Echoes from My Past Lives (Spell Weaver) Read online

  Of course, I could have, uh, what’s the term for it? Split personality—no, there’s a newer term for it. Dissociative identity disorder, or something like that. Great! How many psychological problems could one person have all at once?

  Taliesin seemed uncertain of how to respond to me—and I could tell from his general manner that he was not accustomed to being at a loss for words.

  Stop thinking about him as if he were a real person!

  “I know it is a lot to grasp,” he said finally, seeming to weigh each word. “I also know you can do it.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been doing so well I’m in a hospital. Next I’ll be in a mental hospital.”

  “Stop it!” snapped Taliesin. Despite myself, I backed away a little. He immediately calmed down. “I’m sorry. I know this is very, very hard for you.”

  “Hard?” I almost yelled. “Hard doesn’t come close.”

  “Listen to me!” he said quietly but with an intensity that made me pay attention. “We haven’t much time. I know you understand the idea of reincarnation.”

  “How could you possibly know that?” It was true, of course—we had studied major world religions a little bit in school—but he could not possibly know…could he?

  “I know many things,” Taliesin replied quickly. “Actually, I can know everything you know if I concentrate hard enough.”

  “You can read my mind?” Given everything else that was wrong, I had no idea why that bothered me so much, but it did. Having my mind shattered into tiny pieces was bad, but having someone rummaging around in it was worse.

  “Not in the way that you mean it. I can know what you are thinking not because I can read your mind, but because I am part of your mind. I wish you would stay calm long enough to let me explain. I cannot convey in mere words how important it is that you understand and accept what I have to say.”

  “What’s so urgent?” I said, barely holding back my anger. Yeah, I was angry with him, feeling that he must be responsible in some way for what was happening to me. But I was also angry at myself for getting drawn into this dialog with someone I knew couldn’t be real. I was also frustrated, and tired, so tired, and so very ready for my life to be normal again. But what if, what if it never became normal again? What if this craziness was my new normal?

  Abruptly the ground beneath me lurched so violently that I nearly fell. Taliesin looked around worriedly.

  “Tal, we have less time than I thought. I want you to concentrate on staying with me, whatever happens. If we get separated, it may be difficult for me to find my way to you again.”

  Another lurch, this one strong enough to send me sprawling on the ground. Hallucination or not, the impact jarred me just as if it had been physical. As I pulled myself up, I notice that the bright green grass at the far end of the meadow had suddenly gone angry, skinned-knee red. The color seemed to pulse like a heartbeat, to bleed into the surrounding grass, to spread like an infection, turning more and more of the meadow red, flowing quickly in our direction. The ground had also begun to bulge in places, as if something would explode upward from it at any moment. I knew this was a hallucination—it had to be. Still, something about the throbbing redness made me afraid. Despite myself, I backed in the general direction of Taliesin.

  When I glanced back at him, he too was focused on the decaying landscape. He looked as if he wanted to draw his sword, but instead he began to strum his instrument. Then he began to sing calming lyrics in a strong tenor voice. At least, the tone of the lyrics was somehow calming, but I could not understand the language.

  I looked back at the redness. For a moment it continued to flow forward, but then it shuddered to a stop. It continued to throb, however, and the throbbing picked up speed.

  Then Taliesin stopped singing for just a moment, looked at me, and barked, “Help me!” with such intensity that for a second I wanted to cry. He wasn’t trying to be frightening, of course, but he scared me anyway.

  “Help you how?” I asked in a tone that sound just a little whiny, even to me.

  “Sing!” commanded Taliesin in a voice that sounded as I imagined King Arthur would have sounded.

  “But I don’t…”

  “Yes, you do. Sing, damn it!” I didn’t need to look to know that the redness had surged toward us again.

  “What do I…”

  “Sing anything! Just focus on keeping the redness back.” Then Taliesin began to sing again himself. I looked down at the ground and saw that the redness was flaming bloodily only about two feet away. It stopped again when Taliesin started singing, but as before, he did not seem to be able to push it back, only to keep it where it was.

