A Memory of Demons

by Ambrose, David

  Tom turned to Jennifer for confirmation. She nodded once, her own eyes fixed on Julia in wonder mixed with growing fear.

  ‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘That’s Melanie, my sister.’

  20

  Jennifer’s married name was Sawyer. Her maiden name had been Hagan. Her sister’s full name had been Melanie Hagan.

  ‘What was your middle name?’ she had asked Julia.

  ‘Anne,’ was the unhesitating answer, in a tone of voice that wondered why anyone should ask such an obvious, silly question.

  They sat on the stairs – Jennifer, Tom and Clare – while Julia sorted through some old stuff of Melanie’s that she’d spotted in the junk room. Jennifer had offered to make coffee downstairs, but it seemed somehow wrong, even impossible, to treat this thing as a social occasion. Besides, Tom and Clare wanted to know exactly where Julia was every second of the time. As long as they were there, on the stairs, she wasn’t going to slip past them and out of the house as easily as she had slipped in.

  ‘My mother never got over Melanie disappearing the way she did,’Jennifer said. ‘She was always sure something terrible had happened to her. She used to wake up screaming from nightmares that she would never talk about.’

  ‘Why did your sister run away?’ Clare asked.

  Jennifer shrugged. ‘Kids.’ It served both as an explanation and an admission that some things remained for ever beyond human understanding.

  ‘But surely,’ Clare insisted, ‘there must have been a search. A child can’t just disappear. She might have been abducted, injured – anything.’

  ‘She bought a ticket for Buffalo at the bus station. We were told there was a couple who remembered giving her a ride east, just past Rochester. After that the trail ran out.’

  ‘Did she have much money with her?’ Tom asked.

  ‘She took our mom’s housekeeping money for the week, plus about twenty dollars that were in my purse. She wasn’t abducted. She ran away. There was no question about that.’

  And you think your mother died because of that?’ Clare said.

  Jennifer shrugged again. ‘Heart failure, they said, seven, nearly eight years ago. That’s all they tell you – heart failure.’

  There was a pause which none of them knew quite how to fill. In the distance they could hear Julia sifting through stuff, opening boxes, pushing things around. ‘It’s all right,’Jennifer had said, ‘it’s all my stuff in there, none of it’s Joe’s. She can go through anything she wants.’

  ‘Was Joe living here?’ Tom said. ‘Before Melanie left?’

  ‘Yeah – the four of us. Me, Joe, my mom and Melanie.’

  ‘And your father?’

  ‘My dad had left long since. Melanie couldn’t have been more than four when he went. He was a drunk. Nobody missed him, least of all my mom. I don’t even know if he’s alive or dead.’

  Tom thought back to the dolls Julia had played with in Hunt’s office five years ago, remembering how she had kept her ‘other daddy’ always at a distance, never quite one of the family.

  ‘So,’ Jennifer said after another moment’s silence, ‘what do we do now?’

  ‘I wish I knew,’ Tom said. ‘As I told you, we don’t know how or why, but our daughter seems to have been born with some memories that belonged to your sister. Apparently – and this is something I only found out last night – apparently it’s a phenomenon that happens amazingly often.’

  She listened closely as he told her about Julia’s sessions with Hunt. ‘Did she talk about me?’ she asked when he’d finished.

  ‘Not so far as I know,’ he said, looking to Clare for confirmation.

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t believe so.’

  ‘It seems that the memories are patchy at best,’ Tom continued. ‘She’s never said anything about leaving home or what happened to her. She didn’t even say where she came from. It’s just by chance that we’re here. At least we thought it was by chance. To be honest, I’m beginning to wonder.’ He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. ‘I don’t know what to think.’

  At the sound of Julia’s footsteps they all turned. She emerged from the room she’d been in with an armload of CDs, videos, and a few magazines.

  ‘These are all mine,’ she said. ‘Can I keep them, Mommy?’

  She had asked the question of Clare, who looked momentarily startled by it; then, Tom saw, reassured.

