Over to the left in the same home county, the sun touched its golden brow to the High Street’s Eastern end, flooding the entire length with a pearlescent mirage of soft light.
It cast a shimmering spear through a particularly well-positioned bedroom window, instantly awakening the Master, who climbed from the narrow single bed, lit a stick of rose-infused incense, struck a set of copper wind chimes and then padded off to the bathroom chanting a dawn mantra.
Om Mani Padme Hum
A huge ellipse with markers strewn –
Stretching far, it seemed a tunnel –
Looked immensely like an air-strip,
Star-port landing, this the summit.
Before my eyes the globe appeared –
Pupils widened, thoughts ran clear –
Radiance filled the tunnel, deep;
Hidden star-ways mark this keep.
Then were sounds of celebration –
Laughter, shouting, whooping, cheering –
Drifting down to where I waited;
From their vantage point they watched it.
As it glided, came to standstill,
‘Here’s the moon!’ cried out the nation.
Thus I pondered, numb with wonder:
‘What brought round this situation?’
Whose the hymn of ardent praise,
The church of luminary office;
Are there here to end their long days,
Star-struck scientists of Attis?
Did these ancient priests control
The queen of ebbing, flowing tides,
The weathered ship of midnight squalls,
The treasured orb that mirrors light?
Only one can read their signs
If free; the one will travel time.
Then to one, unseen, unheard
Shall be revealed at once these words.
“I’m here!”
I had appeared,
And whence I came knew not
The captains of this ice-bound station,
Staging post for secret stops.
All around me, calls, confusion,
Did they know and were they shocked,
Knowing I’d traversed the gateway,
Breached the time, the shield of clocks?
“Still my heart!”
One’s will commanded.
“Should I hide?”
The reason wondered.
But before ‘twas weighed, decided,
All sped past me, called: “It’s coming!”
So, it seemed, the point I went through –
Fortune had decreed its safety –
Fabled portal, scene of landing,
Far-off, frozen, hidden stargate.
Words formed in my awe-struck eye-mind:
‘So the lantern of the night sky
Sails into this place for service.’
I must see this once, this lifetime!’
A sloped and hazardous deck
Above un-named oblivion,
Drew me near its icy edge,
Beheld I vast dominions.
Jeff didn’t answer Vanessa’s question, although he did stare at her with a dazed expression for almost 10 seconds. He had also eaten the spiked risotto and his eyes were hugely widened but completely blank. She repeated the question and he looked hastily at his watch, clearly flustered.
“Oh yes, umm, quarter to ten.” Am I here?
“Thanks Jeff” She batted her lashes and his eyes shot to her chest as if they were iron filings and she had magnets in her nipples.
So it wasn’t that late, she had plenty of time to find the one she was looking for. Vanessa’s mind emptied again as she unconsciously tuned in to what the Chairman was saying. The words were strangely familiar, but she couldn’t quite place where she might have heard them before.
“ONE FLESH, ONE BONE, ONE TRUE RELIGION, ONE VOICE, ONE HOPE, ONE REAL DECISION.”
People were murmuring all around and Vanessa swivelled her head to gauge the audience’s reaction. Some were nodding vigorously but others were grumbling over folded arms and shaking their heads equally vigorously.
A minority even seemed to be on the verge of heckling, she realised in surprise. In the meantime, a slow but steady stream of people was milling towards a small door by the side of the stage.
Where are they going, she wondered vaguely, is there a work-group in there….at this time?!
It didn’t seem possible. A very large and untidy woman was standing by the door handing out what looked like a bundle of papers to those who passed through. Vanessa briefly strained her eyes in the woman’s direction but couldn’t for the life of her make out what was going on.
Nor did she particularly care. Something inside her was moving, shifting shape, pushing against the prison of her body, ready to make something crystalline from the ethereal substance of her imagination. It was focused on something – actually, someone – a man who was pulling her.
The shivering needle of her spirit grew firm as it strained towards him.
Vanessa stared into the half-full glass of mediocre white wine. Her mind slipped unnoticed to a place that might have been a million miles away, it seemed so far.
