27.

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

Explorations: Zone Horizon  (1 - 18)

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

Explorations: Through the Forest, the River  (31 - 50) 

The Corridor                                       

                                                                                 Justin Barton

Part Three

Steven

     When we arrived at the house, Gavin had just left, a few minutes before, with Kestrel and Molina. Apparently they had set off travelling southeast on a short-cut through the trees.

    It was John and Rob who told us this. Together they had just carried a box of firewood into the house. In the distance we had seen them carrying it through the kitchen door. We could hear Kate and Tamsin laughing about something, on the opposite side of the house.  A moment later, they appeared, also carrying a box of wood.

    We went to help them, but they put the box down, and came and hugged us.

    “Are you OK?” said Kate. I felt that Kate took in something from our eyes, when we responded to this, even though for some reason I had not been intending at that moment to start talking about what had happened. She had been looking at Ffion, as she responded by saying ‘Yes - very OK’ and then she looked at me.

    I could see she was wondering whether what had happened was between me and Ffion.

    And then Tamsin evidently focused herself. She had been watching our expressions, and Kate’s probing look.

    “Something happened” she said.

     We were sitting on the floor, in the study, or library, the sound of the fire coming from the stove nextdoor.  

    It had taken a long time for me and Ffion to describe everything. Now, as the last details were being recounted I was aware that although everything had changed, for all of us, right now nothing followed from the change. It was strange for something so momentous to have no immediate practical impact, but the challenge with which we were all confronted was getting back safely to the ordinary world, and what had happened provided no tangible assistance with this task. In fact, I sensed that a feeling existed between us that hearing the ‘call’ of the worlds  Ffion and I had visited might jeopardise our ability to return.  It was as if there had been two currents that had swept in different ways through all of us in the course of our narration - the first had been a bright rush of excitement and astonishment, and the second had been a worried feeling of concern – a feeling that had been pushed to the forefront at the point when we told everyone about  Ket’s warning that we were in danger.  I had been aware  that for the last half an hour only Tamsin had shown a full willingness to envisage the direction that had now appeared. Everyone else had become more subdued.

      Tamsin had become increasingly interested in the house in Somerset, saying that when we described it she was getting flashes of very positive feelings, or images, that she could not quite bring into focus. Her fascination now contrasted with the mood of those around her. By this time even Ffion and myself had been affected by the more sombre current of feeling.

     When we had finished we all speculated for a while about doorways in the Corridor, about the ring of silver birch trees and gorse bushes, and about the tall, thin ‘man’ who I had encountered. This in turn led us to the question of the Deep Hotel, and to Ket’s warning. None of us wanted to pile up guesses about the danger. Talking about the warning took us straight to what was all along the immediate practical issue to be resolved – when to attempt to go back.

    We decided we would not try to use the sound shadows room that evening. We had all eaten well, as a result of having the food given to us by Cass’s group, but it did not seem to be a good idea to attempt the crossing when we were tired. Ket’s warning had taken us rapidly to this discussion, and it had also made the outcome inevitable.

   “Let’s go when we’re fresh, and wide awake” said John. 

     I had heard someone moving around downstairs – they had dropped something, in the kitchen, it seemed. I had been half-awake, but now I woke up completely, drawn into full wakefulness by the sudden memory of what had happened the day before, as if the sound had been a trigger for the memory.

     It was like the opposite of the experience where you are having a beautiful dream, and then you realise it is not real.

     But could it really have happened? I thought about it, and the fact of being where I was, in a house in a parallel world, served as a support for the reality of the experience.

     I wanted to talk about it - the excitement of remembering it was like a wave of energy arriving.

     Ffion was deeply asleep alongside me. She had probably been awake for hours, while I slept, at the beginning of the night. It was perhaps only 5 or 6 in the morning, but I got up anyway, to see who was in the kitchen.

     I went very quietly down the stairs. When I got to the ground floor I could see Tamsin in the kitchen looking very abstracted, maybe even slightly distressed.

     She brightened when she saw me.

     “Can we go for a bit of a walk?” she said.

     I agreed, and after each of us finding an extra layer, we set off.

      As we walked alongside the lake Tamsin told me that all through the night she had been dreaming and half-dreaming about the place in Somerset which Ffion and I had seen the day before.

     “I think its very important, that place. Something very beautiful happened there, I think… Its like – its like I can hear it singing…”

     I was struck by the intensity with which Tamsin was speaking, but when I thought about my own experience the day before I suddenly felt certain that she was right.

