A Novel Idea Page 2

  Chapter 1

  THE single bell of the half hour barely penetrated his foggy, hung-over sleep. He opened bleary eyes and tried to focus on his watch. Only seven-thirty. Gratefully he remembered that today was Sunday and he didn’t have watch until four. He could still sleep off the effects of last night’s liberty, and he fell back face first into his pillow.

  Now that he was awake, though, he could hear the rumblings of the ship. Quiet voices drifted to him from other bunks, the muted clang of shoes on metal stairs reverberated from overhead. He remembered how hard it was for him to sleep on board at first; the constant sounds of the ship were all new to him, and for his first two weeks aboard, he barely got more than catnaps, just the time between bells. Now, however, he could sleep through anything.

  Then why wasn’t he sleeping? He certainly hadn’t gotten eight hours yet. He was pretty sure it was after 1A.M. before they stumbled back aboard from their trip to Honolulu. They’d made a hell of a night of it, though—met some girls, gotten thrown out of the Royal Hawaiian, avoided the MPs and had still gotten laid. No one back home would believe the duty he was pulling. Instead of being just Loser Reynolds, here he was in the Navy on a battleship stationed in Hawaii for Christ’s sake. It just didn’t get any better.

  He checked his watch again. Seven forty-five. He didn’t think he was going to be able to get back to sleep. Might as well get up. He needed something to get the sour taste out of his mouth. It felt like an army had walked across his tongue with shit on their boots.

  Swinging his legs out of his bunk, he had to clutch at the edges while his brain spun around in lazy circles. Whoa, boy; take it easy. What was that last stuff they’d been drinking? Tequila shots, he thought. Hoping to clear his head, he shook it, but that just made the spinning worse. Finally he just clamped his jaws tight against the sickening motion and grabbed for his dungarees and his chambray shirt. If he were going to have to heave his cookies over the side, he’d better be dressed before he went topside.

  Not more than five minutes later—he’d barely shrugged into his shirt and pulled his pants up—he heard the drone of planes overhead. They sounded pretty low. Someone, he thought, was going to get his ass busted for buzzing the harbor. Just like those prima donna pilots to pull a stunt like that. But then he heard muted thunder somewhere forward of the ship. Some kind of ... explosion? There was another one. The ship rocked suddenly. Another explosion. What the hell ...?

  Suddenly the boson’s pipe shrilled GQ from the bitch box. “General quarters, general quarters,” yelled the box. “All hands man your battle stations. This is not a drill!”

  What the f—? He grabbed his shoes and socks and slammed his white hat on his head. Below decks had erupted into ordered chaos, the other men who bunked in his section pulling on clothes, running for duty stations, barely missing each other in their practiced hurry. He jammed on his shoes and trotted quickly through the battleship, edging sideways through hatches as other men went in opposite directions past him. All Reynolds could think was, “This is not a drill.” What did that mean?

  Retracing the familiar route through the ship’s narrow passageways, he reached the radio room and found Hamilton already at the panel. “What the hell is going on?” he asked as he pulled on his life vest.

  “Grab your headset,” Hamilton said excitedly. “Listen to this.”

  Reynolds found his headset, jammed it down on his head. The words leaped at him.

  “... not a drill! Air raid, Pearl Harbor! This is not a drill! Air raid ...”

  Reynolds heard the words but they refused to come together in his brain. “What does that mean?” he shouted at Hamilton. He heard more explosions from outside the ship.

  Hamilton grinned at his companion, his eyes bright with excitement. “What do you mean, what does that mean?” Hamilton whooped. “Come on, Reynolds, have a little imagination. Maybe it means we’re going to get to fight Japs. Maybe it means we’re finally going to get into this friggin’ war!”

  Replacing his headset, Reynolds stared at the array of controls on the radio panel. Right now more than anything he wished he was on the bridge, somewhere where he’d know for sure what was going on. He wished he could see something.

  The radio crackled, whined, crackled again. “Attention all personnel, all personnel, Pearl Harbor is under attack, repeat, under attack. Japanese Zeroes have bombed Pearl Harbor—”

  Hamilton let out a whoop that drowned out the voice and Reynolds waved him down.

