rand b lee : THE GREEN MAN & OTHER STORIES

The Green Man & Other Stories collects for the first time anywhere eleven of the early short stories of fantasist Rand B. Lee, who for many years has been delighting — and shocking — readers with tales characterized by pathos, sensuality, humor, and a keen sensitivity to life on the borderland of perceived reality.

In "The Green Man," a lonely little boy encounters a strange, shadowy figure at woods' edge, a figure who will change his life forever;

In "The Pearl," a seedy cityscape becomes the backdrop for the death — and redemption — of a drug-addicted gay male prostitute;

In "Shriving Autumn," prepared especially for this collection, a tormented nobleman seeks his son, who was stolen away by fairies;

In "End Cruise," the brain of a dying holo star tells a horrifying tale of seduction, transformation, and betrayal;


On sale at Amazon (Kindle Edition) now.



In "Heart In Winter", a psi-talented child with multiple personality disorder flees a relentless pursuer;

In "On Springfield Mountain," a community of quarantined psi-talents is forced to face its inner demons when a handsome stranger crashes on their mountain;

In "Letting Go of Waverley," the husband and followers of a dead channeler grapple with loss, hope, and thwarted ambition;

In "Still Life With Doves," a physician imprisoned on an alien planet by a conservative, repressive regime suffers a twisted version of "let the punishment fit the crime;"

In "Knight of Shallows," originally published many years before the appearance of Jet Li's The One, a young man is catapulted into a series of alternate universes, seeking a murderous version of himself;

In "Full Fathom Five My Father Lies," Rand Lee's first published story, castaways on an alien planet forge an all-male society that is anything but Utopian;

And in "The Sound of His Wings," an old man and his psi-talented lover are threatened with the loss of all they hold dear.


From The Green Man & Other Stories :



 


Gary found Waverley lying on the red bed with her head tilted back, her long blonde hair dashed across the blue silk pillows, her mouth slightly open. She was dressed in her yoga outfit: off-white slubby cotton tunic, drawstring trousers to match. Her feet were bare and her body was very cold and stiff. Gary had known Waverley was dead from the moment he had put his hand to the knob of the bedroom door and said, “Honey, we have a client in an hour,” known it at that moment of vacant stillness. Her bedroom door, not theirs, though it had been theirs once, long before and briefly.

He touched her, though he knew he should not. He buried his head in her cold chest; he pulled at her cold face with his hands. The silent part of him that knew things knew with certainty that her body was empty of her, because he could feel her around him like a cloud of light — no, subtler, like a shift in the arrangement of reality around the bed. And he could feel her Others around him, too, their waveform characteristically calm and compassionate, but with a difference. They were no longer the presences he had grown to know over the years of leading Waverley into deep trance for her clients, her television audiences, her OtherLove weekends; for the thousands upon thousands who had come to identify her entranced voice with the deep meaning of things. These Others were deeper, richer, broader, somehow, than the Others she had channeled. She’s been added to them, he thought. He let his body go through its motions of grief until it was time to tell Delores to call the police.

The medical examiner was very kind, improbably tactful for a professional man of science who did not believe in all this channeling bullshit but who knew the far edge of sorrow when he saw it. He had lost his brother, he explained to Gary. “It’s never easy,” he said.

“What happened to her?” Gary croaked.

“It’s too early to tell for sure, Mr. Malcolm. A cerebral hemorrhage is my guess, but I’d like to see an autopsy done.” He consulted a paper. “You are listed as Ms. Angelus’s next of kin?”

“I’m her husband,” Gary said. “I’ll authorize the autopsy.”

“Fine, fine.” The look in the medical examiner’s eye said what his mouth did not: If you were married, why the separate bedrooms? Why no mention of the fact in the media? Why no kids? Some breakdown of Love, here, Mr. Malcolm, here in the house that Love built? And then the people with the stretcher were coming out of Waverley’s room. Her face was covered with a sheet, but a strand of her hair, shining gold, glinted from beneath the fabric. Gary found a pair of manicure scissors in his hand without quite knowing how they had gotten there. Under the watchful gaze of the waiting police, he leaned over and snipped a lock of hair from the scalp of the corpse. Delores took the scissors from him, but did not take the hair.

