Explorations: 28

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 - 50)

The Corridor

Justin Barton

Part Five

Ffion

It was over.

And yet - at the same time it was not over at all. Later it would come to seem that the events of the previous two days had merely been a necessary preliminary, an achievement which opened the way to the main struggle.

We picked our way down the slope through heavy rain, acutely aware of the danger of lightning, past the bedraggled spikes of mullein flowers, and onto the track to the house. Rob was walking, after having been supported for the first few yards by Tamsin and Steven. He had come round almost immediately, though he had been dazed and lacking in balance at first. There were big drops of rain coming down, and as we were beginning to walk there was another lightning flash - fork lightning striking somewhere to the east of the house. Very loud thunder arrived a second or two later.

About a hundred yards from the house Kate suddenly started shaking uncontrollably, and her teeth started chattering. I felt they were primarily shudders of delayed shock, and of fear, although the cold was not helping. I had seen the sinister, predator entity up on the hill, and I was not surprised Kate was getting a shock response.

When we got into the house we were all relieved to be away from the lightning, and after a minute wrapped around with two blankets and a duvet, Kate stopped shaking.

“I thought I was going to break my teeth!” she said, laughing a little. She looked pale, although colour was beginning to come back, in patches, to her cheeks.

I knew that I would also be looking pale. I was glad that I was sitting down – I kept getting moments of feeling slightly faint. I was feeling incredibly grateful to Kate, and looking after her had been helping me to keep my thoughts and feelings from becoming too much for me.

If I started to think too much about why I was grateful to Kate, I would be jolted back into a state on the edge of shock. And it didn’t help too much to concentrate on the relief of being back in the house, both because of the difficult conversation that was now impending, and also because the thought of being away from the lightning made me think about the terrifying entity I had just seen on the hill.

Steven was hunkered down in front of me clasping my right hand with both of his. Kate was to the left of me on the sofa in the living room, and John was sitting beyond her, with tears of relief on his cheeks. Tamsin was on the floor opposite Kate, with Rob alongside her, opposite John.

What had been happening to Rob? I had sensed at the end that something had been taking place between him and the two Deep Hotel beings - Col and Jane. In a way I did not want to know – I had a frightened desire to get back to the ordinary world and to live as if such things did not exist. But my escape three days before to the elsewhere made this feeling unsustainable –it was too obviously cowardice – and in any case I sensed that the new emotional rip-tides that would now be in effect in the ordinary world would mean there would be no coward’s option.

Steven had been saying ‘thank you’ to me and Rob for attempting to save him and Tamsin. But this gratitude did not make me feel closer to him. I realised that I felt extremely angry toward him – and Tamsin. It was at this point in my thoughts that I would start to feel dizzy, close to fainting. Steven had said ‘it was an accident, we were on the hill, it was accident.” But what were they doing on the hill in the first place, at 5 in the morning? And the irreversible result of us not leaving for the ordinary world that morning was what had just happened between me and Rob.

I felt suddenly that I was about to cry. The emotions I had just experienced were so intense I was about to be overwhelmed. Only half an hour ago I had been having what had no doubt been the most intense erotic experience of my whole life, and seeing the entity on the hill had been only the most shocking event in a day and a half filled with so many different kinds of fear. However, in fact what stopped me was the memory of what I had seen on the hill – crying was not going to help with threats of that kind.

John suggested going up to the attic room. He went to get candles for later – it was still early in the evening, and the sun was now shining, but the power was off in the house, and before long it would be twilight.

I wanted to tell Steven what had happened, before speaking to everyone, but there would not be a chance. Everyone was getting up, and I stood up with them, feeling unnerved by the situation, and by the one dark aspect of the house on the first floor – I felt almost unsteady from this thronging of fears, and I was glad that Steven had taken my hand as we started toward the stairs. I tried to think about the atmosphere of the attic room to shut out the thought of the red door on the first floor landing. To my relief there was nothing there as we passed - only the white-painted wall, and the small bookcase.

On the second flight of stairs a view of the forest beyond the lake reminded me of seeing the wall of white light at the end of the events in the Deep Hotel, and this in turn reminded me of everything I had understood at that point in the experience.

Steven and Tamsin gave an account of their experiences after they had been swept away from the hill two days ago. An ordeal was on the way, and at the beginning it was hard to concentrate, but empathy and the recentness of my own experiences rapidly propelled me into a focused state.

I was disturbed by what had happened to Steven with the familiast – I wanted to tell him that he took too many risks, and needed to change, so he was more aware of danger. It was unsettling that Steven had in a sense been made pregnant, through him being lured into a female self. But Shona had warned me that Steven’s unfocused female side could lead him into danger, and this somehow made the event less perturbing. After everything that had happened – and especially given that it seemed sexuality was something different to what we had thought – I was less concerned about the nature of Steven’s libido, and more concerned about his cavalier attitude in dangerous circumstances.

The first – unexpected - phase of my ordeal was when Steven and Tamsin told us about them becoming the couple, Sara and Arden, at the house in Somerset. The glow that came off them as they talked about this experience was almost something you could feel in the room, and their description both affected me in a hauntingly powerful way, and left me feeling worried, and annoyed by what seemed to be an inconsiderate excitement. The experience had been – vicariously - one of being in love, and it had evidently been acutely intimate. I knew that Steven and Tamsin felt a real love for each other, but I had been feeling that this love was being successfully sublimated into a profoundly active friendship. I now felt afraid that what had happened in the Deep Hotel would break this balance.

In the course of telling everyone about the first stages of what had taken place in the Deep Hotel there were many moments when I indicated – deliberately or involuntarily – that the story was heading toward something extremely distressing for Steven and Tamsin. Rob had done the same, and at the point where he described arriving in the ‘memory room’ he faltered.

“We were set up…” he said, awkwardly. Then he winced, and shook his head.

It was clear that Tamsin could see what was going on.

“We’re going to have to say everything” she said. She then told us about the fact that the experience of being in love as Sara and Arden – and of the lovers being each other - had not only been intensely sensual, it had also held within itself a powerful sexuality.

She also then said – and this completely sealed the effects of her words – that at the very end she and Steven had briefly had the experience of being each other. She said this was the same kind of experience. She did not explicitly say that being each others bodies and selves had included sexuality, but a slight hesitation in her voice made what had happened completely clear.

Steven had been nodding, though with a slightly furrowed brow. But now I saw that he was nervously rubbing a hand down his cheek. He confirmed, using very few words, that his experience had been the counterpart of Tamsin’s.

It felt that what I had just been fearing had already happened. And in a way it was worse – it certainly felt as if it was worse in relation to potential for future intimacy than what had happened between me and Rob. There was a sublime glow of love about it which would never suggest a need for caution, and which left me feeling appalled by its possible consequences. Only keeping going forward could help us now – I sensed viscerally that what Shona had said about Steven now applied with great urgency to all of us.

“OK, OK.” I said. “I’m going to tell you” I said.

I spoke about what had happened, trying to talk only about what might be important. My faltering words fell into an increasingly distressed silence. Then Rob, looking mortified, took over from me, stumbling bleakly for words even more than I had.

