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was heading back to town. He’d rather take his chances there than spend another second in the belly of that rotting house.

Chapter 13
     
     
    “I don’t like to waste a lot of time,” Avery began, rolling up his sleeves. “Do you know how this works?”
    Lysander nodded. “Uh, I start babbling incoherently and after an hour you scream Eureka! and tell me why I’m so messed up?”
    Avery laughed. “Your parents haven’t told you?”
    The confusion in Lysander’s face was obvious.
    “Lysander, something happened to you a long time ago, something you’ve buried deep within your subconscious.”
    Lysander’s face flushed red. His eyes darted away and he vaguely spotted a marble bust of Bach by the far wall.
    “Oh, it’s perfectly normal. That’s the way the mind works. Call it, if you will, a survival mechanism. Everyone has bad memories, but when they’re, say, traumatic, you tend to deny them entirely.”
    Avery brought his hands together as though he were squeezing a ball. “A kind of pressure begins to build, you see. In a way, thoughts are things, Lysander. You can’t keep them down. They need free rein—they need to breathe. You get me?”
    Lysander nodded as Avery’s hands continued to press against the imaginary ball. “Now, if that pressure becomes too strong, something has to give.”
    “Hence my seizures?”
    “It seems that way.”
    “Hmm.” Lysander scratched his chin thinking. “Other therapists accept this idea of yours? I could check the net, you know.”
    Avery laughed again, this time a full and hardy laugh. “Some do,” he said. “But not all. I’m only here to release the pressure. I’m not here to make you a perfect person or to change who you are. I’m just here to help you identify what caused your attack.” Avery leaned back and rested his hands on the plush arms of the chair. “Once we do that, my man, we may have it beat.”
    Now it was Lysander’s turn to swallow a laugh. “My man.”
    Jack, the sixties just called. They want you back .
    He really was from the sixties, Lysander thought, remembering how he had found Avery in the garage as he arrived, working on his 1966 MGB. Blood red with white racing stripes. Lysander had run a hand along the car’s smooth surface, admiring the dedication it must have taken to nurse the dying beast back to health.
    “I’m gonna put you under hypnosis,” Avery was saying.
    Lysander was pulled right out of himself. “You’re gonna put me in a trance and then tell me I’m a chicken?”
    But no sooner had he asked the question than another, more serious concern occurred to him.
    “What if I can’t wake up again? What happens then?”
    Avery was rubbing his hands on his knee, fighting a smile. “That doesn’t happen. Can’t happen. But let’s say I put you in trance and then I keel over with a heart attack. Eventually you would fall into a deep sleep and then wake up feeling fine.”
    “Would I know what was going on?”
    “You would have some awareness of events going on around you, yes. If I coughed, for instance, or if there was a fire—” Avery stopped short. “Like I said, I’m here and the process is perfectly safe.”
    Avery leaned forward. His voice was deep and soothing, and Lysander couldn’t help but feel his muscles letting go. “Let me show you what I mean,” Avery said.
    As Avery started talking Lysander glanced over his shoulder, wondering idly if the man had ever been married. He hadn’t seen a wedding ring. But his eyes began to grow heavier, his mind spinning in slow circles, and it soon took some effort to follow Avery’s gentle instructions. He was to walk along a flowing stream, Avery had said, and watch the water as it sparkled with bits of sunlight. The water was so serene and peaceful.
    Fifteen minutes later, Lysander could barely feel his arms and legs. Within thirty he had reached the deepest parts of his subconscious.
    In his mind’s eye, Lysander could see someone up ahead shrouded