“Remember it all”
by Mike and Heather
Like many of you, the origins of my abiding interest in hypnosis stretch back into my early adolescence. For me, it was a slightly older girl named Laura Conner who introduced me to hypnosis. We grew up together in a little college towncalled Arkham, Mass. Our fathers were professors in the same department at Miskatonic University and we lived in the same neighborhood. Her younger brother David was my best friend and fellow junior scientist.
At all of 15, she was the picture of sexual attraction to my 14-year old eyes, and I felt the first unexplained stirrings of desire and a consciousness of just how women looked when I was around her. She had smooth, honey-colored hair and wide, pale blue eyes. She wore lip-gloss and I was fascinated by the smell of her skin when we passed in the hall.
Now in most hypnosis stories, she’d be 19, equipped with improbable breasts and a case of rampant nymphomania. This is not most hypnosis stories. Because unlike most hypnosis stories, this one is 99% true. The name of the town and the characters has been changed to protect the innocent, but other than that, this is pretty much the way it happened.
My best friend David and I were building a plywood dinghy in his back yard one late August afternoon when Laura called out from the back steps of their house, “Hey, you two! Come in here for a minute...I want to ask you something!” David shrugged and we kept working. The boat was an ongoing project over the course of that summer and we were nearly done with it. We wanted to take it out on the creek a few times before Winter arrived so the past few weeks had seen a marked increase in our productivity. Laura called out again, and we finally relented.
The house was quiet, which was the first odd sign. Not television, no radio, no music played, which for a group of kids left alone is remarkable in and of itself. Laura and her friend Heather were sitting in the living room.
Heather. Heather Bates. Heather, the girl most likely to make me run like hell. Heather, who was not yet sending any of those “I am about to blossom into a beautiful woman” signals to my 14-year old brain. Heather, fellow class brainiac and competitor for most points in Latin and geology at St. Vitus Preparatory. Heather, whom I called “Hate Her” to my friends.
And they looked, well...suspicious. David and I both suspected some kind of prank and were eyeballing the exits when Heather came right out and said, “Hey...we just read a book about how to hypnotize people and we want to try it on you.”
“No way,” I said, “I’m not letting you hypnotize me. You’ll make me eat dirt or cluck like a chicken. I’m out of here.” And I was, until Laura’s quiet voice said, “She won’t hypnotize you, Michael, I will.” Well, I might as well have been tied to the floor, because my feet stopped moving and my mouth opened on its own and said, “OK, Laura...but no funny stuff.”
“I promise not to make you eat dirt.” She smiled and I was now completely sold.
“Or cluck like a chicken?” I asked.
David interrupted, “Well, this is dorky, Mike. I’m going to work on the boat. She’s going to make you do something weird and I don’t want to see it.” He was out the door within seconds. I stood there feeling awkward.
“Well, hit the couch,” Heather said. Laura smiled and gestured.
I did as I was told. You know the next part. Laura produced a shiny pocket watch from somewhere and started swinging it in front of my eyes. Back-forth, back forth. Two small things were distracting me; I could hear David pounding nails into the boat and I could just see Heather’s face in my peripheral vision. Laura was reading what I now know is a pretty standard induction. You know the details.
After a while, I stopped caring that Heather had a smirky, predatory expression on her face and I stopped hearing the hammering from outside. I felt very relaxed and comfortable, thinking that this was a great way to sit around with Laura on a quiet afternoon. At one point, I sensed that she leaned very close and whispered something in my ear. The only words I made out then were, “...and that’s a secret even from Heather.”
After what seemed like a very long time, I was conscious of Laura telling me that it was time for me to wake up. I felt like we had been having a long conversation but I was suddenly fully awake again. The sun was low in the sky and long shadows alternated with the last golden light of an Autumn afternoon. Nearly two hours had passed.
“Oh, no,” I said. “What did you make me do?” Laura grinned smugly. I felt an odd sensation in the pit of my stomach.
She looked ostentatiously at the mantle clock and said, “Gosh...it’s already 5:30.”
Hate Her said, “Well Laura, it’s been fun, but I’ve got to get home.”
Laura looked at me and said, “Hey, Michael. Heather needs someone to walk her home. It’s not far...”—it was—“...and you’re feeling generous, aren’t you?” I didn’t consciously notice the emphasis she placed on the phrase “feeling generous” but I felt the impact, and fast.
Suddenly Hate Her looked at me with a strange expression of anticipation. “Sure,Laura. I’d love to walk Heather home.” Heather beamed at me and I felt unbelievably warm inside. Why did I ever call her Hate Her, when Heather was such a great name? And how was it I had never noticed her lips before? They were a sort of naturally pouty shape I’d never noticed before. Wasn’t it odd that I had never once noticed how long and graceful her neck was? I also saw but didn’t internalize the look of triumph that only two teenage girls can share.
I ran down the rear stairs to get my backpack, ignoring David’s look in incredulity. I skidded back through the Conner home, meeting Heather and Laura at the door. “Ready?” I asked.
Heather air-kissed Laura on the way out the door and Laura sing-songed, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!” A few minutes later, I found myself carrying Heather’s backpack slung over my own. She really did live out of my way, but a few minutes after we started walking she slipped her hand into mine. It felt really good, as did our first kiss a few minutes later.
We were both a little flushed from that, and I felt an odd but really pleasant straining sensation in my pants. We stopped to kiss three or four more times before we got to her house, which was across from the Widener Library at Miskatonic University. Kids from Arkham usually gave the Widener a pass, but being the geeks we were, we even kissed under the statue of Dr. Lovecraft.
“You know,” Heather breathed in a quiet voice, “If you kiss under the statue you’re kissing your one true love.” I found myself staring into her eyes with a newfound appreciation that they were a deep hazel color.
