Ancient Echoes (14 page)

My God, she’s running from me. Running from her own father. What have I done? How have I frightened her?

She had locked herself into the bathroom. He knelt outside the door calling for her. Part of his mind, a rational part, kept saying to him: don’t make things worse. You’re not in control. Don’t make things worse.

The loving part was desperate to hold her, to make sure she wasn’t hurt.

Natalie yelled for help.

Greyface twisted his hair, jerked back his head, tugged and jerked in emphasis to the words.
She should have followed me. You stopped her. Bring her back.

‘I can’t.’

In a sudden moment of fury he turned where he was slumped, struck at Greyface, tried to grab his arms and twist them into submission, but he found himself staring at Angela, his grip
bruising her. She eased his fingers from her arm, kissed him quickly, reassuringly on the mouth.

He melted into her body, hugged her as he cried. ‘I’m cracking up. I’m so fucking frightened. It’s just … suddenly. Come on. I know it’s sudden, I know it makes no sense … oh shit … it makes no sense … I’m so frightened …’

Inside the bathroom, Natalie kept yelling; but for a while, Angela held him, whispered in his ear and stroked his hair.

Greenface had left the twilight and passed quickly through woodland, emerging by a deep, icy pool fed by a wide fall of water from the towering cliff above. Here, she bathed for a long time before stalking the shallows, half-crouching, watching for fish. This naked hunt was unsuccessful, and half-way through she seemed aware of being watched, tugging on her white-shell tunic and running again.

Soon she came to a place where the land fell away and a vast plain opened before her, wooded and mountainous in the distance, gleaming bluely where a vast lake sprawled across the earth.

For a long time she stood there, and Jack felt drawn to that great distance, drawn to home; but as always with these moments of shared vision, he felt her hesitation, her fear before she started to run again, and the glimpse of Greenface faded into darkness, the darkness of his room, a darkness broken by a thin crack of light where the curtains were not quite closed.

The door to the room was open and a white-gowned figure stood there, watching him. The girl was holding a mug of coffee and she walked cautiously to the bed.

‘Is that for me?’

‘Mummy says you’re not very well.’

‘I’m not. I’m sorry I frightened you yesterday. I didn’t mean to.’

The mug was hot and he drew a quick breath as he tried to find somewhere to put it down. Natalie was solemn as she stared at him, then came to a decision and jumped under the covers
with him. They sat, propped up on the pillows, and watched the light grow.

‘Have you been out dancing?’ Jack asked.

‘Nope. Mummy’s been sending E-mail and I’ve been reading.’

‘Early risers.’

‘Couldn’t sleep.’

Angela came in carrying her own mug of coffee. ‘How’s the head?’

‘Sore. Spinning. I’ve seen her again, this time in a waterfall. She’s heading deeper, heading home. I don’t know what to do.’

‘Who’s heading home?’ Natalie asked.

‘A strange woman with a green face, and two spears, and a blowpipe which she uses with great accuracy.’

‘Oh, her,’ Natalie said matter-of-factly.

‘Yes. Her,’ Jack said, with a sidelong glance at the girl. ‘Have you seen her?’

‘No. My bird-friend talks about her though. I think he’s married to her. He misses her.’ She looked round sharply. ‘Are you going to get her back? When are you going to get her back?’

The sudden change in voice startled Jack. For a second he felt sick, staring at his daughter, looking for a sign of the grey mask among her own pale features. But Natalie just said, ‘Will you paint her for me? Then I can show him.’

I’ll take your Natalie. I’ll take her bit by bit
…

‘You’re not to show him anything. Do you understand?
Nothing.
You’re not to
see
him, Nattie. Do you understand me? Can you understand what I’m saying to you …?’

His voice was rising. The girl huddled below the covers, eyes wide as the angry face of her father loomed over her.

Angela tugged his arm. ‘Easy, Jack. Take it easy. Jack …!’

‘She’s not to dance with him,’ he said desperately. Angela’s face swam in his vision. ‘He’s going to take her,’ he mouthed silently. ‘Bit by bit. I don’t know how, but I don’t dare think he’s bluffing. Bit by bit, Angie. How will we know?’

She took his hand in hers, stroked his fingers. ‘Jack … you’ve always resisted working with Steve Brightmore. And I know
you’re reluctant to let him try to document your … visions. But I think it’s time you tried something. Something that won’t harm you, can only help you.’

‘This Midax stuff?’

‘It works, Jack. It’s going to be a fabulous tool in therapy; not to mention psychometry. If Greenface is accessible, you’ll be able to confront her. If she’s there, in here …’ she tapped a finger on his forehead, ‘I’m confident you’ll be able to interact with her, to persuade her to … whatever … come out, join her partner, leave you, leave you in peace. She doesn’t belong there, Jack. The chance to cut her out and discard her is in your hands, and in Brightmore’s research.’

She looked at him long and hard. The name Brightmore rankled him; her continued familiarity with the New Zealander offended him. They talked a language he didn’t understand, shared enthusiasm and humour based on work and observations that excluded him from understanding.

Bloody Brightmore!

‘Please?’ she asked. ‘We can’t risk too many yesterdays. Even if it’s all psychosis, you’re doing yourself some serious harm. Please?’

He thought hard for a few seconds, then whispered, ‘I suppose it makes sense. But won’t I be vulnerable? And won’t that mean Natalie is vulnerable?’

Angela didn’t answer. After a while she sighed and slightly shrugged.

‘Yes. I’m afraid it does. But if there’s a chance of it working …’

He lay back, his hand gently touching his daughter’s hair as she listened to her parents. ‘Okay. Let’s give it a try. When do I start?’

