16.

This blog is three books in the process of being written, in the form of initial drafts of the sections, posted in the intended order, a project for which the overall name is Explorations. The three books are a continuation from Hidden Valleys: Haunted by the Future (Zero Books - 2015), and also from On Vanishing Land, an audio-essay made by myself and Mark Fisher (released by Hyperdub/Flatlines on 26th July, 2019 - https://hyperdub.net).

Explorations: Zone Horizon  (1 - 18)

Explorations: The Second Sphere of Action   (19 - 30)

Explorations: Through the Forest, the River  (31 - 49) 

The Corridor, Part One                                                                                 7.
                                 
                                                                      Justin Barton                                     
                                                                      
                                                                                                                



Ffion


        The birds were singing. I got out of bed, and stretched, looking at the ridge of the mountain through the window. The house was very quiet, I knew that my mother would have gone to get something from the village.

     Five more days in the Asturias mountains, and then back to London.

     Earlier, a phrase had been spoken to me in a dream, just as I was waking up. Someone, very impersonally, had said to me “You are forever starting to happen”.  There was a critical quality about this – I was being told in the dream that I was stuttering continually on the edge of getting started in some way – but at the same time the phrase carried another, eerily positive meaning. I was struck by how the words seemed very different from anything I might say myself. I wondered what Steven would say about it. Too much, probably.  Its positivity would get lost beneath too many words. I smiled. I thought about him, now almost certainly starting his day in the quietness and strategic seclusion of his house in Bromley. I wondered how he was getting on with his abstract paintings, and if he had done anything about looking for work.

    I had first come to this valley when I was five. Thirty years later I was here once more, after a long gap, because my parents had come here to live. I liked that they had taken a leap, and it seemed to be working out well. Today, I thought, I would finally hire a horse and ride to the top of the mountain through the beech forests, and get the view. I’d done this once before, when I was eighteen, and during this trip I had been longing to do it again. It would be a bit dangerous, I thought, but I would just have to concentrate. I had an undefinable sense of potential in my life, and the thought of the long south view across the forests and rocky peaks seemed to fit with this feeling, as if in some way it would help me bring the future into focus.

   

Steven

      It was a very hot day, with no wind, and a slight heat haze, and I felt it was too hot for my actions to be interesting to observers.

       In any case, everyone would be used to seeing me. I climbed over the fence, and walked casually into the garden. I had no immediate intention of trying to get into the house, but as I wandered around, looking for where the foxes had their den, I glanced at the windows to see if any of them were obviously open. I was already convinced that the house had been unoccupied for at least six months. I had seen no lights at night for a long time, and the garden had grown into a luxuriant world of long grass, and flowering wild plants, a terrain for foxes, and for a pair of jays.

     The previous day I had spoken to my friends Tamsin and Rob, who had just come back from visiting the Sami people, up in the hinterlands of Norway.  Looking back, I wonder if this conversation had left me restless, and made me want to go out into the heat and explore.

     As I wandered around the garden my attention was caught by an enamelled tile, deeply embedded in some straggly grass by a garden shed. The tile was a deep violet colour, and seemed to be around four inches across. There were bits of rusting equipment nearby, and between them I had caught the glint of the glassy surface. I prized the tile free of the grass, to get a better look at it, and found myself staring at a key  - a key for a yale lock - which had been hidden underneath.

       Swept forward by an impulse, I went to the back door of the house, and tried the key in the lock. The door opened, and immediately I called out, trying to sound as friendly and reassuring as possible. After a few seconds, when no-one had responded, I went in, and closed the door. I was in the kitchen, and from there I turned left into a dining room, and went on into the living room, whose door  was open, revealing a large hallway. The house was warm, and silent, and there was a kind of dreamy feeling about the place, that wasn’t lessened by there being a film of dust on everything.  Everything was beautifully furnished, but in a minimal, and slightly haphazard way.  For a moment I had the fugitive, seemingly senseless impression that the house was like an ear, which in some way was listening to the sunlight.

          The mail in a large pile on the mat triggered a detective instinct, and I found that a letter from the base of the pile had a postmark from ten months ago. I then went and checked the fridge, whose shrivelled and dried-up contents indicated the same degree of absence.

           On the wall of the living room, above a fire-place, was a photograph of the White Horse of Uffington, the 3000 year old chalk hill figure, in Oxfordshire. It looked like it had been taken from a calendar. The beauty of the horse’s lines made me think of the engraved images of reindeer I had seen when I was travelling in Mongolia – stylised deer flying upwards, engraved spirally onto tall stones. In turn, the memory of the deer-stones brought my mind back to the Sami, with their reindeer. Tamsin was going to visit the day after next, and the transition in my thoughts felt like a closing of some half-seen trajectory in my mind – I was left feeling a yearning to hear about the Sami people, who were nurturing the last remains of an ancient culture, high up on the shoulder of Eurasia.

      I heard a sound from the top of the house which I thought was probably a bird on the roof – or perhaps the bird had flown against an upstairs window. But in the silence the indeterminate sound remained in my mind, and left me wondering – could there be someone in the house who was in need of help?

      I went to the foot of the stairs and called out again.                

           I went upstairs, noticing at the top that the thick dust on the wooden boards of the hallway was unbroken.  I already felt convinced the sound had been a bird and that there was no-one up there. After glancing, in a slightly abashed way, into a couple of bedrooms, I found myself looking into a strikingly painted room, with a sound system whose speakers were placed against the back wall, and on either side of the room half way along.  The end wall of the room had two tall speakers fixed to it, with a rectangle of wall between them which was painted  grey – this rectangle was about eight feet wide and four feet high, and started about three feet from  the floor. The two side walls had a pair of tall speakers each, a little over half of the way from the back wall. The side walls, and the wall by the hallway were painted a muted pale violet, and so were the patches of wall above and below the grey rectangle. It was only after a moment that I realised the room had no window.

    I went back into the corridor for a moment, and looked at a piece of paper stuck to the door. It was handwritten, and it said

 “Go sideways, don’t stop!”

    I examined the writing. It was scrawled playfully in ballpoint pen, and I felt it had probably been a woman who had written the words.

       I went back into the room. I saw that on a shelf by the sound system there was a set of CDs. I picked one up. It was home-recorded, and on the spine were the words “Sound Shadows 1”. I saw at a glance that the CDs were all named the same way,  in a numbered series. I picked up the last one, which said “Sound Shadows 5”. But on the front of this CD there were three asterixes, in felt pen, and the words THIS ONE.

  Opening the case, I found it was empty. I then pressed eject on the CD player. On the CD that came out were the words “Sound Shadows 5”.

     I paused, noticing there were two broad, flat cushions on the floor between the speakers in the middle of the room, and that there were more in the corner to the left of the door. The room was about the sound system.   

     I returned the CD into the machine, and pressed Play.

     Sound Shadows 5 started with a quiet, humming drone, that slowly deepened its timbres, and increased in volume. There was a warm feeling about it - it seemed to be made out of just two tracks, probably by using real instruments whose sounds had then been modulated. However, as the track continued, something new started happening.

    I sat down cross-legged, between the front speakers, having moved a cushion out of the way. I always felt more comfortable sitting on floors than on cushions.

    The music had the quality of having holes in it…  It was a sonic space in which gaps had been made in a first, louder track, and where there was still a drone-note music in the gap, coming from the second track, which was playing out of the speakers at the end wall. The gaps had striking rhythms, or pulse-patterns,  and these sequences of pulses were of course made up of silences.  Furthermore, the sounds of the continuous track were modulated in a striking way during the gaps in the middle-speaker track. It was as if they flowed smoothly, like a river, when both tracks were playing at once, but when gaps in the other track occurred they became strikingly modulated, though fainter at the same time. Or, it was as if a smooth surface took an imprint – when the imprint happened one track was removed, and the second one was given a subtle texture of micro-rhythms, or was given a change in its tonality.

    I was sitting facing the end wall, and thinking about how the music had a summer quality. It was like a hot day – like the day outside – when warm silence keeps being broken into by sounds. The call of a wood pigeon, a train in the distance, a horse neighing. At the same time I was aware that the room had a wall without a window, a wall which you faced as you listened to the music, as if it was designed to help in the experience of listening. As I was thinking this, I noticed that I was perceiving an effect of the end wall being green, a kind of luminous green, similar to the colour you see if you close your eyes immediately after looking at the sun. I felt it must be the violet of the side walls producing their complimentary colour. 

    After a while the experience of the gaps in the music became something new. In a dream-like way I discovered that in the longer gaps in the track I was ‘seeing’ terrains or places. I felt the music had put me into a near-sleep, hypnagogic state, and I tried to relax in order to keep the experience from vanishing. What I was seeing was placed across the space of the end wall – in my mind the gaps in the music had located themselves onto a spatial correlate. The effect was faint, and often disappeared completely, but it was very striking.

     I kept seeing green leaves in sunlight. Specifically, it was trees in sunlight, sometimes quite close, sometimes further off. It was initially like seeing a film projection on the wall, but even though it was faint and unfocused, I kept getting the feeling I was seeing through a window to a real place, somewhere out in the country.

     Then I was fully ‘awake’ again, and I could only see the dark grey end wall. I decided to clear my mind, and concentrate on nothing but the music.

     I was aware that the gaps in the first track were now longer. I got rid of that thought, and concentrated on the feeling of the sounds, focusing my eyes on the end wall. Almost immediately I was seeing leaves again.

      And then suddenly I was seeing a place with acute, lucid clarity, as if I was there. I was seeing a grassy hill, on which I was standing, a small lake at the foot of the hill, a house off to the left, a quarter of a mile away, and beyond the lake a forest stretched out as far as I could see. Everything was bright with midday sunlight.

     With a jolt I was back perceiving the room. I knew I had been so shocked by the apparent reality of what I had just seen, that I had woken myself.

      I was very struck by what had just happened. It seemed that I had gone into a lucid dream state, apparently assisted by the hypnotic effect of the music. I thought about the place I had seen, and wondered vaguely what I was reaching toward in dreaming it. As tends to happen with lucid dreams the sense of the experience having been exactly like reality began to fade.

    The track ended.  I knew that it was time to go. I wanted to be back in my own house, able to think about what had happened, without having been caught trespassing. 

   The whole set-up was for inducing trances, I thought, as I stood up. I looked at the windowless wall with its screen, and then back at the sound system, feeling impressed and somewhat astounded. I wondered whether the recurring experiences of seeing leaves had been simply my own, oddly consistent hallucination in response to the music, or whether the subtle timbre of the sounds in the ‘gaps’ in some way was a direct expression into sound of the movement of leaves.

     As I left the room, I had a strong, complex feeling – I felt pleased at the thought that I was about to get back to my own place, and that I would have ‘got away with’ my visit to the empty house, and at the same time I felt disconcerted by how interesting the experience had been.  It was as if I had incurred an unexpected liability. 

    I locked the door, and put the key back under the tile. There were dappled shadows of a tall cherry tree on the long grass around the hiding place. I went back into my garden, across the fence, thinking about the name ‘sound shadows’, and wondering how the track had been made. It seemed the gaps were silences that were equivalent to shadows – shadows ‘thrown’ from the music of a third, discarded track, whose sounds were only heard as textured silences. 

                                                                  

                                                                   *

     Throughout the next day I had an unusual rhythm playing in my head. It had a slightly slowed-down, drifting quality, and it sounded faintly “tribal,” while seeming somehow modern at the same time. I liked it – it had first come into my head the night before, not long after arriving back from the empty house.

     Tamsin phoned and said she would be coming on her own for the planned visit the following day, because Rob had been persuaded to go back to his work for a few days, despite officially being on holiday. She told me she had something for me that she and Rob had acquired on the journey. I was left imagining she would arrive with a Sami musical instrument.

     I went into town, to Farringdon, and met an old colleague to talk about a job that might soon be available at a travel agency specialising in trips to remote areas. The knowledge that soon I could be returning to work hung over me on the return journey. I would have much less time for the paintings I had been working on over the last two months. A persistent feeling of bleakness was only dispelled by a phone conversation with Ffion.

    Ffion worked as a producer in the music industry, and her specialist knowledge gave an additional depth to her interest in the “sound shadows” track. She was initially perturbed by what I had done, in going into the empty house, but by the end of the conversation she was open, to some extent at least, to the idea of going to the house with me to hear the music.

    I wandered into the garden, and was relieved to see that there were still no signs of people being around at the empty house. I realised that I did not want to tell Tamsin about what had happened. I felt that if I told her she might want to go to the house and listen to the track, and I wanted to wait and go with Ffion.

*

     The next morning Tamsin texted to say she would be arriving late. She was caught up in a difficult situation involving our friend, Kate, with whom she was staying. Kate had just started a new relationship – with a close friend of mine -  and her ex was suddenly in a jealous state, even though it was he who had ended the relationship.

        I painted on and off through the day, caught up in reveries that sometimes seemed to help the painting, and sometimes took me away from it completely. The painting I was working on was semi-abstract, but with a strong horizon line, near the base of the canvas.  I was imagining the colours and forms I was painting in the ‘sky’ as both abstract potentials of the world, and as real incursions of unknown forces.  At one point I started thinking about my close friends, and as I did so I found I was trying to paint an abstract expression of the ‘edge’ or ‘intensity’ I perceived in them. I was thinking, as I did this, about how they all had a tendency to explore new experiences, in one way or another, and to explore ways of thinking that came from outside conventional thought.

      By initial training I was an anthropologist, but, feeling dissatisfied with the deadening optic of the academic world, I had left my official studies in order to travel, and to study art from non-western societies. My aim had been to become an artist, and simultaneously it had been to reach the point where I could transmit the validity of the dreams and pragmatic perspectives of older cultures.

    And now I had a flash of re-perception of the painting. The area at the base became a warm, empty, secluded expanse; a hidden-away interior that was brightly and almost hauntingly secure beneath the uncertainties of the sky.

*

    Tamsin was sitting opposite me, in the living room. She was wearing loose, sand-coloured, cotton trousers, and a green top, across which her longish fair hair was hanging in wavy strands. She was looking vibrantly healthy, and she also seemed more confident than normal – her trip to Norway had obviously boosted her, pushing into the background her tendency to be under-confident and  wistfully perturbed about her life. Her great strength was a kind of dreamy and clear-sighted openness to new ways of seeing things, and this had not been fostered by several years of intermittent dead-end jobs, and of failures to achieve a breakthrough as an illustrator and writer of graphic novels.

    We had been talking and listening to music for hours. It was now well after midnight, but the window of the living room was wide open, letting in the night breeze. Occasionally the wind chimes attached above the outside of the window would be roused into a few of notes. Outside it was a warm, starry night.

     Tamsin had been talking about her experiences in the far north of Norway.  The Sami way of seeing the world had evidently been supplanted to a great extent by modern Norwegian culture and religion, but it was still fascinating to hear about the ideas and ways of life of the people Tamsin and Rob had encountered.

  Toward the end of their holiday they had also met an extraordinary Swedish woman, a traveller and anthropological scholar, by the sound of it. This woman had told them lots of things about the lives of indigenous peoples in the north of Europe and in Siberia and Mongolia.    

  “She said this great thing. She said she was ‘a student of insights expressed in dream-systems’”

     We talked about this for a while, and then there was a pause. Tamsin was looking for something in her bag. I got up and looked out of the window. The empty house was visible, a calm silhouette.  A breeze was ruffling the net curtain, and it tugged at the wind chimes above the window enough to create a scattering of notes.

     “It’s amazing about Kate and John, isn’t it?” said Tamsin.

     The news that Kate was going out with my friend John had been striking. I knew of no connection at all between the two of them, apart from myself, and I had never had the chance to introduce them, though I had played her his music. She had apparently met him at a gig in a pub somewhere.

     “Kate seems to be really in love with him” continued  Tamsin. “And she says he’s a brilliant musician.”

