Up until recently, I have led a fairly unremarkable life. I worked at an uninteresting but decently well paying office job, which allowed me to pay my half of the rent for a two bedroom apartment which I share with a roommate who I almost never talk to. I was dimly spiritual in the way that many of my generation are, paying vague lip service to a God I almost believed in, but largely being too preoccupied with the mundanity of day to day existence to deal with any thoughts of the supernatural.
About two weeks ago, however, I became consumed with an almost palpable feeling of intense dread. No matter the situation, day or night, whether I was at work or at home, I felt utterly terrified that something horrible was about to happen. I found myself studying the faces of strangers, as if I was looking for someone who I was trying to avoid. I’d jump at unexpected sounds, drink coffee at night to keep myself from falling asleep, and frequently found myself looking over my shoulder.
It was during my monthly brunch with my mother when I finally admitted that something was wrong. She had noticed the intense bags under my eyes, the way I twitched whenever I saw someone pass by our table in the cafe, and the difficulty I was having in maintaining any semblance of conversation.
“Are you alright Margaret?” she asked, concern causing her brow to wrinkle slightly, “is there something wrong?”
I nearly broke down crying on the spot, but managed to hold it together somewhat. I explained to her how I had been feeling recently, and how frustrating it was to feel scared all the time for no reason at all. My mother listened attentively, nodding at the appropriate pauses to gently encourage me to continue. When I had finished, tears welling in my eyes from the relief of being able to express these feelings, she squeezed my hand gently and suggested that I visit a friend of hers who practiced hypnosis.
Now, my mother has always been into a lot of New Age mysticism and alternative medicine. After my father died, she became even more interested in the subject, getting into crystal healing, astrology, that sort of thing. It never seemed too harmful, aside from the handful of times where I had to talk her out of believing borderline antivaxxer propaganda, but it was definitely something I’d never really had much patience for. When she suggested that my problems may be due to some repressed memories that could be restored via hypnosis, I was understandably a bit dubious as to its legitimacy.
I expressed my protestations to my mother, but she was insistent that the source of my problems could be rooted out and dealt with by this hypnotherapist, Dr. Moritz, and she was willing to pay for my appointment to boot. She insisted that he had helped her a lot in the years since my father passed away, and that it was all based on sound science. This was, of course, highly doubtful, but in the end I begrudgingly agreed, if only to avoid making a scene. She wrote down an address and a phone number and told me to give him a call as soon as possible to set up an appointment.
After I got home I was tempted to toss the scrap of paper into the trash, but something made me call that number, some instinct which I wasn’t able to explain. It felt as though I had to call, that if the same scene played out a million times in a million different universes, each time I would find myself dialing that number.
I figured from the way my mother had referred to Dr. Mortiz as her “friend” that he was going to be some aged hippie operating out of a trailer park which reeked of cannabis, but I was pleasantly surprised to be greeted on the phone by a professional sounding receptionist. She managed to slot me in for an appointment the very next day.
I arrived at Dr. Mortiz’s office in the late morning feeling bedraggled and exhausted. I hadn’t been able to get a wink of sleep the previous night, so great was the dread which increasingly seemed to permeate every moment of my continued existence. I gave my name to the receptionist who smiled at me warmly before informing me that the good doctor would be with me in a few minutes. I slumped down into one of the empty waiting room chairs and stared blankly at the floor, too tired to indulge my paranoid instinct to inspect the faces of everyone around me.
In the way typical of psychiatric professionals, Dr. Moritz took significantly more time than expected to call me into his office, perhaps 15-20 minutes. I had practically dozed off at that point from my utter exhaustion, but the sound of my name dug me out of my stupor.
“Margaret Jackson?”
I looked towards the speaker, idiotically raising my hand as if I were a student in an early morning high school math class silently announcing my existence when the teacher called my name while taking attendance. The man who had spoken my name was short, perhaps 5’6” or so, with thinning gray hair, a round bespectacled face, dark brown skin, and a tweed jacket. He smiled as he noticed my hand raised, gesturing at me to follow him as he opened the door which led back towards the exam room.
