I asked the maitre'd to notify Room Service to send a pitcher of iced tea up to my room before we left the restaurant. To my surprise, we found a waiter just pulling up to a stop outside my room as we got off the elevator; I tipped him generously for the prompt service and we took the cart inside ourselves. I set the pitcher and glasses and the little bowls of lemon wedges and sugar out on the little table across from the bed, poured a glass for each of us, then dug out the four books on the paranormal that Tommy had given me and put them down at the center of the table.

We settled across from one another, doctored our teas to our respective tastes, and then got down to the business at hand. Wish picked up her journal and cocked her head at me inquiringly. "Before I begin reading, do you have any specific questions?"

I sighed. There was one question that had been nagging at me ever since I'd first met her and Tommy; surely Wish was the person to ask...wasn't she? "Well, yes. I've asked both Tommy and your father about this, and neither one will come clean with me about why you've all been calling me 'Alex'. Is it really just because it's a play on words with my last name? I keep getting a feeling that there's more to it than that---a lot more."

She sipped at her tea thoughtfully. "This is good; you listen to your intuitions, and you interpret them with an admirable degree of accuracy. I've met people with similar Gifts who never learned how to do that properly. You're right, though; there is a reason for that, and I apologize for their evasiveness. When I tell you---"

My stomach tensed up in anticipation. Maybe I was about to get some straight answers at last. I hoped.

"---I can only hope you'll understand. It may sound flaky to you---New Age---out-there...but no matter how odd it might sound to you, Tommy, Dad and I all accept it as our truth. One of the biggest problems with life is that truth is strictly a subjective phenomenon; what one person perceives as absolute truth, another may see as ambiguous, at best---or an outright falsehood. In the final analysis, truth is what you accept as fact...and we've all learned, along the way, that what we accept as truth and fact may not be perceived as either truth or fact by anyone else. All we can do is present our beliefs, and see what others do with them. This is what I'm up against here: What I'm about to tell you is truth to everyone in our group...but it may not be something you can handle. I can only tell you what I have to tell you, and hope that it doesn't backfire and turn you off completely."

That didn't sound very promising, but for some reason it didn't particularly trouble me. I sipped at my own tea to buy a little time while I tried to get my thoughts in order.

I finally just decided to be honest about it all and told her, "Look---weird's starting to become a regular feature of my life...and since I'm having trouble believing you're going to start yanking me around, why don't you just give it to me straight and let me decide for myself?"

I was a little surprised that she smiled at that. She sipped at her tea again, pursed her lips thoughtfully, and finally murmured, "I'll go for that. Okay, this is the short and sweet of it: To begin with, Dad is a hypnotist."

I nodded. "I know. He told us all about that at the lecture in Malibu. He also covered hypnotic past-life regressions, as well as the phenomenon of parallel-life and future-life incidents occurring during these regressions."

She nodded soberly. "Okay---that's good. Well, a few years ago I started having a long series of very clear, very intense dreams; the central figure was a blond man. The odd thing about the dreams was that I never saw his face, yet in the dreams we were deliriously happy. I asked Dad to help me find out who he was...so, one day we both settled down in his office and he put me under and began regressing me, trying to find out where this blond man fit into my deep past."

She didn't merely sip at her tea this time; this pull classified more as a gulp. Whatever she was about to tell me was upsetting her, big time. "I found myself living back in nineteenth century Great Britain; my name then was Bridget Stevenson, and I was married to the person we both know in this lifetime as Tommy---although in that lifetime his name was Dennis. Dad was there too---but in that lifetime he was my uncle...a minor nobleman named Sir Alfred Vaughn. My parents, my sister, and both my brothers had died of an influenza that had decimated half the shire, and Uncle Alfred and Aunt Millicent took me in and raised me as their own daughter."

Her eyes were dark, troubled; I could both see and feel that these memories were tearing at her. "Dennis was killed in a war---or if not a war, at least a big battle of some sort; I don't remember the exact nature of the conflict---those memories are still indistinct, even now, and the pain that goes with them tends to drive me away from the subject when I try to retrieve them. But I do recall this much about the matter: My marriage to Dennis had been an arranged one; there'd been no love involved in it---at least, not at the outset. But Dennis was a good man---surprisingly gentle and caring as men went, in that day and age---and I did eventually grow to love him, in a sense. There was no real passion in our relationship---more like deep friendship and marital duty than anything else. But because of that friendship-love, it hurt terribly when he was killed. Aunt Millicent had died of a massive stroke just a few days before I'd received the news of Dennis's death; I was already reeling from the shock of her loss---losing Dennis was just more than I could bear in good grace. I retreated into myself and the work of running the household for Uncle Alfred after Aunt Millicent died; I essentially fled from the whole world for more than two years."