     “Yes, he is.. And I - I know  he’ll be in love with her as well. It’s incredible news, they really deserve each other…”

     Knowing them both, I sensed what they must be feeling. It made me think of myself and Ffion. I was glad that my two friends had apparently entered the very thinly populated country of genuine lovers. But because in the past I had been in love with Kate for a long time – though without a relationship taking place – my feelings were not quite as simple as this. The knowledge she and John were going out created a bright, festive feeling that somehow was faintly troubled at the same time. The perturbed side of this festive affect was a tinge of envy toward John, alongside a much stronger current of pleasure that Kate might now be in some sense closer to me – a current that heightened the sense of there being something to celebrate, but which seemed in part to come from the same amorous source as the envy, rather than simply from empathy.

    What was it to have this kind of relationship? The deep current of longing did not really end, and this fact was being pressed home to me in an almost disorientating way, because the same situation applied with the woman sitting opposite me. For the two years before the relationship with Ffion I had been very drawn to Tamsin, who had not had a boyfriend when I had first met her, and had inadvertently taken my affections away from Kate, before equally inadvertently creating the same kind of situation by starting her relationship with Rob. I was very much in love with Ffion, and yet, despite them being subdued, and transmutated to an extent into the tonality of friendship, these other feelings remained.

     Tamsin was holding out her hand. In her palm was a small carved stone. The stone was unworked apart from on one side, which had been made into an approximate oval, on this face a deer-stone reindeer figure had been carved, travelling upwards along the long axis of the stone.

    “We told the woman about you travelling round Mongolia. When she gave it to us, the woman said – “Show it to your friend, he’ll understand”.

     Initially, all I was struck by was the coincidence – that I had thought about the deer figures two days before in the empty house. Then I was left wondering how to respond to what the woman had said.

     “Well, extraordinary – but… I don’t know if I do understand.”

    There was a pause, filled with late-night silence.

     “Well - deer stones” I continued, stumbling for words, aware that I had somehow looked for an enigma beyond the one for which the existence of deer stones would be the answer.  “It’s the design that’s used on the neolithic standing stones in Mongolia”. But it’s funny, I was thinking about them just the other day”.  And as I spoke I remembered feeling in the past how poignant it was that now the reindeer, and the forests which had sheltered them, had disappeared from almost all of Mongolia. And I also remembered my own idea that the deer figures, travelling upwards in a spiral around the stones, were symbols of a human journey.

     “Maybe I do understand.” I said, laughing a little. I told Tamsin what I had been thinking about the meaning of the carvings.

     “They were shamanic people, weren’t they?” asked Tamsin.

     “Yes, absolutely.”

     “Its like a symbol of their whole world, not just the human territory. It’s a magical symbol…” said Tamsin.

     “Yes,” I said, with emphasis.  There was another pause, because I was thinking about telling Tamsin about what had happened two days before. I held the stone in my hand, looking at the design, the deer flying upward, with the long stylised antlers swept over its back.

     “It was funny,” said Tamsin, “the woman seemed more shamanic than the Sami people we met. She said people need to learn silence…  and she said they need to learn to listen to silences…”

      This made me think immediately about the ‘sound shadows’ track, with its curious gaps.

    I decided that, after all, I would tell Tamsin about my experience in the abandoned house.

      *

     We had gone down to the end of the garden. It was a starry night, although this close to the centre of London only the brighter stars were visible. Beyond the fence the unoccupied house was a gaunt presence.

   “Sound shadows” whispered Tamsin in a gothic voice.

  There were no lights on in the house. And in the absence of sounds I noticed that I was concentrating on all the sounds in the night around me. For a moment, as I de-focused my vision, I saw faint coloured patterns projected against the house. I felt this was a random, ordinary event, and I convinced myself this was true by producing a similar effect while looking in an unfocussed way toward the cherry tree.

    Tamsin was looking at the stars, and slowly turning round.

 “Its great the way we’re floating in space, spinning round” she said. I was aware that she was tilting herself toward the north, toward the pole star, and therefore toward the axis of the planet’s rotation.

   It struck me how much I enjoyed being with Tamsin. But I was also feeling relieved that I had not had to turn down a request to go to the house the next day. Even though I was not considering the possibility, this relief seemed to be bound up with the conviction that us going off and getting into a trance-state – while non-legally in someone else’s house - would be too intimate an adventure from Ffion’s point of view.

   

     *

  

    

  The doorbell had rung. It was another hot day, and it was around an hour after midday. I opened the front door. Kate and John were standing outside. John was beaming a smile and Kate was laughing - John’s tall, inspired-and-reflective figure, alongside Kate, with her slim, poised femininity, and her unaffected quality of being sparklingly on the edge of seeing into the depths of things. They had texted me earlier to ask if they could come over. They had needed to get away from Kate’s ex, and they had offered to give Tamsin a lift to her house in Brighton.

“Yaaaaay!” I said, as my response, aware as I did so that it was Kate from whom I had acquired this exclamation - and aware also that I was both greeting them and affirming their relationship. I had never seen them together before.

I hugged them both, and we went into the house. In the kitchen we filled some glasses with fruit juice, and I noticed a bright atmosphere that seemed to be pervading everything. Kate was obviously in a good mood, and John’s warm, thought-pervaded sense of humour seemed heightened.

      Tamsin had been talking to Rob on her phone, and she now came down from upstairs and we all went out onto the lawn and sat on the grass.

      There were a few tiny clouds, and almost no wind. A wood pigeon was cooing in the distance, and there were sounds of insects moving amongst the flowers. The day was a tight coil of energy that only appeared to be a space of relaxation because of its dreamy warmth.

    Kate spoke for a while about her ex’s jealous behaviour, in a way that was kind and without bitterness, although a firm, acerbic quality appeared in the set of her mouth when she talked about the aggressive things he had done and said. Looking at her, wearing a loose top and jeans, and facing the sun, I received an impression she was ready for anything, and that she had already embarked on an adventure that that was being blissfully heightened by the summer.

     And a sudden feeling came to me  – my relationship with Kate was something different, and more extraordinary, than it had appeared to be. This insight came and then went, leaving me unable to grasp it. It had appeared to be about something that went beyond and yet  somehow  included amorous feelings, and that belonged to an unsuspected dimension of existence.    

    Tamsin brought up my experience at the house opposite, pointing to the house as she did so. Feeling grateful to have this change of focus, I recounted what had happened to me.

       As I had expected John was captivated, and wanted to hear the track. But what I had not expected was Kate’s response.

     “Yes, let’s go and try it! It’s an amazing opportunity. You know where the key is, so it won’t look like breaking in, and not with the four of us.”

   “And if we do it in the right way – like its normal – nobody will pay any attention,” said Tamsin.

   I was bemused by this turn of events. But  a conjunction of four people who were prepared to do such a thing seemed too good a chance to miss. I knew that this might make a third visit with Ffion seem less advisable – or might even prevent it – but I decided these were risks I should take.

    

*

Very shortly afterwards we were standing at the open door of the empty house, and Tamsin was cheerfully calling out.

“Hellooooo. Is there anyone there?”

After a pause, Kate went in, followed by John and Tamsin. I followed, closing the door behind us.

After calling out again, and waiting in the kitchen, we went into the living room and stood in front of the picture of the Uffington White Horse. I had told Tamsin about how it had reminded me of the Mongolian deer-stones.

I was aware that the house was hotter and stuffier than it had been last time, and it occurred to me that the heat in the house might have been a major cause of my previous experience.

“I wonder if the heat in the house combines with the music to act like a drug” I said, as we went into the hallway.

“Well, if the music is like a drug” said Kate “then something’s going to happen to me, I know!” 

I could see she had gone pale, and I knew I had said the wrong thing. Kate never took any kind of drug, after having had a very bad experience, many years before, as a result of smoking a small quantity of grass.

   When we got into the room Tamsin and John started to scrutinise everything, but Kate remained immobile, by the door.

         “Go sideways, don’t stop!” said Tamsin, laughing. “This is very cool. The whole set up must be to get you into a trance. A trance is sideways from ordinary experience.”

     “But it’s a bit stuffy in here” she added.

     I think I’ll have to miss it, said Kate. “I feel a bit faint. I’ll sit in the kitchen downstairs, but on the floor, so I’m out of sight.”

    John said he would go with her.

*

    “OK, so its us” I said to Tamsin, after they had gone.

I paused, feeling uncomfortable. But I went over to the CD player, as if action was the only thing that would steady me.

“Shall we listen to it?”

    “Of course” she said, smiling broadly, and sitting down on one of the mats.

I started the CD, and sat down on the other mat. As I sat down I remembered my impression from two days before that the house was like an ear, listening to the sunlight, and this now led to the idea of the surrounding world as a kind of ocean-void, bright but obscure - a space of the radically unknown, full of energies and currents.

*

   We had been listening for about five minutes, sitting on the floor. Tamsin was very struck by the ‘gaps’ in the music, just as I had been.

    “They’re like imprints, more than shadows” she had said, after hearing the first couple of minutes.

     For a while I couldn’t stop thinking about this idea, and I got caught thinking about the kind of sound that might have been ‘cut out’ from the first track. Had it been a human voice, had it been an instrument? Had it been musical at all? I kept getting the feeling that something serenely anomalous had travelled across the music, leaving its footprints for us to 'see'.

      I realised I was failing to do what I had done the last time. Even though I was thinking partly through images, I was still thinking. I threw myself into listening to the sounds, and to the gaps, in particular.

    To my surprise, something happened almost immediately. As if I was looking through mist that was suddenly clearing, I suddenly had a view of a ‘wall’ of trees in the distance. 

     “Amazing” said Tamsin, with intense emphasis. Something was obviously happening to her as  well. I redoubled my efforts to get into a dreamy state of complete concentration on the music.

     In the next gap I saw the view from the hill I had seen the previous time. The lake a hundred yards  below me, and the trees stretching  into the distance. It was only a flash, but the feeling of place and time was very strong. I could taste the cool air, and hear the birdsong.

     I concentrated on listening again, and this time I succeeded in relaxing and opening up completely. I found myself dreaming I was in a wide interior space of luxurious rooms, that seemed to be inside a mountain, lit brightly but from an unseen source.  The air was cool and relaxing, as if it was a very hot day up above, and here and there in the rooms were coloured intricate designs, set into the walls, subtle panels of abstract figures, and fluidly angular tessellations. There were also coloured hangings, and occasional cushions and sculptures, -and there were screens with slowly changing video displays. I was not alone in this space. I felt the presence of a woman alongside me, welcoming me, and laughing. I felt the rustle of her skirt against my leg.

     Then I heard Tamsin calling out  - “It's so beautiful!” And I looked towards her voice, and I could see her in the place by the lake, as if from thirty feet away, and then - instead of being in the subterranean place, I was standing on the hill.

    

   

     “Amazing!” said Tamsin again. I looked at her for a moment, in a state of growing wonderment that felt like a dam about to burst, and then looked back at the trees, the lake , and the house. I turned round feeling the ground beneath my feet as I moved. There was a low forested escarpment a few miles away to the north. As I turned back I saw a dragonfly skitting forward along the top of the hill, heading in the direction of a silver birch growing a little down the slope to the right.

     I set off walking toward the silver birch, calling to Tamsin as I did so. I was feeling that I had never really appreciated the beauty of trees until that moment. The trees  all had a striking thereness, a quality of sculptural serenity that was somehow familiar, but at the same time felt new.

     At this point I had no memory of where I had just been. I had a confabulated vague idea that we were staying at the house, and that we had just walked up the hill.

     “Yes, it is amazing,” I said. “It’s a vast forest, an ocean of trees!”

     I turned back toward Tamsin, seeing her walking toward me about ten feet away, and with an entranced, ecstatic expression on her face.

     It was at that point I realised I was dreaming – although without remembering the empty house. I looked at Tamsin, who was staring hard at me, as if she was trying to work out whether I understood the momentous nature of what was happening.

     “We’re dreaming!”  I said.  We looked at each other in sustained astonishment. And along with the astonishment there was a feeling I had never experienced at this level of intensity – a warm feeling of comradeship, a joyful comradeship in the midst of an unprecedented, powerful experience. It evidently could have occurred to me that the Tamsin I was seeing was merely a Tamsin I was dreaming, but this idea never crossed my mind. Instead there was the visceral feeling of being together in a dream.

    

   I looked at Tamsin for confirmation she was feeling the same, but I saw her eyes were focused elsewhere, as if over my shoulder.

   “An ocean of…” Tamsin had a rapt, swept-away quality as she spoke, as if she was entranced by some new perception of the world to the point where words could only trail off into silence.

   A jolt then went through her, and she suddenly spun away.

   “We should explore” she said, laughing. “We mustn’t get stuck”

   I agreed, and started walking down the slope toward the lake. But as I did so I saw Tamsin looking around her, and for a moment my viewpoint changed and I was Tamsin rather than myself, and there was a blissful brightness - and then I was walking forward again feeling like someone who has just landed after taking a very difficult jump where a fall had seemed inevitable. I was going toward the house, which was painted white, with blue-grey tiles on the roof; moving down the hill between the yellow flower spikes of mullein plants. I noticed that one of the plants had had most of its leaves stripped by caterpillars.

     It was then that I saw a woman come out onto a small first floor balcony of the house - a balcony that faced the lake. With a shock of recognition I saw that the woman was Ffion. I saw her come out onto the balcony, and then go back in again.

    It was Ffion!

     

     The next thing I remember I was on the other side of the house, going in through a door that led to a kitchen. I went through the kitchen, and then I went into a square hallway on the ground floor, aiming to find the upstairs room with the balcony.

    Then I heard Ffion’s voice, calling my name, from a room to my left. I went into a living room, a longish room that ended with windows that looked out toward trees, though the lake would be visible to the right.

    Ffion was standing half way down this room, with her back to me. I went up to her.

       “I’ve worked out the house” she said, still facing away from me, as if intent upon understanding something.

     And then she toward me and suddenly I saw that her eyes were white opalescent globes, without irises.

     I felt a stab of acute terror. I reeled backward a step. I was in shock, unprepared, and for a moment everything seemed to break into pieces, and me with it. I remember there was a kind of seething, humming sensation, which was also a sound, and at the same time I had a feeling I was suspended in the sky, surrounded by a kind of white glare, that came from every direction, including beneath me.

     “Don’t be stupid, listen to me.”  Ffion’s’s voice, with its humdrum admonition, seemed to jolt me back into the room. Her eyes were now closed, as if she was concentrating, and I knew from her body language, and her furrowed forehead that she was desperate to tell me something.

     Her voice now became slowed down, and the words were suffused inextricably with images. As she spoke, I was seeing a sloth moving in an emerald-bright jungle.

    “The ...house ...is ...a ...window ...... and... a... way ...of...waking ...intent” Ffion’s voice continued but now it was as if someone else was speaking through her, a voice from the jungle I was seeing.

     “To get... back... concentrate...into...the room.”

     At that point - just before I woke - I had a series of flashes of things that afterwards I couldn’t remember. Vast, fugitive perceptions that were about the house, and about places that were somehow connected with it.

   

Tamsin

      Something had just been happening that I knew was too intense for me to be able to remember it - but it had been about Steven taking up the same space as my own body. I had just come down the hill, and I was now walking on a long wooden walkway across the lake, in bright, sun-suffused mist. Behind me the event was an immense whiteness that was receding, leaving nothing but a memory of the feeling, a feeling of rapture and lucidity. Steven was still within me, his own body superimposed within mine, and I knew, in a dream-knowledge way, that Steven had been there not just to be co-emplaced within me, but to be the worlds of perception that had just been taking place. But now as I moved along the walkway, with a breeze in my hair, I was wondering what it was like for him to be my female body, as well as his own.

    Earlier, listening to the intricate timbres in the gaps in the music it had been a while before I saw anything on the screen. But then in one of the gaps I had seen a wall of leaves, and at the same time the view of the space around had darkened, as if the light were concentrating itself in the sunlit trees. The next time I had glimpsed the lake and the hill, and the big white house, and then at some point after that – I had been swept away.

    At this moment I did not remember any of these earlier experiences. I could remember some of the details of the walk down the hill, and I had a firm impression that Steven had been with me at the top, but I didn’t remember anything about the house in Bromley. I had set off down the hill, walked into another dimension, and now, with the place I had just visited in some sense receding from me I had decided to continue my exploration, and had set off on the walkway across the lake.

