Free Echoes from My Past Lives (Spell Weaver) by Bill Hiatt Page A

are going to snicker about the idea of a twelve-year-old having a serious relationship, but to me it was serious.
    I heard Eva had come to see me a few times, but I was always asleep or sedated—as in my screaming was getting on the staff’s nerves, so someone decided to dope me up. No, I know that isn’t really what the staff was doing, but sometimes that is the way it felt, particularly when I missed a visit from Eva. On the other hand, who was I kidding? Did I really want Eva to see me having another screaming fit? Probably not. But I did want to see her. Once, hauntingly, I smelled her jasmine perfume when I woke up, and once I found a strand of hair—I’d swear it was her strawberry blonde—lying on the pillow right next to me as if she had been leaning over me, perhaps bending over to give me a kiss. Yeah, I know, probably wishful thinking, but in this nightmare my life had become, it was about the most pleasant thought I had.
    Certainly it was a more pleasant thought than wondering why Dan hadn’t visited me at all. If I had one friend as close as Stan, it was Dan. All three of us had grown up together, so I really couldn’t remember a time when they weren’t both in my life. Unfortunately, they had never been in each other’s lives much—Dan was an athlete and Stan was, well, a mathlete, but when the three of us were together, they at least tolerated each other. Clearly, we would never be the three musketeers, but at least I could count both of them as good friends to me. Well, that’s what I thought until I landed in the hospital. Stan stuck with me, and Dan vanished as if he had been a dream—I woke up, and he was gone.
    I was just about to get Dan and Eva out of my mind and concentrate on Stan, but then I had another “episode,” as one of of the doctors referred to them. You gotta love medical jargon. It can make everything sound so clinical, so neat and tidy—quite a trick when someone is talking about my head getting sandblasted from the inside. No, that image didn’t quite do the experience justice. Think about the famous “chest-buster” scene in Alien , except that instead of an alien bursting out of my chest, I had one ripping its way through my brain and blasting my skull apart.
    No, that doesn’t really capture the experience either. It wasn’t quite that painful, though I could feel all of the experiences I was imagining, and since most of them seemed to involve my death, some of them did inflict pretty heavy pain, but that wasn’t the worst part. Far worse was the feeling that my mind was being torn into tiny pieces by some…well, at the risk of repeating myself, some alien presence. Yeah, the feeling of my brain being invaded by someone or something that did not belong there was definitely the worst part. Ever come home and find that your house had been robbed? Multiply that feeling by a thousand, and you have some small idea of how what was happening to me felt.
    This time I was being strangled. I could feel someone’s cold, callused hands on my throat. Someone had sneaked up on me. I grabbed at his hands, but he was much stronger than I was.
    In earlier experiences I had been too shocked to really focus on the details, but I had promised myself that next time I would try to figure out what was going on. In this case, I had to figure it out quickly. I could feel myself struggling to breathe, feel the hands tightening.
    Think! Think!
    I tried to take in as much detail as I could. Oh, did I mention that these feelings came complete with full visual hallucinations? Anyway, the room I was in was one I had never seen before. Someone rich lived here, though. The furniture was very fancy, antiques mostly. The room was large, very large, like one in a mansion, and the place looked spotless, as if the owner had a large staff to maintain it. Glancing down, I saw my hands still clawing at the killer’s hands. Well, not my hands, but rather those of a much older man. Could I somehow be