Holland Suggestions (4 page)

“But you were just starting out.”

“Yes, I was, but there wasn’t any room in Vivian’s mind for that kind of thinking. She wasn’t interested in potential, only results. She was impatient with change; everything moved too slowly for her. I don’t think she ever worried about next year or last year, only now. In a lot of ways I guess she was really practical.”

I went into the kitchen and refilled my glass. “Besides,” I called through the hallway, “we were horribly mismatched.” I came back to the den and deposited the Scotch bottle and the ice bucket on the desk. “I guess that comes out a criticism of her from my viewpoint, but she isn’t here to defend herself, and I guess you’ll have to take all this with a grain of salt. I mean, I keep wanting to say things like bitch and whore, and that’s not credible at all, is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“I really learned to hate her. After she left me, when she was gone for five or six months and I knew she wasn’t ever coming back, I began to methodically destroy her in my mind. I must have cursed her name a thousand times, maybe more. It seems silly to me now, but I believed then that it was the only way I could make it. I do know that it was the worst period of my life, no question about it, and it lasted two years. By then I had distorted her image so that I didn’t have any real grasp of her anymore. Then I forgot about her, or thought I did. I guess my subconscious never did let me forget, though, did it?”

She married me to get away, you know. She had been in some kind of trouble in Wyllis when she was just eighteen. I never did know what that was about; only that she was under a court order of some kind. She refused to talk about it, just as she refused to talk about losing her department store job later, after some employee had poured red paint over the carpets one night after closing. I was an easy out for her, so we got married and moved up near Richmond. She hated that almost as much as she had hated Wyllis. Vivian hated everything. From the beginning, I knew, with the bleak certainty that some men know those things, that it wasn’t working. Knowing it didn’t help. When she wanted to leave, she just left. And when I got in her way she tried to cut my throat with a broken milk bottle.

I was filling my glass again and Judy was staring out at the gray day. Maybe I could stop here and finish another time; but no, it was coming up like a rotten meal and I could not stop until it was all out. Telling Judy about the milk bottle wouldn’t help her, but at least I had faced it and passed it. Now I could move on to something else. I noticed that Judy was staring at the bumpy scar on my neck, where I was feeling it with my fingers, and I took my hand down and busied my fingers with my glass.

The Scotch was having a dulling effect on my brain. That was what I wanted, but not too much or too soon. I sipped it and pushed the glass away from me.

“Where did she go?” Judy asked.

“I haven’t got the slightest idea. I haven’t seen her to this day.”

There was a long pause while we both reorganized our thoughts. Nothing came of that, so after a while I asked her if she had more questions.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Is there any more?”

“A little.” I sat up and opened the first of the Holland folders. “The next part of the story involves an old friend of mine. You know the name Robert Holland?”

“I’ve seen it on your filing cabinet. I always thought he was someone else you didn’t want to talk about.”

“I guess that’s true; I don’t know. Robert and Vivian were having a…thing…together. When I found out about it I wanted to hurt Robert, and I did. I did a really lousy thing; it cost him his job and probably would have ruined his life, but he died soon after it happened anyway. Here’s his picture.” I passed her the faded snapshot. “He’s the one in the middle, a lot younger here than when I knew him. They were on an outing in Colorado, I think, when this was made—probably sometime in the middle forties.”

I leaned over and looked at the picture, upside down in my vision as she held it. Robert, young and beardless, was wearing an assortment of hiking gear.

“Who are the other two with him?” she asked.

“The man on the left is Kenneth Barcotti. The guy on the right is Leland Smith. Robert told me they were inseparable, great pals in college. I’ve never met either of them.” I sipped my drink. “Let’s see—Kenneth Barcotti—did I say he was the one on the left? Yes, your left—Kenneth was the explorer, member of National Spelunkers, world traveler; he disappeared on a trip in the Colorado mountains just before Robert died, and I don’t think he was ever found. Leland Smith became a psychologist, like Robert, and moved to the Midwest to teach, or maybe to practice—I don’t know. Like I said, I never knew them, and I haven’t even thought about them for fifteen years. So Leland Smith—well, I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing now.”

