Legacy Of Terror

Upstairs, a phonograph was playing classical music. For the first time, this seemed like a house where people lived, instead of a house where they died. She liked it all very much, and she felt that she belonged and was not an outsider.
    “In what way?” she asked.
    Gordon said, “He is tall and, I imagine, the women would say he is very handsome. He's maybe thirty-five or so, terribly young for a psychiatrist, at least in my estimation.”
    “Was he able to regress Celia under hypnosis, to take her back to the moment she was stabbed?”
    “No,” Gordon said. “But he came close. Let me tell you exactly how it was.”
    Celia had been sitting up in the hospital bed when Gordon was conducted into the room by Dr. Carter. She was pale, but as lovely as she had been before the incident. She seemed to have lost a little weight, but there was no other sign of her condition.
    “Can't she see me?” Gordon had asked.
    “She only sees me-and she only hears what I tell her to,” Carter had informed him. “Sit down over there. She does not even know you're here.”
    Dr. Carter walked to the side of the bed and stood by Celia. He touched her face with his fingers, but she hardly seemed to notice. He cupped her chin in his hand and raised her face so that she was looking directly into his eyes.
    “Hello, Celia,” he said.
    “Hello, Dr. Carter.”
    “How are you feeling?”
    “I don't feel,” she said.
    “How old are you?”
    “I am no age.”
    “No age at all?” he had insisted.
    “No age at all,” she said.
    Dr. Carter turned to Gordon then, smiling, and explained what he had done, through hypnosis. The first step in age regression was to get the patient used to floating about in time, to accepting a fluidity of age. By giving her no age at all, he could suggest, hypnotically, that she was now only twenty years old. Now nineteen. Now eighteen. And so on until she was a child. In this case, however, it was only necessary to go back a few days, back to Monday evening.
    “What time is it now?” he asked Celia.
    “No time.”
    “What day?”
    “I don't even know,” she said. And she giggled self-consciously.
    “There's no need to be ashamed of not knowing the day,” he said, speaking warmly, still touching her face.
    Okay,” she said, immediately malleable to whatever he said
    “Now, do you see a clock in front of you, Celia?”
    “No.”
    “Look closely.”
    “I see it.”
    “Watch the hands,” he said.
    “I am watching them.”
    “Are they turning backwards?”
    “Backwards?”
    “They are, aren't they?”
    “Yes,” she said, her pretty face puzzled.
    “Don't worry about that. They should turn backwards. That's what we want them to do. In this case, that is perfectly natural.”
    The frown was erased from the girl's face.
    “It is now Wednesday morning, yesterday morning,” Carter said. “Do you remember yesterday morning?”
    “I woke up in a hospital.”
    “That's right.”
    “I was hurt very bad,” she added. “I touched myself and I hurt where I touched myself, and the nurses came and there was this needle in my arm, feeding me glucose and…”
    “Okay, fine,” he said. “You're okay now. Yesterday's hurt doesn't matter if you're okay today. Isn't that so?”
    “Yes,” she said, calmed instantly.
    “Now,” Dr. Carter said, “it is no longer Wednesday anymore, is it, Celia?” He stroked her chin.
    “No.”
    “It's Monday morning, isn't it?”
    “Yes.”
    Carter had then turned to Gordon and explained that he did not want to regress the patient immediately to the moment of the attack, prior to her coma. That would have been too traumatic, too sudden. Instead, he intended to regress her to Monday morning and then slowly work her through the day until the moment when she had been attacked.
    And so it had gone until Carter said, “Now, it is late Monday night, and you are putting the suitcase in your car. You are going away to stay somewhere for the weekend. Is that right?”
    “Yes,” Celia had said. But already there was a look of trouble on her face, a shadow of anxiety.
    “Where are you going, Celia?”
    She did not answer.
    “Where are you going for the weekend?” Carter asked again.
    “I-”
    “Yes?”
    She could not speak it.
    “What are you afraid of?” he asked.
    “Nothing.”
    “Good. There is nothing to be frightened of, nothing at all. Now, where are you going for the weekend?”
    At that moment, she tore herself away from the doctor's gentle hand and began to scream.
    “It was horrible,” Gordon told Elaine, breaking his narrative to add his first