They bore the dead woman out the wide, white-pillared front door, out across the wide green flower-bedded lawn, and loaded it, with some effort, into the back of the ambulance. Gary signed some papers without taking his eyes off the van, not until it did the job for him, vanishing around a corner of the long driveway, bound for City Hospital and the morgue. Long after the medical examiner and the police had left, he was still standing there, holding the strands of hair in his fingers, looking out at the empty bend in the drive.

There is a tunnel,  and she is flying down it, toward a bright light that grows steadily brighter and brigher. Around her, there is joy: welcome home, welcome home, welcome. And the music lifts and laves her like the currents off Oahu. 

But close behind the wave of love, another wave follows, propagating with increasing power: the shrieking wail of the heart abandoned.

The news hit the wire services like a child falling to pavement: FAMOUS NEW AGE GURU DIES; FUNERAL HELD MONDAY. Letters and telegrams flooded WaverColm Ministries’s uptown office. Dowdy little Sandra Dworkin, important at last, answered mail and talked to reporters, reading from a prepared statement. The OtherLove Centers in Seattle, Santa Fe, Virginia Beach and Key West hung white crepe paper on all their windows and doors and limousines. For the funeral, held at the Maui Center, Gary led a group meditation for three thousand people from all over the world, amidst fountains of flowers and swelling Bach. He did so without knowing how he was doing it, and scarcely knowing why; he just did it, or something did it through him, the words coming and the energy from the audience supporting him and drawing him through it to the end.

During the service, he felt for Waverley’s energy. She was there, and so were her Others, but they seemed far out of his reach. Not so for the audience; afterward, he was thronged with people claiming that Waverley had touched their hearts intimately through the meditation. “She was so clear.” “She told me I had to follow my inner voice.” “She told me she was at peace.” “She told me to tell you that she loves you.” Finally, his rage was so great that he had to excuse himself, and let Hari Ram, the Sikh security chief, do the clearing out.

Over the weeks that followed, Gary holed up in the Sonoma house where Waverley had died. Friends dropped by regularly to see how he was doing, bringing with them every symbol of love current in Northern California: crystals, medicine shields, smudge-sticks, energy-balancing templates, bongs, offers of Reiki™ or Ro-Hun™ or applied kinesiology or Inner Attunement sessions, chakra-opening tea mixtures, cauldrons of chicken soup made from hand-fed poultry, organic vegetables, and natural spring water. A number of people, both genders, offered to keep him company in bed. The inevitable hardy mutant strain of reportorial virus managed to elude the house immune defenses, namely Hari Ram the Sikh and Delores, but was stopped cold by Mu, Gary’s white husky, who guarded the upstairs hallway from intrusion with a savagery wholly  uncharacteristic of his genus. Personage! phoned; so did Crow News Network. Mu was unimpressed.

George Simpson, Gary and Waverley’s agent, was impressed. “You’ve got to think of the future, Gary,” he said over the phone. He had tried to say this in person, but Mu had not allowed it. “If you don’t make another public appearance, people are going to say that all the things Waverley and you have been teaching all these years are hogwash. They’re looking to you for hope, Gary.”

“Later, George,” said Gary softly. “Later.” In fact, Gary found “later” difficult to imagine. The worst of it was that he felt imprisoned by the present, a present almost wholly circumscribed by the past he and Waverley had shared. In her death-room, his room now, he lay on the bed for hours staring at scrapbooks, listening to Others tapes. once he put on a sweater of hers he had saved, just to smell the perfume lingering in it. For the first week, Delores left trays at the closed bedroom door; he seldom touched them. The second week, he found himself able to wobble downstairs, take a shower, change clothes. But downstairs reality — the ringing phones, the smell of Delores’s cooking, the parlor without her in it at the piano — all this hurt his eyes, like a too-bright light; he could only take it ten or fifteen minutes at a time before he had to flee upstairs again, Mu at his heels, into the dark embrace of the shuttered bedroom.

Waverley, where are you? Why did you leave me? What do I do now? Can I come, too?

No answer.

The third day of the third week after Waverley’s death, Gary descended to find Delores standing at the kitchen door with a folded newspaper clutched in her left fist. The knuckles on the fist were much paler than the surrounding dark skin. “Delores, what is it?”

“You shouldn’t see this, Gary,” said Delores, but she handed the paper to him anyway. Unfolding it, he was trapped by the headline, which had been underscored by a lurid red smear from Delores’s marking pen. It ran:

FAMED PSYCHIC TO SPEAK FROM BEYOND GRAVE!

