Mystery Dance: Three Novels

by Scott Nicholson

  Soon she was breathing evenly. She pulled out her journal and wrote down the dream. The images of the fire and smoke and skull ring sliced into her willful focus on mundane things. She thrust all memories aside and calculated the Cardinals’ chances of moving up in the division standings the next year and their perennial search for a decent closer, centerfielder, and left-handed starting pitcher.

  Julia turned out the light. As much as she feared the dark, and the things it could harbor, she hated the thought that something outside could see her more easily than she could see it.

  Darkness won’t win. Please, God, if you’re up there, don’t let it get me.

  She couldn’t fix an image of God in her head. The pasty, stringy-haired old man with the shimmering aura that was popular in children’s Bible books was the first to emerge from the mists of drowsiness.

  That stern, paternal visage was no comfort, so she let it shift to a woman. She had no model for a female godhead, except the popular depictions of Venus, Athena, and other mythological goddesses, and their beautiful faces came off as haughty and vain instead of generous. She killed the formative image before it could sneer down at Julia in disdain. She recalled something she’d read once, probably by Nietzsche or Heidegger or one of the other renowned existentialists, that posited the theory that if God were dead, he’d have to be replaced.

  Sounds like something Dr. Forrest would say.

  The therapist’s face took over the spot that had been occupied by the gods. Dr. Forrest’s smile was benevolent, patient, and understanding. Existentialism gave no comfort in the night, but human kindness was a snug lover.

  Finally, sleep crept over her, mercifully blank, the fingers of the past receding into shadow.

  The next morning, the first thing Dr. Forrest said was, “You look exhausted.”

  “Thanks, I’ve been working at it.” Julia forced a smile. She felt rumpled, like a silk shirt in a sock drawer. Dr. Forrest had just started a pot of coffee. Her receptionist wasn’t in, and neither was the other psychiatrist who shared the small office building.

  “Do you mind if we lock the door?” Julia asked when they were in the office.

  “I don’t really think that’s necessary. It’s good that you are recognizing your fear, that you’re not lying to yourself. But let’s just risk leaving the door unlocked. Then, when we’re finished and no crazed stranger has burst in, you can claim a small victory.”

  Julia nodded. Dr. Forrest had elicited a lot of small victories. But Julia was ready for a big victory. The dark place inside her head felt as if it were growing, like a cold black fire that was consuming her from the inside out.

  Julia settled in her chair as Dr. Forrest closed the blinds. As she dimmed the lights, Julia said, “Do we have to be in the dark?”

  “Trust me,” Dr. Forestt said. “You want to become whole, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Julia said, reciting the mantra Dr. Forrest had given her. “The whole Julia Stone.”

  “Where shall we start?” the therapist asked, sitting across from her.

  Julia wondered if she should mention her imagining of Dr. Forrest on the high throne of heaven and decided sharing such a thing would be as disturbing as having had a lesbian fantasy about the older woman. Both were silly when laid on the harsh examining table of daylight, since Julia was heterosexual and secular. As far as she knew. “Maybe I should tell you about my dream.”

  “Ah. Did you bring your journal?”

  Julia fished the notebook out of her purse. Dr. Forrest perused the recent entries and looked up with excited eyes. “I think we’re onto something here. Are you willing to face it now?”

  “Whatever you think is best.”

  “Okay. I’m going to hypnotize you, and this time, we’re going to go all the way.”

  Julia’s breath caught. “All the way?”

  “Let’s find out what happened to little Julia Stone. I think I know, but what’s important is that you know.”

  Julia dug her fingers into the arm of the chair, but listened as Dr. Forrest gave the relaxation instructions and then began counting down slowly from ten, leading Julia more deeply beneath the surface of the world like Persephone making her annual descent into Hades. Her eyes were open, and she could still recognize her thoughts as her own, but she floated on a soft, insistent current. She was carried through the shadowed past, twenty-three years back.