She looked almost haunted. I ached to hold her and comfort her, but I could feel that this was something she needed to deal with on her own, so I just stayed where I was and listened. "Then, one soft spring day I met a handsome young blond man named Alex. This relationship was nothing at all like the one I'd had with Dennis; it was deep, and passionate, and intimate. We shared everything; we were so deeply in love that just touching him left me dizzy and disoriented at times. We were to be married---but two months before the wedding, Uncle Alfred and I both died...in a burning barn."

I gulped and waved her to a stop frantically; a subzero chill was plunging down my spine like a runaway horse.

"Wish, stop!"

She looked up, startled out of her darkness and grief, and reached for my hand, all concern. "What is it?"

I squeezed her hand almost convulsively and swallowed, hard. "For as far back as I can remember, I've had dreams about trying to break into a burning barn! I never understood why I was so desperate to get in there..."

I found myself shuddering. "Uh---by the way; whatever happened to Alex?"

She shook her head unhappily. "In that lifetime, I don't know; I died before I could find out. After you die, you almost invariably go through a period of confusion and disorientation; it takes time to clear your awareness enough to be able to go back and look across the boundaries between the physical and etheric worlds and observe events there. By the time I'd recovered enough to be able to go back and look in on the physical world again, the only people I could find living on Uncle Alfred's estate were the farmhands, and they were all busy building a new barn; it was obvious that the fire had completely destroyed the old one."

A look of bitterness swept across her face. "What upset me most was the fact that Lord Swarthmoore was swaggering around the estate, snapping orders to everyone he caught sight of---and they were obeying him almost as if their lives depended on it. He'd seized ownership of Uncle Alfred's lands and properties after we died in that fire."

She shook herself out of the descending mood and turned to other matters: "I found two new graves in the family cemetery. The names on the headstones were mine and Uncle Alfred's. I never did find out what happened to Alex. If he died in the fire too, he must have been buried elsewhere, since he hadn't officially become a member of our family yet."

Then she squeezed my hand pointedly and smiled; it was a sad thing, but it had hope to it, too. "But---at least I know where he is now."

I ventured a smile back, hoping to high heaven that she was right; ever since I'd first seen her in that dream, I'd felt an almost desperate need to meet her, to get together with her...that deep, helpless, overwhelming feeling of true love---and now I was beginning to understand why.

She finally began reading her journal to me; at times she put the book aside and explained the things in it to me in more depth than they'd been written down in the journal---an advantage I wouldn't have had if I'd simply read through the book myself. Being able to ask questions of her when she got to something I didn't quite understand was helpful in unexpected ways; after all, when you write down your experiences, everything you've been through is right there in your mind while you're transferring it to paper---and sometimes the way you put something down seems perfectly clear to you, but to someone else who wasn't there at the event the written words often fall short of explaining things properly.

This is a truth I learned a long, long time ago: What's obvious to you isn't always obvious to someone else.

Wish's tale was a strange one, to say the least, but in light of some of the things that had happened to me in my own life, they weren't so strange that I couldn't accept them as truth. And it took weeks for us to get through her journal, because we could only do it when we were alone in either her room or mine, away from the band---and away from the Three Jerk Stooges. That meant that I had to work and perform in between bouts of reading and explanation, and I found myself chafing more and more at the time I had to spend away from Wish.

But, in the end we got through the journal, and along the way I began reading the other three books Tommy had given me---reading them in earnest, this time; the more I learned from Wish and her experiences, the more I understood what was in the other books---and I developed a driving need to understand these things, because I could feel something coming...something big, and bad, and dangerous...something that had to do with the demon-in-the-flesh that Wish and her loose alliance of psychics knew as Nicodemus Castevet. Forewarned is, after all, forearmed; maybe ignorance is the best defense in some cases, but there are times when ignorance can get you killed, too...and I wanted to be around long enough to really enjoy having met Wish.