Through the blood-beat in Gary’s head, Delores said, “My sister Rose brought this by today. We’ve had forty calls. Reporters, too, of course, but Hari got rid of all of them this time. And your agent’s been trying to get a hold of you.”

Gary read:

Waverley Angelus, world-famous channeler who died January 27th at her home in Sonoma, California, plans to return with a message of hope for the world of the living, claims Sandra Dworkin, secretary to Miss Angelus and longtime friend of the Angelus family.

“Did George know anything about this?” asked Gary.

“I asked him. He said no.”

“What does Sandra say? Has she confirmed the article?”

“Your agent says so. I haven’t talked to her. I didn’t think it was my place.”

“What makes Sandra think Waverley is coming back?”

Delores’s eyes struck sparks in the air. “Sandra says Waverley is going to speak through her!”

Gary blinked. “I see,” he said. He lowered the paper, but took it with him into his study. He unearthed his cell phone from the drawer where he had flung it, just in case the landline were tapped; punched George’s private number into it; and waited for someone to pick up. He and Waverley and the Others had  counseled many women and more than a few men suffering from the aftereffects of childhood sexual abuse, but not until this moment had Gary realized, This is what rape must feel like, a little. The rage that welled up in him was so paralyzing that it took George’s, “Who is it, dammit?”, to jar him out of it.

“George, it’s me. It’s me, George.”

“Thank God! Gare, we’ve got big trouble. Did you get my messages?”

“Delores showed me the papers, George. What do you know about this?”

“It’s over, Gary.”

“Uh, what do you mean, George?”

“I mean, it’s over. She’s done it. The little cow has done it already. Last night Miss Sandra held a channeling session for some select representatives of the national press.”

“This is hard to believe, George.”

“Believe it, buddy. The usual gab rags were there, too late to get it into the print editions that hit the stands today, but not too late to post the news on their websites. That wouldn’t have been so bad, except that she invited Weena and Doc Rudnick from Metaphysics and Sir Daniel Jones from the BritSocPsych. I just got off the phone with them, and Doc and Dan-boy think it’s all genuine.” Gary was silent. Wondering whether he had made himself clear, George the agent added, “Gary, Doc and Daniel think Sandra’s really channeling Waverley!”

“I heard you, George.” Gary closed his eyes as tightly as he could, making red come. “Any doubters there? What about Weena? Did she buy it?”

“No way, thank Christ. She played it cool, though. Said how ‘interesting’ it all was and how it ‘bore further study.’ She read Doc the royal riot act in the car on the way home, though.”

“How do you know, George?”

“What do you mean?”

“How do you know she read Doc the riot act?” Gary paused. “You weren’t there, were you, George?”

“What the hell kind of thing is that to say? Of course I wasn’t there! I just found out about it this morning!”

“Why?” snapped Gary. He could not hold in his anger any longer; it shook his voice. “How did a thing like this get past you, George? How did Sandra get away with holding press conferences without you hearing about them?”

George said swiftly, “She must have bypassed our interoffice spyware when she was working late answering e-correspondence. No excuses, Gary; I should have known. I didn’t. And I think it’s  high time the two of us gave little Sandy a talking-to.” The two men breathed at one another. Suddenly, Gary began to cry, the helpless kind of crying that kittens and small infants do. George began crooning to him in a low, odd, tender, utterly un-Georgelike voice, and Gary’s anguish filled the world, and eventually Delores and Hari Prim took his cell phone away from him and led him upstairs to bed.

The planes of existence are seven in number, whispered the Others. Their names are the Plane of Matter; the Plane of Mind; the Plane of Dreaming; the Plane of Pure Potential; the Plane of Light and Sound; and the Plane of the Other Self. These planes are not to be thought of as tiers, but as the faces of a seven-sided form which is your true body.

Your matter-body is the part of you that is focused on the Plane of Matter. Your conscious mind is the part of you that is focused on the Plane of Mind when you are awake, then expands into the other planes during the body’s sleep. This is an expansion of attention, a movement of notice, you understand, not a movement through space and time. 

When you die, you release your matter-body completely, no longer calling it by your name, giving it back to the Earth from which it was created. And the first nonphysical reality of which you are aware after your body’s death is the Plane of Mind, that which is sometimes called the “astral” plane. It is that plane which mirrors your Physical Reality most closely.

Ghosts dwell there, until the living let them go, and they the living.