By the time Rob was starting to tell us about the offer made to him by the Deep Hotel there was a force-field of distress and embarrassment in the room that meant it was a few moments before what he was saying had its full impact. And then it was as if a fog cleared, and I was staring at the trap that had been set.

Rob would not have been coming back with us – or if he had been, he would have been on a leash. I could feel that he would have been a seduced, permanent servant of the Deep Hotel.

I felt a kind of seething shock going through me, leaving my perception of the room slightly unfocused and feverish. A moment later I was back to normal state, though still feeling horrified. On top of everything else –and inseparable from it – I was deeply disturbed by the thought of Rob having wanted to give me a child. The trap was the main source of the horror I felt, but apparently it springing shut would also have made me pregnant.

In the middle of the vertiginous effects of these thoughts Rob then placed the fact that he had also been hooked – perhaps most fundamentally it seemed – by the promise of reaching an ultra-intense orgasm as a woman, and by the promise that in the future he would be able to take the form of a woman, as well as that of a man. He had not said this the first time in describing the offer, an account which had culminated in him saying ‘”they’d got me, I was about to say yes.” But then – as if he had picked up courage from confronting what had happened - he went back and told us about the other libidinal scene within the event.

I was aware that this admission on Rob’s part had changed the atmosphere in the room. I felt that until then both Steven and Tamsin had barely been able to listen to the description of the attempted entrapment – despite its overwhelming importance – because of the shockingly jealousy-inducing effects of what Rob and I had revealed. In telling us this fact Rob had denied himself the implicit pose of ‘macho male’ within the group that would have been his – without him ever having to say or do anything to claim it – if he had remained silent. It somehow felt very important that he had not pretended to be a solid ground of ‘ordinary’ maleness in comparison with which Steven and John would have been aberrations.

I had a sudden insight that blissful, hyper-charged sexuality was fundamental to the escape from dead, ordinary existence, but that, without being utterly disciplined about how you let go, it could easily be taken over by catastrophic desires that were not really your own. I glimpsed this clearly, and then a moment later the full insight was gone, leaving only a faint impression in my memory. My distress for those hurt by what we had just described – and my fears about repercussions - swept everything else away.

John was now lighting the candles, and Kate was standing up to help him. It felt as if a crisis had been reached, and we had broken through to the other side of it. I was glad, in the darkening house, that our situation had been boosted before night arrived.

Not long afterwards we decided we should sleep. We thought it was best was for us all to sleep where we were, in the attic room. Our plan was to use the attic toilet, and for someone to accompany anyone leaving the room to use it. We fetched mattresses from other rooms, and we immediately – apparently without any thought, let alone discussion - arranged ourselves in a way which was as emotionally un-perturbing way as possible. I slept by the window on the side of the room opposite the lake, with Steven alongside me. John and Kate slept in the middle. Then it was Tamsin and Rob – Rob was by the window facing the lake.

I fell asleep almost immediately I lay down, which was very unlike me.

I half-woke a little before sunrise , and I remembered the night before. Before long I was fully awake and embroiled in unresolvable distress.

I was feeling angry toward Steven and Tamsin.

The initial hook for my anger was the fact that they had gone off together the hill at 5 in morning, together with the idea that they were in denial about the intensity of what they had done together.

Steven seemed to be implying ‘it was love, not a physical act, so it’s alright’, and this in fact seemed to be the opposite of how it should be viewed, especially given he had ended up admitting – once Tamsin had left him no option - that sex was involved as well.

However, when I considered what I felt closely, I realised that I would be feeling the anger whether or not I persuaded Steven out of his denial. This frightened me, because I was left solely with anger, and with no position from which to articulate or justify my anger. Because what Rob and I had done had not been in the end that different – there had merely been a much greater degree of sexuality involved. I wanted to scream at Steven, ‘but your experience was more about love, about being in love!’ But I sensed a kind of monstrous senselessness in this act. How much of jealousy, in the cases where another intense relationship was involved, was people raging insanely against an irreversible bonding which had occurred, and setting out to create psychological and physical blocks preventing the bonding from expressing itself –something I was glimpsing, momentarily, as a horrific, destructive process.

I felt that when Steven and Tamsin had broken through into the Corridor I had been drawn to go beyond myself, both by the positivity of the escape that was occurring, and by a need to prevent them from locking together in the world they had stumbled upon. This event somehow seemed as if it had been a vital intervention. My feeling now, rightly or wrongly, was that it had been fundamental that the situation was widened so that three people were involved, instead of it just being them, in the Corridor together. For instance – and I was trying hard to stay dispassionate - if somehow they had ended up having an amorous or sexual encounter here, the guilt of this might have blocked the whole process of the six of us getting away.

But now, it was as if they had simply gone off and discovered another world together, and had bonded there instead. It was frightening to think about the unthinking determination this revealed. However, they clearly did not feet any guilt – the woman Miranda, whoever she was, had given them the experience, rather than them choosing it, and it had not been an ordinary physical process of having sex.

Thinking about it all made my head hurt. I could see that on some level it was good that they felt no guilt, but at the same time the thought of this innocently intense, serendipitous love between them made my blood start to boil. I felt it was clear they were being disingenuous about the hurtfulness of actions like their dawn walk to a place which was known to be a doorway, and about the extent to which sexuality was now explicitly involved in their relationship - but what good would it do to say anything?

And what good would it be to say they should be more considerate when it seemed that the day before I had been willingly – in some sense of the word – giving myself up to being made pregnant by Rob? What had taken place between me and Rob was inevitably an additional source of dread – I was afraid it would damage the existing relationships, and would function as an excuse or a rationalisation allowing a relationship to form between Steven and Tamsin. If I started thinking about how to help Steven cope with what had happened, I rapidly collapsed into jealous speculation.

I was caught in a loop of anguish and anger, a loop that never really repeated, but nonetheless kept taking me back to the same places, with nothing ever coming into lucid, sustained focus.

Given the vastness of the spaces that had now become apparent in the world, being caught up in jealousy seemed a bit like discovering a gigantic house, and then refusing to live anywhere other than a tiny room in the basement. At one point this image came to my mind, and given my newly acquired suspicion of subterranean rooms, it was very disturbing, and made me shudder. But I could not break free, and soon I was embroiled again.

Eventually what broke me free was the sound of voices outside. After an instant of fear I thought I recognised the voices of Cass and Shona. And then I heard Cass’s voice, calling out loudly -

“Hello, are you there!”

I got up, blearily relieved that the circuit of pained thought had finally been broken, and very glad to hear Cass’s warmth coming up through the window. I pulled on jeans, aware that everyone else was now getting up - with the exception of Kate who seemed to be deeply asleep.

When I pulled back the curtains and looked down I saw Cass and Shona, and a little further back from them a woman I had never seen before. There was also a saddled horse a few feet behind this woman, cropping grass, but looking up at us at the same time. A second later Lewis came into sight, coming from the kitchen door. I waved and opened the window, and then I called out that we were coming down.

Steven

I had been lying awake for a long time, twisted up with worry about Ffion and Rob having had sex with each other. The fact that it had evidently been extremely erotic sex meant that I had no chance at all of escaping from agonised attempts to convince myself that nothing was likely to happen in the future.

