screeching, she leapt from the tree and landed on all fours. Then, glancing around, she grabbed a mammoth bone and swung it, Jennifer saw again, at her. The bone glanced off her shoulder and hit her face. She howled in pain, and the other females, too, hooted and danced away.
The old female was white haired and smaller than her, less than two and a half feet tall, with a flat, hairy face, and a mouth misshapen by the swat of a saber-toothed tiger’s paw. She kept after her, thumping the long bone on the earth, then raising it up with both arms and swinging wildly. Then without warning, the female turned aside, struck her mother, then killed her child.
She screeched when her child was struck down, and baring her teeth, she charged the cast-off female, knowing in the dimness of her brain that this predator was more dangerous than warthogs or two-tusked deer.
Phoebe Fisher raised her cane to strike. Jennifer screamed, leapt aside, and attacked with her ancient rage. She raked her nails across Phoebe’s face, seized her hair, and jerked the head of the small woman back, exposing her pale white neck.
Her lost spirit possessed her now. She was living out her prehistoric revenge. She screeched and bared her teeth. She would rip out Phoebe’s throat and kill this beast.
“Jenny, no!” Kirk screamed.
He came running through the gallery and lunged at Jennifer, knocking her to the floor. Phoebe Fisher scrambled to her feet, swinging her cane. She caught the black museum guard in the neck. The cane’s sharp tip sliced him like a razor. Without a pause Phoebe stepped over Kathy Dart and lunged again at Jennifer, who was on the floor now and beyond the edge of the water hole diorama.
Kathy Dart stumbled to her feet. She was holding both hands to her cut throat, but the blood kept spreading between her fingers. She reached toward Phoebe, tried to keep her from killing Jennifer.
“Jenny!” she whispered, and her mouth bubbled up a mouthful of blood.
Phoebe struck again, swinging her cane down at both Jennifer and Kirk, who was down on the carpeted floor trying to shield Jennifer. The metal tip of Phoebe’s cane jabbed Kirk’s shoulder. He cried out and rolled away from Jennifer, leaving her momentarily helpless on the gallery floor.
Phoebe, raging, screeching, attacked again, aiming for Jennifer’s face, trying to drive the ice-pick tip deep into her eyes.
Jennifer’s ancient memory summoned their long-ago battle. It was at the African water hole that the first incarnated spirit of Phoebe had struck Jennifer with the mammoth bone, knocking her back into the deep water. She had tumbled and splashed, unable to swim, and then the crocodile had struck, seizing Jennifer’s arm and pulling her deep into the jungle pool.
Jennifer smiled. She knew finally who it was that had been trying to kill her now, before she could remember, before she could gain all of her channeling powers. Jennifer jumped to her feet, avoided a wild swat by the small woman, and seized the cane from Phoebe Fisher, then raised it herself as a weapon. She saw the sudden terror in Phoebe Fisher’s eyes. Jennifer knew that in one swift stroke she could kill her ancient enemy.
Jennifer stood poised, aiming for her mark. The old female had attacked her because she had mated with Habasha, attacked her because the other males had cast her aside. Now Jennifer would avenge the killing of her mother and first offspring.
“No, Jenny,” Kirk pleaded from where he lay, clutching his wounded shoulder.
Jennifer swung the ligh
t cane at the channeler, aiming the steel point at the small woman’s face, and as she did, Phoebe Fisher’s face changed before her. The beautiful, bisque white skin exploded in blood, and Phoebe’s small body jumped back, away from her. Jennifer missed her mark, and then she heard the sound of the museum guard’s pistol shot.
Phoebe Fisher bounced off a plaster-of-paris model and slid over the top of the plastic lake and disappeared into the grove of fig trees. She died in the mists of prehistoric time.
Deep in the heart of Africa, at the dawn of life, she had been the first hominid to kill another. She had come down out of the trees to kill the incarnated spirit of Jennifer Winters.
The death of the first human was murder.
Epilogue
JENNIFER DROVE SOUTH ON the New Jersey Turnpike. It was a month since the museum, and Kirk was still in pain, but she knew how desperately he wanted to get out of New York, at least for a while. She would never get him to live in New York, she thought, but so what? She wasn’t sure she wanted to, either. Not in this lifetime anyway.
It was over. Phoebe was dead. Kathy Dart was in the hospital, as was Simon. She had not killed him, after all. She was thankful for that. But poor Tom. He had been just an innocent victim, killed by Phoebe in her lust for revenge. But there was no innocent victim, Jennifer knew now. Whatever happened in life was simply the playing out of one’s destiny.