     I was not aware that earlier there had been no mist – and no walkway. I was in the middle of the lake, and thinking about what Steven might be feeling suddenly caused me to be intensely aroused, though I experienced this arousal as Steven’s, not my own - as his feeling of pleasure as a result of having the sensations of my woman’s body. The feeling came like a wave, but then a second later I had a sensation that something in some way connected to this ecstasy had detached itself from my right hip and gone off into the mist. It went off to the right and disappeared. At the same time I saw that the walkway stopped thirty feet from the far bank. And looking into the mist above the trees I became aware that something was looking at me which had an intense and disturbing libidinal interest in the situation - although in some way I knew I was not being threatened. I was wearing a summer dress which was being ruffled by the wind. I was jolted, something was about to happen, and there was a warning I had to give, but I couldn’t remember what it was –

    And then I woke up.

   

Steven

    I had described my own dream, concentrating initially on my experience of going to the house and meeting Ffion. I then told Tamsin about the beginning, although for some reason I did not set out to express the full intensity of the feeling of comradeship I had experienced. I was aware as I spoke that I was feeling a strange combination of hope and fear. The hope was that Tamsin had felt the same thing, and the fear was that the situation was in some sense getting out of hand.

    “Incredible” said Tamsin. “I don’t really remember about it, but in my dream I had been with you up on the hill, at the beginning.”

    Tamsin had already told me a little about the place she had seen, and I obviously wanted to hear more.

    “There was a house over to the left" she said. "It was white, and it looked beautiful, it had blue tiles on the roof – it was maybe two stories high. And it was all trees in the distance, a whole big forest.”

  It must all be suggestion, I thought.

   “And there were silver birch trees, and there were tall yellow flowers on the slope of the hill.”

    “Mullein” I said, nodding emphatically. Surely I hadn’t said anything about mullein? But then maybe it was somehow all being suggested by the CD. I now wanted to listen to the later parts of the track, and find out if it contained cues for a dream experience.

   “But at the end it became really freaky” said Tamsin. “It was all different, the lake was bigger, and it was misty. And there was something up in the mist that I couldn’t see, that was watching me – it was something really disturbing, but sort of not in a way I can put into words…”

*

At this point we heard Kate calling out.

“Are you OK?”

We went into the hallway. Kate and John had arrived at the top of the stairs.

“I’m feeling better now” said Kate. “We want to try it.”

I felt lost for words. My instinct to get out of the house immediately had been very strong. But now the direction of the situation was changing again. Even if we convinced Kate that the whole thing had been very disturbing, and the experience was not necessarily to be recommended I felt sure that John would be desperate to hear the track.

          While Tamsin was talking about what had happened I went quickly into the adjoining rooms to see if there were any signs of the whole thing being a set up – some kind of complicated hoax. I found nothing, but going into the rooms made me feel even more like an intruder. At that moment I wanted very much to leave the house.

    As I started to describe my experience I felt that I could only set out to communicate how beautiful it had been at the beginning. And immediately I began to feel that in some sense I was caught in a current, a feeling that was disturbing, though not because the current seemed to be going in a bad direction. What was worrying was simply that I was in a current - I was being propelled by events, as if I had fallen into a fast-moving river.

     Both John and Kate wanted to hear the track.  I could tell that Kate had become a little perturbed by things that had been described, but she now had a resolute quality of someone who has overcome their fear, and is not going to miss an opportunity.

     I could see that Tamsin thought Kate and John should make the attempt.

    “OK, lets play it.” I said, looking at Tamsin. “You and I could stay standing up.”

    Tamsin nodded.

    I pressed play.

    “I think its going to feel awkward if we are watching” said Tamsin. “I think we should sit down and listen. If we don’t want to get caught up in it I’m sure we wont. And, I don’t know, I’m wondering if I would see the same place…”

   I sat down as well. By this time I was feeling that despite my misgivings I should not avoid the chance to try the experience again.

*

    John made a few comments, and then stopped himself, allowing the silence of listening to the track to pervade the room. I heard the sound of Kate making herself comfortable on the mat. It seemed that everyone had set out to make the attempt.

   For a long time nothing happened. I was too unnerved by the impression that the situation in some sense was out of control. But the track continued, and I decided I must simply calm my breathing and focus on the sounds.

    I was seeing sunlit leaves almost immediately. And during a gap that was probably only a minute later I had a view of the lake and the trees, which came with a feeling of dreamy brightness, the feeling of a perfect summer day.

    Suddenly Kate said “I can see it!”

     For a moment I wondered if this exclamation would cause everyone to lose focus, but I decided immediately to do what I had done when Tamsin had said she was seeing something. I left my eyes on the screen in front of me – taking it all in without focusing on a specific point - and I concentrated on the music.

    Almost immediately I had a sensation of being pulled forward.

    Then I was in the intermediate place where I could see the view from the hill, but where I was simultaneously in the underground rooms I had seen the previous time – a place I had forgotten about until then. I could see a screen or console to my left which was showing shifting abstract-geometrical designs, and there were rugs and scattered cushions directly in front of me. Beyond these I could see the lake and the trees as if from behind a transparent membrane, only this time I could see Kate in front of me, on the hill, and she made an extraordinary motion of striking the ground with her foot – with a kind of joyful impatience, and then I found immediately I was looking at her with the hill all around me. And she raised her foot, and then, with far more force, though with the same exuberance and impatience, she struck the ground again. I understood the gesture at a level I couldn’t bring fully to thought – it was as if she was telling me I had to commit myself completely to the leap – and I felt that in response I was throwing myself into the perspective of being on the hill. And in the same moment I was there, standing on the hilltop, with all three of the others, looking out over the trees, Kate now standing alongside me to my right, John beyond her, and Tamsin to my left.

    I knew with certainty that I was not dreaming. My legs nearly buckled under me, but I caught myself.

     It was hot, and a breeze was blowing through the long grass.

                *

     This time I had a feeling of thereness which left me speechless. I was viscerally on the hill – there was a locked and compelling awareness that I was in a real surrounding world, and an impression of my being an implacable bodily presence within it. I knelt down and took some earth into my hand, from an old mole-hill. I stood up again, and ran the earth slowly through my fingers. As I did this I watched two crows flying across the lake, from the direction of the house. There was no confabulation this time, no convulsive invention of a past in order to cope with the rupture in continuity. I remembered everything that had just happened – in particular I remembered Kate’s extraordinary gesture , a double gesture, which I felt had been a potent action, a call to act that was beyond my ability to think about it clearly. But instead of confabulation, I was caught up in trying to account for my feeling of a discrepancy between this time and the previous one.

     I looked at Tamsin. She seemed scared. And then I realised she was looking at Kate.  

     Kate had crouched down on the ground, and had gone pale. A moment before she had been looking at everything with a rapt expression on her face. But now it was as if a current of energy had been withdrawn.

     “I’m sorry” she said. “We should go back to the house. It’s too hot” She was looking in the direction of the house by the lake.

     “Yes, said John, lets go back”

“Back where?” I said.  “You mean – to there?” I pointed. I was fighting the impression that what I was thinking did not make sense. A reality TV show, I thought – it had to be. We had been hypnotised, and had been woken up on the hill.

   “Yes” said John, looking perplexed at my question. “Its too hot to not have hats”.

   “You mean you don’t remember about the abandoned house, and the music?” said Tamsin. “Sound shadows, the abandoned house by Steven’s place?”

    “Oh!” said Kate. John was staring ahead, and looking shocked.

   That’s what happened to me last time," I said. "Its like your mind makes something up to cope. Confabulation…”

    But what had happened? 

     I was looking around me at the house and the lake. I realised I was gritting my teeth. The thought that we had all been manipulated by hypnosis or some other means was making me feel angry and light-headed.  I felt as if someone had been grubbing in my head. And I also felt that I was responsible for this happening to the others.

     “But this is not the same as last time” said Tamsin. “We’re  not dreaming”

      I agreed.  I was about to voice what I was thinking, but Tamsin had started walking, in the direction of the house. We all set off, and I knew it had been the right thing, even if we were doing what was expected of us. It was better to be in motion.

      “It must all be a crazy hoax.” I said. “An insane reality TV programme.”  We were drugged, hypnotised, brought here…”

        “We need to orientate ourselves” said John. “Work out what we can. Where do you think this forest can be?”

           Kate was checking her phone, which had no signal. All of our phones had no signal, which heightened my feeling that we were being manipulated, even though I knew it was possible this could be a blindspot in the networks. 

        The time and date on my phone indicated it was a couple of hours after we had left for the abandoned house. The height of the sun indicated the same time. Looking around me, I thought the phones would have been re-set, and that this could even be the next day.

        “It must be somewhere in Kent, or Sussex” said John.

     “Somewhere  in the weald” I said. The very wooded hills between the north and south downs were the most likely place. But I was baffled, and unconvinced. The view south to the hills had been quite a long one, and those hills were apparently entirely covered in trees. I knew the weald quite well, and I had never seen anything like that. The view would be one of the most photographed in the whole area.

     I said this, and it was Kate who responded.

     “Maybe this is somewhere special” she said “Maybe they don’t allow photos”

      The idea of the amount of power and surveillance that would be necessary for this was not encouraging. I calmed myself down by trying to re-interpret what I had seen.

      “I guess it’s a bit less of an anomaly if it’s an optical illusion – if there are lots of gaps in the forest we cant see.”

      

     The corner of the house looking toward the lake had a small diagonal face. At ground level a conservatory came out from this wall of the house, apparently extending a living room in the direction of the lake. Above it was the balcony where I had seen Ffion. This balcony was maybe eight feet across, and it had a simple metal balustrade, painted dark green. Further up, beyond a second window, I saw there were dozens of swallows’ nests under the protruding eaves.  As I looked a swallow darted out of a nest.

     We walked round the house to its opposite side, all of us evidently wondering if we were about to be accused of trespassing. In some sense it seemed I had done this journey a few hours before, but the memory was more like the recollection of a dream. I had a very faint memory of going through the kitchen, but I only really remembered the living room where I had ‘met’ Ffion. I went ahead and found a tangled, overgrown herb-garden with a path leading to a porch in the wall of the house that faced away from the hill and the lake. On the door was a sign: it said

     “Help yourselves! All yours!”

     The writing was large, beautiful, and done in violet ink.

      We paused for a moment. I was wondering what it might mean to cross this threshold.

     I opened the door, and we went in.

   We went through a kitchen with a large table and chairs, and through a hallway. The living room was how I expected it would be. It was a longish room, facing south, with a small diagonal extension in the direction of the lake. However, as I took in the details of the room I rapidly lost all sense of having been there before. I felt as if I had been in a more abstract, brighter version of the room – a dreamed room with fewer objects and more sunlight.

     On the wall, alongside where I had ‘seen’ Ffion, there was a large grey rectangle, painted onto muted violet. The colours were the same as the paint in the Bromley house, and the rectangle was the same shape and size. The whole left hand wall was the violet colour – the other walls were white. On either side of the rectangle were two tall speakers, and there was another set of speakers, standing out in the room, twelve feet apart, and around the same distance from the wall.

    We looked at the CD player. To one side there was a single blank CD case. I looked inside it, and on the CD inside had been written:

      “Sound Shadows 15”

     “Earlier when I was here, at the end of the first time” I said, struggling for words, "I saw this room, but in a - dream sort of way, and I had this thing that I met Ffion. She was here in the room, there, by the grey – screen, or whatever we should call it, although I didn’t see it. And she said “to get back concentrate into the room.”

     I wanted to say more, but I felt I was I was pushing toward an acceptance of something inconceivable. It was far easier to believe we were being manipulated.

     “I’m beginning to feel really freaked by this!” said John, in a half-joking tone.  “Its scrambling my head.”

      “I think we should keep looking around” said Tamsin.

     We glanced into the rooms on the ground floor. Beyond the large hallway there was a library or study, and beyond the library there was a bare-floored utility room, with a furnace and what seemed to be an attached electrical generator. We tried the light switch in this room, with no result, and then tried some other switches in the library and the kitchen – the power was off in the house.

     The next floor had a largish internal hall, with three bedrooms leading off it, including a big bedroom above the living room, that had the small balcony on which I had seen Ffion. There were two other rooms that opened onto the hall - a bathroom, and a large room with bare boards, that looked as if it might be intended to be a gym.

     The third floor of the house was perhaps the most striking. Here there was a central corridor that ended with a kind of attic lounge, facing over the trees. The window was very tall, as well as long,  taking up quite a large proportion of the gable end , with a deep sill that started less than two feet above the floor.  The house was constructed on a slight rise, above the trees, and silver birches are not tall, so the view was above the tops of the trees. On the opposite side of the shallow valley, less than a quarter of mile away, tall trees rose up, looking like oaks, and beyond those the horizon was a line of tree-covered hills. There were cane chairs to sit on, with attached cushions, including a long cane ‘sofa’ that would take three people. This long chair was facing the view, with the other chairs arranged on either side, tilted inwards, but also facing the view.

     The rooms on either side of the corridor were bedrooms, four of them, each of with an attic window. They were very minimally furnished, but each one had a bed.

     Having looked at the bedrooms we came back into the lounge, and we all sat down in the chairs, with Kate and John on the sofa.

     I noticed it wasn’t possible to see the lake from where we were sitting. There was the sky, the trees, and a warm silence, punctuated by the sound of young swallows calling out as they were being fed.

     “An ocean of trees” said Tamsin, repeating the phrase she had used earlier.

     “There’s a very dreamy feeling about this room”  I said. ‘For the first time I feel maybe as if we might all suddenly wake up back in the abandoned house...”

     “I don’t know,” said Kate, “I feel its very lucid in this room, very bright – with a long view...  I feel completely here, not as if I could wake up.”

    John had got up, and was going through a shelf of books. He pulled out a large scrapbook, and brought it over. It had coloured pages, and was full of abstract montages made of clippings of images, words, and sentences from newspapers and magazines, together with found objects of many kinds, such as feathers, and pieces of fabric. Sometimes words or designs had been added with a pen.

     Kate turned to the beginning. Across the endpaper and the first page some phrases had been written.

On the left were the words

“Sideways is not the future.”

On the right was a companion message

 “Sideways is the future  - it is the now, but at higher and higher levels of intensity.”

    

   “Do you think the whole thing is a kind of gigantic joke, or experiment?” asked John. “Maybe we were hypnotised?”

     “A reality TV show?”  I said. “Yes, that’s what I’ve been thinking.” I looked around for where concealed cameras might be.

    “It’s the simplest explanation” said John. 

     He had returned to the shelf, and this time he came back with an ordnance survey map. We were all looking at the scrap book, but now he placed the map over the top.

    “Its a map of Suffolk,” he said, “a part of Suffolk.”

     The map had been annotated with red lines, which all radiated from a point on the left, to the west. At this point a small lake was marked, with a house shown alongside it, to the northeast.

     I pointed to the house. “Thats it – that’s where we are.”

     “Yes,” said Tamsin.  “See the small line of hills to the south, and the hills by the house. And the shape of the lake is right.”

     “Do you think we were meant to find this?” said Kate.  “Like a clue in a game?”

     John whistled, and opened his eyes wide, shaking his head.

     “None of it makes much sense”  he said.  “This is a hundred miles from Bromley, and staging us waking up, standing up on the hill, seems a bit beyond what is possible.”

     “I think it’s something else”  said Kate. “I just feel its something else.”

     I was staring at the map. And then something clicked.

     “The trees!” I said. “There is no forest marked on the map, only a tiny wood, west of the lake.”

     I looked for the date of the map. It was recent - 2002.

     “From the hill there are trees in every direction, as far as you can see. That’s not on the map.”

    “Maybe the whole area is an experiment” suggested Tamsin.  “And the map people have been told to keep quiet about it.”

     I had gone to the east window of the room. In that direction the map showed a track or driveway  leading from the house toward a minor road running north-south about a mile away. Below the house and a bit to my right I could clearly see the twin tracks of a driveway. There was a faint scattering of gravel on the tracks, and grass growing between them. One of the tracks was much clearer than the other, as if only people on foot had been using the drive, but, sure enough, thirty  yards away it was just possible to see wooden gate posts, among invading plants, at the point where the track went into the woodland.