After waving to everyone outside, I turned to go downstairs, thinking that the strange woman must be one of the women from Cass’s group. Passing Rob I nodded a greeting, and immediately wondered, without any reason, if the lack of words could have been seen as unfriendly.

Ffion was waiting for me at the door. She took my hand, and squeezed it, and then let go immediately, and went ahead. I followed her, feeling much better, as a result of Ffion’s gesture.

As we went down the stairs I took in that it was a cloudy, and slightly misty morning, and I saw a group of seven or eight goats on the slope of the nearby hill. From the second window I also caught a glimpse of a rabbit disappearing into some thick undergrowth by the wire fence.

I was looking forward to seeing Cass and the others again. So much had happened – I now felt that we would understood them much better than we had before.

Ffion unbolted the door, and because everyone was standing back about ten feet from the door, and without thinking about it we went outside to them. Tamsin and Rob came out behind us, and I saw Cass looking through the glass of the door. Then I saw her face clear, when she saw John and Kate arriving in the kitchen.

“You’re all OK” she said, with a beaming, twinkling smile . “I knew you were really, I could tell from how you were at the window.”

I realised they had not seen Kate at the window.

I was initially very aware that Cass was looking at us all, nodding with pleasure, as we greeted each other.

I was introduced by Shona to the unknown woman, who seemed to be in her mid-twenties, and who had a slightly punkish shock of dark brown hair, above a pretty, rounded face, with strong, brown eyes that seemed both feminine and boyish at the same time.

“This is Hazel” said Shona.

I had hugged the others, but with Hazel I took one of her hands and clasped it in both of mine. Smiling happily she completely the gesture by adding her left hand firmly to the clasp.

“I’m so glad you’re all OK.” said Cass, who for some reason was holding back from going into the house, in response to Kate trying to usher toward the kitchen for breakfast.

I opened my eyes wide at this, hearing the emphasis she was putting on the words.

“Yes, we are” I said. “But a lot has happened”.

Cass looked at me, as if she was trying to glean what had taken place from my eyes.

“We guessed that something would be happening with the Deep Hotel yesterday, and we set off at four o’clock this morning.”

Cass was looking at me for confirmation as she spoke. I nodded, briefly, opening my eyes wide for a moment, to express the shocking nature of the events.

“Yes, you’re right” I said.

“Well, you’ve made it through,” said Cass, looking at all of us.

“But, now , before we have breakfast” - Cass looked at Kate wamly – “I have to introduce Hazel properly, or let her introduce herself.”

“We only met her half an hour ago, at the crossroads a mile southeast of here. We’ve never met before.”

Hazel smiled at us all, but looked embarrassed at having been put on the spot in this way.

“I’ve – she faltered - “I’ve come… from a place that I think just maybe you know about – maybe. A place called Carswell Hall, in Somerset.”

I heard Tamsin’s sudden intake of breath.

“Is it a beautiful house with a dried up lake,” she said, “and hills to the south, and - ”

“That’s it!” said Hazel, with obvious pleasure. “Its Carswell Hall. There’s a group of us living there – we’ve come together there over the last five or six months.”

“This is Rocket” she said, turning to the horse. “Well, he was called Robin originally, which became Rocket Robin, and then Rocket.”

The horse was looking at us, swishing his tail, and giving the impression he understood he was being introduced.

“That’s funny” said Rob. “I was called Robin originally as well, but with me it just became Rob”

Hazel smiled warmly at Rob, and then she continued.

“There’s obviously a story about how we knew – but the main thing is that I’ve come here on Rocket to invite you all to visit, and to stay, if you want. But - I have this feeling that in a way the invitation has been made already.”

She was looking at Ffion as she said this. I felt that Ffion did not recognise Hazel - but she was nodding hesitantly, obviously recalling her walk past the house three days ago.

“Well, well”, said Cass, looking at Ffion, and then at me, taking in the enigma.

Then, she smiled broadly, and I felt she relaxed, and she looked suddenly as if she was a little tired. I immediately became aware that she and Shona and Lewis had just got up in the small hours, and walked eighteen miles, presumably very fast, in order to help us.

“If its alright” she said, “lets all tell our stories over breakfast.”

The sun was now faintly visible through the misty cloud, and we decided to eat outside. Ffion and I brought two more of the round outdoor tables from other parts of the garden, making a line of three tables.

The large gas bottle that Kestrel had carried to the house was now used to power the pair of burners on the kitchen surface. We made porridge with raisins and dates, and large quantities of coffee and tea.

As we went outside with everything a wood-pigeon was making its mesmeric, mutedly flute-like call, and when it stopped for a moment I became aware that a blackbird was singing from the roof of the house. Rocket, now without his saddle, was grazing near the outhouses.

I sat down facing toward the southward wall of trees, but on an angle halfway toward the southeast corner . Cass was diagonally opposite me, down the line of the three tables, with Hazel sitting on her left. Someone had put the book of diagrams and abstract paintings in the middle of this opposite table.

We ate for a while with very little being said by anyone.

After Cass had finished her porridge, she drank from her mug of coffee, and looked around her.

“We’re in a hurry, I think. So we probably all need to be – concise”. She laughed.

“Yes” said Lewis, looking at Ffion, who had agreed emphatically about being in a hurry. “But I think you’ll find that this time you just need to turn on a sound shadows track, and you’ll go straight back. You have the batteries we gave you. You shouldn’t lose any time.”

“First of all, said Cass, “we need to thank you.” She was looking at Kate and Ffion as she spoke.

“You showed us a way of getting Josh over here in both of his bodies. Yesterday morning Shona pulled him over. I realised that it was just necessary for someone to be very warm and sparklingly positive with him, and yet drily and challengingly unaffected by his urbane humour, in a persistent way.”

Shona was laughing.

“It only took half a minute, once I’d found the exact frequency. A lot easier than going back to the disaster, and travelling to Australia!”

“So finally we’re all over here.” continued Cass.

In a few days we’re all going to travel to Ynys Ystwyth, the place we told you about in mid Wales. We have become friends with the people who live there – there’s around twenty people there - and there are two ways to the Elsewhere, a direct way from a place near Ynys Ystwth, and also a doorway that leads to a Patagonian forest in Corridor Chile, which in turn has a place with a doorway leading out – to the Elsewhere.

Cass then turned to Hazel, holding out a down-turned palm with spread fingers toward her.

“You were in the middle of what you were saying, earlier.”

Hazel then explained how her group had known or surmised we were here.

“Three days ago” she said“I was asleep in my room in the house, in the afternoon, and I dreamed I got up and went to the window of my room, and when I looked out I saw a woman I didn’t recognise walking past the house. I walked out of my room to meet her, but I was dreaming, and as I was going through the house I lost track, and the dream changed to another dream. I woke up later, remembering seeing the woman through the window. When I woke I remembered what I saw as a dream about the woman.”

Hazel paused, looking at Ffion.

“And I think – I think the woman was you” she said.