     As we walked up the hill – without having talked about it we were walking to the top of the hill by the lake - I gave Tamsin my own impression of the place I had seen. I found it hard to say anything really coherent – I kept stumbling over my words. It was as if I felt that Tamsin had made the point already, and that what I was saying was redundant.

          “But yes,” I added, at the end, “Ffion said she felt something wonderful happened there, something amazing…”

     We sat down at the top of the hill, Tamsin sitting to my right, and a little in front of me, facing the view, the same as me. It was still extremely early in the morning. The sun had just risen, but it was behind a low band of clouds.

     She pulled out a small plastic bag, which contained some dried marijuana leaves.

    “I found this in the kitchen, but I guess it’s not a good idea.”

    I didn’t really have to think about it.

    “Yes, I don’t think it is, either.”

    “I was thinking about a tiny, tiny toke, that would be gone in a couple of hours. I have this feeling there is something we need to understand about that house, before we go back. As if we need to orientate ourselves, to help us to not get stuck, back in the ordinary world.”

   I felt a strong affinity for what Tamsin was saying.

    “But yes, I know – its not a good idea…” she added.

   It was true that we probably had two hours. We had decided we should sleep until around 8, if we wanted, and it was now only 5.15. I almost never smoked grass - the same as Tamsin – but separately, though occasionally together, we had both had some extremely powerful, positive experiences with it. But none of this affected my opinion.

     “We can’t afford to be at all messed up in the head when we try to get back” I said. Tamsin was nodding emphatically.

“And I have a feeling” I continued “that it could be like climbing into a smoking trans-dimensional  rocket…” I faltered, suddenly aware that my slightly glib words were having a new, unexpected impact upon me, because of what had happened only a few hours ago.

     “And hitting the take-off button” said Tamsin, completing my sentence, and putting the bag of marijuana decisively down on the ground, to the side of us, in a gesture of discarding it.

     There was a pause.

     “And I’ve been thinking recently that there is a part of you that somehow it doesn’t wake - or that it even suppresses. The most intense form of your intelligence…”

     As I said this, I was taking in everything around me, and trying to bring to mind the kind of intelligence I was thinking about.

     I maybe should have guessed what would happen.

     “Yes” said Tamsin.  I heard wonder and excitement in her voice.

     I had a sudden image of Ffion with a strained, encouraging look on her face. 

     There was a flash of white light. White light coming from everywhere.

     White light, coruscating with tiny electrical threads of colour, as if you were getting a glimpse into the nervous system of the world.

Tamsin

    Everything was white.  And the man from the party, where I had just been, was saying -

     “Its a burst, there has been a burst – we’ve been incredibly lucky. The party  – it was incredible, and everything has combined to make it happen – we were dancing in such an amazing way, but everything came together.  But you can never say with a burst, you can’t ever predict them.”

    I now believed  I had just been dancing with the man at the party – a party which had in fact taken place, although in reality I had never been to it.  I was five years back in time, at a time before I had met Rob, when I had not been in a relationship.

     I was walking in a white glare, with the man alongside me on my left. I believed I had just met the man. However at the same time  I had a background feeling that I had known him for a long time.  I was walking on rock and grass, with a cliff to the left, ten feet beyond the man, and a tumbled landscape of forested hills stretching away in the brightness.

     It wasn’t like an ordinary glare effect. There was a visceral shimmering brightness to everything, a bit like the brightness of mother of pearl, but at the same time looking at the landscape was a bit like looking at light-saturated film. There seemed to be tiny filaments of violet, green and pink light running through everything.

    “Dont worry” said the man – “you havn't burst.”

     I appreciated him saying this. I was acutely disorientated, and I needed reassurance. It occurred to me I should just breathe deeply and calmly look around me. As I looked at the ground, and took slow deep breaths, without me really being aware of it the ambient white light faded, or maybe stopped being visible, but because the light conditions were still not normal I didn’t notice the change.

      There was dew on the grass where we were walking, and the reflected sunlight was creating intense spots of rainbow light, in which the violet light was very bright. And when I looked toward the sun I saw there was an intricate corona of violet light around it, like a view into a cone with the sun at it’s tip, a cone made of delicate, curvilinear patterns of violet light.

Steven

     It was still immensely bright, and I found I was seeing the lake and the forest from a viewpoint inside the hill, as if the hill was secretly made of air and light, and I had floated down into it. I attempted to counteract the downward direction – I remembered the Deep Hotel – and I projected myself upward.

