Overheard in a Dream (21 page)

“
You shouldn’t be here,” Torgon said
.

“
I’m here because the acolytes won’t wash you like I will, and you need washing. You’ve gone very sweaty. Now, shhh. You needn’t talk.
”

It felt good, the confidence of Mogri’s hands, the familiar smell of water herbs. The Seer never used water herbs, but then he wouldn’t have taken the liberty of washing her either. Her head was still heavy with the aftereffects of the death oils the Seer had
given in order that she might escort the child’s soul to safety. Torgon allowed herself to drowse
.

“
It was so strange this time, Mogri,” she murmured
.

“
What are you talking of
?”

“
In isolation. The Power came over me.
”

“
It was probably less the Power, Torgon, and more the death oils. You did not have your soul when they brought you down from the isolation hut and I feared greatly that you would not get it back this time. You must have walked great distances among the dead to find this child’s spirit – too far, we feared – and there were many who thought the dead had barred your way and wouldn’t let you back again.
”

Mogri paused. “It is perhaps not fitting that I should say this but I feared less the dead were to blame than that the old man had poisoned you with the death oils. He is
very
old, Torgon. I do not believe he always thinks straight.
”

“
It wasn’t the death oils that caused the visions. It was the Power. They came before I was given the death oils.
”

Mogri’s expression grew serious. She quickly made the gesture of deference with her fingers. “This is for you to talk with the Seer about, Torgon, not me. I have no holy calling. You know that.
”

“
I cannot talk with him. He will say they were unholy things which came to me. He will say I lost my way among the dead and was seduced into darkness, but this is not so. It … the Power … shone with great light. And in the light I saw other ways of doing things. Ways that seemed not like Dwr’s at all … At one point, I saw Anil’s baby, but she was well grown. She was five or six summers maybe, with fair hair like her brother’s, but curly, like her father’s, and the moon kiss was gone … No, not gone exactly, but where it had been there was naught but a scar line. A crooked
line, as is with Bertil’s mouth, you know? Where he caught it on the spear and it has healed.
”

Mogri shook her head. “Except a moon kiss never heals, Torgon. The child would just waste and die.
”

“
I know that. But in the visions the Power brought me, it was different. The child thrived. Her soul was happy to be in such a body and would have found no blessing in her death.
”

Torgon sighed. “Why would Dwr send such visions to me, when they question holy laws? What am I supposed to make of them? They came so strongly and took me from the darkness into another place.
”

“
Here, give me your hand,” Mogri said gently and reached over. Taking Torgon’s hand between both of hers, she pressed it to her breast. “What you need is the feel of living flesh. You’ve been too long among the spirit kind. Hold on to me a good moment. This is what you need most.
”

“
Perhaps she was right, because the quicksilver brilliance of the Power faded from Torgon’s mind with the warmth of Mogri’s hand. Weary and wordless, Torgon let go of the feeling and lay back in her bed.
”

“I
don’t know where that came from,” Laura said, looking at the yellowed sheets of school notebook paper covered in adolescent handwriting that James was holding. “It hadn’t been in my mind at all, but that’s what came as I sat there in the library. I was
horrified
. She killed that baby! Torgon
killed
it. Just like that.”

“Do you suppose it could have been an expression of the turmoil you were feeling at that time?” James asked.

Laura sat back. “This is what I want you to avoid doing,” she said quietly. “Pre-judging all this. Confining it to a box.”

“No, I’m trying not to,” James replied. “I’m simply remarking that you had many powerful negative feelings at this point in your life. Our minds are capable of some quite remarkable transformations.”

“If anything, I think perhaps it was the other way around,” she replied. “Because I was experiencing such powerful negative feelings in my own life, I was more open to what was happening in Torgon’s. This was in the sixties. In those days, there was very little graphic violence around. There wasn’t
the gratuitous violence, the casual autopsy porn that you see everywhere these days on TV and in the movies. So I was genuinely repulsed that Torgon would do something like this. It was just so foreign to my way of life.

“I’d immediately recognized what was wrong with the baby – it had a cleft palate. One of my cousins had a baby like that, so even at fifteen, I knew quite a lot about it. I certainly knew it could be fixed and a child could grow up completely normally. But Torgon didn’t even give the baby a chance. She killed it outright.

“That just sat with me in such a dark, secret way. I kept reading back through what I’d written, re-experiencing it each time. Asking
why
? It was the action, not the violence that upset me. I never thought: where did this terrible story come from or how could I write something so graphic about murdering children? To be truthful, it didn’t even occur to me to consider my own role in it. All I was thinking was: how could such a sensitive, intelligent person as Torgon accept that killing the baby was the right thing to do? The mother had offered to care for the little girl herself. Why didn’t Torgon fight for that? Just because she’d been taught that’s what their god wanted, why didn’t she stop and think for herself?

“But it compelled me as well. I had this faint ache – not an anxiety really – just a kind of pressure building up, that made me long to write the rest of it. My imagination had finally found form. Picking up that pencil in the library literally changed my life. From that moment on, writing overtook me like a physical force. It became all I wanted to do.”

“What did your family think about this?” James asked.

“Marilyn showed a passing interest at first. She talked about how I might get famous if I kept it up and maybe
even get a book made into a movie in Hollywood, because that happened to some writers. But then she kept wanting to read what I was writing and I could hardly share it, could I? Marilyn was expecting romantic stuff or at least something recognizable as a teenage girl’s life. Not child murders.

“My dad said nothing about it at all. I don’t know when it happened, but sometime during my teens, we’d become strangers. Or perhaps we’d always been. My father loved me. I was always certain of that, but I’d long since realized we lived in parallel universes.