  You may remember that I was a musician…but I never said I was a particularly good one. Actually, I was the lead singer in a band, but our audience was typically the walls of a garage, and I kinda wanted to keep it that way. Still, the audience now was the inside of my head, so what did I really have to lose?

  I glanced over at Taliesin again. His eyes had a feverish intensity to them, and sweat glistened on his forehead. Whatever he was doing was clearly straining him. I know this will sound crazy, but looking at him gave me a feeling of urgency.

  But what should I sing? He had said I could sing anything, but I couldn’t think of a single song that didn’t seem ridiculous in this situation. Then Taliesin looked over at me, not commandingly but almost pleadingly.

  Oh, what the hell?

  So I started singing Jesse McCartney’s “Leavin’,” I suppose mostly because what I wanted to do more than anything else was leave. I was singing it a little higher than it was written, and my voice cracked more than usual, but I did sound a little like a singer. Just a little. I’m sure Jesse would have begged to differ.

  Then the oddest thing happened. Taliesin and I were singing different songs, with very different melodies, in different languages. The combination should have sounded awful, even if I had been a real singer, but somehow it didn’t. Maybe I was even crazier than I thought, but I could hear the two sounds merging somehow, producing something different from either one. The redness could sense the difference too. It shuddered and actually receded just a little.

  It took what seemed like an hour to wipe out the angry red and restore the original vibrant green of the grass. By that time I felt as tired as Taliesin looked, but I also felt strangely good. Yeah, I know—the more weird things I saw, the more I felt as if I really were crazy, and yet there was something satisfying about helping Taliesin, even if the whole thing was happening in my head.

  What is it people say about questioning your sanity proving you are sane? Was I actually beginning to think I was sane, and did that mean the craziness had finally gotten me? Would I ever see my parents again? Stan? Eva? And, more frighteningly, what if I saw them and didn’t know who they were? Or what if I knew who they were but said or did things that convinced them I was hopelessly and completely nuts?

  I jumped a little when Taliesin patted me on the shoulder. “Good job, lad! For a moment I wasn’t sure you were going to help me.”

  “For a moment neither was I.”

  Taliesin smiled just a little. “Nonetheless, you did, and that’s what matters. Well, that and the fact that you really aren’t ‘nuts.’”

  The good feeling faded quickly. “I don’t like you getting in my head like that.”

  Taliesin actually laughed, not a belly laugh but at least a cheerful one. Then he gestured at the scenery around us.

  “Given where we are, Tal, how can I really avoid ‘getting in your head’?”

  Well, he had me there.

  “What was that…that red thing?” I asked, wanting to change the subject as much as I really wanted an answer to the question.

  Taliesin sighed. “I fear the answer will not be any more to your liking than anything else I have said. Do you promise to hear me out this time? No interruptions, no shouting, no denial.”

  “All right,” I said reluctantly. I hated to buy further into whatever delusional
fantasy my brain had cooked up, but denying what I was experiencing did not make it any less real. I had found that out the hard way the first time I had felt someone’s death.

  Taliesin looked around. “To give us a place to talk, I have been pulling this image out of my memory and…projecting it to you, but it is so elaborate it is rather taxing to maintain for such a long period. Would you mind if we switched to a little more confined environment? It would be easier for me to keep a smaller scale illusion going.”

  Aside from the fact that I had seen the landscape almost disintegrate earlier, I had to admit that it did seem real. When I had fallen earlier, I had seen every blade of grass, had felt grass beneath my hands. I could feel the warm breeze against my skin. I could see the sunlight sparkle on the water of the rippling surface of the lake and on the more distant snowy mountain peaks. If the circumstances had been different, I would have accepted it all as real without question. To think that Taliesin was somehow conjuring the whole scene up would have been truly impressive—if Taliesin had been real.

