Inklings occupied the ground floor of a Federation style house: two-stories of brick and stucco with a turret roof and corbeled chimneys. I approached a bay window that exhibited fine, wood-barreled pens, expensive French inks, and jade chops with red sticks of wax.
Fear throbbed.
Tucked among a display of embossed journals stood a slender volume with a blue unmarked cover—the precise object that had been appearing in my recurring nightmare.
A thin wind cried in my ears.
I entered the shop with a thoughtless, gauzy mind. Delicate chimes from a cluster of silver bells above the door announced my presence.
Out of a back room beyond a kiosk of stationery samples, a slender woman emerged, smoking a clove cigarette. Rambunctious auburn hair and bold eye makeup adorned a pale face, middle-aged and world-weary as a gypsy’s.
She stopped abruptly as if surprised, though her painted features showed no emotion. Tilting her head for me to follow, she returned the way she had come.
I hesitated. My moment of decision pivoted on the dream feeling of that slender book in the display window. If I opened it, I knew I would find blank pages. Yet…
My dead gathered close.
Walking with them past the kiosk to the back room, I parted its macramé curtain. A smell of humidity mothered by rain invited me. I stepped down two slate steps into a gallery of blue sunshine.
Bales of clouds jammed several long skylights. A glass wall looked out on profuse beds of red poppies and purple rhododendron. Curlicues of floral scents seeped through slanted louvers near the ceiling.
The smoking woman sat in a big rattan chair with a fan back. She studied me quietly.
Behind her, a viola inclined against an assemblage of wall racks holding curious objects, including an hourglass in a housing of fingerbones, two armadillo shells, framed photos of crop circles, a ruff of eagle feathers, dowsing rods, assorted rocks and crystals, porcelain masks, nautilus sections, and a clutch of leather-bound volumes with spines marked in cryptic glyphs.
She gestured with her fuming cigarette for me to sit opposite her in an upholstered armchair, a bulky club chair of indigo fabric.
Staring at her leather pants with zipper seams and bloomer ruffles at the hips, I sat and shifted uncomfortably. A spate of foolishness gripped me.
Only the blue book in the store front window held me in place. “Your aunt told me you’re looking to hire a medical doctor…”
A sterling post glinted from the corner of a full mouth, lips precisely defined with radish-red lipstick. “Arethusa?”
“Yes. I met her in a small park three blocks from here.”
She drew on her black cigarette, savored the inhalation, and exhaled languidly. “There is no park three blocks from here. And my Aunt Arethusa Xenakis—my great-aunt actually, the original owner of this shop—she drowned over a century ago.”
My head felt congested. “I don’t understand.”
“Nor do I, really.” She stubbed out the butt of her cigarette in a tray of blue petrified wood on an ebony side table. “The park is something I call a Pardes phenomenon.” She crossed her legs, and I almost lost the train of the conversation staring at her black suede ankle boots. Each crimson heel had an Eye of Horus stenciled at the back, and white clouds imprinted the blue soles like a Magritte sky.
I snapped my attention back to what she was saying about Pardes meaning ‘orchard’ in Persian.
“We get our word ‘paradise’ from it,” she went on even as I began bending forward to push myself out of the chair and spare my damaged brain her lunacy.
“The Pardes in Jewish legend is a reflection of heaven that appears briefly at unpredictable places in the world. I believe you met my great-aunt in the Pardes.” Her expression sharpened. “As for the dead. Well, they’re always around us. As you know too well.”
My voice sounded like an echo. “Pardon me?”
“That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” She lowered her chin knowingly. “Your dead brought you here. The blue book in the window.”
My impaired nerves couldn’t sort her uncanny knowledge, and I stood up and swayed forward into a dizzy swirl.
“Please sit. You’re going to faint.”
I sat. All the fibers in my body brightened. “How do you know about the blue book?”
“Oh, that’s just a soul tag.” She dismissed the strangeness of it with a wave of her heavily ringed hand. “I saw it in my mind’s eye when you first came in. I took a guess your dead have been using it to mark this shop, so you would recognize it.”
“Who are you?”
“Cybilla Rayne.” She opened her wide-sleeved arms, exposing all the chicanery of her rugged medallions and Celtic knot talismans tangled with ribbons and ruffled scarves. “Like you, a trauma broke me. That was long ago. I’ve had some time since to get used to progressing in other ways.”
My jeweled clarity passed away at the mention of trauma. I knew again there was something wrong with me, which made her sound right. Something dire and without cure. And I was once more disquieted by this spooky woman who progressed in other ways.
“The blue book that caught my attention,” I muttered. “You saw that in your mind’s eye?”
“Yes, yes. Tell me now, who are you?”
The moment turned grimy. “You know about the blue book—but you don’t know my name?”
“I’m an intuitive, not a mind-reader.” She glowered with annoyance. “Tell me who you are.”
“I’m John Prosper.” Just saying my name filled my head with helium, and I had to grip the arms of the chair to keep from rising. “I served as a medical officer with the First Battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment. I was wounded in Afghanistan.”
