The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (2 page)

Then he heard it. The sound of an outboard motor in the distance. It grew louder and louder and seemed to be headed toward him.

He started to tread water. He began to shout. “Over here, over here!” He yelled and screamed and prayed, afraid that whoever it was would miss him in the dark.

Then he saw her, steering the boat toward him. She cut the motor, and glided in close.
Ah, Christ
, he wept.
Good Marcia, sweet Marcia, beautiful Marcia. I love you, baby
.

A sliver of moon peeped out from behind the cloud. It suffused the lake in an eerie glow. She looked like a ghost dressed in
a fur coat. Her face was ash white and set like wax. Expressionless. Coldly beautiful.

He found new strength. Now he felt warm, strong again. He waited, treading water, waiting for her to get to him.

“Look, Marcia,” he said. “I didn’t mean what I said back there.”

Her face was rigid. “Get into the boat.”

“I’m sorry. I mean it. I’m sorry.”

“I know. You’ve been sorry so many times before.”

“I was drunk. I didn’t know what I was saying. I hate myself for what I did to you back there.” He was really contrite. He thought he saw her face soften a little. Now he hit home. “I love you, Marcia. I always have.”

“I know that, darling,” she said. He knew he had finally gotten to her. “It’s all right. We won’t talk about it again. We’ll never talk about it again.”

She picked up an oar and maneuvered the boat, trying to present the stem to him so that he could pull himself up without tipping over the craft. He watched her, thinking how beautiful she, looked here in the moonlight. And how strange. Her face was still expressionless. In this light it didn’t look quite real. It was a delicately tinted golden mask. Blue, blue eyes, almost too blue to believe. The small straight nose in the perfect oval of the face. The black hair, dark and tumbled, a bird’s wing of it curling down her cheek and along her white throat. There was a faint Oriental cast to her face. The artisan who had painted this mask had gone a little overboard with the mouth, as he had with the eyes. It was ripe red, crushed-strawberry red, the lips soft and full and moist. In this light it looked almost obscene, a sensuous gash in the papier-mâché.

He turned on his back and floated, waiting for her.

The boat drew alongside. He was about to turn over and reach for the stern when, surprisingly, she stood up. The mask became animated now. There was a sudden strange look on her face. It was evil, contorted. The red slash parted to reveal her bared teeth. She raised
the oar high over her head, holding the handle with both hands. Her fur coat fell open as she did so, Underneath, she was stark naked. He saw the red bruise marks around her neck and shoulders. He saw the long, lithe white body; the high round breasts placed well apart, the nipples stiff with the cold; her small waist; the tight, flat belly; the long, milk-smooth thighs; the little tuft of fine black curling hair; and in this moment, in this frozen moment, he even noticed the small birthmark on her lower abdomen, just above the tuft of hair, the strange blue birthmark shaped like a tiny diamond.

She brought the oar down hard with all her strength. Straight down on his exposed crotch.

He screamed with pain. He turned on his stomach, still screaming. He looked up at her. She raised the oar over her head again. She sobbed as she swung it down. It caught him on the head, and the blow seemed to penetrate his skull. She hit him again, and again.

Dimly he heard himself crying,
“No, Marcia, no, no!”

It seemed to come from very far away. His skull seemed to be exploding. He could barely see her now. Desperately he reached out to grab the boat. He managed to catch the side, just barely. She brought the oar up again and slammed its edge against his clutching fingers. He let go. Looked up at her face for one last moment. Saw, through the blur, her wild, staring eyes, the bared teeth, the hot blazing hatred.

Then her face was gone.

Suddenly it was dark and, very cold. There was a roaring in his ears. He was turning around and around as he went down. Like an acrobat tumbling through the air in one of those slow-motion films. Around and around, arms flung wide, legs spread apart, down and down. He did not try to move, He could not move. It was a strange and slow and dreamy descent.

His head hit the bottom first. His face sank into the cold muck and weeds, almost up to the neck. His body arched over a moment later and lay inert in the ooze.

Then his lungs exploded.

He opened his eyes. His body was drenched in sweat.

Always, whenever he had this particular dream, this nightmare he had come to call the Lake Dream, he awoke exhausted, as though he had never slept at all.

