26.

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) 

(Part One of The Corridor is section 16 of Explorations)

The Corridor                                                      

                                                                      Justin Barton                                       

Part Two

                                                                                                      

Steven

     It was now two hours later. We had told the woman – Cass - what had happened to us. After this she had gone to see John, who was fast asleep, saying afterwards that he would be fine, and there was nothing to worry about. She had skilfully deflected all of our questions, saying at one point that she would explain when she knew what had happened to us, so she would know what she could use to help with the explanation.  She had spent a lot of time asking Kate about her experiences the night before.

     We were sitting at the far end of the living room, beyond the sound shadows wall. It was well past midday, and the sunshine was coming into the room on a marked angle from the right. The scrapbook was on a low table, open at the pages Ffion and I had been looking at earlier.

   Eventually there was a pause.

   “So, where are we, what is this?” asked Rob.

   The woman smiled, and nodded, opening her eyes wide for a moment.

     “Well – this is the Corridor” she said, giving the word a subtle emphasis. “And yes - it’s an emergent parallel world. What you’ve picked up and guessed along the way – was the truth about it” As she said this she looked at Kate and me, and then at Ffion – she gave Ffion a look that seemed to communicate respect and admiration.

    "It's all there" said Cass, pointing to the scrapbook. She paused.

     I was looking at the words 'the Corridor' and at the words to the left - 'the Disaster,' and 'the Deep Hotel'. And then I looked over at the word 'Travellers.' I felt a shivering sensation in my upper spine.

     “I mean I should say immediately," continued Cass, "that in a sense I don’t know that much more about it than you do.”

     She looked out of the window, toward the sky, and then continued.

 “This is an emergent parallel world, alongside the ordinary world. And it is a parallel world which has doorways leading in turn to other worlds. These other worlds are either in the Elsewhere, where you went” she said looking at Kate, “or they are here alongside this world. Because this world has these doorways, we call it the Corridor.”

     Cass smiled, and then added “And we call the ordinary world the Disaster.”

     There was a silence, a moment of birdsong in the quietness of the house.

     “Why?” asked Ffion.      

     “Because this world is less haunted, less overrun, by negative forces. Although it does also have extremely dangerous aspects.”

     Rob leaned forward. He was about to say something, but then stopped, as if he was weighing up the second part of what Cass had said.

     “What happened to John?” I asked.

     “Exactly” said Cass. “I’ll tell you in a moment – well so far as we can say, right now.  But first, I’ll tell you the basic facts about the Corridor, so you can ground yourselves, as it were.  In a way I’ve only told you about it in the abstract so far.”

     “This world is forested and overgrown almost everywhere – all of the cities are also overgrown. However everywhere there are pockets where things are relatively unchanged – like this house. However, things you find in these places, like newspapers, only go up to the 5th of June, 2005. In fact its all much more complex than this, because the Corridor in another form of itself existed for around 35 years before, but this world came into existence five years ago, and that was - the culmination of the entire emergence. No-one really knows the entirety, in depth, of what happened, but we do know a lot of specific things.  Me and my friends stumbled into this world around two years ago, the way you have now, and I’ve met people who in turn said they’d spoken to people who said they’d fallen asleep in the ordinary world on the 5th of June, 2005 and woken up in the Corridor. We know that this happened to hundreds of people at that time – the emergence - scattered across different time-pocket places, although it seems that for almost all of them it was a total shock. They had been swept up into something without any deliberate waking awareness of what was happening.”

      “A woman who I met not long after I got here for the first time – she had been here a year – she told me that she was sure different indigenous tribes from around the world had been at the forefront in the dreaming-into-existence of the emergent world. However, she said that the emergence was primarily the dream, or the creation, of the planet, with human beings – as parts of the planet – as only a very small element in the process...”

    “The only way you can think it is that five years ago a parallel twin of the ordinary world was created, and then immediately – in an instant - it was dreamed forward a hundred years. But it was dreamed forward a hundred years without human beings as part of this process. But at the same time there were anomalies – time-pockets  - within the emergence, places that stayed unchanged, as if a kind of dome-shaped membrane was placed around them.”

     “The basic facts are these – the Corridor exists, with its anomalous, unchanged places, with five years having passed for these places. And human beings with enough openness and courage can get over here.”

     After a moment Cass continued.

     “But – it can be a complex process getting over here. What happened with Josh earlier is to do with that. I don’t mind saying that I find you all a bit unnerving – I’m not going to explain right this second about it all, but you have all blasted straight through without any intermediate phase”.

     “But why did you come here today, to this house?” asked Ffion.

     Cass looked at Ffion, smiling and nodding. I sensed that Ffion was maintaining the stance that there were two possible versions of what was happening. I liked the fact she was doing this, despite it seeming unlikely that Josh’s disappearance was a conjuring trick, but I wondered if Cass would feel offended.

     “Yesterday I was in Melford, and I saw smoke coming from the house – from the chimney, I guess. When I first arrived in the Corridor two years ago, there were people living here, part of the time at least. I met them a few times, but I never had chance to get to know them."

     “Did one of the women have red hair?” I asked.

     “Yes, one of them had long red hair, she was called Abi, I think.”

     The description fitted with my memory of the women in the garden, although the name was not something I could verify. I could see Ffion assessing this slight corroboration, and I knew that it would not count for much in the face of methodical scepticism. 

     “The last time I came here, back in March, there was no-one here. And it looked as if everyone had moved on.”

     “And so you decided to come back here today?” asked Rob.

     There was a slight pause, and the woman’s eyes narrowed and ‘clouded’ a little, as if she was remembering something disturbing, or enigmatic.

     “Yes, I decided to come back here today, with Josh.”

     “Listen, I have a suggestion” she added, after another pause. “Everything is good here, this house is a brilliant place, and you’re all safe and sound – I mean that.  But my suggestion is - if your friend is well enough, come over and visit me and my friends tomorrow. We live in a  converted factory on the outskirts of what used to be Ipswich. I know you’re all needing to get back, but I think there should be a gap before your friend tries again, and ideally a gap filled with some new experiences, to help him forget about what happened. Come over for one day, stay the night, and then you can go back to the ordinary world the day after.”

     She was looking at Ffion as she said this. It was true that a view of a derelict Ipswich would verify her account of things.

     “It sounds like a good plan” I said. I was looking around at everyone, trying to gauge their response to the offer.  “Its a good invitation, thank you”.

    “But first, said Kate, “can you tell us what happened to John? I dont think we should decide anything until we know more about whats going on. I mean maybe we should all come with you now – we could make a stretcher for John or something...”

The woman smiled.

     “This is all you need to know. There are two main kinds of doorways in the Corridor. There are doorways that lead to the worlds of the Elsewhere. And there are doorways that lead to somewhere we call the Deep Hotel. All you need to know is – go in the direction of the Elsewhere, don't go in the direction of the Deep Hotel. You can always feel the difference, there is always light, or a quality of outsideness in the Elsewhere, and in the Deep Hotel you are always inside a building or underground, and there are never any windows. The beings in the Deep Hotel are just beings like we are, struggling in a very dangerous cosmos – I’m not being moralistic about them, but don’t go there, you might never come back - go towards the Elsewhere.”

   "Xenography..." said Ffion, sounding unconvinced. I felt she was trying to get Cass to say more.

    "I hadnt come across the word before," responded Cass, "but yes - that's a way of describing what I'm telling you."

     

     “Who are these - beings,  in the Deep Hotel?” asked Tamsin. As she asked this I remembered the moment when there had been a woman alongside me, welcoming me, in the subterranean world, and how I had felt and heard her dress rustling against my leg.

     “Well,” said Cass, “ its better to ask in general about the other beings that can be encountered in the Corridor.” She looked smilingly at Kate as she said this. “There are many beings here who are energy entities, with a high level of awareness and intelligence, but who do not have bodies that have organs, the way we do.” They have bodies as a substrate to their awareness and intelligence, and they can die just like us, but they do not have a body which is a collection of organs. Kate, it seems met two beings of this kind last night, one of whom took her to the Elsewhere.”

     “The beings in the Deep Hotel are very different – they have far less courage and openness to the outside, but in one sense they are beings of the same kind, in the sense that they also are energy entities without a body-with-organs.”

    “And what do they want from us?” I asked.

    “They want our energy, or rather, they want to gain something by encountering our energy – specifically they are charged up by our emotions, and heightened by learning the forms of being we have acquired. But I should say that these Deep Hotel beings are also around in the ordinary world - in fact it seems they have quite a powerful, subtle influence there. The worlds of the Deep Hotel open onto the ordinary world, in the same way as they open onto the Corridor.”

        “This time they tried to snare John, and the plan I think was to catch you as well,”said Cass, looking at Kate. “Their world is an extraordinary world, and it has an allure, nobody goes there without them being complicit in going there – unless they are trying to save someone - they go there because they are attracted. And in the same way, nobody gets permanently trapped there unless they are complicit in being trapped.”

     “Freaky!” said Rob, with an inadvertent shudder in his voice as he said it. “Beware the velvet underground!”

     “This can't be true,” he added shaking his head.

    Cass smiled. “You’re all going to be wondering about all of what I’ve told you, and you’re all going to be sceptical, and that’s good. If you weren’t sceptical about this – you’d be crazy.”

      She laughed.  

    “I’m expected back at my house this evening, and I’m going to head back quite soon. Its a twenty mile walk, so I can’t stay much longer. But please come to visit us tomorrow!”

     “How many of you are there? said Kate. “And how do you manage to live here?”

“There’s eight of us, and I dont know – we don’t entirely live here. Its as if there are curves of departure and return, and we’re based mostly here, but partly back in the ordinary world.”

    “And for now it’s relatively easy for us to be here, because there is a whole area of Felixstowe container port that is one of the unchanged places. The port is just fifteen miles down the river from Ipswich, and the time-pocket area has a large number of containers that are full of food - tinned food, rice, wheat, oats, lots of things that are still fine to eat. It feels like it cannot be an accident – this entire part of the Corridor has been given an energy supply to last it until all the food becomes unusable. So for a while yet we have provisions to keep us going, and clearly we have lots of other resources.”

     “And what has happened to your friend”, asked Kate “to – Josh?”

     “You have no idea how lucky you’ve all been” was Cass’s indirect response.  It left me unnerved about what she was going to say. She caught my eye, and continued –

   “Its not what you’re thinking. You’re lucky - because there are two ways of getting over here, and you have come over here in the uncomplicated way.”

     “The other way of coming here involves being doubled. This is not in fact an abnormal state for human beings – for instance” she looked at Ffion, “it was your double, who said “the house is a window.”  Or rather, I should say, it was you who said it, but you in the form of your double. When the Corridor emerged, all the people who woke up here who had no idea what was going on - without knowing it they were simultaneously living their life back in the ordinary world.”

       “Josh is like that – he is doubled. He has a self living in the ordinary world, in Australia, and he has a self who lives with us, apart from when something jolts him back, and he ends up with both of his selves back in one space. At which point he has only his ordinary world memories. The next time he falls asleep he will get back here, in his roaming body, his roaming self. But that does not solve the problem of getting over here in his entirety, because in fact he is only here in a minimal way when he does not have his ordinary world form fused with him here.”

     “In what way is it minimal?” asked Kate.

     “Well, for one thing – he has much less energy, less overall vitality and intensity. But why don't you let Josh tell you about it himself. He will be back at our place when you get there. I’m not being evasive. I have to leave now, so I need to draw you a map, and run! Twenty miles is a long way. And I think we will end up meeting now, no matter what you decide. If you return to the ordinary world tomorrow – though I dont advise you trying it yet – then I’m sure we will meet before long, back there, or here in the Corridor. And I’ll tell you then!”

     Cass got up, and asked if we had paper for a map. We all went into the kitchen, and I got the ordnance survey map from the window sill by the door, and opened it on the table.

     Cass pointed out the route we should take, to the point where the map no longer covered the terrain we were to cross.  This route leading ‘off the map’ was already marked in red ink. We could not find a map that had Ipswich on it, other than a road atlas. Cass showed us the route on the atlas, and then lastly made a detailed map of the area around the converted factory. Her map-making skills were impressive. The factory was on the near side of the town, and it did not seem as if would be hard to find. The route being shown to us went into Ipswich on a path along the railway line, and Cass said that as we arrived at the station we would see a large circle of yellow paint on a wall over to the left, and that after that there would be yellow circles every fifty feet or so, marking the path to their house.