  “Sure,” I said in a neutral tone, “give yourself a rest.”

  The great outdoors dissolved, replaced by what was obviously a room in a castle. At least, the stone walls around us and the heavy oak door certainly looked like my idea of a castle. There was a small window, so I walked up and looked out of it. Yeah, definitely a castle. Looking down I could see the stone walls and realized that we were several levels up from the ground. A moat glistened darkly at ground level. Looking up I could see a great distance across villages, fields, and forests. This time, though, the detail work on these distant views was not quite as good. They had a fuzzy quality, almost as if I were viewing them through a mist. Taliesin must have been getting tired.

  “I thought it was best to conserve my strength,” said Taliesin, doubtless reading my mind again. “Please have a seat.”

  There was a very large table with not particularly comfortable looking wooden chairs around it. I pulled one out and plopped down in it. Taliesin sat on the other side after taking off his sword and putting down his instrument. Looking around the room, it seemed simple for one in a castle. Aside from the table, there was a not very comfortable looking bed, some shelving, a mirror, a basin, a few other instruments, quite a few scrolls and books, some yellowed with age. On the whole, I would have expected more from a room in a castle, especially one so far up.

  “I always did prefer a simple life,” said Taliesin, answering my unspoken question. “Oh, I indulged from time to time, but I spent most of my time at Camelot in relatively simple surroundings.”

  “This is Camelot?” I asked with less excitement than I felt. I wasn’t really one to read for pleasure, but some of the King Arthur stories had appealed to me when I was a kid.

  “Yes, I have drawn on my memory of my room at Camelot. Of course, if you would rather, I can always ‘read your mind,’ as you say, and we can be in your home. I would have done that in the first place, but I was afraid I might…‘freak you out.’” The idea of Taliesin and I chatting in my bedroom at home might have freaked me out just a few days ago, but now the image was just another crazy deviation from real life, so why freak out over it?

  “This is fine,” I said, squirming a little as I tried to find a comfortable position on the very hard chair. If only Taliesin had had chair cushions back in Camelot.

  Abruptly cushions appeared beneath me and at my back. I jumped a little in surprise.

  “This room is based on one of the rooms I had at Camelot, but that doesn’t mean I can’t make a few…modifications, if they make you more comfortable.”

  “Thanks,” I said, settling back into the chair, which was now much easier to do. “Now, can you please tell me about what happened earlier?”

  “Patience, Tal. There is a little background knowledge I need to give you first.”

  Great! I might as well be in school!

  “I’ll try to be a little more interesting than that,” replied Taliesin with a chuckle. My cheeks reddened a little, but he pretended not to notice.

  “As I started to say long ago, you are familiar with the concept of reincarnation. However, you think of it in connection with religions of the east. In fact, the ancient Celts also believed in a type of reincarnation. They believed that souls came back, not anywhere, but within their own family, or tribe, or at least nation. Our recent experiences convince me that this ancient belief is correct. I know you don’t want to hear this, but I am both your ancestor and yourself.”

  I started to protest, but he glared at me before I could. “You promised to hear me out this time.”

  “Sorry,” I muttered, settling back into the chair.

  “The immediate problem—our problem—is that people aren’t meant to remember their past lives in such detail. Oh, maybe a feeling of what you would call deja vu, maybe an odd reaction to something most people would dismiss without a thought, hopefully some occasional bit of wisdom learned in a previous life. Yes, any of those can happen and have happened thousands and thousands of times. But has anyone had the same ability you seem to have to remember every past life in full detail? Not that I know of. What has happened to you is unique.”

  “But why has it happened?” I asked, sounding whiny again despite myself. “Let’s say I believe you. Why me? Why do I have to go through all of this?” I leaned forward in the chair. “Taliesin, I used to have a life that made sense. Now I am in a hospital, everyone thinks I’m crazy, and frequently I have so much pain I can’t keep myself from screaming. What did I do wrong?”