“Heather, I...I...” the words wouldn’t quite come. But she squeezed my hand hard and I said, “I do love you.”
She smiled a vicious smile from ear to ear then said, “Snap out of it. Remember it all.”
“But, Heather...” Then I remembered. Laura had given me a crush on Heather. A huge, teenage crush on a girl I hated. On Hate Her. I felt like such an idiot, standing there with my face on fire and a raging hard-on in my pants. I remembered the hypnosis now, but I still thought she was the cutest girl ever. Heather was looking so smug, and when she launched on me I was hardly ready.
“You’re such a jerk, Mike Fletcher...I can’t believe how mean you are to me and how you’ve done nothing but insult me since fifth grade. Now you have a crush on me! Ha! I will never date you. I will never kiss you again! I—hate—you.”
“But...” She was gone in a shot, her wavy black hair streaming out behind her.
“Ha!”
I stood there, heartbroken. I would have cried, but I was more confused and hurt than I had ever been. And even smart kids—or maybe, particularly smart kids—don’t have all the tools to handle their emotions at 14. I went home, ate my dinner mechanically, ignored my parents’ and their friends’ discussion of Schopenhauer and climbed the stairs up to my room in the turret of our somewhat ramshackle old house.
My mother said it had been in the family for almost 250 years, suffering from periodic expansions, the latest being a Victorian façade and turret. That at least gave me a terrific room with 270 degree views all around Arkham. A telescope had been discovered in the attic two years before, and I rolled it over to the direction of where Heather’s house would be, nearly half a mile distant. Over the corner of the Widener library I could see her house, her window...and Heather herself.
My heart beat faster as I saw her, clad now in a flannel bathrobe. Her hair was wet and she was talking on the telephone. Damn. It had to be Laura. I grabbed my phone and called David’s line.
“Hey, idiot” He answered. “How’s the new girlfriend?” David knew the whole story, having coaxed it out of Laura by threats a little while before.
“Oh, man...David, this is the weirdest thing. It’s like one minute I hate her and the next minute...”
“Yeah, you’re kissing under the Lovecraft statue. Yuck.”
I could hear some noise in the background, then Laura’s voice on the phone.
“Michael...did you enjoy this afternoon?” She was laughing her easy, quiet laugh. “Heather thinks she’s been mad at you for a long time...”
I burst out, “I’m sorry I was so mean to her in school...I mean, she’s never once been nice to me and I...I...I love her now, even though I know you did it to me....what do you mean, she thinks she’s been mad at me?”
“Heather really likes you, but you were just too dumb to see it...so she got mad. So when we read that book on hypnosis, she wanted some revenge on you. And she was mad until today.”
“She still seemed pretty mad when we parted at the Widener.”
“Can I give you a clue? Remember the secret.” At that, a memory blossomed in my mind. The one whispered comment Heather had not heard. The thing that was a secret even from Heather.
“Oh...” I said slowly, “Thanks, Laura.”
“Don’t mention it. Go get her, chief.”
I didn’t think I knew Heather’s number, but I did. I was staring at her window through the telescope as I watched her answer the phone.
“Hell-o, Heather’s line!” she answered.
“Hey...it’s me...Michael.”
“Well, you loser, you’re just too lovesick not to call me?” She replied. “Do you have a broken heart because I don’t love you? Booo hoooo.”
“Well, you do, really.”
“Do not.”
“You do...you just got so mad at me you wouldn’t admit it.”
“Bull. I’m hanging up now.” I watched her walk over from her bed to her desk, knowing she was about to hang up.
“Heather, I want to say one thing, then you can decide whether to hang up or not.”
Silence. She was staring out the window now, looking up into the darkening night sky. I could see her blunt little nose, and almost make out her strange hazel eyes through the telescope.
“Heather, remember it all.”
More silence, though through the lens I could see her shoulders drop and her posture relax as she leaned against the window frame.
“Oh...oh...oh, Mike...I forgot I love you. I’m so sorry what I said. I just wanted...”
“Don’t worry about it. Looks like I was the second person Laura hypnotized that day.”
And being 14, and fearless and clever, I crept down the back stairs, avoiding both detection and a conversation about the World Bank and ran towards the spires of the Widener as quickly as I could. The night was fantastically cool and clear. A few minutes later, I was up the Bate’s trellis and kissing Heather furiously. We moved from kissing to tumbling around on the bed as teenages will do. We had a close call when her mother showed up, but I swung out the window and stood in the shadows on their roof. They talked idly about school and the coming academic year. I heard the door close, then reopen suddenly.
Her mothers voice spoke in a conspiratorial whisper, “Oh, and sweetheart...the Mason’s mentioned they saw you holding hands with Professor Fletcher’s boy today...”
Heather said as nonchalantly as possibly under the circumstances, “Yeah, he walked me home today from Laura’s. He’s ok.”
Well, he looks quite a bit taller this year than last. Hasn’t he grown up nicely?”
The door closed and there was a moment of dead silence. I could hear the last of the summer’s crickets playing slowly in the cool night air.
She poked her head out the window and pulled me back inside and said, “Hasn’t he just?”
I asked Laura years later what her exact suggestions to both of us were that August afternoon in Maine. She laughed, having dined out for years on the story of how she made us high school sweethearts by hypnotizing us. “I told you both that you were deeply in love and that you always would be. It wasn’t that I knew so much about hypnosis, but I thought I would at least get you guys together for a few weeks and let nature take its course.” Nature took its course all right: we were inseparable throughout high school and college and we’ve been married now for nine years. And we’ve had other hynotic adventures that we’ll share in the coming months...