Not far enough she had mused a moment earlier.
Her posture – gracefully poised and somewhat regal, a gift fromher mother – effectively disguised the lack of attention Vanessa had actually been paying to the post-dinner speeches. Had she been paying attention, she would have noticed they were strange to say the least. A weirdly evangelical statement finally caught her attention, as a school-marmish woman warbled extra-loudly:
“ONE MAN, ONE GOAL, ONE MISSION. ONE HEART, ONE SOUL, ONE SOLUTION!”
This, it seemed, was meant to herald the arrival of someone called The Chairman. Vanessa gave a half-hearted clap as the next city slicker hit the podium. Lord, what a tedious event! She was having trouble focusing and blinked a few times. Despite having drunk only one and a half glasses of wine she was feeling distinctly hammered and couldn’t imagine why.
Vanessa could not possibly have realised that the rather bland risotto was laced with fly agaric toadstool skin, for who could have imagined such a thing occurring at a hellishly dull conference?
The Chairman was a funny colour and, now Vanessa came to think of it, there was a lot more about him besides that didn’t seem right. She gazed at the seductively large goblet and used her last remaining sober brain cells to summon up a bit of will power. I mustn’t drink any more now, have to pace myself.
Squinting back up at the podium, she tried but failed to focus her thoughts. A worrying notion then struck her:
Was it later in the day than she’d realised?
“Excuse me,” she whispered to the man sitting to her left. From his badge she had already noticed he was Jeff Lloyd, worldwide human resources director for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Vanessa was very beautiful and Jeff immediately leaned towards her, his excitement palpable.
“Do you have the time?”
There was a pause of around three seconds, immediately after which I experienced the sudden and remarkable sensation that I was being elevated at great speed. The extraordinarily active light began at my feet and swept over my entire body in an electrifying wave.
The brilliance in the room – the total change in quality of light – was totally apparent even with my eyes still tightly closed. Indeed, it seemed so bright that I dared not open them for fear of going blind. It was as if someone had adjusted a vast dimmer switch on the greatest lantern.
My heart was beating fast and I felt truly ecstatic; each tangible quality of sensation and atmosphere informed me subtly of a change in dimension. There seemed to have been both a quantitative and qualitative change that could only really have been brought about through an extreme alteration of altitude.
Brilliantly intense, the occurrence stimulated my senses in unprecedented style, so my whole mind was filled with awe, and my body with a sensation of pure bliss, as if all material was somehow being experienced as a factor of light energy.
The first clear notion that came into my head I vocalized with words lighter than air: “I’m in heaven!” I had inspired.
The only obvious mystery I was able to discern was that I had felt myself to arise drastically but the light had noticeably – even from behind closed eyelids – begun at my feet rather than my head or whole body at once.
I have only just considered whether I may have been immersed in a depth of light and it must surely be true that on a round planet which rotates for a living, ‘up’ and ‘down’ are paradoxically named directions.
Who can say?
With the roll steady I faced the window, through which both the moon and Venus could be seen shining on that particular night, in conjunction. I clearly remember seeing them and can picture them now, because they were spectacularly close together. Standing between them I stood stock still.
Apart from my right arm, that is, which was busy from the elbow out, apparently winding something up that was seriously heavy. Perhaps the actual universal time piece. The movement had been clockwise.
I had always assumed that the world turned in 3 ways simultaneously, so in an attempt to get the third way right I turned in the opposite direction and started to make a slow elliptical movement with my hips, in a position facing the guitar case belonging to my boyfriend, that was propped against the wall.
For some reason this provoked an undeniable sense of danger which I tried in vain to place.
After a few seconds I was disturbed to realize that I had been unconsciously yet meditatively staring into the small silver clasps at the bottom of the case. These threw off a distinct enough reflection of myself to warrant a hasty turnaround.
At this point I struck the first of two strong convictions that I happened upon that night; namely: that I must at all costs avoid the sight of my own reflection whilst in that particular (alternative) state of consciousness. The second was about not being trapped in time.
