More Than Human

‘Don’t go making big ones out of little ones,’ I said. Sometimes the guy annoyed me. ‘That bothers me. I don’t know why, but it does.’

‘Something’s lying hidden in there and you’re bothering it so it’s fighting back. Anything that fights to stay concealed is very possibly the thing we’re after. Your trouble is concealed, isn’t it?’

‘Well, yes,’ I said, and I felt that sickness and faintness again, and again I pushed it away. Suddenly I wasn’t going to be stopped any more. ‘Let’s go get it.’ I lay down.

He let me watch the ceiling and listen to silence for a while, and then he said, ‘You’re in the library. You’ve just met Miss Kew. She’s talking to you; you’re telling her about the children.’

I lay very still. Nothing happened. Yes, it did; I got tense inside all over, from the bones out, more and more. When it got as bad as it could, still nothing happened.

I heard him get up and cross the room to the desk. He fumbled there for a while; things clicked and hummed. Suddenly I heard my own voice:

‘Well, there

’s Janie, she’s eleven like me. And Bonnie and Beanie are eight, they’re twins, and Baby. Baby is three.’

And the sound of my own scream –

And nothingness.

Sputtering out of the darkness, I came up flailing with my fists. Strong hands caught my wrists. They didn’t check my arms; they just grabbed and rode. I opened my eyes. I was soaking wet. The thermos lay on its side on the rug. Stern was crouched beside me, holding my wrists. I quit struggling.

‘What happened?’

He let me go and stood back watchfully. ‘Lord,’ he said, ‘what a charge!’

I held my head and moaned. He threw me a hand-towel and I used it. ‘What hit me?’

‘I’ve had you on tape the whole time,’ he explained. ‘When you wouldn’t get into the recollection, I tried to nudge you into it by using your own voice as you recounted it before. It works wonders sometimes.’

‘It worked wonders this time,’ I growled. ‘I think I blew a fuse.’

‘In effect, you did. You were on the trembling verge of going into the thing you don’t want to remember, and you let yourself go unconscious rather than do it.’

‘What are you so pleased about?’

‘Last-ditch defence,’ he said tersely. ‘We’ve got it now. Just one more try.’

‘Now hold on. The last-ditch defence is that I drop dead.’

‘You won’t. You’ve contained this episode in your subconscious mind for a long time and it hasn’t hurt you.’

‘Hasn’t it?’

‘Not in terms of killing you.’

‘How do you know it won’t when we drag it out?’

‘You’ll see.’

I looked up at him sideways. Somehow he struck me as knowing what he was doing.

‘You know a lot more about yourself now than you did at the time,’ he explained softly. ‘You can apply insight. You can evaluate it as it comes up. Maybe not completely, but enough to protect yourself. Don’t worry. Trust me. I can stop it if it gets too bad. Now just relax. Look at the ceiling. Be aware of your toes. Don’t look at your toes. Look straight up. Your toes, your big toes. Don’t move your toes, but feel them. Count outward from your big toes, one count for each toe. One, two, three. Feel that third toe. Feel the toe, feel it, feel it go limp, go limp, go limp. The toe next to it on both sides gets limp. So limp because your toes are limp, all of your toes are limp – ‘

‘What are you doing?’ I shouted at him.

He said in the same silky voice, ‘You trust me and so do your toes trust me. They’re all limp because you trust me. You – ‘

‘You’re trying to hypnotize me. I’m not going to let you do that.’

‘You’re going to hypnotize yourself. You do everything yourself. I just point the way. I point your toes to the path. Just point your toes. No one can make you go anywhere you don’t want to go, but you want to go where your toes are pointed where your toes are limp where your…’

On and on and on. And where was the dangling gold ornament, the light in the eyes, the mystic passes? He wasn’t even sitting where I could see him. Where was the talk about how sleepy I was supposed to be? Well, he knew I wasn’t sleepy and didn’t want to be sleepy. I just wanted to be toes. I just wanted to be limp, just a limp toe. No brains in a toe, a toe to go, go, go eleven times, eleven, I’m eleven…

I split in two, and it was all right, the part that watched the part that went back to the library, and Miss Kew leaning towards me, but not too near, me with the newspaper crackling under me on the library chair, me with one shoe off and my limp toes dangling… and I felt a mild surprise at this. For this was hypnosis, but I was quite conscious, quite altogether there on the couch with Stern droning away at me, quite able to roll over and sit up and talk to him and walk out if I wanted to, but I just didn’t want to. Oh, if this was what hypnosis was like, I was all for it. I’d work at this. This was all right.