Free Mystical Paths by Susan Howatch Page A

I sidled to the buffet under cover of darkness and grabbed another of the sausage rolls. As I did so Dinkie suggested that we should all dance on the Cathedral roof and for some reason everyone seemed to think this was a brilliant idea. Funny the whims people get when they’re drunk. But maybe the concept of polluting a numinous place by idiotic behaviour just has no meaning for non-psychics. For me it would have been like throwing paint at the Mona Lisa.
    Deciding it was time to leave I stuffed the last two sausage rolls into my pocket to keep me happy on the journey home, but unfortunately the lights were turned on again before I could complete this manoeuvre and my friend Venetia saw the second roll vanish. Immediately I felt embarrassed by my brazen greed, but almost before I had time to register her smile of sympathy my embarrassment was wiped out as the horror began.
    The power was switched on in my psyche.
    Knowledge began to be hammered directly into my brain, but this wasn’t just a brief rattle of the computer keyboard followed by a quick flash on the blank screen. This was the long slam which seemed as if it would never end, this was the keyboard pounding so fast that the keys were no more than a blur to the psychic eye, this was the big print-out which cascaded all over my mind.
    The shock was so profound that I almost lost consciousness. I could neither move nor speak. I could barely breathe. The Dark began to pour into the room.
    III
    Sometimes foreknowledge is known as ‘second sight’, but when I suffered such attacks they were never visual. In that respect I was less gifted than my father. As a psychic I experienced two kinds of special knowledge: one was the quick flash which could sometimes be written off as intuition; the other, much rarer, was the long slam which bore no more resemblance to intuition than an elephant bears to a mouse. Such episodes had a peculiarly vile, lucid quality which, unlike intuition, seemed to leave no room for ambiguity. This instant, uncontrollable destruction of all the shadows we depend on to shield us from searing truths was horrific. No wonder I nearly passed out with shock. It was as if I’d been sitting in an armchair by a cosy fireside and had been brutally blasted into Belsen.
    Many people think it must be fun to be a psychic. Fun!
    When as a small child I first experienced the long slam I screamed non-stop until my father arrived to stitch up my shredded little psyche. Fortunately my mother was out at the estate office, but poor Nanny thought I’d gone mad. My father held me in his arms for a long time but eventually he slipped his pectoral cross into my hand and told me I was safe.
    ‘No demon can withstand the power of Christ,’ he said, and when he spoke the name of the greatest exorcist who had ever lived, the image of the Light captured my brain and the Dark was conquered.
    Much later in my life I read about autistic children. What interested me was that some doctors believed these children could be helped by being held tightly for long periods by a loving adult. I was never autistic; nor were all my profound psychic experiences equally terrifying. But they could be horrific enough to produce a reaction akin to mental illness, and never, by any stretch of the imagination, could they be described as ‘fun’.
    As soon as the Dark began to pour into the room that night at Marina’s party, I was not only physically immobilised but mentally booted on to a plane not normally accessible to the conscious mind. I looked around the room and all the objects in it seemed to be hammering out messages to me, they were all speaking, although of course there were no words, no sounds, but I stood in that room, Lady Markhampton’s drawing-room it was, the drawing-room of that house called the Chantry which stood in the Cathedral Close, and because all the objects there were vibrating with information I experienced her essence quite clearly; the image was slapped on the