He dreamed that night that Waverley was calling to him from behind the mirror in the parlor, her golden hair floating and her mouth open, as he had seen it last. When he woke up, to piercing sunshine, he knew that she was in trouble.

It was the day of the showdown with Sandra Dworkin, and he thought of Waverley as he drove to the WaverColm offices in the lemon-yellow Porsche, thought of her as she had been the day they had first met, fifteen years previously. He had not thought a woman’s hair could be that color naturally, and for years he had assumed she used dyes. (She had not.) Her contactless lenses were nearly gentian-blue; her skin was perfect for a Caucasian’s, like some China lily’s. The jumpsuit she wore had left just enough to the imagination. Around her neck she had placed a gold chain from which a purple amethyst crystal dangled, pointing to her mysteries. She had stood out from the others in the psychic development group like a butterfly in a bowl of Wheaties.

She had seemed oblivious to the effect she was having on entities of both genders round about her. Her entire attention had been focused on the two psychics up front, who were explaining to the class the layers of the human aura. Gary, a semiskeptic prowling for Silly Season material to please his editors at the Santa Fe Express, had gotten a bad case of truth-chills the moment he had laid eyes on her.

Over vegetarian fajitas after class, Gary had grilled Waverley on her psychic experiences. Improbably, she was Greek. Her father’s last name was “Angelou;” she had Latinized it to “Angelus” because, she said, an angelus was a kind of bell, and she liked bells. She’d lived in Santa Fe for four months. Someone back East had told her that New Mexico was on a power nexus, and that people who went there either got their lives utterly transformed or everything fell apart and they had to go home again. She was thirty, never married, and Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri had awarded her a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology.

Gary had been so conscious of his attraction to the beauty across the table that he had overcompensated, posing his questions more bluntly than usual. Weren’t New Agers basically just a bunch of kooks trying to escape into a dressed-up version of nineteenth century spiritualism? Well, she had replied, taking her time, there was a strong anti-intellectual element in the New Age movement, something it shared with the Fundamentalist Christian tradition, but she didn’t think that intuition and reason had to be enemies. She didn’t believe in the supernatural, but in a wider definition of Nature. Rather than term them “kooks,” she preferred to consider New Agers persons attempting to develop a world-view in which natural was not limited to physical.

How did she know that her automatic writing was the expression of spirit-guides — unbodied minds located outside her own unconscious — rather than simple dissociation or even brain dysfunction? She replied that she did not think that “located” was a meaningful term when used to describe the nonphysical; and anyway, did it matter whether or not a source of useful information was “outside” her or “inside”  her, as long as it communicated with her and was, indeed, useful?

Gary had shifted gears at that point. Wasn’t the whole notion of precognition — the ability to sense events before they occurred in spacetime — based on a deterministic view of reality? This question had seemed to puzzle her at first. She replied that most serious students of metaphysics agreed that the future is not static but fluid, varying according to the free wills of everyone involved in creating it. Precognition, she said, was the ability to sense probability lines, not certainties. Nothing, she said, is written in stone.

By this juncture there was such an overtly sensual element to their sparring that when Gary asked, “But what about crop circles and UFOs?”, they both burst out laughing. Waverley admitted that she believed in crop circles, UFOs, and their extraterrestrial origins, because it comforted her to believe in them. Besides, she said, her belief or nonbelief in crop circles and UFOs would not affect their objective existence one way or another. The persistent, unsubstantiated rumors of extraterrestrial contact seemed to her equivalent to the persistent, unsubstantiated rumors of a mysterious continent to the West of the ancient Roman world. She saw no reason to give up her assumption of the probability of extraterrestrial intelligence until all of space was explored and that assumption had been ruled unequivocally incorrect.

“It’s like animals,” she said. He raised an eyebrow. “Two hundred years ago, most people assumed that animals were merely meat machines, with no feelings and no self-awareness. This despite millennia of anecdotal evidence that animals do feel, do have internal lives, are capable of love, hate, loyalty, jealousy, all the emotions humans show.”

Gary, who loved dogs, nodded. “Believing animals didn’t feel made it easier for humans to exploit them,” he said.

She nodded. “And reinforced our sense of superiority. The Church said we were God’s ultimate creation, after all, the only creatures made in His image.” She shrugged, exquisitely. “I think resistance to the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence springs from the same need we humans have to believe we’re God’s best idea.”

