Greg Smith: Portrait of the Heart-ch1

"It's warm here. Gray. Feels like late spring, just before summer. The wind smells of ocean and wood smoke. And there are puddles from a recent rain, looking like broken pieces of the dull gray sky scattered over the ground."

Rachel Abernathy slowly nodded her head. She swept cascading waves of naturally curly blonde hair from one prominant cheekbone with a short sharp motion of her head, and then she began idly to pick at a right hand fingernail with a left hand fingernail. She caught herself doing it, stopped, and spread her hands onto the carved mahogany arms of Miriam's favorite chair.

"Oh, this place is old. Cobblestone streets. Hitching posts. Wooden steps here and there. Buildings all of stone and wood. And I see faces in the windows. Hmm---that's strange---people turn away from me when I look at them. I'm going farther now. I'm feeling kind of nervous, but I don't know why."

Rachel's heartbeat accelerated until she could feel each strong pulse in her temples. Her eyelids pressed more tightly together, and her hands gripped the chair arms as if she were waiting for a jolt of electric current to hit her.

"There is a pillory in the center of the town square. A man is there, held by the neck and wrists. He is---oh, my---people are throwing things. Jeering. Laughing. I feel badly for him, but I don't dare try to---"

Rachel remained silent for a moment. The extravagant contours of her lips unconsciously half-pouted. Her eyes, obediently closed since the beginning of this past-life regression session, now blinked open and stared without focus into the middle-distance of the densely furnished, nick-knack infested living room of her friend---as if to give her mind another way to see---and then they drifted shut again.

She was confused. So far, her will alone had been sufficient to move her within this place, but now something seemed to pull her in one distinct direction. She tried to resist that force and her motion slowed. As if in response, the force grew stronger. Her disembodied awareness had no choice but to follow it.

"What do you see now?" Miriam's voice was the same honey-smooth contralto as always, but there was a slight edge to it now, conveying enough of a sense of urgency that Rachel responded, categorizing her thoughts and forcing her mind to attach vocabulary to the experience.

"I'm moving. Faster now. I don't know where I'm going. It's someplace I must go. That's all I know."

Rachel's head turned slightly, first left then right. "I don't know. I can't---there's danger. I must---"

Rachel's head tilted forward toward her lap. Curls of hair fell forward, tickling the arched curves of her cheeks. Deep within her mind, she knew she was safe in the candlelight and the after-dinner aromas of Chinese mussels and cracked crab, here in Miriam's comfortable living room. But the tiny teeth of her fear continued to gnaw at the edges of her thoughts. Rachel fought free of them, refusing to be thwarted in her mission for truth. She focused her mind's-eye and nodded in satisfaction.

"Why?" Miriam waited for a reply. She sighed, shifted her weight, and asked again. "Why?" Miriam's pencil began to tap nervously against the spiral notepad on her lap. "Stay in contact with me, Rachel; keep talking. Keep looking for things that you can recognize---things you can remember from the dream. Tell me what you see. Tell me now."

Rachel's brow narrowed in concentration. "It's as if I'm flying. Away from the town. Into the forest beyond. I know my way. I know it well. I've been here many times. Yet this time is different." She swallowed and then coughed; her throat was dry. "This time I'm afraid."

"I don't know---wait---I'm hiding, or running away---oh---there's someone after me---oh, God. Hunting me. I don't know why, but I can't let him find me! I must get away!"

"Rachel! Move on! No one can hurt you. You are in complete control of this process. You can reenter your true time and place whenever you choose. You have full---"

Rachel was suspended between one world and the next. She could feel memories. Pleasant, exciting memories of love, of hard work well done, and of the joy of faith in God. But there was no way to enjoy them, with the urgent feelings of doom that ran up her heels to snap their jaws in her face.

Rachel sensed the tension that Miriam's sigh conveyed. Miriam believed there was no real danger in procedures of this kind, and she had convinced Rachel of that---but now that they were so deeply into the event, so close to finding the answers to the questions that plagued Rachel for so long, Rachel could understand the growing sense of apprehension that seemed to lay upon the air between them.

Rachel didn't answer. She followed her dizzy course, as a crow or a raven might fly, to its destination. A structure slowly rose from the trees, becoming more distinct as she neared it, and when the round stone turret and fortified walls of the place came fully into view, Rachel's heart leaped up to block the breath in her throat.

So many things happened in the next instant that Rachel could scarcely register them all; images fluttered around her like leaves in a storm---

---a face, dark, seeming to be no more than a pair of eyes that stared coldly from a course cloth cowl.

Rachel knew this place well. It was part of her recurring dream. And in the dream this room was never empty.

Then the room swirled away and another face swam near. Rachel gasped and gripped the arms of the chair until her knuckles cracked. She couldn't breathe.

