CHAPTER TWO
TEACHING THE MIND


Back and forth the old man paced and muttered. The odd time he would stop and just mutter and sometimes he would just pace. But rarely did a moment pass that he did not do one or the other.
Pacing could mean a lot of different things, and as such it did little to describe the mind of the man, but the muttering when heard, now that prescribed to him a certain haunted personality, in which only a professional with a degree proceeded by a Psy- should take an interest.
"Then he speaks," muttered the old man, paused for now in his pacing, "when he speaks, I speak what he speaks. Then, and only then, he speaks again." The man held up his hands as if awaiting instructions. The he mumbled on, his voice rising in volume and echo as he proceeded.
"Then he speaks an action and I do the action. If he says shout! Then I shout aloud what he speaks. If he says strike! Then I strike where he says I should strike." The old man followed this last sentence with a downward stroke, a practiced motion that was fast and controlled. All of this was followed by the first real absence of sound or movement and five long audible breaths.
One- Two- five seconds passed and the old man began again to pace and mutter in much the same manner as before.
"Then he speaks," says the old man, "when he speaks, I speak what he speaks." He continued in this manner. He continues in this manner. He continues in this manner.

***
Half a mile away another student from the DTU was preparing for his first day back. And, even when the reoccurrence of Peter’s horrific nightmare is taken into account, it is a fact that this young man, Terry Giles, was much the worse for ware.
The pills weren't working and Terry was a wreck. He was sitting at his kitchen table with a rolled up cigarette in his mouth, staring at the wall. Terry hadn’t slept at all, well maybe for about five minutes early the night before. But as soon as he'd seen her coming he'd gotten out of that dream sharpish. Terry had devised a method to rouse himself from sleep, he called it scream waking. As soon as his dreams began to head in the wrong direction, more often now than not, he would begin to scream and roar. Then he would yell, holler and bellow in his dream until the volume of his night terrors woke his physical self. It had been working pretty well so far, but it was a solution only to a side effect and did nothing to either identify or remedy his root problem. Terry Giles was loosing his bananas.

Terry stared into his coffee mug. No, no bananas in there. The mug was empty and many-ringed at least six of which were darker and stood out from the others. He recognised these as the points during the night where he had zonked out, but not slept.
During these periods, thankfully, Terry didn't dream. It was closer to zombiism than anything else. Anyone that has experienced a continued period of insomnia will know how it feels and those who haven't shouldn't worry that they're missing something grandterrific. Terry surmised in a thoughtful mood that if the brain was deprived of sleep for long enough the grey matter moulded itself into the shape of a surly school caretaker, climbed out of the head through the ear, the left one, and went off somewhere for a smoke break and maybe a cup of tea.
The moral to this seeming to be “If you’ve not got any work for me to do mate, I be over at Mary’s. Give us a shout when you need me.” The thoughts are frozen, like an old computer pretending to think when it has really just crashed indefinitely. And, according to the rings on Terry’s coffee mug, this had happened at least six times during the student's long wait for the saviour of dawn.
Terry found it amazing to experience what was going on in his mind when the caretaker finally came back from his long lunch. During once such zombiefied phase, Terry had actually managed to climb into one of the kitchen cupboards. This was disturbing enough to a recently roused Terry sitting above the sink, looking out into the kitchen in confusion. But when found that he had thoughtfully emptied the cupboards for that specific purpose and grouped the contents in colour order on the kitchen table? He realised how seriously mad he was becoming and though his actions were bizarre enough, the fact that he could remember doing them but not why, was far more disturbing.
It was only a blessing to Terry that his parents had chosen to spend their summer in France and weren't here to witness his disturbance. The were somewhere La Rochelle where an unfortunate relative, Uncle Joshua, had recently died after finally refurbishing what he had meant to be his retirement home.
Terry always found the humour in it. Poor uncle Joshua, working himself to death in order to prepare a place that he could live out his remaining years.
"I’m going to die here," Uncle Joshua had stated to Terry, "remember that." Terry wondered if his uncle could ever have imagined that this statement would be fulfilled so immediately, or whether he would have liked the French farm so much had he known that it would soon become the sight of his final clutch-and-fall.
Terry looked at his watch. This had become a most worthwhile habit, to watch the second hand, as it showed him that yes, time was indeed passing, no matter how hard to believe the everyday fact became. This time though he focused on the fatter hands and actually read the time. It was still too early to be off.
Terry slumped onto the table. The DTU was only five minutes away from his house and it was a quarter past eight.
The dream was going to kill him, he was sure of it.

Last night had been the worst one yet. Even then as he sat wide-awake in his kitchen, relighting a roley, his ten-minute sleep at least eleven hours behind him, the image of her was crystal in his mind. He could see her floating towards him with her arms outstretched, drawing him into her. He'd nearly gone to her too. Even in his few minutes of sleep it was obvious that he could not resist for much longer. It wouldn’t be long before he accepted her embrace.
He had to sleep sometime.
With his parents away and most of his friends either gone down the country or in the States for summer, Terry had done nothing but spend his time in various attempts to pass it. The most successful of these attempts was his taking up smoking again after two years without a pang.
The loneliness and the waiting were wearing him out and destroying his nerves. His mind was cracking open. Soon it would bare all and his fantasies would be in full control. His senses were beginning to play tricks on him and Terry hoped that was all they were, tricks. It would be a comfort to discover that all of this was a phase, which would end some day soon. With a drunken night of snoring maybe, or a stoned comatose, both of which he'd tried. The former making him sick and helpless and the later, so paranoid that he’d contemplated wearing a long silk tie to ward off his nightmares. The details of how this was supposed to help him now seemed sketchy to the sober Terry, although it was definitely something to do with the idea that witches and demons were afraid of salesmen. Again, he was unsure how his could possibly be the case.

Terry took a breath and built himself upwards into a standing position. He would take the long way to The DTU; the very long way. Second year engineering was a welcome prospect when compared to the weirdness of his summer. It would be best to go now and forget his rut for a while.
"Now that’s sad," Terry said aloud, commenting on his eagerness to return to university. He picked up his bag, packed since last Tuesday, and left the house.
The door slammed behind him and his relief to be out of it set him strutting off down the street towards the river.

Upstairs in the Giles house, Terry’s room was a tip, a mass of clothes and rubbish with paper in different forms covering every near horizontal surface. There was the rolled-up sort and the scraped type, as well as the laid-out-and-kept variety. If the images on both were compared, it would seem that the contents had little effect on the classification of them.
There were pictures of cloisters and letters of script. Many of the sheets were notes written to no one, but signed, Terry Giles. The most common image Terry had sketched on the papers was the form of a female, a dark figure wearing clothes of a religious, but unrecognisable. She was a nun of sorts, or a priest maybe, it was obvious that Terry didn't know.
Again and again he had attempted to draw her face correctly but each time either failed to illustrate more than a line or two. A hint of a nose- dismissed. The beginning of a mouth - disregarded, or the entire face had been scribbled out so entirely that he had torn the paper in his hurry to destroy it.

Terry had been dreaming of this woman every night for the last two months. She was always walking towards him, her face blurred and her footsteps inaudible as she glided ever nearer. In each dream she slid closer and closer with each and Terry always saw that she held something in her hands, But he had always been too terrified to examine them and find out what it was.
Only a couple more times could he resist her grasp. In a day or two she would have him for sure. And when she did, what would happen then?

When she reached out and touched him, what would happen then?