A Stir of Echoes - By Richard Matheson Page 0,5

between two kitchen chairs, he'd sat on my stomach and run a cigarette lighter flame back and forth along my exposed legs. I just sat there gaping at him.

"Let's have that again," I said.

"That's right," he said, laughing, delighted at his success. I looked over at Anne again.

"This happened?" I asked, weakly. She got up, smiling, and came over to me. Sitting down she put her arm around me.

"You sure are a dandy subject, love," she said. Her voice shook a little when she said it. Ten minutes later we were all sitting around the kitchen table, discussing my hypnotism. I must say it was the first time I'd ever heard an animated discussion in Elsie's house.

"I didn't," I said, laughing.

"You sure did." Anne made an amused sound. "There you were, twelve years old again, telling us about somebody named Joey Ariola who must have been a beast from the way you talked about him."

"Ariola." I shook my head wonderingly. "I'll be damned. I'd forgotten all about him."

"You just thought you'd forgotten," Phil said.

"Oh... I don't believe anybody can remember that far back," Elsie said. "He was just making it up or something."

"He could go back a lot farther than that," Phil told her. "There are authenticated cases where subjects go back to prenatal days."

"To what?"

"To before they were born."

"Oh..." Elsie turned her head halfway to the side again. Now that the vision of me stretched calcified between two of her kitchen chairs was beginning to fade, she was regaining dissent.

"That's right," Phil said. "And there's Bridey Murphy."

"Who?" asked Elsie.

"A woman who, under hypnosis, claims she was an Irish girl in her previous life."

"Oh... that's silly," Elsie said. Everybody was quiet for a moment and Elsie looked up at the clock. She shrugged at Phil.

"It's not time yet," Phil said.

"Time for what?" I asked.

"You'll see," Phil told me.

Elsie got up and went over to the stove. "Who wants more coffee?" she asked. I looked at Phil a moment longer, then let it go.

"What else did I say when I was-I mean when I thought I was twelve again?" I asked Anne. She smiled and shook her head. "Oh... all sorts of things," she said. "About your father and-your mother. About a bike you wanted that had a foxtail on the handlebars."

"Oh, my God, yes," I said, delighted at the sudden recollection. "I remember that. Lord, how I wanted that bike."

"I wanted something else when I was twelve," said Frank.

I noticed how Elizabeth looked down at her coffee, her pale red lips pressed together. Everything about Elizabeth was pale; the shade of her lipstick, the blond of her hair, the colour of her skin. She seemed, in a way, to be partially vanished.

"I wasn't after any bike at twelve," Frank said.

"Man, we know what you were after," I said, trying to make it sound like the joke that Frank had not intended it to be. "What else did I talk about?" I asked Anne before Frank could say any more. I noticed Ron looking up at the clock now, then glancing over at Phil. Phil pressed down a grin-as did Frank. Elsie came back to the table and put down another plate of little glazed cakes.

"Well, I don't think it's going to happen," she said. "It's already eleven."

"What's that?" I asked.

"Let's see," Anne said as if I hadn't spoken, "you talked about your sister and-about your room. About your dog."

For a second I remembered Corky and the way he had of putting his old shaggy head on my knees and staring at me.

"What's the joke?" I asked, because there was one obviously. "Why are you all looking like cats who swallowed the mice?"

At which point I took off my left shoe and put it into the refrigerator. I turned to face their explosion of laughter. For a moment I actually didn't know what they were laughing about. Then, suddenly, I realized what I'd just done. I opened the refrigerator and peered in at my dark shoe placed neatly beside a covered bowl of peas.

"What'd you do that for?" Phil asked, innocently.

"I don't know," I said. "I-just wanted to, I guess. Why shouldn't-?" I stopped abruptly and looked at Phil accusingly. "You crumb, you," I said, "you gave me a post-hypnotic command." Phil grinned, returned to glory again.

"He told you," Elsie declared. "You knew just what you were doing."

"No, I didn't," I said.

"You did so," said Elsie, pettishly.

"Say," said Frank, "what if Tom was a girl and you gave her the post-hypnotic