Blinking her eyes open, Kate takes a minute. She touches the indentation in her forehead, sliding her finger back and forth over it; it’s something she’s had her whole life and wondered why. How many times in her life has she run her middle finger over the dent?
Could this be where the bullet entered? Kate wonders, and considers it could also account for the bad memory she’s had her entire life. She also considers memories of events of long ago, ones that crop up from time to time, usually when she is in bed waiting for sleep. Kate wonders if they were real events or dreams that morphed into memories. After all, memory is a perplexing thing, she muses; it corresponds to true events but not a carbon copy.
She rubs her forearms, sliding her palms backwards and forwards over her wrists. The thought of someone pressing their thumbs into her wrists leaves her squeamish; her revulsion she now comprehends is caused by the torture she received by the German soldiers, stringing her up by her wrists with spiked handcuffs.
◊.◊.◊
She thinks about her imaginary friends of so long ago, and immediately recognises their faces. Adelheid, Tarquin, and Lord G. She knew they were real.
◊.◊.◊
Kate knows Jacques was her last step through the invisible door; she feels saddened that she is unlikely to hear again from Gaius. Yet the heady sensation returns, and the feeling of being beckoned. Kate closes her eyes once again, breathing in deeply. The guttural, resonating Russian Italian-accented voice of Gaius returns once more.
‘Your conjecture is correct. Since your body carries biological memory of the entirety of your lives, wounds that have led to your physical demise in one life may manifest in another as birthmarks or physical impairments such as missing limbs. The damaged cells are part of your psychic heritage, you see. And of course, your aversion at having your wrists touched is embedded in your psychic memory.
‘Before I bid you farewell, I would like to add that upon your physical demise, there will be a period of self-examination when an account of all your reincarnations will be shown to you. You will meet your higher self and other identities of your higher self who are more advanced than that of your immediate past life. You will also meet other identities with whom you have had emotional bonds in past lives and with whom you will have emotional bonds in your future lives.
‘The traditional belief that the only two certainties in life are death and taxes is a misbelief. Your unconscious higher self knows that it lives past the grave, and that your consciousness will never die.
‘You, and I, are immortal.’
◊.◊.◊
Silence. After a period of time, Kate accepts Gaius has gone for good.
◊.◊.◊
She considers the hardships of her previous lives: Fabius’s militaristic life as a Roman soldier in the early-fifth century; the emotional and physical abuse she endured as native American Sings From Trees in the eighth century; a barbaric Viking lifetime as Eirik in the tenth century; the sexual abuse and horrific death she suffered as Irish priestess Lilith in the twelfth century; the discrimination of slavery she experienced as half-Portuguese girl Eshe in the late-fifteenth century; the extreme hunger she endured as a young Héloïse in seventeenth-century France; the suffering and harrowing death as Lachlan in eighteenth-century Scotland; the family trauma in Lucía’s Italian lifetime in the nineteenth century; and wartime injustices she encountered in the French Resistance in her last past life as Jacques.
Kate cannot ignore the sinkhole that has opened in her stomach. All those lives; their hideous endings. The anarchy. She hurts for Lachlan and Lilith who suffered the most. A heaviness, a dead weight of depression, seizes her.
As though her mood has triggered it, something terrifying happens. She begins to perceive her lives’ insufferable deaths. She begins to physically relive them. Her stomach lurches; Kate tastes the bile in her throat before swallowing hard. After swinging her feet to the floor, she sits up and clutches the edge of the couch, willing the sensations to stop. Instead, and alarmingly, they worsen.
