Notorious - John Jones (read after .TXT) 📗

pleased to see your posting on the internet regarding regression. I felt I had to write to you. I have to confide in someone. I don’t think anybody will believe me. So I write to you, hoping that you can explain the meaning of what happened to me. I know and understand the techniques of regression. It’s a serious interest I have. I wanted to find out who I used to be, so I used the techniques on myself. I set up a video recorder to film what happened, but I ended up kicking the tripod and it fell over. Now it needs fixing. What I found out was that I was around in the seventeenth century. The visions I had were vivid. They were real. I was looking at me in my past. I saw myself digging. I was removing bodies. I knew, I don’t know how I knew, but they were for research. Doctors paid me. That was how I made money. It never paid well though, so I started murdering. It didn’t matter how they died. Drowning, strangling, beating, burning, stabbing. All I know is that I took to it like a bird takes to the air. I could feel myself enjoying it. I made more money then. Then after a while, a lynch mob found me, strung me up out in a field and burned me. I could feel the flames, and when I woke, I was much hotter. My temperature had risen. Please help.

 

I hope to hear from you soon.

Yours.

Ribbet’.

 

Curio frowned. What exactly was he asking? OK, he was a murderer. Did he want to go back to the life before that and change his destiny, so that the following existence would not yield psychopathic tendencies? He didn’t have an answer, but decided to reply as best he could:

‘Dear Ribbet,

I appreciate your letter. You must not be an amateur in order to regress yourself, so you obviously know what you’re doing. Perhaps you should confirm that it is true that you were a murderer by looking, basically, in the history books. There would probably have been some reference to it. Also, you could try regressing yourself again, and if you see the same vision, then that should confirm it. Yet, you may regress to other lives as well. There is no telling with it. Once you go back, it’s down to chance which life you see.

 

I would be interested to know if you do this. I think it’s impossible to change anything that’s happened. Basically, you would have to alter time, and that, I believe is impossible. You enter the realms of fantasy down that route. You cannot change the past. However, that’s my opinion. Maybe it is possible. Who am I to say it isn’t? Regards. Curio.’

 

He clicked ‘send’, and sat back, satisfied. He read the other forum replies, and found two to be of value, but one was from ‘Abe’, who seemed quite sceptical:

 

‘Curio, you can’t expect common, decent folk to just believe something on hearsay. There is a lot of what you would call ‘evidence’ that cannot stand up to scrutiny. That goes for all things paranormal. If you look at them closely, then the proof that they offer is thin, insubstantial, and built on quicksand. I know you, Curio. I’ve heard you on the radio. You talk drivel. Why don’t you subject yourself to scrutiny, or become silent until you know what you’re talking about’.

 

Curio folded his arms and shook his head. Cheeky git, he thought. He typed hard on the keyboard:

 

‘Abe’, you don’t think I know what I’m talking about? Well chew on this. The police have called me in six times to telepathically find missing persons. I will admit I’ve got it wrong twice. The other four, I’ve got it spot on. Is that chance, considering how big Britain is? They could have been anywhere, but I got them right. Also, four times in a row. Now is that not proof that I have some ability? and if I have some ability, then that surely proves that telepathy is real. It is fact”. Curio sent that message, and spent the next few minutes reading other posts, and the latest newsletter. He went back to the forum and found that ‘Abe’ had replied.

 

‘OK, that is good, but it cannot be called proof. Not yet anyway. You need a few more hits to reduce the laws of chance and possibly consider the fact that you may indeed have some ability that could be deemed ‘psychic’. If you provide further evidence of your ‘powers’, then maybe I’ll start believing. Until then, goodbye’.

 

Surely that was proof enough, he thought. Nevermind. He shut everything down and turned the computer off. Soon, the room was plunged into darkness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

10

 

 

Malcolm stared at the bubbles racing to the top of his lager as if he’d never seen them before, like a curious cat watching a fly. He was sat with Tom in the corner of ‘The Silver Wheels’, onto his third pint of lager. It didn’t help bring him closer to any answers. It didn’t help with anything, but he needed to do something, and to speak to someone.

 

Tom had listened, had understood, but could not give any explanation for his predicament. He just sipped his bitter, feeling rather helpless.

“I can’t just do nothing,” said Malcolm. “Or else I’ll never know. Anyway, enough about me. What about you? What have you been up to? Where have you been hacking now?”. Tom looked around him, deciding whether or not he was in earshot of anybody else. The pub was approximately half full, and there was sufficient noise for Tom to keep his voice heard by Malcolm alone.

“If I tell you, you’ve got to promise not to breathe a word”.

