House of Bathory (6 page)

Chapter 9

C
ARBONDALE,
C
OLORADO
N
OVEMBER 29, 2010

B
etsy heard footsteps outside on the porch. She opened the door.

“Dr. Path?”

Framed by the blue trim of the door was the most striking young woman Betsy had ever seen.

She had long dark red hair—a natural auburn. Strands whipped about her face in the wind. Her skin was startlingly white, like a porcelain figurine. It was an outdated look, especially in contrast with the outdoorsy Colorado style to which Betsy was accustomed. Then she realized she was staring at the girl’s green, amber-flecked eyes.

“You are Dr. Path, aren’t you?”

“Yes—I’m sorry,” Betsy said, forcing herself to stop examining the girl’s eyes. “Do we know each other?”

She looked so familiar. Betsy was sure she had seen those features before.

“I am Daisy Hart’s sister, Morgan. May I come in?”

“Of course, I’m sorry. I guess I should have seen the family resemblance.”

Betsy knew she was staring at the young woman, but she couldn’t help it.

“Underneath all that Goth makeup she wears, how could you?” said Morgan.

She frowned, lowering her chin. Her long hair swung down in her face. Then she tossed her glorious mane back behind her ears. Her eyes glittered. Her lips formed a word, but no syllable was uttered.

Betsy stepped aside and let the tall elegant creature enter her office.

“Please sit down, Morgan. So. Daisy’s sister?”

“I am sorry to drop in on you like this, but I’ve come to check up on Daisy. My…dad gave me your contact information.”

“You are from New York, right?”

“Yes, though we live most of the time in Florida now.”

“We?”

The young woman hesitated.

“Dad and I. After the divorce, I chose to stay with my father and Daisy went with my mother.”

“I see.”

Morgan looked around the room. Betsy noticed she focused on the leather-bound books.

“And…?” Betsy let the unspoken question hang. Morgan had come to see her, uninvited; Morgan was going to have to carry this conversation.

“Yes,” she said, reluctant to stop inspecting the house and bookshelves. “Dad and I are really worried about Daisy. I heard she had another choking episode and went to the ER.”

“That was a while ago.”

“Did she say why it happened?”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean, in therapy, did she say anything that might have triggered the choking? What did she say exactly?”

Betsy sat back in the chair and her fingers sought the end of the armrest. She grasped hard as if she were on a carnival ride.

“You know, I really can’t talk about your sister’s therapy with you. It is confidential.”

The catlike eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly. “You are trying to help her, right? I mean, she must tell you everything, right? Has she told you the nightmare about the vampire?”

Betsy opened her mouth to answer, but the reply was stillborn in her mouth. It was none of this girl’s business what Daisy said to her in a therapy session.

“We are working together toward discovering the causes of her distress.”

“Distress?” Morgan scoffed. “Is that what she calls it?”

Betsy’s fingernails dug deeper into the fabric. “No, that is what I call it.”

“Well, she’s a spoiled brat,” said Morgan, spitting out the words. Her green eyes narrowed, glinting. “She has been spoiled rotten since the day she was born. I’m sure that the only reason that she is doing this choking thing is to draw more attention to herself.”

Betsy didn’t respond directly. Instead, she asked, “Morgan, are you staying with Jane and Daisy?”

The visitor sniffed and rolled her eyes. “Yeah,
right
.”

“Do they even know you’re here?”

“No. I’m just passing through. I leave this afternoon. My father wanted me to check up on Daisy’s…progress. And to meet you.”

Morgan fiddled with her starched white collar. Then she dug in the pocket of her suede jacket, producing a white business card from a tooled leather wallet. “Here. This is her dad’s number.”

“
Her
dad?” Betsy asked.

Morgan glared at her. “He’s her biological father. I am Jane’s daughter from her first marriage. Anyway, he says that if there are any questions or breakthroughs, call him first. Not Jane.”

“Your mother? You are asking me not to call Jane?”

“Yes. Call him first.”

“I’ve never met your father. I have met Jane. She signed the papers and writes the checks. Daisy lives with her, not with her father.”

“Roger pays you. He’s the one with the money. He can pull her from therapy any time he wants.”

Betsy turned the card over in her hand. “Tell him to call me. I feel uncomfortable with the situation and I feel I should adhere to protocol.”

Morgan’s eyes widened. “Protocol? Wait! You can’t tell Jane I’ve been here.”

“Why?”

“Just don’t. It will—upset her, and really confuse Daisy. I swear it will.”

Betsy’s mouth tasted sour. She realized she had taken an instant disliking to this attractive young woman. What was it about Morgan that set her on edge?

“You understand that I am under no obligation to do anything you say. My only concern is Daisy.”

