Today I went to the house of the proctor who lives in the lighthouse overlooking the bay. I greeted his attendant silently, we are not allowed to speak to one another, and went around back to the corral. The Marquis as I call him, experiments on horses. I dread this place for it wasn’t unusual to hear the tortured wail of these animals from a distance. Every now and then one of them will reach a point in their agony where they sound almost human. As they gasp for breath you keep expecting one of them to plead “For the love of God please stop.”I have dreams that will go to the grave with me about these beasts. Oh the things I have seen...
I was lucky that day or so I thought for silence greeted me and I naturally assumed I had been spared more unpleasant memories to take with me when I left. As I rounded the bend I spotted the proctor standing over the carcass of a horse with his little tool bag in his hand. As I started towards him a shadow came over us both. We looked up at the same time and what I saw….
There were a thousand ways to die on this god-forsaken (Oh yes he has!) world but this …I was looking at a massive tidal wave one mile high, freeze framed, coloured midnight black with deep red spots… breaking in place. Organic. Massive. Sentient. Moving and staying still at the same time, dwarfing the trees like they were nothing more than grass to its knee. The more I realized just how big it was the more terror I felt. It had not made a sound as it crept up on us for we had heard no sign of its approach…the nature of the thing that towered over me…my god this thing was alive. I heard a gasp from beside me and as I looked to where the proctor stood something crossed my face with mind-numbing speed. The impact cut off the proctor’s scream and when I looked to where he was, he was gone. You know how sometimes you see something out of the corner of your eye but when you look nothing’s there. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a tremendous mass moving away at a tremendous speed. The mountain of.... flesh....was gone and as I stood rooted to the spot, I prayed I would never see it again. Not all prayers are answered.
The antediluvian. The ancient one. This was the wave. No wonder you couldn’t outrun it. No wonder all those who had seen it never lived to tell. No wonder there is no wonder left in this world. Somewhere inside me a door had swung open. Terror in its native form, undiluted by intellect. Nothing I had experienced had prepared me for this . I had met the future and its name is death. Death to all hope. Terror had found a home in me. And it was dark and several hours later before I found the nerve to move from that spot.
When I returned,my proctor’s house was in shadows. As I went up the stairs one of them broke away from the wall and approached me.
Omigod I am going to die!
Omigod I am going to die!
Omigod I am going...
But it wasn’t a remnant of the wave left behind. I understood the tunnels for specimen now. And she read the understanding in my eyes. The wave broke off part of itself to collect these things. That means the proctors are all parts broken off it…! My god....what made Eleni different is that she had grown her own body from human tissue…but her brain must be …like the wave. The proctors moving as one now made sense. The simultaneous smiles made sense…and the behaviour of my beloved proctor finally began to make sense. Eleni, was feeling human feelings. Wearing a human body has its own price tag and feelings are the cost.
The body she had was recording the things she was doing and finally started sending her signals. The need for holistic integration of the organism. And my naked form had been the trigger------“Mathias” she called again and I left the train of thought and dropped to my knees.
“Come here”. “Look at me” I am sorry but I could not make my muscles obey. Suddenly she was in front of me. My gaze came up from the floor and traveled up her body. Very slowly. I took in every inch of her frame every line, every curve, the power in her thighs, the pregnant wedge of her mons, the squares stacked on her abdomen, oh my god, the fullness of her heavy breasts, the total belief in her work and self she held in the square of her shoulders. This and all this I found on my journey to her eyes, which were almost slits, as her hand moved away from the narrow corded waist and came to rest on my chin. Gentle pressure brought me to my feet. First one side of my face and then the other she surveyed, fingertips walking the distance. I could see that her eyes were closed, her mouth moved and she shook the frown from her face and start the whole process again. As I watched her chest rise and fall I realized she was seeing me for the first time. With her eyes closed. So we just stood there for a while.
Leaves rustled as if the wind were counting its bounty in the cold blue light of the climbing moon. An owl asked who as she asked the same of me...no words now...fingers began to slowly trace the contours of my face first my hairline, my eyebrows, my ears and the spaces behind it, then the shape of my nose. Here she paused, shuddered, took a deep breath and lowered her fingers to my lips.
