The Eagle and the Rose Read Online Free PDF

you,” she said. “I think you have had many strange things happen to you which you don't understand. My husband, Paul, is a healer, and has been in the spiritualist movement for over thirty years. If you could just open up to us, maybe we could help you.”
    My mind raced briefly over the things she had said. Healers? Spiritualists? Was I hearing right? Christ was a healer. Did she mean that her husband was like Christ? But before I could assess any of this, Paul spoke again.
    “The only way we can help you, Rosemary, is if you let us. And you could start by talking to us.”
    “If I talk to you, if I tell you about the weird things which have been going on around me,” I heard myself saying aloud, “you will surely think I'm nuts.”
    “We won't think you're mad at all” he said very gently and sincerely. “I think it's time you told someone. Tell me.”
    If you have ever shaken a champagne bottle before popping the cork, you will know just how I felt. Everything just spurted out uncontrollably but explicitly as I began to describe all the peculiar events that had been taking place. You could have heard a pin drop. Faces of strangers looking at me—not laughing, as I thought they might, but appearing interested, curious.
    I found myself talking of my experiences as a child when in the night the faces would come and the whisperings would begin. I told of how many times in my life I had been transported, as if by magic, to a different time or place in the universe, to be with people I didn't know yet felt comfortable with … until I had to explain it to myself later. I told of my visions and of how I would sometimes sit in a room … and see not the room, but another place entirely.
    The more I talked, the more I found I had to say, and then I saw it, quite naturally and quite clearly. It was just like being in a cinema when the lights grow dim and the people all around you fade into the background. Then the screen lights up, showing the picture bright and clear and larger than life, so all-consuming that it pulls you through the void which separates the real from the unreal, allowing you to become part of the scene being unfolded before you.
    Without realizing what was happening I had gone into a “trance state,” and I was now to experience something that would change my life forever.
    I saw before me an ocean, a large, cold, and uninviting sea, and approaching from the right-hand side came an enormous gray battleship. Very slowly it sailed toward me, and as it came into view I became aware of a lady standing on the deck. The dress she wore was long and gray, taken in at the waist. It seemed very plain except for a badge, about an inch round, which was sewn onto the bodice. On her head was a bonnet, which apart from the color, also gray, appeared similar to those worn by the ladies of the Salvation Army today.
    I was just about to speak to her when I realized, with a shock, that this lady had no face. I know this sounds incredible, but where her features should have been, there were none. No eyes, no nose, no mouth … just a blank mask.
    As I watched, her arms reached out to me beseechingly, and I heard her voice, as if from nowhere, crying out for help.
    Even as this was happening, the ship began to tilt and the bow plunged down into the sea. The ship was sinking, and the lady in gray was drowning. Again she reached out to me and I heard her voice begging me, pleading to me for help.
    I stood and watched and did nothing. I could do nothing!
    Just as I thought it was all over, the whole thing started again, as though someone were rerunning a film. Three times the scene was enacted before me, and each time the cries for help, sounding so desperate, reached my ears. I knew with absolute certainty that she would be lost unless I did something.
    But what could I do?
    So helpless did I feel, her pleas so heartrending, that I burst into tears.
    As quickly as it had started, it stopped. Back through the void I came,