I couldn’t hold on any longer and rose to my feet. “I told all this to your aunt—and you’re informing me … she’s a ghost?”
“Doctor Prosper, please, sit down.” Cybilla turned her attention to one of her rings. “I wouldn’t call my great-aunt a ghost. The ambition of ghosts is to be seen. Arethusa would rather not be seen. She made a huge exception in your case.”
“You realize how daft that sounds?”
“As daft as what you’re doing?” She pointed with her kohl-rimmed eyes to my shoes.
I looked down at my feet hovering two inches above the slate floor!
With a sharp gasp, I cringed and collapsed back into the armchair.
“My God!” I cried yet heard no sound. All air had fled my lungs, and I couldn’t draw a breath.
“Relax, John.” Cybilla calmly approached and knelt before me. “Just relax. Breathe.”
I tried but couldn’t inhale. My diaphragm had gone rigid and hot.
Cybilla spoke with care, “This type of levitation is called transvection. Nothing to be alarmed about.” She removed the ring she had been gazing into, a wide band of machine-faceted gold threads glittering as if embedded with tiny gems. “Transvection is something Tibetan monks do every now and then.”
She tugged at the soft gold clasps cinching the threads, lengthened the coiled strands enough to fit me, and slipped the ring of bright filaments over my left thumb.
Immediately, my lungs inflated, and I began breathing normally. My mind cleared, as well—and my first thought was I had hallucinated.
“It’s all hallucinated,” Cybilla confirmed, holding my left hand between both of hers. “We’ll chat up the science of it sometime, to ease your rational mind. But for now, just sit here and breathe normally while I make us some tea.”
She strode across the gallery and disappeared through a stained-glass door with some medieval image of a serpent draped over a cross.
Did she just read my mind? Again? Am I still hallucinating?
Those thoughts carried no alarm. Calmness covered me for the first time since my coma. I turned to gaze out the window and let daylight knock against my face.
Everything looked—and felt—ordinary once more, with no hint of the panic that had wrenched me just moments ago.
The clear day with its bundles of clouds, peaceful flowers and looping butterflies asserted its normalcy. And though the shock of my hallucination had dwindled entirely away, the blue book from my recurring dream still sat in the front window.
I got up and returned to the shop. I took the blue volume from the display and flipped through its blank pages. The exactitude of its dimensions and color fixed me to the center of the earth.
False memory, I reckoned. My post-traumatic brain had retrofitted this real book to my recurring dream image. Another delirium from my battle-scarred nervous system.
The crispness of that insight wholly steadied me. I returned the book to its place in the window and thought of quitting this dainty shop and its very eccentric proprietor.
I would go back to the pocket park and confirm that the experience I had there was not a false memory or an elaborate hallucination. The old woman, who had also worn quirky clothing, no doubt belonged to the same cracked cult as Cybilla Rayne. Who knows what scam they’re running!
I removed the band of woven gold from my thumb and left it on the counter next to the cash register. As I turned to go, night opened in my chest. I staggered a step and took a knee to keep from fainting.
Tottering woozily, I peered over a plummeting void into coal-tar depths. The rogue voice I’d first sensed on yesterday’s flight returned: They are going down always.
Who?
All those wounded I could not save, I presumed. But why haunt me? No medic can save everyone. That had seemed matter-of-fact at the time.
Now, pity cut through my heart for everyone who had given their last moments to me—the soldiers, civilians, even the enemy combatants who had died under me.
They are going down always. And they are fallen already, far behind the world, stranded in the darkest precincts of nowhere.
I heard the vivid clatter of teacups and saucers. Then Cybilla crouched beside me. She smelled like something brisk and blue, a frosty winter morning. How could anyone smell like that? Was I having a stroke?
“You can’t remove the band just yet,” she asserted gently, as if to a child, and took my left hand. Once again, she fit the ring to my thumb. “Your mind is a dream. And it’s fractured. You’ll need time—and effort—to heal.”
As soon as she replaced the ring on my thumb, everything sharpened familiarly. With her pressing that close, I could smell the human musk of her warmth, and that fit me appropriately to the moment.
“What just happened?” I whispered, afraid I might fall apart again. “A moment a go…”
“You were losing your mind.”
“I feel steady now.” Hypnosis, I figured.
Kneeling there on the slate floor, in obeisance to something unfathomable, I really needed to know what was happening to me, and I resorted again to reason.
I recalled from a psych lecture how experienced hypnotherapists could induce hallucinations covertly. We are never more than five minutes from trance.
I touched my forehead to the floor. No wonder she wears all that circus frippery: to distract while she mesmerizes!
“But wait—” I heard reason. Hypnosis can’t remedy nerve damage.
“It’s natural to rationalize experiences of nonordinary reality,” Cybilla said, helping me to my feet. “Go with it. Tell yourself whatever you need to feel safe. Everything will come clear in time.”
“My brain was injured in the war.” I peered into her honey-lit eyes. Talk about hypnosis. “How can a ring change that?”
She smiled softly. “Shall we have that tea?”
Fantasy and Science
No comments:
Post a Comment