Chapter 10: Merlin's Story

We all regrouped in the dining room.

I thought, "Hmmm, when we moved in here we all could eat at the breakfast nook and now look; we have six adults and three children."

We sat around the table and Mrs. Pham and her daughter served the meal for us. Mai was chattering away with them in Vietnamese. She learned that since she had been gone, they had been very happy here.

We sent Mrs. Pham to a food preparation course and she blossomed into a fantastic chef. She was such a great chef, I was afraid I would eventually lose her when she inevitably opened her own restaurant.

Her daughter, Ngoc, was a senior in high school and intended to go on to university in Marine Biology. She had turned out to be a brilliant student.

Her young son, Chien, was doing very well in school and had found his avocations in both scuba diving and martial arts.

Mr. Pham had, with his mechanical knowledge, taken courses in modern marine engines and control systems. He was now working for a high end boat manufacturer in the area and doing maintenance around the house for us part time.

It was amazing what they had accomplished in such a short time. When people are motivated and live in a loving family, they can do anything they set their mind to. They have their own built in support group.

We talked about general subjects and enjoyed a great dinner. As we were finishing up and having an after dinner coffee, I asked Merlin to tell us a little about himself. He looked around the table and found only interested faces looking back.

"I am 19 years old. I was born in Helsingborg, Sweden. It is just across the strait from Denmark, in southern Sweden. My father is in the Swedish military and I spent most of my early years traveling with my parents, due to the variety of assignments my father had outside Sweden. My father spent several years as a military attaché and we moved from country to country, serving in different embassies."

Merlin blushed, "I was what I guess they call a 'child prodigy'. I was tutored and didn't attend school with other children. I received my doctorate in psychology at age 16. It was a few years before that time, that I started noticing I was a bit different from other children."

Mai giggled, "I'll say you are!"

I watched as Merlin look at her. They locked eyes, and messages were being sent.

I thought, "Oh, oh, that's interesting! We've got a couple of lovebirds."

Little did I know?

Merlin shook himself.

"Anyway, like Mai, when I reached puberty I began to notice changes in myself other than the ones we all experience. I started hearing voices in my head."

He looked at Mai.

"Mai has assured me that I am safe in talking to all of you about this. I have never revealed it to anyone, since the initial reaction I got from my parents and others. It was a negative reaction, to say the least.

"It started with hearing a low level noise in my head. It sounded like a sporting event on TV, with the sound turned way down. I couldn't make out any intelligible sounds.

"I was about 13 years old at the time and I mentioned it to my mother. She told me to ignore it.

"It went on and got louder, and I complained again. She took me to a doctor and they tested my hearing, and examined me, proclaiming that I had nothing wrong with me.

"The doctor told my mother it was just 'juvenile hysteria'. They seemed to think that, because of my advanced intellectual development, anything else was just part of my 'weirdness'.

"I started to withdraw around this time, because I felt that I was a freak and I didn't want to be laughed at.

"The sounds continued to get louder and I spent a lot of time by myself trying to control them. I went through stages of control, starting with finding a way to turn them down so they wouldn't drive me crazy... if I wasn't already.

"Soon I found that some sounds were standing out, especially when I was around other people. That was how I finally discovered that I was reading others' thoughts. I would tone down the lower volume sounds and focus on the louder one. Soon I could hear actual thoughts and get a feel for the emotional overlay of the thoughts.

"I began to listen in on people's thoughts. I felt no guilt, at first. I was fascinated with what I was learning about people. I listened to my parents, my tutor, and the embassy staff; anyone I could learn from.

"I honed my skill until I could rapidly tune out others thoughts and quickly focus on just the person or persons I wanted to listen to. I felt some guilt, eventually.

"I thought hard about the ethical ramifications of my talent. I came to the conclusion that I had this talent and it wasn't going away. I needed to develop my own set of values and ethics within me, to deal with my new found life.

"As I became more experienced, I was able to connect to and scan a person, in an instant. I would see what they were doing or thinking and if it fell under my criteria that merited privacy, I withdrew. Meanwhile, there were many other times I didn't.

"When one has a talent like this, you eventually develop a different way of looking at thought versus action. I came to know that many of the thoughts a person has are ephemeral and in the area of fantasy.

"These thoughts are normal mental wanderings and have nothing to do with a person's worth or morality. Sexual fantasies, surges of anger producing images of hurting someone; these are all normal thoughts we all have. We hide them from others of course, to enable us to co-exist in society. We have conscious control of our actions and make choices, suppressing our emotional urges.

"Unfortunately, while I became pretty sophisticated at ignoring the usual rambling and fantasizing people do, there were many who had intentional conscious thoughts that were downright evil.

"It was a shocking education in human nature. A person in the embassy would be saying one thing, with a smiling face and his thoughts were the direct opposite.

"Can you imagine what it would be like to observe someone in a situation like that? To see them interacting with people, and see the scorn, anger, and greed, in the thoughts they had as background to their smiling face?

