Legacy Of Terror Part 12

'Was he able to regress Celia under hypnosis, to take her back to the moment she was stabbed?'

'No,' Gordon said. 'But he came close. Let me tell you exactly how it was.'

Celia had been sitting up in the hospital bed when Gordon was conducted into the room by Dr. Carter. She was pale, but as lovely as she had been before the incident. She seemed to have lost a little weight, but there was no other sign of her condition.

'Can't she see me?' Gordon had asked.

'She only sees me-and she only hears what I tell her to,' Carter had informed him. 'Sit down over there. She does not even know you're here.'

Dr. Carter walked to the side of the bed and stood by Celia. He touched her face with his fingers, but she hardly seemed to notice. He cupped her chin in his hand and raised her face so that she was looking directly into his eyes.

'h.e.l.lo, Celia,' he said.

'h.e.l.lo, Dr. Carter.'

'How are you feeling?'

'I don't feel,' she said.

'How old are you?'

'I am no age.'

'No age at all?' he had insisted.

'No age at all,' she said.

Dr. Carter turned to Gordon then, smiling, and explained what he had done, through hypnosis. The first step in age regression was to get the patient used to floating about in time, to accepting a fluidity of age. By giving her no age at all, he could suggest, hypnotically, that she was now only twenty years old. Now nineteen. Now eighteen. And so on until she was a child. In this case, however, it was only necessary to go back a few days, back to Monday evening.

'What time is it now?' he asked Celia.

'No time.'

'What day?'

'I don't even know,' she said. And she giggled self-consciously.

'There's no need to be ashamed of not knowing the day,' he said, speaking warmly, still touching her face.

Okay,' she said, immediately malleable to whatever he said 'Now, do you see a clock in front of you, Celia?'

'No.'

'Look closely.'

'I see it.'

'Watch the hands,' he said.

'I am watching them.'

'Are they turning backwards?'

'Backwards?'

'They are, aren't they?'

'Yes,' she said, her pretty face puzzled.

'Don't worry about that. They should turn backwards. That's what we want them to do. In this case, that is perfectly natural.'

The frown was erased from the girl's face.

'It is now Wednesday morning, yesterday morning,' Carter said. 'Do you remember yesterday morning?'

'I woke up in a hospital.'

'That's right.'

'I was hurt very bad,' she added. 'I touched myself and I hurt where I touched myself, and the nurses came and there was this needle in my arm, feeding me glucose and*'

'Okay, fine,' he said. 'You're okay now. Yesterday's hurt doesn't matter if you're okay today. Isn't that so?'

'Yes,' she said, calmed instantly.

'Now,' Dr. Carter said, 'it is no longer Wednesday anymore, is it, Celia?' He stroked her chin.

'No.'

'It's Monday morning, isn't it?'

'Yes.'

Carter had then turned to Gordon and explained that he did not want to regress the patient immediately to the moment of the attack, prior to her coma. That would have been too traumatic, too sudden. Instead, he intended to regress her to Monday morning and then slowly work her through the day until the moment when she had been attacked.

And so it had gone until Carter said, 'Now, it is late Monday night, and you are putting the suitcase in your car. You are going away to stay somewhere for the weekend. Is that right?'

'Yes,' Celia had said. But already there was a look of trouble on her face, a shadow of anxiety.

'Where are you going, Celia?'

She did not answer.

'Where are you going for the weekend?' Carter asked again.

'I-'.

'Yes?'

She could not speak it.

'What are you afraid of?' he asked.

'Nothing.'

'Good. There is nothing to be frightened of, nothing at all. Now, where are you going for the weekend?'

At that moment, she tore herself away from the doctor's gentle hand and began to scream.

'It was horrible,' Gordon told Elaine, breaking his narrative to add his first personal comment since he had begun to relate the tale. 'It was as if she were being stabbed right then, in the hospital.'

Dr. Carter had not been unduly disturbed by her sudden, violent reaction. He merely said, 'Stop screaming, Celia.'

And she stopped.

He said, 'No one will hurt you. No one will ever hurt you, because you are too pretty and too charming. Do you believe that anyone would ever hurt you?'

'No,' she said. But she said it reluctantly.

'It is now Wednesday morning.'

'Wednesday,' she repeated.

'Where are you?'

'The hospital.'

'Watch the clock. The hands are moving forward. Do you see how they're moving forward now?'

'Yes.'

'It is Thursday morning now, isn't it, Celia?'

She said that it was.

At that point, Carter had turned to Gordon. 'I'll have to wake her now and try again tomorrow. Would you please leave? She might be harder to control in subsequent sessions if she knows she's being observed.'

'And I left,' Gordon said. 'I was quite shaken.'

'I imagine so,' Elaine said as the story slowly impressed upon her how eerie the scene must have actually been.

'At first,' Gordon said, 'I considered going back to watch the other sessions, until he was finished with her. I'm sure Carter would have let me. But when I heard her scream and saw the look on her face towards the end of the session, I knew that I didn't want to be there when she finally relived the attack. That would be too much.'

For a moment, they were both quiet, and Elaine said at last: 'Gordon, do you believe this. .h.i.tchhiker theory?'

'What other theory is there?'

'I don't want to make you angry at me,' she said.

He leaned forward. 'You couldn't do that. What is on your mind, Elaine?'

She hesitated only a moment, then told him everything.

He listened closely, and when she was finished, he said, 'Come on. We have to let father know about this.'

He led her into the den and had her repeat what she had told him. Lee Matherly listened, amused at first, then more and more concerned until, when she finished, he looked deeply disturbed.

'And you never got a look at the person and haven't any idea who it was?'

'No,' she said. She did not want to go into detail about her suspicions of nearly everyone. There would be time for that when Captain Rand was here.

'I'll have to talk to father,' Lee said. 'Will you wait here a few minutes?' He stood up, not waiting for a reply, and left the room.

'You must have been terrified,' Gordon said. He took her hand, and she felt his strength enclose her fingers, felt that protected aura again.

She nodded agreement.

'Don't worry,' he said. 'Father will take care of this. It looks, now, like it will all be settled this evening.' He sounded grim. He had realized, just as his father must have, that her story was a strong indication that the killer was a member of the family. 'It will all be settled shortly,' he repeated. 'I'm certain.'

'I hope so,' Elaine said. The dark, paneled walls seemed terribly close, the air thick and unbreathable.

They waited for Lee Matherly to return.

Chapter 15.

When he returned, Lee Matherly had regained some of his cheerfulness. He sat on the edge of his desk, directly before Elaine and said, 'Well, Elaine, father admits having told you that story about nearly being murdered last night. But he says, when he buzzed for you, he was so terrified that he wasn't able to think clearly. He says, now, in retrospect, he knows he was dreaming. But when he woke, having an attack, he was confused about what was real and what wasn't.'

Elaine shook her head negatively. 'The bulb had been taken out of his nightlight.'

'I'm sure there's a logical explanation for that,' Lee said. 'It's just coincidentally pertinent to his nightmare. And father is certain it was only a dream.'

'Was I dreaming too?' she asked. She was beginning to get angry. None of these people wanted to face up to reality, to truth. They were so eager to accept the theory of the hitchhiker that they would bend over backwards to misinterpret any clue that pointed to their own number.

'It's possible,' he said. 'You had gotten little sleep in the past days. And you had the frightening experience of listening to father recount his nightmare as if it were truth. You can see how-'

'What about the cat?' she asked, figuring she had already lost that point.

'What about it?'

'Who stabbed it and put it in the garbage bag?'

'I can't tell you who murdered the poor animal,' Lee said, 'But it was Denny who put it in the bag.'