“My God, Pete!”

Nora was leaning on her elbows, staring down at him, her blue eyes wide, her face pale. She had thrown the bedclothes from her, and her breasts had fallen free from her nightgown.

“Oh.” Then, mumbling, “What is it, Nora? What’s wrong?”

“Wrong? You just scared hell out of me, that’s all.” She showed him her arm. “Look. Gooseflesh. I’m still shaking. There I was, asleep, when I heard this voice yelling out. Right next to me. I wake up and there you were. Talking in your sleep. Or rather, shouting. Only it wasn’t
you
.”

He knew it was bound to happen again, sooner or later. He turned his head and looked out of the window at the familiar scene: palm and lemon trees just beyond the terrace; across the pool and patio, garden apartments. Beyond them the line of high-rise office buildings on Wilshire Boulevard, gleaming white in the early sun. And beyond them the great spread of East Los Angeles, already beginning to blur in the smog.

“Pete, you’re not listening to me.”

“I heard you.”

“I’m trying to tell you, it was awful. This crazy voice coming out of your mouth. It didn’t belong to you at all.”

“Oh?” He tried to beg casual. “What did it sound like?”

“Not it. He.”

“All right. He.”

“Weird. Deeper than yours. Coarser. God, I’m still shaking.” It’s like some horror story, he thought.
X speaks again
.

He saw that she was really frightened and tried to humor her out of it.

“Nora, have I ever told you I was a schizo?”

“What?”

She looked at him blankly and he grinned. “It’s true. By day I am known as Doctor Peter Proud, brilliant young associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Pursuing the history and culture of the North American Indian as my chosen field. Known for my gentleness, tolerance, and humanitarianism. Beloved by all my students and my fellow faculty. You might call that the Doctor Jekyll side of my personality. But at night …”

“Stop it, Pete,” she said angrily.

“I’m sorry!”

“Who’s Marcia?”

“Marcia?”

“You were yelling her name in your sleep.”

“I don’t know any Marcia.”

“You’re sure?”

“Never knew anybody by that name.”

“Never?”

“Never in my life. The lady is a stranger.”

“Well, you must have heard it somewhere. You must have known a Marcia somewhere, but you’ve forgotten. Anyway, you were yelling something like, ‘Don’t, Marcia, don’t!’ ” She shuddered. “Or to put it more exactly,
he
was doing the yelling. “She swung her long legs over the edge of the bed. “I’m still shook up. Excuse me while I run for the nearest john.”

She padded out of the room, and he heard the bathroom door slam behind her.

He turned to look at the clock. It was 6:15.

The Lake Dream
. There were others just as insane, and he gave them other names. But this was the one that came most often. Of late, it had been coming to him about twice a week. And it never varied. It was always monotonously the same, down to the last detail.

Always, he died in the same way.

He was swimming in this lake, and this woman Marcia came along in the boat, and each time they said exactly the same things to each other. The picture never changed; each detail was frozen. Always, he turned on his back to float, and always she raised her paddle and smashed him in the balls and then on the head and then on the fingers, and after that, he went down and down, turning around and around, in the same old way.

And Marcia.
The girl of my dreams
, he thought.

She was in many of the others, too. They were shorter dreams, fragments really, but they kept repeating themselves, like the Lake Dream. None of them had anything to do with any memories of his life or childhood. They were clearly of some other time and place. Six months ago they had begun to creep into his unconscious. They not only stayed; they became more frequent and more intense. And they seemed to drive away every other dream he might have had—the usual or normal kind, the kind you forgot the next day.

The strange part of it was he remembered each of them in every detail. He had recorded them in a notebook he kept, and as with the Lake Dream, nothing in them ever varied.

In the dreams he was always this same man, the man he thought of as X. And this strange and mysterious lady, Marcia, was usually with X. They seemed to live in a particular city or town. The town seemed very familiar to him in these dreams. He could see the main street with the arched railroad bridge spanning it. He could see a kind of municipal tower facing a central square. He could see the shops, the houses, the faces of the people on the streets. He knew he had never been in this particular town in all his life. He was
sure of it. Yet he could see it all so clearly. Neighborhoods, even suburban streets.