Morgan hesitated. The green eyes stared at Betsy, cold and glittering.

“You don’t like me,” she said slowly. “I can sense that. But I have an important question for you. And it might be helpful for Daisy. I wish you would give me an honest answer—”

“What is it? If it’s about your sister, the answer is no. I will not discuss her.”

“No, Dr. Path. You’ve already made that abundantly clear,” said Morgan waving away Betsy’s response. “Just a simple question, nothing to do with Daisy.”

“Go ahead.”

“Is it possible to—I don’t know—inherit or borrow a dream from someone?”

“What are you referring to? I don’t understand the question.”

“Let’s say someone dreams about—say, vampires. Like my sister does. Is it possible for me, say, to pick up that dream?”

Betsy said, “What, catch it like a flu?”

“That’s not what I mean. What if the dream world she has at night is the same as mine. Exactly the same.”

Betsy studied Morgan’s amber-flecked green eyes and recognized an emotion.

Fear.

Betsy hesitated, then nodded.

“People who are close, or who are connected somehow to similar emotional feelings, can have similar dreams as a manifestation of a burden they share, especially if they are exposed to the very same experience.”

Morgan shook her head adamantly. “You don’t understand, Dr. Path. What if the nightmare is the same, exactly the same—a castle—identical characters—ghouls with white faces—”

“You may have heard Daisy describe her dreams and unconsciously picked up the detail and emotion—contaminating, if you will, your own dreams.” Betsy felt as if she had gone too far. She shouldn’t be talking about Daisy even this much.

“If you will excuse me,” said Betsy, rising from her chair, “I am expecting a patient.”

Morgan rose from her chair, following Betsy to the door. Betsy swung it open. A few dead leaves blew in circles on the porch, refugees from the earlier snowstorm.

Morgan frowned, making her way out into the unsettled weather.

“There is one more possibility,” said Betsy, called after her. She wasn’t sure what prompted her to continue this conversation, especially as Morgan was a few steps into the wind. “There is a phenomenon called shared dreaming. A sort of astral traveling, an out-of-body experience. Carl Jung himself believed in synchronous dreaming as part of the collective unconscious.”

Morgan nodded, deep in thought. She jingled the car keys in her hand.

“Roger will be in contact soon,” she said. “Good-bye, Dr. Path.” Then Morgan turned and walked back to her car, patches of snow-packed ice crunching under her boots.

Chapter 10

S
OMEWHERE IN
S
LOVAKIA
D
ECEMBER 6, 2010

D
r.
Grace Path wanted to scream, but the hood covered her mouth and she knew screaming would do no good anyway. No one could possibly hear her. She was in a car, hurtling over a road she couldn’t see.

She had struggled, but it was useless. And now, little by little, her mind began to work again, began to think, began to analyze.

The smooth ride made her certain they were on a motorway. It was a luxury car, she could tell by the purring motor, the leather seats. A heater blasted her with warm air, carrying the scent of a new, expensive automobile.

She could see the flash of headlights occasionally as they filtered through the thin material of the cloth that had been thrown over her head.

The two men in the front seat spoke a language she did not understand. It was not Slovak.

The hood smelled of an old-fashioned scent. What was it? Clean smelling, freshly laundered. Had they used this same hood to kidnap other people?

What could they want with her? She wasn’t rich. There was no chance of ransom.

Lavender. The scent on the hood was lavender. And, even now, even here, her mind noted that “lavender” was the root of “laundry”—the flower was used in the Middle Ages to camouflage odors, protecting precious cloth from mildew. Fresh-washed linen left in the sun, strewn with the flower. From the French. Late fourteenth century.

She felt the sting of tears in her eyes. Damn it! What could they possibly want with her?

As the hours passed, they ignored her, except to ask if she wanted water. They spoke in heavily accented English.

“Yes, water please,” Grace finally said. She hated to give them the satisfaction, but she was thirsty.

She heard the crackle of a plastic water bottle being opened, and the sloshing of water into some sort of glass.

The car’s overhead light snapped on just for a minute and she felt the presence of a man stretching back toward her from the front seat. Pale translucent fingers pulled the hood a little way off her face, shoving a thin tube toward her mouth.

“Is straw,” said a young man’s voice. “Hood stays over eyes, lady. Drink.”

The fingers pushing the straw into her mouth were ghastly pale—white bones against the black cloth of the hood. They smelled metallic, inhuman. She shuddered, trying to pull her head away from the fingers.

“You not like water? It comes from the springs deep under castle. Healthy, mountain mineral cures all sickness—”

The driver cursed angrily in the unintelligible language. The man giving her the water said nothing for a few seconds.

“Here. Drink, lady. Drink.”