  “The Oklahoma has been hit, the Utah, the Helena—” the radio voice was cut off by the sudden jarring of the Arizona as shock waves from a nearby explosion rocked it. The thunder made the hair on Reynolds’ neck stand up. Cloistered down in the bowels of the ship as they were, any sound that reverberated down to them like that had to be terrifyingly loud—and close.

  “Attention all hands,” Captain Van Valkenburgh’s voice came over the intercom. Strangely calm, his voice commanded attention. “Prepare to—”

  The roar of a thousand freight trains crashed all around them and the ship rocked violently. Reynolds grabbed at the radio board. In a strange, surrealistic slow motion, he saw the edges of the board bulge away from the wall where it was bolted and felt the shuddering, burgeoning shock of explosion that seemed to catapult him across the room. Thrown against the bulkhead, he felt his shoulder snap and he slid down the wall to the floor. Still within the same instant of elongated time, he watched as the radio board strained away from its bolts and he sat paralyzed as the heavy desktop of the panel ripped loose and bore down on him. Stiletto pain lanced up his legs as the board dropped on them. The pain heaved his stomach over and stale liquor-tainted bile swam in his mouth. The entire ship was shaking, rattling, convulsing like a living thing in its death throes. The metal bolts squealed as they strained against whatever contortions were twisting them loose, and the sickening sound of metal scraping against metal was so loud it seemed to suck all the air out of the room.

  Reynolds braced himself against the bulkhead at his back and pushed against the radio board with his good arm. He couldn’t move it. His shoulder ached almost beyond endurance, his legs throbbed in a way that terrified him. He might be crippled—crippled for life. Or worse yet, what if his legs had to be amputated? He thrust the panicky thought back.

  “Hamilton,” he called out above the roar that still rocked the ship. “Hamilton, I’m pinned. Get me out of here.”

  There was no reply from Hamilton. Straining to see around the jagged edge of the radio board—his shoulder screamed in protest and he winced against the pain—he could barely see Hamilton’s own shoulder. It looked as if he’d been thrown against the opposite wall.

  “Hamilton, help me. This board is on my legs. I’m stuck.”

  The shoulder that was just barely in Reynolds’ range of vision didn’t move. Half angry, exasperated, scared shitless, Reynolds grappled with the edge of the radio board and managed to pull himself up a quarter inch or so, just enough so that he could see better.

  Hamilton stared back at him with dead eyes. A piece of jagged metal pierced his throat. Blood dribbled down the front of his life vest and soaked into the military drab material.

  Panic raced through Reynolds like shots of whiskey, hot in his blood, buzzing in his brain. Sweat ran down the sides of his face in streams. Around him the ship screamed and roared. He clawed at the radio board but none of his exertions had any effect on the heavy slab of metal. It absolutely would not budge.

  The sound of water brought him up. He heard it first, heard it splashing, falling, swirling. It sent cold chills up his spine. Then it began to pour into the radio room. It came in alive, dancing, almost rejoicing. It bubbled and frothed and swirled around the corners of the room, splashing up against the side of Hamilton, running under the radio board, soaking Reynolds’ legs. The water slapped up against him, clear and greenish on one side, and swirled away from him, blood-streaked and brownish on the other. It was cold, a terrifying, numb
ing, otherworldly cold. And it was rising.

  “Help me!” Reynolds yelled. “Somebody, please, help me!”

  The sound of the water roared in his ears. It slapped against the wall behind him, surged over the radio board. It soaked the bottom edges of his life vest. He pushed against the radio panel, pounded on it with the heel of his hand, threw his good shoulder into it. The water swirled around his chest and splashed up on his chin. He clawed at the panel in a mindless, glazed panic. He no longer seemed to have a body. The water circled around his neck, splashed in his eyes. Breathing through his mouth in a frenzied, panting way, he gulped in some water.

  It tasted like blood.

  He screamed.

  “It’s all right,” a soothing, familiar voice told him. “You’re all right. You’ll find you can view this experience without pain and without emotion. You can tell us calmly what’s happening. Now, have you passed over?”