   Cass pulled on her back-pack.

     “If you cant find us and it gets dark, dont worry, we’ll use fireworks as flares, to guide you in. And you can always make a fire in the highest place you can find, and make some noise. We’ll find you, noise travels a very long way here.”

     Outside, it had mostly clouded over, although the clouds were thin and patchy. Looking at the direction of the light, I felt it was around 4, and that there were maybe 6 hours of light left.

     “If you decide to attempt to get back to the ordinary world tomorrow, then take your friend for a long walk before you do it. And if you do come over, then you could always give me your email addresses, and I could go back to the ordinary world myself, and send some emails saying you’re all alright and you’ll be back in touch soon.”

     Without any hesitation, she gave us a friendly wave, and set off. A moment later she had disappeared through the overgrown gateway.

Ffion

     I liked Cass. I liked her, but she worried me. I wanted to know what was happening, and she appeared to be giving us the answers, but how could we know? She seemed to be encouraging me toward accepting things that were even stranger than what was around us, while simultaneously giving us only a part of what she knew. I sensed a startling integrity in her, but of course the disturbing aspects of her behaviour opened up the idea that this integrity was a pretence.

                     I was washing the dishes, singing to myself. Steven had said he would help, but had got caught up talking with the others  in the living room. I loved the house, and I was captivated by the idea that in some sense it was ours. The atmosphere of the forest and the lake was beautiful, but I couldn’t really believe in what was happening, and what was more, at that moment, if I imagined it was real, I immediately wanted even more strongly to return to my familiar horizon. I wanted to be with Steven, on our own, back in the human sunlight of the ordinary world.

   What was stopping us was the fact that John was unwell, or recovering from – recovering from what? What could John tell us about what had happened? And had Kate remembered everything she could? Maybe of course there was nothing here, apart from a shared hallucination, maybe a controlled hallucination – maybe the barrier back to the ordinary world was imaginary in every way – but perhaps talking in detail about the experiences would either clarify the danger, or show it be illusory.

    I was glad when Steven came and caressed my shoulder, and started to dry the dishes.

     “You dont feel that surprised by the idea of all this being real, do you?” I asked him.

     There was a silence, broken by Rob laughing about something in the living room.

     “Well, I’ve had longer here, but I guess that’s not what you mean.”

     “No, it’s not.”

     “Well, its not that I’m taking anything at face value, I dont know what’s going on. But if this is another world, maybe I’m not too surprised, in a way. If you read non-western philosophy, and the best of western philosophy, you always get the impression there is far more to the world than we imagine... But in a way that just means intellectually I’m not surprised, I feel like in some other way I’m quietly in a state of shock...”

     “Yes, that's how I feel. But dont get started on a lecture.” I stroked his arm.

     Me and Steven got into the bed in the large front room.  I was feeling annoyed about not being able to change my clothes.

     Steven pointed to the balcony window.

     “Thats the balcony where I saw you” he said.

     That night had been the one after I rode the horse up onto the mountain. It had been an amazing experience, and I had slept very well afterwards, but I could not remember anything about my dreams.

     I told Steven this, feeling as I said it that we were onto something, even though I felt unwilling to think about it in a prolonged way, maybe because there was nothing more to say.

     Steven started to kiss me, and started to caress my shoulders.

     We made love, furtively, but beautifully, aware of the vast silence around us. 

     I woke up, with an extraordinary dream disappearing from my grasp. Steven was no longer alongside me.

     I felt a desparate need to be in contact with my parents – to let them know I was alright. I had phoned them from the airport, but that was now nearly two days ago. I was also extremely hungry.

     I walked downstairs wondering if we could trust Cass. In the kitchen I found Steven, who was making a large quantity of porridge.

     “Five year old oats?” I said.

     “Well, they smell fine, and that’s what matters.”

     The porridge did smell good, and it obviously wasn’t a time to be fussy.

     “Where are we, Steven?”

     “I have no idea.”

     “I thought so. And where is everyone else?"

     “Upstairs in the attic room. All of them, Rob and Tamsin just got up, as well, and John has been up for a while – and he looks fine…”

     “We have to get back.”

     “I know. Lets take all this up, and find out from John what happened to him, or what he remembers.”

 

     We went upstairs to the attic lounge. The room was flooded with sunlight.  it was one of those times when a whole space of dust-motes was visible, like a gently speeded up vision of  a stellar space populated by white filaments instead of stars. 

     John was sitting cross-legged on the floor, facing the sun. He looked as if he had been through an apotheosis, and had come out of it both unsettled and strengthened. Kate was sitting alongside him, her knee a hand’s width away from his – she had a calm, focused quality about her which was brightly positive, but which somehow made me feel she was concerned about something. Her t-shirt was dark grey with thin light-green stripes running round it, and the green had become a vibrant, striking colour in the bright sunlight.

     “We’ve just told John everything that Cass told us yesterday,” said Rob.

     “So,” said Steven, “ I guess we have to decide whether to walk to Ipswich, or whether to attempt to get back straightaway. Should we accept what Cass said, that there is a danger, or should we go for it?”

     “Well” said John, and after he spoke he shuddered slightly. “What the woman – Cass – said sounds right to me.  I feel as if I was caught in a trap” he said. “But everything is really, really strange about it. And maybe I kind of knew I was in trouble, but part of me was involved in - trapping me.” He  shuddered again.

     “And it seems like its going to be almost impossible to find any way of telling you about it.” Then he looked up toward the sun for a moment.

     “But its going to be really disturbing – really embarrassing talking about it.”

     I latched onto the word embarrassment. If that was what was stopping him, then surely there could no problem, given our situation.

     “But one thing – I have remembered a lot overnight, and I’m in shock about it. Of course, how do I know what is memory, and what might be imagined memory? But the first thing is, I have a memory of experiences lasting hours –and when I put it together it feels like half a day or more,  like ten, or twelve, or fourteen hours. Some of them are now more like dreams, but with some it is utterly clear, like ordinary memory.  I’m shocked about it…”

    There was a pause.

    “What happened?” I asked.  

     “What happened?” My repeated question was a statement of necessity. We needed to know everything.  I looked pleadingly at John. Our eyes met for a long moment.

     “OK, said John,  “but… I can’t begin to say how hard this is going to be…”

    He settled himself into a different position, with one knee up. I saw his hands were pressing his knee tightly.

     “OK, well – it started with me being in this vast subterranean building, kind of palatial,  abstract designs everywhere… very impressive, beautiful abstract designs, on video screens, paintings, hangings…”

Steven nodded emphatically.

     “There was music playing, coming from pillars in the building, and the music was - extraordinary. I would tell you more, but this was just the start of the experience, before a kind of threshold crossing. I was walking in the building, listening to the music, and at this stage there was no-one there, the rooms were all empty, just full of music.

     “And then I was in a narrow room with a long mirror on the left.  And I turned to look at my reflection in the mirror, and it wasn’t me, it was Kate in the mirror.”

     “And I realised at that moment that I was in Kate’s… form - I was Kate, having her feelings, and responses to things, as well as being in her body.”

     “And at that point I heard a voice talking to me, a woman’s voice, and it said –

     ‘If a man truly becomes a woman he loves, he reaches a higher level of existence.’ ”

     “After that, for a moment everything becomes a bit unclear, almost as if it is too intense for me to remember it. Everything was very bright, and there was a feeling of joy, and somehow of  being insubstantial, at the same as being Kate, as if I was feeling and seeing my body as energy – or, feeling. It makes me think of the Blake line ‘energy is eternal delight’. And I remember I felt I had to keep myself as Kate, while moving, and walk to my right to the door at the end of the hallway, and go through it. And I did, and I went through the door, and closed it behind me.”

     “On the other side was a much larger, or taller room – three floors high – although still the room had no windows. The room was amazing, I felt it was a place for parties, for dancing. It had a wooden floor, and brilliant paintings – really impressive, beautiful paintings. I went down some stairs, and as I was crossing the dance-floor, the woman’s voice said something like this -

   ‘become the warm sparkle of Kate’s eyes.’ ”

     I did this, and it was very powerful. Everything became very clear, and lucid, and very, very positive, and there were two women up on a landing on the opposite side of the room, and I went up a spiral staircase toward them. And when I got  to they had gone a little bit ahead along another, quite long,  corridor, and they were gesturing me to follow, and they were both very striking, beautiful women.  And I went with them, and caught up with them. And then, again, there’s a kind of bright - gap. And I feel like I understood things in that gap, and had whole new perceptions, but I don’t remember, there’s just a feeling.

      And the next thing I remember I was in a room – it felt very warm, very serene. And the two women were with me. The three of us were sitting cross-legged on the floor. One of the women had violet hair, in a bob. And the other woman had wavy or curly dark hair, and she was wearing a green dress.

      John paused. I felt he wanted to look at us. He had been staring at an area of floor-boards in front of him, and now for a moment he looked out of the window, and then over at Kate for a moment, smiling at her awkwardly.

     “There isn’t time maybe to talk about all of this, but in a way everything started there, in that room. And – what I’m talking about is that there was a lighted wall opposite where I was sitting in the room, and what I had to do was look at it, and then a scene from some very intense positive event from my past would appear, and then I would go into what I was seeing, and relive what happened. And at this stage it all seemed very positive…”

     “What they told me was that I was vastly more than my current self, and they told me that in order to realise my untouched potential I needed to relive the most positive experiences from my past. They said that me being in the form of a woman was simply a kind of dramatic demonstration of the extent of who I was, but that I needed to do something to ensure I kept the full awareness of my potential.”

     “It was like a series of adventures in the company of the two women. They were adventures in my past, where I relived things that had happened to me, very intense things.”

     “I remember… five different ‘journeys’, but the disturbing thing is that I think there were more, and each time I was living half an hour, or an hour of my past life, and then coming back to the room. And I should say that when I arrived in the room, I wasn’t Kate anymore – I was a woman, but it was as if – the woman was me.

     “A female self” said Kate.

     “Yes, exactly.”

     “With the last memory I was told I was going on my own. With the others the women had come with me, and had been faint presences in the background. This time I was suddenly in Spain with my ex-girlfriend, and I relived this night and morning when we camped in some trees on the top of a hill, we were hitchhiking, and that night I had a very powerful experience of hearing music, and in the morning everything looked incredible, and this cat appeared from nowhere, and befriended us.”

     “And then I was back, not in the room, but in the hallway outside the room, and I could hear the women talking and laughing inside the room, and I felt sort of very alive, full of energy. And I was told somehow that I could either leave that whole world, or if I went into that room, very soon the sexuality of my female body would be awakened, because a party was about to start, with lots of people arriving, women  and men, and the whole experience would go in the direction of sexuality.”

     "But it wasn’t as simple as that, or maybe it was, but in a different way. What happened was that I was suddenly strongly aware of sexuality as an aspect of my being in a female body, and I went into the room pretending to myself that I was about to leave, but deep down knowing what I was doing."

     "And I went back into the room - " John paused, and then started speaking again, after a few seconds.

    "Over an hour about fifteen other people arrived, and there was the most amazing dance music I’ve ever heard. And all I can say, is that everything did become sexual – me with the woman with the violet bob haircut, and then later with the woman in the green dress, and then –“

     John broke off.

     I don’t know – this is bizarrely difficult talking about this.

    I had sex with the woman in the green dress, and then after that – then after that I just kept having sex. Those – physical circumstances – me being in a female body, were lit up with sexual energy, and it was very intense, and it went on and on, an incredible continuous female orgasm - and I couldn’t stop.”

     "I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop until Kate arrived and rescued me."

    There was a look of shock on John’s face, and in the sunlight I could see tears beginning to form in his eyes.

     I felt acutely aware of the integrity he had shown in telling what had happened.  

     He was now looking at Kate.

     “I know I shouldn’t have gone through the door”.

     “Don’t be silly” said Kate. “I’m sure I’d have done the same thing!”

     John laughed, a laugh that became awkward as it took its course. And then he laughed again – a clear, healthy laugh.

     “And what did you see?” asked Steven, looking at Kate. “When you got him back. Was your experience that you were on the landing the whole time?

     Kate looked at Steven, and paused for a while before responding.