I gasped as the electricity coursed through me. She felt it too for her mouth opened and she made a sound that seemed to be pulled from her throat and when I thought I could not take it anymore her fingers began to move again.
The stirring of my loins, the way my head felt light, the deepening of my breath and my reluctance to leave this current that I had entered, all this as her fingers danced lightly over my lips. I felt my soul pour into her. Slow as molasses I entered her universe, inexorably like the rising sun, going deeply, burning bright, pulsing, throbbing, looking for a deeper current, plunging to the core of the rhythm, surrendering to a universal beat as energy flowed between us creating a bridge supported by our sameness all the while exchanging our differences, one star field cross-pollinating the other.
As I lost the ability to see other senses came alive. Somewhere deep inside me I felt, under all the guilt and shame, the opening of a doorway. Suddenly I realized how blind I had been all my life. How very little I had seen with my eyes and the incredible waste I had made with the senses I had been given. So much time devoted to all things that I did not have and never any time to things I did. That which I had I had squandered. The rich incredible bounty that existence offers us began to make itself obvious.
As our spirits began to resonate to some higher frequency I began to see the incredible amount of things I took for granted ,
The mistakes I had not learned from but paid for. All the opportunities disguised as problems I had let slip out of my hands. I heard the hollow rattle that was my life and the abject loneliness that comes from taking no chances and no risks. I had become the ultimate survivor but knew nothing about living. All the time since I had become an acolyte and had been groomed to be the attendant of the proctor Elena I had no sense of who I was or what I wanted.
The saddest thing was I had no ambition to be anything more. I read somewhere that the saddest people are not those who dream small dreams but those who have no dreams at all. As if sensing I was straying from the path I felt Elena call me with her soul and I left behind the moment of clarity and came to her. The essence that was she stood at the brink of a celestial maelstrom and as I joined her. We paused for a moment and plunged into the raging current, a river of souls, all going to the same place eventually, passing on little tips about how to get there, what to watch out for, good places to store up on energy, how to give and forgive, then departing even as others are joining the current, all bringing something to it, t all of us learning as all our souls spoke to all the others. We rode the wave, were part of it, gave to it, learned from it, were nurtured by it and it seemed as if we had always been there.
All of a sudden there was just us and it. Something beyond anything we had the words for. Something that had always been there. Love older than time and space and being and the word that brought all into being. Love so powerful no evil could look upon it or think about it or acknowledge its existence. As we drank in the love we began to feel the silken cord that connected us to bodies left far behind and no sooner did we feel that reality then we began to go back to where we had come. Noooo! Not yet. Too soon we were moving faster than thought itself, past nebulae and holes and stars being created and rips in the fabric where energy transformed all matter within its reach.
Instinctively we reached out for the other and our energy started to pulsate, a cosmic heartbeat that began to grow in frequency and intensity until we started using senses that shouldn’t be available to us yet. And as we pulsed, energy began to spew forth and matter from our joining and we knew these were the ingredients for the big bang of another universe. As we began to close in on our galaxy we realized that the antediluvian had stopped all of what it had been doing and was trying to understand this shift in the fabric of the universe. It had sensed that something monumental had just taken place and no sooner than that began to form a brain in the middle of its mass where it could begin to assess the possibilities of what had moved its senses from below the astral plane. As we followed the silken cord back into our bodies...we could see the ancient enemy looking skyward...confused not because it had been refused entry to the astral plane...but it could no longer connect with the Eleni. I could see and so could she...that we had one chance to leave before the wave began the search for us.....and the knowledge inside us could not be allowed to fall into its hands. WE knew now what it had been working on. Where it planned to go and how to get there. And we also knew how to stop it from leaving the earth...and end its reign forever. The smell of ozone....the cosmic charge built up from the friction of our passage. The plasma that danced over our bodies. The growing rumble from the earth and the breeze that brought its scent as the antediluvian came for us. The crackle of plasma as the place our soul had met plotted the jump for us...
I focused on her just as her eyes stopped the rapid blink of the soul/body connection resetting...we knew. Insane answer. Impossible solution. No choice. Only one direction. And not much time. As we took our first breath...I told her "No matter what!" and she said "Yes". The name jumps to the smile on our lips ... “Donnabella”! And the snap of thunder!
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