Tales of Chills and Thrills: The Mystery Thriller Horror Box Set (7 Mystery Thriller Horror Novels) (131 page)

“Since the near death?” he asked.

“Yes. But it didn’t begin then. It just pops up once in a while… and memories of my first dog, Terri. Then there’s the park I used to play in as a child.”

“We’re off course… back to the near death,” he suggested.

“I was looking at the menu and deciding between lasagna and pasta with pesto sauce when it felt like I got hit in the chest with an iron fist and with the breath leaving my body everything went black, like the lens on a camera which was in the process of closing. I remember the feeling of falling forward, probably ending up with my face on the table, before tumbling down to the floor.”

Keough said nothing, but jotted something on his pad. I continued.

“I was floating and feeling like all of the things that were troubling me at that time were just gone. I heard incredible music, like nothing I had ever heard before. It wasn’t classical, opera, choir or even rock.”

“Was it Hip Hop?”

I stared at him. “You’re giving me shit, and you want me to be serious?” I sat up forward and confronted him — albeit, jokingly. For some reason I felt like I had known him for a long time, even though he was probably 20 years younger than me and the areas of common interest wouldn’t be there but at the same time I had a cautious feeling about him, for some reason.

“Near death,” he guided.

“The darkness rapidly turned to light… a light that was so refreshing I felt almost reborn but without the bodily frailties. There was this fabulous aroma that I cannot describe. How would you describe smells without comparing it to something? This was something so incredible yet new. Something that did not have a place on this Earth.”

He said nothing but was writing furiously. Then I noticed that he was writing like he was in some kind of a trance. His face was expressionless as he stared straight ahead looking at nothing as his fingers and pen moved rapidly across the paper, automatically.

“Doc… Doc… are you okay?”

“Of course I’m okay… why do you ask?”

“Because you’re acting weird.”

“I think that comment might be best reserved for you,” he said as he regained his composure. “But of course my professional self won’t allow my
real
self to say that, but ooops, I just did. How ‘bout that”? He shook his head and chuckled a bit before saying, “We are getting comfortably off course again.” He returned to his weird doctor state.

“And now, let us get back to what happened,” Keough insisted. I was happy to oblige; I was needing to get into this so that I could start putting together what had happened in death and what was happening after death in my dreams.

“I found myself wandering in a strange place (that word again) without agenda or purpose. Then I was whooshed back to life on the table in the hospital and the stark reality of a hospital ER.”

“How long were you gone?”

“Gone?”

“Dead?”

“About 7 minutes they tell me.” I continued. “The first time.”

“Let’s stay with the first time for now. When did you see this Brother Scheible for the first time?”

“I think it was actually not until during the second near death.”

“Okay, stay with the first one… is that it for that one?” He asked putting his pad aside as I nodded yes.

The session ended with that.

CHAPTER FOUR

That evening my wife and I went to a movie about a magical land where there was a bridge between reality and fantasy and on that bridge one could experience true existence. This made me feel a certain kinship to the concept, for that was where I lived these days.

During the movie I went to get us some popcorn. On the way back to my seat I waited for a moment in the darkness while my eyes adjusted and in so doing I looked at the row where we sat and saw something that rattled me to the core, for there just three rows above our seats was Brother Scheible.

I moved toward him, and as I stepped up I stumbled, which caused me to look down; when I looked up again I expected him to be gone… but he was still there.

I sat down in the empty seat right next to him and by this time my wife had noticed me passing by her and she followed me to where I sat. “Honey, did you forget where we were sitting?”

“No, of course not, I just wanted to speak with this guy here.” As I turned to speak to Brother Scheible I found someone else in the seat: Doctor Keough.

I jumped back in my seat as he stared at me with a puzzled look on his face.

I said, “You weren’t just sitting here. I know that wasn’t you.”

He replied with a question, “And who did you think you saw? Oh, and by the way, what the hell are you doing here?”

“I’m thinking the same thing, Doc.”