“Yes, I guess it was me.” said Ffion. “ I – I walked past three days ago, although I didn’t know where I was, or anything.”

“Did you go through the white wall?”

Ffion opened her eyes wide.

“Yes, I did. And so did Steven.”

Hazel slumped down on the table, shaking her head in admiration.

“Incredible. Did you know anything about it?”

“No, nothing.”

Hazel was looking at me, and I was on the edge of telling her that I had received some last minute help, but then she pulled herself up.

“I should finish my story.” she said.

“When I went downstairs” she said, “after the dream that wasn’t a dream, I met Amadou -another one of our group – and he told me that half an hour before he had seen an unknown man walking up the first of the hills, close to the top, and that the wall of white light had been there. He had set off after the man, walking fast, but by the time he reached the slope the white light had gone, and he found no-one on the hills.”

“Then that night several of us had very intense dreams. They were about a group of newcomers who were in trouble, and to be honest nothing really meshed together very well. But two of us, Malcolm and Kimberley they’re called, both had a dream about a house at the end of a lake. Malcolm has actually been to this house, and he recognised it.”

“ I had a dream that I was by a lake that was very like the one here, and I was at the start of a kind of broken pier that went half way across the lake. And I was having a conversation with a woman that I knew in the dream was – the woman I had seen walking past the house.” Hazel looked at Ffion. “The conversation was about the pier, but it was really about something else, a threatening situation – but when I woke up I couldn’t remember anything.”

“Anyway – we decided we had enough to go on, and that someone should come here. I’m the best rider, and me and Rocket are good friends.”

“We went fast to get here – or Rocket went fast, and I did the navigating.”

“You have a good sense of direction” said Lewis. “that’s a difficult journey”

“And you did it in two days” said Cass, obviously very impressed.

“We set off around nine in the morning, two days ago.”

We now described everything that had happened in the previous three days. Struggling to summarize, I told Hazel about our arrival in the Corridor. Then Ffion and I gave an account of what took place when we went to the ring of gorse bushes and silver birch trees.

Everyone made an effort to keep to the most important details, but nonetheless it was two hours later when Kate, Ffion and Rob finished their description of their escape from the Deep Hotel.

Cass, Lewis and Shona had been fascinated by our encounter with Miranda. They said they had never met her, but they had once talked with a woman who had spoken about her.

At the end Hazel commented on the experience Tamsin and I had shared of becoming Sara and Arden at the point of the emergence.

“We’ve been there for months, and we know about what happened, but none of us has re-lived it…”

Tamsin asked if Hazel’s group were connected to the earlier group at Carswell Hall.

“Well” said Hazel, “that’s not easy to answer. Carswell Hall was empty when we found it, and none of us had any direct connection with – Julie and Kelvin and the others. But their group is still around in a way, though we barely ever see them. They return sometimes to Carswell Hall in - the other Corridor world.

Hazel looked at us.

“Do you know about the other Corridor world?”

“We don’t know anything at all about it,” I said – “we’ve just heard that it exists”

“Gavin wouldn’t tell us anything about it” added Rob.

Lewis leaned forward.

“Yes, you need to know – now’s the time. You’ve been strengthened, and therefore you should know before you go back to the Disaster.”

Cass and Shona were both nodding.

Lewis looked at Hazel, saying with a gesture that she should explain if she wanted.

Hazel looked back, smiling.

“I think you should say. We still really don’t know much about it, and I’m being selfish of course – I want to hear your version of the explanation.

Lewis laughed.

“OK, this is it. It… I guess it isn’t an explanation of anything other than anomalies you might find in the future – but it’s a map.”

“There are two Corridor worlds” said Lewis, looking around him at the sky and the trees, and then back at us. “ The vital thing about them is that they are like left brain, and right brain. This one – Lewis pointed around us – is the left-brain corridor world.”

“The Corridor as a whole only stabilised, and became self-contained five years ago. This world came into existence then, and the Corridor as a whole became self-contained, and stopped erratically fluctuating. The two sides complete each other, are necessary for each other.”

“The other Corridor world – the right brain world – is therefore also older than this one. It came into existence around 35 years ago – around 1970. However, initially it was faint and unstable, and in fact it was only constant in a ring around the centre of the planet – the tropical regions. Everywhere else it was only in full existence, broadly speaking, during the summer."

"The other, right brain, Corridor world has apparently become - more extraordinary. It has regions which have their own form of consistent existence, but where ordinary rules of space, time and weather do not apply. It also has at least one additional large land-mass, a new continent – I’ve been there once. This other continent is full of dereliction – bizarrely - and it has inhabited places, like the rest of the Corridor, and it has the strangest desert you could imagine. A desert riddled with space-time anomalies."

"I’ve heard people call the whole Corridor the Escape. I don’t want want to complicate things too much, but I’ve also heard it called the New Escape – to separate it from another world of the same kind that apparently emerged around three thousand years ago. One that it seems we now don’t find it easy to reach. In any case, from what I can understand this ancient equivalent of the two Corridor worlds was an emergence in order to avoid a collapse that was taking place, as opposed to an escape. It was a maintaining by new means."

"So you could call the overall Corridor world the Escape. The Escape exists within the Sideways. And beyond the Sideways is the Elsewhere.”

“One of us should have been writing all this down”” said Kate, laughing.

“The reason its important for us to tell you this now” said Lewis “is that back in the ordinary world there are doorways that lead to the other Corridor world. Its also the reason Gavin wouldn’t tell you, because once you know about this, the fear of arriving in the other world, which has different time-pockets, and, for instance, finding this house completely overgrown – a collapsed ruin – can be one more fear that prevents people from getting back over here.”

Lewis suddenly pointed west.

“Over there, in Warwickshire there’s a whole town - Leamington. It’s a time-pocket, the whole place is a time-pocket. There’s several hundred people living there – they have a school for the children.”

“I met Kelvin while I was there. Your Kelvin” Lewis was looking at Hazel. “Carswell Hall Kelvin. He was passing through – like us. We were on our way back from Wales.”

“Kelvin told me that he and his group were very lucky. He was saying that what they did was easier because the Corridor was crossing its vital threshold. He said the real heroes of the Corridor were the people – all over the planet – who explored it, and collectively helped it come into being, at the beginning, in the first years of the Corridor. He said the first, right-brain Corridor was initially more dangerous, and it was all the more vital to treat it as a world of doors, and to choose a doorway to the Elsewhere. And he also said that it flickered in and out of existence. In autumn at some point it would simply drop out of full existence, and people in it would suddenly be back in the ordinary world. For all these reasons during this first phase people were particularly likely to feel that they were going mad.”

“Kelvin told me about a group who lived in Kentish Town in London in the early 70s. They started out in Kentish Town, and then later they went and lived in the country - in Warwickshire. Jess Ashton, Callum, Pete – those are the names I remember. He said they were incredible people, and they went through shocking ordeals, and they kept going.”

“Yes! I’ve heard about Callum.” said Hazel.

“Yes, he’s kind of a legend. Callum Guire. In the late 60s he was a black history scholar. He was very educated, working on the psychology of slavery, writing a book. He was a genuine, full-on scholar, but what I heard is that there was an edgy quality about him, somewhere between Tricky and Hendrix, while at the same time he would be calmly exposing systems of social domination. And he found it hard to get anywhere in the academic world. They didn't want to know him."