“Unfortunately, Marilyn’s tolerance didn’t last long. My reluctance to show her any of my writing made her suspicious. She started to question just what precisely I was ‘doing down there in the basement’ in a tone of voice that implied it might be sex trafficking or something. When I complained, she said that no one who spent her adolescence shut away in her room was going to grow into a well-rounded individual.

“I felt really angry with Marilyn at that point. I was a straight A student; I helped out a lot with Tiffany; I did all my chores around the house without being reminded; I didn’t drink; I didn’t smoke; I didn’t do drugs or go to wild parties. I wasn’t aimlessly walking the streets any longer, and for more than a year I’d been completely honest about which friends I had and which I didn’t. Why was she never satisfied with me?

“In the end, what saved me was Marilyn’s getting pregnant again. It was a little boy this time and they named him Cody. Tiffie was two and between her and the baby, Marilyn finally seemed to have enough on her plate that she didn’t need to worry about me. Or maybe it was just that the two of them
offered a lot more scope for improvement than I did. Whatever, I was finally left more or less to my own devices.”

A pause. Laura’s expression grew a bit uncomfortable. She smiled awkwardly. “Actually I
had
been honest about my friends, but I was still finding it hard to stay completely within the confines of this world that everyone else seems to find so real. A more creative kind of fabrication had started happening at school. I had no evil intentions in doing it. I wasn’t even doing it for attention. I just had such an enormous creative brew bubbling away in my head that it boiled over occasionally into what was going on around me.

“Guileless as I was at the time, it never occurred to me to think that what I was doing might be construed as taking advantage of people. It didn’t even feel like lying to me. I was simply sharing all this bounty I experienced in my head that others didn’t. I invented characters and storylines, added, took away, fleshed each one out until they were rich, multi-faceted personalities. I never cared if they were real people or not.

“In the end I was too successful at making them believable. One Saturday while I was out, my French teacher stopped by the house with a box of postcards. I arrived home to find Marilyn and my dad sitting grimly at the kitchen table. Panic flooded me. Even without knowing what had happened, I knew I was guilty of something.

“‘Suppose you tell us what this is all about?’ Dad said, shoving the box of postcards across the table.

“I looked blankly at them and shrugged. ‘I’ve never seen them before,’ I said.

“‘No, I suppose not. Because Mrs. Patton has just brought them around for Sarah. Feel like telling us who Sarah is?’ he asked.

“I swallowed hard.

“Meanwhile, Marilyn’s eyes had gone cold and lustreless as a lizard’s. ‘Can you imagine how your father and I felt to have this teacher of yours come to our door all enthusiastic about having this box of postcards to give your little Sarah? What could we say to her? That there was no such person as Sarah and there never has been, that you just made her up?’

“A terrible fight followed. My parents were furious. Marilyn pointed out how I had hardly any friends, never dated, never attended school functions and virtually never invited anyone to the house. She said all I did was lock myself away in the basement and live in a fantasy world. ‘There’s something very, very wrong with this girl, Ron,’ she kept telling my father. ‘She’s turning into a pathological liar. There’s something sick about her.’

“I felt devastated. I wanted so much for Dad and Marilyn to understand what was going on for me, and that I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. Torgon and the Forest had always made me feel so good, but I was beginning to realize maybe there
was
something wrong with it. I cried and cried.

“That night I managed to gather enough courage to try and explain my side of things to my father. ‘We’re done being mad at you, Laurie,’ he said in this very gentle voice when we were finally alone in his study. ‘I know some things got said this afternoon which shouldn’t have, but people are like that in the heat of the moment and it doesn’t really mean anything. You know we love you very, very much, don’t you, and want only the best for you.’

“‘I’m sorry about making Sarah up. I didn’t mean it to get away from me … But, Dad, I’ve got to explain something to you. I see people inside my head, Dad. I see their faces as
clearly as I see yours right now. I hear them when they talk. I know how they feel and what they think about.’

“‘I know it sounds crazy,’ I said. ‘You’re probably thinking Marilyn’s right and I’ve gone nuts or something, but that’s not what’s happening. I
know
they’re in my head and I never have any trouble telling what’s out here in this world and what’s inside me.’

“His brow furrowed. ‘Oh, Laurie …’ he murmured.

“‘But the thing is, Dad, they
are
in there. Lots of them. Whole families. Aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents. There’s a world. A political system. Laws. Religion. Animals.
Everything
… and they’re all in here.’ I touched my temple.

“There was this long pause. Then I said, ‘There’s got to be a reason that all this is in my head, Dad. I feel that. Why would there be so much detail, so much happening, if it wasn’t anything more than messed-up chemicals in my brain or whatever being nuts is?’

“He searched my face, his eyes going over it slowly, as if over foreign terrain. I became worried, because he didn’t speak. Finally, I said, ‘Do
you
think there’s something wrong with me that makes me see all these things?’

“He smiled gently then, shook his head and said, ‘No, I think you’re just a little childish for your age, that’s all. Most kids have outgrown these things by the time they’re teenagers, but with the kind of life you’ve had … the things that happened. You got a bad start to life, Laurie. I’m really sorry for that. It’s understandable that you’re still a bit immature.’

“I frowned. ‘I don’t think what’s happening to me is about being immature, Dad. I think it’s about being different. I don’t
actually want to lose what’s going on in my head. I just don’t want to be so difficult for everyone.’

“‘We’d all like to live in fantasy worlds, Laurie, but it’s not the grown-up way of doing things. There’s nothing wrong with you that a few more years won’t cure. You’ve been very silly, but we’ve all been that at one time or another. All you need to do is stop the silliness and move on.’