#023: Highland

I had the whole thing on tape, using a cassette recorder from Powell's study. Some of my later conclusions were arrived at only after a careful analysis of the material, together with a few leaps of mind, but I had already, at this point, been doing a bit of mental leaping, the constructs of which have been more or less borne out by the final conclusions.

It was not a pretty story, but it was a very human one, perfectly understandable and even worthy of sympathy in its finer movements. I have faithfully transcribed above that portion of the hypnotic session covered thus far, with only a few necessary editorial comments to aid your understanding of what was going on there. The entire session, though, took up that whole Sunday morning, with only a few brief breaks, here and there, to relieve an occasional unbearable tension in the both of us.

I will not burden you with all that detail, much of it given to mental maneuvers and laborious retracings of difficult routes to truth and packaging knowledge as a way around blocks of various types. It is kinder, rather, that I recapitulate and paraphrase the session in a straightforward narrative account, which I have done below, and ask that you simply take my word for it that this is the real story, to the best of my understanding—and about 98.5 percent of it straight out of, or straight through, Karen Highland's mind.

JQ had been a very lonely man, prisoner to his own hermitage, fifty years old and twenty years a widower, when Elena and her brothers came to Highlandville. Elena was about twenty-five, very pretty and vivacious—a real Latin knockout, I guess—well educated, but a bit old-worldly in her moral outlook.

JQ became smitten with Elena, and he proposed marriage shortly after she entered his employ. She declined, but apparently had a fondness for the older man and remained close and supportive until TJ, JQ's son, came home from his latest abortive attempt at college.

I believe, but am not certain, that Terry Kalinsky and TJ were on the same campus at the same time; it is probably not terribly important to the story whether or not they first became acquainted during that period.

TJ and Elena hit it off rather well, rather quickly, and it seems that this bothered JQ—whether from jealousy or whatever. Perhaps it was just because he knew, or had some reason to believe, that any union between the two would be an unhappy one.

He ordered TJ to stay away from Elena.

Elena then threatened to leave.

JQ relented.

TJ and Elena were married in an intimate ceremony at the mansion three months after his return from school.

I get the definite feeling that this marriage was never consummated. Elena began to fade and apparently fell into a deep depression during that first year of marriage.

JQ hired a live-in psychologist to counsel her. She recovered, and there then ensued a renewed camaraderie with JQ. They became intimate and Elena became pregnant.

I do not know what TJ was doing during this period or how he felt about any of it; indeed, TJ appears as little more than a wraith throughout this story—apparently a very solitary and troubled individual, more or less lost in the confines of his own confused reality.

But I do know how JQ felt about it all. He was horrified by Elena's pregnancy, renounced their covert relationship, withdrew from her completely... forever.

Even before Karen's birth, Elena's depression returned and deepened. She was in and out of Institutions for the rest of her troubled and haunted life, reviving somewhat to some accommodation of her reality only after JQ's death.

Meanwhile, JQ himself showered upon Karen all the love and open affection that he could not or would not bestow upon Karen's mother.

There appears to be no hint that Karen's early life was anything less than happy and healthy. Her troubles began when TJ and Elena perished together on a burning boat, but that was only the beginning of troubles—nothing more remarkable than the trauma that may be experienced by any young girl who awakens one day to find herself alone in the world without family except for two uncles who may not be self-sufficient, themselves, in an open society.

It seems that the real troubles—the hardball kind of troubles—began for Karen only after a certain house physician was added to the staff at Highlandville, and this was some six to seven years following the unfortunate incident with the boat.

The coming of Carl U. Powell—CUP, for short- marked the true beginning of the trouble with Karen.

I have not decided, not even at this writing, if Powell was an evil man, a weak man, or simply an inept and stupid man. I do know, and I know this unequivocally, that he was a terribly destructive influence in Karen's life.

The hypnotherapy was inaugurated within the first few weeks of his arrival at Highlandville. The sessions continued on a twice-weekly basis throughout the following five years.

No wonder(!) that Karen was, by this time, such a remarkably good subject. The conditioning was complete. She could respond to audible triggers, visual triggers, even time triggers—even if these were mixed together in patterns spaced seconds apart. I could touch my left ear and put her in deep trance, touch the right and she is instantly back; wink my left eye to sit her down, the right to start her dancing. Go to sleep at eight, Karen, and wake up at six. Pee at ten and take a nude dip in the pool at eleven.

He had used her as a guinea pig! As a research subject for his own enlightenment and amusement! The notes, I believe, were for a book he intended to write one day.

Pissed, yeah, I knew a lot of pissed during this investigation. But Powell was not the only culprit, nor necessarily the worst, and apparently he had at last begun to see the damage he had done through his inept tampering with a human soul.

Whether by accidental clumsiness or by design, he had this girl's mind pretty badly scrambled, though, and it was going to take more than one Sunday morning session to put it all back together again in a fully integrated and coherent personality.

And then, of course, there are those "other" entities. I frankly do not know. My jury is still out on this one. I saw things and experienced things that are patently outside the paradigm that guides most of us in our apprehension of reality, but reality is primarily a mental construct, anyway. It does not really matter—or maybe it does, depending on what you are after. If some proof of life after death is what you happen to be after, okay, it matters, and I leave it to you to make your own conclusions.

I was having trouble enough with the instant world, and my troubles were not yet resolved there.

I remembered that Marcia had set up a poolside brunch for twelve-thirty. I called Kalinsky at twelve sharp to make sure that he would be present for that, then I prepared Karen for a final dramatic performance, this latter requiring all of ten minutes working in deep trance with PH triggers.

I figured, what the hell—sauce for the goose, as our old friend Doc Powell had told me some fourteen hours earlier, is also plenty sauce enough for the gander.

We were going to spread some around.