  ‘You’d better ask Jennifer,’ she said.

  Julia turned to put the question, but Jennifer forestalled her. ‘Help yourself to whatever’s in there, honey,’ she said, ‘as long as it’s all right with your mom.’

  She very pointedly made the reference to Clare. Tom decided he liked this woman more than he’d thought he was going to, despite her husband. He saw the warmth in Clare’s response as she flashed Jennifer a quick smile of thanks, then got to her feet and held out her arms towards Julia. ‘Of course you can keep them, darling. Let me help you carry them out to the car.’

  The three of them walked out together. Jennifer watched as Julia carefully loaded her new-found ‘possessions’ into the back seat. ‘You know,’ she said to Tom in a quiet aside that Julia wouldn’t overhear, ‘it’s true – every one of those things she picked out belonged to my sister.’

  It was if some kind of fever had broken in Julia. She was entirely herself again – sweet-natured, well behaved, Tom and Clare’s own child. She raised no objection to returning to the hotel, and said goodbye to Jennifer politely, hardly as one might to a long-lost sister, rather a new acquaintance one has made that afternoon.

  But her parents asked no questions and raised no obstacles. They were grateful for the calm that seemed to have descended on her.

  ‘I think we’re going to have to be in touch,’ Tom said to Jennifer before they drove off. ‘I’m sorry if that’s going to be a problem for your husband.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘he’s a decent man, basically. Joe just doesn’t trust what he doesn’t understand.’

  ‘You can hardly blame him for that,’ Tom said, getting behind the wheel and starting the car. Jennifer stood by the roadside and waved them goodbye. Julia waved back through the rear window, like the end of a family visit anywhere in the world.

  On the drive back nobody spoke more than a few words. Tom said they’d missed their flight, but he would try for a later one. Julia continued to raise no objection. There was a feeling that something was behind them, and that fact gave both Tom and Clare an immense sense of relief.

  They tried not to think about what might still lie ahead.

  21

  Brendan Hunt clasped his hands behind his head and sat back. ‘I can only come at this from the way I’ve been trained,’ he said. ‘There are various forms of clinical fabulation described in the textbooks, and this is a classic example.’

  ‘Then how do you account for what happened to us at Niagara Falls?’ Tom said.

  Hunt unclasped his hands and spread them wide in a gesture of surrender. ‘I can’t. And I don’t dismiss it lightly. In fact, I don’t dismiss it at all. I accept that everything you’ve told me actually happened, and I have no explanation. If I want one, I have to fall back on concepts like ESP, the ability of the mind to pick up information through channels that we haven’t yet fully understood. Maybe in time we will understand them. Maybe eventually we’ll all read each other’s thoughts instead of having to talk to each other. Maybe what happened to Julia is just a glimpse of the kind of thing the mind may one day treat as routine. I don’t know.’

  It was the day after the family had returned from Niagara Falls. Julia had spent an hour with the psychiatrist, then returned home with her mother. Tom had stayed behind to hear what he thought.

  ‘So in your view this reincarnation idea is nuts?’ Tom had told him on the phone what Pam had said, and what he himself had discovered on the Web. Hunt had even taken a look for himself before his session with Julia that morning.

  ‘To be frank, most of it strike
s me as strictly wacko. On the other hand, some of it seems remarkably persuasive.’

  ‘Did you come across that Dr Lewis page?’

  ‘Oliver Lewis – yeah, I’d heard of him. He’s no fool, and he’s clearly sincere.’

  ‘So you know he has hundreds of case histories where he’s proved beyond doubt that children have been born with memories of other people’s past lives – people from families with whom they have no connection whatever?’

  ‘Well, be careful before you say “proved beyond doubt”. That’s a big claim, and I’d need to examine some of the evidence myself.’

  ‘You’ve got Julia,’ Tom said.

  Hunt looked at him for a moment, weighing him up thoughtfully. ‘Do you really buy into all that?’

