Echoes from My Past Lives (Spell Weaver) (4 page)

I wished I could believe him. I wished I could with all my heart, but I just didn’t believe. My life was such a mess, my mind was such a mess, that I didn’t feel as if I was in control of anything. I didn’t feel as if I was strong in any way right now. I had been moving close to believing him a couple of times, but now he had lost me.

Taliesin rose from his chair and walked toward me. “Tal, no! Don’t give up on me. I can make your situation better, but not without your help. The two of us together can do it—we demonstrated that a while ago. Together we can keep your earlier selves in check while I mend your mind. Without you, I may not be able to succeed.”

“What do you want me to do?” I asked suspiciously.

“Take my hand,” said Taliesin, putting his right hand out as if for a handshake. “Take my hand and become one with me.”

His manner was so compelling I started to put my hand out, but I could feel my heart beating too rapidly, and my breathing had become more like panting. My instinctive response to this situation was profound uneasiness. Something was wrong!

“Become one with me,” he had said. But what did that mean? It did not sound like he was ready to become just a memory. No, not one bit. It sounded more like Taliesin, dead for centuries, wanted to push me out of the way, to take my life and make it his own. I pulled my hand back from his as if his were a poisonous snake.

“Tal, you misjudge me!” protested Taliesin. What he might have done next I was not to find out, for in the next second the walls of this memory Camelot began to shake, and large cracks shot through each stone as if the whole place was about to shatter. Taliesin spared a second for cursing in Welsh, and then he again started singing as if his life depended on it. He also looked at me, clearly expecting me to join in again.

I didn’t. Instead I ran like hell, out of the room, down a long corridor that now seemed more cracks than stones. The shaking was so much worse that I fell several times, skinning my knees and palms, but I kept going.

“Tal, come back! You must come back!”
yelled Taliesin. I ignored him and kept going—well, at least until the roof crashed on me with a resounding thud. Unfortunately for me, even though this wasn’t a memory from some past life, my mind experienced it as if it were. I could feel my body twisting, my bones breaking. Then I could feel my whole body, now buried beneath the rubble, throbbing like a single, gigantic wound. I could feel my lungs straining for oxygen, and I started screaming, and screaming, and screaming, but soundlessly toward the end, as the air had finally run out. I kept right on screaming, in fact, until someone on the outside pumped me full of drugs. Then, mercifully, I lost consciousness.

Part 3: Going up the Rabbit Hole…or Down It?

I don’t know how long I was unconscious. I do know that the first time I regained consciousness, I immediately wished someone would drug me again. What was happening was definitely worse that I had expected.

No, I wasn’t in a straitjacket on my way to the nearest mental institution. That was the very thing I most feared, but at least that would have been understandable. At least that would have offered me some hope of recovery.

What I faced instead was a situation I had never even imagined. When I “woke up,” I found myself in the middle of a conversation with my parents. Yeah, you heard me—I woke in the middle of the conversation, but clearly the conversation had been going on for some time—without me. What is it the announcer always says when a station switches back to a regular program after some breaking news story has ended? “We now return you to so-and-so program, already in progress.” Well, that’s what was happening to me, except that the program was my life.

That bastard Taliesin had stolen my life right out from under me, just as I feared. Well, he had told me I was strong. We would see whether he had lied about that, too.

My mom and dad both looked worried, but less so than the last time I had seen them. At least Taliesin had not been giving them grief.

“The doctors are still a bit unsure about sending you back to school right away, Tal. After all, it has only been a few days since you…” The pause was nerve-racking, to say the least.

“Since you had your last incident, your mother means,” put in my dad, who always had an easier time being straightforward with such matters. However, he had the same tell-tale signs of lack of sleep both he and Mom now shared, including bags under his eyes and a kind of listlessness in his manner. It killed me to see how much suffering I was causing them.

“I’m just anxious to get back to normal,” said Taliesin through my mouth, in a very passable imitation of my voice. “I feel like I’ve been in here forever. I know it’s going to sound strange, but I miss school.”

Both of my parents smiled at that. I, on the other hand, seethed. Yeah, actually I did miss school, but what right did Taliesin have to put words in my mouth?

“You don’t want to alarm your parents.”
I jumped at the realization that Taliesin had become aware of me. Or perhaps he had been aware of me the whole time.
“Let me find a way to ease them out for a while, and we can talk.”

“Talk?”
I replied harshly.
“After you stole my body? After you stole my life?”

Ignoring me for the moment, Taliesin closed my eyes for a second, then looked back at my mom and dad and said, “Wow! All of a sudden, I’m feeling tired. Could I sleep for a little while?”

My mom became instantly apologetic. “Tal, I’m so sorry. It’s just such a pleasure to see you more like your old self, we’ve been going on and on, I’m afraid. We’ll let you get some sleep now and come back before dinner, if that’s all right.

“Yeah, Mom, that’ll be great,” said Taliesin in an imitation of me drowsy that was so spot-on it was disconcerting. My parents said their goodbyes quickly, Taliesin lay down and pretended to be going to sleep—And then I started yelling at him as loudly as I could.

“What the hell are you doing? You stole my life for how long? A few days?”

“Stole your life?”
asked Taliesin, who then chuckled bitterly.
“Saved your life is more like it, unless you want to end up in a mental institution. You just about destroyed yourself last time, and you caused me to lose my grip on the other selves. So I healed you—not at all an easy task, by the way--and then I put you to sleep for awhile, so that I could do, what would you say? Damage control. I couldn’t completely control the others without any help from you, but I am a little better than you at covering the pain they can cause. I have you practically ready to be be released from the hospital.”

“Don’t you mean you have yourself practically ready to be released?”

