by Smith, Skye
"Take a glove off and touch me with your hand."
"Oh no, not now. Our auras have just stoked each other. You felt the strength. It may hurt you," she warned.
"Later, then. For now I must try to teach you a meditational technique to lull your aura to sleep. Is there another person close by that can be here with you?"
"Not right now, why?"
"What I propose is a form of hypnosis. It will put you into a state of heightened suggestibility. I am a man, and you are a desirable woman. It would be best if there were someone else present to protect you against any inappropriateness on my part."
"I trust you"
"You shouldn't," he said, "there is a reason I have my robes bundled covering my lap."
"Oh," she said wrinkling her nose. "that. I understand. Okay. Stand up and open your robes, I'll be right back." She took off one glove and went into her bathroom and returned with a condom, and then put the monk beyond his sexual distraction with one stroke. She immediately grabbed his elbow to balance him and help him to sit back down. "There, better?"
"Yes, thank you," he sighed in a faint voice. He felt decidedly mumsy. "Umm, are there blinds or drapes to those windows? We need a darker room."
"My bedroom. Come with me. Do you want me sitting or lying?"
"Sitting in your most comfortable seat, and warm. I suppose that is no problem with that ski jacket you are wearing."
"Insulated clothing blocks the aura. So does bathing, like, in the hot tub."
"Of course, you would have a hot tub in this house," he said softly, "this is Lotus Land, the West Coast. Now sit, take some deep breaths, and relax." He pulled a leather thong from around his neck and held up the crystal that was attached to it. "What I am going to do is get the conscious you to relax so that I can speak directly to your subconscious without being filtered out. Once I know I am speaking to your subconscious, I will leave it instructions on how to make your aura sleep. I will also leave it instructions on how to make it leap to life. Do you want me to continue?"
"That is all you are going to do?"
"That is more than enough for our first session. It may even take multiple sessions to get that far. Are you ready?" His voice got deeper and he was causing his crystal to twinkle just above her eye level.
* * *
She woke when the monk told her to, and she felt as wonderfully awake as he told her she would. "How long was I asleep?" she asked.
"About a half an hour all together. I used a technique called segmentation to almost bring you out, and then deeper, and out, and deeper. That took most of the time."
"So that segmentation is like resonance, but for hypnosis?"
"I suppose so, yes. Now pay attention. I chose two uncommon actions as triggers, and you have practiced them while you were hypnotized. When you want your aura to get stronger, you put the flats of your hands together as if you were praying." He demonstrated, but stopped her from doing it. "When you want your aura to get weaker, you fold your arms and hold your elbows, like this." He showed her.
"Now it is your turn," he said. "Let's go back to the yoga room and try it out." This time he stripped completely. After all, she had already handled him. She followed suit. After all, she had already been totally in his power for a half hour. They sat in lotus position facing each other.
"Now, let our auras build as before. That's it. Now hold your elbows. Ahhh. Now clasp your hands. Oh my, ohh, nyaaa, oh! Oh, elbows, elbows, elbows. Ahhh..!" He took a deep breath. "Well, that seems to work. Can we break for some tea before we practice some more?"
"But it worked," she said, "why do I need practice?"
"Each time you do it and it works, it strengthens the suggestion. If we practice for a few hours, then it will be still work tomorrow without me having to put you into another hypnotic trance."
"Okay, I'll run down and put the kettle on, but don't you move. I want one more practice, like, while we wait for tea."
* * *
They sipped tea, English style, with milk, while he told her some of his adventures studying religion at Cambridge. She was a bit too excited to listen. "So why did you choose those particular triggers?" she asked, interrupting his story about some strawberry and whipped cream fair along the canals in Cambridge.
He looked perturbed by her question, as if he was not used to being interrupted. "They seemed obvious. To bring on the aura, you assume a pose that is used as a meditational or prayer pose in many religions. To calm it down you assume a pose that is a woman's normal body language to keep to herself."
"So how long have you been practicing with your aura?" she asked.
"For most of my life. I was chosen to be a monk when I was seven because of it."
"So, like twenty years."
"Forty, but I thank you for the compliment."
She was stunned. This man was forty-seven. That was older even than her mum. She had been figuring, like, thirty. Especially since she had seen his firm brown chest. "So you are Chinese, like Mister Li."
"Mister Li is Chinese Burmese. I am Burmese Chinese, but I lived most of my life in England."
"Oh, right, sorry." She wondered where Burmese was. Karl had a world atlas somewhere. She would have to look it up. And Belgium. Both B's, that should be easy. She had to keep him here until the guys got home. The monk was an aura generator. The guys would want to meet him. Damn, they would be late today. Between tea and talk and practice she doubted she could hold him here. Books. Of course. Books.
She ran to the bookshelves in the other room and returned with books on Buddhism, Hinduism, Meditation, and the one with the dirty statues. She half-dropped them on the coffee table in front of the monk. "I have been searching and searching for information on auras. All these books and more. Nothing except some pictures that show them."