At the dawn of time Phoebe had killed her, and in another life she had avenged that act. She had once been a poor black girl in the south who had jumped to her suicide, and Phoebe had been the white man. At every incarnation their spirits had returned to seek revenge on the other.
Spontaneously, she reached out and touched Kirk, let her right hand linger on the inside of his thigh.
“Happy?” she asked.
He nodded. “I’m happy you’re with me, and I’m happy to be getting away from that place.” Without turning around, he jerked his head back toward the city.
Jennifer glanced in the rearview mirror. She could see across the marshy industrial flatlands of New Jersey and the lower west side of the city. She saw the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and Battery Park City, both cast in the deep orange glow of the setting sun. It would be dark in another hour, but by then they’d be far from New York. Safe.
She touched him again to reassure herself. “Thank you,” she said softly.
“Why?” he asked.
“You know why.” She longed to kiss him, to be in his arms, and she almost suggested that they stop, that they find a motel right off the highway, but she knew he wanted more distance between them and the city.
Jennifer took a deep breath and kept her eyes trained on the expressway, at the rush of cars and trucks on the turnpike. Newark Airport was to their right and planes were landing and taking off, gliding onto distant runways, their colored landing lights flickering in the sunset. The air was warmer than it had been, and they were headed south, away from all her tragedies. Everything would be all right again.
She glanced again into the rearview mirror of the small rental car and saw Margit sitting quietly in the backseat, enjoying the drive. She caught Jennifer’s eyes in the mirror and smiled.
“What?” Kirk asked again.
Jennifer shook her head. “Nothing. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Hey, come on, don’t give me that!”
“I love you,” she said instead, then weaved the car smoothly through the traffic.
“You don’t really believe any of that stuff, do you?” he asked her.
“Of course not, darling, it’s just a silly game, like reading your horoscope in the newspaper.”
Kirk smiled and seemed to relax.
Jennifer reached over again and gently stroked the inside of his thigh, letting her fingers enjoy the touch of him. She could not see his eyes, but she knew they were the same beautiful sweet eyes of her Egyptian prince, the same eyes as her brother Danny. It was not necessary, she realized, for her to share her new knowledge with him. She would take care of him, now that he had come back into her life.
Someday, perhaps, when they were older, she might tell him how they had been together once in Egypt, and before that in other lifetimes. In some they had been lovers, and at other times a sister and brother.
It wasn’t necessary to tell him everything now. They were together again, and soon, she knew, they would be husband and wife. Jennifer glanced around. Margit was gone from the backseat, but Jennifer knew the other woman’s spirit would never leave her. Just as Kirk had returned, Margit, her lost mother, had returned in this life and would come again in future lifetimes.
Jennifer watched the traffic and the approaching darkness and let her thoughts wander. In the close warmth of the front seat, she smiled, happy and at peace. She wondered about the other lives she might have lived. So far she had remembered lives of retaliation and revenge, yet there must have been happy lives as well. She sat up and regripped the steering wheel of the car.
Perhaps in other incarnations she had been a woman of importance, a high priestess, even a princess or queen. Someday she would remember those lives, all those glorious lifetimes when she wasn’t doing battle with the spirit of Phoebe Fisher.
At that thought, Jennifer’s heart soared with anticipation. Her life was not over, but her days of anguish were.
“Why are you smiling?” Kirk asked, watching her.
Jennifer kept watching the expressway. She shook her head and said, “I’m just happy, that’s all, and in love.” The nightmares of her primitive past were over. Phoebe’s spirit was gone from her life. Because the channeler’s death had not come at her hands, she had finally escaped Phoebe’s vengeful spirit.
Yes, Jennifer thought, she would ask Kathy Dart to help her. By making contact with her higher consciousness, with her unlimited soul, she would use the wisdom of her reincarnations to chart a long and happy life with this wonderful young man, her ancient lover.
It was all so obvious now, Jennifer thought. Her life was a perfect puzzle, and she had always been meant, from time eternal, to be on that cold highway in Minnesota so Kirk might find her. It was all God’s plan.
No, she realized. It wasn’t God. She had made the long journey herself. She had found her own way to salvation. She was, as Kathy Dart had said, her own god. They were all gods, she thought, with their own destinies. Everyone worked out his own karma.
Then Jennifer reached over and flipped on the headlights of the car. The high beams lit up the New Jersey Turnpike and cut a path of light into the dark night, and at that moment on the long dark expressway, Jennifer Winters knew she could see forever.
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