    No, it was as if I was in an extension of the hallway beyond the wall, without me noticing, and then I was with John only everything was feeling, without images, though I felt I was… somewhere else, in the extension of the hallway, which was yes, somewhere else, and not an outdoor place, a place inside without windows…  John had come when I called out, and I just felt his love for me, and who he is, and the fact that he was exhausted, drained. And then we were holding each other, and when I looked around me we were back in the hallway, back here in the house."

    After a long pause Steven said to John.

    “What happened to you makes me think of the idea that ‘whoever you love, you are’. Its very striking that you had the experience of becoming Kate, as if what was virtual was actualised. You are Kate already, because you’re in love with her, the same way as she is you. But it seems like it was the first phase of what became a trap, like bait. And it looks as if genuinely valuable things were happening, and were being told to you, with the memory experiences, to distract you and confuse you, and then the real trap arrived…”

     “But I don’t think we should try to think about this right now, other than to work out whether or not we should attempt to get back immediately, or whether we should go for a walk, like Cass said – and maybe a walk to Ipswich.”

     “I think we were really lucky” said Tamsin “that Cass turned up when she did. We’d have thought we were going mad.”

     “Well, unless of course” started Rob. “Unless – I don’t know – unless it wasn’t a coincidence, and in some way we’re being manipulated.”

     I nodded at Rob. “You mean Cass could be like  the controller of a psychological experiment, who goes into her own experiment, acting a role, to re-enforce a… a delusion, a group delusion”.

     I saw that John almost winced when the impact of what I was suggesting hit him. It wasn’t that I was discounting his experience. I was just trying to keep open all the possibilities. But of course this led to the idea that what had happened to him had been a hallucination, which in turn would suggest that it had all been a product of his own desires, which would leave his male ego in a difficult situation. And it was me who had pressurised him into telling us everything about his experience.

     “So” said Tamsin “if this was true, then what happened when John came back, would somehow have been created by, I don’t know, hypnotic suggestion and drugs…”

     “Yes, we’ve been captured by a group of deranged hypnotists” said Rob drily, partly  as a joke it seemed. But I felt he regretted saying it.

     Rob stared at the floor for moment, and then looked up at all of us, shaking his head to show his disbelief in the explanations he had suggested.

     I saw that Kate was looking distressed. There was a piling up of disturbing perspectives taking place, and she was obviously empathising with John, and probably feeling we were getting away from the true account of what was happening.

     “Anyway” I said, “when I think about Cass I can’t believe she’s a fake, at all – but there’s really only one question, for now, from any point of view. Should we pause and do something else before trying to get back again? And I guess the advantage of going to Ipswich is we do get a chance to confirm what Cass said.”

“I don’t feel ready to try to go back again” said John. “And I do feel like a long walk would be good…”

“Lets go to Ipswich” said Kate.

*

     We had been walking for hours. We were now on a path that evidently was following a river valley. We had seen only very occasional glimpses of the river, through gaps in trees.

     The canopy of cloud was beginning to break, and a gusty wind had begun to blow. Behind us we could see blue sky.

     It had been good to be in motion. My feelings were now very complex, and I was sure the same was true for the others, particularly John.

     I wanted to get back to the ordinary world, where my parents by now would be acutely distressed.

     I wanted it all to turn out to be a hoax, an insane reality TV experiment. However, that idea led to fear in either direction. Hoaxsters working at such a level of manipulation surely had to be disturbing people – they would be messing with peoples’ heads to a shocking extent. But if it was not true, as now seemed likely, then we were surrounded by the utterly unknown.

     I also felt disconcerted by John’s revelation about his experience. And again, this development was unsettling for me whether or not we believed in the existence of the subterranean world. It was astonishing to think that a total physical transformation within a real world was possible, but if the world of what Cass had called the Deep Hotel existed, then it seemed that such transformations were being used for a kind of eerie seduction.  It had also turned Kate into a kind of sexual focus within the group - which I found annoying  - while simultaneously  it had left John feeling deeply insecure. And these last  circumstances would remain whatever the cause of John’s experience – the events would not lose their power to sway and disconcert even if it was shown that the Deep Hotel was a crazy figment, if anything their power would be increased.

     As we went on, walking through ruined villages, seeing thickly rusted cars by the road lost in brambles, with plants growing from their windows, and churches whose towers were cascades of climbing plants, the situation began to seem incontrovertible. This shift in turn led both to the feeling that we were over the edge of everything we’d known, and to the unnerved, panicky feeling, in me at least, that we must find a way back immediately. But of course, if we succeeded in getting back what would we tell people, and how could we be the same again, knowing all the time about a nextdoor dimension? I was torn. I wanted very much to leave all this behind. But another part of me wanted to know about the other, positive directions that Cass had told us about.

    At one point me and Steven went off the path to look through a wrought iron gateway on the edge of a village. We were holding hands as we looked through, toward a crumbling manor house just visible through small gaps in trees growing where there would have been a lawn, or at least a driveway. A very large bird flew up from the roof of the house, and powered its way out of sight, with a few flaps from its huge wings.

John

    I had been concentrating on reading the map – specifically on getting us to the turn onto the railway line. But now we had found the turn, and we were on the final stage of the journey, the path going through vast expanses of rosebay willow herb, along low embankments, and through overgrown, forested cuttings.

     I was aware of Kate more intensely than ever before, and this heightened awareness made me feel an almost overwhelming love for her. I could feel  her emotions, her enjoyment of the sunlight and the enigmatic situation, her fierce resolve to ensure it was possible to return to the ordinary world, her concern about me. I could feel her hair being blown in the wind, and the movements of her clothes against her skin. I could feel the playful shine and sparkle of her eyes.

      I was aware that in the main it was only men who were really perturbed by the thought of a man becoming a woman. For women there was almost no force-field of embarrassment created by the idea – in fact it was if something normal was being described. What was it that men were afraid of? The effect of me having become Kate was that I was now more in love with her than ever.

     We walked for several miles along the line. Above our heads there was blue sky on the right, and the last of the cloud being blown away to the left.

     There was a low hill to the right, covered in trees. It looked as if the trees were growing around and out of houses, but it was impossible to tell.

     On the left the ground went down a little, into a wide flat expanse, with more low hills two miles away to the east and north east.  We came to a place where the trees on this side had been cut down, presumably for firewood.

     A mile away there was a fifteen story tower block, green with vines and bushes, looking more like a rock pinnacle in a jungle, than a building. All around it there were the signs and outlines of heavily overgrown buildings, a forest stretching to the horizon which, when looked at carefully, was evidently a derelict city.

     Without saying very much we walked to the overgrown train station that we could see half a mile away. People had cleared an area at the end of one of the platforms, and a sign had evidently been cleared of its vines. The lettering of the sign was flaking, discoloured, and in places overcome by rust. But what it said was clear –

Ipswich

     I had been to this station two or three years before – changing trains for Felixstowe. And Ffion and Steven said they had been here. They were both nodding in the same way as I was.

    It was a visceral feeling of unprecedented recognition. The place was utterly different, and yet in relation to the geological terrain it was in every way the same.

     We sat down alongside the sign, and shared out food. We could see the circle of yellow paint that indicated the path we had to take next.

     I felt shocked. I looked, in a dazed way, at the circle of yellow paint, and then I found myself looking at the sky to the southwest. In that moment everything felt very positive and yet hauntedly desolate at the same time. We needed to find Cass and her friends, but the conviction of this group of people that the Deep Hotel was a real place focused a feeling within me of having been menaced from an unsuspected direction.  

      But I knew that primarily I had not been hoping the whole situation was a deception – in fact the opposite.  And my yearning toward the reality of what was around us was not the desire to avoid embarrassment. The very sharp, double fear – of desolate terrains and of the Deep Hotel - that might have made me want this to be illusion was totally outweighed by the beauty of this forested, green world, which it seemed could  even be open toward other worlds at a higher level of intensity.  The music I had heard the day before, after Kate had rescued me, was suddenly playing in my head.

Tamsin

     Ruined Ipswich in evening sunlight had an eerie, serene atmosphere that left me feeling almost insubstantial. I felt, as we walked, that I was on the edge of dreaming. As if there was so much abandonment about me that I was wanting to join it, and abandon my waking self.

     I had tried, when we set off again, to ground myself by concentrating on the tiny details of walking. All through the day I had been aware of a kind of lucid sensuality in the act of walking – I had given more awareness to the movements of my body, and they had become more like dance than walking. I felt this was the reason for me having walked so far without being exhausted and full of muscle strains. My legs and feet were aching, but in a way that was almost pleasant, a kind of gentle background hum.

    I sensed that I was able to feel the beauty of our surroundings because we appeared to have a welcoming destination only a short distance away, rather than us being confronted by night in a ruinous forest city – a place whose very existence was unaccountable. I was very glad to see each new yellow circle of paint, but these path markers were a reassuring pulse that seemed, with each new instance – to push me further toward trance.

   Everything had changed, and it was discovering it was all real that was making everything dream-like. Only the act of thinking about it, as opposed to taking it all in, could anchor me. I started getting abstract images which were ways of understanding what had just happened to us. I saw the walk down the train-line as the last phase of a kind of bottle-neck from which we had escaped when we reached the station. Or it was if as a group we had passed through a mirror, and everything was now the same but completely different. I had heard Ffion talking about a need to think about the motivations of Cass’s group in helping us, and I agreed with her entirely – I could tell by her tone she had the same positive impression about Cass as I did. But this urging of caution about our destination was an aspect of the change. I could see a wide-eyed, astonished look in Ffion’s eyes that had not been there before. I felt Cass had given us an invisible thread which would was guiding us out of our disorientation, and which, at the very end, had become tangible, leading us now toward her home.

Rob

   Since it had become relatively certain that we were beyond any ordinary situation there had been one main question in my mind.

     Cass had been confident we could get back, and I was using that fact as my basis for thinking.  What I wanted to know was – why did Cass refer to the ordinary world as the disaster? Why had she said that the world of our lives up until then was more haunted, in some sense, than this one?    I found it hard to believe that this was not in fact the future, but whatever the relationship between the two worlds, I was aimed now at returning to the ordinary world, and I did not want to have missed the chance to find out what Cass had meant.

    I noticed something about a house on my left. It was a dilapidated, detached house – the first house on a side-street. When I looked at the bushes around the gate I saw they had been cut back with shears. I realised that the house was badly deteriorated, but that it was not at all a ruin.

I called everyone over, and we went and looked into the house through a bay window that had the sun pouring through it. The room was in good condition with easy chairs, and a rug on well-swept bare boards. The most unusual thing in the room was near the window, a five foot tall glass tube or vase which was completely full of glass marbles, of every conceivable kind.

“So you won’t lose your marbles,” I said.

Tamsin laughed. We stood, arms around each other, looking at them.

“I wonder  what happens if you suddenly want one that’s down at the bottom” said Tamsin.

Tamsin

Steven was looking at Cass’s map.

“Well, if we’re going right, Cass has marked this crossroads, and the bend in the path, and we’re very nearly there. I expect this house is theirs.”

“It’s sort of dilapidated, but not derelict.”  said Kate. “It’s another time pocket...”

We continued, walking up a gentle slope for a while, and then, following another yellow circle, we walked for a few hundred yards on a wide track that ran on flat ground.

We turned to the left into a high-walled courtyard in front of a brick building that looked like a factory. Leaves were being lifted off the ground, and being swirled around, a small tornado. There was a faded sign saying:

Briony One

Design Dreams

     Spreading from the lower left and top right corners there were patterns of coiling plant stems, and flowers.

     I was suddenly aware that four people had come out of a door in the far right corner of the courtyard.

     Cass’s voice

     “You made it! Wonderful!”

     Alongside Cass on her right there was a slim man wearing quietly stylish black clothes, and a reticently friendly expression. His skin was deep black, and his hair was cut short. My first impression of him was that I had met him, and talked with him, at some amazing party, which might have been a real party, or might have been a party in a dream.

     Alongside him, in turn, was an extremely attractive woman, with curly dark hair, who smiled at us all with real warmth, and then quite rapidly seemed to settle into looking abstracted, as if she was depressed, or was worried about something.

    The fourth person, who came straight out towards us, was a solidly built man with a tangle of hair and a wide face. He had a quality of calm, knowledgeable happiness about him, and he radiated pleasure when he saw us.

