‘Sheets,’ she came back.
‘Good. All done,’ I declared, and grinned encouragingly.
She leaned forward slightly and looked at me with veiled eyes. ‘Is something wrong with me?’
‘No,’ I lied firmly. Her answers had clearly revealed a mental lake bottomless with mystery and a deeply disturbed inner world. I swung my chair to the side and stood up. ‘Come on, I’ll take you next door.’
I walked to the door, opened it, and waited for her to join me. As she reached me I registered two impressions. First: that I towered over her. She was much smaller than I had originally thought. Second: the inappropriateness of her perfume, a girlish, floral scent of almost sickly sweetness.
She went through the door and waited just inside for me, rapidly taking in the dim lighting, the faint scent from the lavender diffuser, the blinking lights of the electrical equipment, the zero gravity chair where she would sit and the armchair next to it that I would occupy. I closed the door and indicated the recliner.
‘Have a seat.’
She moved toward it and gingerly settled herself into the black leather.
‘Comfortable?’ I asked.
‘Very,’ she replied with a tense smile.
‘Let’s see if we can get you even more comfortable,’ I said and taking the remote hanging off it, pressed a button on it. The chair began to recline and she wriggled slightly. It stopped when it reached the ergonomically optimum position of locating her feet fractionally higher than her head. In that virtually weightless stance there was no stress or strain on her back, neck, shoulders, or arms. I activated the therapeutic massage function and her body started to move and shake gently.
‘Oh, this is nice,’ she commented, rotating her shoulders.
I handed the remote to her. ‘Feel free to control the strength of your massage.’
She took it from me. Her fingers were very white and slender, the nails painted pale. The skin looked soft. She had obviously not done a day’s work in her life. Our skin did not touch.
I moved over the console and switched on the audio recorder. Then I flicked a switch and a metronome based device began to glide down from the ceiling. I stopped it when it was a few feet away from her face. I spent a few minutes tinkering with all the dials and functions of the different machines. When everything was ready I went back to her chair and switched off the massage function. The room became very silent.
She sighed softly.
I activated the relaxing heat pads under her back and looked down on her with a professional, neutral expression. ‘Ready?’ I asked.
She nodded.
‘Excellent. Let’s begin.’
I sat on the armchair next to her and pressed the button that killed the lights. The room was now lit only by the flickering LEDs in the different electrical equipment. In the small, sterile space, her nearness suddenly seemed more potent, her perfume stronger. I could hear her breathing in the dark. It affected me with a strange cold anxiety. I took a deep breath. Just this one session, I told myself, and switched on the soundless metronome above her head. A narrow band of blue light came on and began to tick like a pendulum.
‘The glowing light you see has an invisible flickering, but its flicker rate is so fast the human eye cannot perceive it as an intermittent flashing, only as a strip of perfectly steady light moving at a perfectly precise and rigid repetition. Its frequency has been set to exactly correspond to the alpha brainwaves present in the human brain when in a relaxed state. Staring at it will entrain your brain in the same way your television does.’
‘The TV doesn’t hypnotize us,’ she said softly.
I glanced at her. Her face rose out of the darkness like a glowing blue mask. ‘As it happens, it does. You fall into a semi-hypnotic state every time you watch TV, especially if you view it in a darkened room. The longer you stare at it, the more hypnotized you become.’
‘Really? Why on earth did they set it at that frequency then?’
‘Probably so you will believe everything you see and buy everything they sell. Shall we begin?’
‘Yes.’ Her hand twitched on her thigh.
‘Please remain as still as possible,’ I instructed. Stress on muscular relaxation assisted in disorientation since one of the ways humans kept orientated was to know where their hands and feet were. With immobility, those ties to reality were weakened and dissociation was more readily accepted.
I waited for a few seconds then began the induction in my ‘hypnotic voice’: monotonous, deep, and somnolent. ‘Olivia, I want you to fix your entire attention on the moving light.’
She took a deep breath and attached her gaze on the steadily swinging band of light.
‘Without taking your focus off the light, you will relax every muscle in your neck. Feel all the tension flo