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Ted needed to talk about the sad memories, relating even more details than he had been able to report in the hypnotic state. And he wanted to talk about Volmo, rethinking those encounters with his new understanding. “You didn’t remember him from childhood, after he appeared in Atlanta?” Barbara asked. “Not at all,” Ted said. “I thought he was just another of the spirit guides, like Sharon and Raphael. He was awful looking, though. And that place where my grandmother and I were stank, smelled putrid, like a dead animal. I think that’s how the reptilian ones smell.” “What about that surgical procedure performed on your grandmother?” “Whatever they put in her head, I believe, is what caused her to have the stroke. He got her out of the way, just as he threatened, and then later he had access to me whenever he wanted. She died protecting me, and I carried that hidden knowledge, that guilt, for forty years.” His whole life, Ted now realized, had somehow been orchestrated, on some level he couldn’t grasp, by forces he couldn’t begin to fathom. He did not know what to think any more, but he knew what he felt. The old, haunting sense of guilt, at least, was already beginning to subside, but angry resentment, tinged with fear, took its place. What else in his life, he wondered, had been manipulated? And why? Masquerade of Angels 238 Twenty-Four We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. Eliot Gazing out the window a few weeks later, Ted was oblivi- ous to the renewal of life all around him, in the bright spring green of the trees and the outburst of colorful flowers in the yards. His mind was filled instead with the image of a quiet grave in the old family cemetery back in Alabama. It was the fortieth anniversary of Grandy’s death. He remembered how she had wept the morning before, sheltering him in her embrace, and whispered the name of the devil. Ted mourned for her, as well as for himself and the forty years of guilt that had haunted him like a restless ghost. “Thank God, at last I know the truth,” he thought. “At last I can be free of the pain and uncertainty. It wasn’t me, I did nothing wrong. It was that monster and his alien illusion of my grandfather.” The memory of what had been done to him and his grandmother was sickening and brought him out of his rev- erie. Ted looked up toward the field that lay quietly behind the row of trees and bushes, and his emotions surged. “You came again, didn’t you,” he murmured, “and did things to me and my neighbors. You hid the memories from me, but it won’t work. I’m going to go under hypnosis again. I’m going to find out what you did to us, and I will tell the whole world the truth. Someday I’ll expose you for the bastards that you really are. I may not can do it right now, but The Light - Twenty-Three