     “Well done” he said, with a huge smile.

     Cass introduced us – the man alongside her was called Lewis, the man with the tangle of hair was called Gavin, and the woman was called Shona.

     “I’ve cooked a pot of food” said Lewis, “I’ll heat it up.”

     Shona had given both Kate and Ffion a hug, and then she hugged me, and took me by the hand for a moment, and said “come on, I’ll show you”. I felt she was putting a brave face on something, because of her earlier ‘clouded’ expression, but I wasn’t sure any more.

     She took me through a long, eclectically cluttered and decorated room that seemed to be a living room, kitchen, and dining room, and which ran the width of the building. At the back there was a field, with two horses, grazing a hundred yards away by a wall. They both looked up when we all came out through the door.

    “That’s Kestrel and Molina” said Gavin.

    We all went upstairs, apart from Lewis and Cass, and were shown a long corridor, with many rooms coming off it on either side, which were bedrooms. Then we were taken to a beachcomber’s cave of a room, that was above the ground floor room where we had started, and also ran the width of the building, with a series of windows, looking out to the east. 

         The room was full of extraordinary, beautiful objects, some of which were suspended from the roof. A large writing desk had coloured glass spheres, and plaited coloured ropes hanging above it. On a wall nearby there was a stylised painting of a two horses which looked Mongolian or Chinese. Beyond this was a large screen showing very subtle geometric patterns which were changing constantly, in a motion that was like water rippling.

      Sideways on one window ledge there was a tight coil of some vine which had lost its supporting branch, and which had small branches coming off it that looked like a head stretched forward, and legs spread out – an alien wolf with a spiral rib-cage.

      As we went down to eat, I was aware that the house had an atmosphere that reminded me of the very best music festivals, only it was as if that atmosphere had found a house, and a project, instead of drifting for a few days and then disappearing.

     We sat down at the huge dining table. I was sitting opposite another big screen showing fluid abstract patterns, patterns which at that stage were a kind of calm solar violet colour, like rainbow violet somehow threaded through sunlit clouds. Looking at the screen felt like being high up in the atmosphere.

     The meal was delicious, a bean stew. Lewis said there was no meat because “Cass forgot to ask if any of you are vegetarians”.

     While we ate Cass told us about the house and its inhabitants.  There were three other members of the group, called, Jane, Tariq, and Alexa, who were off somewhere, and apparently Josh was upstairs – he had returned, but would come down to see us later.

     “It’s Josh who programmed our abstract visuals” said Cass.

     Shona told us that the doorway they generally used for travelling between the Corridor and the ordinary world was a sound-shadows room in a house a mile down the road. She pointed back the way we had come, and said we would have passed it.

     “The marbles house!” I said.

     “Exactly!” said Shona, laughing.

     The conversation turned to the question of people being doubled, and living in both this world and ordinary world at once. However, Cass rapidly curtailed the discussion, so that we did not learn anything new.

     “Talk to Josh later” she said.

     It became clear listening to Cass, that she had taken a large part in helping people discover the Corridor.

   At one point Lewis briefly told his story. He had been a musician, making dance tracks that were a fusion of drum and bass and dubstep, and had been on the edge of becoming very successful.

    “I was nearly taken over by the success machines," he .said.  "And then the Cass did her work – she showed me something else. The Cassandra went to work on me...”

   “And showed you the disaster was the present, not in the future” said Steven.

   Lewis looked at Steven for a moment.

   “That’s it” he said, smiling. "Different from Homer's Cassandra." 

   “And perhaps more than anything else” he added, “she showed me that silence is the way forward. And silence turns out to be a kind of impersonal love."

    As he said this Lewis made a gesture of pointing out the world around him.

   "A love for the planet. And because it's impersonal it's all the more intense."

     Then I saw Rob leaning forward, from the opposite side of the table from me. And I knew what he was going to ask.

     “What is haunting the ordinary world?  Why do you call it the disaster?”

     Lewis did not respond - it was if he was still thinking about what he had just said. But Cass smiled, opening her eyes wide. She paused for a moment before saying anything. I noticed her eyes go to the video screen which was now showing a field of horizontal blue lines that reminded me of both clouds and feathers. They were mutating very slowly, tiny pools of change spreading like water, or frost flowers.

     “OK”, said Cass, suddenly.

     “This is it.  All of you - try looking at the screen. Don’t think at all, but look at the screen intending to see the answer to the question – ‘what is haunting the ordinary world?’”

     Gavin went and turned off the music that had been playing. It had been a quietly edgy ambient-and-melodic piece, which a minute before had included a serene, delicate vocal part that seemed to have been made by using the high part of overtone singing, but without the deep drone that should have gone with it - I had felt sure it had been Lewis's voice. The effect of the track continued, somehow more audible than it had been before.

     We all did what Cass had suggested, and the silence was striking, an immense, twilight silence broken only by a few bird calls.

     I looked at the new form of the abstract patterns. They were rippling grey-blue worlds that had a kind of depth as if you were seeing into a forest or a cave full of strange statues. But there also seemed to be a strobing image – too fast to take in other than subliminally – which after a while I started envisaging across the patterns. It was a sunlit room with a window above a garden -

     And I was a woman who was being courted by a man who I did not really love at all, but who was extremely wealthy, and who was going to make me his bride, and there were things about him I didn’t like, but I was about to have sex with him, and give myself to him, and the sex in his beautiful house in the countryside was going to be overwhelmingly, shockingly powerful, I was almost shaking at the thought of him seeing me naked, at the thought of him knowing that my aroused femininity belonged to him, that he could clasp me tight and...

     I shuddered awake, pulling my eyes away from the screen. Without intending to, I let out a small exclamation of pain and disgust, a shudder of revulsion from my vocal chords.

     “What did you see?” said Rob.

     “I” – “I” I stammered.

     For some reason, I was looking at John. I felt I was understanding something about what had happened to him, but then it was gone.

     I looked at Cass.

     “I think maybe I saw what you were talking about.”

     Cass was scrutinising my eyes, and face. I felt sure that my cheeks were flushed.

     “I dont know what to to say” I said “I think I saw something about how... people get hooked into things they dont really want. It was a kind of a dream where there was a woman who was being pulled into a relationship with an unpleasant man because of his money – because he had a beautiful house in the country…”

     I stopped, perplexed about how to describe the erotic aspect of the dream, because it had seemed to be more a result than simplistically part of the motivation for the woman’s capitulation.

     “It’s a very long story, really” said Cass, speaking as if she understood my difficulty. “And in fact you have to see it for yourself in the end, rather than being told about it. There’s a side to it that has to do with peoples’ intent and libido, and then there’s another side, that we think involves new disturbing developments, and that’s about intent and libido as well, but its also very much about peoples’ minds – about blocked ways of seeing everything. I think what you saw has a lot to do with the initial libido-energy side of what’s going on.”

    She turned to Rob.

     “But the main thing you can say is that what’s haunting the human world concerns subtle forms of control and domination, as opposed to love.”

     “Yes!” I said. “Thats it.”

     I had allied myself with Cass, in saying this, but this agreement with her left me feeling awkward. I felt that at a deep level what Cass had said was right, but I was aware I would be unable to speak about details of what she was arguing for.  Rob was clearly unsatisfied, but I knew his silence meant he had recognised my unwillingness to talk.

     After a brief continuation of the discussion, led by questions from Ffion and Steven, Cass said emphatically that really we all knew already, and that it was something we had to perceive for ourselves. She also said we were short of time.

   Steven nodded. And I had a feeling he was agreeing about everything Cass had said, not just about our lack of time.

   “Is there time for a quick look at the horses?” he asked.

   

   

Ffion

   I was feeling worried about John. I had seen something pass between him and Tamsin, immediately after she had jolted awake from her screen-induced trance. I saw that John had been disconcerted by what had happened – his face had turned white.

      All along I had been wanting to say to John that having – in some sense – a sexual experience while in the ‘form’ of  a woman should be seen as a wonderful achievement for a man, not as a source of embarrassment, but of course I had not. In more than one way this statement had a ‘too hot to handle’ feeling about it, both because it was touching on something extremely personal, and also because it had a quality of ‘political correctness’ about it, which somehow felt as if it was missing a point. If it was true that the Deep Hotel existed, then the ‘bait’ some of its inhabitants had used with John was sex, and that meant of course that being positive about John’s experience was in danger of playing into the hands of those who were trying to trap him. I strongly wanted to believe that no such world as the Deep Hotel existed, but I could not simply behave as if it did not.

    My wanting John to hold on to his poise was partly self-interested, because I wanted us all to return successfully to the ordinary world, without one of us being caught on the way, but at the same time I knew that him feeling perturbed about what had happened to a great extent reflected something disgraceful about human perceptions of sexuality. And I sensed that if he had a sharp feeling that the ‘Deep Hotel’ – whatever it was – was something malevolent, he could end up believing that there was something wrong about what he had felt while he was there, which would open up the prejudiced perspective that a man was diminishing himself by having a woman’s experiences.

     As we got up to go out through the doors into the field outside, I picked up a guitar that was leaning against a wall. I had noticed it before, and had been wanting to play it. As we went out I gently strummed a few notes, and then started tuning one of the strings.

    The horses were near the door, twenty feet away, facing us, as if they had been waiting for us to come out. Behind them there was the last of the day’s light, green-blue midsummer light to the northwest and the north.

     To my surprise, both horses came up to me and started nuzzling my hands and face. I didn’t give it any thought when John took the guitar from me, even though it was him who had been in my mind as I picked it up – I was too struck by the affection being shown by the horses.

    “They really like you” said Gavin.

     Shona introduced them again. The horse on the left was a male palomino, with a long blonde mane, and was called Kestrel. The horse on the right was a chestnut-coloured mare – she was called Molina, and she had a white blaze running up the length of her forehead, a blaze that grew wider as it went up. Both of them were about fifteen hands high, and even in the semi-dark I was struck by the intelligence of their eyes.

     “You love horses, don’t you?” said Shona.

     It was not something I was always thinking about, but it was true. There had been a horse I had deeply loved as a child – a horse which belonged to a friend, but which I had ridden all the time – and when this horse was killed in a road accident I had been heartbroken.

     I nodded, thoughtfully.

     “I rode a horse up a mountain in Spain four days ago” I said.

     Shona let out a playful whistle, and patted me very warmly on my shoulder.

    “That’s a very good thing to do. No wonder you dreamed your way over here, when – she paused to remember the name – “when Steven found this sound shadows room of yours...”

     John had started picking out a tune on the guitar. The others were stroking the horses, and I was looking at them, and wondering if horses were any different in the Corridor. The brightest stars were becoming visible in the sky above us, and to the southeast, around the side of the building.

   The tune John had been working towards had suddenly appeared beneath his fingers. It was a lilting, mesmeric melody, which refrained itself over and over.

      The melody rose upward to a clarion-call of a high note, which made you want to run, wake yourself, see the astonishing beauty that could call such a note into being. 

    Both of the horses nickered, and I felt sure, despite it seeming improbable, that they were expressing appreciation.

     Lewis came out from the kitchen, with an immense sharp-eyed smile on his face.

     Cass looked at Kate.

     “I think it’s not only you who has seen the Elsewhere”, she said.

     Eventually John stopped.

     “That’s the tune I had in my head when Kate got me out  – when Kate got me back to the house.”

      He was smiling, and there was a bright shine in his eyes.  I felt he had just completely crossed the threshold back to his normal poise, or more than his normal poise.

     Cass said we should go back into the house – she said she had a suggestion to make. We sat down in the easy chairs in the living room.

     “OK” she said. “This is about what you do next. And I think there is something I can do to help.”

     “We need to get back – urgently” I said.

     “Yes, exactly. Tomorrow you’ll need to go back to your house, and use your sound shadows doorway. I’m not going to suggest you use our doorway, because I think you will find it easier to use the one you have used already. Now, tomorrow evening might not be the best time to go – I would suggest the next morning, when you’re all fresh, and when you have the positivity and energy of the morning.”

     “So - my idea is that you give me some email messages for your friends and family, and I’ll take them through the doorway – tonight – and email them using the computer in the ordinary-world form of the house. Around one message per person. It only needs to be something like “Everything’s fine, at a festival in Moldovia, will be back in touch very soon.”