She had him. His eyes lit up at the sight of such quality books. They would keep him busy for awhile. University types were all the same... they loved books. She watched him choose the one with the explicit statues and open it, and flip through.
"If you wish to know where the aura comes from, it is natural to man. An extension of the sense of touch in the skin. If you wave a hand over the hair on your arm, the feeling is similar. Unfortunately with the adoption of clothing, we have lost much of that sense.
"And the colors and the scents?"
"Your subconscious, the part of your being I reached today, likes to organize experiences for future reference. Some of the references were probably mapped into the brains of our ancestors eons ago. The aura exists, the light and the scents do not exist. They are labels that your subconscious brings up from ancient memories. Ancient from before words."
"But they seem so real."
"And yet you instinctively know the scents do not come from your nose, nor the light from your eyes."
"Where were you a month ago? You should see all the graphs the guys have made trying to explain our auras."
"There are guys with auras who live here with you?"
"Oh yes, didn't I say?"
"No, and they have been using scientific methods to, what, measure your aura? I would like to speak to them. Will they be home soon?"
"Later," she said eagerly, "but I can make you something to eat if you want to wait."
"Let me think about it."
"So, you are saying that the odor of charred toast is one of my ancient memories from a time before civilization."
"You are having toaster problems?" he asked searching her face, hoping she would say yes.
"No, auras, silly." She saw his beaming face change immediately and become very severe. "Like the kidnapper. While I was struggling with him my head filled with the charred smell."
"You must tell the police that this man is very dangerous, insanely dangerous."
"Tick, done," she said. "I work with a psychiatrist attached to the serial killer task force. She knows all about my sensing of charred toast."
"So she will label him a sociopath or a psychopath. Good enough.
You must be very careful around such people."
"Well everyone should be careful around them. They are bad men. Insane, like you said."
"No, you in particular. Anyone who can sense them, must be very careful. In past times when the psychopaths have taken control of kingdoms they have ruthlessly purged anyone who could sense them. Their success, their very survival, depended upon it."
"Huh, I believe it. They scare the hell out of me." She wondered if she should ask him about why her hands had killed one.
"Individually, they are scary, but when they join together and organize, they enable such evil as destroys entire cultures."
"But on the web, they list most Corporations as being psychotic."
"I rest my case." he said. "All organizations, with time, eventually enter a state that your psychiatrist would consider insane. Democracies, religions, political parties tend towards schizophrenia. Corporations, armies, and dictatorships tend towards the psychotic. Do you understand the difference?"
"One is two people in one head fighting for control, the other is someone who can justify immoral behavior." She was quoting Erik, from one of their discussions, and was pleased that she not only understood what she had just said, but sounded rather expert delivering it.
"More or less. I don't like the modern labels. I prefer the labels that are over two thousand years old. Organizations that have a split in power at their core tend to keep themselves more or less ethical, and more or less moral. They are self-critical, and stay more or less in balance. Those that are single-minded tend to become very unethical and very immoral and trend towards extremes."
"Aren't ethics and morals the same thing?" she asked.
"Ah, my child, holy men have been arguing that for thousands of years. The simple answer is that morals are based on the golden rule, whereas ethics is a list of generally agreed upon exceptions to the golden rule." He looked at her. She was smiling mischievously. "The religious golden rule, not the capitalist golden rule. Do unto others, not he who has the gold."
"So, what you are saying," she said, "is that if a psychopath, like, makes it to the top, other psychopaths jump in and help him out?"
"That is the end effect, but the mechanism is much more subtle. There are a lot more imitation psychopaths than real ones. I call them fauxpaths, but your psychiatrist friend would probably call them narcissistic personality disorder. Once a culture starts rewarding psychopathic behavior, the fauxpaths adjust their behavior to take advantage of it. Currently corporations are filling up with fauxpaths. Eventually their lack of morals and ethics will destroy the corporation that enabled them, and the shareholders will loose their shirts. It is a regular financial cycle."
"You use too many big words. You're saying that eventually the psychopaths destroy each other."
"No, the psychopaths get away with it and move on. The fauxpaths and the shareholders destroy each other and release a lot of evil into the community around them.
"So, like, am I sensing both the fauxpaths and the psychopaths?" She was getting a little weary trying to keep all this new terminology straight.
"No, just the psychopaths. They may both act in a bad way, but with the fauxpath it is just an act. With the psychopath, it is who they are. A fauxpath won't have an aura because they will have killed it with their actions."
"So why do the psychopaths still have an aura?"
"They don't. They have gone so far the other way that what you are sensing is like, like, umm, a black hole. Do you know what a black hole is?"
"Of course. I love Star Trek." She decided that she had to ask him about her having killed a man. "Umm, if I confess something bad to you, do you have to keep it like, quiet?"
"I am a Buddhist monk, not a Catholic priest."
"So that's a no?"
"That's a maybe," he said. "Probably, but it depends upon the confession."
He watched her quietly. He could tell she was having a mental struggle with something. There was a line between her brows, and her eyes had clouded a little. She appeared to come to a decision, and blurted it out.
