The Devil's Elixir

58

Tess looked totally spooked right from the second I saw her. She seemed to want to jump right into things and just led me out into the garden as soon as I came in, away from the house. I didn’t know exactly what was troubling her, but I assumed it was fallout from our talk the night before and suspected this wasn’t going to be a fun chat.

She surprised me by saying, “I called the shrink, Dean. Dean Stephenson.”

Not what I thought this was about.

I asked, “The one you think Michelle took Alex to see?”

“Yes. Turns out he’s not just any shrink. He’s a practicing child psychiatrist, but he also runs the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at Berkeley. And, more specifically, he runs a subsection called the Division of Perceptual Studies.”

I wasn’t sure where she was going with this, or what the urgency was. But clearly, it was important. I tried not to be too flippant and said, “Okay.” Though I might have stretched the word out a bit more than was wise.

“His central focus—his focus for more than forty years of study and field research,” she told me, “is survival research.”

She paused and gave me a look, like she was waiting to see if I’d heard of it. I made a face to indicate I hadn’t. “What’s that?”

“Survival research is about looking into whether or not any part of us can ever survive the death of our physical body.”

Survive the death of the physical body? She was losing me. “What are you talking about?”

“People like Stephenson explore whether or not our souls might be able to survive the deaths of our bodies, and they do this by looking into things like near-death and out-of-body experiences, deathbed apparitions, after-death communications . . . and what they call ‘transmigration of the soul.’ And that’s what Stephenson’s speciality is. Reincarnation.”

“So . . . you’re saying the guy Michelle chose to take Alex to see is an expert on reincarnation?”

“Yes. And before you give me that roll of the eyes you’re so fond of, try and keep one thing in mind here: We’re talking about a seriously qualified, high-powered academic, okay? This isn’t some turban-wearing medium in a fairground Michelle took him to see. The guy’s a legend in the parapsychology community. Which isn’t a big one, for all the reasons you can imagine, starting with its name. He’s got impeccable credentials. He’s got a PhD from Harvard. He’s a fully qualified psychoanalyst who’s had scores of papers on psychiatry published in all kinds of professional journals. He’s written books on psychiatry that are required reading in classrooms. He’s got fellowships at the most prestigious hospitals. The guy’s a bona fide member of the medical elite of this country.”

“And he studies reincarnation,” I reiterated, trying to keep all cynicism out of my tone. Then I had to ask, in case I was missing something, “So he believes in it?”

“Yes. Well . . . in his own, guarded way. This is a guy who’s studied thousands of claims over the years. He’s got a team of researchers working for him. He doesn’t deal with past-life regression, with hypnotizing adults—he doesn’t believe in it. He only looks at cases where children are having what’s called spontaneous recall. When they remember stuff. Out of the blue. And despite all the evidence he’s collected over the years, he doesn’t go around making claims he can’t back up. He acknowledges the fact that he doesn’t have any proof of reincarnation. What he says is that, in a lot of the cases he’s studied, reincarnation is the best explanation he can think of. It’s the one that fits best. He’s got evidence, but not proof, if you see what I mean.”

It still sounded to me like something James Randi would have a field day with, but if Tess was taking it seriously, I was all ears. I’d kind of learned that lesson the hard way over the years.

“Okay,” I said. “So how’s this related to Alex?”

“It seems Alex was exhibiting unusual behavior—behavior that points to reincarnation.”

“ Spontaneous recall?”

“Yes.”

“Like what? Is this about those drawings you showed me?”

“Partly, yes,” she said, fixing me intently as her hands went all animated. “Typically, in these cases, kids who claim to remember past lives start talking about them at a very young age, sometimes as soon as they can speak. They start saying things that they shouldn’t normally know about—names of people they’ve never met and places they’ve never been, sometimes in a language they’ve never learned. They’ll talk about stuff that’s beyond their age, like technical details about, say, a World War Two plane, like they’ll see a picture of one and they’ll know whether the thing hanging under its wing is a bomb or a drop tank. Details. And when they talk about them, they’re more articulate and more lucid than they normally are. More than would be expected at that age. Then, typically, these memories fade by the time the kids reach six or seven. The theory is that other memories—current ones—crowd them out.”

I was doing my best to keep an open mind. “So you’re saying Alex knew stuff about some past life?”

“According to his teacher, he started saying things that surprised Michelle. And a couple of things that surprised his teacher, too. And the drawings. And he was having nightmares. Michelle didn’t seem to want to talk about it too much, but it must be why she took him to see Stephenson.”

I tried to picture Michelle doing that. Weirdly enough, that didn’t seem too outlandish to me, given that she was into a lot of New-Agey stuff that I used to like ribbing her about. I’m not saying I was buying it. I’m just saying I could see why she would think that and take him to see someone like Stephenson.

Tess obviously read the doubt on my face. “You think this is nonsense.”