After a few more disturbed gyrations, my actions somehow arrested by having thought too hard, I fell light-heartedly onto the bed and closed my eyes, feeling wonderfully satisfied with my spinning achievement.
The immediate possibility of coming down from the Benedictine high was out of the question and I did not bother to even contemplate such a thing.
Instead, I submitted myself to the force of the higher power which had first taken over me the two weeks earlier. In other words, I proceeded logically and without any waste of ‘time’.
(‘Time’ is bound in order to be seen as captive rather than captivating).
In my state of heightened reason it seemed entirely appropriate that I should start to spin with this somehow supernatural energy.
Therefore, shortly after Benedict’s departure I stood in the centre of the room and started to turn around, faster and faster in a clockwise direction until the room was a whirl of spiralling white light.
I built up enough momentum to perform such a complete turn-around that it occurred to me in passing that I could spin the whole floor along with myself.
Detachedly impressed with this accomplishment, it seemed a relatively small step to make the spirals spread outwards until I was going so quickly that the centrifugal force caused the world to spin around with me. It was the beginning of a full-blown revolution.
I span around for a number of minutes until the world got going at finite speed – held ad infinitum with the momentousness of gravity – and then, when I felt aligned with a certain mysterious point, stopped dead on the very same spot (from which I had not once deviated) without falling, feeling dizzy or even moving at all.
Now, I’m sure you will agree that not only was this physically an incredibly impressive feat for any person – let alone a very stoned person – there is something highly unusual and somehow also relevant about having perceptibly turned the world.
This is the story she told the Master of Mysteries: “It was my second year at university at the start of the summer term, a night in May. I had a nice Thursday evening out with friends, most of which was spent in a student faculty building listening to a band called The Egg.
I was with a clever person called James (what is in a name?) and we experienced the music in the best possible way, which was psychedelically transcendentally. This involved one of us empathetically playing the guitar (him) while the other was drumming (me).
My boyfriend and our male friends had, at a comparable point in the evening, embarked upon what I later found out to be THE most debauched party imaginable then, courtesy of a fairly well known homosexual history tutor from a neighbouring college.
“Bloody hell and buggery” was the first definition to arise when I was later given the low-down, and it was related that the host regularly dosed his guests with LSD in order to ensure that his annual party was a weird and lively, corrupt sort of affair; the stuff of almost legend. Or so I heard
My own very enjoyable evening of musical appreciation was drawn to a close before midnight, after which I returned alone to my room at college.
I had not been back long before I was surprised by a late visit from another of the very bright and interesting fellows, this one called Benedict, who had been looking for my boyfriend but by a curious twist of fate found me instead. As it happened, the meeting was serendipitous and Benedict’s company was something of a blessing. He even rolled a most wonderful joint and, in keeping with the spirit of peace, we listened to almost the entire collection of Bob Marley’s greatest hits.
Benedict was exceedingly clever and I enjoyed his visit. We related well and it seemed to me that everything we did not say made perfect sense. I also had the distinct impression that something was going to happen, that it was inevitable as one follows two. What that something would be, I could not have said, although I felt I knew.
Suffice it to say that Benedict left my room shortly after the joint had been smoked and Bob Marley left us. He had been there for just over an hour and during this time I had become supremely and irrevocably high.
The Master opened for business as usual and prepared the small but atmospheric treatment room for a ten o’clock appointment. It would turn out to be another curious case.
A young and beautiful woman opened the door to Mysteries in a state of some agitation, saying she’d had a bizarre experience several years ago and was now being reminded of it for reasons which seemed to relate to a love affair of sorts, an affaire du coeur.
She was also aware that the extraordinary planetary activity was inclining her to share the details of her experience with someone else.
The Master was doubly intrigued when Soaring Eagle suddenly appeared to impart a message:
This described has taken place, truth recounted; sooth instate.
Sitting up very straight in the second chair, the woman took a sip of the proffered ginger tea and then broke apart the floodgate of her unique tale: