Entangled (20 page)

Ria took the pouch from her.

It was heavy.

She put her hand inside and counted one … two … three … four … five stones, all of perfect throwing weight. She drew one of the missiles out and examined it in the beam of light at the entrance flap. It was, without a doubt, the most beautiful thing she had ever seen – a cold and deadly egg of milky quartz.

She took the other stones from the pouch and laid all five on the floor of the tent side by side so she could study them. All were exactly the same shape, size and weight. All shared the same outer shimmer and the same strange inner opacity, like swirling mist or clouds. All were flawless and smooth to the touch.

‘I’ve had them half my lifetime,’ said Merina. ‘I found them by the Snake river, lying in a circle on the bank, still wet as though someone had just fished them from the water. But no one else was there. Beautiful, mysterious stones. They have some power about them – any fool can see that. I picked them up and carried them away with me. All these years I’ve kept them safe …’

‘Then you mustn’t give them to me. They’re much too precious a gift …’

‘All these years I’ve kept them safe,’ Merina repeated, ‘without ever knowing why. But last night Our Lady of the Forest visited me and told me to give them to you.’

With the words came an image of the beautiful, exotic, thrilling woman whom Brindle had called by the same title and whom Ria had seen on her journey with the Little Teachers. The tall woman with long black hair and deep blue skin who had stood with her long-dead parents by a river in the spirit world.

Ria was dumbfounded: ‘Last night, after I ate the Little Teachers, I also saw this blue woman …’

‘She is not a woman, Ria! Do not be deceived, for she does not belong to humankind at all. She is one of the eternal spirits. One of those to whom all the worlds and every time and place are open. Past, present, future – nothing is hidden from her.’

‘But what does she want me to have the stones for?’

‘Why, my child! Is it not obvious? She wants you to
throw
them, of course.’

Thanks to a stopover at a Starbucks in Santa Monica, heavy morning traffic on the 405, and the beat-up engine in Bannerman’s decrepit Chevy, the fifty-mile journey from Los Angeles to UC Irvine was now well into its second hour. In such circumstances Leoni should have been fuming. She couldn’t bear to be delayed or frustrated – by anything. But having just escaped from Sansom’s creepy lunatic asylum she felt differently. Every mile that crawled by on the freeway was a mile further away from Mountain Ridge and a mile closer to Bannerman’s project – and maybe to some answers to the big questions now swarming all over her life.

‘It’s a residential programme,’ Bannerman was explaining as he drove. ‘Part of the deal is that all the volunteers – there are thirty of them – live in at our research facility on campus and don’t have contact with the outside world for the duration. The whole project runs for four weeks but the other volunteers have been there for nearly two weeks already, so you’ll be joining halfway through.’

‘And what is it? Like some sort of dorm or something? I’m not sure how good I’ll be at living with thirty other people.’

‘You’ll have a small private room. You can be left alone, or you can socialise. It’s up to you. The only commitment is that approximately once every two days you come down to our lab – it’s in the basement of the same building – and we give you a shot and you report the effects to us … Sometimes we’ll ask you to have two or three shots in the same day – which can be tough.’

‘These shots … they’re not ketamine, are they?’

‘Ketamine?’ Bannerman sounded surprised, even affronted. ‘Certainly not. Where did you get that idea from?’

‘At Mountain Ridge. Last night I tried to escape …’

‘That was gutsy of you,’ commented David from the back seat.

‘I just got so mad with the way they were treating me,’ said Leoni.
‘Anyway, it didn’t do any good. They caught me in a minute and sedated me with a huge hypodermic full of K. Then they strapped me back on my bed and that’s where I stayed until a certain knight named John Bannerman rode in on a white charger and rescued me this morning …’

Bannerman’s face had clouded with anger: ‘That’s so irresponsible of them,’ he exploded. ‘Sansom ought to be behind bars for using ketamine like that. It’s not a tranquilliser – unless you’re a horse.’

‘So what is it, then?’

‘Lots of things. It’s used as an anaesthetic for certain kinds of surgery. It’s also a powerful hallucinogen – that’s why it’s popular on the club and rave scene.’

Leoni nodded in agreement: ‘I snorted it in a club once. It’s a heavy trip. But what it did to me at Mountain Ridge was way beyond that.’

‘Any idea how much they gave you?’

‘The nurse said something about “four hundred milligrams intramuscular”?’

‘That would do it!’ Bannerman whistled: ‘You could have open-heart surgery on four hundred milligrams IM and you wouldn’t feel a thing.’

‘Yes, I was knocked out – or at least my body was. But my mind felt like it had been set free and I travelled to the same place I was in when I had my near-death experience. It was the land where everything is known again, and the Blue Angel was there. The green flowers were there. The monsters I saw before were there, too – they’re trees but they have these huge beaks like birds – and I met this girl who they were going to attack. I tried to warn her, then the next thing I knew I was yanked out of there and stuffed back inside my body in Mountain Ridge.’

‘You told me your near-death experience felt, what did you say, “more real than real”? Did all this feel that way too?’