"That was about the time I realized I needed more education in how the human mind works. I already had a master's degree in Physics. At thirteen, I completely changed my focus, and obtained my PhD in psychology when I was sixteen years old.

"During those three years, I honed my skills with my talent and learned a lot about myself and others. I found that I could focus my reading on individuals and could pick out individuals in a crowd, and follow their thoughts.

"I found a fertile training ground in the embassies.

"I found that the more I used my talent, the farther I could reach with it. It started out being limited to the same room. Soon, I could scan an entire building, and pick out a subject from among many people.

"I seemed to have more difficulty over long distances though. My abilities were not limited by just the distance. It was a combination of distance and the density of the population in the area.

"The only exception to this was that if I had a close emotional attachment to someone I could contact them anywhere."

Here, he looked at Mai and blushed.

"As time went on, I found another sidebar to my talent that has helped me enormously. I can detect others with mental powers, and both hide from them and obstruct the use of their powers. I found this out at an embassy we were visiting in Thailand.

"There was a large reception at the embassy and many people were milling about in their fine evening clothes. My parents had me attend these events with them, but I always kept a low profile. I looked older than my chronological age and no one seemed to remark on my presence.

"I was scanning people at this reception, as was my usual habit, when I came up with a blank. The person I was scanning had a wall around his thoughts. He was a late middle aged Asian man.

"As I puzzled about this, I felt a sudden blast of mental energy emanate from him in all directions. Luckily for me, he couldn't identify who was scanning him, but he had the mental power to attack.

"I instinctively put up a shield I didn't know I could make, and instinctively stabbed a focused bolt of energy back at him. Almost instantly his shield fell and I could see deep into his mind. I found pure evil. I became instantly nauseous.

"I had to slip behind a column out of sight, or people would have thought I was sick. I stepped outside onto the balcony and vomited in the corner. It took me several minutes to recover enough to go back inside.

"When I reentered the ballroom, there was a crowd of people standing around something on the floor. Emergency medical people came rushing in and when the crowd moved back, I saw the man I had probed lying on the floor. The medical people worked over him for a short while and whisked him away on a gurney.

"I was stunned. Had I done that to him? I stood there in shock, with mixed emotions. I was sick that I had possibly injured or killed someone. On the other hand, images from his mind kept flashing in front of my eyes. I had to leave and be alone.

"I found my parents and told them I would be in my room. They were preoccupied with the incident and told me to go ahead. I went to my room and fell back on the bed, trying to stop shaking.

"You can't believe the things I saw in that man's mind. He was involved at a high level, with an organization that trafficked in slaves, mostly for the sex industry worldwide.

"He used his powers to force girls and boys as young as 6 or 7 to be compliant, when they were kidnapped or bought, from mostly Asian countries. He could cause the victims to do what they were told, and to ignore the physical pain they felt when they were abused.

"He enjoyed his work and frequently used the young girls he obtained, for his own pleasure. He generally had to kill them when he was done with them, because they were no longer marketable. He had lost count of the number of young girls he had used and disposed of over the years.

"I was starting to hyperventilate and the room was spinning from my reaction to the memories I had obtained from him. I frantically tried different ways to push the memories down and keep them from my thoughts. My reaction was causing me to go into a severe anxiety attack and I thought I was going to go catatonic from shock.

"I concentrated on controlling my thought processes and visualized a compartment into which I put the memories. I created an iris like opening and dialed it down until it was just a pinpoint, then closed it. The memories were gone, but I could feel the compartment as a dark cold object in the back of my mind.

"The relief was palpable. I took deep breaths and did my centering exercises, to still my mind and flush the toxins from my body.

"Finally, I was able to think coherently and I went over in my mind what had happened earlier. I forced my mind to recall in slow motion the event when I was attacked. I had felt the blank space where his mind should have been and instantly, there was a fan of mental energy shooting from his mind. If it had been a focused beam pointed at me, I don't think I could have stopped it.

"In analyzing my memory of the energy, I realized that this man could consciously control large amounts of an energy that I wasn't even aware of until then. Where had this energy come from?

"I thought about it and remembered my response to his attack. Where did I get that energy?

"I scanned around me for a target to test myself on. I sensed a lizard outside, on my balcony. I very gently flexed my mind, to generate and focus energy. Flexed is the only word I can use to describe the process.

"I could feel a warmth or radiance building in my mind, drawing from outside of me. I could focus that energy into a beam, concentrate it and direct it. I directed it at the lizard very gently and could feel its reaction to it.

"There was an increase in the animal's anxiety and I tuned the nature of the beam, to be reassuring and warmly calming. The lizard quieted and I directed him to move toward the open balcony doors.

"He came into my room and up onto the bed with me. I had him stop, and caused him to go to sleep. He immediately did.

"I could tell from the experiment that I used only a miniscule amount of the energy available to me to control the lizard. I realized then that I could control or kill people, or any living thing, with this energy.

"I tried to trace the source of the energy, but it came from all around me. I likened it to the energy that the universe has inherent in it. It was all around me and it was unlimited.