“Yes, he was, and I was troubled then too.”
“The two of you were a terrible influence on each other.”
“I don’t remember that at all. We were good friends. He was my only real friend there.”
Malachai sighed. “You’re going to have to trust me on this, Jac, but due to patient-doctor confidentiality, I can’t reveal what I know or explain why Theo’s a dangerous personality for you to interact with. But he is, Jac.”
She looked at him. Trying to read his unreadable visage.
“Druids believed in reincarnation,” she said, eyeing the translucent amber egg he was still holding. The soft light made it look as if there were living fire trapped in its heart, burning forever.
“Yes, they did,” Malachai said.
“If I went, I would share what I found with you. I could look for proof of your myth while I’m looking for mine.”
“Reincarnation is not a myth. You know, I had this very same conversation with Griffin North not two months ago.”
Jac held herself steady. Bit the inside of her cheek. She felt tears threatening. She couldn’t allow herself to think about Griffin now. She’d just lost even more of him. He wasn’t part of her life. They couldn’t be together. He was with his wife and little girl where he belonged. She took a breath.
Focus.
“I’ll look for proof of your theory then, is that better?” she asked, fighting to stay in the moment. “Maybe there are memory tools in Jersey.”
Jac knew how much Malachai yearned to find one of the legendary sacred objects presumed to be memory aids to facilitate past-life regressions. It was believed that four to six thousand years ago, in the Indus Valley, mystics created these meditation tools to help people enter into deep states of relaxation, during which they would have access to past-life memories.
There were supposed to be twelve memory tools, Malachai had told her, twelve being a mystical number repeated all through various religions and in nature. Twelve objects to help pull memories through the membrane of time, he’d said.
Malachai believed two of these tools had been found in the past few years. The first was a cache of precious stones and the second was an ancient flute made of human bone. Both had subsequently been lost. A third tool, a fragrance that acted as an olfactory trigger, had also surfaced for a short time, but that too had disappeared. But the legends about these tools had grown. There were rumors that men had killed for them and that fortunes had been lost trying to find them. Treasure hunters never gave up looking for the fabled devices, and hustlers tried to defraud innocent collectors with objects they tried to pass off as authentic. Adventure movies had been made and thriller novels had been written about spectacular searches for the memory tools, or fantasies about how they were exploited for evil.
They were Malachai’s holy grail. Jac knew he lusted after finding one the way some men lust after money and power.
“Bribery will not change my mind. Your well-being is more important,” he said.
“I’m surprised to hear you say that. I didn’t think there was anything you wanted more than finding a memory tool.”
“You wound me, Jac. Do you really think I’d sacrifice your safety for some object?”
She studied his face in the firelight. Until that moment, if she’d been asked that question she might have said she wasn’t sure. Malachai didn’t just study reincarnation. He believed in it deeply. It was the reason he’d been at Blixer Rath in the 1990s.
Like Jung, Malachai theorized that many people suffering from what traditional therapists think are personality disorders are in fact suffering from past-life issues. Memories of other incarnations that are bubbling to the surface and causing fears, phobias, anxiety, even alternate personalities. They believed many issues could be tracked back to unresolved past-life conflicts demanding attention in this life.
Malachai had been at the clinic because regression therapy was part of their protocol. Using hypnosis, he explored patients’ recent and more buried pasts. Jac hadn’t been a good subject, though. Under hypnosis, she hadn’t been able to regress any further back than her own recent childhood.
Reincarnation was not Malachai’s passion, it was his lifeblood. Jac admired him for his zeal and for believing in something so profoundly. Envied his certainty. She questioned everything and yearned for a code, a creed. Jac had always wanted to be one of those people who know exactly who they are and operate from a position of unquestionable loyalty to their core.
Instead she was fascinated by all beliefs, myths and legends but had faith in none. If pressed, the only thing in the world she was sure of was that no matter how deeply you care about someone-friend, family or lover-sooner or later, one way or another, you will be hurt or disappointed. She had come to believe in the instability of the known. Time and experience had made her a cynic.
Mythfinders, both the book and TV show, was a cynic’s look at mythology. The stories had value as metaphor, of course. But she thought it was important to expose the fragile ground fables stood on. Jac hoped by tracing a myth back to the actual person or event whence it had sprung, and showing how that small moment had been exaggerated and romanticized into a fantasy, she’d help people manage expectations. Trying to live up to grandiose ideals made life more difficult. Yearning to be who we cannot be, for what we cannot accomplish, engenders discontent.
Hadn’t she seen it firsthand? Her father had exhausted himself trying to live up to the family legends and lost most of what he’d cared about in the process. Her mother’s ambition to achieve literary goals beyond her talent had so destroyed her self-esteem she’d turned to ruinous affairs.
But the opposite of what Jac had imagined had happened with Mythfinders. People found it inspiring. The kernel of proof she tried to show was so small backfired. To know the legends had sprung from reality-even a kernel of reality-was empowering and encouraging. Her followers had found hope in her deconstructions.
“Well, if that’s your best shot, you’ve failed,” Jac said, folding up Theo’s letter and putting it back in the envelope Malachai had left on the desk. “You haven’t given me a good enough reason to refuse the invitation.”
“Your safety isn’t a good enough reason?” he asked.
“It would be if I believed my safety were actually at stake. But what you’re saying is vague. All you can tell me is that when we were both teenagers, Theo and I were potentially-what? Partners in crime? I know that. I remember the rules we broke that summer.”
“You didn’t just break rules. You fell under his spell. You were attracted to his need to seek out and put himself in danger. You hiked on unexplored trails that were off-limits. Stayed out past curfew. He offered you wine and you drank it. Marijuana and you smoked it-”
“I was a fourteen-year-old and had a crush on him.”
“It was more serious than that. You were susceptible to him in a profound way.”
“Maybe I was but I was just a kid.”
“What if I told you that you still could be susceptible to him? We had to send him home, Jac. We couldn’t treat him. He still might be untreated.”
“It was seventeen years ago. He was a sixteen-year-old kid in some kind of distress. Do you realize, even for you, how illogical and farfetched this all sounds?”
“No matter what I say, you’re determined to go, aren’t you?”
“Stop talking in riddles. What else could you say?”
“He could seduce you, Jac. And I don’t just mean sexually. I mean emotionally. At your core. He could use you to achieve his goals.”
“Malachai, you’re talking about it as if you think he’s some kind of evil sorcerer.”
“As far as you are concerned, I think he is.”
Five
SEPTEMBER 8, 1855