Page 57 of In Her Dreams
But Olivia couldn’t afford even that small risk.Her work was too important, the stakes too high.She pressed harder on the accelerator, watching the needle climb past seventy.Another check of her rearview mirror—a quick, darting glance that didn’t linger long enough to trigger her fear—assured her that no police car was following her.
As she turned her eyes away from that little mirror and focused on the road ahead, she thought impatiently of her mission yet to be completed—the cure for her own uncomfortable problem, spectrophobia.Her fear of mirrors had inconvenienced her long enough, interfering with her career and blocking any expectation of relationships.
Her mind drifted back to where it had all begun—her grandmother’s house with its polished hardwood floors and heavy velvet drapes.She’d been seven years old, playing with a set of jacks on the carpet while her mother and grandmother argued in hushed but intense voices in the kitchen.
She remembered the moment her grandmother had stormed into the living room, her mother following close behind, their voices raised now.The words themselves had faded from memory, but the emotion remained—sharp and jagged like broken glass.
“I won’t have you filling her head with these stories,” her grandmother had shouted, gesturing wildly toward the ornate floor-length mirror that dominated the far wall.
That’s when it happened.Her grandmother’s hand had struck the mirror—not hard enough to shatter it entirely, but with enough force to create a spiderweb of cracks across its surface.Olivia had looked up, transfixed by the sight of her grandmother’s fractured reflection, the woman’s face split into a dozen distorted versions of itself.
Something had shifted in Olivia’s young mind at that moment.The crack had occurred just as her grandmother was saying something about “the other side” and “spirits that shouldn’t be disturbed.”In her child’s understanding, the smashed mirror had become a broken barrier between worlds, a damaged portal through which something terrible might emerge.
She’d screamed, covering her eyes, refusing to look at the mirror again.
For years afterward, Olivia had managed to live with her fear.She avoided prolonged eye contact with mirrors, kept bathroom visits brief with her eyes lowered, and never decorated her own spaces with reflective surfaces.Her aversion was notable enough to be remarked upon by friends and colleagues, but she’d learned to deflect with humor or vague explanations about vanity being a distraction.
But as the years went by, something had changed.The fear had intensified without warning or apparent cause.Perhaps it was the stress of tenure review, or perhaps, as Olivia sometimes suspected, it was because something on the other side had finally noticed her trying to escape its power.
Whatever the reason, her carefully maintained coping mechanisms had failed.She’d fled conference hotel rooms upon discovering full-length mirrors.She’d refused dinner invitations to restaurants with mirrored walls.She’d avoided public restrooms, knowing large mirrors were usually present.
Her reputation for eccentricity had grown, but academia forgave such quirks in those who published regularly and brought grant money to the university.Her disheveled appearance became her trademark—a brilliant mind too occupied with important thoughts to bother with vanity.
But privately, Olivia had become desperate for a cure.She wanted to be in control of her own life, not subject to this expansion of childhood fears.Her research into phobias had deepened and darkened, taking over her professional life and obliterating the little personal life she’d had.
Her intensified work had led her to the Zalticans, an indigenous people whose ritual codexes she’d studied years earlier.They had practiced a ceremony called the Chantico Rite, involving the ingestion of a substance called Ka’lutma, which they believed allowed participants to transcend their earthly limitations and fears.
Olivia had administered the rite to herself first, of course.Alone in her home, she’d prepared the Ka’lutma according to ancient instructions, ingested it, and waited for transcendence, for liberation from her fear.
Instead, she’d experienced a vivid hallucination of being trapped in a hall of mirrors, each one showing a different version of herself, some aged, some youthful, some distorted beyond recognition.She had emerged from the experience more terrified than before, yet also strangely enlightened.
The problem, she’d realized, wasn’t that the ritual didn’t work.It was that fear needed to be faced at its most extreme point—the moment when it threatened to stop the heart itself.Only by surviving that moment could one truly transcend.
But how could she engineer such a moment for herself?She didn’t dare push herself close enough to that brink of madness without understanding it better.
The answer had come slowly, over months of contemplation: she needed to understand the mechanism of fear at its most primal level.And for that, she needed test subjects.
Anthony Walsh had been her first recruit, though he hadn’t known it at the time.She’d easily recognized his problem when he’d failed to deliver a lecture at that conference, and from then on, he’d fallen prey to her manipulations.
Olivia had offered him what seemed like an academic collaboration: a chance to experience an authentic Zaltican ritual that might provide help with his problem and insights for his practice.She’d told him the ritual required two participants, but the truth was that she needed someone to test it on more thoroughly before trying it on herself again.
His joy at regaining his ability to speak in public had led to his willing collaboration.But his joy gave way to dread as he realized he was now her slave.At her insistence—actually, at her posthypnotic command—he’d sent others to her for help: Richard Winters with his claustrophobia, Anita Palmer with her fear of birds, and Samuel Rodriguez with his agoraphobia.All referred discreetly by Walsh, all desperate for relief.
The Chantico Rites she’d performed for them followed the traditional form, with one crucial difference.While they were in their Ka’lutma-induced trance states, receptive to suggestion, she had planted posthypnotic triggers.Each participant received a dreamcatcher, crafted by her own hands, embedded with symbols that would eventually trigger their specific phobias at an unexpected moment.
Richard had been the first to succumb.His heart, already weakened by age and existing arrhythmia, had given out when claustrophobia overtook him in his own bedroom.Anita had followed, her ornithophobia also triggered by her personal dreamcatcher.Sam’s agoraphobia had manifested so severely that he’d apparently suffered a stroke from the sustained panic.
Three apparent failures.But those three deaths, while tragic, had provided Olivia with invaluable data.Now she needed more subjects to continue her work and Anthony was refusing to provide them.
So Dr.Anthony Walsh would become the final subject in her experiment.If he somehow found the strength to transcend his terror, he might hold the key to her own liberation.But if he too succumbed, then Olivia would have to conclude that no one could survive that ultimate confrontation with fear.
Her options were clear.Either she would reinforce the hypnotic suggestion that kept Anthony silent about the Chantico Rite, or she would employ her ultimate weapon.During his ritual, she had linked a specific phrase to his glossophobia—a meaningless sequence of syllables that, when spoken directly to him, would trigger such overwhelming terror that his ability to speak would be paralyzed completely.
In the worst case, if he truly threatened to expose her, the phrase might do to him what the dreamcatchers had done to the others: trigger a fear response so severe that his body simply couldn’t withstand it.
“Nath-hak-to-mah,” she whispered into the car interior, testing the phrase on her tongue.It felt powerful, ancient, though she had invented it herself.
“Nath-hak-to-mah.”Yes, that should bring about a suitable resolution to her problem.