  “Tal, none of this is your fault, and no, I don’t know why this happened to you in particular. Your memories don’t suggest that magic is very common in the world anymore, but I have to think some kind of dark magic is involved one way or another. Right now, though, our most pressing concern is not why it happened, but how to keep it from destroying you. Would you not agree?” I nodded. Did Taliesin see a way to solve this problem?

  “Stop thinking of him as real!” demanded some part of me.

  “Screw you!” I shot back abruptly. “If he doesn’t exist, I’m not losing anything by listening. If he does, if he really is me from a former life, then maybe he can fix this.” As soon as the thought crossed my mind, I realized I wanted it to be true. Why had I been fighting him so hard? Did I want to be crazy? No! So why not at least check out other alternatives?

  “I’m not experiencing your past memories, though, am I? I get little bits and pieces, but none of them seem to be connected with Camelot or anything like that.”

  “No, my memories are not the problem. Remember, I said you are remembering your past selves.” Well, I had missed that the first time, perhaps because I wanted to.

  “You have lived other lives,” he continued, “not just mine. Many of them. I can’t count very easily, but I would say hundreds. It was the work of some of those lives you saw earlier in that redness. Their raging makes it hard even for me to sustain a coherent environment.”

  “Hundreds?” I asked, much more shakily than I had intended. Taliesin nodded solemnly. Clearly, he was not much happier about the situation than I was.

  “You mean I have…hundreds of other people…in my brain?” The voice was still shaky, but I couldn’t help it.

  “No, not exactly. This is not like possession by demons, or something like that. You don’t really have hundreds of other souls inside of you. What you have is the memories of all of your past lives.”

  “But you aren’t just a memory! We are sitting here,” I said, with a sweeping arm movement, “wherever here is, having a conversation.”

  “And that, Tal, is the problem.” Taliesin leaned forward, and his voice became quieter, as if he feared someone else overhearing. “It is unusual enough that you can remember all of your past lives in the first place, but you aren’t even just remembering them, as you would with your own memories. You are re-experiencing them, and in a very random way, as far as I can tell. What I believe is happening is that, when
the memories of those lives were re-awakened within you, they somehow shattered the barrier between memory and reality in your own mind. Unable to understand the relationship between the memories of your earlier lives and the memories and experiences of your current one, your mind has created a separate consciousness for each of those lives. Nourished by their old memories, the various consciousnesses thus created behave much as their originals would have, except that many of them are in some kind of shock, either reliving their deaths over and over, as you have noticed, or crazed by the unfamiliarity of their surroundings.”

  Great! So I really do have multiple personality disorder!

  Taliesin shook his head at that. “This is no…psychological problem, as such things are defined in your world. It is more like otherworldly, or you would say, ‘supernatural.’ However, that might actually be good news.”

  “How so?” I asked. Whether the mess in my head was natural or supernatural didn’t seem to make much difference. Either way, it was still a mess.

  “Ah, but not an irreparable ‘mess.’”

  “I really wish you would stop doing that!”

  “It is precisely because I can do it that I know I can make the situation better,” said Taliesin patiently. “I have already told you that your previous selves are creations of your own mind, not truly separate beings. If they had somehow become separate, I can’t think of a way to force them back together. Fortunately, there must still be some ties, however frayed. How else can I know your thoughts? For that matter, how can I speak modern English? You have noticed I have to struggle for words a little, but for the most part I do pretty well, considering I did not speak the language in my own lifetime. I suspect you could read my thoughts and speak my language if you would let yourself. Even as things are now, you have picked up a word or two, and a little poetry, have you not?” I stiffened a little at that. During the last few days I had occasionally had odd moments of recognizing words I didn’t remember knowing, and once I had absent-mindedly scribbled a few lines of poetry onto a napkin. Faced with such overwhelming problems, I had easily forgotten those little moments, but now that Taliesin mentioned them, I had to admit he was right.