"Murder."
"Don't tell me," he said.
"Murder of a psycho serial rapist?"
"Okay, let me have it," he sighed, wondering what he was getting himself into.
"That producer that died a few weeks ago? I killed him with my aura."
He took a few deep breaths. He had felt the strength of her aura. Was it possible to kill with one? He focused his mind. He must remember everything she said. "You just killed him because he smelled charred?"
"I wasn't wearing these." She held up her gloves. "He was trying to rape me. I was on the edge of passing out, something to do with the charred thing." She reached up and put her hands under his chin and against each side of his neck. "I tried to push him away like that. He collapsed. They tried to resuscitate him. Nothing. He died."
"Ahh, now I understand what Mister Li was trying to tell me. He assumed you had used a physical force like the Chi to physically collapse the organs in his throat or his medulla." He saw the blank look on her face. "The medulla is like the tail of your brain. It is controls many of your automatic bodily functions, and it is inseparable from your subconscious."
She pressed her gloves against his throat. "That is about as hard as I was pressing and it wasn't like a punch like Mister Li showed me. He collapsed to the floor. I heard him moan and I figured I had put him into a trance, but he never recovered."
"I would research it for you, but here in Vancouver I have no access to a Sanskrit library."
"Best guess." She watched him disappear into himself. He was gone for almost twenty minutes. She poured more tea.
"When you yawn," he finally spoke. "you come very close to a state of death for a split second. It is complicated, but roughly what is happening is your subconscious is telling the body through the medulla that the brain needs a recharge, and that everything else can go without until it gets it. I think that your aura confused the subconscious or the medulla or both and they stopped everything at the same time."
"Like a heart attack?" she asked wrinkling her nose. "Like his heart just stopped?"
"More than just the heart. They could have resuscitated him from just the heart. It may be that all of the automatic bodily functions stopped at the same time. You said he moaned afterwards. That tells me that you did not hold his throat for more than a split second."
"I don't remember. He collapsed immediately, so that broke my connection."
"If everything stopped for just a second, then his body would have tried to come back, like it would from a yawn. With everything stopped, it couldn't. A resuscitation would not work, because that would be just the heart. It would not keep beating by itself."
"So are you going to report me?" She held her breath waiting for his answer.
"It was not murder. It was a very peculiar accident. I will keep your secret."
"What if he hadn't been a psycho?" she said solemnly. "Would it have still have killed him?"
"Absolutely."
She looked at her hands and shuddered. Her voice was weak when she spoke. "Have you ever heard of anything like it before?"
"Similar techniques, but they rely on the use of a weapon," he reached around to the back of her neck and found the soft spot at the base of her skull. "There is a soft spot there that is used by assassins. They use something very thin and sharp, like a long hat pin, or those picks that you use to break up blocks of ice. They jab it through that soft spot and deep into the medulla, and then jag it back and forth. Death is immediate and almost bloodless."
"But I don't think that was what Mister Li was talking about. He said I had a monk's power. I'm sure he meant that no touching was needed. He introduced us. You are a monk. Why are you telling me about a method of stabbing, when I am asking about the power of auras?"
"He is an old man. He is describing things from old myths," he replied calmly.
"I didn't kill that producer in an old myth. Tell me."
"Why? You have an explanation of what happened. It will never happen again. If you aren't planning on killing someone else, then you have no need to know."
"I need to know so I don't accidentally hurt someone." She could hear the stress in her own voice, and could hear her own pulse in her ears.
"Come then, back to the yoga room. We will practice putting your aura to sleep so you will have no more accidents."
"Why won't you tell me, what are you afraid of?" She stopped arguing because he put up his hand for her to stop.
"When you can show me that you are in control of the powers you already have, then ask me again."
"Thank you," she said, trying to calm herself, "Shall we go and practice some more, then?"
* * *
There were no lights on downstairs so Erik climbed up to the second floor. He stopped in his tracks, feeling that since this fey girl had come into their lives, he never knew what he would be coming home to. It was great fun. This time there was a Buddhist monk in full regalia meditating in the common room. Maya in her silk robe, was in a lotus position facing him. She was grasping her elbows to hide her breasts from the monk. He walked quietly around them.
"Erik, this is Sarthani," she said softly, "He knows auras. He has been training me in how to control mine."
Erik bowed politely and asked if he could join them. Of course he could, but it was polite to ask before assuming the company of a monk. He went to his room, exchanged his office clothes for his silk robe, washed his hands and face and stood there looking out at the view for a moment to centre himself before joining them.
When Karl arrived an hour later he found Maya meditating, while a Buddhist monk sat in front of a computer screen with Erik. He was taken aback by the poncy Ox-Bridge accent of the monk, but was struck by the same sense of wondrous fun that Erik had experienced only a short time before. Seeing Erik in his silk robe, he hurried to the bedroom to get his. It had been many years since he had meditated with a monk. He wasn't going to miss this opportunity despite the work he had brought home.