Chapter 11

D
OWNTOWN
M
ANHATTAN
R
UBIN
M
USEUM
D
ECEMBER 6, 2010

W
et snow sluiced under the tires of the taxi pulling up to the curb at 150 West Seventeenth
Street.

Betsy paid the Pakistani cabbie, tipping far too much. She chalked it up to her excitement, she was actually about to see Jung’s
Red Book
—she wanted the entire world to share her excitement, the joy of anticipation.

Forget the analyzing, Path,
she told herself
. You are on vacation this weekend.

She marched through the sidewalk’s dirty slush, her cheeks burning from the wind gusts rocketing down the city canyons. Betsy was always amazed by how sharp Manhattan’s wind could feel, comparable to the sting of blizzard gusts in the Rockies.

She pushed the glass door open and was embraced by warmth and yellow light. She sighed with delight.

The Rubin Museum exuded the scent of the sacrosanct. Betsy had visited it before, to see the Buddhist mandalas and Tibetan art. When she was at Jungian conferences or visiting friends in New York in the winter, she would often duck into the little private museum for a cup of chai or a curry soup to chase the city chill away.

She often thought of her father here, though he died years before it opened. He would have loved it.

Tonight’s program, however, was the only reason she had flown to New York for the weekend. Carl Jung’s
The Red Book
—Jung’s illustrated chronicle of his journey of the soul and battle with madness—was on display at the Rubin. This original manuscript had been locked in a Swiss bank vault for fifty years. This was the first time it had ever been seen in public. Along with the book itself, the museum was presenting an extraordinary series of discussions that were virtually public Jungian analyses of prominent artists, writers, intellectuals, and mystics.

Jung, a protégé of Sigmund Freud, had moved further and further away from Freud’s principles. He eschewed his mentor’s rigid adherence to sexual trauma as the root of most mental illness. Jung believed in the collective unconscious, that all humans shared a common pool of ancient knowledge and experience that they were not aware of, but which affected every moment of their lives. Dreams and intuition were valuable tools to not only the psyche but to the soul.

At the age of thirty-eight, in the year 1913, Jung was haunted by his own demons, foreseeing the death and destruction of World War I. His visions tortured him further until he labeled them a “psychosis” or “schizophrenia,” but instead of trying to cure himself, he explored his visions in what he termed “active imagination.” He illustrated his dreams and began keeping a series of notebooks, which were later transcribed into a big red leather bound book,
The Red Book
.

Each evening discussion in “The Red Book Dialogues” paired a Jungian psychoanalyst with one of the notable guests. The celebrity would be shown an illustration from
The Red Book
, seeing it for the first time right there on stage, and then the psychoanalyst would ask questions about the viewer’s feelings and interpretations of the drawing.

This particular night the celebrity was a tarot card reader named Rikki Gillette, to be interviewed by Dr. Jane Kilpatrick from the C.G. Jung Institute.

Betsy’s mother was originally going to meet her for this event, but Grace was still engrossed in historical research in Slovakia. Besides, thought Betsy, her mother never “got” Jung. This would be far beyond her comfort zone.

She thought of her father. If only he had lived to see
The Red Book
tonight.

There were plenty of familiar faces in the crowd. To see the manuscript, written and illustrated by Carl Jung himself, was a psychoanalyst’s version of making the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Betsy waited her turn to peer down at the enormous tome, encased in bulletproof glass. Every few days the pages were turned. She gazed in awe at the twisting colors and bizarre forms on the two selected pages.

Superimposed on a labyrinth of river blue and beige lines was a figure of a—turbaned man?—outlined in red and black. He fell back, staggering from a golden ray of light piercing—his heart? But if it was his heart, why did it look like a club, as on a playing card? His face showed no fear—surprise, perhaps—and…

Betsy leaned closer.

Ecstasy. The man was being touched by the divine.

Others crowded around her, she could smell curry on someone’s breath, perhaps the woman behind her in line. Betsy only then realized that the man was standing on a snake, an angry snake ready to strike.

“Excuse me—may I have a look if you are finished?”

Betsy nodded, but it was agonizing to step away from Jung’s original work. She was thankful that her mother had given her a first edition copy of the book for her birthday a few weeks before.

Betsy joined the slow-moving line into the auditorium. An usher asked her to pick a tarot card from the fanned deck in his hand.

“It’s part of the shtick for tonight,” he said, winking at her. “Hold onto it.”

Betsy turned the card over in her hand. Her breath caught in her throat.

On the card was an illustration of a girl, sitting upright in bed. Her face was cupped in her hands—she was clearly crying or terrified. Above her were nine swords, dangling in the air. The bedspread was covered with zodiac symbols and roses.