  ‘I’m just trying to keep an open mind. After what I’ve witnessed at first hand, that’s the least I can do.’

  ‘What about your wife?’

  ‘Clare thinks pretty much the same. She’s ordered a couple of books she read about on the Web. She even suggested we get in touch with this man Lewis himself.’

  Hunt tipped his head in a way that suggested this was a course of action he would neither encourage nor oppose. ‘As I said, Oliver Lewis seems like a good man. He was head of psychology at UBMA till he retired. He must be seventy by now.’

  ‘But can you treat her – Julia? I mean, if this thing’s not just a psychological condition, but something more? What are we supposed to do?’

  Hunt leaned forward, sliding his elbows across the polished surface of his desk, his brow furrowing as he tried to find a way through the dilemma he could see the man across from him was in.

  ‘Look, Tom,’ he began, ‘I hope I’m the last person in the world just to dismiss out of hand anything that doesn’t fit into the framework within which I normally work. Any psychiatrist gets people coming in with stories about being abducted by aliens, living in a parallel universe, or being the reborn spirit of some Egyptian goddess. And you always have to have some little place at the back of your mind that says, “OK, if this is not a condition that responds to standard methods of treatment, is it possible that something is happening here that is beyond the limits of what I have been trained to understand?” It’s not for nothing there are different schools of thought on almost everything, including the human mind. Freud, Jung, Adler, Lacan and all the rest – all looking at the same mystery from a slightly different perspective. And the human mind is a mystery in the end, one that I suspect we’ll never get to the bottom of.’

  ‘So what you’re saying is . . .’ Tom stopped, because he wasn’t quite sure what Hunt was saying. Hunt finished the sentence for him.

  ‘I’m saying we should not close any doors. At the same time, we need to be aware that a lot of them lead nowhere. On this question of reincarnation, it’s an idea as old as time itself. It’s accepted without question by many Eastern religions, specifically Buddhism. But it has no place in the West. Now why is that? I don’t know. Is it because we are wrong in the West? Or is it just a cultural thing? In the West we talk about the inextinguishable spirit of man as a kind of metaphor, in the East they mean it as a literal truth. And not just spirit but personality. What does it mean? I don’t know.’ He sat back with a sigh. ‘I’m sorry,’he said, ‘I’m just thinking out loud, which isn’t much help to you.’

  ‘On the contrary, it’s reassuring to meet an expert who’s honest enough to admit he’s baffled.’

  Hunt gave a thin smile. ‘You know what I think? I think that even if some kids do pick up, by whatever mechanism, on the past lives of others . . . I don’t think it matters. If it did, it would have amounted to something more than it has by now. But from what I’ve read, even in the East, it doesn’t change the way people live and what they do all that much. In general these memories, whatever they are and wherever they come from, and even if they’ve been verified as literally true, tend to fade away when the child gets into its teens. Ultimately it makes no difference. It’s a loose end. Life is full of loose ends.’

  ‘And we shouldn’t pull on them? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘I think I’m saying pull on them by all means, but don’t expect them to lead you anywhere much. You’re not going to unravel the whole ball of wool, you’re just going to wind up with longer loose ends – you know what I mean?’

  ‘Yeah, I know what you mean.’ Tom sighed. ‘All the same . . .’

  ‘You want to get to the bottom of this thing. I understand.’

  ‘Will you continue to treat her, even if we do contact this guy Lewis?’

  ‘Of course I will,’ Hunt said, almost shocked that Tom had put the question at all. ‘I’ve told you, I don’t regard Oliver Lewis as any kind of charlatan, though there are plenty of those out there. On the contrary, I’ll be interested to meet him.’

  ‘The thing that worries me, both of us, Clare too, is that we’re getting Julia involved in some kind of weird world – you know, spook-hunters, fortune-tellers, seances in the front room. Do we have the right to do that to her?’

  ‘I don’t believe you’ll be doing that. You know what struck me this morning? The fact that Julia herself shows no signs of being disturbed, yet the girl she claims to remember having been was clearly disturbed. I think that’s a good sign, that detachment, and it’s something I want to help her hold on to.’