“The story is that he said ‘we’re all slaves in the Disaster.’ ”

There was laughter, but it was an uncomfortable laughter. It was clear we all knew the words had an unnerving edge to them.

“But yeah -” continued Hazel, “I heard he nearly cracked up when he started coming to the first Corridor.”

Lewis nodded, emphatically. "And later he and the woman called Jess became extremely good at helping people with the transition."

“So the main reason I’m telling you this,” he said, “is that if you meet people who know about the Corridor through a connection of some kind to the Kentish Town group, or to a guy called John Davenant who was a friend of theirs in the early 70s, then remember that any doorway they have found is likely to lead to the other Corridor.

“And you can’t just jump across.” said Hazel. “We know about this. There are very few doorways, and it seems the walls between the two worlds are very solid. In the other Corridor world Carswell Hall is forest, with a house that started becoming derelict in 1970, and has been crumbling away for around a hundred and forty years.”

“Malcolm and Amadou went there, and they thought there might be a way of getting across, but they couldn’t find a way of doing it. They spent a couple of days trying.”

“But what they did find was a large glade that has been cleared half a mile east of the house, with a group of seven yurts – you know, the Mongolian tent-houses. But they were full of beautiful things, with stoves in the middle, and furniture and everything. A whole group of homes, but kind of closed down. It seemed like no-one had been there for months.”

“And - I met Kelvin once as well. He was just wandering around the estate, on our side - I mean in this Corridor world. And he told me that when his group, or some of them, come back to Carswell Hall, from the Elsewhere, or from somewhere in the Sideways, they live partly in those yurts, and partly in a house somewhere else further south.”

Shona was humming a tune, a tune that I half-recognised in some way. The tune had a nursery rhyme quality about it, and she was singing it very slowly, in a way that was reminiscent of a music box that has wound down. She had a thoughtful, almost perturbed expression as she did this. She looked as if she was trying to work out a problem – and as if the tune was the problem. She was leaning forward, looking towards Cass, and I felt that her posture, and her abstracted look had together functioned to stop the conversation.

Towards the end I recognised the tune. It was a tune for the nursery rhyme ‘Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross.’

When it came to the final line Cass completed it, saying it without a tune:

“She shall have music wherever she goes.”

Shona had stopped singing when Cass took over – it was as if the music box had wound down.

She now looked apologetically at Hazel.

“I’m sorry” she said. “The tune came into my head, without the words, and then I realised what it was”.

I hummed the last phrase of the tune.

“Nursery rhymes – they’re very, very strange.”

Cass leaned forward toward me, obviously thinking about what to say.

“Yes, absolutely. But lets go beyond strange. I could give my own example, but I’ll ask you – when you were a child was there a children’s rhyme or poem that really spoke to you – that swept you away, set you dreaming. Something very positive, very beautiful. Its normally stories that do this, but a rhyme can do it as well.”

I thought for a moment, and I was about to say no, and then to my astonishment I remembered something.

I laughed. I couldn’t believe I was about to tell a group of people about this.

“Well – don’t laugh, wait until you hear it”. I said, awkwardly. “It’s the end of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Pigling Bland.” I gave an embarrassed smile, but then continued.

“The story is about the struggle to escape to the ‘Westmoreland Fells’, and there is at least one beautiful painting of the ‘Westmoreland Fells’, high, in the distance, with sunlight on top of them.”

I noticed that Kate had clasped her hands, happily – I guessed she knew the story.

“It’s a life and death struggle because Pigling Bland is basically being sent to the butcher’s. He meets a female pig called the Berkshire Pig, and together they escape. They have to cross a bridge over a river, and then they will be safe – they’ll have made it to the Westmoreland Fells. On the second to last page, without you knowing it’s a poem , it says “They came to the river, they reached the bridge, they crossed it hand in hand”. And on the last page it says

And over the hills and far away

She danced with Pigling Bland

Ffion was laughing, and nudged me, to express her amusement.

“Perfect!” said Cass. “You left strange behind on the other bank of the river.”

“Interesting that it’s a story anyway” she added.

A conversation started about stories and nursery rhymes.

Initially I felt pleased that I had been able to overcome my embarrassment in order to say the Pigling Bland rhyme. A moment later I had a moment of fear when I wondered whether Ffion might come to see me as ‘bland’ – lacking in wildness – in comparison to Rob. But then suddenly I laughed at my own neurosis, aware of how much wildness we had all needed to arrive where we were, and the fear vanished, leaving me with a surge of elation at having overcome the jealous distress.

I focused on what was happening, on the people around me, at a level that involved the conversation, but that somehow went deeper and wider.

I became aware of the fact that there were six astonishing women at the table, and of the way in which each of them was utterly different from the others. I was also aware that not one them was attempting to’ take the light’, and no-one seemed to be perturbed by the intelligence, vivacity and beauty of the others.

And then I started wondering – why had the Deep Hotel beings apparently concentrated their entrapment efforts on the men in the group – on myself, and on John, and Rob. Why? It seemed that Ffion had been in danger of conceiving a child with Rob, but this did not seem to be an attempt to keep her in the Deep Hotel.

I then started worrying again about Ffion and Rob beginning a full relationship. My only hope was that they were not in love with each other. With a huge effort I started thinking about what being in love is – instead of trying to convince myself that Ffion and Rob were not potentially connected in this way – and I brought to mind Sara and Arden, which of course took me to the thought of Tamsin.

I was going to look at Tamsin, and then instead I looked at Kate. And then I glanced at Ffion.

And suddenly I understood something.

Men intensely love the brightness of women. But they don’t know what to do about this love. So they end up either feeling pain from being cut off from women who they love, or having sex. Only when they are in love is their love unaffected by distress or feelings of ‘control’ or of sexual ‘taking’. Men badly need their own form of this brightness to wake – they need it because it is freedom from self-importance and ‘gravity’ of all kinds, and because an aspect of it is lucidity, an ability to see to the heart of things. With brightness men acquire the ability to abandon their self-image and preconceptions – which means they finally have the fluidity to make decisions.

It was clear that women are normally locked in a half-awake state, whereas men are barely awake at all. For a moment I saw very clearly that men have a fundamental initial tendency to be adjuncts or guardian-assistants in the creative process or adventure that is the life of a group of human beings. And this was why the Deep Hotel had been interested only in the men – males make better servants than women. Unless they have woken their brightness - in which case they would have an increased capacity for freedom, for independence.

And I suddenly understood that in the ordinary world the guardians had been corrupted, re-envisaging themselves as lords and masters, and had transmitted their new distorted, control-fixated state to women as well. The guardians had become prison guards, trapping women in a process that left women blocked by themselves as well, and which damaged men even more than women.

I was jolted back from these insights by something Lewis was saying.

“Well there’s just one gothic, adult nursery rhyme” he said, looking around him, giving a wry smile. He seemed to be wondering if anyone would guess what he had in mind.

“This is it” he said.

