But crazy as her actions seemed, he didn’t think Sara was suffering from a personality disorder. He recognized what she was doing, and she repeated the same actions over and over again.
His theory, developed over months of observation, was even crazier than Dolinski’s. To most people—civilians—what was happening to Sara was simply weird, but to Ben, an ex-Naval officer, the actions formed a familiar pattern. Sara’s symptoms pointed to a particular diagnosis that shouldn’t have affected a seven-year-old child.
His father had suffered battle fatigue after the Second World War, and Ben himself had seen and heard about enough cases firsthand. For the past few months he had done extensive research on the effects of posttraumatic stress syndrome. He had talked to old soldiers and visited veteran’s hospitals. It wasn’t unusual for soldiers to relive battles in their dreams, night after night, going over and over the same incident, as if the scene had been burned so deeply into their minds that they couldn’t forget or move past it.
He’d had his own share of posttraumatic stress syndrome after the Gulf War. Sleepwalking was rare, but there were documented cases.
He shadowed Sara as she made an invisible turn, his attention sharpening. This was something new.
He watched as she shrugged into an invisible coat and wound what seemed to be a scarf around her throat. Her head came up and the remote expression on her face turned to terror.
“Rouge.”
He frowned. “Sara?”
She looked directly at him, her gaze once more sharply adult, but he had the distinct impression that she didn’t register him; she was looking at another face.
She spoke clearly and precisely. The content and the language she used—German—chilled him. A name registered: Stein.
He watched as she unwound the invisible scarf. “Who is Stein?”
Her face went blank, and for a moment he thought she wasn’t going to answer. The technique of trying to enter into the dream, to defuse the grip it held on his daughter, had so far proved spectacularly unsuccessful. It seemed that when she dreamed she was literally locked into another world and, short of physically intervening by shaking her awake, he couldn’t reach her.
She fixed him with an eerie gaze. “Stein?” she said in a coldly accented voice that shook him to the core. “Geheime Staats Polizei.”
All the fine hairs at the back of his neck lifted. Sara was his daughter; he loved her fiercely, and yet, in that moment she was not, by any stretch of the imagination, his cute, lovable little girl.
“Stein’s dead,” he said softly. “You don’t have to worry about him anymore. The war’s over. We won.”
He kept talking, relating what his own father had told him about the Second World War, emphasizing several times that the Allies had won. It had hurt, it still hurt, but they were okay now. They would never let the mistakes that had led to the horror of the Second World War be repeated.
He didn’t know if what he was saying was penetrating the world she was locked into, or if he was making any sense, because talking to Sara as if she had actually been there didn’t make any kind of sense. But if even a fragment got through, it could help.
She blinked, and the terrible tension left her face. She stared at him, the dream Sara abruptly there, with him, her gaze incisive. For the first time, he had the impression that he was finally making headway, even if this uncanny “grownup” Sara still shook him.
Dolinski had mentioned the possibility of multiple personalities, but Ben had never been prepared to believe that. His daughter was tall for her age, already strong willed and with a sharp intelligence. Today, she had spent most of the afternoon down at the swimming hole with her cousin, Steve, and the Bayard kid who had moved in next door. Sara had been calling the shots, and that was typical. She had a natural knack for organization and command. To him, the “sleep” personality was recognizably Sara.
“Did you hear what she said?”
“Not now, Mae,” Ben said calmly, his gaze still locked on Sara’s, but the high pitch of Mae’s voice had shattered the fragile bridge he’d built. He had been so close—
Sara blinked at him, in an instant shifting from eerily self-possessed to sleepy and bewildered. “Did I walk again?”
The fear in her eyes tugged at his heart. He scooped her up, walked to her room and placed her in her bed. “Just a little, but it’s okay. I got you, honey. It’s over now.”
Sara’s gaze clung to his as he tucked her in, taking her through the comforting bedtime routine, even though it was after midnight. He didn’t know how much of the experiences she retained. Before tonight he would have said none, but now he wasn’t so sure. Something had changed in that moment he had made contact with her inner world. He had thought about the contact as a bridge. If that was the case, then he had finally made a start at crossing it and maybe neutralizing whatever it was that was upsetting her.
“What’s Geheime Staa—” She frowned. “I said that, didn’t I? When I was sleepwalking.”
“It doesn’t matter, honey. It was just a dream.” He gripped her hand and gently squeezed it. “This is what matters, this is real.”
But he was beginning to think they had a bigger problem than Dolinski had outlined in his reports. He was no longer certain the therapy sessions were helping. Building a bridge to the core of the stress that created the behavior was all very well, but he would prefer that Sara forgot whatever it was that was upsetting her.
Ben sat on the edge of the bed, keeping a watch on his daughter to make sure it was over. Within minutes her eyelids drooped and she sank into an exhausted sleep.
Mae had gone back to bed. He should follow her, but even if he climbed between the sheets, he didn’t know if he could sleep.
Sara was a highly intelligent, creative child. After extensive physical and mental testing, Dolinski was convinced she was suffering from some kind of mental stress that had been brought on by an event that had made a shocking and indelible impression. Perhaps a graphic scene witnessed on television at a time when she was feeling especially vulnerable, or even in real life. Unable to cope with what she had seen, her mind had sublimated the event and the sleepwalking occurred when fragments kept surfacing in dreams.
According to Dolinski, dreams were a “safe” level to process unpalatable information, or create an acceptable context for an event, so the mind could absorb the information and move on. In his opinion, as upsetting as Sara’s symptoms were, they would fade with time. Young children were mentally tougher than most people gave them credit for—they bounced back when adults crumbled. He could see no reason why Sara should be the exception to the rule.
Ben had been happy to go along with Dolinski’s optimism. His explanations had seemed logical and scientific, and they had been backed by several impressive diplomas on his office wall. Now he was forced to revise that opinion.
He was no authority on mental disorders—or, for that matter, psychic phenomena. But over the past few months, he had read exhaustively on both subjects. As difficult to understand as many of the mental conditions were, at least they seemed to have identifiable causes and were researched and presented in a logical, scientific manner. Most of the material in books on psychic phenomena had been presented with a distinct lack of methodology or any kind of scientific or logical grounding.
As open as he had tried to keep his mind, he’d had difficulty buying into theories that seemed as wild and crackpot as some of the psychic conditions described. But a certain category of “cases” had uncannily mirrored what was happening to Sara.
Past-life memories.
He hadn’t mentioned the concept to Mae.
Getting his head around the idea that Sara could have lived a previous life, and that