  Brian Thompson realized with a slowed down start that he was still hypnotized, that the scene he’d been describing was only what he’d seen in his mind, the playing out of a past life. Relieved and thankful that he wasn’t any longer the pinned, dying Reynolds, he took in a big, slow breath.

  “Yes,” he reported back to his questioner. “I’ve left the body. I’m floating up above it. I can see it, still pinned down under the radio panel, under the water.”

  “All right.” Cathleen’s voice was cool, low-pitched and relaxed. “I’m going to bring you back to the present, now. Back to Albuquerque, October sixth. You will awaken feeling refreshed and clear-headed, glad to be alive. I’m going to count to five, and when I reach five, you will be back in Albuquerque, back in the present time and in this room. You will be able to remember everything you’ve just been experiencing. One. You’re letting go of what you’ve just been receiving. Two. You’re coming up now, coming out of the hypnosis. Three. You’re almost there now, almost back to the present. You’re feeling awake and relaxed, as if you’ve just had a long, refreshing nap. Four. You’re coming on up now. On the next count you’ll be able to open your eyes, and you’ll be completely awake and completely relaxed. Five. Open your eyes, now. Open your eyes.”

  Hal Thompson sat across the room, arms crossed over his chest, and watched as his seventeen year old son obediently opened his eyes and sat up. Blonde and freckled, the boy was the epitome of a fresh-scrubbed all-American kid. For just a moment, when he’d ‘realized’ he was pinned under that radio panel, his face had contorted with an expression Hal had never seen before, an expression of sheer panic and fear. He had to admit, it was a good stunt, however it was done. But he wasn’t buying it.

  “How do you feel?” Cathleen was asking the boy. At barely thirty, the shapely young hypnotist was almost annoyingly calm. Long, dark hair caught at the back of her neck, she exuded confidence and serenity. Hal found her curious. Most of the people her age seemed caught up in yuppyism, clamoring for success, frantic to be in the mainstream of the latest technical knowledge, technical break-throughs, technical toys. But this woman seemed far removed from that mainstream, and cared even less. She had the clear eyes of someone secure in some other¬worldly knowledge. If she hadn’t been so normal otherwise, Hal might have thought she was one of those brainwashed cult followers, but she actually seemed pretty decent outside of this little hypnosis scam. He was still waiting for the payoff.

  “Wow,” Brian said in answer to her question. Sitting up now, he leaned his elbows on his knees and shook his head in delighted disbelief. “What a trip. Dad, did you get all that? Do you realize I was on the Arizona?” To Cathleen he said, “Dad was in the Navy, too.”

  “Mmm,” Hal said noncommittally. He still had his arms crossed over his chest. With his outdated buzz haircut, his unyielding frown, his body language screamed skepticism. He’d only agreed to witness this silly experience to placate Brian and Wendy, his daughter, but he knew before they began that seeing it would not change his mind. It was garbage. Reincarnation, past lives, hypnotism—all garbage.

  “Wow,” Brian repeated, still grappling with the situation. “I can’t believe it. It was so real. I didn’t just see it, I felt it. Dad, now I know why I can’t stand to be held under water. Do you remember that summer you took us to the pool in the park, and that bully held me under water and I about went nuts? The panic I felt during this regression was the same kind. Man, that was awful. I hope I never feel that again.”

  “You’re a very good subject,” Cathleen noted, changing her position to a relaxed cross-legged sit on the floor that reminded Hal of yoga. Even with her back ramrod straight, she still looked completely relaxed. “If you’d care to do more regressions later on, I’d be interested in hypnotizing you for them. I think we could get a lot of good material.”

  Hal narrowed his blue eyes at her. Was this the other shoe falling? What now—sign up for ten more sessions at only $49.95 a crack? He studied the woman, wondering if she were taking Brian for an easy mark of if she got her kicks out of seducing young kids. He wondered if he’d be too obvious if he mentioned the fact that Brian was not yet eighteen.

