The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (16 page)

The body, of course, was mortal, a temporal covering. It was also changeable. The flesh we began with when we were born wore out and was continually replaced by new flesh. New tissues replaced the worn-out ones. In a sense, your body was reincarnated even during the same lifetime. It underwent birth and rebirth in its material form. He recalled reading that the cells in a human body change completely every seven years. When you were a child you were in one body. When you became a teenager, you were still
you
, but your body had changed completely. When you became a man, you had a whole new body. But inside of all these bodies, there was still the original
you
. When the body got too old to function anymore, you simply shed it. The flesh decayed and became dust.

But the soul goes on. To another body, newly born. And after that, still another. And so on, according to some divine design. There is no end to it. And the principle is immutable:
I will be tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday—or some previous day
.

He, Peter Proud, knew this now, knew it for sure. But nobody else did.

He wondered what would happen if he ran out onto the street and proclaimed what he knew.
Don’t be afraid to die, good people. Because you’ll live again
.

He imagined the incredulous faces, the jeering laughter, the
names: kook, nut, weirdo, crazy. In earlier times, he would have suffered the fate of other prophets. The mob would have torn him apart or stoned him to death. Today they’d probably call the police, judge him insane, and lock him up.

But there was someone he could tell it to: Hall Bentley. He reached for the phone, and stopped. He decided that he might as well wait a little while. Possibly in the two days he had before he left, he might accumulate more information. He might as well give it all to Bentley at once.

He rose and went to the window. It was a moonless night, and the city of Riverside was ablaze with light. He could see the traffic moving along the cloverleafs and the parkways on the other side of the river, like a series of jeweled snakes, and the myriad of lights blinking in the suburbs of the city. He thought about Marcia again, wondering whether she was living down there somewhere among those lights.

He decided the chances were very much against it. Thirty-five years, give or take a few, was a long, long time. People died, or they moved away, or they got lost. Yet, in a very real sense, she was the only clue to his own identity. Find her, and he’d know who he was.

That, he thought, was going to be some trick.

He undressed slowly, and finally he fell asleep. His sleep was plagued by the dreams. He had them all, except for four: The City Dream, the Tower Dream, the Cotton Mather Dream, and the Prison Dream.

The next morning he had breakfast in his room. Then, unable to think of anywhere else to start, he began to go through the telephone directory.

In the short time he had been here, he realized that Riverside was a fairly sizable city, its population perhaps two hundred thousand. The phone book itself included not only the subscribers of Riverside itself, but those of many of the outlying districts and towns.

He began on three assumptions. First, that Marcia had never been convicted of his murder. Second, that she was still alive. And third, that she still lived in Riverside. He started to check off every Marcia listed in the phone book. Vaguely, he hoped that one of the surnames might hit a memory nerve somewhere, might open some tiny hidden compartment.

By the time he got through the letter F, he had checked off some twenty names beginning with the name Marcia. None of the last names conjured up anything. Besides, there could be fifty or a hundred more Marcias in Riverside whose identities would be hidden because only their husbands’ names were listed in the phone book. He closed the directory in disgust and threw it on the bed. He was reaching for nowhere.

Still, the key was Marcia. If he found out who she was, he would find out who he himself was.

He went downstairs. The elderly clerk was on duty at the reception desk. He smiled as Peter approached.

“Good morning, sir.”

“Good morning.”

“What can I do for you?”

“I’m looking for a lake somewhere in the area.”

“Yes? What lake?”

“I don’t remember the name. I used to live around here as a small boy, and my folks used to have a cottage there …”

The clerk looked at him dubiously. “Well, we have a lot of lakes around here …”

“I realize that. But I do remember something about this one. There was a big hotel on it, called Puritan. Puritan House, Puritan Inn, something like that….”

“Oh, you probably mean Lake Nipmuck.”

“Nipmuck?”

“Yes, sir. There used to be a Puritan Hotel on the north shore. But when they built the new parkway near the lake about five years ago and got all that traffic going through, they tore it down and put up a Holiday Inn there.”