  “The hooded man is standing over you,” came Dr. Forrest’s voice, as if from behind a wall of water. “The man with the skull ring.”

  “Help me,” Julia said, scared, her hands tight in the knotted rope, the stone hard beneath her bare back.

  “The bad people are around you, Julia. They’re chanting, belladonna and incense are burning in the crucibles. At the end of the stone is an inverted cross, a decapitated goat’s head speared on its tip. Its eyes are open and black, and flies circle the rotting flesh.”

  Julia squirmed in her chair. She couldn’t remember giving Dr. Forrest all those details. But Dr. Forrest had taken her deeply into her subconscious, had mapped and mined it, perhaps knew the territory more intimately than Julia herself did.

  And Julia was so forgetful, wasn’t she?

  “What’s the hooded man doing, Julia?”

  “He–he’s putting his hand inside his robe. He pulls out–”

  “A knife. He pulls out a long sharp knife, doesn’t he, Julia?”

  She nodded, a lump in her throat, sweating even in the chill of the imagined night air.

  “What happens next?”

  “He…he’s raising the knife. He shouts something.”

  “You remember, don’t you? Tell me what he says.”

  “He says ‘Lord Master Satan, we offer you this blood in your sacred name, that you may smile upon…that you may smile upon–”

  “You recognize the voice, don’t you, Julia?”

  Julia moaned, writhing on the granite slab under the bright eye of the moon.

  “Whose voice is it, Julia?”

  Julia whispered, her mouth dry.

  “Tell me, Julia. Who did this to you? Who is to blame for all your fear and pain and sorrow?”

  Julia looked up at the man whose hood had fallen back, his face revealed. She struggled to sit up against invisible bonds.

  The name tore itself from her lips. “Daddy.”

  And the response, drifting from the corners of the world and the cracks in her mind, insinuated in a whisper:

  Jooolia….

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Julia ripped free of the dream altar, broke the hypnotic trance.

  Dr. Forrest held her as she cried.

  “You’re not alone, Julia,” the therapist repeated over and over.

  Julia wept herself dry, trying to forget the face beneath the hood, the man who held the knife, the man who had given his daughter to the bad people.

  “It’s always hard to accept a truth that’s so awful, but it’s the only way to let the healing begin,” said Dr. Forrest. She opened the blinds and let light spill into the room, and then sat across from Julia in her usual chair.

  “Daddy,” Julia whispered to herself, blinking against the harsh glare of reality. She shook her head. “No. He couldn’t have done that. He loved me.”

  She could remember his arms around her, hugging her, dressing her, holding her hand and walking her through the park. Taking her to the Pink Palace outside Memphis, showing her all the strange animals that stood stiff and still in the museum’s glass cases. She remembered his smiles, his blue eyes as warm as August sky, the way his stubble tickled her cheek when he kissed her. She told Dr. Forrest these things, evidence against this cruel, freshly conjured memory.

  “All that may be true as well, Julia,” Dr. Forrest said. “The mind tries to protect us. One of the ways it does that is by burying the bad memories deep in the basement, way down there where they’re hard to dig up. It’s natural that the mind lets you retrieve only the happy memories. A survival mechanism.”
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  “He loved me.”

  “The body remembers what the mind wants you to forget. Don’t you feel the pain in your stomach and chest? In all the places the bad people touched you?”

  Julia nodded. Her muscles were sore, her stomach felt as if someone had punched it with a fistful of nails, and the place between her legs–

  “I know it’s hard for you, Julia,” said Dr. Forrest. “But we have to do this all the way. We have to be honest. What else do you remember about your father?”

  “He…he told me bedtime stories when he tucked me in at night.”

  “Would this take place in your bedroom, or in his?”

  “In mine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Chester Bear was always beside me. There was an oak tree out the window, and a streetlight on the other side of it. My room almost always had stripes of shadows across it. We lived next to a farm, you could smell the chickens.”