  “That was really a great one,” Wendy said from the other side of the living room. Finishing up the notes she’d been taking throughout the session, she turned off a cassette recorder and flipped through the pages of her notebook. “I’ll bet we could verify a lot of the detail on this. There should be tons of information about the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Arizona.” Glancing up at her father, clear-eyed and convinced, she smiled at him. “Well, Dad, what do you think? Isn’t it as amazing as I told you?”

  Hal hesitated. Wendy was twenty, more mature than Brian, but still taken in. He didn’t want to start a row, but the kids had to realize this was a scam.

  “Amazing,” Hal admitted slowly, “but not enough to convince me.”

  “What?” Wendy and Brian chimed together in shock.

  “But Dad,” Brian argued, “I saw it all. I was right there. I saw every bit of it. I felt it. It was real.”

  “How can you say that?” Wendy asked in turn. “You saw how agitated he was when he realized he was going to drown. You could see the tension in his body. And I’ll bet we can verify a lot of this.” A sudden thought came to her, and she snapped her fingers in response. “Dad, do you remember when we all went on vacation to Hawaii? How old was Brian—four? I was seven. And remember when we went to the memorial for the Arizona? Brian wouldn’t get on the boat that went out to the memorial. He cried and screamed and carried on so, Mom finally agreed to wait with him on the dock, and when you and I had seen it, you stayed with Brian and I went back with Mom and saw it again. Remember? And we couldn’t understand why he was so upset? Dad, he was only four years old. He didn’t even know what the Arizona was.”

  Brian shook himself. “God, that gives me chills just thinking about it. But I remember that, now that you mention it. I was scared to death and I didn’t know why. I was just terrified about being out there over that water. I don’t know what I thought would happen to me, but I just know I really didn’t want to find out.” He turned from Wendy to Hal, confident now. “This explains it all, Dad. How else can you explain it?”

  Hal shook his head. “I admit it’s pretty convincing,” he admitted, “but there are lots of other explanations.”

  “Like what?” Brian pounced.

  Hal shrugged. “Who knows? You might have seen a movie on TV when you were four that showed people drowning, maybe even showed Pearl Harbor. Science still doesn’t know to what extent our subconscious minds pick up stuff, what we take in and store without even realizing it. You may have seen something, just a picture, and stored it away, and when we got to Pearl you associated it with the water over the memorial and you panicked. For that matter, this whole ‘regression’ could be the replaying of a forgotten movie in your mind. How many war movies have you seen? I doubt if you even know. But like Wendy said, there’s lots of information available—you might even have picked some of it up in school, heaven forbid—an
d your subconscious mind could have made the whole thing up.”

  Brian’s look darkened. “I didn’t make it up, Dad.”

  “I’m not saying that you did,” Hal corrected quickly, holding his hands up in a peacemaking gesture. “At least not consciously. But subconsciously—who knows? We don’t even understand dreams yet, much less the other weirder things that go on. I just think there’s some other explanation for it, that’s all.” Glancing down at Cathleen still cross-legged on the floor, Hal smiled in polite apology. “I would imagine you run into skeptics like me fairly often.”

  “Of course,” Cathleen replied in that cool, low voice. She smiled in return, a confident, forgiving smile. It grated on Hal’s nerves. “It’s a very personal subject, and people can only believe what they feel. Like religion, you can’t argue faith. It’s either there or it’s not.” She uncurled her long legs and stood up, all in one fluid motion. “Well, I must be going. Thank you for letting me come to your home, Mr. Thompson.”

  They all stood. Wendy shot Brian a speaking glance, and he was quick to fumble his wallet out of his pants pocket. “How much did you say—?”

  “Oh,” Cathleen laughed, shrugging. “Whatever you feel it was worth to you. I don’t like to set a price. You may feel it was infinitely valuable, or you may think, like your father, that it’s worthless. I’m just happy to be able to do it for those who really want to understand.”

  Uneasy with setting his own price, Brian fingered the few bills in his wallet. Finally he yanked out a ten and handed it to Cathleen, thought better of it, and pulled out a second one. “Is that—?”

