The Memorist Read Free

ebony eyes gleamed. He reached for the auction catalog tear sheet again, and as he did Meer glimpsed his shirt cuffpeeking out of his handmade suit jacket, revealing a white-on-white MS monogram. This was a man educated at Oxford, who quoted Aristotle, Einstein and Carl Jung to her, who enjoyed showing off his collection of playing cards that dated back to the fifteenth century, who had written an important monograph on the psychology of Victorian England’s preoccupation with the occult. When he discussed regression it never suggested psychic parlors with ruby-beaded curtains; he imbued the concept of soul transmigration with a scientist’s gravitas, making it hard to dismiss his words as anything less than the truth. Nonetheless, she didn’t believe what he believed. Or what her father believed. When she was younger she’d wanted to, tried to, even had been willing to be their guinea pig, but they’d never proved their theories to her satisfaction. The leap of faith they’d required of her was too great. Like her mother, Meer was a pragmatist.
    “The description says the object is an early eighteenth-century gaming box that belonged to a woman named Antonie Brentano, who was a friend of Beethoven’s,” Malachai read aloud.
    A metallic taste filled her mouth and made her teeth hurt. Her shoulders tensed and her jaw muscles tightened. A ripple of shivering shook her. She heard something, far away. Distant but distinct. Deep in her back, where she’d broken her spine when she was nine years old, the fused vertebrae throbbed. Suddenly, she felt sick. And even though she was no longer a child, but a thirty-one-year-old woman, she wanted to get up and run away.
    She’d been running away that day too, trying to escape the haunting music that scared her because it always preceded the memory of that terrible chase through the forest. Her problem obsessed her parents. Had changedthem into two strangers who argued about what kind of help she needed. The endless visits to various kinds of doctors kept her out of school, made her different and ruined the family’s plans.
    That afternoon she and her father had been in Central Park flying her kite. It had been winging its way higher into the sky than she’d ever imagined it could go when storm clouds suddenly rolled in, and with them came the awful, beautiful music.
    Letting go of the kite she took off, running wildly, trying to escape.
    Calling out for her, begging her to stop, her father ran after her, even managed to catch up to her and was only a moment away from pulling her to safety when a bike rider came around a bend too fast to stop. The impact sent Meer flying into the air and she landed on her back on rocks near the road.
    “Meer? Are you all right?” Malachai leaned toward her, pulling her out of her thoughts.
    “When I was a little girl, I used to sit here and think about all the other kids my father told me came to you for help and how they must have sat on this same chair and heard this same clock ticking and how they must have all gotten better because I never saw any of them in the waiting room. I thought you’d cured them all. I was sure you were going to make me better too.”
    Now on Malachai’s face, Meer saw sympathy. She much preferred his default expression: the arched eyebrows and aloof gaze of the objective observer. Compassion wasn’t what she wanted or deserved for succumbing to her old affliction. She knew how to fight the onslaught of an episode and keep it at bay. She knew her triggers and had avoided all of them. Yet, she could hear that old faraway music again…vague and indistinct, coming from beyond thisroom, this town house, this street, this city, from beyond this time. She felt the freezing anxiety that threatened to take her breath away and the terrible sadness that made her want to weep for something or someone lost to her now. It had been years since she’d been visited by this devil.
    Gripping the couch’s arm, she tried to