      I felt as if on some level I was  understanding something, but a second later it was gone, leaving only a feeling that what I had been grasping had been somehow too large for me to see it.

     The conversation had continued about the absence of the forest from the map, and about whether the map was in fact a map of the area where we were.

     I pointed out the driveway to everyone. Tamsin looked through the window, and then back at the map, which she had taken from me.

     “That’s a town” she said, pointing to the map. “Melford.”  The map showed a small town, on a river, only five or six miles to the northeast.

     “I think we should go there,” she said, “to find out where we are.”

     We went back down the stairs, Kate carrying the scrapbook with her, and John scrutinising the map. Tamsin said we should take water, and on the first floor landing she went off to the bathroom saying she would check if there was water there. She turned the tap, and I was expecting nothing would happen, as with the electricity. But a stream of water appeared.

   John and Kate went downstairs, but Tamsin was now washing her face, and I waited for her.  Everything now felt reassuringly normal, as if the presence of the water and Tamsin’s everyday behaviour were enough to convince me that we were about to walk away toward normality, leaving only a necessity to work out how the illusion had been produced.

   Tamsin was using the mirror above the basin to re-arrange her hair, and feeling a bit embarrassed watching her, I turned to go.

   “No, wait” she said laughing, and I as turned round she came toward me. Her eyes were shining – she gave me an affectionate, self-deprecating  look as she went past me, and then as I turned to follow, she speeded up and went off toward the stairs.

    And then for a moment I was her, facing toward me, as if she had turned around – I was her being looked at by me. And in a rush I was Tamsin in an envisaged aroused state because the whole of my body was within her, suffusing her and bringing her to ecstasy. And instantly after that I was her without any reference to myself within her, and I was in an erotic rapture of feminine clothes against my skin, as a man was caressing her, and was about to make love to her.

    And then it was gone. I stumbled slightly, but caught myself. I immediately set out to behave normally, laughing at my clumsiness. Once downstairs I went into the living room, and picked up the CD we had found.

    There had been a dream-like, charged intensity about what had happened which I had experienced in states brought about by taking drugs, but this kind of oneiric rush was new to me under sober circumstances. It must be the shock, I thought – the unaccountable change of place was having an impact that was like a drug.

     I was feeling ashamed – because of the infidelity involved in what had happened. But looking at the CD focused my mind in the direction of Ffion, and I felt a sudden wave of distress about being cut off from her.

      I went into the living room, and stood opposite the rectangular grey screen. Kate came with me, and put the scrap book on a low table, sitting down to look at it. It felt as if it was a message in an unknown language, and is if Kate was trying to find a key to reading this language. I could hear John helping Tamsin to find food in the kitchen.

     I looked at my mobile. It still said ‘no network available’.

       I went to look in a room under the stairs for the electrics board, and, slightly to my surprise I found it. The main switch was turned on. I then went back into the living room, feeling slightly disorientated. 

     I went over to Kate, and looked over her shoulder at a montage of triangular, or 'splinter' shapes of forest landscapes - the pattern of the intersections of ripped pages gave an impression both of lightning, and of a white glare beyond both the forest and the sky. And then a moment later I was experiencing it as just a montage of torn pages.   I

  

   Tamsin and John arrived with a large bag of raisins, and some half-walnuts in a big paper bag. They put these into a smallish backpack they had found, together with two bottles of water. I went and got a compass I had noticed near the door in the kitchen.

     “Does anyone have mobile signal?” I asked.

     No-one did.

    “But that’s not that strange”’ said John, obviously thinking about it as he spoke.  “We’re in the countryside, it could be a gap in the networks.”

    We all agreed this was possible, but there was a hollow feeling about our agreement.  I put my mobile in my pocket, and went and looked abstractedly at a bookcase on the right of the door to the room. Tamsin came with me, and picked up a folded newspaper from a pile of them on a low shelf, all of them looking a bit faded. The newspaper was from three years before - it was dated 31st May 2005.    

     “We need to think before we go, do we think there is a chance this could be the way back?” I was looking at the screen on the wall, feeling foolish.

    “Yes,” said Kate, after a pause, nodding. “Yes, it could be – maybe…”

     “I just wondered about getting the power on.”  I said.

      I then gave everyone a more detailed account of my dream experience of meeting Ffion. As I spoke I was aware that what we were doing was like Kate looking at the scrap-book – the phrases from the experience were cryptic and their relevance was unknown, to say the least.

    To my surprise, the description had an obvious heartening effect. It was a clue about what to do next, even if it was uncertain, and even if it produced a feeling of being “at sea” in relation to conventional views of reality.

     “Well” said Pete “yes, maybe it’s something to go on…”. Although the words could have been hypnotically implanted into you.”

     Tamsin was fascinated by the phrase  “The house is a window.”

    “Yes,” I said, “it really felt right somehow when we were in the attic lounge just now, but I cant really explain what I mean, apart from there being the amazing view.”

     At John’s suggestion we went to look at the equipment in the utility room.

      “Well, the switch saying “GENERATOR ON” seems like a giveaway” said Tamsin.

     There were a few sawn logs on the floor by the furnace. None of us had ever seen such a thing, but it seemed to be a wood powered generator.

     In an outside shed we found hacksaws, and two smallish branches, that would not be enough on their own. We would need to get more logs.

     “OK”, I said, as we went back through the house, “it looks like we know how to get the power on. I needed to feel, before we go, that I possibly have a way back to Ffion, just in case we don’t find what we’re expecting out there...”

I looked at Tamsin, including her in what I was saying. I realised that at that moment the fear of being trapped was making me feel sick in the stomach.

“Yes” said Tamsin “I’m worried about Rob. This feels completely different to last time. I don’t feel like we’re going to wake up.”

     We were now in the kitchen. Kate was filling an extra water bottle.  She had put the scrap-book down on the kitchen table, open at a spiral montage which had green and violet as its main component colours, along with the white and black of the newsprint. 

     Tamsin had gone out into the orchard-garden behind the house looking for fruit. She reappeared very rapidly, from the left.

     “Well, there will be lots of plums and apples, but they’re not ready yet.”

     I quickly went over to what was clearly an overgrown vegetable garden. I saw there were potato plants growing amongst the weeds. I also noticed a small marijuana plant, growing in front of a south-facing retaining wall.

     “By the way,” said Kate, as I arrived back, “has anyone really taken in how blue the sky is?”

     It was true. I felt we had all been appreciating it, without fully taking it in. The sky was a deep blue vastness that made me think of sapphire. And then I realised something.

     “There are no vapour trails” I said.

     We all looked at the sky, and then at each other.

     “Maybe this part of Suffolk is off the flight-paths,” said John, sounding unconvinced.

     “Well, I’ve flown over the Suffolk coast on the way to Russia.” I said. “Not that that proves anything.”

     “The sky doesn’t look polluted at all,” said Tamsin.  “It looks like the sky in Cornwall. Or Norway, only its deeper blue than Norway.”

    Kate turned herself round slowly and then looked back at us.

    “I think the reality TV idea is wrong...” she said “ But lets go and find out”.

     We set off, walking to where the path led into the woodland, through a narrow gap in undergrowth that had grown between what evidently were gateposts. The transition into the woodland was immediate, and striking. The trees were mostly beech and oak, with a few yew and holly trees, and the path ran through a half-light world of open spaces and occasional undergrowth, with a brown-green carpet of leaf-litter and small plants. We walked for half a mile, saying very little, relieved to be moving after the prolonged discussions at the house.

   At one point we saw a group of deer in the distance. They galloped off immediately they saw us. And then only a moment later we saw something more unusual. We came round a bend and over a slight rise, and a hundred yards away on the path there were three wild boar. They looked very sleek and healthy, with dark shiny hair, and a kind of furtive confidence. They paused when they saw us, looking at us, and sniffing the air. And then they ran off down the path.

     “Are there wild boar in Suffolk?” John asked.

     “Well, I’ve heard they’ve been re-introduced to England,”  I said.

     “What else do you think there might be?” asked Kate. She was joking, but I could tell at the same time she was unnerved. The largest of the three wild boar – no doubt a male – had possessed a large pair of tusks.

     “Who knows? Maybe nothing, but anyway wild boar aren’t dangerous, they’ll always run away, unless you corner them and antagonise them. Lets avoid pig panic!”

     “Yes, oh brave explorer!”  said Tamsin laughing. 

     John was looking at the map.

    “Well, this definitely has looked like an overgrown driveway. So, if we’re right there will be a road or something very soon. There’s a clearing up ahead.”

    John was right. The path here was running between walls of undergrowth, and in the distance you could just see green leaves in sunlight.

    We kept walking and the path ran out into a narrow clearing which turned out to be a larger path, running south-north. The path gave the impression that it had been tended, that trees had been cut back to maintain it, and it was evidently more frequented. It was a dirt path, running between grass and bushes. We immediately found a few bootprints, though it gave the impression nonetheless of being as much an animal path as a path for humans.

     “It’s in the right place – and it runs north-south” said John. “Though it’s not the road...”

     We turned to the left, and kept walking. We were all clearly feeling a need to find out what was going on. In a way everything seemed idyllic - there was a lot of the honeysuckle flowering alongside the path, and wild roses.  However, at the same time we all seemed to share a quiet visceral urgency – an almost bodily need to discover the secret behind what was happening.

     John announced after a while that according to the map we would soon be coming to a crossroads. As he said this, Tamsin, who was ahead of us, called out.

     “Yes, there’s an old signpost!”

     The path came out into a wider glade, and to the right, emerging out of a mass of flowering rosebay willow-herb, was a slightly tilted sign-post. An old-style country sign-post, with its narrow metal pole topped by four rectangular sign plates. A climbing plant with white flowers and green, unripe berries was twirled around the pole and spread out amongst the signs.

    The signpost was brown with rust. There were only the faintest traces of the white paint with which it had originally been painted. I went and stood amongst the pink willow herb flowers and looked at the sign board pointing north. The lettering had been in metal base relief, and despite  the rust, and the absence of paint, it was just possible to read it.

     Melford 2

     I read this out, wondering as I did so what the confirmation meant.

    “So, this is the road to Melford” said Kate.  “We’ve read the map correctly”.

     “Yes, but what’s happened to the roads?” said Tamsin. The other road that crosses here is just a tiny path through the undergrowth. Its a bit frightening really.”

     “We don’t think this is... the future, do we? John was staring at the sign-post, as he asked this question. “Maybe there has been a disaster”.

     “Or maybe” I said, “this is a new forest they’ve created, a special nature reserve of some kind.”

     “Sideways is not the future,” quoted Kate.  “But – well, maybe that means something different.  We need to get to Melford. Maybe this is the future. But – but – have you noticed the sounds – can you hear cars in the distance or anything?

     We listened. Apart from birdsong, insect calls, and the sound of the wind in the trees there were no sounds at all.

     We set off again, walking quickly.

    I was now very struck by the different wild flowers that were growing by the path and in the surrounding woodland. We passed bee orchids, and in several places there were cornflowers, which I felt I had never seen growing wild.  There was also a bright-pink five-petalled flower which none of us could name.Earlier on the forest-floor I had seen several flowers  that were unfamiliar, except perhaps from photos in books.

   “It’s a gigantic private nature reserve, that’s being used to hoax us” I said, as a speculation rather than as a statement of fact. But even with the doubt in my voice the words rang hollow. In the silence and under the unnaturally blue sky my attempt to explain now felt like one more confabulation.

    I was walking alongside Tamsin, and I saw that she was looking pale, and was biting her lip.

    “Its beautiful here,” she said, “but this is really scary. And I’m very worried about Rob trying to phone me.”

      After walking for around fifteen minutes we saw what looked like a clearing up ahead. And then a moment later we got a view of a distant forested horizon to the north, across a valley. The hill on the opposite side of the valley was entirely covered in trees. Up ahead of us the path came out onto a terrace of land that extended as a kind of spur from the hills in which we had been walking, with an escarpment all around it. The terrace of flat land was covered with long grass and dotted with hawthorn bushes, wild roses, and patches of blackberries.  We caught a glimpse of what looked like wild goats, vanishing into forest off to the left. There were pink-lilac orchids growing in the grass, and here and there were two-foot stems  of a dark-purple flower, that looked a bit like a foxglove.

     We walked along the path, which ran at an angle across the clearing, northeast to the edge of the slope.

     In the distance was a low hill, covered strikingly in a tangle of forested ruins, that for a moment appeared to be cliffs and rocks. The hill was another, larger spur of land, sinking southward toward a river, which as we came to the edge of the slope, could be seen flowing brightly amongst trees at the foot of the hill.  At the highest part of the hill was a tower which had trees growing out of the top. The remains of a semi-collapsed bridge could be seen crossing the river. Nearer to us, on our side of the river, amidst lower, heavily overgrown buildings, a large warehouse or industrial building stood out, its ivy-covered facades topped by a terrain of buddlleia.

     “Its Melford”. I said.

    Two large birds were flying above the near side of the town – maybe harriers or buzzards I thought – spiralling lazily upwards on thermals.

     There was something inexplicably serene and attractive about this overgrown town, basking in sunshine.

     And then I said something which came to me as if the words were not really mine.

     “I think we’ve gone through a doorway to a world where the domination of human beings has been erased.”

     Kate looked at me, and nodded.

     “I don’t really know why I said that”, I said, feeling consternation. It wasn’t what I was intending to say, if you know what I mean. It was just what seeing the town overgrown like this ... made me feel.”

    “But I think it’s right” said John. I saw him shiver as he said this. I understood why – the situation was evidently the most intense thing any of us had encountered.

     “I think it’s true” he continued. "I mean – we’d know if a whole market town in Suffolk had been experimentally allowed to become...derelict – wouldn’t we? But what we don’t know is – what's caused this to happen?"

     We set off down the hill, and it soon became clear that the path was leading to a bridge over the river. Not far from the overgrown warehouse we could see there had been a right turn, but the road was completely lost amongst buddleia, young ash trees, and huge blackberry plants. All around us were derelict, ivy-covered houses, but there was generally no easy way of getting close to them, and we decided we should try to reach the centre of the town, and attempt to explore the larger buildings there.

     The bridge was a surreal sight. It was completely covered in small trees and undergrowth, with vines festooning off it, and trailing onto large dead branches that had lodged against the bridge supports. On either side, down by the river there were were large areas of a chest-high plant with pink flowers, that I was fairly sure was called Himalayan balsam, and there were several of these plants flowering on the bridge. When we got closer we found the path went through the middle of the undergrowth, staying away from the balustrades. There was almost no view of the river as we crossed, but our main concern was stepping lightly on the surface, in case parts of the structure were on the edge of collapse.

     There was a feeling of achievement that came from having crossed the river. We went quickly up the hill, between badly collapsed buildings, on the same path, with its animal droppings and an occasional footprint.

     At the top of the hill the path forked, and we turned right into what soon became a sunlit canyon of vegetation. The walls and roofs of the houses were a mass of plants – buddleia blossoming on roofs and walls, elder trees coming out of windows, ivy, columbine, and honeysuckle tangled together on walls and lamp-posts. High up on a south-facing roof I could see a cluster of sea-pinks, and a patch of deep red that was maybe a wallflower.  One or two of the houses had collapsed, but the spaces had largely been filled by young trees. At one point we could see the hills, and a glimpse of river, through one of these gaps. Everywhere there were butterflies, including a blue butterfly the size of a red admiral which I had only ever seen in books, and a swallowtail butterfly, which I recognised from visits to Spain, but which I had never seen in England.

   “This is off the edge” I said. “If this is an experiment, it’s gigantic…”

     We arrived in what had evidently been the market square of the town. There was a large building on the right, which looked as if it had been a town hall. It had a tower rising out of the front of the façade.

     It was clear that something had been written in white paint on the front of this building, above a small door on the left.

     When we arrived there we found a flight of steps leading to a door, which was wide open, and partly overgrown. Just outside the door there was a tall pile of small stones and bricks, about two feet high. On the wall above the door were the words:

     “FOLLOW THE CAIRNS”

     “The paint is new” said John.

     We were all thinking about the implications of this discovery – a recent message, amongst the dereliction.

     “I wonder if it was done by people from the house” said Tamsin. “And follow them where?”