  “That’s fine,” she assured him, her voice smiling. “I’m not in this to get rich. Thank you again, Mr. Thompson. Wendy, I’ll see you later.”

  “Yeah,” Wendy agreed, waving a cassette tape and the notebook. “I’ll get this typed up to you tomorrow.”

  “No hurry.” Cathleen shrugged into her light jacket. “Although it’d be great if we can get it in the next newsletter. Don’t forget, Brian, if you want to do another one, let me know.”

  “Okay, Cathleen,” he grinned. “Maybe after I get over the heebie-jeebies of this one.”

  Cathleen’s low, sensual laugh followed her out the door.

  “Boy, Brian, what a ham,” Wendy said as Hal locked the front door behind their guest. “When I tried it, I couldn’t get anything at all. Cathleen said sometimes it’s hard for people to let go enough to allow the images and memories to come in, but jeez—you didn’t have to overdo it.”

  Brian grinned devilishly at his sister. “What’s’a matter, Sis? Jealous?”

  “Don’t be a nerd,” she ordered. “You’re probably just young enough to have fewer control issues than people older and more responsible than you.” The compliment was lost in the dry overtones about age.

  “Hah,” Brian laughed back, stung a little at the reminder that he was the baby of the family. “I guess you would know about control issues. I heard your last boyfriend hit the road. What happened—he get tired of you ordering him around, too?”

  Wendy threw her notebook at Brian, but he ducked and it landed tented up in the entry way.

  “Okay, you two,” Hal said in a timeworn voice.

  Wendy glared at Brian and breezed past him to pick up her notebook. Carefully, she smoothed out the crumpled pages.

  “But really, Dad,” she said, returning to the original subject, “you’ve got to admit there’s something to it. Everything Brian was describing was so real. He’s never been a history buff, or even shown much interest in your time in the Navy. Do you really think he could have subconsciously pulled all that out of his memory of movies he’s seen?”

  Hal made a project of picking up all the glasses and napkins scattered about the living room. “It may have sounded real but I think you’ll find it’s not accurate,” he said.

  “Why not?” Wendy asked.

  “You said it yourself,” he said over his shoulder as he headed for the kitchen. “There’s a wealth of information about the Arizona, and what you’ll find is that it was hit by a bomb that ignited the front magazine. It exploded in a huge, sudden fireball and sank in eight minutes flat. Not the slow swamping that Brian described at all.” He rinsed the glasses and began to load the dishwasher.

  “Hm,” Wendy murmured, jotting notes to herself. “I’ll look it up. There’s bound to be tons of information on the internet. And Brian, what was the guy’s—your—name? And his friend’s?”

  “Reynolds,” Brian said, shivering. “And the other guy was Hamilton.”

  “And you were both radio guys. What did you say the name of the captain was?”

  Brian blinked. “Van something. Vandenburg? I thought you were taking notes.”

  “I was, but I knew the cassette recorder would get everything so I didn’t try to write it all down.”

  “I’ll be surprised if you can verify any of this,” Hal snorted.

  “Is reincarnation really such a strange idea?” Wendy asked again. “Millions of people all over the world believe in it. More people believe it than don’t, as a matter of fact.”

  Hal studied his daughter thoughtfully, wondering if he and Barbara should have taken the kids to church more often. They’d never been strongly religious, and maybe they’d erred by not injecting more spiritual meaning into their lives. Maybe this was the kids’ effort to find that meaning, especially since their mother died. Dying of cancer at the age of forty-five was just not the way it was supposed to be. But reincarnation ...

  “It’s a crutch,” he stated finally. “It’s an excuse for screwing up now because you can atone for it later. And karma is just a rationalization for why someone has been dealt a rotten hand in this life.” He shook his head. “It’s garbage.”

  “Dad, your feet are so encased in cement, it’s amazing you can walk around at all,” Brian observed loftily. “If it’s not business, bird-watching or photography, it’s too weird to be true.”

  Hal ignored his son’s criticism and addressed Wendy. “How in the world did you get mixed up with this Cathleen, anyway?” he asked. “I never thought you’d go for this woo-woo stuff.”