The perfect symmetry of his features held the softness and playfulness of a young boy. But the bold set of his jaw and the strong lines of his brow and cheekbones denied that playfulness, and his eyes spoke of a determination and a depth of passion that no boy had ever known.

He was handsome in the extreme, a timeless statement of perfect proportion and balance of features that would have pleased Da Vinci as well as Maplethorpe.

But it was not his beauty that struck Rachel like a baseball bat; it was something else entirely. The image of his face was attended by a lightning-bolt of memory. Rachel knew it immediately and undeniably, with a knowing that reached to the deepest marrow of her bones: this man's face was the key to her mystery.

There was love in his eyes, a love that she had never dreamed could be---a fierce love, of the kind that capture's a man's heart, and then ignores that captive's pleas for mercy---an implacable love, as strong and irresistible as the tides that drag the seas around the world.

To find this one proof that such a love had ever existed was like finding a holy relic that gave the proof of Heaven; Rachel wasn't sure that she could stand to look into those beautiful blue eyes for long. There was too much love in them for her to see without leaning toward them, as if a love that strong generated its own inescapable gravity.

And fear was there, coiled in the corners of his eyes like quiet serpents---the fear that watches and waits whenever a love so commanding rules the soul. And loss was there, and sorrow, and hope, and enduring passion.

Those emotions, like towering waves from each quarter of the sky, crashed together, and Rachel was helpless in the center of them. Her lungs locked. Her arms outstretched. Time held its breath. Rachel stared at those beautiful eyes, and her soul recognized them immediately.

She felt so alive in that moment---more vitally alive than she had ever felt before. But it was also terrifying in its intensity. And she could almost hear a voice that insisted she go back. Away. Now. Before those feelings trapped her and crushed her.

The wooden frame of Miriam's couch creaked as the woman stood. The parquet floorboards groaned beneath her weight as she neared Rachel's side. Then the older woman clapped her hands.

In a strangely detached way, Rachel was amazed to be simultaneously aware of her dream of the past and of the circumstances of the moment. Tangled in feelings that stunned her, awash in confusion and fear, Miriam's voice became a beacon, and Rachel followed it. The vertiginous waves of emotion began to recede and eventually left her beached upon the shores of her own identity once more.

Yet, regardless of whatever she hoped to catch in the net she cast into her past, precious few images clung to it now: There were faces there. One old and wise. One dark and ominous. And the deliciously handsome face of the Blue-Eyed Man, shining with love.

Behind them, a structure stood in somber light: the Manor House. Its corroded edges etched sharp shadows on the barren ground around it. The image radiated from her mind, and with it came a fear that chased her courage to cringe in a corner of her mind.

She tried to hold back a scream, but her lungs snatched enough air to carry it and threw it across the room before she could stop it.

She told herself this fear wasn't necessary. Nothing was really happening here. This was only a dream---an hypnosis-assisted journey to find the key to penetrate the mystery of her recurring nightmares.

But Rachel screamed again at the mental image of the old Manor House, though she couldn't begin to understand why.

Miriam clapped her hands again. This time Rachel's eyes snapped open and her lungs froze mid-scream. She inhaled a strong breath and straightened her spine against the upholstered back of Miriam's favorite chair.

Miriam's posture relaxed, and she smiled one of Rachel's favorite smiles. Miriam's face, a delightful study in shades of teakwood brown, was made for that wide smile. But a moment later the haunted look in Rachel's eyes drove that smile away.

Rachel's eyes rolled upward and stole a glimpse of Miriam's maternal scowl that was segmented by the curved bars of her lashes, and then her line of sight moved downward to her own hands. They were tangled in her lap like a bundle of twigs. She separated them and placed them on the thighs of her pale over-washed Levi's. She sighed, as much out of embarrassment as relief, and then she returned her gaze to Miriam's warm brown eyes.

"We didn't learn much, did we?" Rachel said, shrugging slightly to say that she was undaunted, though concerned that Miriam was disappointed in her.

"Honey, you gotta remember, you can't just bust down doors in the subconscious." Miriam reached back and winced as she turned toward her couch. "They take keys." Miriam released her large hand from the back of Rachel's chair and clamped it on the back of the couch. She took a step, and another. "And sometimes the locks get rusty." She smiled the half-smile that told Rachel to look beyond her words for a deeper meaning.

"I think you're right." Miriam gusted a breath as she lowered her body to the couch. The leather cushions sighed a long comfortable sigh.

Miriam glared in shock. Rachel's cheeks ran hot for a moment. She knew she was blushing, but she didn't care.

Rachel sighed, looked down at her legs, and bit the tip of her tongue behind her closed lips. She felt like a schoolgirl again, dizzy with the raptures of a new and pristine infatuation. She held the image of the Blue-Eyed Man before her and studied it, and the blush spread from her cheeks to her neck and upper arms.

"I don't know." She grinned an unconstrained excited grin that drew a chuckle from Miriam. "But I do know I'm going to find out."