Taliesin was usually far calmer than I was, but it was apparent from his tone that he was ready to blow up. I suddenly realized that might be exactly what I wanted him to do.

“What will it take to convince you that I’m trying to save you, not replace you? You are the one who is making this situation impossible, not I!”
I could hear the stress in his voice. Good.

“I’m trying to struggle with a situation even you say is one of a kind. But you told me I was too strong for you to manipulate, and then you knocked me out for…how long was it? Days? You lied to me. You must have.”

“I did not lie!”
snapped Taliesin, moving ever closer to the breaking point.
“You are strong, but you are also untrained. You haven’t spent the years that I spent developing mental discipline, and you let yourself be hurt…badly.”

Taliesin had suggested I could know what he was thinking if I let down my defenses. I had no intention of doing that, but I did try to focus on him just enough to know what he was feeling. From what little I could tell, he was angry. I couldn’t tell if he was angry enough to slip up, but I wasn’t sure that I would get a better opportunity. Taliesin had said I could work magic just as he could. Again I did not want to open myself to him, but I tried to see just a little. I tried to see how he had pulled me into a world drawn from his memories.

Taliesin realized what I was doing, of course, but he was a little slow to respond, and I got what I needed, then closed my mind to his again.

“You young fool…”
Taliesin began, but faster than either he or I could have expected, I put myself in the same state of mind that I had seen in his thoughts, and suddenly we were no longer in the hospital room but instead shrouded in a white mist. (I had been visualizing the school soccer field, but at this point I would take what I could get.)

“What are you playing at?” asked Taliesin angrily. “Don’t you realize how dangerous this is? Every time you engage in these kinds of stunts…” He would have gone on, except that I punched him in the face as hard as I could. I guess his anger had slowed his reactions enough that this time he didn’t anticipate my move fast enough, and based on my own experiences, I was sure he felt my fist as much as he would have from an actual physical blow. He staggered in a very satisfying way but managed to keep on his feet. However, I was on him before he could pull himself together, and I hit him even harder. I don’t want you to think that I was prone to getting into fights, but I was athletic, and there were times when I had to protect Stan from bullies, so I knew how to take care of myself when I needed to.

Taliesin was on the—well, I would have said ground, but everything was the same white mist. Taliesin was on the mist, but he was lying down, and he was bleeding.

I was on him before he could try to get up, but I did not hit him again, mostly because the mist beneath my feet had started to tremble, and in the distance I could see a familiar redness pulsing and bleeding into the wavering whiteness around us. Although I hated to admit it, Taliesin had told the truth at least about restraining the other selves. Each time we had been in conflict before, Taliesin had had trouble maintaining control. Now, as he lay at my feet, barely conscious, the throbbing redness, which had crept toward us before, flew at us like blood spraying from a severed limb in a B horror movie. No, more like a tidal wave of blood. It hit, it knocked me over, it engulfed me. As soon as I was completely submerged, my other selves started pounding on me, and I was hit with one painful memory after another after another. I bit my lip, so literally and so hard that I bled myself, but I knew it was only a matter of time, seconds maybe, until I started screaming and wrecked all of Taliesin’s careful work to get me out of the hospital.

Taliesin’s careful work. Yeah, what little brain I had left at this point had just begun to realize that perhaps he wasn’t really out to replace me. Whether he was or not, though, dealing with him had to be better than letting the chaos of my other selves rip every single brain cell to shreds one at a time.

Taliesin had said that I had been blocking him out pretty successfully. Well, if that was true, then I might be able to block out the howling madness around me. I sang, but I hadn’t mastered the way that Taliesin could channel magic through his music, and my singing had no effect. In the seconds I had left before I was completely overwhelmed, I had to come up with a different strategy.

Desperately I visualized darkness and silence, total disconnection from everything else around me, and I began to feel the past memories just a little less intensely. Maybe it was adrenaline, maybe it was the vague feeling that someone on the outside was sending me good thoughts. Could my parents be back in the hospital room? Could Stan? Maybe they were all there, and Dan too, and Eva, especially Eva, and maybe, just maybe, they were reacting instinctively to the turmoil inside of me, willing me to hold on, willing me to beat whatever demons there were within me.

Whatever was going on in the hospital room, whatever was happening inside of me, the pulsing redness around me continued to fade, as did the constant hammering of painful memories, and I began to feel some hope.

It took me what seemed like forever, but eventually I got to something approximating the shadowy silence I had been trying to visualize. The problem was that, once I had achieved that state, I had no idea what to do next. Okay, so I no longer felt my other selves constantly tearing away at me, but I didn’t feel much of anything. Every time I tried to make any kind of move, like waking up in the hospital room, I could feel my other selves surge forward.

“Taliesin!” I called out. Even that caused a buzzing in my head, but I had to try.

Taliesin had been lying at my feet when I had first been overwhelmed, but he was no longer nearby as far as I could tell. He might possibly be dead, but somehow I doubted that any of my past selves, least of all him, could actually be killed. Nor could I, if reliving so many deaths had not already done me in. That did not, however, prevent any of us from going hopelessly insane. I had a hard time visualizing Taliesin meeting that fate either. He seemed to be the only one of my previous selves who hadn’t lost it initially, after all.

“Taliesin!” I shouted as loudly as I could without shattering my shadowy refuge completely.

“Tal?” I heard his response like a low whisper, but I wanted to do a victory dance anyway. If I could just find a way to reach him…

“Imagine me there,” whispered Taliesin, again answering my thoughts, but I was long past being shocked by that. The question was, could I do what he was suggesting? Imagining darkness and silence was one thing; imagining Taliesin was quite something else. Look how far imagining the soccer field had gotten me earlier. Nonetheless, I had to try. No, I had to succeed.