By the end of the evening, Gary had known that he had to see Waverley again. Fifteen years later, he still had his first recording of her voice, made that night on his little reporter’s pocket digital, a recording made before the Others started speaking through her; before the psychic fairs and the conference circuit; before the money; before the worldwide fame; before WaverColm; before the OtherLove Centers; before he lost her to the Light.

She is caught in mid-light. Around her, Physical Reality flows like a dream, image upon image, shoals of thoughts flitting here and there like silver fish; images: Gary, presenting her with Mu, an eight-week-old husky pup, wriggling, sweet-smelling, all tongue and needle-teeth; Sandra Dworkin weeping over black-edged letters and e-notes of condolence; George their soon-to-be agent smiling artificially at his first Others session; the midnight razor in bereaved Gary’s hand, hovering, undecided. She is not cut off from the love of her Others, or from her Deepest Self, but she feels stretched between planes, attenuated, and try as she may, she cannot complete her transition. Their longing holds her like a sharp grey chain.

Frightened — because this is the Plane of Mind, and she has not yet separated entirely from ego — she calls for help.

When Gary arrived at the office building, the lobby was mobbed with press, who pointed cameras at him all the way to his private elevator. Kinsfolk to Hari Prim the Sikh were waiting when the lift stopped rising and its doors opened. Seeing who he was, they relaxed and parted to let him into the WaverColm offices.

George the agent had gotten there before him. He was standing in all his bulk, grimacing over a glass of spirulina brandy at the bar in Gary’s private office, watching Sandra Dworkin weep. Sandra was sitting in a chair opposite Gary’s cherrywood desk. She was dressed in a linen leisure suit so like the yoga costume Waverley had died in that Gary nearly turned around and walked back out. Instead, he went around to his side of the desk, put up his briefcase, stood with his fists knuckling the desktop, and said, “Sandy, I’m upset.”

“I know,” said Sandra, between sobs. “I’ve upset everybody.” She stirred feebly. “Do you want some coffee?” Despite Gary and Waverley’s constant assurances that they were more than capable of making themselves coffee, Sandra had always insisted upon doing it for them. When Gary did not reply, she abandoned her Fifties secretarial role and wrung her polished nails. “Stop looking at me that way, Gary! I know you must think I’m a Judas. I know you both do.” She hurled a look at George the agent. “But I can’t help what you think. She was there. I saw her. I felt her. She came to me. She was there.”

“Bullshit,” said George.

“George,” said Gary softly. George moved away from the bar, across the room to where the great amethyst geode sat dreaming on its pedestal under the skylight. “Sandra,” said Gary. “Look at me.” He perched on his desk as close to her as he could manage without flinching. She looked at him, her mascara running, devastation and adoration mingling in her gaze. With a shock he wondered how long she had been in love with him and Waverley.

He said, “Sandy, I remember how excited I was when Waverley first channeled the Others, back in Santa Fe. I couldn’t think of anything else. I was so hyped up about it I ran around trying to convince everybody I respected to come listen to her, see for themselves, hear for themselves. So I know what you must have felt when it happened to you, and why you asked Doc and Weena and Sir Daniel to your session.”

Sandra smiled unbelievingly. “You understand?”

“Yes. And I understand why you didn’t tell me, or George.”

She burst into tears again. “I was so afraid,” she said. “Nothing like this had ever happened to me before! Waverley always said I was psychic — strongly psychic, a latent medium, she said — but I hadn’t cleared my chakras fully yet. And when she came to me — when it happened — I thought, oh not yet, I’m not ready, I’m not good enough. But it didn’t matter. She was ready.” Sandra moved suddenly, reaching out with one hand as though to grip his thigh; desperately, he willed her to stop, and to his amazement, she stopped and let her hand drop. “Gare, I didn’t want to raise your hopes. I wanted to be sure it was her. I needed someone who would be able to tell, and who — who wouldn’t be too hurt if it was all a lie.”

“Tell me what happened, Sandra. The first time Waverley contacted you and told you she wanted to speak through you.” He leaned back on the desk and waited, conscious of the tension in his and George’s shoulders.

The story came out Sandra-style, in bits and pieces and between sobs, but it was clear that she was enjoying herself. The gist of it was that she had been in her bathroom. It had been about ten o’clock on a Friday evening, and she had come home exhausted from working late at the office answering mail. She had been depressed, she said, worried about the fate of WaverColm now that Waverley had “crossed over”; pained in her soul, deeply pained, because of the sadness in the letters she had been reading. (“They miss her so much,” she pointed out.)