Kate feels the slicing open of Fabius’s throat, the blade slashing through his windpipe, the action drawn out as though it is on repeat, an overlapping of motion. She can barely breathe. She clutches her throat with both hands as she gasps for air, convinced she is going to die. Minutes pass before the harrowing episode subsides. Soon after a brief pause, she feels the burn of a sword as it slices deep into her back in her life as Eirik — the withdrawal and the hacking as it plunges into her body time and time again; the searing hot pain as the sword is finally driven through her heart. Doubled over in agony, the pain is such that Kate is so stricken she cannot scream. When the agonising death of Eirik wanes, without hesitation, the death of Lilith begins. There is no respite. Kate feels the torturous pain of being burnt at the stake in its entirety. She shakes her feet as she desperately tries to shake off the fiery sensation. Next, she endures the fire travelling up her body as it melts her skin and broils her insides. In the grip of such suffering, Kate becomes hysterical as she writhes on the couch and tries to get away from her hellish ordeal. She longs to black out. It is not to be. The caustic pain of her nerve-endings almost drives her insane.
As the anguish of Lilith’s death finally abates, she knows the worst is yet to come — the death of Lachlan.
The onset of Lachlan’s death begins with the tightening of a noose around her neck. Kate gasps for air. The blockage of blood flow causes a fierce throb inside her head. She feels the rupture of blood vessels in her face; the burning sensation that makes her face feel as though it’s on fire. Though it doesn’t happen physically, Kate feels her eyes pop from the pressure. Seconds later, she feels the sting of the knifepoint as it makes a shallow cut across her breastbone; then the vicious sweep of an invisible blade as it slices her open. Kate utters a strangled scream when she feels hands plunge into her abdomen and disembowel her. She smells the pungent stink of her burning entrails as they drop into the fire, as at Lachlan’s execution. Kate vomits on her feet as she is subjected to the executioner’s invisible hands burrowing under her ribcage and ripping out her heart — the agonising, excruciating pain — lasting, lasting, everlasting.
As her death as Lachlan eventually subsides, Kate is overwhelmed with gratitude, and she begins to breathe easier. Albeit prematurely. Ten seconds pass before she is pitched backwards when a bullet blows apart her brains — the death of Jacques. Although it was a sudden assault, and one that left her dazed and disoriented, Kate is grateful it was the one ghastly death during which she suffered the least.
The pain and suffering ends. She slumps on the couch and closes her eyes. Inside the clammy warm stew of her clothes, she inhales deeply and slowly to slow down her rapidly pounding heart. Kate is particularly grateful she didn’t reexperience Jacques’s torture when they strung him up by his wrists with spiked handcuffs. In an unconscious motion, she tucks in her arms across her stomach.
Minutes later, she soaks her emotionally-shattered self in the bath. The wild-winter weather outside is generating a lovely cosiness inside. Weakened, she closes her eyes, luxuriating in the comfort.
Kate remains in the bath at length, turning on the hot-water tap with her foot every few minutes. She senses a change occurring and snaps open her eyes. Astonished, Kate finds herself disconnected from her body. Her view of herself in the bath is through another’s eyes. She soon comprehends that her consciousness is in spiritual form and wonders if she is dead.
Kate sees a light, a brilliant, pulsing, living light that is exquisitely ethereal. Its magnetic pull draws her in and she merges with a vibrating world of energy. She indulges in a realm of peace and happiness and pure, divine love. Kate grasps that it is a spiritual evolution. Her spiritual evolution.
She discerns that this is where we go when we die.
Subsequently, Kate hears a whooshing sound and with it comes an awareness of being sucked into a vacuum as she returns to her body. She tries to will herself to stay. She doesn’t, and this depresses her. She wanted to stay in her nirvana forever. After the ordeal of reliving her shocking deaths, Kate doesn’t want to ever go through another one.
With the bathwater still moderately hot, dispirited, Kate stays in the bath and mulls everything over. Then she begins to observe something very peculiar. Her stomach begins to quiver and vibrate. The vibrations accelerate and intensify. She stares at her abdomen in astonishment as her vision allows her to see billions of molecules whizzing about at a tremendous speed. The sensation intensifies and Kate discerns that it is evolving into something else. Something … sexual.
Kate cries out in ecstasy as she experiences the most intense orgasm — an ongoing, pulsing, everlasting orgasm, which after many delicious and delirious minutes, leaves her body jelly-like.