‘A thousand per cent. But ketamine’s just a drug …’

‘Not necessarily. Remember we talked about how our brains might not be so much generators of consciousness as vehicles or receivers that mediate consciousness at the physical level?’

‘The idea of the brain being like a TV set?’

‘Exactly. And most human brains are tuned, by default, into Channel Normal – everyday reality, in other words.’

‘Makes sense,’ said Leoni. ‘We’d be pretty messed up if they weren’t.’

‘But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other channels broadcasting
at us all the time which are all also equally real but not normally accessible to our senses. Perhaps what happens in NDEs is that there’s a natural release of hormones into the brain that retune its wavelength setting and allow us to perceive those other realities.’

‘But what’s it got to do with illegal drugs like ketamine?’

‘A lot, if I’m right. In fact, my whole research project’s based on an illegal drug.’

Leoni grinned: ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. You’re pushing an illegal drug at UC Irvine? Which one?’

Bannerman was obviously uncomfortable: ‘Look … there are about half a dozen substances that affect the brain in much the same way that the near-death state does and make it possible for us to induce the same kinds of experiences. To a certain extent, ketamine is one of them – as you discovered – but it’s far from ideal. It’s unpredictable. Too hard to control. Maybe even dangerous.’

‘So what do you use?’

‘We get good results with dimethyltryptamine …’

Leoni frowned: ‘Dimethyl what? Never heard of it.’

‘Dimethyltryptamine – DMT for short.’

‘OK, now I know what you’re talking about. Friends of mine have smoked it. I hear it’s pretty full-on.’

‘Yes. It’s full-on,’ said Bannerman. ‘And we give it as an intravenous infusion which makes the onset of the experience even stronger and faster.’

‘How come you’re allowed to do this?’ Leoni objected. ‘I mean DMT’s a Schedule 1 drug, right? People go to jail if they’re caught with it. What makes you so different?’

Bannerman sighed: ‘Because we’re administering DMT – which isn’t addictive, by the way – as part of a properly constructed scientific project. We went through all the correct channels and procedures. It took years but eventually we got full approval from the DEA, so we’re completely legit. The next problem was raising money to pay for the research. We didn’t get anywhere with that until about six months ago when one very rich guy stepped in and gave us everything we need.’

‘Who is this guy? Maybe I know him …’

‘I have to keep his name confidential. It’s part of our deal. He’s very imaginative and open-minded … We sold him on the idea that if he
backed our project we’d find the holy grail of quantum physics for him …’

Leoni felt stupid but asked anyway: ‘The holy grail of quantum physics?’

‘I mean proof of the existence of parallel universes and a reliable method for getting volunteers into them and then back out again in one piece.’

When Leoni still seemed confused, Bannerman said: ‘OK, look … It’s what we’ve been talking about. We’re using DMT to simulate the brain chemistry of the near-death state in a large group of volunteers. Right?’

‘Right.’

‘We hope to get some insights into the visions of other worlds that NDE-ers report – the same sort of realistic and convincing visions that you yourself experienced in the near-death state. Established medical opinion is they’re “just hallucinations” but the hypothesis we’re testing is they could be part of an alternate system of human perception – a sort of sixth sense that might be harnessed to explore other dimensions of reality.’

‘So the realm of the Blue Angel is a parallel universe? And I can enter and leave it with DMT? Maybe that’s what she meant when she said I had to make the veil between worlds thin if I wanted to see her again. Perhaps that’s exactly what DMT does.’

‘Maybe,’ Bannerman agreed. ‘But I’m only saying that it’s possible. If we do the science properly we might get a bit closer to certainty on this …’

‘I’m not a scientist,’ David interrupted. ‘So I can call it like I see it. The Blue Angel is real. She has to be, otherwise different people wouldn’t see her. She wants something from us and we need to find out what it is.’

Before high sun Ria and Brindle had climbed the terraces of Secret Place again and returned to the flattened platform in front of the Cave of Visions. Carrying the deerskin pouch from a strap slung around her shoulder, hefting the reassuring bulk and weight of the five quartz throwing stones inside it, Ria felt more like a warrior queen than a rabbit hunter. She had weapons! Given to her by a real Sorcerer. What could be cooler than that?

All around her there were Uglies armed to the teeth with spears, hand-axes and clubs. A war band of fifty braves had assembled to escort her safely back to the Clan. Grondin and Brindle would once again be leading and Ria saw many other familiar faces.

Most radiated friendliness and warmth. The single notable exception was the brave who’d stared at her with such hostility and anger during the night in the Cave of Visions. He stood at the front of the crowd with his shoulders hunched, his swarthy features knitted up into a frown, his chinless jaw thrust forward, and dark and thunderous thought-imagery emanating from him like a noxious vapour. Then his gruff voice was inside her head: ‘I am Garn-garnigor-shengo-aptenjen,’ he said, ‘and I oppose this mission. I will do as my king orders but I fear that only grief and loss will come of it.’

Ria kept her eyes fixed on Garn: ‘I agree with you,’ she said. ‘Fifty men is too many. It’s just going to attract attention. Five will be enough to get me home.’