“Reveal yourself,” the woman said. They struggled in the dark.
But that was a dream too. He woke up alone except for a mosquito singing in his ear. The sheets were tangled around his legs, his pants were undone, and his testicles ached as if he had just spent himself in a wet dream. He rolled from the mattress and stumbled into the bathroom, running tepid water to splash in his face. He looked in the mirror for reassurance, but there was no mirror. Disoriented by fever and nightmares, he was remembering another bathroom in another country. He dried his face on a towel that reeked of mildew and developer, and went back to the bed.
His bag lay open on the floor.
The copies were gone. They had left him with nothing—nothing but the one sheet of tracing paper he’d copied by hand and folded into his notebook. He stared at the design. It was the same he had dreamed of seeing in the French boy’s mirror. Not dreamed, no; they had been here.
He had been robbed. Drugged, then robbed.
If so, then why did he feel relieved? Fulfilled?
He went into the dark narrow hall. The corridor looked longer than he remembered, and seemed to curve slightly, tapering until it deposited him at the top of the stairs. The clerk watched him descend into the dim, low-ceilinged lobby, smiling unconvincingly.
“Were there two people here to see me?”
The boy nodded. “Yes… your friends. They go up, come back just now. They say you sleeping.”
“My friends?”
“Yes, who come two nights ago.”
“What?”
“Same ones. I remember.”
At that moment the boy’s eyes fixed on the American’s forehead. He squinted, then went pale. The American wiped his brow, expecting to find a squashed insect there, something repellent, but there was nothing. He turned away from the desk and went out into the night, as if they might be lingering just outside.
The street, like the corridor upstairs, seemed to arch away from him, as if he had grown preternaturally aware of the curvature of the globe, as if he were about to slide away over the edge of everything. He was convinced now that these were the early stages of some illness new to him: dizziness, vertigo, and the slow steady throbbing of everything, as if a generator were pumping somewhere deep within the earth. In the intervals between waves of fever, everything looked uncannily clear. The light spilling out of bars and shops turned the garbage in the street into diamond replicas of itself. The babble and broken sounds of traffic merged into one voice breathing a harsh litany. The erratic motion of cyclos and pedestrians seemed elaborately choreographed. He felt as if he alone were capable of transcending the role written for him; the dance revolved on every side, but he had no part in it.
He spun around to see exactly how free he was and saw the desk clerk staring at him. The American moved what felt like an inch toward the street, extracting himself from the complex machinery of events. The boy’s eyes widened as if he had vanished completely, sidestepped the world. The rest of the scene darkened with a violet light that threatened to dissolve the edges of all objects. The buildings looked transparent but by no means unreal.
The American sensed something coming into the light of his piercing consciousness, an opacity swimming up beneath the insubstantial surfaces of everything he saw. For a moment he found himself hovering above the street, above the entire city. Phnom Penh rearranged itself into a wheel, the streets like spokes. He could see all the way to Tuol Sleng, could see two official cars pulling away from the entrance of the museum. They were practically the only two cars in the streets of Phnom Penh at that moment. One of the cars drove away; he could see the custodian’s body jouncing inside. The other headed straight toward him.
A grate clanged down over a shopfront, and his illusion of transcendence broke into a million disappointing pieces. He felt the world settle into place around him, coming down like the iron bars. He sunk to his knees, unsure where his body had been all the time he was hovering above it. He was not sure if what he had seen was the real Phnom Penh or a version that lay disguised within it, like a low flame that had blazed up wildly and then subsided again. The street was as it always had been, every shop different, every random speck of garbage uniquely meaningless. If there were a pattern here, it lay buried so deeply that he would never find it. He felt the night turning like a wheel, accelerating. Whatever wasn’t at the still center of that wheel would be flung violently away. He knew he was nowhere near the center. He must head inward, toward the source of all patterns. He must creep and cling to every surface, crawling like a millipede, or be cast off forever into the surrounding dark.
He threw himself to the ground, scuttling for shelter, oblivious to the Cambodian faces watching him in amazement, the mouths open in warning as he scurried into the street. That was how he came to be crushed beneath the tires of the only car on that long boulevard.
PART 1
We spawn in the sickness of your souls. We feed on and hasten your spirit’s decay. No move is made without our knowledge, no thought of yours but has our seed-thought at its core, which only waits the proper time to germinate. It is right that you fear us, for fear is worship; fear is the one prayer we never fail to answer.
We live in the quickness of your souls. We strengthen your spirit and guard you from decay. When you are in danger, we are there to watch your steps; when you think on evil, we come near to ward it off. You need fear nothing in the world when you accept us, for the world is love, and prayer is our language. Your love gives us the power to move in your lives. Love is the answer to all your prayers.
1
Lilith Allure, true to form, was already an hour late.
She did this to Derek every week, so he kept working long past the point at which he would have switched off the computer in anticipation of any other guest. He had finished writing his lecture days ago, and polished it repeatedly. There was no point in memorizing the thing since he was going to read it verbatim from the page. On the other hand, he had nothing better to do than rehearse it one more time.
Many of you already know this story, but please allow me to recount it briefly for those in the audience who might have attended tonight’s talk as a favor to others more familiar with my work…
Derek imagined scattered laughter in the hall. Always start with a bit of humor.
In November of 199_, a young woman came to me for past-life counseling. This encounter in a professional context was to change not only my personal life but my very outlook on reality. I had recently moved to San Francisco from Los Angeles, finding it more congenial to spiritual pursuits. The Bay Area is a remarkable focal point, where the potent ley-lines of Earth’s magnetism converge among the unparalleled feng shui of surrounding water and rolling hills dominated by the majestic and magical Mount Tamalpais. It is in short an astral omphalos and spiritual retreat for pilgrims the world round. It felt only natural that I should arrive in such a place while writing Exploring Your Past Lives. I found I was able to make a modest living through psychic consultation and hypnotherapy.
My visitor, whom I shall call Ms. A, had also recently moved to the Bay Area from Southern California, and was quite active in the City’s flourishing Neo-pagan community. She had formed alliances with the Temple of Set, the Latest Reformed Order of the Golden Dawn, the O.T.O., a coven of Gardnerian Witches, and several other more politically conscious Wiccan groups. Perhaps as a result of such an eclectic curriculum, she had begun to experience a series of overwhelming visions, powerful trances that came without warning, whose content did not correlate with the imagery of any known mythology. Several of her acquaintances sought an Atlantean explanation, speculating that perhaps she had been a high priestess in that doomed culture of unmatched magical attainment; they thought her recent spiritual explorations had reactivated psychic abilities left untouched for aeons. Ms. A was advised to find a reputable guide to put her in touch with her prior incarnations. My reputation being more than slightly known among such circles, it was by no means an improbable coincidence that brought her to my office and opened the most amazing chapter of my life.