     We looked tentatively into the building. “Maybe to the top of the building?” I suggested. “That’s how cairns are normally used – on mountains”.

     On the floor of the room were swirls of leaves, and many animal droppings, but the space into which we had moved had a strikingly underelict aspect. Beyond a glass partition on our right we could see a large foyer, lit by beams of sun from a skylight. A reception desk was visible, looking for a moment as if it was unchanged, until our eyes adjusted, and we saw that its top was covered in feathers and its sides were rotten from damp, and thickly striped with guano.

     At the back of the room, by an open door on the left, we could see a small pile of stones. The door led to a dimly lit flight of stairs.

     Guided by the piles of stones we went up three flights, along a corridor, up another, very narrow flight of stairs that was full of bird droppings, and then emerged into bright sunlight onto an area of roof that looked out over the valley. There was a high balustrade, but there was also a raised area of roof where there a group of people could sit, without the balustrade blocking the view.

     The view south across the river was startlingly intense.

     The sky was bright blue, with no vapour trails. The whole of the horizon from east to west was forest. In the area of land immediately beyond the river, there was a large area of heathland, where it appeared there had been a forest fire not long ago, judging by the charred trees that stuck out here and there from gorse and bracken, and other heath vegetation. Directly ahead of us, maybe three miles away, there was what appeared to be a monument, or a folly of some kind. It was hard to work out what it was – its outline was blurred, presusumably because of climbing plants – but it looked as if it might be an obelisk, perhaps forty feet high.  It was clear there had once been a road, going in the direction of this monument from a second bridge over the river, beneath us. This road was now a narrow grassy path.

      Something about this view had an unexpected effect. The brightness of the sky, and the vastness of tree-covered countryside visible made it implacably certain that something had happened. What it was that was behind our experiences was still completely unclear, but with even the most humdrum explanation of them, it was inescapable facing this view that there had been some kind of event, of a momentous nature. Even if this was a lucid dream and the others were figments of my imagination, this was a lucid dream of a kind beyond all known precedents. And again, if it was only an experiment being carried out on us, this experiment was not just incomprehensible in terms of its terrain and its intrusiveness, it was also shockingly beautiful.

    We pulled ourselves up onto the raised patch of roof, and sat down. Tamsin handed round raisins, and walnuts. No-one was saying anything much.

   

     Kate suddenly asked a question.

    “Steven, What do you know about the people who lived in the empty house in Bromley?”

It was a very good question.  I thought back to the day I came to view my house as a possible buyer.  Afterwards there had only been momentary glimpses of people in the distance, but that day I had seen them, or some of them, and the event had made a strong impression.

     “Well,” I said, “I don’t really know anything about them. But when I came to look at the house – my house – I saw people in the garden.”

     It came back to me, very clearly. I had wandered outside while the estate agent had gone back to his office to find some missing keys. I was feeling glad that I could see the house without the estate agent being around.

     There were four or five people in the garden of the house opposite. A man was playing a guitar, and there were two women singing – one of them had long red hair, and a bright, strong quality about her.  Initially I thought they were singing in an unknown language, but after a while I realised they were expressively inventing word-like flows of sounds.  It sounded like a conversation between the two of them, and between them and the guitarist, a conversation made up of tonalities expressed through timbre and rhythm, and through the suggestive qualities of the sounds in relation to known sequences of words.

     I told everyone what had happened , and I paused for a moment, re-living the event.

     “It was funny” I said. “I was buying the house not really to live there, but to rent out while I was away. I knew it could be easily rented, but I wasn’t sure about living there. The area didn’t feel right. But I think I felt differently after seeing those people… In a quiet way they seemed very … alive…”

     “And at one point one of the women saw me - the woman with red hair – she saw I was looking at them.  And she smiled and waved, in a very laid-back sort of way. Very friendly. And I waved back.”

     Kate was looking at me intently, a smile playing on her face.

     “There was no chance of you not buying the house, was there?”

      I agreed with Kate, but I didn’t quite know how to respond.

     “I think in a way it’s not at all a coincidence that we’re here.” Kate continued.  “I think you were ... beckoned.  I mean maybe not in the end toward them, but toward here – toward what they seem to call ‘the sideways’”.

     Everyone was silent again, and in the silence the power of the space in front of us seemed to reassert itself.

     “But if all this is true,” said Tamsin – “then, who are we?”  

     I looked at Tamsin, feeling the intensity of what she had said.

     John stood up. “You mean, if we can cross boundaries between different worlds, what are we?”

     “Yes”. said Tamsin.  “And... and more than that – its giving me a feeling that a lot of the time I havn’t been properly awake. As if I’ve been lulled - by concentrating too much on human stuff...”

     We decided we would walk back to the house by a different route, walking south toward  the  monument, and then turning back west along a road which was marked in red ink on the map – as part of one of the radiating lines coming from the house - and which we hoped would now be a path. It looked as if there would be the long visibility of semi-heathland for part of this unknown route, and we had the compass with us as backup.

     I was struck by how calmly we were making difficult decisions. I felt the decisions we were taking were right, but that they were bold, adventurous. It seemed the situation was bringing out the best in us – in particular, the ability to make courageous choices without agonising about them.

     The  monument was a mass of ivy, and other climbing plants. There was no sign at all of what it had been.

    To our relief there was a path leading in the direction we were going. Just beyond the overgrown monument there was a crossroads of paths which corresponded exactly to the road crossroads marked on the map. We turned right and set off walking at a fast pace along this new path.

      We started watching for the path we now needed to get back, which should cross ours at right angles. It felt however as if there should be another mile to go. We were crossing another area of heathland, with the late afternoon sun in front of us, due west.

    There was a moment when I was thinking about Ffion, and the fact I had apparently seen her at the house, the first time. And then, I returned to looking around me.

     I saw that off to our left, about two hundred yards away, there was a group of three silver birch trees, growing amongst a clump of gorse bushes. The trees seemed to be roughly in a triangle, growing about thirty feet apart from each other. There was a striking beauty about these trees, especially in the slanted afternoon sunlight. They were growing in the middle of a tongue of land, which stretched southwest, before sloping down slightly on three sides toward lower, wetter ground.

     At my suggestion, we all walked over to them. Arriving at the trees, we found that they and the gorse bushes surrounded a ring of close-cropped grass. There was no way in on our side, but it turned out that the ring was open on the southwest. There was a gap five feet wide between the flowering gorse bushes, and we walked into the circle.

     “I don’t think this is natural” said John.

     He was pointing to a whitish stone, embedded in the grass in the centre of the circle. I felt the stone was probably some kind of milky quartz – what could be seen of it was an angular patch of rock about ten inches across, and extending at its highest only about six inches from the ground. There was no way of telling how large it was, though somehow it gave me the impression that most of the stone was below the ground.

     “I mean, that’s been placed here, hasn’t it?” he continued. “Maybe the ring of trees and bushes is natural”.

     “Yes, I think you’re right” I said. “It cant be a coincidence - for one thing, I think it’s an igneous rock, and there wouldn’t be any igneous rock in Suffolk.”

     We had all sat down on the grass on the east side of the ring, facing the sun. The shadows of the gorse bushes had not quite reached the stone.

     There was a striking feeling of serenity about the place. Sitting there I kept getting flashes of sunlit expanses – places I had been or maybe imagined? - that would not come into focus, and these flashes came with an intense feeling of happiness.

     “This place is wonderful” said Kate. “It’s like a place you find when you’re a child, and you never forget.”

     I was about to say how much I agreed with her, when something happened to interrupt me.

     Somewhere in the distance, a wolf howled.

     It was a long way off, to the south or southeast, and the cry was subtly modulated, rising and falling, and then rising again. I heard the sound, and its initial effect was just to stop me from speaking - and then I ‘re-played’ it. A shiver went up my spine. I had no fear of wolves at all – in fact I felt an affection for them – but a kind of visceral, ancestral shudder seems to be the response to a wolf being heard unexpectedly, and the unknown nature of our circumstances no doubt made the effect more intense.

     “A wolf!”  said Tamsin. “There were wolves where I’ve just been, in Norway, but we didn’t see them, or hear them.”

     Kate had got up, as we all had, and her face was pale. I felt she was caught between extreme fear, and the desire to find a weapon.

    “But do you think there’s a pack of wolves?” she asked.

     “I think wolves in the middle of summer with young goats around are not going to be in the least bit interested in human beings”, I said. “Apart from maybe a friendly interest”.

     John laughed. “And did you hear how extraordinary the cry was? It was beautiful, more like singing than anything. I’d never thought about wolves howling – it is singing really.”

     “I think we should get back to the house” said Kate. “Its going to be dark before long, and we have to find the paths. And I think we should have sticks with us. We don’t know about this... place. We don’t know anything.”

      I admired the fullness of Kate’s response. It was time to go.

     As we left I looked once more at the whitish stone. It had no real lustre, and it had patches of dirt on it, but there was something very beautiful about it. It gave me the impression of a kind of lonely warmth.

     After a very nervous fifteen minute walk we found a north-south track going across our path, and we set off at a fast speed walking up it, worried now that we were wrong, or that we would fail to find the left turn leading to the house. We walked mostly in silence, all of us instinctively limiting our speech to statements about finding the path. My confidence about our courageous choices had now ebbed away completely, and I was dreading that night would fall before we made it back to the house.

     And then we found the path. Tamsin saw it first, and ran ahead, calling out,” Yes, this is it! I remember! This is it!”

    Everything looked different in the evening light, and from the unfamiliar angle, but then with huge relief I also recognised the place. We had completed a very large circuit, across unknown, confusing terrain.

     When we arrived back at the house it was still broad daylight, but the sun had set behind the hill.

     Still thinking about the wolf we had heard, when we got into the house there was a feeling of relief as we closed the door behind us, and bolted it.

     “Good” said Kate, “and now we have to find candles”.

     “I thought you were going to say, ‘and now we have to find a gun’” said John.

     “Well, ideally” said Kate, with amused asperity in her voice.

     I was looking at the sign saying ‘Help yourselves’.

     “Well, the sign doesn’t say ‘Help yourselves, and look out for the wolves!’

     “Yes, its true! Said Kate, laughing. “I think its OK. And thats good,because I don’t want to kill wolves, they’re beautiful...”

    Tamsin had found candles, which we set up in the living room and kitchen, even though we didn’t need to light them yet. We brought bowls of nuts and dried fruit into the living room.  As we did this I was aware of how much the house felt like home.

  

   “So, what have we found out?” asked John.

    “And what’s our plan for getting back?” added Tamsin. “We have to get back. I think Rob could be really worried by now. I’m sure he’ll have texted, and he’ll have tried to phone me.”

   “Yes”, said Kate, with firmness. “We have to get back”.

     I emphatically nodded agreement. I was worried about Ffion.

     “Yes” I said. “We need to get back, and – we need to know we can get back”. But we have to stay calm about it. I think the main thing is, we need to get wood for the generator, and get this CD player working. I looked over to John, and then back to Tamsin and Kate.”

         “I think we’ve found out that this is somewhere else”,  I said. And I think we’ve found out that we don’t know much about it. What we’re left with I think is that there are reasons to trust the people who left the notes, and who made the music... It seems likewe  used one of their ‘sound shadows’ CDs to get here – even though I know it seems crazy – and I guess if that’s true we can use one to get back”.

     “Lets hope we can get the generator working, said John. “Its not like we know anything about generators”.

     “And where have the people gone?” said Kate.

     The fact that it was now beginning to get dark made these questions urgent, and eerie. A blackbird was singing outside, but this normally calming sound only served to make us more aware of the vast space of forest and dereliction with which we were apparently surrounded.

     “They seem to make a habit of abandoning houses.” I said, trying to joke.

     “But maybe they havn’t abandoned this house” said Tamsin. “Maybe the sign just means they don’t want to kind of claim the house as their own if they have gone away for a long time.”

     “There are so many different sides to this” said John. “I mean, if this is not the future, if this is a kind of sideways, parallel world – then why is it like this?”. Why is it an overgrown version of the ordinary world? And again, why is this house not derelict?”

     “And maybe” – John stood up – “I don’t know, maybe this is a crazy social-psychological experiment”, Maybe this isn’t England, maybe we’re in – I don’t know – Russia or the Ukraine or something. And maybe its a place planes don’t fly, a mock-up of some kind left over from the cold war...”

    I was struck by John’s explanation for the absence of planes, and I was aware that his idea could not be ruled out.

     “Yes, the Ukraine could maybe be like this” I said, aware as I did so that this fit less well with the area being a preserved relic of the cold war. "Or maybe southern Russia... I guess if we cant get back by using the sound shadows, we should set off walking in whatever seems the best direction, and hope that’s right...”

     I was suddenly feeling extremely tired. It looked as if Tamsin was as well.

    “I think – maybe I need to sleep before I do anything else” I said.

    “Yes” said Tamsin. “I cant keep going much longer. But listen, I’ve been thinking. If this is all like a dream, and if we are all really back in the sound shadows room, then maybe when we go to sleep, and kind of give up this dream, maybe we’ll wake up back there!”

     Kate looked excited.

“Yes!” she said.  “So if we let go of the dream by going to sleep,  then we’ll be pulled straight back.”

     We decided we would try to sleep in the largest of the first floor bedrooms, the room directly above the living room. As we set up candles in the room, and sorted out places to sleep, I was aware I was feeling extremely tired, and I had no doubt I would fall asleep very soon after closing my eyes.

    “So if one person falls asleep, will there suddenly be an empty bed?”  Tamsin voiced this thought as she was laying a duvet down on the far side of the room’s double bed.

     It was an unsettling thought. I had the image of seeing a duvet slowly erasing the shape of a human body underneath it. The house was now in darkness, and it was disturbing to think of being alone in the room, the last person to fall asleep.

     “Well, we don’t know anything” I said. “Maybe we will all go at once, one person going will draw everyone back”.

     I had put down a couple of duvets and a pillow on the other side of the bed, the side by the door. This improvised bed looked very inviting. I slept well on hard surfaces, and my tiredness had overtaken me like a tide coming in.

“But of course” I added “this is just an idea we had. We could simply sleep here...”

“And wake up here” said Kate, finishing my sentence, and catching me soberly in the eye as she did so.

     The last thing I remember is watching the candle-light flickering on the ceiling. Then I was waking up some time later out of muddled, bizarre dreams, and I was still in the room. It was still dark, and I guessed it was only a couple of hours later, or less. The thought that came into my head was that maybe we all needed to fall asleep at once. But this didn’t seem like an insight – it seemed more like a continuation of the earlier conversation.  I felt in fact that  John and Kate might be awake, but it sounded as if Tamsin was asleep. I was awake for a while, wondering about our situation, and then I fell asleep again.

*

     When I woke again it was dawn. There was faint light coming through the window.  A few birds were singing, and it was raining. I could hear the rain on the trees, and I could hear an overflow hitting the ground, from a blocked gutter, or maybe a broken down-pipe. This time it seemed the others were all asleep.

     My feelings about still being in the room were confused.  Slightly to my surprise I felt a kind of relief. It was as if I had wanted the substantiality of this world to be proved. However, this primary feeling led straight to a fear that I would not be able to get back to Ffion. The thought of being trapped, unable to return, was acutely disturbing, and gave me a feeling like claustrophobia. Or maybe agoraphobia would be a better name for it, given the feeling was that I was trapped outside.

     Moving very slowly and quietly, I got up, and left the room, in order to go to the bathroom.  I was aware as I was leaving the room that I had already taken in the position of a creaking floor board, just before the door. I had made a mental note the night before, as we were making the beds – the level of foresight surprised me a little, given I had been tired, and it made me think that I had never really believed that going to sleep would take us back.

     Leaving the bathroom I wandered into the small bedroom on the opposite corner of the house from the one where we were sleeping. I stood at the window watching the rain falling. I was struck by the way everything seemed both dream-like and acutely real. When I thought about us all being there in this unknown place I felt what I was experiencing was more dream-like than most dreams. But when I thought about the rain, and the wolves off in the forest, there was suddenly a sharp insistence to everything.

     Following an impulse, I took a sleeping bag from off the top of the wardrobe, laid it on the bed and got into it. I didn’t want to disturb the others, and I wanted to think about the world we appeared to have found.