I shuffled through Robert’s papers, found his manuscript on hypnosis, and the small package of newspaper clippings fell from between the pages. It fell face up on the table, and I knew that Judy wanted to pick it up and look through it. Her fingers were twitching.

“We’ll get to these soon,” I said. “Just contain your natural female curiosity and let’s take it one step at a time.”

I was really getting tight now, so I pushed my drink away to the far corner of the desk. Then, in an unsteady voice that seemed to belong to someone else, I told her the story of Robert Holland.

“The first time I saw Robert was in the fall of 1955. He was my psychology prof, you know. He’d been on the skids in the early fifties—Robert had a bad drinking problem all his life—and it had been up and down for him ever since his graduation. Mostly down, from what he’d told me. His friends tried to help him; they did what they could, but there wasn’t really anything that anybody could do. Robert Holland was a drunk, plain and simple.

“By 1952 he had pulled himself together and had taken a job as an account executive with a little advertising agency in suburban Washington. The following year he got back into teaching, when the chancellor at Schuster gave him an associate prof’s job. The chancellor was a real bastard; he kept two or three guys like Robert around all the time, just to help feed his ego. Warren Rice, his name was; Warren Rice. Yeah, well, this Rice never let Robert forget that he could be sent back to the skids with one little stroke of the pen. Robert worried all the time about his job; Rice terrified him. He had reason to worry, because he was into hypnosis again and Rice had ordered him to drop it. That was about the time of the Bridey Murphy thing, you know; the publicity on that was still going strong. And some of it wasn’t very good publicity. There had been a move to discredit Bridey, and Rice never liked the hocus-pocus that seemed to go with hypnosis anyway. So he ordered Robert to cease and desist; to stop all experimentation and all classroom discussion on hypnosis at once. But Robert couldn’t stop. By fall, when I arrived, Robert was conducting secret experiments with a few select students—those who had checked out in class as good subjects and could be counted on to keep their mouths shut. I became his best subject. I could go into a trance immediately, three and four levels deep. Most people, even good subjects, never accomplish that.

“We began doing some strange things. I would go to his house, at first alone, then later with Vivian, and we fooled around with age regression. Robert believed that a good hypnotic subject could relive any experience from his past, in all five senses. When the Bridey book broke—Do you remember the story about the girl who was sent back under hypnosis to a previous life?”

“I read it last year,” Judy said.

“Good. Well, Robert always believed in Bridey—not necessarily in
that
experiment, but in the concept. At first we used fairly simple techniques, like automatic writing. …”

She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s just another way the conscious mind can communicate with the subconscious. You go into a light trance and soon you begin to write. What you write is a direct message from the subconscious.” I saw her doubt and tried to emphasize my point. “Listen, it’s really a valid force. Psychologists use it all the time now. Look it up yourself if you don’t believe me.”

“Okay,” she said, still not convinced.

“Let me tell you what I did once with automatic writing. My dad once gave me a gold watch. It was one of those heirlooms that had passed from father to son for I don’t know how many generations. One day it suddenly disappeared; I couldn’t find it anywhere. It had a strong sentimental value and I felt lousy about it for weeks. For a while I even suspected that Vivian had sold it without telling me, but that was one time she wasn’t guilty. I found it through an automatic-writing experiment. It was in the watchpocket of a pair of plaid slacks that Vivian had bought me that fall. I hated them, but wore them once, just to please her. Wearing my dad’s gold watch seemed to make the slacks more bearable, so just that once I took it out of its case and carried it with me. By noon I’d completely forgotten that I had it. Later I hung up those terrible pants and never wore them again, and I forgot that the watch was still in the pocket.”

“What did you write?”

“Just two words—
plaid pockets—
but they were enough to jar my conscious, and then I remembered.”

“That’s fantastic. Can you still do it?”

“Probably. But listen, Robert and I were into things like that all the time. The watch thing was just my first experiment with the practical use of hypnosis. There were others, more than I can remember. It’s all there—in his journals. Vivian began going with me, and she developed a kind of morbid fascination with both the hypnosis and the hypnotist I didn’t know anything about that then. …”

Surprisingly, Judy shifted the talk away from her mother. “What else did he do?” she asked.

