Life to Life: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (23 page)

I thought of Lewis
Carroll, then, and wondered where that guy had gone to get Alice's
adventures in Wonderland. A place like this? Did a place like this
exist in 1865? Or did 1865 forever exist in a place like
this?

Mr. Lincoln? Are you there?

He was not, but another was.

Dear old Dad was there. I was not really
sure that I was; but he was. He was the whole place, I think. I
mean, he was everywhere there.

I asked him, "What is this place?"

He asked me, "What would you like it to
be?'

I said, "Is it as easy as that?"

He said, "It's as easy as you want to make
it."

I asked, "Is that good?'

He replied, "Is it bad?"

I told him, “Hell I don't
know. Isn't it the same thing?”

He chuckled and told me, "You're the boss.
It's what you make it."

I asked, "What is?"

He replied, "Everything is."

I snapped my fingers, I think, or I snapped
something and said, "Like this?"

He smiled and said, "Sure."

I said, "Are you really my dad?"

He said, "Yes. But also your son."

I said, "Wait right there. You have to be
one or the other."

He said, "I am."

I said, “You are? Okay.
Which one?”

He said, "Of course."

I thought, shit, I'm in heaven with a
comedian. But he heard that thought and he laughed and told me, "If
that's the way you want it, that's fine with me."

I said, “My will be
done?”

He said, "Always."

I had to think about that. Finally I told
him, "I think I need some relativity."

He said, "Okay."

"Objectivity."

"Okay."

"Where the hell am I?"

"You are at home."

“
At home?”

"Relatively, yes."

“
How about
objectively?”

"Objectively you are between there and
there. Or here and here. However you prefer it."

I said, "I just want to know what the hell
is going down."

He replied, "That is in review."

“
What do
you mean by
in
review
?”

"Relatively or objectively?"

"Both."

He chuckled; told me, "The antecedent
follows the precedent."

I said, "Don't give me fucking
tutorials."

So he said, "That which may be usually
follows that which has been."

I wanted to argue about
that. I said, "That sounds like bullshit. Tell it to Darwin. If
that which was governs that which is or may be, then where is
change?"

He showed me a patient and
tolerant smile. "You forget fruition."

"The cosmic egg," I decided.

He gave me a delighted
smile. "Exactly."

"So what is in review?"

"A route."

"A route? A route is in review?"

"Yes."

"Route to where?"

"Route to there," he said enigmatically.

"Where is there?"

He said, "Exactly. We
might have to intervene."

"Intervene?"

He replied, "Yes. Scrub
the route, you know."

"Abort it? Abort the mission?"

He said, "You could put it that way,
yes."

My head was beginning to hurt. Or something
was. I told him, "This is all very confusing."

He told me, "If you demand relativity and
objectivity, how could it be otherwise?"

I told him; getting angry,
now, "You are telling me that relativity and objectivity are the
source of confusion."

He replied, "And the mother of
invention."

I said, "You mean necessity."

He said, "There is no necessity except in
confusion."

"That's pure baloney!" I argued.

"Relatively and objectively," he replied,
"you're something of an arrogant bastard, aren't you."

I growled, "Thanks, Dad.
Maybe I come by it naturally."

He chuckled, said, "Yes, your mother always
had that problem."

"Comedians," I complained. "Heaven is filled
with comedians."

"How else could we bear you?" he replied to
that.

I laughed and he laughed.

I said, 'bye and he said 'bye.

And then I awakened in Rachel's arms.

And Rachel was dead.

The other girls were dead,
too. Annie was not there, of course; had not been there, not
really, not all of Annie.

I could find no marks on the bodies, no
visible evidence of the cause of death.

There was evidence of a
different kind on me, though, drying little puddles of semen
streaked across both thighs. I staggered into the little bathroom
and washed that off, then quickly got into my clothes. There was a
smell in the air, in there, a disturbing smell, and I think I knew
what it was even before I got outside.

I was stunned and confused
and sad and exalted all at once and I barely knew my own name but I
knew smoke when I smelled it and I knew what it meant. Reality was
clashing in on me and I was remembering the bonfire fuel in the
courtyard.

Two of the surrounding
roofs were blazing when I got there, and the entire courtyard was
intensely hot. Ted was lying curled on his side near the door to
the office corridor, another guy was a few yards away; both were
dead but they were not burned and really looked quite relaxed in
their death, the same as the girls back there, as though it had
come to them easily.

I found a garden hose and
turned it on but the pressure was not all that great; it was like
pissing into the wind. I heard distant sirens, though, and knew
they were coming my way, so I threw the hose down and ran into the
general offices.

It was hot in there but not blazing yet.
But, God, there was death; bodies strewn everywhere; I hoped it was
a nightmare but knew it was not.

Those folks had all died easy, some just
reclining back onto the couches; others toppled from their chairs;
a couple of men holding hands and sprawled across the corridor.

I could not find Janulski; he was not among
those dead.

I found the recording equipment in a small
vaultlike room behind his office. It had all been turned off and
the tapes removed. Specially designed tape storage cabinets lining
the walls stood bare with doors agape.

I ran through the offices like a crazy man,
trying to find something alive, but finally had to give it up and
get the hell out of there. The walls had become so hot they could
spontaneously ignite at any moment.

The firemen were there and
going through their preliminary drill. I grabbed one with
captain's bars and told him where the bodies were. He jerked his
head in an understanding nod and sent his troops into the
battle.

I had just emerged from that war zone so
knew where they were headed, and I had to respect those guys...but
I could not help them and I was just in the way. So I went on to
the parking lot and found the Maserati and moved it safely to the
rear then tried the mobile phone and connected with Paul
Stewart.

