#015: Resonating

Doc Powell's quarters were in the same wing as Karen's and were expansive enough to house also a small dispensary and a paneled study. I learned later that this had been JQ's apartment for his final two years, during which time he had confined himself within those walls. It had been a period of considerable discomfort and pain, which perhaps accounts for the depressing atmosphere I encountered there.

I have found that unhappy human experiences, especially those of a repetitive or continuous nature occurring within the same physical reference, or a singular event experienced with severely traumatizing emotions, somehow become imbedded in the molecular structures of that space-time field and sometimes never dissipate to the point where a sensitive person does not resonate them.

Sometimes the resonance is there long after the purely physical structure has been totally destroyed—so maybe the very earth, itself, is imbedded with this unhappiness.

To illustrate that latter connection, I remember an incident a few years ago when I was driving through one of the western states—Wyoming, maybe—and picked up a very strong emotional resonance while stopped at a rest area along the interstate highway. It was a feeling of desperation and despair mixed with terror. Casual questioning of a maintenance man brought out the story of a homesteading pioneer family of ten massacred on the site by an Indian war party. This some one hundred years earlier, yet somehow the event remained indelibly impressed in the space-time matrix despite the disappearance of all physical traces.

I was very uncomfortable in Powell's quarters, despite the fact that they were charmingly decorated and pleasing to the masculine sense of comfort. This feeling of discomfort had nothing to do with the knowledge that I was working on very short time before Kalinsky or the cops, or both, came looking for the same thing I was looking for.

I had that feeling of urgency, yes, but it was quite distinct and apart from some disturbingly resonating factor impressed within those walls. I did not know, at the time, that JQ had died in that apartment nor did I have any specific feeling as to the nature of the disturbance; I knew only that unhappiness had lived there.

This, coupled with the time-factor urgency, may have had some effect upon the efficiency of my search. I did find an entire library of open-reel tapes, indexed by date and covering psychoanalytic sessions with Karen over a five-year period. The periodicity indicated semiweekly sessions over the entire period, which seemed to make a liar out of Karen. She had told me point-blank that she had never thought of herself as being "in analysis."

The surface evidence seemed to indicate that she had been involved in some very heavy analysis. There were over five hundred such tapes, a fact that foreclosed any thought of carrying them away from there—besides which, it would have required probably a thousand hours to simply listen to that entire library, perhaps five thousand to come to any conclusions about the information that might be recorded there. I had no such time at my disposal. Five hours would have been regarded as a great luxury of time.

Of much greater value, in the given circumstances, would have been some sort of cross-index or catalog of subjects covered in those tapes. A quick scan of such a catalog could at least reveal the range and depth of those sessions, enough maybe to allow a fast synthesis and give me a mental snapshot of the trouble with Karen.

I found no such catalog, nor could I locate a case file, which should at least show a psychiatric profile of the patient as well as progressive commentaries by the doctor.

I did find a little leatherbound notebook in the bookcase headboard of Powell's bed. It was not labeled and the contents were written in what appeared to be some sort of shorthand notation. Scrutiny revealed the shorthand to be, actually, an abbreviated form of plain English; further scrutiny satisfied me that the forty-odd pages of jottings all concerned Karen Highland. I added this to my treasure trove.

Ten more minutes of careful searching turned up several more notebooks, a couple of unmarked cassette tapes, a small desktop appointment calendar covered with doodles and more shorthand, a couple of bankbooks that indicated that the five-year residency had been profitable, indeed, for Doctor Powell, two one-way airline tickets to Rome for the following Saturday, a small legal tract on "Conservancy and the Mentally Disabled," and ten thousand dollars worth of American Express traveler's checks in Powell's name.

I took the notebooks, tapes, and calendar and left everything else undisturbed.

And now I have to give you one of those "suspended disbelief" items. I do not know how to explain it in conventional logic nor even in a sensible unconventional logic; I can only tell you what occurred, or how I sensorially interpreted what occurred, and leave it to your own conclusions.

As I was standing at the front door and preparing to quit that apartment, I saw something suspended in the air over near the bookshelves in the sitting room. Now, the room was darkened, with only a small nightlight near the front door, so this object or whatever had to be supplying its own illumination. It had a very faint glow, somewhat like radium, and exhibited a sort of undulating-wave appearance—if you can visualize a sheer curtain panel being gently manipulated by the breeze at an open window, sort of like that except that no constant form was maintained.

The closest description I can arrive at, for those who may have had a class or two in psychics, is that it looked like an electronic screen representation of the electrical field of an energy wave, with about the same degree of stability—at maximum expansion, maybe ten inches wide and two feet long.

As I watched, this energy wave or whatever moved into the bookcase and instantly contracted to a point and disappeared. As it did so, a large volume was ejected from the bookcase and fell to the floor.

I stood rooted to my spot by the door for perhaps thirty seconds, then I turned the lights back on, went to the bookcase, picked up the fallen book.

It was warm to the touch, front and back, a heavy leatherbound tome titled "Principles of Economics."

What appeared at first to be a bookmark tucked between the pages turned out to be two sheets of lined yellow notepaper, legal size, folded twice and filled front and back with finely scrawled handwriting.

The heading of the front sheet read: "The True Final Will and Testament of Joseph Quincy Highland."

The second sheet was headed: "My Dearly Beloved Karen."

Let me tell you that, even before I read those final messages from JQ, my mind was fairly tumbling with the implications of the event.

Please remember that I am a woman who does not like any suggestion that supernatural agencies could be at

work in my reality. Yet I had been given an at-hand demonstration of an event that seemingly could not be explained in any other terms.

From somewhere out of the matrix that separates the world of space and time from whatever other realities may be only dimly guessed, an entity of will had found a way to interact with the energy universe and to thereby place in my hands the desires and instructions of a man more than ten years in his grave.