     Suddenly I was seeing a misty mountain valley, at night, and a small group of ancient pine trees. Then a moment later, I realised my perspective was from one of these trees.

     My perspective was that of a tree - a pine-tree growing at the bottom of a very deep mountain valley. This state initially had a sketchy quality, as if was an experiment in envisaging that had crossed over into being dream-like, but which was still a little unstable and minimal. What I was not really bringing into full awareness was that when the state slipped away for a moment I was seeing the sky from the lake as a kind of bright substance that had rooms in it – a void-filled sky substantiality that I felt more than saw.

   I was sure, with a kind of direct, bodily knowledge, that Tamsin had gone somewhere. I was convinced she had gone to find out about something vital, maybe about the place in Somerset. I also had an idea – which seemed to be supported by my tree-perspective being faint and fluctuating – that any time I wanted I could simply return to the hill.

     The feeling of being the tree was extremely pleasant, a kind of extreme, sensual delight. I was warm electric orange from my roots to the tips of my branches – warm electric orange calmly coruscating in the space of my trunk, like fire, but somehow brighter and slower in its rhythm. I was a world of perception of the colours of light, and of the surfaces revealed by the light in the world around me, such as the cliff wall.

        I felt convinced that everything was happening in a very short amount of time, and I had an idea that I was going to learn something from this new experience. When I felt worried about what I was doing, I would remember the flash-image of Ffion encouragingly waving to me. What I believed, without thinking about it, was that in a moment I would focus my anomalous state, and then I would be propelled forward – through the mountain in front of me - toward Tamsin, wherever she was.

     I had an unimaginably vast world of tree-memory. As my tree-state focused itself, this depth-space of memory started to surface.  I remembered a supernova, hundreds of years ago – bright enough to see during the day. But the memories would not fully appear.  There would just be a decreasing flickering of the recollection – like the memory of the nova – when I attempted the act of deliberate remembering.

    I was also a domain of singularly strange, fascinating dreams and abstractions that in the same way would not come into focus – or rather when I attempted to dream or think, I would go into a fugue, and then an unknown amount of time later I would come back from a powerful experience that I could not quite remember.

     Eventually I started to concentrate simply on perception. I was aware that too much time  must have passed. I believed, rightly or wrongly, that having explored this experience of being a tree, I could simply ‘wake’ myself, and be back on the hill.

      I became aware that I was closely surrounded by steep rock faces of mountains – that in fact I was in a deep canyon. Forty feet away in one direction there was a vertical rock face, and set into this cliff near ground level there was a series of wide rectangular plates of extremely smooth stone, maybe twice the height of a human being, and wider than their height. These plates of smooth rock were completely flat – they were anomalies in the world of surfaces around me. After a while I began to feel they were the key to understanding what was happening. They made me think of eyes that somehow were looking at me through closed lids.

Tamsin

     I tried to get clear about what had just happened. We had been dancing, and everything had been very special – very intense and wonderful. I had met the man while dancing, maybe three hours ago, and then a few moments ago everything had gone white. I began to feel perturbed, and I could feel fear on its way.

     “Its OK, I’ll explain everything, it’s a burst.”  said the man.

     “But its not surprising in a way,” he continued, “even though we’ve been lucky.”

     “We met a long time ago. I’ll tell you in a moment. Anyway, you’re completely safe, and the glare will subside in a moment.”

     “I don’t know if I want it to subside!” I said. “Its amazing. The patterns around the sun are incredible.

    “Yes, they are, aren’t they?”  But I wondered if he was seeing what I was seeing – there was not enough excitement in his voice. Or maybe they were normal for him.

     I looked at him. He was wearing loose green trousers, and a t-shirt with a sort of abstract ‘scimitar’ pattern on it, that seemed vaguely familiar from somewhere. I had told him on the dance-floor that I liked the t-shirt. And we had commented on the fact that we were both wearing green. I was wearing a green skirt, and a lacy green top over a white t-shirt.

     He gave me a big smile, that was striking in its poised quality, and had a kind of abstracted warmth, as if he was thinking about something he wanted to say, or was wanting to ask me something. He seemed to be in his mid thirties, the same age as me. He had short dark-brown hair, and the lithe body of someone who dances. He had been dancing incredibly well, I remembered now how he had danced – very fluidly, and sometimes very fast, but always with flawless rhythm, and a kind of wistful expressiveness in relation to the music, as if there was something he wanted to do, beyond the amazing things he was already doing. It had been when I saw this expression that I had kept getting an enigmatic, very positive feeling that I knew him from somewhere – that somehow I had known him for a long time.