  “When he tucked you in, how did he do it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did he help you put your pajamas on?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Were you ever naked when he tucked you in?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Did he ever touch you in ways that felt wrong?”

  Julia thought of that creased face, those clenched features beneath the hood, the strange light in the eyes of the man who was going to cut her. Her father. She shuddered and looked down at her hands fidgeting in her lap. His blood was in her. Or maybe he thought of her flesh and blood as his possessions, free to give and take.

  “It’s very important, Julia.” Dr. Forrest leaned forward and touched her knee. “Other women have gone through the same experience. Do it for all of them.” A pause and a whisper. “For all of us.”

  Julia looked at the therapist, trying to read those somber gray eyes behind the glasses. Not her, too? Had this wise and supportive woman suffered through a similar experience? Was her compassion constructed on determination, perhaps seeking to resolve her own psychic wounds by applying salve to others?

  But Dr. Forrest had survived, had conquered the past and shed all its baggage. Dr. Forrest had not let abuse destroy her present and future life. The doctor was whole and healed.

  A surge of anger swept through Julia. Her life was being stolen from her. She was being raped and tortured more viciously today, by her fear and doubt, than she had been as a child. In this instance, the scar was worse than the wound, because at least wounds brought pain. Even pain was preferable to numbness.

  “Did he ever touch you, Julia?” The woman’s voice had slipped from its calm professionalism into a sharp, firm tone.

  “I don’t remember,” Julia said, her eyes welling even though she thought she had drained her reservoir of tears.

  Dr. Forrest squeezed her wrist as tightly as the bad people’s ropes had. “He touched you, didn’t he?”

  Dr. Forrest should know. Dr. Forrest had learned things about Julia that Julia herself hadn’t accepted yet. But she wasn’t going to take this last terrible step, she wasn’t willing to throw open the cellar door and shed light on those bones. She couldn’t force herself to face a memory that made her entire life a lie.

  “Okay, let’s pretend for a moment,” Dr. Forrest said softly, releasing her wrist. “It’s safer to play make-believe at first. Suppose he had touched you?”

  Julia said nothing.

  “How would that make you feel?”

  Julia looked at the clock. The session had lasted nearly two hours. The televangelist that had hijacked her VCR had threatened an eternity of fire and brimstone for sinners, and Julia wasn’t sure such a punishment could be worse than a life sentence inside her own skull.

  “I’m sorry,” Julia said, rubbing her temples. “I think we’d better stop. My head’s splitting.”

  Dr. Forrest sat back and pursed her lips. “It’s always hard to admit. Perhaps the hardest thing in the world. That a father’s love could go so wrong–”

  Julia gathered her purse and headed for the door.

  “You’re not alone, Julia,” Dr. Forrest called after her. “You’re never alone.”

  Julia drove home, her thoughts jumbled. The world outside the car windows seemed unreal, a strange movie set onto which she had been dropped. The faces in the passing cars showed no signs of comprehending the conflict of this particular scene. And the script, well, apparently the script could be rewritten at any time, to alter the opening scenes and therefore change the meaning of everything that came after. Even though the later scenes contained the exact same sequences and dialogue as before.

  As she left the office district and came to the outskirts of Elkwood, some of the tension fell away. Fewer cars closed her in, fewer traffic lights ordered her to stop. The trees were more numerous, and the colorful leaves provided momentary distractions from her rage and pain. By the time she pulled onto Buckeye Creek Road, she had almost convinced herself that the session had never happened, that the vision of her father’s face beneath the hood was just one more misleading memory.

  She went straight to the phone.

  “Hello?”

  Good. He was home, probably watching golf on television, a Chivas Regal and coke sweating cold in his hand.

  “Hi, Mitchell, it’s me.”

  “Julia!” He sounded pleased to hear from her. She very rarely called him, and she felt a brief shiver of shame at her diffidence. After all, this man had stood by her through her adoptive parents’ death, through her reluctance to offer her heart fully, through her budding disorder and relocation.