“I can see now we’re going to have to play the tapes. But not today, okay?”

“Just tell me the highlights.”

“Robert conducted a long series of age-regression experiments. He sent me back to specific days in my past, which I described in great detail. I mean, I remembered what was on the radio, what the weather was like, damn near everything about any specific day. We checked it in the newspaper morgue and it was all accurate. I never missed once. My voice changed as we went back into my childhood—it
became
a child’s voice. But you’ll hear that on the tape.”

“Go on,” she said; “there must be more.”

“We went back further and further, until I was speaking baby gibberish. Then Robert decided that we were ready for that big experiment, back beyond birth, you know, just like Bridey. What we got was a man named Jake Walters in the 1870s. The name didn’t mean anything to me; still doesn’t. We researched my family tree but never found any record in my parents’ or grandparents’ lives of a man named Jake Walters.”

“Who was he then?”

“I still don’t know. I only know this: He was a vicious killer. He spoke in a gravel voice and used a dialect that was almost middle English. The first time I heard his voice on tape, I wanted out. I told Robert I didn’t want any more of that. He insisted that we go on, find out more about Walters, see if we could uncover some tangible proof that he had lived. That scared the hell out of me. I learned to hate that voice. If I had been Walters in the 1870s, I didn’t want to know about it.”

“So you quit the experiments?”

“Yes.” My head was clearing again so I reached across the table and picked up my glass. “Robert was crushed, but I didn’t have any choice. My grades had dropped; Christ, I was a physical and mental wreck. I almost flunked out that year, and I blamed Robert for that. I started blaming him for a lot of things. Then, when I found out he was seeing Vivian, I wanted to hurt him and I did.”

I opened the package of newspaper clippings and unfolded the first yellowed sheet. Under the headline
ANOTHER BRIDEY MURPHY?
was my picture and the words
First of a Series.

“An acquaintance wrote that, a young reporter I knew. I gave him the whole thing, even let him listen to the Jake Walters tapes. You can imagine what happened. Robert was fired on the spot. Vivian and I fought over that and I got caught up in a defensive position. I know now that it was a rotten thing to do, but things done are never undone. Robert was fired and left town and that was that.”

“And that’s all of it?”

“Just about.”

“There’s more?”

“Not much. You were born four months later, and six months after that Vivian left us. Then, a few months after she had gone, there was a knock at my door late at night. I thought it might be your mother come home, but it was Robert. He looked like death warmed over, and at first I thought he was on the skids again. I remember we just stood there looking at each other for a minute; I remember that part so well. Neither of us knew what to say. Then he came in and we sat and talked for a time. We both apologized. He asked about Vivian, but I got the feeling that he really wasn’t interested anymore. He had come back to…to do…one final experiment.

“I told him he was out of his mind, but before I could ask him to leave he told me he was dying; some liver problem. The doctors had given him less than a month, and he wanted one more try on the Jake Walters thing. He was almost in tears; he was begging me; in another minute he would have been crawling to me, and I don’t think I could have stood that. So I did it. How the hell can you refuse something like that? I was scared, I’ve got to tell you that; I was so goddamn scared I almost couldn’t bring it off. It was the hardest one we ever did. There were so many things bothering both of us, and it was the first time I had ever seen his hands shake. But we finally did it; I don’t know how long it took, but when it was over he told me that it had failed and he wouldn’t be bothering me again. Then he picked up the reel of tape and walked out. I never saw him again. Two weeks later I got a letter from his friend Leland Smith, from somewhere in the Midwest, saying that Robert had come to see him and had died there.”

At last I had come to the end of it. Judy came to me and hugged my head against her breast, and when she had gone my head was wet where her face had been. But she had handled it fine; we had both done fine. There were a few odds and ends, but maybe she would never need to know those things. Some things were better left unsaid. Like Vivian’s obsession that her child would be a demon from hell, a throwback to Jake Walters. Like the day I found Vivian standing over Judy’s crib with a plastic bag in her hand.