     But what was happening now? Where was I? Somehow the concept of a burst, and the man’s confidence, had been allowing me to suspend my awareness of the discontinuity, and maybe my recent experiences were helping me to behave in this way, even though I believed myself to be at a point years in my past, and had no direct access to them. I shuddered, and for a second I had the thought that in some sense I had been abducted, taken unconscious against my will to this place.

     The man evidently saw what I was feeling.

     “Its OK, its OK. Stay chilled. There’s nothing wrong, in fact it’s magical - incredible - what has happened. There has been a burst, and we have made it here. We are not going to know how we got here, but we’re here. I’ll explain where ‘here’ is in a moment.

      I looked out from the cliff, and I could see nothing but a tangle of hillocks that were covered in forest, and an industrial looking building with plants growing out of its roof, and then a line of forested hills beyond that. There was nothing I could see that would substantiate what he was saying, but I was left with a feeling that there was something important that I had half-remembered, though I wondered a second later, whether I had been remembering a dream, rather than something that would help me orientate myself.

     “Come on” said the man. He gained my attention by coming in front of me, and touching me lightly on the shoulder. It was a respectful touch, although I could feel an electricity about it – he was refraining from making a pass at me, rather than not really wanting to…

     He then tapped the design on his t-shirt.

     “The right action now is to go to the house” He said this enigmatically, as if the words had a connection with the pattern.

“To my house, in fact” he added.

     Now I started to feel I had to work out why the pattern on the man’s t-shirt was familiar. I realised when I thought about it that it was like something I had painted once. I had completely  forgotten about that painting. I had seen the shape in a dream, and it had somehow been a special kind of diagram.  I had only ever sketched it, using oil paints that I had borrowed, and the details of what I had been thinking about when I made the design would not come to me properly.

    What the man had on his t-shirt strongly reminded me of the pattern from my dream – the colours were the same, as well as the shapes – a bright green, and a striking scarlet red on the edge of being crimson. The shapes on the t-shirt were a series of red sections within a green scimitar, or fluid triangle, sweeping upward in a diagonal, starting at a  point low down on the left, and ending wide up at the top on the right. The first red sections were tiny, and they were much larger at the top.

     It was of course impossible to know whether this was exactly the shape from my dream, but the feeling of it being the same made me feel that I must have seen this t-shirt without realising it, before having had the dream.

     “The right action is now to go to the house” he had said.

      I started to wonder what the man had meant about us going to his house, and what he meant by a burst – but somehow I was at the same struggling to remember what the diagram had been a diagram for…

     The man had been singing a strange song with a beautiful tune. He stopped, and suddenly very earnest, he said

     “When we get to the house, I’ll explain everything, I promise. Come and see the view from the cliffs!”

     We were now walking down a staircase cut into the rock of a deep gulley that ran from the right, stopping short of reaching the cliff by forty feet. The staircase curved round in a horse-shoe shape, spiralling down into an area of rocks and small trees that had a slightly Japanese feel to it. In front of us when we reached the gulley’s base was a small paved walkway leading to a welcoming-looking door in the wall of rock, a door that was painted an attractive blue-violet colour.

    The man’s earnestness had calmed me. I now felt sure that we had been driven to the vicinity of the man’s house, that we had been knocked unconscious by some drug we had taken, and that the man had delirially created the idea of a ‘burst’ to explain the effects of the drug, and the loss of memory. It all made sense.

     The man opened the door, and ushered me into a long hallway with a bright window at the end. Before reaching the end of the hallway we turned right and went through a series of furnished rooms, all lit by electric light, before emerging  into a very cosy, beautiful living room that had a long window with sunlight pouring through it. I went to look at the view, and found that the house was built into the cliffs.

     On my left, through a doorway, there was a something between a corridor, and a long narrow room, that had more cliff windows, all along its length. There was something very comforting and homely about the house.

     And the best thing of all was the view from the windows. The terrain beyond the cliffs was an evocatively beautiful world of rolling hills, forests, glades and meadowlands. The height of the cliffs meant that you were higher than the hills in the middle distance, so that there was a view across these to higher hills five or six miles away.

    There was a long sofa on one side of the room, underneath a slightly abstract painting of a sunflower, painted in orange more than in yellow, with bold curved sweeps of the brush.