I met a man upon the stair

I met a man who was not there

He was not there again today

Oh how I wish he’d go away

The rhyme had a chilling effect. Everyone seemed to have felt the force of it, as if we had all just had an unfocused glimpse of something very unpleasant.

“They’re warnings aren’t they? Said Rob. “Warnings, messages…”

“Yes, different kinds of messages” said Cass. She then quoted the one that had started the conversation.

Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross

See a fine lady on a white horse

Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes

She shall have music wherever she goes.

“This gives me a chance to say something.” she said.

“Your experiences in the Deep Hotel will I’m certain have given you the basis for a completely different understanding of sexuality, an account of sexuality that has to do with the human capacity for becomings having been blocked in some way, rather than it simply being about pleasure and reproduction. In particular this is all about the blocked capacity on the part of both men and women, to become women in the context of dreamings of all kinds. However, the main thing I want to say is that your new account of sexuality will be pretty much right, I’m sure, but it is likely to be a draining distraction if you stare in that direction too long. The two areas are not really separate but it is best to look in the direction of love, rather than in the direction of sexuality.”

Rob looked searchingly at Cass.

“I need to know” he said. “If I had said ‘yes’ in the Deep Hotel yesterday, would I have been trapped there – I mean would I have been really trapped there? Couldn’t I have found a way out – like the one we were shown – once I had realised what had happened?”

It was Shona who responded.

“Your agreeing in that way to stay with them and serve them would have been an act, a moment of transformation, where the act would remain permanently in effect. Or put it another way – it would have set into motion a charged libidinal current, and an ongoing world of compelling experiences. That current and those experiences would have meant you would have had no chance of waking up and smelling the coffee. You would have been there – permanently.”

“But why didn’t you tell us?”

“In a way we did” Shona, responded. “But if we had told you in a graphic, explicit way – you would have been too afraid to do anything other than return to the ordinary world. And it would only have been illusory that this was giving you a choice. The fear of the unknown that would have taken you back is not really you, so you would never have made a choice. Getting past the Deep Hotel gave you a chance to go up over an energy threshold so you could leave this fear behind.”

Cass looked at us, taking in the perturbing effects of Shona’s statements. Then she spoke.

“And giving a warning involving the danger of manipulation through sexual ecstasy can go very wrong. Under bad circumstances people can choose to remember – for all practical purposes - only the idea of sexual ecstasy, and can abandon themselves in the wrong direction, imagining they will be strong enough to come back whenever they want. Better for people to get past the danger during good circumstances.

Cass had seen that Tamsin was wanting to say something. She acknowledged her, and then continued.

“The last thing is that we came here today to try to get you out of trouble, if necessary, and if possible. Me and Shona would have gone into the Deep Hotel.”

After a short silence, Tamsin spoke for us all by saying thank you. After this had been echoed emphatically by everyone, she waited another moment, and then asked her question.

“And was the danger the same with the familiast?”

“The same, or maybe worse – so far as we can say. I think you and Steven were in danger of losing your freedom in an even more horrible way than in the Deep Hotel – because of the trap being very constricted and very invasive. The familiasts are rogue, powerful entities that seem to be like outrider cousins of the Deep Hotel beings. Fortunately there seem to be very few of them. Beware of lone, hauntingly charismatic strangers who you meet here when you are on your own.

“However, I think by now they might not dare try it, because all along in fact you are at a much higher level of energy than they are, and given you could focus your energy, you could wrench them away from their locked down existence, and cause them to die of fear, or to be metamorphosed into something much better - though they would not see it that way beforehand.”

I now felt slightly dazed by trying to take in the implications of everything that had been said.

But I knew what John was thinking when he pulled the book of diagrams and abstract paintings from the centre of the table, looking at Cass, and then at Lewis.

“Kate’s right” he said “We need to make new maps”.

Ffion

A moment later, Hazel stood up. Rocket, who had been lying down, legs tucked under him, ten feet or so from the table in the direction of the gate, got up as well.

“We have to go” said Hazel, smiling at Rocket’s immediate response.

“You’re all about to leave” said Hazel, looking at my group. And then, looking at Cass, Shona and Lewis, she said – “and I guess you’ll want to get back and start preparing for your journey to Ynys Ystwyth.”

Cass said there was no need to hurry, on their part, but she conveyed at the same time an approval of Hazel’s chosen moment for leaving.

“Yes, I think now’s the time.” said Hazel.

I suddenly felt compelled to get up and go over to Rocket. I had gone up to him earlier, to say ‘hello’ but there had been too much going on for me to give him my attention for more than a moment.

As I went round the side of the table Rocket was ambling towards me. I felt suddenly that something was happening. I was acutely aware of the birdsong coming from every direction around the house, and of the sound of the light wind ruffling through the leaves. I felt as if turning my attention to this remarkable horse had turned off a current of background stress, and left me able to perceive with undisturbed clarity.

I put my hand on the side of his head, but did not stroke him, it seemed wrong. Instead I pressed my hand against him briefly with a gentle pressure. I felt him lean his head toward my hand.

And then I knew what I had known before – when I was above the sky planet.

Ket and Tarul were both horses.

They were horses who had crossed a threshold of awareness, and who had reached both full lucidity, and an ability to take any form they wished. They were from the Earth, like me, but now they primarily lived in the dimensions of the Elsewhere. They had told me all this when we were in the sky of the planet with the white-violet sun, but I had been left without any access to the memory, until now.

I felt a deep fellow-feeling with the horse in front of me. I was suddenly aware, looking into Rocket’s enigmatic quizzical eyes, that he and I were on exactly the same level, and not in any trivial sense, such as having needs in common, as with the need to find food. I saw in that moment that this kind of ‘we’re all the same’ discourse was recurrently a mask for a condescending attitude toward animals, involving a view all along that humans are fundamentally superior.

Rocket was in the same position as me, but arriving at the problem of ‘waking up’ from the direction of being a horse, as opposed to a human being. And I felt that if reason was less developed in him, as yet, his lucidity was perhaps at a higher level than mine. I was sure he could directly perceive my love of horses, and I suspected also he sensed the presence of Ket and Tarul in my memory worlds.

He nickered, as if to agree with me, and our eyes met. I felt a flicker of intense joy, as if something had passed between us that I could not bring into focus, and then he threw back his head and neighed, finishing the neigh by bringing his left front hoof down hard on the ground.

Kate let out a burst of excited, astonished laughter. She had recognised her own gesture, that had been so vital for us. How had that happened? How had it come into her head to stamp her foot in this way?

I wanted to tell everyone what I had understood about Ket and Tarul, but Hazel was starting to say good-bye to everyone. As she spoke she very expertly put the saddle onto Rocket. After tightening the girth and putting on a very light halter - it had no bit and was I guessed just for balance and communication – she stood by the horse and gave a succinct description of how to get to Carswell Hall. John wrote the directions down in a notebook he had found in the house.

Then Hazel put her foot in a stirrup, and jumped onto Rocket.

“You’ve already been invited – twice! But yes, come over to Carswell Hall, anytime, and stay as long as you want.”

“Good luck, hope to see you soon!”