“I’ve got quite enough to worry about, thank you. I hardly think that whatever you’re up to will stop me finding out why my Dad went mental”. Tom was quiet for a few moments, then leaned in closer to Malcolm.

“My source of income is fine. No detections. Well, did you know that there is a new company opening up just off the M53. Ryvak centre for medical research?’. Malcolm shrugged.

“You’re not going to hack into them?” he said, his tone rather loud. Tom’s eyes became shifty, his face turned a light scarlet, and he quickly scanned the pub for anybody who might have heard. Nobody had.

“Shhh!” he said, looking back. “Keep your voice down”.

“Come on, be realistic,” said Malcolm, “You can’t steal money from them. It’s like stealing from a charity”. Tom shook his head.

“No. It’s not. They’re going to experiment on animals, and use them for nothing that can’t be done without them. Why can’t they experiment on prisoners or volunteers? ‘cos that’s too much like common sense”.

“I thought they stopped testing cosmetics. Isn’t that banned now?”

“You think they’re going to stop that if it makes a profit? They test on the voiceless. Animals cannot protest, say no, tell the scientists to fuck off and stick the needles in their throats. You think they care about animals? Well trust me, I guarantee that they don’t.

They’re subjects. Objects to be probed and examined. Cannon fodder. Barcodes. Statistics. I don’t need to go anywhere near the place to bring it crashing down”.

“Crashing down?”.

“Well not literally. I mean they’ll start losing money, but I won’t be taking it. It will actually be going nowhere”.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll tell you when I start doing it”.

“How tempting is it to just go there and burn it down?” Malcolm asked.

“Very,” Tom said. “It’s tempting to just go there with a machine gun, walk around the place killing everyone, rescue the animals, then burn the damn place down so it can’t be used again. Still, what I intend to do will have a similar effect, but no-one will die. No animals should come to any harm, ‘cos harm is exactly what they will come to if they go in there. So I’m going to harm them right where it hurts the most”. There was a few moments silence.

“I think it’s my round,” he said, standing up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

11

 

 

The library on campus was the type where the air itself was very still, where every sound was amplified, even down to the turning of pages by students who looked lost in their work, with open textbooks spread around them, along with rulers, rubbers, pens, calculators.

 

They were probably those who were fast approaching a deadline, so made a beeline for the library to scribble down what they could. Malcolm sometimes wondered if half of them cheated by copying out of books. Maybe they did. He was often tempted himself to do so. He was here to see a student whom he did not particularly know, but was on nodding terms with.

 

The type of person whom he would acknowledge passing by in a corridor, but would have nothing else to say in other situations, such as in a lift, or a queue. This time, however, Malcolm was seeking him out because he was a student of psychology with criminology, studying for a first degree with honours, and was coming to the end of his last year. In a few months time, he would either have a career in it, or would be stacking shelves in a supermarket.

 

Malcolm eventually found him upstairs, unsurprisingly in the psychology section. He had a table to himself in the corner, and Malcolm hovered near the rail overlooking the tables below. Ryan Vaughn was 24, and was one of those students who looked much older. This was self imposed primarily because he was the type of student who could easily grow a moustache and beard within a few days.

 

In every class, along with the stereotypical skinny kid, overweight kid, shy kid, loud kid, big-eared kid, freckle-faced kid, handsome kid, buck-toothed kid, there was always the kid who would display none of these, but would be the first to grow a moustache, and they would feel like the more mature pupil, the one who had taken further steps into adulthood.

 

Most of the kids would look up to their elders, and emulate them by trying smoking and alcohol at young ages, but then in an ironic turnaround, when they reached adulthood, when they became ‘mature’, they longed for their childhood and wasted youth. It was basically a case of ‘If only..!’ If only I’d done this, if only I’d done that. Everybody to some degree had some regrets that could not be rectified. Malcolm would probably regret not talking to the girl he is attracted to around the university.

 

Should she vanish altogether, then no scientist on the planet could help him reverse time. If only, it seemed was a bane on the conscience when the irreversible decision was wrong. However, for Ryan, making himself look older may prove in the long term to be a mistake. An integral part in shaping the persona of the adult is in the decisions made in youth. A teenager prone to hostility sees an old woman carrying a purse. His decision is made right there. His life could alter based on that choice. If he steals the purse, then maybe he is caught and sent to a place where there are others like him, and he is therefore influenced by them. Should he not steal the purse, his life would take a separate path. The choices Ryan, and indeed Malcolm, had made, had led them here, to this moment, and any regrets they had are accepted, and not entirely forgotten, but sometimes reluctantly remembered.

 

Ryan had a few psychology books around him, but he was reading a newspaper, the rustle of the pages amplified. Malcolm wondered if the books were simply for show, for some extra