I told him what had happened—well, most of
it—but that took awhile because I had to repeat myself a lot; guess
I was not speaking too clearly. My chest hurt and my head hurt and
I was all but overwhelmed by an ever-deepening sadness.

I do not remember ending that telephone
conversation.

I just remember sitting there in the
Maserati watching the smoke billowing up from the Spiritual Center
of Light and trying to remember what had led up to this.

That is where I was and the way I was when
Stewart opened the door and slid in beside me.

"You okay?" he asked gruffly.

I assured him that I was—but hell I really
did not know if I was or not.

He said, tautly, "They got
all the bodies out."

I said, quietly, "That's
nice."

He said, "First look says they were dead
before the fire."

I replied, "Yes, I think that is probably
correct."

He asked, "What's been going on here?"

I told him, "Beats the shit out of me,
Paul."

He said, "You don't know?"

I said, "Right. I don't know."

He said, "If you find out,
will you tell me?"

I told him, "Hell, you're the cop."

He said, "Looks like another Jonestown."

I asked him, "Another what?"

"That religious cult that all killed
themselves back in '78, the Jim Jones bunch. Another one of
those."

I said, "Oh, shit."

He said, "Yeah. Numbs the mind, doesn't
it."

I said, "Tell me about it."

He said, "I'll tell you
about your friend Annie. I had just been on the horn with the
jailer when you called me. She's had a little problem. A strange
little problem."

I should have been
prepared for it but I was just sitting there mostly stunned and
stupid. I said, "What strange little problem?"

"Had to rush her to the infirmary. Had a
hemorrhage."

"Had what?"

"Hemorrhage. They thought at first it was
from the vagina. Turned out to be not quite that."

"What do you mean, not quite?"

He said, "It's baffling. Don't know what to
make of it."

I was losing the stuns, I guess. I said,
"Let's both be baffled. What the hell are you talking about?"

"Wasn't exactly vaginal.
It was virginal."

I repeated, stupid again, "Virginal?"

"Yeah. Can you beat it? Thirty-five years
old. Married four times. But the jail doctor says her hymen not
only was still intact, but it was so extensive and so tough before
the rupture that there is just no way that lady could have ever got
laid. She would have needed surgery first. Can you buy that?"

I'd already bought it.

I was remembering a dream. Or whatever the
hell it was.

I heard myself asking Stewart in a dull
voice, "It ruptured, huh?"

He replied, "Well not spontaneously, no. She
obviously had a little help."

"A little help," I
echoed.

"Or else she helped herself. Just can't
figure out why."

I sighed, and knew why.

I just did not know why all those people had
to die, in the bargain.

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Tutorial on the
Mountain

Sigmund Freud once remarked that religion is
the most incurable form of insanity.

Freud was pure atheist, I guess, so I'm sure
he was thinking of the entire religious instinct.

Of course, who really knows what insanity
really is?

Maybe you could turn it around and say that
insanity is the strongest form of religious expression.

Nobody really knows what insanity is. Even
Freud, for all his acknowledged genius, was just a man; subject,
therefore, to error the same as all men.

North American Indians
revered the insane. Most Europeans, I guess, have always abhorred
them. They locked up their lunatics and threw away the keys, abused
them terribly; maybe they were really just terribly frightened and
insecure about the whole thing.

Nobody really knows what
it is all about. Certainly the crazy people live in a reality quite
different from the common reality. That makes them a minority; it
does not necessarily make them wrong within their own minority
except as they wrong themselves. Maybe insanity is an entirely
natural state of being, for those who are there. Maybe these folks
just have a different window onto reality and find it too difficult
to adjust to ours. Maybe all the electric shocks and drugs and
other therapies can convert them to our view—but does that not also
give them an unnatural window if it can be maintained only in that
way?

I know; I rationalize. I propose while God
disposes. But shit, that is what my head is for. Isn't it? Isn't
that what yours is for, too?

But, you see—I am
thinking... maybe I am crazy, too. I am thinking, maybe the psychic
sense is just another form of mental derangement. None of that shit
really happened. I dreamed it up. I went into some kind of asshole
trance and fantasized a sexual experience with a woman who all the
while was locked up across town, and I frolicked in my insanity
while a dream burned and folks died all around me.

Dear old Dad is no more than a fantasy
extension of my own insanity, a delusion fed by rampant neurones
out of place in space and time, out of touch with reality and
monstrously out of context with that which is noble and good.

I am thinking that, yes,
but all the while I am thinking it I know this is bullshit. I did
make love with Annie, or with some beautifully tangible essence of
Annie, and I did have a genuine mystical experience.

If that is insanity, then I'll take it.

But don't ask how Annie projected herself
from that jail cell into the sanctuary and that beam of light.
Hell. I have had many out-of-body experiences myself, and I don't
know how I do that. If we had to understand everything before we
did it we'd all drop dead because nobody knows consciously how to
make his own heart beat. It just does, and we go with it.
Out-of-body, too.

But if you need some official documentation,
there does exist quite a bit of covering literature. Look it up.
Wouldn't hurt you. Such as the case of Alphonse de Liguori. He was
the founder of an eighteenth-century Christian monastic order. In
the year 1774, this monk who was later canonized fell into a trance
while fasting in his monastery which was located four days travel
from Rome. He came out of the trance to announce the death of Pope
Clement XIV and claimed to have been at his deathbed. It was later
confirmed by others who attended the pope's final hours that
Liguori indeed had been present, that he had spoken to them, and
that he had assisted in the last rites for the pope. So go figure
it.