     Cass laughed. “Whatever you think! But if you decide to do it, its probably best to make it a single story for all six of you – and maybe call the event you’re at a party or something, because otherwise people will search for it, and if they’ll find nothing, and that will worry them.

     “And I’m afraid it means giving me your email addresses and passwords”

     I found myself wondering for a second whether this was the ‘sting’ of a bizarre scam, but I had  seen enough now, and the idea could not sustain itself.

     Most of the others had already signalled they agreed with the plan. Steven had said ‘it sounds like a good idea’, and was now looking at me for confirmation.

     “Yes, lets do it”, I said, – “I want to get a message to my parents”.

     In the end our story was that we were at a private ‘festival’ or party at a house in the middle of a forest in Estonia. All of the messages were short, reassuring, intensely  apologetic, and calmly enigmatic about the reasons for not having been in touch until now (though several of the messages said that there was no internet connection or mobile reception at the party).

     I had finished writing my message, and I had put my email address and password across the top of the paper.

     Cass had made herself a mug of coffee, which she was holding in both hands, as if the mug was a baby bird.

    She came up to me and Kate, who was sitting alongside me, and said -

“Will you go up and see Josh?”

    We both nodded, surprised.

    “I think there is a slight chance you will pull him over here completely, which is what he desperately wants, but you will enjoy meeting each other, anyway.”

   “You think that we can cause his self in the ordinary world...” Kate started.

    “To fuse with his Corridor double.  Yes, but something tells me it is very unlikely, I think it will either need to be less deliberate than this, or in some way more deliberate, but that is going to be our problem, of course”

   I’ve chosen you two, because I think it is women who can pull him over. But not really in the sense you’ll be thinking. It needs to be people who can see past him being a cool techno-dreamer, and see something empty underneath. You can pull him by seeing the emptiness, or the part of him that is not awake... I think it needs to be women who can see through him, and who are capable of a certain implacable – dryness.  A dryness in their response to him.”

    We had been told which room to go to. I think both of us felt slightly unnerved as we went upstairs. I noticed Kate pulling her borrowed cardigan across herself, which I knew was a response to her being asked, in effect, to ‘pull’ a man towards her.

    Light was coming from the room at the end of the hallway, Josh’s room apparently.

    The man we had seen the day before was sitting at a computer in a scruffy room where everything was a mess apart from the desk where he was working.

    He turned when we came in, responding to us saying “hi”.

    “Hi” he said.

    He looked at Kate first – she had come into the room in front of me – and then at me.

I smiled at him, and he gave a broad, warm grin as a response.

   “So you’ve been sent as the extrac – “ Like the last time he froze in mid-sentence.

For a split second I saw the space of his body as rippling, or shimmering, like agitated water, and then this perception spread to everything around me, including myself, and was gone.

     I noticed Kate nearly lose her balance. She crouched down on the floor, putting a hand on the floorboards to make herself steady.

Josh looked as if he had been given an electric shock.

     “You nearly did it” he said, shaking his head, as if to clear his thoughts. “But my ordinary world self has  - re-composed himself, and he’ll see that as a fugue, a lapse of attention...”

There was a pause during which Josh turned off his computer. In the middle of doing this, he got up  and cleared scattered clothing and books from chairs, and apologetically said we should sit down. I was watching his face, and he seemed perturbed.

     Kate was running her fingers down the hair on the side of her head, in a repeating gesture.

    I asked if she was OK.

     “Everything went – sort of, fluid for a moment” she said, smiling to let me know she was fine.

    “But fluid isn’t the right word”, she added, looking at Josh. “It was more like the stuff the auroras are made from, but kind of denser and, very electrical...” Kate was blushing, I sensed that for her the process of trying to ‘call’ Josh’s other self had had a sensual aspect.

Josh turned his chair round, and sat facing us.

     “I think I maybe saw your other body for a moment” said Kate. “There was a space superimposed across this one, as if it was a room somewhere, but all I could see was another – version of you which was alongside you, on your right.”

     “It had much, much more energy, but it was far less - fluid…”

     Josh nodded, and smiled.

    “That’s kind of the difference.”

     There was a pause.

     “But what does it feel like?”

     Josh turned to me, opening his eyes wide.

     “Yes, good question. It feels more poised, more kind of serene, in a charged sort of way. But you feel thin – because you dont have the gigantic energy currents of the ordinary body. And this on one level is to say that you dont have organs in this body, and you dont have desires other than love, fascination, exploration... whatever words you use. I dont get to have the pleasure of eating and drinking, because I dont have a digestive system, and my breathing is a perceptual act involving the idea of lungs, not an actual consumption of oxygen.”

     “And so you dont have sexuality?” I asked.

     Josh grinned. I could see he admired my boldness.

    “I dont and I do, at the same time.  I have love, and the sensuality of perception – and thats much more than people realise. Often when I’m in a room I’m seeing from my own eyes, but also from the eyes of the other people in the room. There is an intense shine about people’s eyes – and their whole bodies – which is very beautiful – delicately, intensely beautiful, I dont have words really.”

    He was looking at me as he said this. It was my turn to blush.

    “Yes, you’ve got words.” I said, crisply, but thoughtfully.

    For a fraction of a second I saw Josh’s body as water again, or as some kind of fluid electrical fire – it was if I saw more clearly this time, even though the duration and intensity of the moment were both much less.

     Kate was looking at us intently, as if she was watching a combat, or a dance.

     “I think you’re reminding me not to be melancholy, not to be passive and negative”.said Josh.

      There was a pause, while I was trying to think what to say.

     “But you cant imagine how envious I am of you” said Josh laughing.

     “Your whole group is astonishing – you’ve just shot through, all six of you, and all of you are here in your entirety...”

    “But I’m trying to keep myself positive – moving forward.” he added.

     “So you do the programs for the videos?” asked Kate.

      “Yes, and we all think now it might on one level it might have been a mistake. When I’ve finished the one I’m doing, I’m not doing any more, and I think before long we might stop using them. Back in the ordinary world I am a programmer, and I am not going far enough away from my ordinary self, to pull myself over here with things that are utterly new. Instead what I’m doing here just seeps across to my other self and makes him more successful, and self-satisfied.”

    “But its more than that” he added.

     Josh looked at both of us in turn, as if appraising us in some way, assessing whether we were up to hearing what he wanted to tell us.

     “The videos are trance-inducers, dream-generators, or at least, they are here in The Corridor. Thats simply what they do, if you let go, and just perceive them, without thinking.”

And we have used them – they have been valuable. I know you’ll find this hard to believe, but through looking at them we found a group of people in the far west of Wales, and we went and visited them, and we plan to go and join them – they have an amazing place there.

Put up a sail and the wind will catch it. But what if we had put up a different kind of sail, or of we had found a way of getting into the air, instead of staying on the surface?”

    “But there’s no point in asking that”. said Kate.

     “You’re right. You’re completely right, we have found this direction, and its brilliant, and there is no point in thinking about what might have happened otherwise”.

     “But I’m only really talking about this because over the last few months we have started suspecting that the programmes are being hacked . Human beings are obsessively visual, and I think we may have played into the hands of forces that want to take us in the wrong direction – I have a feeling it might have been better if I had taken a direction that was more likely to open us up...

     “Hacked? I asked “By who?”

     “Well – I know you havnt had time to form any views about this – but, to speak plainly, we think they have been hacked into by the beings that hijacked John.”

    I shuddered, involuntarily. It was a real spasm, a jolt.

    There was a silence, which was eventually broken by Shona coming into the room.

    “So you havn't managed to yank him into his senses!” she said.

    After that, the four of us spoke for a while, but without returning to the subject of the videos.

     Me and Steven were given a room of our own. The room was largely unfurnished, but it had curtains, and a very comfortable double bed.

     I lay awake for a long time. Despite being exhausted from all the walking, it was hard to stop examining what had happened. It had been a day on which my view of reality and been acutely perturbed.

     After a while the day became a kind of floating terrain that I could look at from one direction, or the opposite one, as if I was flicking instantaneously from one vantage to another – either from the morning perspective of the house by the lake , or from the night perspective of the warehouse home where I was lying in bed.

     At one point I slipped into for a moment into a dream where something immensely positive was happening. I came round from it what seemed to be only two seconds after it starting, and could not remember anything. But a word appeared in my head, which seemed somehow to refer to the fugitive dream, and the feeling of joy I had just experienced.

     The word was ‘pre-shock’.

Rob

     I felt I had been sleeping for maybe a couple of hours. Tamsin was in front of me, deeply asleep, her body tucked into mine.

     I was remembering something that had happened to me when I was a young child – around six years old. I had dreamed I was flying over countryside, several hundred feet above the ground, with an immense area of hills spread out in sunlight beneath me.  The next day I very foolishly told three friends – all boys – about the dream, and I was ridiculed by them.

     I remembered being in the garden shed of my house, afterwards,  furious, and vowing to get them back for mocking me. The memory then became a dream where I was in the same place, surrounded by a void of exactly the same kind, with the view of the trees beyond the garden fence, and I was a body-shaped void surrounded by a void of exactly the same kind, and I knew very clearly in the dream that a day is a world that continually floods into you, suffusing you with itself, and that things could go wrong in the course of this continuous influx. I had a dispassionate awareness of a kind of bleak teeming of something invasive and predatory within the void of my body.

     I then fell asleep. Afterwards I worked out that I must have slept for at least another hour, probably more.

    At the end of this time asleep I dreamed I was running up from within a labyrinthine cave that had many entrances with heavy metal doors, and that all of these doors, apart from one, had been shut. I knew that the cave and the expanse of rock was my life as it had become, as if over time it had been frozen, or calcified. I turned a corner, and I could see light in the distance. It was still several hundred yards ahead, and I was terrified that the door was about to close. The fear woke me. Opening my eyes I was glad to see early morning daylight.

     It was several days before I remembered the dream reverie that had emerged from the childhood memory. Instead I remembered only the initial half-asleep recollection of my anger at having been mocked, and the abstract dream about attempting to escape from the cave.

 

*

Ffion

      I was woken by Shona.

     When I said I would get up, she said she would go and make us coffee. Apparently the others were off being shown around the area. For some reason I wanted to know if the horses were there, but Shona had gone.

     She had left my jeans and t-shirt, neatly folded, on the chair by the bed.  They had been washed and tumble dried, and had even been ironed. At the end of the evening, after showing us to our room, Cass had lent me a t-shirt and bath-robe, and had said we should give her anything that needed washing.

     I had breakfast with Shona in the long room on the first floor. The sun was pouring into the room, lighting up everything, making an emblematic silhouette out of the alien wolf, with its spiral rib-cage.

     Shona was wearing a long violet-lilac skirt and a white top, across which her dark hair was falling in a tangle of striking, natural-looking curls. The day before her hair had been tied back. Part of me – a part of me that was normally a long way in the background – was feeling that she was almost overwhelmingly attractive. The combination of extreme thoughtful strength and femininity was very powerful.

     Shona told me that Cass had succeeded the night before in sending off all the emails.

      This was good news, but it gave me a sense of unreality that was hard to shake.

      I was eating toasted home-made bread, and home-made plum jam – delicious, even though I didn’t normally eat jam. I looked at a bookcase, and started scrutinising the books. They were an eclectic mixture –  cosmology, natural science, novels, meteorology, anthropology, philosophy.

     We talked about horses for a while, as we ate – I had asked about Kestrel and Molina, who had apparently been taken along on a brief circuit of the area.

     Shona told me that horses as a species had done a complete circuit around the planet – they had crossed the land bridge to Eurasia, while it still existed, had died out in their area of origin, and had only made it back to the New World thousands of years later.

“Back to the New World” I said, smiling.

“Yes!” Said Shona, with an answering laugh.

But then suddenly she was looking straight at me, and I knew she was signalling she was about to tell me something important.

     “So – there are some things in relation to Steven that I need to say.” Shona laughed, obviously amused by the attention-grabbing quality of this statement.

     I opened my eyes wide, looking at her a little sceptically. I didn’t know how to respond.

     “The thing is that Steven has a huge amount of energy, and he needs to be assisted in not getting – snagged, or hooked... He needs to be helped with not getting stuck.”