‘I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers, and I become the other dreamers …’

‘At last!’ a male voice said. ‘I’m here, right behind you, Jack. Where the hell are we? In a plane? It’s all very hollow. Very angular.’

Angela’s presence in his dream induced a moment’s dream-shock, since she was in the form of a man, and out of sight. And yet though she spoke with the man’s voice, it was unquestionably Angela.

She said, ‘This is beautiful. I’m getting startling colours – some shape as well. Are we flying up a hill?’

‘Yes. Very slowly.’

He was in the front of a small, single winged plane, peering through the blur of the propeller. The pilot was behind him – Angela’s presence was located behind the pilot, at the back of the craft.

The plane was indeed flying up a hill, rising in almost absurd slow motion. Below, the hill was a sequence of tiled and marbled baths, coloured in luxurious blues and greens and blacks, the water gushing from the mouths of lions, giants, grinning gods and ghoulish gargoyles. Azure blues and scarlets gave way to mottled mosaics, and silver moonbursts, each bath occupied by a few naked humans, of both sexes, drenched and diving in the spouts of liquid.

‘Water?’ Angela guessed. ‘It is. Water. I can just make it out. And people … You know what water means …’ she teased. Jack watched the ruins of the buildings on either side, thinking about the detail, the columns, the statues, the intricacy of the
arches. The plane ascended slowly and he sensed the summit of the hill approaching.

‘What does water mean?’ he asked, manipulating the dream, confronting the Outsider in the dream (this was, after all, the purpose of the test).

‘In most people’s case: sex. But there are so many Roman baths – I’m beginning to get a good VR focus. Maybe you need a shower? Oh God, look at him!’

Through her masculine voice, she laughed. Below, a Herculean male was being scrubbed with huge brushes by four lithe young women, his hands above his head, as if hiding from the pain.

‘You’re
weird,’
Angela said.

‘It’s a dream!’

‘Not mine, though, I’m relieved to say. God, Freud would have adored this.’

‘I can’t control what surfaces.’

‘Obviously.’

‘It’s an archetypal image – symbolic.’

‘Rubbish. You hanker for a good
scrubbing
!’

‘Behave yourself.’

‘Why? I don’t
mind
if you put a few nubile girls into the baths. I shan’t be
jealous.
Just as long as you put
me
in.’

‘Can you see the baths? The faces on the waterspouts?’

‘Vaguely. Try staring at one spot. See if the focus sharpens.’

But Jack ignored the dream suggestion and turned in his seat. The pilot was a blank-faced man, face white as a ghost, skull-like, dressed in ancient flying gear and flexing a ‘joystick’ easily from side to side. For some reason his hands were bandaged. Behind the pilot sat his old geography teacher, Mr Simmons, a fat faced-man with greasy black hair, who was looking earnestly at the passing ruins, the bathers, the brilliantly coloured marble baths.

‘Christ, I hated you at school!’

Jack struggled for a moment for full presence in the dream, then managed to say, ‘Smile at me?’

‘I can’t,’ Angela/Mr Simmons said. ‘I’m caught up in the visual side. I don’t have control. I’m just a passenger in this intersect.’

Jack himself lost control, then, finding the dream shifting, like a jump in a broken film, to the high part of the hill. They were still flying slowly over the white coral of weathered ruins, but a great bull’s head was towering from the ground, horns curved elaborately, almost meeting above the broad, red features, the empty eyes.

‘It’s the shadow-horning,’ Angela said, beginning to drift into dream incoherency. Jack was aware that she was saying, ‘It’s the bull.’

‘I don’t want to fly too close.’

‘Dream, dream, dreamers into the surfacing.’ (She was actually saying: ‘Maybe they’ll surface now …’ meaning the bull-runners.)

Angela’s voice, blurring, was also different in tone again. She was an actor from the 1950s, whom he knew but couldn’t name, grey-haired and very smooth. More importantly, she was referring to Greyface and Greenface, but in this dream, lucid though it was, he could not hear them, he could not even remember how he called them. When he tried to control the lucid state to focus on the bull-runners, they twisted out of
sense
into
incoherence,
and he saw two characters from Star Trek, one of them speaking as Captain Kirk, but with the face of his grandfather, recently dead.

Greyface and Greenface belonged in another region of this
pre-conscious
as Brightmore called it.

‘I don’t like the look of this,’ Angela said. But already the dream was decomposing, the elements of TV science-fiction blurring the crystal image of the Roman baths, the ruins, the monstrous bull’s head.

As quickly as he had felt threatened by the looming creature, the lucid state dissolved, and though Jack kept control of his own ego-presence, searching briefly for Angela, he had drifted into a picnic scene, some soft reflection of his school days,
tinged with anxiety and a sense of wandering away from the security of the group. He managed the escape line, ‘Coming up for air!’, but drifted on, slipping into normal sleep, normal dreams.

Cat
REM18

Term:
05:16:
Day
3

He woke suddenly, fully alert, yet surfacing into a world of madness, where the conversation he could hear was surreal and the movement of people random. As he focused his mind on the chaos, he realized that Angela, Steve Brightmore, and other members of the MIDAX team were animatedly, excitedly and jokingly discussing the ‘Hill of Baths’.

‘Jack’s
back!’
he called out as he sat up on the couch. The huddle of researchers dispersed and Angela came over to him, her face ruddy, glowing.

‘You’re a natural! Jack, you’re a natural. You throw such a strongly defined Optical Resonance Image …’

‘Do
what?’

‘Optical Resonance!
We can
read
you! I could
see
those ruins – the water! I was there, flying
with
you. You’re a natural.’