“Where is this awful place you spoke of?” Carol persisted.
“The cellar.”
“What’s so awful about the cellar?”
Hatred seethed in the girl’s eyes. Her lips were peeled back from her teeth in a feral snarl.
“Laura? Answer me. What’s so awful about the cellar?”
The girl slapped her across the face.
The blow stunned Carol. It was sharp, painful, unexpected. For an instant she simply couldn’t believe that she actually had been hit.
Then the girl hit her again. Backhanded.
And again. Harder than before.
Carol grabbed her adversary’s slender wrists, but the girl wrenched loose. She kicked Carol in the shins, and when Carol cried out and sagged for an instant, the girl went for her throat. Carol fended her off, though not easily, and attempted to get up from the armchair. Jane pushed her down and fell on top of her. She felt the girl bite her shoulder, and suddenly her shock and confusion turned to fear. The chair tipped over, and they both rolled onto the floor, flailing.
The flat land through which they had been driving began to rise and form itself into gently rolling hills, but the mountains were still a long way off.
If there had been any change in the weather during the last half hour, it had been for the worse. Rain was falling harder than ever; the hard, fat pellets of water shattered like glass on the roadway, and the amorphous fragments bounced high. Paul kept the speedometer needle at eighty.
“Reincarnation,” he said thoughtfully. “Just a few minutes ago, I told you that I could believe anything today, but that’s wild. Reincarnation? Where in the devil did you come by this theory?”
As the windshield wipers continued to thump, and as the tires sang a shrill dirge on the rain-puddled pavement, Grace told him about the telephone calls from Leonard, the visit from the long-dead reporter, the prophetic dreams; she told him about the grim battle with Aristophanes. “I am Rachael Adams, Paul. That other life had been revealed to me so that I can stop this murderous cycle. Willa did not start the fire. I started it accidentally. There is no reason for the girl to seek revenge. It’s all a mistake, a dark misunderstanding. If I can talk to the girl, Jane, while she’s regressed to her Laura phase, I can persuade her of the truth. I know I can. I can stop all of this here, now, once and forever. Do you think I’m babbling? Senile? I don’t believe I am. In fact, I know I’m not. And I suspect you’ve had some strange experiences recently that confirm what I’m telling you.”
“You hit that one on the head, all right,” he told her.
Nevertheless, reincarnation—being born again in a new body—it was a stunning, soul-shaking thing to accept. There is no lasting death. Yes, that was much harder to accept than the existence of poltergeists.
“Do you know about Millicent Parker?” he asked her.
“Never heard the name,” Grace said.
The rain started falling even harder. He turned the windshield wipers up to their highest speed.
“In 1905,” he told Grace, “Millie Parker attempted to kill her mother—on the night before her sixteenth birthday. Like the Linda Bektermann case, the mother ended up killing Millie, instead of the other way around. Purely self-defense. And here’s what you might not realize: Under hypnosis, Jane claimed to be Laura, Millie, and then Linda Bektermann. But the names meant nothing to us.”
“And again, in the Millicent Parker case,” Grace said, “the girl’s desire for revenge was frustrated. Yes. I knew there must be another life between Laura and Linda.”
“But why this night-before-the-birthday thing that keeps cropping up?”
“Laura was looking forward to her sixteenth birthday with great eagerness,” Grace-Rachael said. “It was going to be the best day of her life, she said. She had all sorts of plans for it—and for how her life would be changed after she attained that magical age. I think, somehow, she felt her mother’s treatment of her would change once she was ‘grown up.’ But she died in the fire before her birthday.”
“And in life after life, as her sixteenth birthday approaches, the fear of her mother and the hatred of her mother wells up from her subconscious.”