Afterlife - Douglas Clegg [77]
She remembered other things from her childhood, remembered a fight her parents had, remembered when she and Mel had dressed up their pet schnauzer in baby clothes, and then the memories came forward as if, by touching her, he had begun opening doors in her mind that she’d been shutting behind her.
Soon, she had lost even the sound of his voice, but felt him there, his hand no longer moving just above the surface of her skin, but inside her in some impossible way—beneath the surface of consciousness, and his hand guided her along through memory, through doors that opened, one after the other, and behind them, memories. Then, more than memories—fantasies began coming to her—of flying in the air, of swimming like a fish through the water, and then she felt as if she were butting up against some door that wouldn’t open, but his hand was there, with her, and finally it flew apart as if smashed, and behind it was a blood-red room, and she was there, and a man without a face, and he caressed her and touched her, parting her legs as he parted her mouth with his tongue, and in this red room, she felt no shame and had no care that they were being watched by the outsider, by the psychic who chaperoned her journey into her subconscious. The faceless man against whom she twisted and bucked in a sexual fantasy of frenzy and animal lust, now took on the form of Michael Diamond himself—for a flickering moment—but then, as if propelled by pathways of the pulse, she was ejected from her inner fantasy, and moved again to memory—to a row of iron doors that looked as if they were locked, bolted, and bound by some kind of interconnecting bloodroots, but she heard a distant sound of a series of pops, and the doors opened, all of them, and it was as if she were spying on herself, spying on her life with Hut, on the life they’d built, only she watched it like it was one of Matt’s movies, she watched their life, and as she watched, she saw Hut for who he really was, not the man of her fantasies and not the man of her illusions, but a man who was cold with her, and brusque, a man who was selfish with his time and displayed little love even for his son—a handsome, vain man who watched her at times as if she were not entirely human to him…
She heard Michael Diamond’s voice, “Let’s move beyond all of this, there’s another place we need to go. You may be afraid, you may not want to go there. But fear isn’t what it seems. Fear awakens us to our abilities, our senses that have been hidden. Fear is the key to the final door inside you.” She felt as if someone had taken her wrist, and tugged on it, pulling her into a dark place inside her mind, a dungeon where some beast growled in a corner.
“There’s a place inside you,” Diamond whispered. “A place where you’ve been, but you don’t remember. It’s been hidden from you. But you know it. I want you to face your fear and venture there again. With me.”
7
Julie moved as if swimming underwater, with dark vines moving slowly as if pushed by some unseen tide, and the doors were there,