She had bathed and changed into her best robe, and was just starting to put some cream on her face when her reflection in the mirror changed into Waverley’s. “Don’t be alarmed, Sandy,” Waverley had said to her from the mirror. “I have some good news for you. There’s an important message to be delivered to the Physical Plane from the Other Side, and I want you to deliver it for me, because you’re a clear channel.” (“Her eyes were on fire, Gary,” Sandra said.)

Sandra had protested her unworthiness. Waverley had insisted upon her worthiness. This had gone on for a bit, until finally the Angelus had burst into merry laughter, “filling my bathroom with the sound of golden bells,” said Sandra. Waverley told her again not to be afraid; she herself would assist her. “I’ll join my essence with yours in such a way that your uniqueness will not be violated,” said Waverley. “I’ll give you the words to speak. But you have to agree to it. And don’t worry: if you say no, some other way will be found to bring through the information.”

Then, reportedly, Waverley had waited in the mirror, waiting while Sandra Dworkin’s heart had skipped several beats within her newly bathed chest, and the universe had seemed to hang, poised. And finally Sandra had said, “Whatever you want, Waverley. Do to me whatever you want,” and the bathroom had exploded into light of indescribable loveliness.

“When I woke up, it was the next day,” said Sandra earnestly. “I was in bed; I didn’t know how I’d got there. And I didn’t remember anything after I said, ‘Yes.’ That’s how it started, Gary; it truly is.”

“What happened after that, Sandra?” Gary asked.

“Well, I just knew she wanted to talk to somebody really badly.”

“I see,” said Gary. “So you asked the Abrahams, Sir Daniel, and representatives of certain, ah, publications to sit in on a session so you could check the objective validity of the experience.”

Sandra burst into tears a third time. “Oh, Gary, I’m so sorry! I know it was premature, and that I’ve hurt you so much. But I couldn’t help myself.” Her chin tightened. “It was necessary. She made me promise to be brave, to —”

“No way!” Gary had been thinking it; George came out and said it. From across the room, the agent turned to face them and pointed a finger at the secretary. “No way, Sandy. Waverley didn’t make you do shit. Waverley wouldn’t make you do anything. She wasn’t the sort of person in life to force people and she wouldn’t be that sort of person in afterlife.” His voice was controlled, but his tanned jowly face was livid.

“George,” said Gary.

“I didn’t mean —” faltered Sandra Dworkin.

“You stupid little bitch, I loved her, too, you know that?” George’s face was inches from the secretary’s, and his hands, ringed and soft-looking, were extended like a clawed beast’s. He was a tall man, big, and something essential to him was starting to crack and crumble. Sandra twisted away from him with a cry, and Gary’s, “Stop it!”, stopped them both.

George dropped his hands, stepped back. He was breathing hard. He repeated, “I loved her, too,” just as though Gary had not spoken. “And you could no more channel Angel than a moose could sing soprano at the Met.” He vibrated the glass in the door when he slammed it behind him.

Gary and Sandra looked at one another. The air left in the room by George’s departure felt clearer, as though he had catalyzed a shift in all of them. Gary found himself inexpressibly tired. He smiled and forced himself to touch Sandra’s plump wrist, briefly. He said to her, “ ‘A prophet is without honor in his own country.’ ” She frowned, and held her wrist where he had touched it, as though he had hurt her. He swung his butt free of the desktop. “We’ve all been under a lot of pressure, Sandra. I’ve decided to bring in someone to help you handle the correspondence load.”

“You’re firing me.”

“Don’t be silly. I’m focusing your energies on a different project, that’s all.” Her eyes narrowed. “Sandra,” he said, holding her gaze, “I don’t think I’m quite — ready — to hear Waverley channeled by anybody. Her death is too fresh for me. But I’m interested in her message. I’d like you to write down everything she says to  you.”

“Write it?” said Sandra in a gravelly voice.

“Automatic writing. Remember the Ministries course you took last year? Just ask her to write through you for now; tell her we’re not quite ready to hear her. I’m sure she’ll understand. Date the entries to the hour and minute and turn them in at the end of each week. I’ll want to read every bit of the information that comes through. Will you do that for us, until I have time to — sort things out?”

Sandra cocked her head. “Yes,” she said.

“Yes, you agree?”

“Yes, she agrees.” The woman’s plain face shook into a smile. “Oh, Gary, thank you. Thank you from both of us."



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