Heart to Heart: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (7 page)

The reason some people
connect déjà vu to past-life recall is that there are certain
similarities in the more complex forms. Take the case of an
eight-year-old girl who arrives in a certain neighborhood or a
certain village or town for the first time; upon seeing it, she
becomes highly excited and begins pointing out familiar scenes;
perhaps she leaps from the car at a certain point and begins
running from house to house searching for someone she could never
have seen before in this lifetime—and finds them!

Whoa...

That's pretty heavy, sure, but numerous
similar experiences have been reported in the record of our
times.

I have my own theory about
déjà vu, but I'm keeping it to myself for now.

I bring it all up at this
point merely to try to provide some perspective on my experience
with Francesca Amalie on the beach below Pointe House. I didn't
know what happened there. I did know that the whole mind-blowing
happening unfolded as a sustained spine-tingling sense of déjà vu
such as I had never before experienced; I mean from the moment I
stepped off the elevator until the moment we lay gasping for breath
twenty feet off the blanket and shivering in the cold spreading
fingers of the Pacific; I was reliving, not living, the experience
on a frame-by-frame basis, and not just with the mind but with the
whole crazy body vibrating to the double-print sensations and
girding itself hungrily for the spectacular double-print climax
that had to be approaching in two worlds at once. Oh God, what
beauty! What peace with frenzy and what frenzy with peace! What
utter
adoration
of another living being!—both ways, that adoration was
flowing both ways between the bodies.

Call it an act of love or merely an act of
sex; call it what you please; to me it was a mystical experience
broadcasting through the flesh, and I had intimations of things
during that frantic mating that cannot be expressed in mere human
terms. I knew momentarily the pure bliss that is Godly love in its
finest essence, and I learned meaning of rapture. I believe I also
learned something about sexual love.

But I didn't know what the hell was really
going on there. At the moment I did not particularly give a
damn.

When we found the strength to do so, we
returned to the blanket and bundled on it, shivering not just from
the cold but also in the memory of that sexual union.

After a while, quite a long while of
snuggling and quiet rumination, Francesca whispered to me, "I'm
sorry that I lied to you."

I asked, "When did you do that?"

She replied without pause,
“I did not come to Pointe House one year ago."

So I had to ask her, "When did you come,
then?"

"I came," she told me, in
a flat, matter-of-fact reply, "the first time, in 1872."

Okay. I thought about that for a second or
two, then observed, "It was built in 1921."

She said, "This is the third Pointe House.
The first was built in 1798."

Uh huh.

“
Who built it?”

"Valentinius built it. It was destroyed by
fire in 1820. He again raised it in 1871 and brought me here a
year

later."

"Brought you here from where?"

"I had been staying in Vienna."

I said, "That makes you at least a hundred
years older than me."

She said, "That is not impossible."

I said, "I see."

But I did not see, and I did not wish to
see. So I tried to lighten it up a bit.

I asked, "Are you then the bride of
Dracula?"

She laughed. Just laughed.

But I, pal, was anything but laughing.

Chapter Eight: Reverse View

I should have pursued the
question while the mood was there, but I was not emotionally
prepared to do that at the moment, and the whole thing had slipped
away by the time we returned to the house. I mean, the whole thing.
We were back to where we'd been at our first meeting. It was as
though there were two Francescas, one for frolicking on the beach
and the other distant and absorbed in the preoccupations of a
totally different life.

"Can I take you to
dinner?" I asked her as we left the elevator.

"I'll probably just have a bite in my
studio," she replied noncomittally, but it was a clear signal.

I told her, "I like your work. Checked it
out before I went below. Good stuff. How long have you been at
it?"

"Obviously not long
enough," she said, turning back the compliment and evading the
question with the one response.

Different girl, yeah.

So I left it there, for the moment, and went
on to my suite. I heard water running in my bathroom and went
through to check it out. Hai Tsu was in there, drawing a bath in
the sunken tub. I backed away before she could see me and went to
the bedroom window to collect my thoughts.

But it was a difficult collection.

Look, I'm no amateur at intrigue. I was
raised in it, got a couple of damned degrees in it, and I'd
practiced it as a professional in some of the toughest theaters on
earth. But I did not know what to make of this present
situation.

Sure, you're probably thinking at this
point, what's the big deal? Some guy pulled a stage magician's
trick on you at Malibu, got your attention in a way designed to
lure you to Laguna and involve you in a conspiracy to defraud the
state of California, further bedazzled you with some worthless
papers and a ridiculous story of a man who would not die, then
cinched the con with a dazzling seductress who fucked more than
your body. She's playing the game, Ash; she's part of the con, and
she has scrambled your brains.

So okay, I take all that under
advisement.

But why me? And who could concoct such a
bizarre con?—and how could anyone smart enough to concoct such a
scenario not be smart enough to concoct one with a better success
factor built into it?

Sure, I go to the movies, just like you;
I've probably seen all the ones you've seen. I know, I know. So if
it's not a con, then it's a nut house. I've joined the inmates. But
is

insanity contagious? Did I catch it from
Francesca down there at Pointe Beach a while ago? Or was I already
lost even before I went down there?

Had I been crazy all my life?

Was that the answer to Ashton Ford or Ford
Ashton or whoever the hell I am?

I opened the little overnight kit I'd
brought to Laguna from Malibu and took another look at that ten
grand. It was real money. I'd brought it with me, in the thought
that I could give it back if I did not like the case.

I did not like the case.

Frankly, I was scared of the damned
case.

I wrapped the money in the
power of attorney and returned it to the kit. I would give it to
Jim Sloane. Not tomorrow. Tonight. I would take that bath which Hai
Tsu was presumably drawing for me, shake the sand out of my
clothes, and get the hell away from Pointe House while the getting
was good.

