The Sister(140)

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, accounting for all the near misses, and given the nature of what I believe was his biggest trauma, there may be some real significance to the fact many of those incidents involved near-drowning.’

‘He told me he hates water, why would he continue to go in when he doesn’t swim. He should stay away from the stuff.’

‘I think he’s doing a sort of penance with his life at stake. He will just take greater and greater risks, until one day his luck runs out. Either way, it amounts to the same thing. He has a death wish. He’ll die because he wants to.’

‘One thing I can’t understand is why no one noticed all this years ago. You'd have thought someone would have been saying, 'Look, we have this accident-prone kid, who has nearly killed himself, what, ten or twelve times, possibly more let’s have a closer look at him.’’

Ryan took a deep breath and sighed. ‘We had so many other kids who needed conventional help, and I didn’t have time for them all. I tried to shortcut things. He was to have been part of something unconventional. In the end, his mother got wind of the plan, and it was taken out of our hands.’

Anderson looked confused. ‘Whose hands, ours? And what unconventional treatment are you talking about?’

‘It doesn’t matter now.’

A glimmer of understanding darkened Anderson’s expression. ‘I can’t believe you did that without consulting me.’





Looking back now with the benefit of further experience, Ryan realised there was another possibility, one he dismissed as ridiculous almost straight away, but then returned to immediately.

Somewhere in Milowski’s notes, he’d written a theory about his grandfather training him. He’d had him guessing cards before he’d turned them over, he would predict what colours the next person coming around the corner would be wearing. He’d taught him to write his dreams down to help remember them, teaching him to make best use of the faculties he believed inherent in everyone. Was it possible the near-death incidents were another form of training, and if that were the case, the question remained, why?





Chapter 121



Ryan screwed his finger knuckles into his closed eyelids in a vain attempt to rejuvenate them. He was no longer sure he could complete reviewing the files in time. It was almost one o' clock. Exhaustion threatened to shut him down. It had been a long, long time since he’d tested himself to such a degree. Come on, Ryan, you can manage another half an hour.

Turning over the next page, he plucked up a long fine hair. Penny had been through the file! He held it up to the light. It floated like gossamer. It wasn’t one of Penny’s. ‘Mm-m?’ he said aloud, and then placed it back between the sheets where he’d found it. An almost invisible bookmark.

It hadn’t taken long to get Milowski talking about the accident, he’d managed to hypnotise him before he realised what was happening.

Using the notes as an 'aide-mémoire', he skimmed through until he reached his record of their second meeting. Milowski seemed to realise how he’d duped him the first time, he was guarded and surly. His memory jogged; he found he remembered the scene well.

‘Bruce, help me to help you. Tell me about these things that disturb you at night.’

Looking for the notes he’d made when he’d regressed him to four years old, and then seven, Ryan turned the next page and found another out of sequence. He flicked his eyes over it. Once more, he found himself lured into the past.





‘So you had this sense of foreboding?’

‘If that means I knew beforehand what was going to happen, then yes.’

‘Mm-m, you already said it came too late for you to warn them, and obviously you feel bad about that.’

The boy looked at the floor, with his hands clasped together and nodded, the fringe of his hair bobbing in the light coming through the window.

‘I want you to think very carefully, back to that exact moment when you first had the sense. Can you remember what it was that made you think something was about to happen?’

Milowski looked up at the psychiatrist. ‘I can’t explain it, I just knew...’ he said, trailing off; face pinched with concentration, pieces of the jigsaw fell into place, suddenly coming together. ‘Wait a minute!’

Ryan leaned in closer.

Milowski told him everything.





Foraging further into the notes, he found Anderson again.

‘I’m dropping him. He takes up too much time I could be spending helping someone who really needs it. He doesn’t need our help; he will outlive both of us.’

‘You don’t know that. If we can’t help him, he’ll die and you know it.’

‘On the contrary, Michael, I have a friend who knows about these things. The best thing we can do is leave him to find his own feet. If he doesn’t, he’ll be back here for help anyway.’

Anderson frowned at him.

‘Michael, don’t worry, I’ll explain it like this to his parents: “Sometimes, we create more problems than we solve by mollycoddling our kids. I believe he broke down under unprecedented pressure. Time truly is sometimes the best healer, and I firmly believe that to be the case here.”’