  “How are you doing?”

  “Fine, fine. Is something wrong? Your voice sounds strange.”

  “I’ve just been busy. Absentminded. What’s new with you?”

  “Nothing since the last time we talked, what, two days ago?”

  “The reason I called is…I’m coming down.”

  “Here? Hey, that’s really great! I can’t wait to see you,” he added. “When are you coming?”

  “I hope I can get an afternoon flight.”

  “Wow. That’s short notice. You want me that badly, huh?”

  She couldn’t tell if he were joking. “No, it’s not like that, Mitchell. I’ll be getting a room.”

  Petulance entered his voice. “You should stay with me, honey. It’s been months.”

  She wondered if he’d managed to resist temptation in her absence. He was handsome and wealthy, the kind of big catch a lot of women were trolling for. But he sincerely seemed to be willing to wait to marry her. Predictable. She didn’t deserve him. Perhaps no one did.

  “I need a favor from you,” she said.

  “I can’t figure you out.”

  Neither can I. “Will you check with some of your contacts in the police department and the D.A.’s office?”

  “Look here, Julia. My friends are starting to think I’m weird, turning down dates with sweet, young, interested women so that I can save myself for you. And I’m starting to get tired of waiting. I mean, I love you, but–”

  “When you love somebody, you don’t impose conditions,” Julia said.

  “Where did you get that little nugget of wisdom? From one of your shrinks? As if you know the first thing about love.”

  “Mitchell–”

  “Have you ever loved anybody, Julia? Besides yourself, I mean? And the little voices in your head?”

  “Mitchell, please don’t get mad.” Her voice cracked. “I’m trying–”

  “Jeez,” he said, exasperated at her tears. Surrendering. “Okay. What do you want me to do?”

  Say you’re sorry, for one thing.

  But she knew he wouldn’t. Mitchell was never sorry. “Could you check around, see whatever happened with the investigation into my father’s disappearance?”

  “Julia, we’ve been through that a hundred times. The case is dead. No leads. He just walked off the face of the earth. Why can’t you let it go and get on with your life? Sometimes I think yo
u wouldn’t be so crazy if you left the past alone. Hooded men and all that crap.”

  She squeezed the phone until her knuckles were white. Eight years. She’d known him nearly a third of her life. In those early years, they had made passionate love often, and she had unfolded like a flower beneath the sun of his affection. Then her problems had started, tiny paranoid thoughts, a nervous stomach, a sense that she had forgotten something important. Soon came the little surprises, the bad dreams, and the blame.

  Mitchell had encouraged her when she first started seeing Dr. Danner. He had already elaborately planned their future and saw therapy as only a minor detour on the road to their eternal bliss. Over the years, though, as he became more mercenary in his law practice, he’d grown stubborn and possessive, angry at her both for her weakness and for her refusal to marry him. He’d given her an obscenely large engagement ring that she kept in a safe-deposit box. What was scary was that she couldn’t let him go, couldn’t grant both of them their freedom. This was love held hostage, love with a gun to its head, love in a straitjacket.

  “Will you do it for me?” Julia asked when she had regained control of herself. She didn’t want to prostitute herself by tempting him with her flesh when her heart and mind wasn’t fully ready, but she could appeal to his ego. “You know how to get things done. People jump when you call, Mitchell.”

  “Well, I’ll give it a try.” He sounded mildly assuaged. “No promises, though.”

  “Thanks, Mitchell. I’ll call when I get in to Memphis International.”

  “Can we at least have dinner together?”

  “I’d like that,” she said. And she realized she did look forward to seeing him. Mitchell had helped her get through the car-crash death of her adoptive parents, providing moral support in his own domineering, Leonine way. Sometimes she wished she could adopt more of his philosophy, just give in and be his country club ornament, the one who completed his image of the successful young professional.