“What is going on, Jeremy?” Kate whispered. “Why are you sitting here talking to yourself?”

“Huh??? I’m talking with Doctor Keough,” I said as I turned from her to what was now an empty seat. I was amazed. What was going on? Was I losing it? What the hell was going on?

“Let’s get out of here,” I said as we started our way down the steps in the dark with people in the audience staring at us.

“If I live a million years I will never be able to explain what just happened,” I said resignedly to my wife who was holding back tears.

“Did you think you saw the doctor you’ve been seeing these past few weeks?” she asked me.

“I don’t know what that was, but whatever is going on is completely beyond me.”

* * *

That night the wind was blowing the leaves around our house and we slept with the windows open, trying to capture the refreshing autumn breeze in our second story bedroom. My wife was snuggled next to me in a deep sleep and I lay looking out the window waiting for sleep to come as my mind wandered back to the theater, and the tricks it might have played on me in the darkness. How could that have happened and what did it mean? Had my near death experience changed me more than I realized?

Unable to fall asleep, I slipped out of bed, deciding to head to the kitchen for something to munch on; and while on the stairs my eye caught the shadow of something moving rapidly through the moonlight that shone through the living room window and onto the floor.

“Who’s there?!” I stopped in my tracks wondering if I should retreat back up the stairs to where I kept a small handgun. I heard something in the kitchen that sounded like the doggy door flapping. Since our dog had passed away a month before, I couldn’t imagine what was doing that.

I went back up the stairs and into the bedroom and found my gun and when I turned to go back out the door my blood ran cold, for there, standing in the doorway, was a dog staring at me. It was tan and medium sized and looked exactly like what I remember my first dog, Terri, looking like.

“How’d you get in here?” I asked the dog.

“What did you say?” came the reply; not from the dog, but from Kate, who rose sleepily in the bed rubbing her eyes.

“I’m sorry, Honey. Didn’t mean to wake you, but we have a dog in the house.” As I pointed at the doorway I could see it was now empty.

‘What… what dog are you talking about?” she said as she put her feet on the floor and started for the doorway. Then she saw the gun in my hand and she let out a little “Oh.”

I told her about what had led up to me having a gun in my hand and talking to what she considered an imaginary dog.

“I’ll check the house to make sure a dog didn’t get in here through the doggie door.”

“
We’ll
check the house,” she corrected. “And, um. Why don’t you give me the gun?”

I was glad to have her company and had no problem with giving the gun to her. We found no dog and then I put the security slide over the doggie entrance.

“That was strange,” I said as we headed back upstairs. “That dog looked exactly like the first dog I ever had.”

“You mean the one you had when you were a kid? Terri?”

She knew about Terri because I would always measure any of our dogs to the ‘Terri Standard.’

“Are sure you weren’t dreaming this?” she asked, concerned.

“At this point I can’t be sure of anything. But, if it was a dream, it came with panting, fur, and the most intense look I’ve seen on any dog.”

We lay there silently before we fell back to sleep.

The next morning I got up first and headed downstairs and out the door to the driveway for the daily newspaper and as I opened the door I was startled to see a tennis ball laying there on the welcome mat. That was a habit of Terri’s that I remembered quite clearly, she would bring home a ball and lay it on the front porch whenever she went meandering. Probably as a peace offering for the worry she caused me. I picked the ball up and looked for signs of chewing but there were none.

“Look,” I said to my wife, as if offering the ball as evidence.

“Where’d you get that?”

“It was lying on the welcome mat.”

“I’ll bet one of the kids are responsible for that… They probably bounced it off the house and took off thinking they broke a window.”

“I hope that’s all it is,” I said, trying to think it through. “It could also be…” I stopped short of telling her what Terri used to do.

She wasn’t listening closely to what I said as she went into the kitchen and started preparing our morning coffee.

I decided to drop it and keep it to myself; I didn’t want Kate to think I was going insane. Even though, in truth I myself was getting worried about my mental state.

