Afterlife - Douglas Clegg [88]
She felt a shivering rack her body, and she pushed herself up from the floor. The ordinariness of the early morning light coming through windows, of the shadows being erased along the living room and down the hall to the kitchen, made her wonder what life was, and where the real and the unreal separated.
“You’ve been inside me, Julie. I’ve been inside you. You can’t go back from that. You know—inside you— that what I’m saying is true. I showed you,” he said.
She rose up, keeping her back to the door. “I don’t know,” she said, trembling. “You have this ability. I know you do. I don’t know what to think. I just don’t. What if you’re lying? What if you can show me things that never happened?”
He pressed his hands to his forehead, as if he were stopping a headache. “Don’t doubt me. Please, Julie. It’s important. I’m here with you because I knew what you were going through. When you came to me, and I went inside you, I knew the pain you’d felt. I knew the desolation. It’s because your marriage was a lie. He used you. He is still using you.”
“He’s dead. My husband is dead,” she said, angrily. She stepped around him and went toward the kitchen. “I need time. I need time to think.”
“There’s no time,” he said. “They’ve already tested others.”
She half turned, stopping. “What do you mean?”
“Your children,” he said. “They have some of their father in them. They have the genetic material for Ability X. You know that your stepson has things he can’t express. You know that your daughter thinks she has a brain radio. That she communicates with her father. Some of them have already murdered their own children, trying to resurrect them. Do you think your children are safe?”
Julie glanced upstairs to the bedrooms. “Stop it. Please. If that’s true. My God, if that’s true, then why didn’t Hut just come here and take them? Why all these months…” She tried to block out the videos she’d seen. That’s insane. It was your mind. It was stress. Posttraumatic stress. Eleanor called it that. Shock. Shock of having your husband murdered. Shock and despair and anger and grief and mourning and cracks in your mind where you fall off a cliff of life and dangle from a thin branch over a chasm. Nervous exhaustion. Night fears. Erotic dreams. Rape dreams. Short-circuiting in the face of an enormous shock. That’s what it was. This is insane.
“You don’t come back all at once,” he said. “First, your autonomous nervous system kicks in when Ability X turns on another part of the brain. Then, it takes weeks before your memories come back. And they only come back if others with the Ability are there to bring them into you. To get inside the Stream with you. To re-open the doors that have been closed. But you’ve seen him. In your dreams. In the movies in your head. The movies on screen. He is blasphemy, Julie. He violated the sacredness of death. He violates the soul. He does not believe in the soul. He puts himself above the laws of nature, which are here for a reason, Julie. It’s what I learned in my death. If I could take away my life now, I would. I’ve tried. But I can’t. Only when my brain itself breaks down, will I finally find release and enter the Stream that connects us all. And then my soul will go where it is meant to and not be shackled by this body. I wish I could make it untrue, Julie,” he said, getting up from the floor. He came toward her. “I wish I could say I made it all up. That I’m just a murderer. That I murdered your husband and I’m here to hurt you. But it’s not true.”
“Don’t come near me. Please,” she said, feeling an immense ache within her.
“You’re feeling separation from me. It’s all right,” he said. “It passes. It’s what we feel when we’re too much