Betsy made her way to an empty seat. She pulled out her iPhone and did a quick search:

T
HE
N
INE
OF
S
WORDS COMMUNICATES AN INSTANT MESSAGE OF GRIEF, ANGUISH, AND EVEN TERROR.

The lights darkened and the English curator introduced the two guests, analyst and analysand—the fortune-teller who would share her interpretation of one of Jung’s illustrations.

Betsy read on, her eyes glued to the iPhone screen.

I
T IS CONSIDERED TO BE UPSETTING AND DISTURBING AS AN OMEN IN A DIVINATORY TAROT READING.

“And would you all be so kind as to turn off your pagers and cell phones? Thank you,” announced the curator.

The man next to her glared at her. She clicked off her phone.

Dr. Kilpatrick presented Rikki Gillette with the illustration. It was the same one that Betsy had studied so intently a few minutes earlier. The audience was shown a projection on the wall: the red and black turbaned man and the maze background.

“Tell me your immediate reaction to seeing this illustration, please.”

“My first reaction is that I want to cry,” Gillette said. She thought a moment longer. “The maze is reminiscent of Van Gogh, his struggle for a way to go…the intercept of madness and of the Heart Chakra.”

“Heart Chakra!” muttered the man next to Betsy. “Yeah, right! New Age—”

“Shh!” hissed a young woman. Betsy noticed her long red hair and its glorious sheen, even in the dark.

Gillette continued. “But I don’t see anguish in the figure’s face. No, I see St. Anthony, a dark walk of the soul. And the piercing light is illuminating, raising the man up.”

“And the snake?” asked Dr. Kilpatrick.

“He is not afraid of it. It is the light that captures him absolutely. If he focuses on the light, the snake is powerless. He is walking a razor line between rational and irrational. His spirit is speaking to him.”

“As a psychic, do you feel a spirit speak to us?” asked Kilpatrick.

“All the time. But you must go to a place of silence to hear it. Not the jabberwocky of language, of social commitments, of things to do. The spirit is giving you clues constantly, if you can just
see
them, just
hear
them…”

She looked up from the illustration.

“Each member of the audience was given a tarot card when you came in,” said the fortune-teller. “Look at your card please. Who has the Nine of Swords?”

Betsy turned her card over in her hand.

“I do,” she said, waving it. She stood up. “What does it mean?”

“The tarot is a collection of symbols, deeply mythological and indicative of archetypes,” said Gillette.

Betsy nodded. She knew that, as any Jungian would. But what about this particular illustration? What did it mean? Why did she find it so frightening?

“The Nine of Swords is also called the Lord of Cruelty,” said Gillette. “It means you are or soon will be dealing with family secrets. Secrets you may have sensed. But you have not realized the depth and darkness of what was being withheld from you.”

Betsy’s face began to burn. She felt hundreds of eyes on her.

“There is a lot of pain here.”

Betsy started to speak, but the tarot reader shook her head, continuing. “The content is getting in touch with your overwhelming sense of fear. Is there a Scorpio in your life?” Betsy tried to think.
A Scorpio?

“Talk about nightmares!” laughed Gillette, and everyone joined her laughter. “Keep a dream journal,” said Gillette. “And good luck.”

In the question-and-answer session that followed, a distinguished white-haired man stood up across the aisle from Betsy. He was leaning on an elegant walking stick with a silver handle.

“Could you speak to Jung’s theory of synchronicity and its implication in tarot cards, Ms. Gillette?”

There was a murmur of approval from the analysts in the audience. Betsy noted the foreign accent of the man—Eastern European? She wondered if he had studied in Vienna as her father had.

“Synchronicity? The entire universe vibrates to synchronicity, if only we can hear the rich symphony. The first strains of music, created at our beginnings, the notes wafting through space and time, gathering momentum. But it is only the attuned ear that can detect the chorus.”

Betsy listened. She thought of her father.
The third ear, you must develop the third ear,
he would tell her.

She shuddered in the dark so violently that the man next to her shifted his gaze to her.

“It is chilly in here,” she muttered, fixing her stare at the two women on stage.

“I am so sorry to conclude this fascinating discussion,” said the curator. “But our time is up. Thank you all so much for attending tonight’s ‘Red Book Dialogue.’ ”

The audience clapped, and the lights came up fully. Some people rushed forward to ask the psychic questions.

Who did she know who was a Scorpio…other than herself?

She hailed a cab to her hotel. In the dark, her fingers fumbled over the tarot card deep in her jacket pocket.

Betsy shivered in the darkness of the cab. She felt a strong urge to be back in Colorado, back to work. She knew she wouldn’t sleep that night, not until she was back in her own rumpled bed in Carbondale.