  “I met Cathleen in that occult bookstore down town. It was really amazing. I was looking for that new book by Shirley MacLaine and Cathleen just walked right up to me and said hello. We talked for a bit about books, what I was looking for—she helped me find it—and then she just began telling me about her work with regressions and asked if I’d care to witness one. I know this doesn’t sound like much, but the rapport we had was fabulous, right from the start. It was as if we were old, old friends, just instantly. I’ve never met anyone and had them open up to me so immediately. We just seemed very—” she searched for the word she wanted— “familiar with each other. Comfortable.” Wendy shook her head at her lack of an explanation. “I don’t know. But after I watched one regression, I was hooked. When she asked me if I would consider taking the transcripts of the sessions, I didn’t have to think twice. She didn’t even ask if I knew shorthand, and she wasn’t surprised when I told her I did. Everything just fell into place.”

  Hal nodded silently, hands in his pockets, his brow creased with thought.

  “Dad, I know you don’t think it’s serious, but I wish you’d be a little more open-minded about it,” Wendy pleaded.

  Hal was already shaking his head no. “I don’t think so.” His words gave the impression of possible com¬promise; his tone didn’t.

  “I always said he had a mind like a steel trap,” Brian joked, “closed up tight and rusty as hell.”

  Hal shot a reprimanding glance to his son about his language.

  “Sorry,” Brian muttered.

  “You know, Dad, if you’d try it once yourself, you might feel differently. I know you think it’s all baloney, but if you let Cathleen hypnotize you and really felt what it was like, it might really surprise you.” Wendy obviously liked the sound of her idea, and she gathered steam as she went. “Cathleen’s a
great hypnotist, and it’s perfectly safe. All those old wives’ tales you hear about being made to do things against your will are not true. It’s really even kind of fun.”

  Anticipating her dad’s rejection, Wendy dug into the back of her notebook. “Wait,” she said, pulling out a small, four-page newsletter. “Just look at this. This is a newsletter of other people’s regressions. It’s a real grassroots operation but it’s worldwide, and it’s got some really interesting things in it. Just look at it, okay?”

  Hal didn’t take the newsletter right away. He eyed it suspiciously, studied Wendy’s pleading look and finally acquiesced. “I’ll look at it,” he agreed, “but don’t expect me to change my mind.”

  “Okay, but just look at it—read it. I think you’ll see this is not some crackpot fad. Belief in reincarnation has been around forever.”

  “Hm.”

  After Wendy left and Hal had locked up and said goodnight to Brian, he took the newsletter with him to his room but didn’t read it. He set it on the dresser as if it were too hot to handle and needed some cooling-off time. Shrugging out of his shirt, he turned the night’s events over in his mind and, almost reluctantly, he went to the dresser and took out the picture he’d put away months before.

  His wife smiled back at him. Frozen in time, she looked healthy and happy; not at all like she had at the end, withered away with cancer, thin, shrunken. He found it much easier to remember her this way so he kept the picture, but after a year and a half he’d removed it from the dresser top and put it in a drawer. He took it out infrequently, usually only when he was feeling particularly lonely or stymied—like tonight.

  “Well, Barbara, what do you think?” he asked the picture in a soft voice. “I guess it’s normal for kids to search around, try to find a belief system that they can put their faith into, but I never expected anything like this. Do you think there’s anything to it?” For a fleeting moment, he allowed himself an ironic smile. “Guess it’s no stranger than my talking to you about it.” He brushed a speck of lint from the glass. “Aw, it won’t amount to anything. They’re good kids; they’ve got good heads on their shoulders. They’ll mess with this for a while and then get bored and go on to something else. I know what you’d tell me—let them try their wings. If I push against it, they’ll just hang on to it more tightly. I know. I just wish you ...” He let the unspoken thought drift away.

  “Don’t worry,” he continued in a stronger, more confident voice. “I’ll walk the tightrope; not too hard, not too soft.” Feeling better for having made his decision, he stared at the picture a moment longer, touched a finger to the smiling face, and put it away.

  “It’s just easier when I’ve got someone spotting for me,” he said as he closed the drawer.