     As I lay down I thought i was going to review everything in my mind, but the fact I was tired and it was still early in the morning seemed to ensure that the mysterious question ‘what is this world’ led me toward dreaming, rather than thinking.

     I found myself remembering the sloth in the jungle – the image I had seen at the end of my experience of meeting Ffion, an experience which seemed even more enigmatic now than it had immediately afterwards. Initially I started worrying about Ffion, and then after a while I drowsily went through what had happened, and found that I was seeing the sloth moving away, as if it was leading me somewhere.

     A moment before I had been in a wide single story house on a forested hill in Mongolia, with a long view across a huge valley of trees, ending in a mountain ridge maybe thirty miles away. Something very good had been happening in the house, which I couldn’t remember – and now I was looking out across the valley, and a man with a very light-hearted, playful manner was saying ‘look south, be south’ .

     And then I was in the hallway of the house, with a woman who had been with me at the house in Mongolia, and I was looking at a red door in the hallway, in the centre of the wall opposite to the room where I was sleeping, and the woman was encouraging me to come upstairs to the attic room with the view across the trees, and then we were there in the room, only I was now looking out across jungle in bright, intense sunlight, and I had a thought which afterwards I could not remember, and the woman said “Yes, the Yanomami – they were involved in the emergence.”

     And then I was awake again.

     The emergence... I tried very hard to remember everything I could about the dream, aware as I did so that the rain had come to an end, and the sun was coming out. I was also aware that someone had got up.

      After I had done everything I could to solidify the memory of the dream, I went out into the hallway, and found myself looking at the red door I had just seen in the dream.

     At that point Kate came out of the bathroom, to the right.

     “Well, we’re still here” she said, whispering.

     I nodded. I wanted to tell her about the dream.

     As if she sensed I had something to tell her, Kate ushered me into the room where I had just been asleep. Through the room’s east-facing window a large patch of blue sky could be seen. There was still some rain coming down, but it was clear there was going to be sunshine.

   Kate smilingly pointed at the sky.  “What were you looking at?” she asked, “you were staring at that door as if you had seen a ghost”.

     I told her about the dream.

     At the end I said – “I felt as if that was a name for what all of this is – an emergence...”

     “The Yanomami” repeated Kate. “And Mongolia. Emergence on planet earth...”

     “This world seems to be all forest” I said.

     “And the Yanomami are forest people” said Kate. “Jungle forest...”

     Neither of us knew what to say. There was a thought that was coming into focus which was acutely positive, but the more it came into focus, the more shockingly intense everything began to seem. I found myself thinking about John’s idea that we were somewhere in southern Russia  in an enforced social experiment. This second thought seemed far more likely than what I had been half-thinking a moment before.

      “And the red door,” said Kate, “ did we look in there yesterday? Is it a box-room? I cant remember.”

     “No, nor me” I said. We both went out into the hallway.

     We were left standing, speechless.

     The wall opposite the room where I had slept had no door in it. It was a featureless expanse of white paint.

   

     An hour later, all four of us were in the kitchen.

 Kate and I had gone into the room behind the place where we had seen the red door, and had found only the same wall on the opposite side. After that we had attempted to return to the original conversation, but the experience with the door had unsettled us too much, and we were unable to focus. Shortly afterwards both John and Tamsin had got up, and we decided to have breakfast.

John had discovered a camping stove, and a pile of camping gas canisters. There was a large bag of oats, and some loose-leaf tea, and so we had made porridge with water and raisins, and black tea. It was good to have hot food and drink.

  It had started raining again. It occurred to me to look at the barometer on the wall – it showed the air pressure was low. There would probably be showers on and off through the day.

     “The wood is going to be wet” I said. “We’ll be fine” I added, “but it may take us a while to get the fire going”

     Tamsin was looking at a lighter she had just taken from her bag. We knew there were two large boxes of kitchen matches in the house, and at least a couple of other lighters.

     Tamsin looked over at me.

     “The first time, when you saw Ffion, or dreamed you saw Ffion, what exactly did she say about getting back? And what did she say about the house?”

     The memory of my experience of meeting Ffion in the house came back like a surge of electrical current. And I was struck by how I had been thinking about this before I had fallen asleep and dreamed, in the other bedroom upstairs.

     For a moment I found it hard to concentrate. Tamsin’s question had opened up what seemed to be a positive direction on every level, but at the same time, re-living the experience involved had the effect of increasing my feeling that there was more to our situation than ‘met the eye’.

    She said ‘the house is a window - the house is a window and a way of waking intent’. And she said ‘to get back just concentrate into the room’. But that last phrase was all slowed down, like she was speaking at half speed.

     “Maybe we need to slow down to get back”said John.

     Yes, I said, “slow ourselves down, slow our breathing, stop thinking, and concentrate on the room around us… It was very positive what Ffion said - ‘just concentrate into the room’ gave the feeling that if you did that, it would be easy.”

     “In fact, all of it was very positive” I then told them all about my experience, earlier, of following the sloth into the jungle, and into sleep, and then I told Tamsin and then I told them in detail about the dreams about Mongolia,  and about the house, and the phrase about the Yanomami  being involved in the ‘emergence’.

     “‘The house is a window’” quoted Tamsin, fixing our attention on this phrase, the way she had the day before.  “It’s a window with views of forests and jungles”.

     “And there’s a door, as well” said Kate.” I saw it clearly” she said, looking at John and Tamsin. Then she turned to me.

    “It wasn’t suggestion from you telling me about it,” she said. “I came out of the room, and you were standing looking at it. I said you looked like you’d seen a ghost.”

     There was a pause. Then John got up.

     “’The emergence” sounds like a name for where we are…”  he said. “I love the idea of the Yanomami being somehow involved in all this. But what can we say? We need to rule out that we’re not somewhere in a quiet part of Russia…”

     The sun was out again, and this time it looked as if the sky was clear, for now, in the direction from which the weather was coming. John went to the window, looked out at the blue sky, and then turned back to us.

     “We need to go off into the jungle and find wood”.

     A large quantity of wood was blazing inside the fire-box of the generator. In the generator room the electric light was on. It was now late in the evening. It had taken us a long time to get the generator going, not because it was complicated, but because we had failed to find an additional switch that needed to be turned on, on an electrics board in a box room under the stairs.

     Without too much difficulty we had found two large fallen branches. However, the wood had not been easy to cut, because it was wet, and a little “green”.  We all had blisters on our hands. We took on the task of getting all the wood back to the house, and succeeded by early evening. We knew that wood burns quickly, and so we did not want to err on the side of too small a quanity.  In the end  we started the fire by burning a very wood-wormy chair that we had found in one of the outhouses. There had been a long touch-and-go-phase of smouldering wood, but the fire had eventually  crossed the threshold to a level of heat where the wood being a bit damp was irrelevant, leaving us only with the problem of turning on the generator.

     I had put a bit of extra wood into the fire-box, and I went back to the living room, where everyone was standing. There was something reassuringly normal about the electric light in the hallway, and visible through in the living room. 

     It was now near midnight. The process had taken much longer than we had hoped.

     We all went into the living room, and I went to the CD player. I put the CD in, and turned on the player. The start was very different from the other track we had heard, with a higher pitched drone, and more intense timbres, but very rapidly a sonic gap cut into the track. I stopped the track. I had just wanted to be sure it was what we had thought.

     I was on the edge of saying “Shall we go for it?” I looked around the room at the others. It felt strange somehow, attempting to get away at that moment, after we had done so much work which served to make the house more habitable. And I sensed we all felt the fear that we would fail in the attempt.

     I noticed John looking at the TV.

     “There’s just one thing” he said.  “The TV, and also the radio.”

     We all nodded, but no-one spoke. We all seemed to be unnerved by the thought of what might come from the world of dereliction we had seen the day before. Kate had her hand over her mouth. I noticed that in her other hand she was holding the scrapbook from the attic.

     The TV appeared to have no imput, other than for DVDs. Turning it on and getting a blank screen for its channels could only be taken as proof that it had no hidden aerial, or other connection.

     We then went through to the kitchen. There was a big radio on the work surface. At one point the evening before we had searched for batteries, but – using a torch as testing device – we had found only batteries with no charge.

     John now turned it on.

     Static. The sound was powerful and disturbing. John turned down the volume and tried to find a channel. There was nothing, across the whole bandwidth. The radio was on FM. John then switched it, in turn, to long wave and medium wave. Across all three bandwidths, despite John moving the dial very slowly, there was nothing but different kinds and degrees of static. The radio appeared to be functioning normally, but it was receiving no signal.

     “So” said John “either someone is messing with our heads, and this is a clever fake radio, or this really is somewhere else, somewhere where no-one is broadcasting...”

    In the pause that followed, listening to the faint static coming from the radio, I found myself thinking about the place with the three silver birches where we had been the day before. There was a kind of longing connected with the memory, an achingly positive feeling.

    “Well, not using radio waves anyway” said Kate. “There are messages, like ´follow the cairns´. And maybe dreams here are a kind of broadcast”.

     I looked at Kate, nodding emphatically. “We don’t know anything, but yes, maybe”.

     “Radio Mongolia” said Tamsin.

     We went back into the living room, and we found ourselves places to sit on the floor, facing the grey ‘screen’ on the wall. We decided we should sit in the positions relative to each other that we had adopted last time, with John and Kate in the centre, Tamsin off on the right, and me to the left of John.

     I was feeling nervous, and somehow unsure of myself. I felt the positivity of what we had just said was deeply fragile, that it was possibly built on surmises that would never receive any support. Maybe the only anomaly was that we had been somehow transported to a future world, where in fact, a horrific disaster had taken place a long time ago, and where a handful of time-displaced  humans were struggling to survive (and perhaps by this time the people who had left the messages were dead). This full counter-surmise was that the other ideas we had about what was happening were all wish-fulfilment in response to the evidence of human cataclysm which we did not want to accept. I was struck by the fact that as I had listened to the static of the radio I had not felt oppressed, in fact I had had a positive experience, but afterwards the absence of signal left me feeling bleak, and perturbed. Was this bleakness reality breaking through?

        The other, and deeper, source of anxiety, was that I was desparate to see Ffion, and I was acutely frightened of us failing to get back to the ordinary world.

             It seemed like it would be me who would turn on the CD, and I felt I should say something before I did it. I didn’t feel like I would have the calmness in my voice that I wanted, but I spoke anyway.

          “So, I guess it’s a question of stopping thinking, just perceiving, and listening to the track, to the music. Concentrate into the room, and – “ I stumbled over my words, then started again. “And lets intend to be back”.

     Something was wrong, I felt awkward, and without any composure. But no-one seemed to be noticing a problem. I pressed play, and went and sat down alongside John. 

Kate  

     This ‘sound shadows’ track was different. It felt like a brother – or a sister – of the other track. It was somehow both softer and sharper all at once.

     It had the same two spaces of sound, foreground and background, with the gaps in the foreground  -  but there was now definitely  a kind of clear, mesmeric quality about both the sounds and the rhythms that had not been present in the other track. The continuous part – the underlying sound-space - had a warm subtle pulse of its own, and this pulse kept on appearing in the perforated foreground.   For a while the sounds made me think of dappled sunlight coming through leaves, but tropical sunlight –  as if I was on a mountain in an equatorial forest, and had just found the remains of a tiny, ancient town, and I was looking up through the trees,  catching glimpses of the true nature of the world. The track made me think of the spiral montages in the scrap-book. It had the calm fluidity of movements of air on a hot day.

     I was seeing another room in the house, up on the top floor.  And at the end of the room i could see bright sky. The room was an intensely positive place. It was a long room, facing south, with bare walls, and wooden boards stretching in front of me, and the room’s window - was the entire end wall.

     I knew that beyond the window there was no ground. What I was seeing was a view outwards from the world. The bright sky I was seeing was white-blue, and acutely beautiful, full of light and energy. The words ‘cosmic summer’ came into my mind, but I knew I was seeing something that was there all the time.

     I was unaware that I was not doing what we had set out to do. But the experience had such an overwhelming beauty and validity that if I had been aware I think I would have decided to continue.

     There were birds fluttering in the room, small green birds like finches, but with longer beaks. There were several of them, flying everywhere, landing on the floor-boards for just long enough for me to see them, and flying around again. For a moment I caught a glimpse of a very friendly looking man, standing somewhere in sunlight, surrounded by meadow grass, and flowering wild rose bushes. He had an intensely charming smile, and he was wearing a short black jacket with white seashells sewn onto it. He told me to go back to the attic room, and to wait for someone he would bring.

     I thought about the room, and immediately I was back in it. For a short while I alternated between following the flight of one of the birds with my eyes, and looking at the sublime vastness that I could see at the end of the room. At one point I found I was looking at a bird that had landed near me, to my right, and then I looked up and found there was a woman sitting opposite me, smiling at me.

     The woman’s  eyes had a warmth that was astonishing. She was wearing green, a vibrant, lovely green. Her clothes were floatingly feminine, and yet at the same time they expressed a delicate fluid strength that would split rocks if necessary. The warmth in the woman’s eyes was love, but I sensed that it was also courage.

     The woman’s body had ample curves. As she sat there, giving a welcoming smile, she looked every inch a warrior visionary, and at the same time she looked capable of a level of joy I had never envisaged before. I was aware just in looking at her that she knew something about being a woman that was very special, and very intense. I felt specifically – and it was as if she was deliberately communicating this to me – that she knew about a form of controlled perceptual abandonment, and that this knowledge was fundamental for everything, for understanding the depth of things, for focusing your love, for everything. What was at stake was energy, and the awakening of perception. I felt sure it would be very unsettling for most men to encounter her, because I knew that her knowledge was as vital for men as for women, and that it would demolish their understanding of maleness.  The woman told me things, but without words.  She told me – and I understood completely what she meant – that we should look for opportunities to escape to the outside, and also that if we were experiencing turbulence, after ruptures had occurred in our normal reality, we should then use the practical, everyday modes of behaviour we had learned in the ordinary world. She told me – you’re all in danger, if it doesn’t feel like love and freedom, don’t go there. Then she said

     I am an opportunity to escape.

     She said this to me with a huge smile, both warm and twinkling with unknown possibilities. I knew she was about to go, and that she had been preparing me so I could make a clear-headed choice.

     I went with her.

     As I came back, I knew in a fundamental way that the world in which we had found ourselves was  a new dream of the planet – a new dream on the part of the planet, and of some of the planet’s inhabitants. I saw this, with absolute clarity, and then a moment later, I simply had the idea, but without the full perception that had gone with it.

     I was back in the room on the ground floor. I had turned sideways ninety degrees, and I was sitting facing the window. I discovered I couldn’t remember anything about where I had just been, and nor could I remember anything other than the arrival of the man with shells on his coat, and the start of the encounter with the woman in green. I remembered the joy of the moment where I decided to go with her, and I knew she had told me or shown me things before this moment, but now they were lost in my memory.

     John was sitting in front of me, looking relieved.

     I took his hand, and smiled, trying to convey to him the happiness I had been left with by what had just happened. What had everyone else experienced? Steven was on my right, hunkered down, with one hand down for balance. He looked strained. We hadn’t got back, he wanted to get back to Ffion.

     Tamsin was on my left, her eyes shining. I knew she wanted to get back to Rob, as much as Steven wanted to get back to Ffion, but she seemed to be coping better with the strain.

     “I think we’re going to be alright,” I said. A phrase came into my head to express the intuition that was causing me to say this.

    “I think the wall between this world and the ordinary world is quite thin. We’ll get there next time”.

     I could see that Steven was looking at me very closely, and I could also see that he was grateful for my positivity.

    I told them about what I had experienced, struggling to find words. I felt overwhelmed by a feeling that something had just happened to me, that something transcendental had happened -something that involved seeing the world as fundamentally other than how I had imagined it to be.  In talking about it I kept re-experiencing what had happened, and at the same time, I recurrently felt a collapse in my euphoria, given that the idea could not go away that the event had merely been a dream.

     At the end I told them about the apparent or possible  insight that the world in which we had found ourselves was a new dream on the part of the planet.