“No, I mean—hey, what do I know?”

She gave me a small, reproaching shake of the head. “Look, I’m as much of a skeptic about this as anyone. But after reading all this stuff about Stephenson and his work . . . It’s amazing, Sean. These kids, the ones whose stories he examined . . . Stephenson and his people aren’t fools. They pick at these claims like they’re reincarnation CSIs. They interview the kids, they talk to everyone around them, to family members from both their present and past lives. They record everything and cross-check it all, word for word, and all the time, they’re looking for reasons to dismiss them. They look for holes or for alternative explanations or for parents who are inadvertently feeding their own wishful thinking or their cultural predispositions—and, obviously, they also look for outright scams. But in some of these cases—dozens of them, over the years—Stephenson and his team ended up convinced that the kids could very well be reincarnated souls. And it’s not just memories. Some of these kids have physical links to what they claim are their previous lives. His website’s full of them—it blows the mind. One kid who started talking about a past life had been born with a serious birth defect where his main pulmonary artery hadn’t formed completely. By the time he was three, he was telling his mother things like, “I never used to hit you when you were a little girl, even when you were really bad,” and remembering all kinds of things about his grandfather—his grandfather who was a New York City cop who had died long before the kid was born, from being shot six times while trying to stop a robbery. And the bullet that finished him off had gone in through his back, through his lung and cut open a major artery that caused him to bleed out. Wanna guess which artery it hit?”

She didn’t even wait for me to answer, her face ablaze with excitement. “The pulmonary. Another kid who started remembering a past life had this birthmark under his chin. The past life he was talking about matched that of a drug dealer who killed himself by holding a gun to his chin and pulling the trigger. When Stephenson and his team looked into it, they got coroner reports and eyewitness testimonies, then they checked the kid more closely and you know what they found? A hairless birthmark on the top of his head, exactly where the autopsy report said the bullet’s exit wound was. Stephenson’s website says that in many cases where they saw a birthmark that corresponded to the entry point of a bullet, they discovered another one that matched the exit wounds on the autopsy reports. It’s mind-boggling.”

My mind was definitely in a major boggle. Two tides were pulling at my better judgment. One was that it was Tess telling me all this, and Tess had a finely tuned bullshit detector, one I trusted. The other was Stephenson. The fact that a Harvard PhD with all his credentials could devote his life to researching hundreds of cases and end up being convinced by a significant number of them wasn’t that easy to dismiss. I just couldn’t believe I was actually sitting here entertaining this insane notion, but I was intrigued and found myself going along with her and asking, “Do all the past lives that these kids recall involve a violent death? Hasn’t anyone remembered a past life that ended peacefully in bed?”

She studied me dubiously, like she wasn’t sure if I was being serious or just a doof. I wasn’t kidding. Either way, she said, “Actually, a vast majority of the cases he’s studied, something like seventy percent, seem to involve previous lives that didn’t end naturally, meaning they died either in a car crash or by getting shot or murdered or in some other kind of violent end. And his theory is that the shock of those deaths might somehow disrupt things and cause those souls to retain more memories than they normally would.” She paused, gauging me again. “I don’t know what to believe, but . . . you’ve got to admit, it’s pretty compelling evidence.”

“But not proof,” I pointed out. Then I nodded. “Yeah, it’s— surprising. And a bit troubling. But what about Alex? What did he say about him?”

Tess looked uneasy. “I don’t know. I only spoke to his secretary.”

“And?”

“He’s away. She doesn’t know where he is.” Tess’s face tightened, and I could see she wasn’t comfortable with what she was about to say. “I think he’s your missing scientist, Sean. The guy in the basement of the bikers’ clubhouse. The contact lens?”

That took me completely by surprise—and I was now seriously interested. “What makes you think that?”

“About ten days ago, he called her and said he had to go away. Didn’t say where, didn’t say for how long. He’s not picking up his cell. He’s never done that before.” She paused, letting out a rueful breath, then added, “He also wears contacts.”

Him and countless others. “What else?”

She hesitated.

“Tess, come on. The fact that you’re sure Stephenson didn’t slip off to Vegas on a bender means there’s more. Tell me.”

She was having trouble keeping her eyes on me, and I noticed she was also shivering. I suddenly flashed to something Karen Walker had said when we interviewed her. That the bikers’ last kidnapping was in the San Francisco area.

Stephenson was at Berkeley.

I felt a chill crawl down the back of my neck as Tess edged closer.

“I don’t think they were after you, Sean,” she said. “I think they were after Alex all along. That’s why they’re still after us. And that’s why they took Stephenson.”

“Why?” I asked, feeling my core tighten up. “Why would they want Alex?”

She met my gaze, and a shadow crossed her face. “Because they think he’s the reincarnation of McKinnon. Because it looks like your son could well be the reincarnation of the man you killed.”