‘Wow,’ she sighs, completely exhausted. ‘What was that?’
◊.◊.◊
Perhaps it is Gaius she hears again, though the voice seems to stem from within her. From wherever it originates, Kate senses it is the naked truth.
Oh, the irony, she thinks, amused, given the setting.
◊.◊.◊
‘There was a purpose to your suffering. You needed to relive the wretchedness of your former lives’ brutal deaths to appreciate life’s greatest reward — love in all of its vitality and glorious manifestations.
‘The cosmic consciousness is an awareness of the life — its natural molecular structure, its vibrations — in every living thing, whether it be animal, human or plant. The cosmic consciousness within you can lead you to perceive whatever you wish and however joyous you wish to feel.
‘It behoves you to channel your cosmic consciousness in a felicitous manner. When you apply yourself accordingly, it will allow you to be in love with all of life — in love with all of life’s wondrous gifts. If applied justly, the cosmic consciousness within you will grant you the most powerful and exhilarating perception, emotional and physical. But if you attempt to delude and exploit others, you are fooling yourself because your cosmic consciousness will see to it that you will be unable to channel at all.
‘It was believed that as long as we follow the scriptures, we will be rewarded in Heaven. It is merely one’s own prejudices and convictions that thwart one’s true happiness. Likewise, it is one’s own cosmic consciousness that can grant true happiness.’
◊.◊.◊
A long silence. Alone again and wrapped in her bathrobe, Kate delicately returns to the couch and tries to come to terms with everything. She perceives the realisation that she cannot know the highs without experiencing the lows. Likewise, I cannot know the lows without experiencing the highs, she muses.
◊.◊.◊
Hours pass. Absent-minded, she watches a small black fly flying in tight circles in the middle of the lounge — round and round. It is incredibly annoying. As she thinks about her experiences, Kate is utterly grateful to be living in the twenty-first century where law and order largely guarantee a life without fear of being burnt alive or viciously slaughtered.
She feels gratitude to Gaius who has gifted her a priceless legacy; a legacy of knowledge that she wants to share with every man, woman and child, from the drooling drunk to the queen of England. What’s more, he has made her feel special because he chose her to connect with instead of someone well known, such as a famous clairvoyant.
◊.◊.◊
Kate ponders on her lives. Apart from the two that afforded her comfort, none fall under the happily ever after romantic fairy-tale category and neither did she enjoy any significant wealth in any of them.
She reflects that in most of them there were battles and wars and she considers that not a great deal has changed. Kate wonders when leaders of the world will be mature enough to stop inciting war.
◊.◊.◊
Her eyes widen. She is consumed by an epiphany. ‘That’s it!’
Her ginger tom’s yellowy-green gaze blinks at her. Unbothered, the cat returns to its position, resembling a round-orange, faux-fur cushion that has been carelessly left on the mat to fade in the sun.
Kate discerns that she chose the lives of Lachlan and Lilith before she was born into them — before her soul had entered them. She chose the lives of Lachlan and Lilith because she now understands that severe hardship expedites the spiritual growth of one’s soul. If her lives were of a wealthy, stress-free nature; of shallow and meaningless behaviour, her higher self would not have evolved to what it is today. And to what she has just experienced.
Kate understands that the terrible treatment she experienced during those lives was planned by her.
◊.◊.◊
Her walks through space and time have confirmed that upon her physical death, her consciousness will live on — an expanded consciousness, no less — and when she has completed her reincarnation cycles, when her higher self is far more advanced than it was before, she will carry on living in other spheres of existence, in various levels of consciousness, progressing to higher planes, to higher energies, until she reaches the highest energy of all and merges with the all-powerful, psychic primary-energy gestalt.
God.
◊.◊.◊
Kate’s fear of death has gone. Furthermore, it is something she will welcome when the time comes — when she returns to her spiritual self, and the next phase of reality begins.
