Life to Life: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective Read Online Free Page A

that?"
    "Positively," Annie replied. "Write it down
if you'd like and date it. I'll sign it."
    There was an impressed murmur from the
group. The actress wanted more detail. "What sort of role? Do you
see...?"
    Which is the point at which good old Ashton
blundered in. It was pure faux pas and I don't know to this day why
I did it. I am really not a show-off and I am usually respectful of
other people's turf. But I was standing in Annie's limelight
without even realizing it, and my jaw was moving without the
thinking mind telling it to do so. It was almost like absentminded,
like replying to a question while your head is buried in a
book.
    "It's a story about a nun who becomes a
prostitute in Paris during the Nazi occupation to save the fleeing
Jews."
    Yep. Ashton said that. Annie's eyes were
giving me a measuring look.
    I recovered, I think, to
the satisfaction of everyone except Annie. "Kidding," I said with a
chuckle. "Sorry, folks. I have to take the reverend away from you."
I took her hand and pulled her out of there. Francois followed us.
As soon as we were clear I told Annie, "Sorry 'bout that. Just sort
of slipped out. Like gas. Please accept my apology. More
importantly, I want you to know that I want to work this problem
with you and I think we need to start a game plan."
    The lady was showing me a
very haughty look. The gaze swept to Francois then back to me as
she said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Ford. I do not see anything positive
here."
    "Not blood on my face again, surely," I
said, still trying to keep it light.
    "I see death in your aura."
    I said, "Then maybe we better work up a game
plan for me.
    “ What is—?” Francois
ventured only to be shut down by the frigid reverend.
    "That would be quite impossible, I'm
afraid," she said icily. "Good night, Mr. Ford."
    I looked at Francois and
Francois looked at me.
    I said to Annie, "Good night to you too,"
and went the hell away from there.
    Death in my aura, huh?
    Shit. There is death in every aura.
    And the good Reverend Annie was a lady with
a lot to hide.
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter Four: Waiting in the Stream
     
     
    Let's get it into the record, right up front
here, that I am not antireligion. Many of mankind's noblest moments
have come in the religious quest—our most exalted art, music,
literature, even architecture—the whole search for identity as a
living species has been largely propelled not by the practical
requirements for survival but by an aesthetic appreciation of the
divine possibilities within us.
    It would almost seem that the innate human
penchant for religiosity represents the spiritual equivalent of
physical evolution. How else could we dare reach for the stars—and
why otherwise develop the technologies that could put us there?
    So I do not knock religion
per se. My respect for the edifice does not, however, prevent me
from noticing the chipped bricks, broken windows, or sagging
foundations that appear from time to time. Churches contain toilets
as well as pews, so not everything going down within the edifice
is necessarily sacred—unless there is some basis for the
expression holy shit.
    Devoutly religious people sometimes do
irreligious things. The same is true of entire religious bodies,
unless you'd rather just forget about the horrors of the
Inquisition, the burning of "witches" in New England, the
acceptance of human slavery in young America, etc. ad nauseam. None
of that, however, invalidates for me the religious instinct.
    Where we go wrong, I think—so many of us,
and so often—is in our resistance to fair and impartial inquiry.
Either we defend the faith so stoutly that we refuse (or are
afraid) to look at the broken windows, or else we are so cynical
that we will see nothing else.
    Francois Mirabel's remarks
about the religion industry were rather typical of that latter
point of view. Yet the religionists themselves promote that sort
of cynicism through their dogged insistence upon the infallibility
of their own limited