myself, but celebrated. After all, every thing has its place. And every place, its thing. The things that build this house have their place. They had life, and in death…they grow the White House in rooms of bone.
“And this house…must have its thing. These days…that’s me.”
Mrs. Tanser picked up a hammer and raised it above Tricia’s head. She breathed deep as the girl squealed and tried desperately to run. Her screams rang out like bullets scraping metal. But Mrs. Tanser’s other hand held the small girl fast. A trapped animal.
“You’ll live here forever,” she promised. “And I promise you’ll hardly feel a thing. I can’t believe the torture some of these kids must have gone through. I could never be so cruel.”
Tricia screamed again. A horrible, larynx-shredding sound. But she couldn’t break free of the old woman’s grip. Mrs. Tanser lived only for the house now, and Tricia had never felt such desperate strength before. The veins of the woman’s hands stood out blue and serious above the small girl’s reddening fingers. “I came to this town because I loved children. Genna and Jillie didn’t want to stay here either,” she whispered. “Look at them up there.” She nodded at two tiny skulls shrieking in silence on the wall. “But what could I do? I adore children. The house… This house…it never relents…”
“Hold still,” Mrs. Tanser said. “I want your face to stay this beautiful, always.”
Tricia twisted and turned, staring at the bone-white eye sockets and jaws of the handful of splintered skulls that lined the half-constructed wall of the small room like fractured masks. Those perfect, unblemished bone faces screamed silently in chorus with her, as Mrs. Tanser turned to make her kill.
“It’s going to take a long time to finish this room,” the old woman lamented. “But I will finish my room. Everything has its place. And every place, its thing. This room is mine.”
She brought the hammer down.
HEAL THYSELF
Jeffrey Jackson peeked over the top of the magazine. His eyes went to the clock on the wall. Had it really been only four minutes since he'd last looked?
His hands shook, so he put the magazine aside before the pages started flapping. Every session with Dr. Edelhart left him calm for a day or two, fists unclenched, the red behind his eyelids dulled to brown. But always the raging night crawled out on its belly, fingers tickled his brain, his cabbies got radio messages from Mars, and sweaty, dark figures flitted along the perimeter of his dreams. And in the mirror he saw the man he had once been. Those last days leading up to the next session were a cold turkey of the soul.
Jackson wondered if what he'd read were true, that patients became more addicted to therapy than they ever could to drugs. He gripped the arms of the waiting room chair, palms slick on the vinyl. He tried one of the relaxation techniques that Dr. Edelhart had taught him. That wallpaper pattern, reproduced a thousand times in the expanse of the room. If Jackson crossed his eyes slightly…
No good. He settled on watching the receptionist, who pretended to be busy with paperwork. She was white and almost pretty, but Jackson no longer had much interest in the opposite sex. Or any sex, for that matter.
He started from his chair when the buzzer rang. The receptionist gave him a two o'clock smile and said, 'Dr. Edelhart will see you now.'
Why did the doctor never have an appointment before Jackson's? If only Jackson could see another patient walk out of Dr. Edelhart's office, face rosy with beatitude. Perhaps that would give Jackson hope of being healed. He crossed the room and, as always, reached the door just as it swung open.
Dr. Edelhart smiled broadly, teeth bright against his wide, dark face. He extended his hand. Jackson wiped his own hand on his pants leg and shook Edelhart's. Prelude to The Ritual.
'How are you, Jeffrey?' The same question as always.
You know damned good and well how I am, Doc. You've shrunk my brain and cracked open my past and put every little memory under your magnifying glass. Walked me back to my childhood. Into the womb, even. And beyond.
Way beyond.
Jackson blinked, barely able to meet the taller man's eyes. 'I…I'm doing fine.'
He brushed past the doctor, headed for the security of the familiar stuffed chair. Edelhart didn't believe in the couch. He was too post-Freudian for that. Edelhart was of the New High Church, a dash of Jung, a pinch of Skinner, and equal portions of new age-right action-spirit releasement-astral projection-veda dharmic-divine starpath to inner beingness. Add water and stir.
Edelhart's mental porridge cost $150 an hour, and Jackson considered it a bargain. He settled in the chair as Edelhart closed the door and adjusted the window shades. Since the office was on the seventh floor, the traffic sounds below were muted. Jackson was almost able to forget his fear of cars. And windows. And the faces on either side of them.
Jackson closed his eyes. Edelhart's chair squeaked behind his polished mahogany desk. The room had an aroma of carpet cleaner and sweat. Or maybe Jackson was smelling his own panic. He tried to breath deeply and evenly, but he was too aware of his racing heartbeat. And the past, where he would soon be headed.
'So, where were we, Jeffrey?' The doctor's voice was deep, resonant, a soul-singer’s pipes. Even this familiar question took on a musical quality, a sonorous bass. Or maybe he was stereotyping. After all, not every black had the rid’dem.
'We were…' Jackson swallowed. 'Going back.'
Jackson didn't have to look to visualize the doctor's head gravely nodding. 'Ah, yes,' said Dr. Edelhart. The shuffling of papers, a quick perusal of notes, Jackson's round peg of a head being fitted into this square hole and that triangular niche. 'So you've accepted that present life conflicts and traumas can have their roots in past lifetimes?'
'Of course, Doctor.” Jackson was too eager to please and too afraid to do otherwise. “Especially that one past life.'
'We each have at least one bad former life, Jeffrey. Otherwise, there would be no reason to live again. Nothing to resolve.'
Jackson wanted to ask which of the doctor's past lives were the most haunting. But of course that was wrong. Dr. Edelhart was the one behind the desk, the one with the pencil. He was the doctor, for Christ's sake. The answer man. The black dude delivering The Word to the square honky.
Sheesh, no wonder you're on the teeter brink of bumblefuck crazy. Starting to shrink the SHRINK. And this guy’s the only thing standing between you and a rubber room. Good thing dear Dr. Edelhart doesn't believe in medication, or you'd be on a brain salad of Prozac, Thorazine, lithium, Xanax, Xanadu, whatever.
No, the only drug that Edelhart believed in was plain and simple holism. Jackson's soul fragments were all over the place, in both space and time. Edelhart was the shaman, the quest leader, the spirit guide. His job was to take Jackson to those far corners of the universe where the fragments were buried or broken. Once the fragments were recovered, then all it took was a little psychic superglue and Jackson would “Become Authentic.”
Jackson just wished Edelhart would hurry the hell up. Seven months of regression therapy and they were just now getting to the good stuff. The tongue in the sore tooth. The fly in the ointment. The nail in the karmic wheel. The past life that pain built.
'I'm ready to go all the way,' Jackson said, surer now. After all, what was a century-and-a-half of forgotten existence compared to thirty-plus years of real, remembered anxiety?
'Okay, Jeffrey. Breathe, count down from ten, your eyes are closed and looking through the ceiling, past the sky, past the long night above…'
Jackson could handle this. He fell into the meditation with practiced ease, and by the time the doctor reached 'Seven, a gate awakens,' Jackson was swaddled in the tender arms of a hypnotic trance. He scarcely heard Dr. Edelhart's feet approaching across the soft carpet. The doctor's breath was like a sea breeze on his cheek, the deep voice quieter now.
'You're on the plantation, Jeffrey. The wheat is golden, the cotton fields rolling out like a blanket of snow.
