Der Schädelring: Thriller (German Edition)

said. “You want to become whole, don’t you?”
    “Yes,” Julia said, reciting the mantra Dr. Forrest had given her. “The whole Julia Stone.”
    "Where shall we start?" the therapist asked, sitting across from her.
    Julia wondered if she should mention her imagining of Dr. Forrest on the high throne of heaven and decided sharing such a thing would be as disturbing as having had a lesbian fantasy about the older woman. Both were silly when laid on the harsh examining table of daylight, since Julia was heterosexual and secular. As far as she knew. "Maybe I should tell you about my dream."
    "Ah. Did you bring your journal?"
    Julia fished the notebook out of her purse. Dr. Forrest perused the recent entries and looked up with excited eyes. "I think we're onto something here. Are you willing to face it now?"
    "Whatever you think is best."
    "Okay. I'm going to hypnotize you, and this time, we're going to go all the way."
    Julia's breath caught. "All the way?"
    "Let's find out what happened to little Julia Stone. I think I know, but what's important is that you know."
    Julia dug her fingers into the arm of the chair, but listened as Dr. Forrest gave the relaxation instructions and then began counting down slowly from ten, leading Julia more deeply beneath the surface of the world like Persephone making her annual descent into Hades. Her eyes were open, and she could still recognize her thoughts as her own, but she floated on a soft, insistent current. She was carried through the shadowed past, twenty-three years back.
    "The hooded man is standing over you," came Dr. Forrest's voice, as if from behind a wall of water. "The man with the skull ring."
    "Help me," Julia said, scared, her hands tight in the knotted rope, the stone hard beneath her bare back.
    "The bad people are around you, Julia. They're chanting, belladonna and incense are burning in the crucibles. At the end of the stone is an inverted cross, a decapitated goat's head speared on its tip. Its eyes are open and black, and flies circle the rotting flesh."
    Julia squirmed in her chair. She couldn't remember giving Dr. Forrest all those details. But Dr. Forrest had taken her deeply into her subconscious, had mapped and mined it, perhaps knew the territory more intimately than Julia herself did.
    And Julia was so forgetful, wasn’t she?
    "What's the hooded man doing, Julia?"
    "He—he's putting his hand inside his robe. He pulls out—"
    "A knife. He pulls out a long sharp knife, doesn't he, Julia?"
    She nodded, a lump in her throat, sweating even in the chill of the imagined night air.
    "What happens next?"
    "He . . . he's raising the knife. He shouts something."
    "You remember, don't you? Tell me what he says."
    "He says 'Lord Master Satan, we offer you this blood in your sacred name, that you may smile upon . . . that you may smile upon—"
    "You recognize the voice, don't you, Julia?"
    Julia moaned, writhing on the granite slab under the bright eye of the moon.
    "Whose voice is it, Julia?"
    Julia whispered, her mouth dry.
    "Tell me, Julia. Who did this to you? Who is to blame for all your fear and pain and sorrow?"
    Julia looked up at the man whose hood had fallen back, his face revealed. She struggled to sit up against invisible bonds.
    The name tore itself from her lips. "Daddy."
    And the response, drifting from the corners of the world and the cracks in her mind, insinuated in a whisper:
    Jooolia . . . .

 
     
    CHAPTER EIGHT
     
    Julia ripped free of the dream altar, broke the hypnotic trance.
    Dr. Forrest held her as she cried.
    "You're not alone, Julia," the therapist repeated over and over.
    Julia wept herself dry, trying to forget the face beneath the hood, the man who held the knife, the man who had given his daughter to the bad people.
    "It's always hard to accept a truth that's so awful, but it's the only way to let the healing begin," said Dr. Forrest. She opened the blinds and let light spill into the room, and then sat across from Julia in her usual chair.
    "Daddy," Julia whispered to herself, blinking against the harsh glare of reality. She shook her head. "No. He couldn't have done that. He loved me."
    She could remember his arms around her, hugging her, dressing her, holding her hand and walking her through the park. Taking her to the Pink Palace outside Memphis, showing her all the strange animals that stood stiff and still in the museum's glass cases. She remembered his smiles, his blue eyes as warm as August sky, the way his stubble