The Reincarnation of Peter Proud Read Free Page A

Naturally you are curious. These are psychic aberrations of some kind, screen memories, perhaps. It might be possible to dig them out, but it would take a long time. Other than this, Dr. Proud, I must tell you frankly that I cannot give you any real answers.”
    “But the dreams” Peter had insisted. “They all seem totally about someone else.”
    “You mean this man X you refer to.”
    “Yes.”
    “X is yourself.”
    “But what about this town I keep seeing—?”
    The psychiatrist had smiled. “Dr. Proud, are you implying that you are hallucinating about some past life? That this is some psychic manifestation of reincarnation?”
    “I don’t know. The thought has crossed my mind.”
    “I guessed as much,” Staub had said. He had continued to smile. “But I doubt it. When you’re dead, you’re dead. Clearly it’s possible to regress in one’s sleep back to childhood, and even infancy. But only as far as’ one has actual living memory. I’ve had people, patients, who actually believe they are reincarnations of some pharaoh, or a Roman soldier in Caesar’s legions, or some member of Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet. They quote Edgar Cayce; they tell you all about Bridey Murphy. They want to believe that after they die they will be born again. It’s usually harmless, and it gives them some kind of comfort. It’s all part of the occult scene today. Many people can’t face reality. Or they find it ugly. They find their lives empty and unrewarding, so they look for other answers—karma, voodoo, astrology, even witchcraft. All of these are nonsense, of course. But they all have the same mystique. If you believe it, it’s so.”
    Nora came out of the bathroom and got back into bed with him.
    “All right,” she said. “Now you can tell me what it was all about.”
    “What was all about?”
    “That dream.”
    “It wouldn’t make any sense to you.”
    “I don’t expect it to. But tell me anyway.”
    Reluctantly he told her. She thought about it for a while. Then:
    “That Indian stuff in the dream. The fact that you teach the subject.
    Probably some kind of simple association.”
    “It could be a little more than that.”
    “Yes?”
    “I happen to be one-sixteenth Indian.”
    She stared at him. “Come on. You’re putting me on.”
    “No, seriously. My great-great-great-grandfather, or whatever the sequence, was a Seneca. The Senecas are part of the Iroquois nation. The story goes that he was a chief, took this white woman a captive—my great-great-etcetera-grandmother—and made her his squaw. It’s part of our family history, and I’m not quite sure I believe it. It could be a lot of romantic crap.”
    “You never told me.”
    “You never asked me.” He grinned. “I hope you’re not prejudiced.”
    “Me? Are you out of your mind?” She laughed. “How many other girls get a chance to sleep with an authentic early American like you? Part Indian, the rest old Wasp. It’s in to be ethnic these days.” Then her smile vanished. “One thing I can’t get over is that
voice
I heard coming out of you.”
    “Mr. Hyde.”
    “Yes. You know what I kept thinking of?”
    “What?”
    “The ‘little man.’ Sir James Frazer wrote about it in
The Golden Bough
. It’s a classic study of myth. I wrote a paper on it in my senior year. Frazer said primitive man believed that an animal lives and moves only because there’s another animal living inside of him. Same with a man. A man lives and moves only because there is a ‘little man’ inside of him. Today we’d call it the soul. If the ‘little man’ is present, there is life. If he is absent, there is death. Sleep is the time the ‘little man’ is temporarily absent. In dreams, the ‘little man’ leaves the body and wanders around—visiting the places, seeing the persons, and performing the acts of which the dreamer dreams. In this case, your ‘little man’ had a date. With some lady named Marcia. A very murderous little date.”
    “Very