     “An emergent parallel world” said Steven. “But”, he added. ‘it’s a new dream” . His eyes were wide.

     There was a pause, and then Tamsin said -

     “And I wonder about the walls between the dreams.  I think maybe I kind of looked across, rather than going across.”

     In the course of telling everyone about my experience I had found out a little of what had happened to the others. John and Steven had listened to the track, and had experienced shifts to a slightly more trance-like state, but had apparently  experienced nothing significant. However Tamsin had had a recurring “hypnagogic” view of a wide sunlit room. This experience seemed strikingly similar to mine.

      “I mean, the room I saw was different from yours” she had said. “It was wide and there were several windows, with a window on a wall on the left as well, but it was flooded with light, I could really see out through the windows, it was like there was glare, a soft glare, as if it was extremely bright light through net curtains, though I didn’t see the net curtains. But in a way it was the same as what you saw, maybe it was another way of seeing the same thing. I knew it was facing that way, the same way” Tamsin pointed toward the window at the bottom of the living room. “But yes, it was almost like it was this house, but in the ordinary world somewhere.”

     “And as I came round from being asleep I was talking to the Swedish woman who me and Rob met in northern Norway, and who gave us the  Mongolian deer stones.  I don’t really remember anything, but I was telling her about what was happening here, and she was excited and wanted to know more, as if she wanted to know how to get here. Yes, I remember, the house felt like it was in Sweden, in the south of Sweden.”

     “But maybe”  Tamsin continued, “we both kind of reached a window, and then we looked in different directions.”

    “Yes!” I said. I wanted very much to say more about what had happened to me, but I felt now was not the time. I longed to wake memories of what I had experienced after I ‘escaped’  with the woman,  and I thought talking it all through might do this. But I felt we should try to get back, and that the attempt to remember should be postponed.

Steven

     I went and made some tea.

      I felt calmer now. I had listened to the sound shadows track for twenty minutes, and nothing had happened other than a ‘heightened’ state where I was faintly seeing patterns in the ‘gaps’ of the track. We had failed to get back, but Kate’s optimism had affected me, and her description of what she had experienced had given me a feeling of immense unexplored directions – and this had made a return to the ordinary world seem more possible.

    As I was waiting for the kettle to boil, I went out through the door of the kitchen. I took two steps out of the door, and then stopped, astonished.

     The stars were intensely bright.

     So many stars were visible, the sky was white-black, not black. Maybe once in Mongolia I had seen the stars this bright, but I wasn’t sure.

     There were tears in my eyes, but as I looked the feelings of fear and distress were all evaporated, and I was left with nothing but a feeling that the night was a vast challenge. I knew suddenly that the only way of getting back to Ffion was to stop worrying and act, and I knew that I wanted her to see this sky.

      I went back into the house, thinking about what Kate and Tamsin had described.

     the house is a window

     I was no longer feeling stressed. I had a feeling that Kate was right, that the next time we would succeed.

      and a way of waking intent

     I turned off the light in the kitchen, and then I took the tea into the living room.

     I asked Kate if she would turn the CD on, once we were ready.  I had a feeling that at some level she now knew more about the situation than I did, and I wanted to let her choose the moment.

     Kate nodded, smiling.

     We drank some of the tea. John was rotating an empty CD case in his hands, alternating between turning it in one direction, and then rotating it back in the other.

    “Cosmic summer…” he said, looking at Kate.

     “Yes - yes” said Kate, opening her eyes wide with excitement,  and looking back at John,  and obviously searching for more to say to evoke what she had seen. Her mouth was open, as she looked for words.

     But then she settled herself.

     It was so beautiful. But - ” she continued, falteringly. “But I guess now we need to be looking in the other direction.”

     There was a slightly strained pause, as we took in the idea of these two directions.

    “Earth summer” I said.

     “Yes, exactly!” said Tamsin.

     “Earth summer  in the normal world. In the northern hemisphere.” I laughed at my unnecessary exactness.

        We were ready again, and Kate was at the CD player.

        The CD started playing, and Kate came and sat down with us, between John and Tamsin. I was sitting at the far left, with Tamsin on my right.

     Everything was very different this time. I was aware of the increased lightness and energy of this track, the way I had been the previous time, but I concentrated on the gaps, and threw myself into looking at the grey screen while simultaneously staying aware of my view of the room around it. I discovered that if I kept looking at the screen while being deliberately aware of the periphery of my visual field the screen would become a faint haze of green light at the point where I was hearing the sound shadow gaps. After a short while there were patches of hazy violet light, as well as green, and with each sound shadow I would see things in outline – buildings, trees, objects that could be large sculptures, standing, or floating in space – visible atmospherically through a cloud of green and violet light. And then I focused on what I was trying to do – instead of waiting to see something I recognised - and instantly I was seeing the sound shadows room in the house in Bromley, as if from the door of the room, with the other grey screen in the middle of this view.

     And then, for a moment, I was dreaming, something about walking through old, empty buildings that were all constructed on the top of a mountain ridge. But when I stopped dreaming  I had my eyes closed, and for that instant I believed that the Bromley sound shadows room was the place where I had been trying to do something, whatever it was, before the dream about the mountain ridge, and that I had nodded off there for a second, and had woken up again.

John

     The sound shadows track was playing, and Kate had sat down alongside me. I was feeling unsettled. I wanted very much to be back in the ordinary world with Kate, and yet at the same time I wanted to have experienced what she had just described to us. I felt emotionally dislocated, as if in some way my desire to be away from everyone with the woman I loved was mean-spirited in comparison with the longing for what Kate was calling “cosmic summer.”

      But to my surprise, almost immediately after the music started I managed to start concentrating on its gaps, and on the screen in front of me. It was as if an electrical current was turned on, and even my jangled, perturbed intention to clear my head of thoughts was enough to start a compelling flow of anomalous experiences.  I concentrated on the sound shadows and the screen with the aim that I would then start aiming myself toward the room in the house in Bromley. But the moment I went into a focused state I immediately saw a room, like a cross between an attic box room, and a corridor. It was a very serene place, and at the far end of the room, forty feet away, there was a big window with sunlit net curtains blowing in a slight breeze. There were a few isolated objects along the walls of the room, standing on their own – a trunk, a grandfather clock, a chest of drawers. The room was placed somehow at the top of the house, although it also felt like somewhere else completely – somewhere pleasant that I couldn’t quite bring to mind. It felt as if it was midday.

     But a moment later I was seeing something different. I had seen it already - it was a place that I had half-glimpsed on the way ‘across’ from the sound shadows room, but which I had then forgotten about competely. It was a sophisticated subterranean world of rooms that was brightly laid out with intricate coloured murals, beautiful chairs, mosaic floors, screens showing abstract videos, paintings, abstract sculptures. This time, in front of me there was a flat screen console on a desk, with a screen showing fluidly geometrical coloured patterns.

     The two ‘views’ – the attic, and the underground world - alternated with each other, and for a short while I was seeing both at once, the long sunlit room visible through the centre of the subterranean rooms. At one point I found myself looking at the screen with the patterns, and I realised I was hearing music, from a source behind me. I looked round, and discovered there were two pillars not about twenty feet away, that seemed to be the source of the sound. Then I looked back in the initial direction.

   The abstract video was impressive, but by far the most striking thing was the music. It was a delicate, beautiful music, that at same time was heavily, calmly charged. The bass was a gentle hum, deep, but not very deep, that sometimes crackled with static, and the high notes were worlds of intricately dancing melodies, that made me think of beautiful movements of warm, electrically charged air – they were like an ecstatic dance of vortical currents.  I also had the impression that I was listening to an intensely lucid series of insights, expressed through music, and that I was understanding them, moment by moment, but without ever being able to fully remember what I had understood. I kept thinking things like – ‘its about intentions and feelings, different modes of intention and feeling’, and I knew these things were true at each time, but I could not ever remember anything about the specific things that I had understood.

     After a while I realised that the music consisted of voices. It was as if I had been hearing people doing something like humming, without realising what it was. The voices belonged to four people,  two men and two women, who were somewhere else in the cavernous suite of rooms. At a certain  moment these people started to  used words to communicate.   I was being invited to walk forward, to walk through the rooms while listening to their music. The idea I was being given was that I would be welcomed fully in a moment, once I had attuned myself – in a way that I could not bring completely to mind – and once I had simultaneously walked towards where the four people were. I had a feeling of extraordinary anticipation, a feeling that I was about to reach ecstasy.

     And then I was walking in a narrow hallway alongside a long wall which was a single mirror. I was seeing Kate in the mirror. She was walking alongside me, smiling at me, in the ‘mirror’ version of the room.  I was overjoyed to see her. I stopped and turned, and there was Kate, standing opposite me, looking at me with a huge, twinkling smile.

Steven

     I opened my eyes, and I was in the sound shadows room facing the door. A split second later I realised I had succeeded in getting back, and that Tamsin was excitedly grabbing my shoulder.  But as this was happening I was becoming aware of something else.  I could hear voices from people in the corridor outside the room - and one of the voices was Ffion’s!

     I stood up, feeling slightly light-headed.

     Ffion appeared at the door of the room, followed a moment later by Rob, Tamsin’s boyfriend. They had obviously both been searching for us, and they had made it all the way to the empty Bromley house.

     I went and hugged Ffion, picking her up and spinning her round.

     “It’s a trick!” she cried out. “It’s a miserable trick!” I could see Ffion was overwhelmed with relief, but that at the same time she was coping with something that could not be accepted as real.

     “No” I said “its not a trick”. I turned to look at the others, for corroboration, my mind wondering at the same time about what exactly Ffion had seen, or not seen.

     I felt that as I had been hugging Ffion I had been somewhere else, and had not really been taking in the situation in the room. When I looked around me I realised there was something very wrong. What I saw was like seeing a confluence of energies that was nearly perfect, but which had something wrong with it which was going to transform everything.

     Rob and Tamsin were also hugging. Meanwhille, a few feet away, Kate was standing on her own, looking intensely distressed. Her face was white. John was not in the room.

      “We were just in here a second ago!” Ffion was saying. “There must be a hidden door”.

     I turned back to her, my mind racing. I felt dizzy again. I was aware of Kate calling out “John”, and of her going out into the corridor, and of her saying to Tamsin and me as she went –

     “John’s not here”

     I spoke to Ffion.

     “Its not a trick” I repeated. “Its, I don’t how to describe it – but I’ll try to tell you”. And then I realised I wanted to be sure about what Ffion had just told me.

     “What did you see when you came in here before? Was the light on? How long were you in this room for?”

     “I don’t understand”, said Ffion “you’re not making any sense”.

     I opened my mouth to say something, and then stopped.

    Ffion looked at me, and I felt she was sensing my agitation.

     “We were here for a few minutes, and then we went to look at the other rooms. And the light was on, there was no-one in the room”. Ffion went over to the wall at the end of the room, and laid her hand on the grey screen, as if she was expecting the wall to be some kind of optical illusion.

     “What’s going on?” she said, turning back to me. I took her by the hand.

      “Well, right this moment, John is supposed to be with us, he was with us a moment ago, and he’s not with us”. Speaking felt like running into a head-wind, because of what I was not saying about what had happened.

    I hugged Ffion again.

     “Its so good to see you” I said. “I’ll explain,” I added.

     Ffion was now looking at me, reaching into me with her eyes, trying to read from my expression what kind of thing had happened, and whether or not I was in trouble in some way.

     “Hold on” I said, going off to look into the hallway outside.

     Kate was coming up the stairs as I arrived. She was still white, and she looked at me pleadingly.

     “He’s not outside. I’ve been out there and called out. And he’s not anywhere here in the house.”

     And then Kate took my arm. “I think he’s stuck. I think he got stuck half way over. I think I felt it happening”.

     “Well, we don’t know”. But I nodded at her, to indicate that I felt it was likely she had had a glimpse of something. I felt unnerved by what she had said, it was like something very large arriving that blocked the sun for a long time as it arrived. But I ushered Kate back into the room. Even though I was suddenly feeling slightly numb and dizzy I knew  the first thing was to attempt to give Ffion and Rob some kind of view of the situation.

     “We have to go back” said Kate, as we came into the room.

     “Go back where?” said Ffion.

     Somehow Kate’s conviction that going back would be the solution made me feel more positive – surely in fact if John was not here, he would turn out to be back in the house by the lake. He would have got stuck somehow, and as with our first attempt, he would have found himself still there, in the living room.

     However the return of positivity did not lend me the ability to describe what had happened. I stumbled over my words in trying to explain, alternating between narrative and an attempt to describe the forested world in which we had just been living.

     After a while Tamsin interrupted.

     “Have you seen it says on the door here ‘Go sideways, don’t stop’? It seems like we’ve been to a world which is sideways to here.”

    “Yes” I said, very grateful for Tamsin’s help. “Whatever you think about it, what we’ve experienced is that we’ve just spent two days in a - .”

     I was going to say "a sideways world", but I hesitated, and then Rob’s voice broke in. He was reading out from a small notebook he must have found amongst the CDs.     

    “You’ve turned sideways, and then you realise that this is the direction of the future. Sideways is another world of the now. Beyond it is the elsewhere.”

     There was a silence. Everyone was a bit nonplussed by this, in many different ways I think. I felt a shiver in my spine, and, curiously, across the right side of my head.

     “Where did you find that?” I said.

     “But what does it mean?” asked Rob.

     I didn’t know how to respond. I was acutely aware of Kate’s distress, and at the same time I was thinking about the phrases, and about what we should do. As I was thinking, I found I was getting an image of two arcs the breadth of a continent meeting above my head and forming a loop. As they came together I knew what I had to say.

     “We have to go back” I said. I turned to Ffion, and then back to Rob. “We have to show you. There is no point in trying to tell you, when you can just be there yourselves, with us. And – and this is the first thing all along - we have to go back for John.”

     There was silence.

     “Yes,” said Kate. “If he was somewhere around he would have come straight here. He’s not outside trying to get in or anything, I went and looked. I think he’s back there.  I think I knew he wasn’t with us – at the last moment – coming over.  As if he got stuck.”

      Kate was on the edge of sobbing.  I knew the situation was strictly inconceivable for Ffion and Rob, and I had a strong impulse to act quickly. I went over to the CD player.

     “I don’t think he’s stuck – I think somehow he lost focus at the wrong moment, And now he’ll be too worried to let go.”

     Kate gave me a pained look, which was on the edge of resentment about my contradicting her. The look clearly said “you think you’re presiding over all of this, but in fact there’s much more going on than you realise.”

     I turned to Rob and Ffion. “The sounds are the doorway.  See it as music that helps to initiate a lucid dream, if you perceive, and don’t think, and just listen to the music and look at the wall.”

     Ffion was looking at me with wide-eyed consternation, and shaking her head.

     But then, after she had looked around the room at the others, and had encountered the raw sincerity of Kate’s pleading expression, her face changed, and I sensed she was feeling unnerved by the idea that something might actually be about to happen.

     “Please try.” I said. “Clear your head completely, and listen to the sounds.”

    Ffion looked at me and nodded.

     Rob was also looking at me, and then he looked over at Tamsin, who  had been saying “Its true – it all happened, we were there for two days.”

     Rob nodded as well.

     “OK. he said. “OK. Lets do it. Whatever it is.” There was a genuine, open-minded laughter in his voice.

     I turned the music on.

      I went and sat by Ffion. I listened into the subtle timbres of the spaces in the track, and within thirty seconds or less, I was glimpsing the forest, and the lake. The glimpse was faint, and I was left afraid that this time I would not make it across. I concentrated again on the sound shadow gaps, and this time, as I maintained my concentration I had a feeling of me and the music being peeled upward off the ground, and of both the music and myself somehow rippling in a breeze, like a length of fabric swept up into the sky on a hot summer day.

