Читать книгу Mystical Paths - Susan Howatch - Страница 29

I should never have involved myself in Marina’s plan, but I felt so sure that for once I could use my powers with benign effect. After all, I was no longer an undergraduate messing around with ouija boards – or even an innocent abroad locking horns with a witch-doctor. At twenty-five I thought I could give myself credit for some degree of maturity, but what I could never acknowledge was that in psychic matters I was no better than a precocious child who could recite the alphabet but who had never been taught to read and write.

There are basically two problems with séances. First, most dead people can be assumed to be at peace with God, in which case efforts to contact them are futile, and second, if the dead people aren’t at peace with God, the most sensible thing one can do is to leave them well alone because lingering shreds of discarnate spirits, as my father had often told me, are either trivial or demonic. I had no doubt that Christian was now at peace with God. It was true he had died ‘unhousel’d’ and ‘unanel’d’, cut off from life by a violent death when he was possibly not in a state of grace, but during his life he had been a good man – or as good as most men can hope to be – and I had no doubt that since his death various people had prayed that he might rest in peace. Why shouldn’t God have responded by exercising a loving forgiveness, healing those deep fissures which I had been so sure existed in Christian’s personality, and finally enfolding his soul? It seemed a reasonable assumption to make in the circumstances.

From that reasonable assumption it followed that the chances of making contact with Christian were nil. What was much more likely to happen in the séance was that Katie’s acute emotional distress would be projected from her psyche and cause havoc. That was why I planned not a séance but a pseudo-séance, a rite which might appear designed to contact Christian but which was in fact merely designed to help Katie. I thought that provided I kept my mind closed against any discarnate shreds of former personalities that happened to be floating around, I would be dealing not with the dead but with the living because what was really required of me in this situation was to be not a medium but a healer.

This attracted me, and was almost certainly why I had agreed against my better judgement to take part in Marina’s plan. Even now, when my head was stuffed so full of theology that I could have written a thesis about the transformation of the historical Jesus into the Eternal Christ of the Church, I felt irresistibly compelled to look straight past that multi-symbol image to the charismatic Galilean wonder-worker who had healed the sick and raised the dead.

‘I want to be a healer-priest when I grow up,’ I had announced at the age of eight after an enthralling game in which I had resurrected my tin soldiers, but my father had replied firmly that if I wanted to heal the sick I should train to be a doctor.

‘It’s true all priests are involved in the healing of souls,’ he had said, ‘but a ministry which centres on healing the physically and mentally sick is so extremely difficult and so fraught with danger that only priests with the strongest possible call to heal should attempt it.’

It was not until later that I found out about his brief, unsuccessful attempt to be a healer. Naturally he had assumed, since I was so like him, that if I tried to be a healer I would fail too.

But the fascination with healing had persisted, and now, years later, I found myself seduced by the challenge of restoring Katie Aysgarth to full mental health. The result was that I planned the pseudo-séance in a haze of euphoria.

Disgusting. No wonder my father prayed daily for another religious thug like Cuthbert Darcy to knock the hell out of me. I was like one of those typhoid carriers who bounce through kitchen after kitchen and leave a trail of disaster in their wake.

God knows how anyone I met ever survived.