  He was right, of course, though Tom hadn’t actually thought of it in those terms. ‘I get the impression that sometimes she “becomes” Melanie more than others,’ he said. ‘But most of the time she remembers in, as you say, a detached sort of way, like it’s just a story she’s read.’

  ‘That was certainly how she sounded this morning. Tom, if you’re agreeable, I think I should see her a couple of times a week for the time being. But don’t think of it as “treatment”, because that’s not the way I want her to think of it. I’m just someone she can talk to, outside the loop as it were – a point of reference. And a lightning rod, if she needs one.’

  They shook hands as Tom left, reassured by what he’d heard and less afraid than he had been. He called Clare on his cellphone from the car. They decided to take the plunge and do what they had been hesitating over. They decided to get in touch with Dr Oliver Lewis.

  22

  ‘Strictly speaking,’ said the dry, rather careful voice on the telephone, ‘you’re a contaminated case, therefore of no real value for research purposes.’

  ‘Contaminated?’

  ‘Forgive me, it’s an offensive-sounding word, but not intended as such. It means simply that you have already made contact with the family from which these memories of your daughter’s seem to arise. Therefore I would be coming in after the fact, not before. Which means I cannot rule out an element of collaboration between the two sides.’

  ‘Dr Lewis, I assure you—’

  He cut off Tom’s protests with an understanding laugh.

  ‘No, no, please don’t think I’m accusing you of dishonesty, Mr Freeman. I’m quite sure from everything you’ve told me that you have nothing to gain by inventing such a story. The other family, however . . . well, I would have to meet them before I made up my mind.’

  ‘All right,’ Tom said, ‘I see your point. From an academic point of view, you’re right. But my wife and I are just trying to understand this thing that’s happened to us, and frankly we’re looking for some help.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can give you the kind of help you’re looking for,’ he said. ‘If you want explanations, I don’t have any.’

  ‘I think my wife and I need to find out as much about this as we can.’

  There was a pause. Tom wondered what the other man was thinking. Was there a warning in that pause? Was this something they should avoid knowing too much about?

  ‘I must say, it sounds like a sufficiently interesting case to be worth taking a look,’ Lewis said eventually. ‘Give me till tomorrow to rearrange my schedule. I’ll be in touch.’

  Clare, meanwhile, had made a point of ha
ving a conversation with Julia’s teacher, Betty Kaye. She and Tom had decided it was better she be aware of the situation than not. She was a little taken aback, Clare told Tom afterwards, but listened carefully and seemed to understand. She too had heard of such things. ‘Actually it’s amazing how many people have,’ Clare said, ‘when you start to talk about it. Heard of, but never come into contact with it. Or if they have, they’ve simply explained it away as a child’s over-active imagination.’

  Which was exactly what he and Clare would have done, Tom knew, until now. The same thought passed through Clare’s mind. She was silent a moment before saying, ‘Anyway, it doesn’t appear to be a problem. Julia’s behaving perfectly normally, working well, doing just fine. Betty Kaye says she’ll keep an eye open – in case.’

  Tom nodded. One more item ticked off on the checklist, one less immediate problem. But he could not shake off the feeling that there was more to come. That thought hung over both of them, unspoken. It was like having someone you love seriously ill but in remission. You know it could all start up again at any moment.

  As promised, Dr Lewis called the following afternoon. He said he would fly up from Taos in New Mexico, where he lived, in a couple of days. He politely refused both Tom’s offer of hospitality and any help in finding somewhere to stay, preferring always to make such arrangements for himself, he said. He intended no discourtesy: it was merely a part of the independence he needed to maintain of the people and events he was investigating. They didn’t hear from him again until early evening on the day of his arrival. He said he would like to see Tom and Clare before meeting with Julia. They told him she was staying over at a friend’s house, so he took a cab and was with them in fifteen minutes.