I got up laboriously and followed the doctor, going down a short corridor before passing through another door, behind which was warmly decorated room fitted with two chairs and a couch like one would expect to see in the office of Sigmund Freud. The walls were covered with various simple but pleasant paintings, mainly idyllic natural landscapes and small cottages. Near the couch was a bookshelf containing a number of children’s books and small knick knacks, such as stuffed animals, toy cars, etc. A record player sat in the corner of the room.
“You treat children as well?” I asked, struggling somewhat to wake myself up as I observed a small plush skunk sitting next to a copy of The Phantom Tollbooth.
“On occasion”, he replied, sitting down in one of the two chairs, “but the books and toys aren’t just for them. In certain cases, when the patient’s trauma is buried deep enough, it may be helpful for the patient to temporarily regress to a younger state of mind. Objects such as these can assist in the process. Please, sit down.” He gestured towards the other chair as he fished a notepad out of his coat pocket.
I did as he instructed, trying my best to sit up straight despite my fatigue.
“So”, Dr. Moritz began, clicking his ballpoint pen, “what exactly has brought you into my office today Ms. Jackson?”
I explained the underlying sense of dread which had begun to permeate every single part of my life, and how I was barely able to function. I told him about my obsessive need to check the faces of strangers, as though I were keeping an eye out for someone who wanted to hurt me, about how I was unable to sleep at night due to the paranoia that something horrible was going to happen. Most of all I expressed how confused I was, at how utterly without cause my whole ordeal seemed. Through it all Dr. Moritz listened and nodded, jotting things down on his little notepad.
When I had finished, he took off his glasses and folded them into his pocket, leaning forward to look at me in the eyes. “Well Margaret, I think you were absolutely correct in coming to me with this problem. Your symptoms are very consistent with some form of repressed trauma, possibly something which happened in your childhood that you are just now beginning to recollect. However, while your subconscious mind seems to remember this event, your conscious mind does not. What I’d like to do, with your permission of course, is to place you into a hypnotic state. While in this state, I will ask you some questions which may help in unlocking the repressed memories which have been causing you so much distress.”
I agreed, and Dr. Moritz instructed me to lie face up on the couch. He dimmed the lights slightly, and turned on the record player. It wasn’t really music that was played, but a gentle droning sound, a sort of mindless white noise that lent the room an almost otherworldly energy. It was comforting, in a strange way, somehow relaxing.
I’m not sure exactly what I expected the process of hypnosis to be like. I knew it wasn’t likely that Dr. Moritz would swing a pocket watch in front of my eyes like a pendulum and tell me “You are getting very sleepy”, or that he would have me stare into a rotating spiral, but nonetheless what wound up occurring was still somewhat surprising.
It just felt like he was talking to me at first, he made a series of rather repetitive, calming statements and told me to follow his pen with my eyes, to focus only on the pen. In the beginning it felt rather silly to be quite honest, and I struggled to keep myself from from giggling at how ridiculous everything seemed. However, as time passed, I began to feel more and more relaxed, my inhibitions waning, all mental barriers breaking down. My shoulders, which had been tense for the past week or so, loosened, and my breathing became regular and rhythmic. I didn’t fall asleep, but I felt as though I were just on the edge of consciousness, that if Dr. Moritz told me to I would instantly pass into the deepest slumber I’d ever experienced.
Once I had reached this point, Dr. Moritz began to ask me some questions.
“Margaret, why are you afraid?”
“Something terrible is about to happen”, I replied, my conscious mind not processing the words I had spoken.
“Why do you believe that something terrible is going to happen?”
“It has happened before. Many, many times before.”
He paused at this, and I barely heard the faint scratching of his pen over the droning from the record player “Now, Margaret, I’d like you to tell me something, as well as remember something for me. Can you try and do that?”
I nodded.
“I want you to tell me what you are worried is going to happen, and to remember when it happened before.”