“I see. Where can I find it?”

“Here,” said the clerk. “Let me show you on the map,” He picked up a folder on the desk. “It’s about twenty miles from here. But once you get on the Miles Morgan Parkway, it’ll take you no time at all.”

Nipmuck. The name was familiar enough. The tribal word itself meant “fresh water fishing place.” The Nipmucks were one of the inland tribes of central Massachusetts. They had followed the hostile tribes at the outbreak of King Philip’s War and later fled to Canada or westward to the Mohicans and other tribes on the Hudson. Nipmuck. One for the book, the one he would finish someday—maybe.

He drove down Main Street. The arrows indicated that there was an entry to the Miles Morgan Parkway on the other side of Court Square. He drove past the Municipal Building and then stopped the car for a moment near the curb. A sign on a separate section of the building caught his eye: Riverside Police Department.

It struck him suddenly that the answer might be in there. Maybe part of the answer, maybe the whole answer. If the girl in his dreams had been caught and convicted of her crime, they would surely have some kind of record. Even if it went back thirty-five years.

He started to circle the square, looking for a parking place. Through his windshield the traffic was a moving blur. Sweat soaked his collar. It was very simple—just go in there and ask.

Then he thought about it. It wasn’t simple at all. In fact, it could get pretty damned complicated. He began to write a scenario in his mind. The red-faced police sergeant sitting behind the desk stared at him:

“What can I do for you, mister?”

“I wonder if you could give me some information, sergeant.”

“What kind of information?”

“Do you have any record of a murder committed at Lake Nipmuck, sometime in the forties?”

He pictured the sergeant, hard blue eyes suddenly alert, watching him now with interest.

“In the 1940s, you say?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a long time ago. We’d have to look it up. What kind of homicide was it?”

“Well, it probably looked like an accident. But it was a murder. The victim was a naked man. They probably dragged the lake for him, or found his body floating …”

“What was the name of this victim?”

“I don’t know his name.”

“You remember the name of the killer?”

“I don’t know that, either. But it was a woman.”

“I see. A woman.”

“Yes.”

“You know a woman murdered a naked man, but you don’t know her name.”

“I told you, I don’t. I don’t even know whether the police ever found out about her or not. If they did, it’d be in your records.”

It was easy to imagine the way the sergeant would stare at him now as though he were dealing with some kind of kook. But more than that: the hard eyes would become suspicious.

“What’s your name, mister?”

“Peter. Peter Proud,”

“What’s your interest in all this?”

“I—I’m just interested.”

“You haven’t answered my question, Proud,”

“Look, sergeant, all I wanted was some information …”

“Just how did this homicide happen? Can you give us any details?”

“Well, the man was swimming in the moonlight. The woman came up in a boat. Her name was Marcia. She hit the man over the head with her paddle two or three times. He sank …”

“How do you know all this happened?”

“Well, I dreamed it. I just dreamed about it.”

“I see. You saw it all in a dream.”

“Look, sergeant, I’m sorry I bothered you. Forget it …”

“Hold it, mister. Not so fast. Maybe you’d better tell your story to the lieutenant …”

He squirmed as he let his imagination run on.

“I saw it all in a dream, lieutenant. It’s true, it really happened. How do I know? Well, I was the man who was murdered. In my previous life, that is …”

Say that again, Proud. And see how crazy it sounds
.

They might do any number of things—simply throw him out, or hold him for observation. They might, out of curiosity, even take the trouble to go back into their files. Suppose they found no record of any homicide at Lake Nipmuck in the forties. That would prove that Marcia had gotten away with it, of course. But the police might be interested enough in what he had to say, no matter how wild it was, to start some kind of investigation—of him. Who had really
told him about this? Where had he gotten his information? What was his real interest?

It was late morning, and the sidewalks were crowded with shoppers. Through his car window he stared at the people passing by. He had developed the habit now of peering at faces, trying to match them with the faces he had seen in his hallucinations. Particularly the faces of women in their late fifties.