  And then I was standing in the sumptuous underground place, the cool-on-a-hot-day subterranean city, with its delicate, exquisite hangings and paintings, and computer screens showing fluid abstract art-works. And i knew for certain that John was somewhere in this place, and I knew that I had been avoiding thinking about my experiences of being in this underground world, for reasons I felt unsure about. I also knew it was vital none of us were waylaid there. I could see the view from the hill up ahead with a wall of the subterranean place dimly superimposed on it. I willed myself onto the hill, and feeling the grass under my feet, and the breeze on my face, I reached out toward Ffion, Rob, Tamsin, and strongly at the end toward Kate, who I knew somehow was wanting to go in search of John. Then I stamped my foot, copying what Kate had done the last time. I stamped it once, and felt everyone now was around me on the hill, apart from Kate, and then I stamped my foot again, Then Kate was with us, although I felt she was unsure about whether she was doing the right thing.  I stamped my foot a third time, very hard, feeling as much like a horse as a human being. The whole movement was about reaching a total intent to cross over to the other world, to be on the hillside above the forest. At the end of the motion I felt a kind of click that went all through me – and then I was reeling slightly, my knees buckling under me for a second. I was standing with all of the others on the hill, with thick, but broken clouds above us, and early morning sun lighting up a patch of forest to the southwest.

     I looked around, taking in, as I did so, a look of transfixed, open-mouthed happiness on Ffion’s face. We were all there- we had done it!

      “I’ve got to say this before I forget” It was Kate’s voice, cutting into my excitement. 

“There’s a whole other much wider, deeper level. Its an ocean of feeling and intent. The place where I was just now was beautiful, but it was trapped, the place itself is trapped. I understood everything for a moment, but I can’t remember. I’m frightened for John. I think I could have saved him, but I think we would have been caught there.”

     Kate set off walking toward the house.  “I’m going to go on my own to the house, I think I can call him from there.”

     To my astonishment Ffion called out after her, with immense conviction and assurance.

     “Don’t look at the door, look in the other direction!  And do NOT go THROUGH the door!”

     I looked at Ffion. She looked back at me with affection, but with a powerful, impersonal quality in her eyes. Her look seemed to say that I was doing fine, but that I was not quite up to speed.

     Rob had set off walking down the hill toward the lake, with a dazed, excited look on his face, and Tamsin was alongside him.

     “Kate and John are in love”, said Ffion, “so maybe none of us will be necessary.  But after a while I will stay with Rob, and you should take Tamsin and say you’re going to help them, and then stay downstairs and send Tamsin up to the first floor. Tamsin pulled you over here when you first arrived – I saw it happen. She can maybe do the same for John”.

     I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

     Ffion was now spinning gently round with immense joy in her face.

     “I cant believe this!” she said.

     She came up to me, and actually picked me up and spun me round, an ecstatic reversed repetition of what I had done with her, only a few minutes before. On top of everything else, I was amazed by her strength, and fluency of movement. I was eleven and a half stones, in comparison with her nine stones - although the light frame of her body was always very well-toned, she had never done anything like this before.

     “We’re actually here, completely here, with both of our bodies!” As she finished saying this she put me down, having spun me round three or four times.” I was here before with my travelling body, in a dream that I’d forgotten, but now we’re all here in our entirety.”

    “I’m in a heightened state – what you’ve called a trance state when you’ve been been talking about shamanism, but its really a lucid state, trance is completely the wrong word. You were in a heightened state as well just now when you pulled us all over, but you’ve lapsed back out a bit.”

     “I understand it all, though I cant really put it into words – no I cant. I can a little, but now isn’t the time. And I’ve just seen now – it was like I saw a blazing light, like a light about to run out of oil – I’m going to lapse completely to normal in a moment.”

    And then suddenly she said, quietly, but with huge emphasis  – “Tamsin has to go now”

     Tamsin and Rob had walked down the hill together and were standing by the lake. I could hear Rob saying something like ‘its just not possible’.

     Ffion and I walked quickly down the hill.

     “Dont forget, she has to go into the house on her own.”

     We reached Tamsin and Rob, I spoke quickly, while Ffion, to my astonishment, took Rob by the shoulder, and lead him toward the edge of the lake.

     “Ffion’s in a ... Ffion seems to be really – understanding things -  and she thinks you’re needed right now to help get John out of trouble. I think we should go.”

We set off walking, and then both of us started running.

     We slowed down as we got nearer to the house, and then Tamsin stopped running altogether.

     We were walking by the south side of the house. I tried to bring to mind Ffion’s perspective on  what was happening, and the details of what she had said.

     I stopped at the path to the kitchen door. Tamsin ran ahead, and went through the door. I saw her running toward the stairs, and up the first flight.  Then, for some reason, she stopped, on the landing. She had her back to me, and I imagined she was frozen in indecision about something.

    The moment went on, as if time had stopped.

     “Are you OK?” I called out. There was no response.

     A few seconds later I heard an intense, agonised cry, that nonetheless seemed to have a screamed quality of relief about it. It was Kate’s voice. A moment later I heard what I thought was John’s voice. It was definitely a man’s voice, but I couldn’t be sure it was John. Tamsin’s whole body jolted, and then she turned toward me, and sat down on a step, trembling slightly.

      I came up to her. Tamsin looked at me, with a dazed look in her eyes, as if she was trying to see something behind me. Her face was pale.

     Go and see if John is there, and if he’s OK. She said. “I was seeing so much just now, but I’ve lost it – I cant remember it”

     I went up the stairs.  Kate was sitting cross-legged on the landing.  John was lying stretched out on the floor, with his head in her lap, and his eyes closed. His breathing was coming in shuddering bursts.

     John’s face was extremely pale. He looked as if he had been wasting away with a deadly disease for days, and had consumed no food during this time. As I looked at him, I was aware that his shuddering breathing was returning to normal, but this did little to calm the shock of his skin being a cadaverous white.

    Kate had tears in her eyes, and looked frightened, but I could see she was trying to control her distress.

    John opened his eyes. He looked at me.

     “I don’t remember. I’ve been somewhere  – on the other side of that door. But I don’t remember any more, what happened. Have I actually been gone?”

      “You weren’t here when I got here” said Kate. I sat facing the other way from where the red door was – that time – and I tried to envisage you in the place I had seen when I came over – the underground-city place”

     John nodded.

     “And then the next thing I remember I was standing with you here, facing you, and you nearly fell, and I lowered you down. I remember a sensation we were spinning, fast, and then we were standing here.

    “I remember the spinning as well. And there’s music in my head now, very beautiful music, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything so beautiful. That was how it started, music, there in – the underground world.  But this music is more beautiful.”

    “How do you feel physically?” I asked.

   “Very faint, and very tired, and I think maybe I’m hungry. I feel a bit sick, but I think maybe it’s because I’m hungry.”

    “You need to get into a bed, and rest I think, and then have food later.”

     I noticed that Tamsin was now on the landing with us. I hoped she wouldn’t say anything about how bad John looked.

    “I saw you” said Tamsin. “in the underground world. I was with Kate here in the room, and then I saw you here with Kate.”

     John nodded, giving a big smile to Tamsin.

     “I’m sure you’re going to be fine,” I said. “And after you’re lying down, I will go and see how Ffion and Rob are doing. As a result of you not coming across with us, they’ve come over here, which I’m sure wouldn’t have happened otherwise, not now. So you’ve saved us a lot of stress, trying to convince them this place exists!”

    “That’s good, they’re here.”  said John. “You and Tamsin were both worrying.”

     I was sitting with Ffion at a table in the garden. The scrap-book was open in front of us.

     A tide of anomalous events and states of consciousness had reached a high point, and then had fallen back.

     When I had returned, with Tamsin, to the lake I had found that Ffion had just undergone a sudden and disorientating shift back into an ordinary state of awareness. Everything that had happened after being in the sound shadows room had become like a faintly remembered dream, and she had no recall of any of the things she had said and done. Her and Rob had been looking at the lake, and one moment Ffion had been in the heightened state, and a moment later she had been in semi-shock, confabulating to attempt to deal with the situation.

     Since then Ffion had been restlessly exploring the idea that what was happening was some kind of experiment or bizarre trick, maybe involving a combination of mind-altering drugs, and hypnotic suggestion. I had responded by telling her everything I could about what had happened over the previous two days, and by showing her the house.  She loved the house, and the pleasure given to her by it seemed to help her ground herself on the strange terrain of ‘either/or’ which it was necessary to occupy. Either we were somewhere else completely, or we were in the ordinary world and some bizarre trick was being played on us. I was still to some extent in the space of this disjunction, but I knew that by now I was on the threshold of accepting the validity of the situation.

       Ffion had told me earlier about how she and Rob had come to be in the abandoned house. Rob had called her in northern Spain, and thrown her into acute anxiety by telling her that he couldn’t get in touch with Tamsin, me, Kate or John, and that he had been to my house and found no-one there. She had flown back three days early, agonising about what Tamsin’s account of being in the sound shadows room could mean, and speculating about whether we had all been killed as intruders, in the process of trying to return there.  She had a key to my house, and once they had found no-one there, she and Rob had rapidly convinced each other they should try to get into the abandoned house, and they had succeeded, without problems, by opening an unlocked sash window in a downstairs room.

     As we went around the house I recounted the events of the last two days, and in particular I told her about what she had said in the minutes after arriving on the hilltop, and about my dream-like experience of meeting her in the house.

     She had simply shaken her head, and laughed, wide-eyed, but unwilling to affirm any view on the subject.

     “Well, I don’t know anything about it. There’s nothing I can say, really. And I think we should be careful not to go mad”.

    Ffion started to turn the pages of the scrap-book.

        “I think this book is like a clue, whatever we think about what’s happening” she said. If this is an insane experiment then the people doing the experiment have created this, and we can try to see if it leads anywhere, or if we can work out what they’re up to. If this is all real, then its more information, in some sense, from people who know more about it than we do”. 

  

      “Yes, yes – brilliant” I said, pushing my chair closer to the table.

I was impressed by Ffion’s investigative astuteness, even though this attribute was her trademark, in a way. She had been working as a producer in the music industry, and she had acquired a reputation for seeing through the false or inflated claims of impresarios, musicians and suppliers of goods for events. But even under these unnerving circumstances she was maintaining her poise, and attempting to solve the enigma of our situation.

   It was evident that the montages in the book were abstract twice over, both at the level of the words – which were sometimes in the form of cuttings, and sometimes written onto the page, and at the level of the diagrammatic use of space and colour.

    We looked for a while at a page which seemed to be all about dreams, landscapes and animals. It was fascinating, but after a while Ffion suggested we look quickly at everything in the book.

      Towards the end of the book there was a page with very little on it. The words had all been written onto the page, and there were just two cuttings.  At the top of the page on the left was a word, apparently a heading -

           Xenography

         And nearly halfway down the page were two pairs of words: the first was on the left, and the second was in the middle -

        the Disaster                                        the Corridor

         

       Near the top of the page on the right was a single word -

           Travellers

      On the lower left was the phrase -

         The Deep Hotel

     There was an isolated question mark to the right of these words, an inch or so away from them. And there were two isolated question marks on the top right, both an inch or so away from the word “Travellers”, one on the left, and one on the right, and both a little higher up.

      About six inches apart from each each other, two thin vertical sections from a small print of a painting had been stuck into the middle space of the page, the one on the right slightly higher up. The painting was almost entirely of blue sky, with curiously swirled clouds in it, and beneath the sky there was a space of rock-like objects. I knew that the painting was a late work by the surrealist painter Tanguy. I found its presence there very striking, partly because it seemed in some way to fit perfectly, but also because it was a painting in a series of works which I knew had been an inspiration for the paintings I had just been doing, back in the house in Bromley.

     I had a sudden, very positive memory of the ring of silver birches and gorse bushes, with the white rock in the centre. And a moment later I had an odd impression that there was a tall, very thin man, standing looking at us from the trees in front of us, twenty feet away, on the south side of the garden. I looked up, and for a moment I saw an outline of the figure in the leaves of the undergrowth. Then there was nothing, not even anything about the area of leaves that suggested a human figure.

     I felt a slight shiver go up my spine. I wanted to tell Ffion about what I had just experienced, but I thought it would be better to avoid saying anything that would create unease. Instead I plunged into thinking about the enigmatic words on the page of the scrap-book.

     “xeno” is - outsiders, outside..." said Ffion.

     “Yes” I said. “Outsiders, foreigners… So “xenography” – the study of the outside?”

     “A map of the outside” Ffion responded.

     As I was wondering about the other things on the page Tamsin and Rob came out of kitchen and sat down at the other two chairs around the table.

     “John’s asleep” said Rob. “Kate wants to stay for a while, but I said I would come and take over a bit later”

     “Brilliant” I said. “We’ll take turns.”

     Earlier we had picked wild raspberries from a slope overlooking the lake. John had eaten a few of the berries, and had drunk water, and had said he was feeling better, but exhausted.

      “So, we’re here for now,” said Tamsin, “until John is well enough.”

     “ Well, that’s a relief,” said Rob, grinning. “I was worried we only had a day ticket”

     I liked that Rob was laughing about our situation, despite our lack of knowledge about it, and despite what had happened to John  I felt the pressure of everything we didn’t know needed to be dispelled by positivity, and laughter would be the best thing of all.

     Ffion had been looking at the house, as if trying to appraise what it meant for us, and I was half aware that she had turned round to look behind her.

    And then Rob suddenly stood up, looking in the same direction.

     Emerging from the path at the far end of the garden was a woman, perhaps in her forties, and a younger man. Both of them had backpacks. The woman had piercing eyes, dark curly hair on her shoulders, and was wearing a long moss-green top and jeans. The man had a mop of scruffy hair and moved around like he was amused by everything – he was wearing grey jeans, and a grey t-shirt with abstract diagonal designs in black.

     The woman came up to us, with a warm twinkling smile that counteracted the impression of her probing into us with her gaze.

     “I’m Cass”she said. “This is Josh”.

     She looked for a moment at a mobile phone on the table.

     “Let me guess - you’ve just arrived here.”

     I stood up.

     “Yes”, I said, “though we don’t know what that means. Hopefully you can tell us...” I introduced Ffion, and then Rob and Tamsin, and then gave her my own name.

    “Well,”said the woman, looking at all of us “welcome to the Corridor.”

     There was a pause. The woman was calmly smiling at us, and I was about to ask what she meant by this name.

    “Is this your house?” asked Ffion.

    “No” said the woman. “I think it’s yours”.

     There was a pause.

     “And it’s a great house” said the man, laughing, and going closer, past the table.

    The woman nodded. And she now seemed to be concerned to avoid doing anything that would give the impression of being wilfully enigmatic. There was a pleasant, brisk frankness now, as she spoke.

    “We live about twenty miles away” she said pointing to the southeast. “ There’s eight of us. We get food from the Felixstowe ferry terminal, which has an area which is not derelict. We can help you with supplies. I don’t know how much you know – I don’t know how long you’ve been here.”

     Then I heard an exclamation of surprise from the door of the house. Kate had come out, and was looking at the newcomers, and in particular at the man, who was now standing on the other side of the table from me, not far from the house door.

     “Who are you?” Kate asked brightly, responding to the man’s wave of greeting. Her question didn’t sound like an interrogation, but more like a expression of interest in him, a greeting that went straight to the point. Kate’s genuine cheerfulness contrasted with her red eyes and puffed up face from crying.

     “I’m the -” said the man, and I could tell he was about to make some joking response. But it was as if he had done a double-take in mid-sentence, and had seen Kate’s face more clearly. Then in an instant his pause for words became something else – his face went from playfulness to frozen confusion. He looked around him at all of us as if he had no idea where he was.

     “Josh!”  It was the woman’s voice, shouting out the name with intense urgency.

     I looked at the woman, aware that her immense composure of a moment ago was now completely gone.

     And then I looked back. I was looking at the man, but it was as if I was looking at an after image of him, on my retina. I felt for a split second that I was experiencing some kind of light effect, a kind of faint localised glare – I had the impression I was seeing a mist of white in the place where the man had been, as if someone had suddenly turned on some kind of light and particles in the air had been revealed.

     I blinked. The man was not there. The impression of a light effect had gone. Kate was staring into empty space, like the rest of us, and the woman was calling out the man’s name again, with even more intensity than the first time.

     Then there was silence.

     The silence was brought to an end by the woman, who shook her head sadly, and then pulled her poise together again, as if she was putting on a coat. She smiled at Kate, and then at the rest of us.

     “We should talk” she said.

***

      

       Copyright Justin Barton 2013