“I am going to die”, I said, before everything went black.
-–
I was no longer laying down in Dr. Moritz’s office in the United States of America in the year 2023. I was no longer Margaret Jackson, 27 year old office worker.
I stood in a field of grass at sunset, in one hand I clutched a spear tipped with a flint point. I was clad in crudely tanned skins, and my hair was matted and filthy. My body felt different from normal, different proportions, different structures. I was a man. I had always been a man. I had no name. Language wouldn’t be invented for thousands of years.
I surveyed the field, searching for my quarry. I had been pursuing the deer for hours, and expected that it should soon tire so I could sweep in for the kill. My tribe would eat well when I brought home the fruits of my labor, and the skin would be a useful source of material to fabricate new clothes to replace those that had become worn over time.
I heard the crack of a stick breaking underfoot behind me. I turned around to see what was there. The plains held more predators than just me.
Standing before me was a man, perhaps two heads taller than I was. He was naked, save for a loincloth, and carried in one hand a crude stone axe, with a handle made from a human femur. His face was hard, jagged, as though it had been carved from rock. Greasy black hair fell down to his shoulders in matted clumps. His eyes glinted like shards of obsidian in the dying sunlight.
I raised my spear reflexively, unsure of what the stranger wanted. He began to walk forward. I grunted something out in the crude half-words of this time before time began, a warning perhaps, but he paid it no mind. I thrust toward the man with the spear and he grabbed it with his free hand, snapping the shaft with a single swift movement.
I dropped the ruined remains of the spear and tried to flee, running like mad through the primeval wilderness. However, in the fading light, it wasn’t long before I tripped and fell to the ground, my ankle twisting painfully. I cried out to the sky in agony, and moments later, the tall man with the long dark hair stood over me, gripping the axe in both hands now. He snarled, baring his crooked, overcrowded teeth, before he buried the blade deep into my skull, and I knew no more.
-–
I was no longer a prehistoric hunter, senselessly murdered in a field at sunset.
Now I sat near a tent in the desert sand, resting after a long day’s work. My name was Nezemab, and I was a workman who had been employed at the construction of the Great Pyramid. By modern reckoning, the year was somewhere around 2570 BC.
The job was almost complete, and I sat contemplating the enormous structure that had been under construction for as long as I could remember, staring up at how it seemed almost to touch the stars themselves. I was one of thousands who had worked on it over the years, but still I felt a sort of pride swelling in my chest as I looked upon my handiwork.
My fellows were all asleep, but recently I had been having difficulty getting much rest at night, regardless of how exhausted I was from my labors. I kept having the nagging suspicion that something was coming, something terrible which had happened at some point before, but I couldn’t remember what.
I decided to go for a walk to clear my head, thinking that perhaps the night air could do me some good. I wandered out into the night, away from the countless tents in the workers’ camp and into the vastness of the desert. It was a full moon, so I had a little light to see by, but still I had to walk slow to avoid tripping, or stepping on one of the many scorpions which came out when the sun went down.
The walk was pleasant, and the moon shone beautifully down upon the dunes, the stars twinkling in the sky like a million lanterns, but still I felt my heart weighed down with dread and paranoia. My eyes wandered over a tall dune in the distance, and there I spotted a figure standing in the moonlight, staring back at me. It was too far to get a clear view of whoever it was, but my blood ran cold with recognition, even from this far away. My mind flashed with images of a man with greasy black hair and a stone axe. After a moment of our eye contact, the figure began to sprint towards me with almost unnatural speed. I screamed and began to run back towards camp, crying out for help.
As I approached the tents I could see people begin to stir, roused by my shrieks of terror and panic. I waved my arms wildly, desperately trying to get their attention. I turned my head around to see how close my pursuer had gotten, and began to sob with utter horror as I saw that he had already halved the distance.
I was just about to reach the outskirts of the camp when I felt a sharp blade pass through my leg and I fell to the ground in agony, clutching at the wound. Standing over me, wearing a ragged cloak to protect from the harsh desert wind, stood the man with the greasy black hair and crooked, sharp teeth. In his hand he held a bloodied khopesh, and he raised it to strike the killing blow.
In my final moments, I cried out the words “I know you! This has happened before!”, but it was too late. The blade severed my neck, and my decapitated head fell to the sand, blood spurting from my twitching corpse. As my vision rapidly faded, I heard the man speak, in a low gravelly voice that sounded like a knife being dragged across stone.
“Pray it does not happen again.”
-–
I was no longer Nezemab the workman, my headless body spurting blood onto the desert sand.
Once again I was a woman, and once again I spoke English, though of an archaic type. My name was Isabel Waite. It was the year 1613, and I had been found guilty of witchcraft.
I was dragged through the street in a yoke, the crowd jeering and shouting, pelting me with rotten vegetables and clumps of mud. Chants of “Burn the witch! Burn the Witch!” rose up from the onlookers as I was led into the town square, where a stake had been set in the ground, surrounded on all sides my kindling. Someone splashed a bucket of oil onto the scraps of wood.
I cried out incoherently, too terrified to eloquently express my need to escape, unable to protest that I was innocent of the allegations set against me. But a child had gone missing, and someone had to be blamed. Before the baby’s disappearance I was seen as a healer, often visited by the townsfolk to treat their wounds and ailments, but now I was an object of hatred and revulsion. There was no staying their hand.
And yet, even before the missing child, I had been filled with a terror I could not explain. I had never been a soothsayer, never had I before prognosticated anything. But even a week before the infant had disappeared, I knew in my heart of hearts than one day soon, my life would come to an abrupt and painful end.
I was released from the yoke, only to be bound painfully tight to the stake, my hands and waist wrapped in a coil of rope. From my vantage atop the mound of oil soaked wood, I could see men and women who had once been my friends cheer on my coming incineration. Their faces were filled with hatred and rage, all sympathy long since replaced with a burning need for vengeance.
“Burn the witch! Burn the witch!” they cried louder and louder as the final knots were tied and I was securely fastened to the stake. The calls for my demise were silenced as a man dressed all in black stepped forth, unrolling a scroll upon which was written my death warrant.
“Isabel Waite, thou hath been found guilty of sorcery and the murder of young Henry Snowdon. By the power invested in me by his majesty King James, I hereby sentence thee to death by immolation. As thy body burns, may the sins committed during thy pact with Satan be cleansed. So sayeth the gospel, thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. May God have mercy upon thy immortal soul” spoke the witchfinder, rerolling the scroll and pocketing it. He stepped back into the crowd, and the calls for my destruction renewed. “Burn the witch! Burn the witch!”
I screamed and gibbered, begging to be saved, crying out to a God who had forsaken me. From the crowd stepped forth a man holding a lit torch, and I shrieked upon seeing his face. In that instant my mind was flooded with memories of ancient Egypt and prehistory, of prior lives ended before their due time. Obsidian black eyes reflected the light of the fire, greasy black hair cascading down his shoulders. His lips were curled back in a snarl, exposing his jagged, crooked teeth.
“What doth thou want?” I cried at the man who had already killed me twice.
“Surely thou hath realized by now?” snarled my murderer, before tossing the torch atop the kindling, and thus this life ended in burning agony.
-–
I was no longer Isabel Waite, condemned to death for a crime she didn’t commit before a mob of frightened, ignorant townsfolk.
Now I was Bertha, a Frankish peasant in the year 856. My village was in the middle of a viking raid.
I had warned by neighbors that doom was coming, that I felt in my very bones that we must flee, and soon, but they laughed at me, believing my words of warning to be the delusions of a mad old woman. Their laughter died on their lips when the longboats were seen off the coast, bristling with warriors intent on slaughter and pillaging.
The invaders came with axes and swords and torches, looting and murdering to their hearts’ content. I sat and looked down at the chaos from the hill atop which my hut stood, in awe at the orgy of bloody violence which spread out before me. I watched houses burned, men and women carried away to be taken as slaves, and valuables carted off to fill the coffers of some distant jarl.
Smoke from the ruination of my village streamed up into the air, and I watched ashes flutter past like leaves in an autumn breeze. My gaze lowered and I saw a lone viking begin ascending up the hill, battleaxe in hand. I waited for him, not moving from my seat. I was old, and did not fear death.
Eventually the man reached me, pausing as he looked down at my slight form. He towered over me, and when he took off his helmet I couldn’t help but gasp a little in recognition. For the third time now, my mind suddenly remembered the ends of my previous lives.
“This doesn’t make sense”, I muttered, staring into his malicious, obsidian eyes as he began to raise up his weapon, “the last time you killed me it was the year 1613, that is over seven centuries in the future. How can you be here now? How can I remember?”
He stayed his hand for a moment, replying, “The linear passage of time is an illusion, one invented by the human mind to understand the world around us. It has no reality.”
My attempt to think of a followup question was the second to last thing to pass through my brain, followed in quick succession by my murderer’s axe.
-–
I won’t bore you with the more detailed intricacies of my dozens of other lives. Instead I will attempt to summarize, as best as I can, the prolonged and disjointed conversation I have had with the dark haired man with the crooked teeth and obsidian eyes over the millennia.
I am a cowboy in a Californian saloon, the year is 1876.
“Are you the Devil?” I ask
“The Devil is just a myth, made up to frighten children and fools into submission. I am real.” A hunk of lead ends this life an instant later.
I am a peasant in feudal Japan, the year is 1285.
“How do you keep finding me?” I ask.
“I just know”, he replies, before bisecting me with his blade.
I am a French partisan, captured by the SS. It is the year 1943.
“I’ll do anything you ask, just please don’t hurt me!” I shout, trying to reason with him.
“Stay dead this time”, he demands, executing me with a pistol.
I am a scavenger in the ruins of what was once a great city, in the year 2567.
“Will you ever stop?” I scream, my leg caught in rubble.
“I will stop when my job is finished”, he snarls, snapping my neck with his bare hands.
There were other lives, countless others, but eventually he stopped letting me ask any more questions. He began to seem increasingly frustrated, angry that I simply wouldn’t stay dead. His face had become contorted with horrible, primal rage, and he would often scream with incoherent madness before ripping me to pieces like a rabid animal. I think he has long since gone mad with his hatred for me, an eternal Ahab hunting a whale which steadfastly refuses to die.
Sometimes, when I had the chance to do so, I would choose to kill myself rather than give him the satisfaction of ending my life for me. Sometimes I would try to fight back. It never made much difference though. Whether I put a bullet between his eyes or a dagger through his heart, it wouldn’t stop him. Whatever drove him ever onward through the bleak infinity of time to end my seemingly endless lives, his will was stronger than mere flesh. I gave up on trying to kill my seemingly unstoppable pursuer after I watched him walk naked across the surface of the moon to beat me to death with a rock.
-–
I snapped out of my trance and promptly sat up from the couch before vomiting onto the floor from the whiplash of returning to this lifetime. Dr. Moritz leapt out of his chair in surprise and quickly paged for someone to come clean up the mess.
I began to walk out the door, and he tried to call me back. “Wait, Ms. Jackson, just a moment!” he called, frantically trying to get my attention. I simply walked out of the clinic and drove home.
I know he is coming soon. I know there is nothing I can do to stop him. Some of my past lives had the mental fortitude to choose death on their own terms, but I personally cannot conceive of doing so. So instead, I rest, sitting at home in comfort, patiently awaiting my murderer. I do hope my roommate is away when I am killed, I’d hate to traumatize them.
Maybe after this time he’ll give up.
-–
The above note was recovered from the apartment of Margaret Jackson on June 11th, 2023, after her mangled body was found by her roommate. Witnesses claim that they saw a man with long dark hair and crooked teeth enter the building earlier that day, but none recall seeing him leave.