We all called out ‘yes’ and wished her well with the journey.

And then they were gone, setting off at a trot round the side of the house.

“Goodbye Rocket!” I called out.

We all followed, and watched Hazel and Rocket disappear from sight.

“It’s time for us to go as well” said Cass.

I felt a stab of sadness. It was obvious that we might not meet again. Cass smiled at me, and I felt she was feeling the same.

As she and Shona and Lewis were filling their water bottles, Cass spoke about Josh.

“He’s immensely grateful, and he would have come here to thank you himself, but we felt the house was too much of a risk – we thought he might get pulled back into the ordinary world.”

“This house is very direct in its effect,” said Lewis. “So direct it’s almost dangerous.”

Lewis looked at me.

“As you said, from what I heard – when you were in your other body - the house wakes intent. But the other side of that is that it’s easier than normal here to go through doorways.”

“Does that mean we shouldn’t live in it?” I asked, slightly perturbed both by the statement, and by the fact that ‘my’ words had been passed on, and remembered.

“No, it means you’re very lucky” responded Lewis, smiling. “But like with all the other things that are valuable but dangerous, you just have to be careful.”

We were standing in sunshine at the entrance to the path leading east. The sun had now burned off almost all of the misty clouds – there were just a few wisps of cloud, drifting and changing on a slight breeze.

“There’s a few things we should say about what it will be like being back in the ordinary world. The first thing is that, in ways you won’t anticipate, the people you know there will unthinkingly act in ways that will make it very hard for you to get back here.”

“Another thing is – take sound shadows CDs from here, and from the Bromley house, and if you lose access to that house, just set up a new sound shadows room in your own house there. If your intent is to get here, you should succeed in forging a new link to this house, or to the hill… “To the hill”, he repeated, emphaising the words slightly to show the difference was important.

“Who knows how the link happened in the first place, but I think you’ll find you can make it again without any problem. But remember the pillbox Gavin pointed out to you. That one, and the ones in that whole area, all come to this Corridor world – but nonetheless, be careful. Bear in mind you might end up in the other Corridor if you go too far from there…”

“And also, said Shona, “we’ve left the key for our sound shadows house in a green box on the kitchen mantelpiece. That only helps in this direction of course. You could break in to the house in the Disaster, but we’d prefer it if you didn’t. It could draw attention.”

“And if you’re in our house don’t turn on any screens.”said Lewis. “Last night during the storm the Deep Hotel took over our screens. Nothing happened – we turned them off almost immediately when we realised what was going on. We’ll have got rid of the ones that are there now, but you never know. There was probably always a risk of this happening, because of screens being such a thing in the Deep Hotel, but we had a strong attachment to them, because they had showed us Ynys Ystwyth.”

“The last thing” said Cass “about being back in the ordinary world - although this also applies here - is that you having hopefully got past the Deep Hotel is in fact just a beginning.”

It was a moment before her words sunk in.

“What primarily haunts the ordinary world is something that emplaces a form of its mind into all of us. An endemic mind that gets forced into all of us as when we’re very young children. Call it the control mind.”

“It’s control, and self-importance, and jealousy, and crude, power libido, and subtle fabrics of dead, domination-stories about the nature of the world. And it’s all about who you are – the love and desire and intelligence you are – being kept almost entirely asleep.”

“But remember to keep everything in perspective” said Lewis. “Remember to keep looking toward the positive horizon. Otherwise you won’t have the energy to see what’s happening, and to break free.”

“Kelvin from Carswell Hall told me that two years before the emergence he and Julie did a trip to southern Siberia, and they stumbled on an abandoned military base – or maybe a soviet space programme base - in the middle of a forest, miles from anywhere. They stayed there a couple of weeks, and it was there that Julie had the dream about the way in which a group of friends living at Carswell Hall could live, in order to wake themselves.”

“He also said that they only really made it because Julie was already recurrently visiting the Elsewhere, even though she didn’t always remember at the time”.

Kate gave an involuntary shudder.

“Another thing he said was that Julie is an amazing dancer” said Cass. “And that might be one of the most important things we tell you. Don’t be too grave and serious!”

“And yet –“ Cass started to speak again, and then paused. Shona was smiling, though there was a pensive quality about her smile. After a couple of seconds Cass continued.

“Although the horizon we’ve just been talking about is the fundamental thing to keep in mind, at the same time remember, this is a life–and-death situation. You can be trapped permanently, you can die. One of the members of that Kentish Town group never made it – he killed himself, or rather, he was suicided by predatory forces that feed on the energy that comes from such events. The control-mind predatory forces took advantage of his weakness, and pushed his own version of the control mind into propelling him towards his death. Unless you remember this is a life-and-death situation, you may not have everything fully in focus – you are likely to have not fully woken up as the love and lucidity you are, all along. Wake up in the right direction, and wake up completely.”

She smiled broadly at all of us.

“Good luck!” she said, and then she turned and went into the tunnel of the footpath.

“See you next time” said Lewis.

Shona gave a delighted smile.

“Keep dancing” she said, and at the end she looked at me with a twinkle in her eye. Then she turned and followed the other two.

They disappeared from sight almost immediately, round a corner of the narrow path. For a moment we could hear them, and then then there was only the leaves rustling in the slight breeze, and the sounds of birds and insects.

“Shit” said Rob.

A few moments after they had gone – we were standing in the same place, talking - a pinkish bird flew above us, and landed in a tree on our right. I saw that it had a crest above its head. It perched for only a moment, and then flew off into the trees.

“A hoopoe, I think” said John.

“Yes, said Steven. “The only other time I saw one I was in Mongolia, in Ulan Bator.”

“Maybe it came across from that military base in Siberia” said Tamsin.

We took all the breakfast things into the house, and washed up. Then we made sure the doors and windows of the house were all closed. Steven detached the gas bottle from the burners.

Everyone else had gone through into the living room. Steven and I stood for a moment in the kitchen. Then I went to the living room, and Steven followed me.

John was wearing a dark green coat-jacket he had found in one of the rooms. He was going through the sound shadows CDs. He looked up as we arrived, and then he took two of the CDs, and put them into a side pocket which he then zipped up.

“I’ve got the note-book as well,” he said, indicating the other pocket.

Rob came back from looking out of the window on the left. It seemed he had been looking toward the trees whose tops you could see from the attic room. I felt how everyone was nervous.

“Its working fine, the CD's in there” said John.

“Lets just go for it.” said Steven. “Decide where we’re going to sit, and then go for it. I’ll start the player, if you want – we just need to make sure it's not on repeat.”

I wanted to smile, but I restrained myself. I knew he had said this because he was afraid he would make this mistake. He was showing his usual awkwardness with equipment of this kind.

We were in two rows of three. I was in the middle at the back with Kate on my left. In front of Kate was John, and then Rob and Tamsin. At the last moment I decided I would sit on the right, so that Steven sat in the middle. I felt that Rob was being protected by the group, because of what had happened, and I felt Steven should be treated in the same way, given what had happened with the familiast. Steven pressed play and came and sat down alongside me, as the track started.