     “Steven really loves women, which in fact in every sense is brilliant. He has expressed his love for women by having a couple relationship with a very extraordinary woman – you – and by having genuine creative friendships with other extraordinary women. This only works because he has the sense to find women strong enough to cope with the situation. Again, this in fact is brilliant, and don’t think for one moment that I’m being a relationship counseller!”

     “However, the problem is that Steven has successfully woken his love for women to the point where he has virtual women running around inside him. Whoever you love becomes part of you, but not only that -with that amount of femininity in a man, female selves get a chance to wake, and to emerge. Again, to say it a third time, this is brilliant – it’s an achievement.”

     “Whoever you love becomes part of you?” I repeated, a little bit taken aback by the fact that she had used a phrase almost identical to one which Steven had used the day before. I wondered if she had been talking to him.

     Shona nodded.

     “Yes” she continued. “And this, with Steven, has allowed female selves to wake in him. But these are real women, as real as is the Steven self. They are real women with womens’ loves and lucidities – and womens’ desires.”

     “All of this in fact is secretly natural, the inevitable result of a process of waking up which never normally gets a chance to happen, because the circumstances which bring about this waking are almost always collectively fended off.”

     “The only problem is that Steven needs to keep moving forward, so that his energy connects up with the future, in a special sense of the word. If he is inactive, if he goes in circles, then there is a danger that something will hook the desires of his wakening female side.”

     “When you say ‘something’” I asked, “you mean the beings from this ‘Deep Hotel’ world? I mean, I don’t know whether it exists, but that’s what you mean, isn’t it?”

     “Yes, that’s what I mean…”

     “I think the Deep Hotel hooked John” she continued, “ in a way where he was always likely to escape, because the trap had a direct connection to the woman he is in love with, who would eventually attempt to save him. But I think they sent a message to Steven in doing this – I think it’s Steven they are really trying to get. And they’re trying to do this by luring him with the promise of crossing a threshold by becoming you. But this is what will not happen. This change is in their power, and they are right about crossing the threshold -, but instead they will keep him with transformations that do not set him up to be rescued.”

     "For all of us – women and men – learning to let go is vital, fundamental. But we have to learn to let go in the right direction.”

     We were about to set off – the six of us, with Gavin, and the two horses, which had packs on them  filled with supplies. A gift to us: "so your house will have food if you decide to come back" Cass had said. Gavin was also going to show us a cache of supplies which the group maintained, for emergencies, in a building in Melford.

      I was the last to leave the house. It wasn’t that I was not ready at the end, it was more that I liked the place, and I was happier looking at the objects in the downstairs  living room, than milling around in the courtyard.

    Lewis appeared in the doorway, gesturing me to come out. As I started to leave the room the video screen suddenly showed an expanse of bright green, with a scrawl of abstract white lines fluidly run through it –and across the top sixth of the screen there was night blackness with a suggestion of stars, and with a few irridescent white lines running away through the blackness. And then for a moment the screen became a window showing a moonlit landscape of hills and forests.

    Then this view had gone. I shook my head.

     We went out into the courtyard.

     “That was something else again” said Lewis. He described how he had just seen a moonlit, forested landscape. "I havn't seen anything quite like that before. And it definitely wasn’t from the Deep Hotel."

     I wanted to talk about what had happened, but it was clear there was no time. 

    Lewis gave me a hug, and then stood back. “I’ve got this strong feeling" he said, "that your whole group is depending on you.”

     I looked at him for a moment, before I spoke.

     “So, no pressure then.”

     Lewis smiled, as if it was the response he had expected - or had wanted.

     Gavin told us he had grown up on a farm forty miles away from Ipswich. He and his girlfriend at that time had ‘run away’ to the continent fruit picking one summer when he was 17, and he had not come back for many years. By the time he returned he was a painter, and he had a degree in environmental science from a university in New Zealand.

     He was responding to Tamsin’s questions when he was telling us these things, and I was walking along by one of the horses – Molina – stroking her mane, and occasionally getting a ‘nickering’ sound in response – a sound that seemed to mean she liked what I was doing.

     Gavin broke off from something he’d been saying, and pointed to the right, where a tiny path was branching off through thick undergrowth.

     “That path leads to an old second world war pillbox – you know, the concrete, machine-gun nests built in case there was an invasion. The pillboxes round here all seem to be time-pockets, although its not easy to tell. But what we know is that if you sit inside the one at the end of that path, you’re likely to find yourself back in the ordinary world. Its a doorway, but back to – the Disaster. And in the Disaster they are doorways that bring you here.”

     Everyone gathered around Gavin.

    “So, it’s the same as the sound shadows rooms” said Steven. “But how easy is it?”

    “Its much the same, though a bit harder”.said Gavin. “You have to clear your mind, and just perceive. You sit looking towards the wall, with the rectangular window to the side of you, you clear your head, and eventually you find there’s been a ‘click’. The sounds and the light have all changed, you maybe cant hear the wind in the trees any more, or the smell has changed to the smell of a sheep field - you know that you’ve gone back.”

    We set off walking again. The horse Molina had nuzzled me in the neck, just before we started.

   Everyone was talking about the pillboxes, but as we walked I started paying close attention to the two horses. I found their company very enjoyable, and I felt strongly that they were intelligent, and in fact were not really like ordinary horses at all. For one thing, they were simply coming with us, rather than being led by Gavin.

     Shortly afterwards I saw that Steven was looking at the map. I went over and asked where we were. He showed me, and then pointed at a left turn several miles in the distance

     "If you go along there you come to the ring of silver birch trees and gorse bushes, that I told you about. With the white stone in the middle.”

     "There's something about that place" said Steven thoughtfully.

    We stopped to rest and have some food, at a point where the path turned sharply to the left. We sat in some shade on a grassy bank, while the horses grazed, wandering further up the track.

     At one point, after we had finished eating, a very large dragonfly appeared twenty feet down the path and John got up to look at it, followed by Kate, and then by Tamsin and Rob. Steven got up as well. But the dragonfly came in our direction along the path, zipping past us – iridescent green, and apparently four or five inches long – and continued in the direction of the horses.

     Tamsin had apparently seen another dragonfly, and she and Rob went further off, back in the direction we had come. John and Kate were now laughing, and I could see that John was pointing to something stuck to the back of Kate’s jeans and t-shirt, which seemed to be seeds of some kind.

     Steven hunkered down, looking at Gavin, and holding out a stone that I had seen him pull from the ground a few minutes before.

     “It’s all flint country round here” he said.

     He then told Gavin about the ring of trees with the white stone at the centre, and asked him if he knew anything about it.

     “I’ve never been along that path, and no-one’s told me about that place – which I think means that none of us has found it.  I agree about the stone, you don’t get big lumps of white quartz round here.” He nodded at the flint in Steven’s hand.

     A slight wind had come up for a moment, blowing Kate’s long brown hair across her face. John was giving her a neck massage, having removed the seeds from her back. Kate shook her head very fast, like a cat, to clear her hair, and then closed her eyes, as the wind ruffled the shorter hair at the front against her cheek. John was massaging the nape of her neck with what looked to be inspired, skillful movements. For a moment Kate arched her back, and smiled blissfully.

     Steven dropped the stone.

     I suddenly felt sure that Shona had secretly told me – in a disguised, powerful way -  that Steven was utterly obsessed with women, and that we needed to keep moving forward because this  obsession could lead to anguish and the collapse of relationships, not just because of what she believed about the Deep Hotel.

     At one point I asked Gavin about the horses.

     “Well” he said, “horses, and animals in general have a tendency to be a lot more – awake in the Corridor.”

    He paused.

    “Though I don’t think we know too much about animals in the Disaster,” he went on, “because we generally only meet domesticated animals, and wild animals who are under pressure from humans.  And in fact Kestrel and Molina have come over from the ordinary world.”

     “How do you know?”  I asked. Earlier Cass had said they had found them, grazing by a river, somewhere forty miles inland from Ipswich.

     “Because I used to see them” said Gavin “in fields I used to walk across, in some hills not far away from where I lived.”

   “How long has all this been going on for?” asked Rob. “Cass said the Corridor was here before what happened five years ago.”

   “Yes, that’s right. The Corridor came into existence – partial existence - thirty five years ago, and that initial world is there world alongside this one.”

    When Rob asked Gavin to tell us about this other world he refused to say anything more.

   “It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the other Corridor world, he said. “More the opposite, if anything. But the main issue is that, in an early phase,  if you widen and complicate perspectives unnecessarily it can cause people to freeze up, or to fixate, or both. And this is a bad comparison, but you’ve seen the danger of someone ending up in the wrong place during a crossing.”    

     Rob was looking at Gavin, nodding, but obviously unsatisfied. I could tell he thought he was being manipulated into dropping this line of questioning.

     “But how can we make a choice if we don’t know what’s going on?” he asked.

     “How can you make a choice if you’re frozen and fixated?” said Gavin, smiling. However his smile had a rueful quality, as if he did not like having used this contestatory mode of response.

     After a brief pause, he started speaking again.

     “Look – there are two things Cass told me I should say about this Corridor world.”

    “The first is that if ever you meet someone here who gets emotionally close to you very rapidly - who for instance reminds you of someone with whom you were once yearningly in love – then beware! They may not be at all what they seem - there are other non-human dangers here, as well as the Deep Hotel.”

    Gavin looked at us, with a serious, probing look on his face, as if checking to see we had been listening. At the end he was looking at me, and for some reason, after the initial eye contact he gave me a big, warm smile. He then looked over toward the sky to the southwest, above the trees, sweeping his eyes brightly along the horizon.

   “The second thing is - always stay really positive, despite the need for caution, about the thought of encounters here in the Corridor. Almost all of the people you meet here are very definitely worth meeting.”

      Recurrently along the path there were tall foxgloves, and lilac orchids. Whenever we had a long view across the country there was a startling, halcyon beauty to the expanses of forest, and the glades filled with flowering wild roses.

    I started enjoying being silent, and taking in everything around me. It was as if some part of me was telling me that I should not waste this opportunity.  I would have been worrying about my parents and friends, but Cass had short-circuited this source of distress by sending the emails. I still felt jolts of concern when I thought about them, but, after all, what could I do, other than what I was doing? And more than that, becoming increasingly calm and positive seemed to be what I needed to get back.

     We reached the top of a long gentle slope. Steven pointed to a path leading off to the left.

     “Thats the turning.” he said.

     “Is it a long way round?” I asked.

     I now wanted to see this place, and it was obvious to me that Steven was drawn towards it. However my main feeling was one of wanting me and Steven to be on our own. This was not simply to do with Steven, in fact it was very much a feeling that while we were still in this astonishing environment – whatever or wherever it was - we should take the opportunity of giving it our full attention, and I knew it would be easier if we were on our own. Steven would not mind if I said we should stop speaking.

“Its the same distance, or a bit nearer, to the house in that direction.” He pointed northwest.

 

“The house is just five miles over there.”

“Is it easy to find the way to the house?”

“Very.”

I went for it. I turned to Gavin, and to everyone.

“Would it be OK if me and Steven took the other road back? He wants to show me the place with the white stone – the ring of trees.” Unintentionally my left hand brushed lightly against Steven’s right hand as I spoke. I was aware I had graphically made the statement that we wanted to go on our own.

    I firmly expected Gavin to behave as if we had just proposed an indulgent, dangerous plan. Instead there was a kind of ‘click’ of increased alertness in his manner that was entirely positive. I felt as if he was seeing me as a newly-encountered leader in some warrior situation who had just announced the possibility of a new direction for resolving the conflict.

     “Yes. I think you should.” he said, looking calmly and piercingly at both of us. “But be careful.  Take the map, we dont need it. And take a compass.”

     We were walking across a forested upland, with occasional broad fire-glades, full of bracken, profusions of wildflowers, butterflies fluttering through sunlight.

    I was aware that in the Corridor you could go off and make love almost anywhere, in any open glade in a forest, wherever you chose. There would be the – surely very reduced - chance of a dangerous person watching you, but there seemed to be freedom from any danger of criticism. This thought gave the Corridor a very erotic aspect, and I was suddenly feeling that this fitted with the Corridor being an immensely verdant, fertile world.

     After a while the thought of making love became irresistible, dreamily powerful.  I was about to turn and playfully hug Steven – communicate my desire for him - when he spoke, pointing to the left.

     “There.” he said.

     Two hundred yards away I could see a cluster of silver birch trees, growing amongst gorse bushes.

