The Mask

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.”
    Grace nodded. “From the subconscious of the girl she was in 1865, the girl—the identity—who is buried down at the bottom of Jane’s psyche.”
    They rode in silence for a minute or two.
    Paul’s hands were sweaty on the steering wheel.
    His mind spun as he tried to absorb the story she had told, and he had that old feeling of balancing on a tightrope high above a deep, deep, dark chasm.
    Then he said, “But Carol isn’t Jane’s mother.”
    “You’ve forgotten something,” Grace said.
    “What?”
    “Carol had a child out of wedlock when she was a teenager. I know she told you all about it. I’m giving away no secrets.”
    Paul’s stomach quivered. He was cold all the way into the marrow of his bones. “My God. You mean… Jane is the child that Carol put up for adoption.”
    “I have no proof of it,” Grace said. “But I bet that when the police spread their search nets wide enough, when they finally locate the girl’s parents in some other state, we’ll learn that she’s adopted. And that Carol is her natural mother.”
     
    For what seemed like an eternity, they struggled on the floor by the hearth, grunting, twisting, the girl throwing punches, Carol trying to resist without hurting her. At last, when it became clear that Carol was unquestionably the stronger of the two and would eventually gain control of the situation, the girl shoved away from her, scrambled up, kicked her in the thigh, and ran out of the room, into the kitchen.
    Carol was shocked and dazed both by the girl’s unexpected violence and by the maniacal power of the blows. Her face stung, and she knew her cheeks were going to bruise. Her bitten shoulder was bleeding; a large, damp, red stain was spreading slowly down the front of her blouse.
    She got up, swayed unsteadily for a moment. Then she went after the girl. “Honey, wait!”
    In the distance, outside the house, Laura’s voice rose in a sharp, shrill scream: “I haaaaaate you!”
    Carol reached the kitchen, leaned against the refrigerator. The girl was gone. The back door was open.
    The sound of the rain was very loud.
    She hurried to the door and looked out at the rear lawn, at the small meadow, at the forest that crowded in at the edge of the meadow. The girl had disappeared.
    “Jane! Laura!”
    Millicent? She wondered. Linda? What on earth should I call her?
    She crossed the porch and went down the steps into the yard, into the pelting, cold rain. She turned right, then left, not sure where to look first.
    Then Jane appeared. The girl came out of the woodshed at the southwest corner of the cabin. She was carrying an ax.
     
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    “… and Carol is her natural mother.”
    Grace’s words echoed and reechoed in Paul’s head.
    For a moment he was incapable of speech.
    He stared ahead, shocked, not really seeing the road, and he nearly ran up the back end of a sluggishly moving Buick. He jammed on his brakes. He and Grace were thrown forward, testing their seat belts. He