I was feeling afraid that I would be left behind, or that I would be diverted into the Deep Hotel. But of course I knew by now that I had to turn off anxious thinking, and just perceive.

I looked at the grey rectangle of the screen, and I concentrated on the mesmeric, serenely unsettling sounds of the track. I felt suddenly that it was like walking inside an ancient ruin in the early morning, passing a series of passageways that led toward the outside - passageways that culminated a few feet away in vines, and in an expanse of sky seen from a hill.

Lewis had told us what would happen, but I was still struck by how rapidly everything took place.

Suddenly I was the sky above the abandoned house in Bromley. At the beginning my point of view was a hundred feet above the roof, but a moment later I was thousands of feet of swirling air, a sensual, streaming world of calmly lucid delight. I felt I was suspended, with an arched back, an enormous distance from my feet to my head, with my arms spread out wide behind me , and my head thrown back – but though I was aware of my physical form, at a deeper level what I experienced was that I was an immense and dreamy vortex of air, a twirling bliss of summer sky. Simultaneously I was aware that the others were arriving in the room in the house beneath me.

Then I was aware that we were all in the room – I felt that only three or four seconds had passed – and this awareness seemed to pull me back from the experience of being the sky, which, as my attention fixed itself on the room, I knew had just expanded to a point of intensity where I could no longer remember what had happened. I opened my eyes.

All six of us were sitting in the room in the abandoned Bromley house. We were sitting in the same positions, but facing in the opposite direction from the sound shadows wall. The door of the room was wide open, and there was banging coming from somewhere on our right.

I felt an immense relief that we were all there, and I grabbed Steven’s hand.

“We did it.” said John, talking in a whisper.

“But there are workmen here” he added.

Kate and John hugged, and then Kate went out furtively from the room.

While this was happening John took the CD from the player, and another one as well, and put these in one of his pockets. Rob and Tamsin had both gone to the door. Ffion and I were at the wall trying to work out if the sounds were coming from the next room.

“There’s scaffolding. They’re on the roof I think, lets just go” said Kate.

“And remember, we’re friends of the owners who’ve been given a key to keep an eye on the place.” said Rob.

Steven pulled his keys out of the pocket, and showed us the key on his key ring.

“I cant believe I still have these.”

I knew what he meant, but it wasn’t the time for talking about it.

“Lets go” I said.

We all went into the hallway. We could hear men talking and laughing on the roof, and I had a glimpse of scaffolding, and of a man’s legs on a ladder, through the window of the bedroom on the right. The front door was wide open, and I was worried that there would be someone out there, on the path to the door.

There was no-one. We went through the living room, past the photo of the Uffington white horse, and then we were in the kitchen. The door was locked, but Steven unlocked it, and we walked across the garden, trying to look nonchalant, and not looking back.

“Well it’s a good thing they’ve got us to look after the place” said Rob, acting a caretaker to Steven. “Otherwise it would all get taken over by rats and squirrels”

“And pigeons”

“Yes, pigeons, disease-carrying, sky-rat vermin…”

Rob’s voice had become louder to express the fake hostility, and I wondered if he would cause us to be noticed.

We all climbed over the fence into Steven’s garden. Looking back it turned out that no-one was on this side of the house roof. After a few moments, during which we saw no sign of anyone looking for us, it began to seem likely that we had passed undetected through both the house and the garden.

It was a day of high, thin cloud – diffuse mid-afternoon sunlight was breaking through. The word ‘opalescent’ came into my mind.

We sat down on the grass near to the main wall of the house.

Steven was shaking his head.

“We’re here, and – where we just were – Cass and Lewis and Shona are walking back to derelict Ipswich.”

“And Hazel and Rocket are in the forest beyond the lake.” I said.

“I can see it”, said Kate “all of the trees and birds and animals, and paths in the forest - all the way to Somerset.”

“I wonder what there is between the house and Somerset” said Steven. “ Ruined buildings, unchanged, time-pocket houses – or places like the ring of gorse and birch trees….”

There was a silence. Then I got up, and everyone followed. We went into the house, and then into the living room.

Tamsin went straight to the wind chimes, and ran her fingers across them, releasing a melodious jangle of notes.

“I think sound is going to be –“ Tamsin broke off in mid-sentence, and I saw she was looking toward the door of the room.

A very tall, thin man was standing there, dressed in a faded grey suit, and an equally faded, grey t-shirt. His head was somehow a fraction too thin for him to be human. He didn’t look disfigured. He just looked like an alien being of some kind, who resembled a bird of prey, rather than a human.

He did something which was similar to a smile. It had some of the warmth of a smile, but I felt it was also an expression of thoughtful wonder. For a moment I was looking at a woman, and then I was back to seeing him as a man.

“Thank you” he said, nodding at us all, though I felt it was Steven who he focused on most.

“Be seeing you”

Then he turned very fluidly on his heel, and stalked out of the room.

We went after him, into the hallway. Following an intuition we looked out through the front door. For a moment we saw no-one, and then I saw the man, already two hundred yards away, on the same side of the road as the house.

We all saw him, but then a moment later he turned to the right onto a side road, and disappeared from sight.

“He turned south’ said Steven.

“Of course” said Kate, “where else would he turn?”

We went back into the living room. This time we all sat down immediately, facing each other. I was feeling a bit annoyed by the rapport that had just been demonstrated between Steven and Kate.

“That was him” said Steven. “The man who I met at the house in Somerset – Carswell Hall.”

“I guessed” said Rob. “I think we all guessed”.

There was another silence. I felt surprised by how I felt. I had been expecting to feel a combination of relief, and sadness, as a result of finally returning to the ordinary world. Instead I felt the same as I had before. There was the same feeling of being surrounded by brightness, by the anomalous, the same unnerving and yet exhilarating feeling of being challenged from the unknown.

“Its not really – possible to come back, is it?” said Tamsin.

I nodded to Tamsin. She had put my thoughts into words.

The six of us in the room were there with our shockingly complex relationships – relationships that could only work together if our lives were lived at maximum positivity, without anguish or neurosis. But more than this I was wondering to what extent this world was a place of doorways in multiple directions, just like the one we had left. It was maybe just that in some way the doorways here were more obstructed – perhaps random drifts or deliberate impositions had both hidden them and made them harder to use. Even the thought of the distress involved in explaining away our absence to our families and friends could not – for now - bring back the ordinary world’s humdrum, quotidian way of being, it could not dispel the perception of what was all around us. We had returned to the ordinary world, but this world now made me feel that it was substantially the same as the Corridor. For this reason, also, we needed to sort ourselves out – there was no option of risking being caught unfocused, or in a state of cosy denial, if we were surrounded by potentially dangerous unknown beings, beings who were aware of us.

I wanted to phone my parents. I stood up, for some reason – even though I knew that the next task was working out an agreed explanation of our absence.

“I guess we’ll have to set up a room for sound shadows” said John, getting up as well.

Everyone agreed, but there was nothing to say – we could not even know for certain that we had lost access to the abandoned house. John went to the window humming the tune he had sung the evening we arrived at Cass’s place, when we were in the field with the horses. The sky beyond the window was an expanse of hazy sunlight.

Thursday 18 August 2016

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