      We walked on a diagonal through bracken and past tangles of blackberries, bumble bees moving everywhere.

     There was an undeniable atmosphere about the ring of silver birch and gorse. The afternoon sun was shining directly onto the white stone at the centre, and the trees and gorse bushes gave me a feeling of potential, of some momentous possibility I had known about once, but had forgotten.

     As I sat down I was in a very unusual state. I was feeling very clear and focused, and yet somehow dreamy at the same time.

     “Its a beautiful place.” I said.

     Steven nodded emphatically, sitting down alongside me, on my right.

     I had been wanting to make love.  But my response to the place, and Steven’s  wordless agreement,  had somehow opened up a silence that was about a genuine perception of our surroundings. I balanced myself, sitting cross-legged, and then, without thinking about it I closed my eyes, following the impulse of concentrating on the sun on my skin, and on the sounds of the birds and insects.

     And then – almost immediately – it happened.

     I was seeing a semi-tunnel of pillars and stonework, with light at the end thirty feet away - a dilapidated small colonnade, with a line of pillars on my left, and a wall on my right. I walked forward into the light, across broken paving stones. There was a grassy hill in front of me in the distance, bathed in sunlight, and a big manor-house on my right.

     I opened my eyes again, and looked toward Steven, who had his eyes closed – it seemed he had followed my example, or perhaps something about the place had drawn him to do the same thing.

     After a few moments Steven opened his eyes, with a look of astonishment.

     I told him what I had seen.

    “Yes,” he said, “I had the same thing.”

     “I had the same thing” he repeated, “ but it was different from what you saw. It was a flat plain of grass, extending in every direction, and a few isolated trees, like – like – sentinels, and the sky was an evening sky, but kind of white. It was peaceful, and the sun gave me this feeling that I was seeing over the edge of the plain towards it, as if the sun was close or the earth was flat.”

     I had been watching Steven’s face.

     “What did it feel like?” I asked.

     “It was very beautiful, and peaceful, and lonely.”

     “Was it sad?”

     “Maybe a little. Kind of sad, and at the same time very beautiful.”

     “I think we should try again”, I said. “And we should not talk, we should have a rule that we won’t talk at all.”

     Steven agreed.

    As I closed my eyes I was shocked by the fact that I was instantly seeing the colonnade – the place I had seen before. So shocked that I opened them again. Then calmly I closed them, and this time for a moment there was just the sound of bees in the gorse flowers.

     I listened to this sound for a moment, and then –

     The colonnade, the light at the end.

    I walked to the entrance, looking at the green hill in the distance –I knew unthinkingly  that I was in Somerset - and when I came out of the entrance, I saw that there was a very large, very delapidated manor house to my right.  It was three stories high, with Georgian windows, and built of brick, with what seemed to be virginia creeper growing over most of the building. A few hundred yards in front of me there was a low-lying area of marshy ground, with what looked like patches of reeds growing in the centre of it. To my right there was a wall, stretching as far as the house, with fruit trees growing against it.

     I knew something about that place, but I could not fully remember it.  It was something very positive, and it was about people who lived there, or had lived there.

    But it was the sky and the hill that was drawing me forward. In my dream-like state I knew what had happened here was important because it was connected to the positive feeling that came to me from looking at the horizon to the south.

      It was hot, it was the middle of the day - although I did not give any thought to the discrepancy.  The sky had a few cirrus clouds, and it became white to the south – the striking effect given by bright sunlight diffused through very thin cloud.  As I walked I became more and more perceptually focused, more and more aware that again I had leapt impossibly to somewhere new. Something told me I should keep walking, I had a kind of intuition that there was something I should get to, before an opportunity was lost. I thought I had seen Steven up ahead on a hill to the south of the big house, and I went in that direction, feeling sure that the opportunity was there, beyond the hill.

     I walked to the top of the hill. Beyond it –

     the wall of white light

     The hill went down a little, and then up a slope to the top of another slightly higher hill a few hundred yards away. The facing slope was a mass of flowering wild rose bushes, gorse and occasional patches of bracken and grass.

     Beyond the second hill, stretching up to infinity, there was a wall of incandescent, enigmatic , white light. I felt as if I had known about it all my life, and had kept forgetting about it. The light was utterly positive and beautiful, intensely and calmly bright. It was sunlight and starlight, and it was wild roses, and the brightness of the air – it was something wild and beautiful, the blissful essence of midday. It was enigmatic because primarily I saw it as a wall, but simultaneously, at a level beyond ordinary thought, I saw it as a space made up worlds of unknown bright energy that could not be brought into focus, and as a serene calm emptiness made up of voids in the form of awareness.

      This was it. This was what I had been moving towards.

     I took stock, separated everything I knew from everything I half knew or surmised or felt. I had no full knowledge about the people who had lived in the house, and I certainly did not know that I had seen Steven in front of me – in fact, I thought maybe I had seen someone else. Having brought the situation to mind, I decided to look with full concentration at what was ahead of me, and around me.

     The state I reached when I did this was unprecedented, astonishing.

     I had become the day. The sky, the heat, the wild roses, the drifting thistledown. I had a memory of a feeling from when I was a teenager, inconceivably  bright and positive. And gravity was no longer pressing me down in quite the same way.

    The white wall was a doorway, I knew it was a doorway to the inconceivable.  And I also knew intuitively that my transformed state was a key to the door. I realised I had no idea at all whether or not Steven had gone ahead of me. But I knew that I had to go anyway, whether or not I ever saw Steven and my friends and family again. And I knew I had to do it for them, as well as for myself.

     I let go, toward the wall of white light. As I went towards it I became insubstantial. I was floating, not bobbing or drifting on the air, but moving very smoothly forward at an increasing pace. As I came closer I had become a feeling of vastly sensual bliss, a feeling of insubstantial , or ultrasubstantial delight, I was a sphere-world of sensuality and intent to explore and encounter, and I was the day, and the two things were inseparable from each other.

    And then, in the very last moments, I strengthened myself, ready for what was about to happen, and I knew that the forward motion would after that have been an illusion if I had not made this change. I added ‘around’ myself a barrier of resolute alertness, a fierce and calm hostility to whatever might attempt to damage me in any way.

     As I did this it was as if all of the lights came on, in myself, and outside myself. I was surrounded by a seething white quantum world of star energy. And I was an implacable love and lightness reaching out -

    And people were reaching for me in return, greeting me, from a vast distance -

Steven

     I closed my eyes, thinking I would see the plain of grass again, with its lonely, sentinel trees, and the sun looking as if it was somehow right alongside the planet. After a few moments I was half-seeing it, but thinking about the nature of what I was seeing at the same time.

    Dreamily I was focusing on the fact that the plain of grass was an evening place, and was very bright, but somehow cool. I found that I was seeing the white stone and imagining it receiving the heat from a hot midday sun. Then suddenly I was looking at what seemed to be a dried up lake bed, full of reeds and grasses, and weed plants like docks. There were tracks of an animal in some mud, and I knew that they were the tracks of a fox.

     I looked up, in the blazing sunlight, and saw a grassy hill. I could very clearly see Ffion walking up the slope, near the top. It was her - I recognised her clothes, her way of moving. Looking around for a moment, I saw the manor house. I knew somehow that I was in Somerset, and I knew that the place was where something very extraordinary had happened.  I started skirting around the lake bed, in order to follow Ffion, who was now out of sight.

      I could see that the sky had an intense brightness, and I felt that this sky that I was seeing beyond the hill was the ultimate direction. Suddenly I understood that Ffion was about to leave in that direction.

     I felt a burst of anguish – and then I was opening my eyes.

    Ffion was not alongside me.

    I felt an ever greater stab of anguish, a shock-wave of distress. I looked around me, saw no-one, and then I immediately closed my eyes. I did not go and look to see if she had gone off beyond the trees. I knew she was where I had just been, and I was frightened.

     This time it was several minutes before it happened. Summoning all of my resoluteness, I slowed and deepened my breathing, and eventually I succeeded in concentrating on the space of sound and touch around me. Then I found myself seeing a patch of stone with bits of plaster or cement on it, and I felt I was in the colonnade again. I envisaged the heat and light beyond the colonnade, and abruptly I found I was standing a foot away from the end of the tunnel looking at the dried up lake and the hills. I walked forward, and there was a tall, thin man in front of me, walking casually toward me, wearing grey-black, drainpipe jeans, and a charcoal jacket with a grey t-shirt.

     “Let go and perceive”, he said, smiling at me, in a way that seemed positive, but somehow not at all human. “Let go and perceive.”

      He said it a second time as he was walking past me. My eyes were following this strange gaunt figure.

     “And then when you have let go, surround yourself with protective awareness.”

     He nodded, and turned away, disappearing into what seemed to be an overgrown garden alongside the colonnade.

     At that moment I was disassociated, and I just kept walking. When I turned round a moment later, the man had disappeared.

     I walked, the house on my right, and the lake bed on my left, toward the hill where I had seen Ffion. The sky was very white beyond the hill, and as I walked it grew brighter.

     And then I was at the top of the first, lower, summit of the hill.

    For a moment I could not move. What I was seeing was unimaginably beautiful.

    Four hundred yards away, down a bit, then up a bit. And then gorse bushes silhouetted against the whiteness.

   The white wall - a door toward cosmic summer, stretched to infinity.

   I set off to walk down the hill. I realised that the figure I had met had been friendly, and then put aside the thought of him.

    I looked at the white wall, and the day around me, starting to breathe everything into me, across the full width of my visual field, and across the full width of all my senses. Immediately I was gliding along above the path, and the whiteness was in front of me – only, now I knew that I had somehow already become the whiteness, I was already the light of the sun, and of all the other suns whose light reached the planet.  I was a calm white quantum world, a quantum world of light and plasma whose serene brightness was matched by an immensity of sub-atomic contact, like constant lightning.

      I realised suddenly that my intent had to be my love for the beauty of the world, along with an intent to get to Ffion, without any anguished feeling of having been left behind. What I knew was that I had to take up the challenge of life and death. At the last moment I utterly let go toward the wall of light, toward cosmic summer, and I became a supreme sensual bliss, an ecstasy of travel in immensity, a joy and a love that - maybe because of the warning which had just been given - also added to itself a sharp, locked awareness of the need to defend itself if necessary.

     And then I was an incandescent white world that seemed to be the size of the galaxy, electrically rippling with quantum contact.

    And I reached out, and at that point the being I had met earlier by the colonnade pointed out  ‘she’s there’, and I saw a direction, a place that I felt rather than seeing it –

     I was the violet light of the sun, and everything was ultra-charged, and yet serene, at the same time. White-violet, electrically ultra-charged serenity.

     And Ffion was alongside me, along with two of the other beings, and I was feeling them, or being them, Ffion and the others, rather than looking at them. My sight was spherical, a sphere of sight, but the sun was the primary focus of my visual perception. Insofar as I was looking at them – primarily I was them, as well as myself – Ffion and the other two beings were spheres of energy that appeared both as transparent, and as spherical worlds of whitish-to-irridescent filaments that were floating within the transparence (sometimes they seemed like woolly, plasma-like, spaces of mother-of-pearl energy, and at these times they were opaque).

     Further away there were seven beings, and around us and below us was the atmosphere of a gigantic blue planet. Far below us there were clouds in intricate swirls and archipelagos. I was the thin serene reaches of the high upper atmosphere, and faintly I was the clouds above and in front  of the face of the vast planet.

   I had just been having an experience so momentously positive I knew it was too intense for me to hold on to the memory of it. I was now the white-violet sunlight and the upper atmosphere.  A moment before I had still been the clouds, and before that – I knew I had been the sun and the planet, but this was knowledge now, and the memory was gone.

     I was aware that one of the unknown beings with me and Ffion was female, and that the other one was male. I was aware that they liked me, but also that they were curious about something.

    When I had arrived in that world I had been aware that the entity from near the colonnade had appeared with me, and then had disappeared, whisking itself away as if it was being sucked through a crack in the energies around me, a crack that closed immediately after the entity had gone.

     I re-lived this moment, aware that in doing this I was communicating with the unknown beings, and then the memory came to an end, and they seemed satisfied. I concentrated on being with Ffion, who was full of exultation that I had arrived there, and who seemed to be wanting to show me things, and on the extraordinary pleasure of being the two unknown entities alongside me, and the other seven off in the distance.

