heroine's death into the afterlife. I tell you, something is about to happen. The barrier is breaking down, I myself talked to the dead and I came back, and on some subconscious level we all know the barrier is breaking.'
'Michael, you have to calm down. This thing with the hands...'
'I don't want to talk about that.' But he was bashed, that he had to admit, and he intended to stay bashed. He liked being bashed. He picked up the phone to order another case of beer. No need for Aunt Viv to go out for anything. And then there was all that Glenlivet Scotch he'd stashed away. And more Jack Daniel's. Oh, he could stay drunk till he died. No problem.
By phone he finally shut down the company. When he'd tried to work, his men had told him pointedly to go home. They couldn't get anything done with his constant talking. He was hopping from subject to subject. And then there was the reporter standing there asking him to demonstrate the power for the woman from Sonoma County. And something else was plaguing him, too, which he could not confide to anyone: he was receiving vague emotional impressions from people whether he touched them or not.
A certain free-floating telepathy it seemed; and there were no gloves to shut it off. It wasn't information he received; it was merely strong impressions of like, dislike, truth or falsehood. Sometimes he was so caught up in this, he only saw people's lips moving. He didn't hear their words at all.
This highly charged intimacy, if that was the proper thing to call it, alienated him to the core.
He let the contracts go, transferring everything in the space of an afternoon, making sure all his men got work, and then closing his small shop on Castro which sold vintage Victorian fixtures.
It was OK to go indoors, to lie down, to pull the curtains, and drink. Aunt Viv sang in the kitchen as she cooked for him meals he didn't want to eat. Now and then he tried to read a little of David Copperfield, in order to escape from his own mind. At all the worst moments of his life, he had always retired to some remote corner of the world and read David Copperfield. It was easier and lighter than Great Expectations, his true favorite. But the only reason he could follow the book now was that he knew it practically by heart.
Therese went to visit her brother in Southern California. A lie, he knew, though he had not touched the phone, merely heard the voice through the answering machine. Fine. Goodbye.
When his old girlfriend Elizabeth called from New York, he talked to her until he actually passed out. The next morning she told him he must get psychiatric help. She threatened to drop work and fly out if he didn't agree. He agreed. But he was lying.
He did not want to confide in anybody. He did not want to describe the new intensity of feeling. He certainly didn't want to talk about his hands. All he wanted to talk about were the visions, and nobody wanted to hear about that, nobody wanted to hear him talk about the curtain dropping that separated the living from the dead.
After Aunt Viv went to bed, he experimented just a little with the touching power. He could tell a great deal from an object when he allowed himself to handle it slowly; if he asked questions of his power - that is, tried to direct it - he could receive even more. But he did not like the feel of it, of these images flashing through his head. And if there was a reason he had been given this sensitivity, the reason was forgotten along with the vision, and the sense of purpose regarding his return to life.
Stacy brought him books to read about others who had died and come back. Dr Morris at the hospital had told him of these works - the classic studies of the 'Near Death Experience' by Moody, Rawlings, Sabom, and Ring. Fighting the drunkenness, the agitation, the sheer inability to concentrate for any length of time, he forced himself through some of these accounts.
Yes, he knew this! It was all true. He too had risen out of his body, yes, and it was no dream, yes, but he had not seen a beautiful light; he had not been met by dead loved ones; and there had been no unearthly paradise to