CHAPTER FIVE

That afternoon I got myself back into a research article I was writing for my publisher on the boom of weird weather incidents which seemed to be occurring in sequence around the globe for the past 40 years. I called a friend, Justin Timmins, who’d emerged over the several years previous as one of the foremost meteorologists this side of the equator. He was a leading authority on all things “weather weird” and usually eight steps ahead of his colleagues, and he was also a very brilliant physicist. His theories were sometimes dismissed by academia and some of the media as being too far off the paper. However there were those in the emerging media who found him to be in the very center of weather logic and very much on the mark with the climate of mother Earth. I thought that maybe there was something going on that could be causing a shift in the energy system of the Earth and opening something that might be causing these experiences. What the hell? Anything is possible.

Since I covered him in a magazine article five years back, and treated him and his work with respect he came to be one of my greatest sources on climate and someone I greatly enjoyed having a beer with at a favorite local watering hole.

“Hey Justin, how are you doing?” I greeted my friend as he answered his phone.

“Hey to you! Where you been? I get worried that I’m losing my ties to the normal when I don’t hear from friends like you.”

“I died,” I said with a smile, “but didn’t stay that way long.”

“You died? You’re serious?” he asked.

“Serious as the heart attack I had,” came my response.

“Shit. Are you okay now? Can I do anything? Do you need help?” he blurted.

“No… I’m alright. Believe me. I got a stent which opened up my blood system. Like a windy day opens the flow of weather. Just like that. Can I meet with you soon?”

“Sure, why?”

“I need to finish an article on weather, and I have some things that I want to run by you.”

“Sounds like we need to have a beer. When?”

“How about tomorrow? We can take advantage of happy hour prices at Lenny’s Pub. Say about 4? You in?”

“I’ll be there.”

“Stay well,” I said.

* * *

We greeted each other with a hug and a handshake the next day. He asked me how I was feeling and could I still have a beer without risking another heart attack. “Can you still have sex? I hear that after a heart attack you can’t even take stimulants.”

“Not a problem, so far. What are you drinking?”

We ordered beers and started our visit with light conversation. Justin was in his mid forties, African- American, handsome and wise beyond his years. He was highly respected by all who worked with him but because he was usually on the cutting edge of things he was sometimes controversial.

“How is your latest study on the Antarctica going? Are the tree huggers still ignoring your fact finding that it’s getting colder there while the arctic is warming?” I asked before I took a sip of beer.

“Nah, they don’t want to confuse themselves with the facts. Why would they ever do that?”

“Is it still that way with the media and some of the more vocal professors? Are they still putting you down?” I chided him.

“Hasn’t it always been so? The media? Upper Ed? Congress? My mother-in-law? Oh the shame of it all. I tell ya, I can’t get no respect.” He did his best Rodney Dangerfield impression with bug eyes and all. He looked the part of a weatherman who was trying to look different. He was tall and weight proportionate. His clothes were fine and his shoes were always shined. He wore progressive glasses, the kind of lenses that reacted to light. He didn’t look like the weather people on TV and maybe that was because he was given to so much more than merely reading the forecast, after all, he was at root, a physicist.

“I need your latest quote so that I can wrap this piece up and put it to bed with a statement from you that will guarantee the usual controversy. I have to get myself caught up after all the events of the past months.”

“Are you really feeling okay?” he asked as he put his hand on my shoulder in a supportive way. His eyes conveyed concern.

“Physically I’m feeling quite well. It’s not that. But it seems like mentally I may have a challenge.” I said.

“What do you mean? You’re having problems? What’s going on?” He leaned in, awaiting my response.

“When I died I had a near death experience that has me moving in and out of a surreal reality that I can’t seem to get my arms around.” I shrugged my shoulders as I made my statement. “I have made a living describing things in writing based on my observations. Until now I have never been at a loss for words, what I have now is great difficulty understanding what is going on with me. I can’t even explain all of this to my wife and you know how we are as a couple.”