     And then suddenly all ten of us were a sweeping curve of motion, an exhilarating flight that seemed to follow a path that opened up in front of us, an exquisitely intricate, fluid, slingshot curve, that swept forward in a trajectory that speeded up, as it went, and then slowed – and then, the same again, but more so, an even more intricate, fluid trajectory. I knew that the paths that we  were seeing, and were causing to open up in front of us, were connected to the sunlight, and the clouds far beneath us, and to the whole planet, but it was not possible afterwards to hold on to the worlds of perceived connections involved in this knowledge.

     And then at one point we reached an extreme acceleration that somehow gave the impression of a speed so fast it was experienced as stillness.

     And I was standing with Ffion alongside me in a bowl-like depression in an area of rocks – and there were two people in front of us, twenty feet away, with warmly sparkling eyes, a man and a woman.

Ffion

    The man had a long nose, and relatively plain features, and the woman had a tangle of short, curly hair. I knew their names, and more importantly I knew the way they were at the level of the intent – their awareness, their emotions, their ways of being. But this was the first time I had visually encountered them as anything other than spherical worlds of intent, globes of energy.

           I had been with them – and the other seven beings – for what had seemed like an immense amount of time, and they had shown me things which were now slipping away from my memory, though I felt calmly sure that the experiences were there within me, and that eventually I would have access to them.

     The woman smiled at us, and then nodded at me, indicating that she had already told me what she was about to say.

       “My name is Ket, and this is Tarul”.

       As I looked at them I was aware that their bodies were expressions of their natures into human form, but that they were not originally human. I was also aware that the communication that had just been taking place had taken the form of a bliss that had been both hyper-abstract and deeply sexual, and that fundamentally it had been an encounter with the transcendental, the sacred.

     Ket was giving me a beaming, lovely smile, full of vitality, and a kind of wild thoughtfulness. I realised I felt an incredible love for both her and Tarul.

    “OK” said Ket. “Now’s the time to look around you properly.  Just do it in a casual way – glance at things for a moment, and then move on.”

   We were standing in a kind of bowl of rock, thirty feet across - the rock was a kind of honey-grey colour, but it had veins that were more amber coloured. It looked as if the rock had been a kind of gel or suspension, with clear amber-coloured layers within it. In front of us was a gap with a vast view to a distant horizon, slightly hazy. There seemed to be a plateau of rock in the middle to far-distance, and a little to the left. This plateau had what seemed to be vegetation on the top of it – the colours of the vegetation were shades of grey-lilac, and light grey-green,  that made me think of the colours of lichens, though it seemed I was seeing things that were the size of trees. To our right the amber veins in what was clearly a narrow slab of rock were being lit brightly from the opposite side by the light of the sun.

The sun  -

The sun was slightly smaller than the Earth’s sun, but it was brighter. The light was slightly emerald-green. Yellow, but tinted astonishingly with emerald.

     “Look away” said Tarul. “Dont look at the sun for more than a second. Look at something else, anything. You’re focusing yourselves – and the sun could melt you back, as it were.” He laughed.

     We were instantly on the move, led by Tarul and Ket. “You’ve done it,”  said Tarul, “but keep looking around you at the rocks, and we’ll show you a little bit of where we live when we’re here.”

     “Yes, I’m called Ket.”  Said the woman “But you know that already, dont you?”

     “Yes, of course” I said. She had told me when I had been melded with her earlier.

     “It sounds like it should be your name, or one of them.” said Steven. So maybe I do know it.”

     “By the way”, said Tarul, looking at Steven “The entity that helped you get here was curious - an enigma. We think that - ” Tarul paused for a second. “We think that the Earth has had a new kind of child.”

     “Yes,” said Ket,” a thin-energy, warrior child!”

     I was aware there was a kind of metallic taste in my mouth.

     “I feel it is a form of energy-awareness that has been there all along,” said Tarul, “but that it has broken its way out or up – woken itself up across a series of thresholds...”

     “Evolved” added Ket, smiling. “It has probably happened before, but we haven’t encountered beings from the Earth of this kind.”

     We were crossing a sunken courtyard, which led on the left into a building which was set into the rock. I could see right through the building to the sky, visible presumably through windows on the opposite side. The floor of the courtyard was made from small hexagonal tiles and triangular tiles, which had an exquisite pattern – dark green on white that reminded me of curved lines that I had once imagined I was seeing coming from the sun, at dawn, when I was looking at the sun just above the horizon. As we climbed up some rock steps leading out of the courtyard I saw that the roof of the building-come-cave was a fluidly arranged geodesic expanse that was mostly opaque, but with beautifully shaped areas of transparent glass, to let in the light. The word ‘ultrageodesics’ came into my mind.

     Tarul and Ket suddenly burst into a run, up the last thirty yards of the slope, where it became a little more steep. I admired their energy and lightness of foot. Steven ran after them, and after a moment, I jogged up the slope as well, laughing at something I half understood, but which would not quite come into focus.

     I cleared my head as we got to the top. I had a terrified feeling that we were not going to be there much longer, and I wanted to see everything.

     The view, in fact, was almost overwhelming. The plateau was like a boat moored in the terrain, a boat the size of a city. Its upper surfaces were now lit up brightly with lilac, the colour of this lilac vegetation heightened somehow by the evening sunlight. But although the plateau was vast, and astonishing, it did not command the view. With the extra height from the hill where we were standing the horizon beyond the plateau was visible. This horizon seemed to consist of extremely high land, with subtle, shallow contours, suggesting huge hills with gentle slopes, even though their scale was large as that of mountains. It was a like a vast wave of land, and it created a breathtaking awareness that we were standing on another wave of ground, rising slowly but immensely from the floor of the valley.

     Behind and around the hill where we were standing was a sloped flattish expanse of rock dramatically shot through with amber veins.  To the right, in the distance, some of the areas of amber rock were lit up by the light of the sun, creating an effect of translucence unlike anything I had seen. Here and there across the rock were grey-green or grey-brown plants ten or twenty feet high - their shapes were similar to those of trees, but their colour was more like lichen. The terrain as a whole consisted of vast waves and slabs of honey coloured rock, veined and tinted with amber, scattered - and occasionally covered – with green, brown and lilac plants.

    What was deeply overwhelming, however, was not that this was an astonishing landscape, but that it was a view of a planet. And it was from this perspective that Ket spoke, when she broke the silence.

    “Feel toward the world” said Ket. "Return to the way of seeing you had just now, in the high atmosphere, above the other planet – the sky planet.”

     I did what she had said, and instead of being nearly overwhelmed by the view, as I had just been,  I was suddenly having an experience of seeing through and into the whole planet - the planet seen and felt as a vast hyper-charged intensity - a serene void, full of worlds.

    Thousands of miles away, on the equator, there were two spheres that had the quality of bruises, or oil slicks - they were like hard but flexible spheres that gave the impression of having an oily, bruise-like space within them.

     "Those are predatory incursions" said Tarul, " they have quarantines around them created by the planet and by those who are in the vicinity. What’s inside those spheres will either be transformed, repulsed, or destroyed."

     For thousands of miles, serene, calm terrains, with nothing that was predatory or parasitic in relation to us. I knew that the depth-level world of inorganic space held potential danger, but the terrains of the planet around us were free of menace. Serenity – freedom.

     Tarul had been saying that if an incursion occurred near them it would be their task to help the planet to deal with the predators. He had just added that it was less likely at a large distance from the equator – the hottest, most energised part of the planet.

     “This is an outer base,”  said Ket. “We come here to encounter the awareness of this world. We also spend a lot of time in the world that most of us come from originally, though it’s not where Tarul and I come from.  We go back, find new alliances, often in inorganic space, or we find ourselves caught up in complications from which we need to extricate ourselves, gaining energy in the process. And then we return here, or to other places – it is a spiral, an upward spiral...”

    “And” said Tarul,  “using a base-line the length of the space between two stars there are things it is possible for us to detect. The cosmos consists of belts and flows of energy, and these belts and flows shift, bringing about radical changes in circumstances at a deep level – the level of inorganic space.”

     “Soon you’ll both run out of energy,” said Ket, “and you will simply go back to where you started from. We could prevent this from happening, but your ordinary energy bodies would solidify again, and the different conditions here would initially be extremely traumatic for your bodies to handle – and in any case we can see that for both of you your intent is to return.”

     “It is possible that we will now never meet again, though who knows? Our serendipity, if we focus it, may bring about another meeting. It has been wonderful to encounter you, and to share states of being with you.”

     “There is only one thing to say now. You and your friends are in danger. You have all acquired the ability to leap to new worlds with the entirety of yourselves, and this, given the specific danger you are facing, means there is a very high risk of you being permanently trapped.”

     You need to focus yourselves at the level of the smallest details, and at the level of your long perspective. Feel how making all the small actions fluidly precise is the ultimate doorway. And remember that what you are – is love and courage!”

    Ket made a twirling gesture of pointing out the entire world around us, a playful gesture that had a bright, feminine quality about it, and I knew she was saying that a joyful perceptual openness to the world was fundamental.

     Suddenly I was together in one place with Steven.  I could feel his sensations, and see and feel everything through his senses as well as through my own. Our bodies were superimposed across each other, together in one place. The feeling was immensely enjoyable – there was a sharp lucid beauty about it, a feeling of us locating into each other, and as a result becoming more focused, more awake and capable of perception and understanding. It was clear we were a fighting unit.

 *

     I became aware I was listening to birdsong. And then I was opening my eyes in the ring of silver birch trees and gorse bushes. Steven was sitting alongside me, he was looking at me with a wide-eyed expression of shock and excitement that in some way looked almost feral in its calm intensity.

    I stood up, and walked, experiencing complex physical sensations as I did so. My joints clicked, but more than that, I had sensations of little zones of tension in my muscles putting up resistance, but then being ‘clicked’ into fluidity of movement, by a kind of unstoppable  knowledge of how to wake a slightly stiff body.

     I felt much lighter than normal.

     “Do you feel lighter, as well?” I turned to Steven, who had got up with me.

     Steven nodded. “Yes, as if gravity is a bit less”

     We paused.

     “They are amazing” I said.

     “Yes. I don’t have words. They are incredible – so, intensely alive… “Tarul…”

     “Ket.”

    I felt shocked by how lucidly beautiful it had been. I wanted to talk about my experience at the beginning - of becoming the other members of the group, together with the sun and the planet. But I felt sure that I would stumble into silence, and I said nothing.

     “Its good that we were both there” said Steven. “We will understand each other – we share it.”

     I looked around me, feeling somehow unwilling to talk about the future, rather than the immediate circumstances and the event that had led up to them.

     Where the stone had been there was now a gap in the turf.

     Steven came up and looked.

     “ That stone was that being” said Steven. “Or, it was one of its bodies”

     “It's solid body” I said. “Or maybe how we saw its solid body…”

    “Perhaps we should say its more solid body. You weren’t here just now, and I don’t think your solid body travelled in any ordinary way.”

     I looked around again at the serene late afternoon light.

     “We have to go,” I said.

     “Things aren’t going to be to be the same again.”  I added.

     I had said it as a fact, not as a melancholy or exultant statement. I felt the knowledge was something compact, and yet vast, that it was quiet like the hot afternoon, and yet shockingly positive. But I knew it was positive, without really completely feeling it. It was as if I was slightly numb, or tranquilised by too much expenditure of energy.

    I reached out, and we clasped hands for a moment.  We did not hug, everything was expressed in the contact between our hands. 

     We started walking, Steven assuring me it was the right direction.

     As we walked I looked at the height of the sun above the horizon. I felt in a way as if many hours had gone past, especially if I thought about what had happened above what Tarul had called ‘the sky planet’. But at a deeper level I knew that in fact my awareness had just been acutely more focused, and that as a result I had lived through an immense amount of experiences in around an hour of ordinary time.

    We walked on, looking for the turning. We knew we would have to explain to the others, and we knew it wasn’t really possible to explain.

     We found the turning onto the path, and twenty minutes later, with the light beginning to fade, we found the left turn onto the path toward the house. Everything seemed hushed and serene in the forest. There was a smell of leaves and pine-needles, a rich woodland smell.

   At the back of my mind, Ket’s voice -

   You and your friends are in danger.

***

Copyright Justin Barton 2013