Many of the dreams were winter scenes. Deep snow on the ground. Blizzards. But the fact was that he had rarely seen snow, except on the tops of the mountains surrounding the Los Angeles basin. Or when he had gone skiing at Aspen or Mammoth. He had been born in California and had lived there all of his life.

But even more weird was this “Puritan” thing. The word “Puritan” occurred not only in the Lake Dream, but also in the other fragments. He saw it on signs, on buildings, and in limbo. It seemed to suggest New England. But he had never been in New England in his life. He’d been east several times, in New York City and Washington, but never in New England.

Now, it seemed, he had a new problem. He was beginning to talk in his sleep, not he, really, but the man he had come to think of as X.

A couple of weeks before, he had stayed overnight at the house his parents owned in Palm Springs. He had awakened to find them both in the room, dressed in night robes and staring at him. They had looked terrified. They had heard someone shouting in his room. Like Nora, they said it had sounded like someone else, a stranger. They had thought it was a burglar who had broken in and who had perhaps awakened him and had been shouting in the middle of a struggle …

And even before that, in the hotel at Las Vegas. That night with Sybil Wilson. They had been shooting some film about the Apache at Twentieth Century Fox, and they had decided they wanted everything really authentic—the tribal dress and customs and so forth. So they had hired him in the capacity of what they called a technical adviser. They had been shooting desert locations in southern Nevada, using Vegas as a base, and Sybil Wilson had been the script girl. One thing had led to another, and finally she had come to his room.

Early in the morning, he had awakened from the Lake Dream to find her staring at him white-faced and throwing on her clothes. She had run from the room terrified. When he called her later, she coldly informed him that she did not like men who talked in their sleep, especially in some weird kind of voice. In effect, she had implied that he was some kind of crazy.

He knew he was going through some strange psychic experience. He didn’t know where these fantasies came from, or why they were happening to him. And naturally he was disturbed. He had gone to see a psychiatrist, a Dr. Ludwig Staub, very expensive and highly recommended. After a few sessions with Staub, he could sense that the psychiatrist was baffled.

“These dreams of yours,” Staub had said, “do not seem to be dreams at all in the ordinary, classical sense. I would call them hallucinations. They are fixed and repetitive, and you have extraordinary recall. They do not seem to come from any subjective sensory stimuli we can trace. If it is of any comfort to you, they are not schizoid in character. The dreams of the schizophrenic are usually flat, vacant, unevocative. He might dream of a chair, or a tea kettle, or a road leading somewhere—an object of some kind. These dreams have no action and no people. Your dreams—or, again, let us call them hallucinations—are much more elaborate than that. And you do not have any apparent symptoms of schizophrenia.”

He had found
that
a relief. And Dr. Staub had gone on: “You do not seem to be greatly disturbed at this point—I mean emotionally. Naturally you are curious. These are psychic aberrations of some kind, screen memories, perhaps. It might be possible to dig them out, but it would take a long time. Other than this, Dr. Proud, I must tell you frankly that I cannot give you any real answers.”

“But the dreams” Peter had insisted. “They all seem totally about someone else.”

“You mean this man X you refer to.”

“Yes.”

“X is yourself.”

“But what about this town I keep seeing—?”

The psychiatrist had smiled. “Dr. Proud, are you implying that you are hallucinating about some past life? That this is some psychic manifestation of reincarnation?”

“I don’t know. The thought has crossed my mind.”

“I guessed as much,” Staub had said. He had continued to smile. “But I doubt it. When you’re dead, you’re dead. Clearly it’s possible to regress in one’s sleep back to childhood, and even infancy. But only as far as’ one has actual living memory. I’ve had people, patients, who actually believe they are reincarnations of some pharaoh, or a Roman soldier in Caesar’s legions, or some member of Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet. They quote Edgar Cayce; they tell you all about Bridey Murphy. They want to believe that after they die they will be born again. It’s usually harmless, and it gives them some kind of comfort. It’s all part of the occult scene today. Many people can’t face reality. Or they find it ugly. They find their lives empty and unrewarding, so they look for other answers—karma, voodoo, astrology, even witchcraft. All of these are nonsense, of course. But they all have the same mystique. If you believe it, it’s so.”