I would take the bath, yeah, but it was not
to be alone.

Hai Tsu had come up behind me. I knew she
was there even before I turned around to confirm with the eyes what
I already knew by some other avenue. Another dazzling seductress,
yeah. I guess I knew at that very moment that the getting had
already gone.

She wore a black, sheer,
hip-length negligee, and that was all she wore other than a
delicate red carnation in her hair. I had never cast eyes upon such
a divine female form. This was almost a comic-strip body, calling
up images of
Terry and the Pirates
and the Dragon Lady, except that this lady was
definitely no dragon; this lady was God's own idea of feminine
perfection.

She said to me, with that deliriously
secretive joy in the quiet voice, "Bath is ready, Shen."

I was gawking, I know I was, but I was
trying to at least gawk coolly. "What's that you called me?"

"Bath is ready," she repeated, reaching for
me with a graceful gesture available only to women of the
Orient.

Her hands were at my belt buckle and I was
reaching for cool.

I said, "No, I mean, what name did you call
me by?"

She was kneeling, withdrawing my pants,
gazing up at me from across cosmos. "Call you Shen. Are you not
Shen?"

I got it then. It had
tickled a tendril of memory when Francesca told me earlier that Hai
Tsu referred to Valentinius only as Shen, and explained, "I
believe that is some kind of Oriental title of respect."

Now that tendril was
flaring, and I knew that
Shen
was quite a bit more than a title of
respect.

It has to do with the yin and the yang of
Taoism, the interaction of which produces the created world and all
that occurs within it. Yin is the passive, feminine principle and
yang is the positive, masculine energy. Good spirits, collectively
referred to as Shen, are full of yang.

Lao-tzu founded Taoism in
the sixth century
b.c.
As a religion it lost much of its vitality after about the
second century
a.d.
when it was combined with various elements of Buddhism, but
survived strongly into twentieth-century China as a philosophy and
also as a form of ceremonial magic.

In its magical forms the Tao is thought to
be a route to immortality in the flesh. Early Taoist magicians were
alchemists who compounded various substances in a search for
immortality through chemistry (sort of like our modern medical
researchers?), developed various potions and pills and combined it
all with meditative disciplines designed to prolong life.

Lao-tzu is reputed to have possessed the
secret of long life, and the Tao tradition speaks of the Three
Isles of Immortality and the Eight Immortals who achieved
immortality by ingesting certain substances.

See where I'm at now?

I'm a sunk duck, that's where I'm at, Shen
or not.

Hai Tsu gently undressed
me to the skin, then escorted me to the bath. But she did not put
me in the tub right away. She first lay me down on the massage
table, removed her negligee, uncoiled a hose from the bath
fixture, and wet me down for a couple of minutes under a warm,
gentle spray, both sides, then she used a large sponge and
delicately perfumed soap to cover me front and back with a thick
layer of foamy suds before she went to work on me with those
incredible hands.

Yeah, I know where heaven's at.

I got a full body massage
under delightfully slippery suds by trained hands that knew all the
sensual paths to a man's heart; then I got a full body massage
under the same delightfully slippery suds by another full body that
knew how to fit all the opposing surfaces together in the most
captivating maneuvers.

Ten minutes of that, pal,
and you just don't give a shit anymore—not even with the enchanting
Francesca less than an hour behind you. The yin is firmly in
control of the yang, and all you have to do is lie back and let it
happen.

It just went on happening for a greatly
extended period of utter bliss—nothing explosive going on, you
understand, just that same slow, sinuous, sensuous rubbing of
flesh upon flesh. I couldn't even tell you if I had an erection
during any of that; I wouldn't know and wouldn't care, wouldn't
have given it a thought one way or another and it wouldn't have
mattered one way or another.

Later, yeah, it mattered.

She knelt astride me on the table and
thoroughly rinsed the suds from both of us with the warm spray;
then she went to work on me with lips, teeth, and tongue—all of me,
the whole extant surface area of me, nibbling and licking and
kissing in that same slow, deliberate rhythm—and a whole lot of
things quickly began to matter a whole lot.

This was the flip side of the Francesca
experience. I mean that it was a reverse view—an opposite angle, so
to speak—like the difference between inside and outside or topside
and bottomside. It was a reverse view also in intensity. Where the
one had been frantic, demanding, consuming, this one was
languorous, lazy, a giving up and giving in, capitulation to the
sense and immersion in pleasure.

Hai Tsu did not allow me an orgasm. She
would lick, nibble, blow and tickle right up to the boundary of no-
return then clamp and hold and divert sensations elsewhere, over
and over—I don't know how many over and overs—just endlessly it
seemed, until it gradually dawned on me that I was no longer
straining to leap that boundary, or for anything whatever, and I
slowly descended into the most relaxing peace I have ever
known.

She wet me down again,
turned on the whirlpool in the tub, and softly announced, "Bath is
ready, Shen. Dinner in one hour."

Then she quietly
withdrew.

And so did I. I fell asleep, and dreamed
miraculous dreams, and visited the Magi in a beautiful reverse view
of the meaning of life and of death.

And knew in those dreams that both are the
same.

Chapter Nine: The Echo and The Omen

The angel looked exactly like Valentinius but
said his name was Valory, which I understood to be another cover
identity for St. Germain. He told me that names are abstractions
anyway, and serve their chief purpose as a legal
convenience—hinting darkly that the human world is overly
preoccupied with legalities—and suggested that I just call him Val
for short.

I replied that I thought names were rather
important abstractions at any rate, and that set him off on a long
dissertation about the origin and customs of names and naming,
implying that the thing had gone overboard and lost much of its
meaning in the modern age.