He headed for the lake. He had originally intended only to visit it, to see how it compared with what he had seen in his hallucination. Now he realized that his search might very well end there. At Nipmuck, it was possible he might find out who he was.
If
he had any kind of luck.

He turned the car into the Miles Morgan Parkway and then cruised at a steady sixty.

The excitement grew in him. The more he thought of it, the surer he was that his answer waited for him at the lake.

It was a beautiful, clear spring day. To the west he could see the eroded remains of what were once the lofty Berkshires, to the east the ridges of the central Massachusetts hills. Here, in the valley between, there were small farms, the land just being plowed for planting, and tobacco fields. Much of the land was strewn with rocks. Vaguely he remembered from some long-forgotten course in geology that this region had gone through a great glacial period. Enormous ice sheets had ground their way toward the sea, Like giant battering rams, they had pushed tons of rubble and stone before them, strewing the rocky waste all over the region. In places, he saw these deposits piled in rounded drumlins or left in long ridges of gravel. He saw two or three abandoned quarries filled with water.

Again, he had the same eerie feeling
I have been here before
.

He wondered whether, as X, he had been born and brought up in this Riverside area. It was entirely possible. In the dream, he pictured X as about his own age when he died—twenty-seven. If
that were so, and he had died sometime in the forties, as the dream indicated, then he must have been born sometime between 1910 and 1920. Maybe, as a small boy, he had clambered over these rounded hills of trap rock or run along the ridges of gravel. He might have gone skinny-dipping in the cold, clear spring water that filled the quarries, and dived from their tilted rocks, taking care not to break his neck on some rocky protuberance concealed by silt or weeds. Here he might have known the feel of rounded pebbles on bare feet as he waded brook or stream, and heard the singing of water as it rushed down the granite crevasses in the floods of the New England spring, and perhaps he had snagged many a fishing hook on the stony bottoms.

The road sign caught him dreaming. He was almost upon it when he saw the direction: E
XIT
16. L
AKE
N
IPMUCK
. He put on his brakes hard. The tires screamed on the pavement. Someone blew a horn at him angrily from behind.

In a few minutes he was at the lake. He drove slowly along the narrow, two-lane blacktop as it twisted and turned, following the contour of the shore. He saw the patch of smooth-faced stone on the mountain, exactly as he had seen it in the Lake Dream. The Holiday Inn was standing behind the same grove of pines, built on the site of the Puritan.

But he could not find the cottage. In the Lake Dream he had seen it all so clearly: the outdoor fireplace, the picnic table, the graveled walk lined with whitewashed stones leading down to the dock. And, of course, the dock itself. He remembered the place with woods on each side and a sprinkling of other cottages around the lake. He had been sure he could go directly to it.

But now he was totally confused. The lakefront was jammed with cottages, one next to the other, with very little land between them. In the last thirty-five years or more, the building boom had come here. In some places, there were two or three cottages between the lakeshore itself and the road. Almost all of them had the same
kind of dock he had seen in the dream. To his eyes, they all looked vaguely the same, as though the same developer had thrown them all up at once. They were homey folksy places, with small signs saying: “The Wilsons Live Here” or “George and May” or “Fred and Alice” or “Charlie and Joan.” Now, in April, they were all closed. They were all forlorn, looking a little shabby, wearied by the winter.

He drove around slowly. None of them looked the least familiar. Vaguely, he knew it was directly opposite the hotel, somewhere on the south shore. But you could stand at a hundred places on the south shore and be opposite any point on the opposite side. Moreover, he had never seen the
part
of the cottage he had dreamed about that faced the road, and he couldn’t go tramping around every cottage on the south shore. And in three decades or more the cottage could have gotten a new dock, new walk, new outdoor furniture. The old place could even have been torn down, and a new one put up in the same spot. Despite the fact that some refurbishing seemed to be needed, many of these cottages seemed fairly new, as though they’d been put up in the last five or ten years.