     But where was I? The shock of the situation hit me again – I was with an unknown man, in his house, in the middle of nowhere,  and what he had been telling me should surely be seen as a sign he was insane. I didn’t even know the way back to the door.

     “Welcome to my house” said the man, in a quiet, slightly sad voice. “You’re totally, totally safe” he said. “And I’m now going to explain everything”

     “Sit down” he said.

     Reluctantly, I sat down on the sofa. I sat perched on the edge, with my legs together. I was wishing my clothes were less alluring, less feminine. Thinking about it, it seemed by far the most likely thing was that I had had a blackout that had somehow lasted from the rave to arriving on top of the cliff, and that the man had put something into my drink. The beautiful sunlight effects, and the man’s t-shirt had somehow combined to prevent me from seeing what was happening. My heart was pounding. I wanted to run to the door.

     “Its OK, really it is”. said the man, obviously seeing what I was feeling. There was a pained, sad note in his voice.

     “Look the first thing is – do you remember the dream you had when you were twelve about meeting a boy in a mountain valley, and building a den?”

     Immediately after he said this, the man indicated that he had to go and get something, and he almost ran out of the room.

    What he had said was a shock.

   It had been one of the most intense things that had ever happened to me.

   I had dreamed – if it had been a dream – that I had spent hours with a boy of my own age, on a sunny day in a clearing in a pine forest in a high mountain valley. The dream was that we both knew we were dreamers, asleep somewhere else at the same time, and that somehow we were able to be together for a few hours. We loved each other, in an immediate, unspoken way.  It was also true, inseparably, that we were dreamer comrades, given a rare, astonishing chance. The only way we talked about any of this was to say how lucky we were.

     A fundamental aspect of the dream was that the boy said, on two occasions “I don’t know if I will be able to get home”. And in some way he was unable to tell me what he meant by this – but what I understood was that if he told me our experience of being together in the dream would come to an end.

     There may have been a connection between the boy’s feeling he might never get home, and what we chose to do in the hours that we spent together.

     With great persistence, and with no tools, we set about creating a shelter from fallen branches, and from plants like ferns with long stems that could be woven into the branches or simply piled on top, along with mosses and lichens.

     At the very end of the experience, I saw that the boy had become pensive – and I also saw that his skin had gone pale.

    The sun was about to go behind a mountain.

     We kissed to say goodbye. There was nothing sentimental about that kiss, it was full of love, and full of the aching feeling that we might not meet again.

     The sun went behind the mountain. It was after we had kissed - we had been talking to each other for a few moments, and I looked up at the mountain, and saw the sun was no longer visible.  And I wanted to go to the next glade which still had the sun, and I looked back, and the boy was gone.

     And just before I woke up – the dreadful, terrifying thing – I saw a door open in the side of the mountain. It was as if, high on the rock face of the mountain,  a section of rock had slid sideways into itself, leaving a rectangular gap that would have been a hundred feet high. I felt that something not ordinarily substantial was about to slide out of the gap, something ethereal and impersonal.  But all I saw was the door, leading into darkness. And then I woke up.

   For weeks afterwards I was haunted by this dream, in a way that left me with no source of comfort. Whenever I thought about the boy I was filled with an inconsolable longing and sadness. I felt the sadness because I remembered feeling, as I came round from the dream, that the boy was very ill, and could have been about to die - and that this was what he meant when he said he might not be able to get home.

     So, what had the man meant?  I stood up, feeling a compulsion to move – I was being crowded in by two completely different possibilities, one blissfully positive, and the other one completely terrifying.

     I went towards the window, and looked at the view, making an effort to breathe deeply and slowly. For a moment the effect of the view was to make me feel positive towards the man – it was such a serene, beautiful expanse of forested hill-land, like nothing I had ever seen. But I felt the place must be a long way from London, where I had just been, and I was disturbed by the fact that I had no memory of how I had arrived there.

     The phrase ‘nowhere place’ came into my head, connected both to what I was seeing, and to my memory of the place in the dream. It had a very positive ring to it. Where was this?

     I then walked quickly around the room. It was L-shaped, with a bend to the left at the end – the door through which the man had left was on the back wall in this sideways extension of the space. I discovered that on the wall opposite this door was the design from the man’s t-shirt – it was the same green and red scimitar patterns, in the form of a painting, hung on the wall.

     I had been on the verge of remembering something at the moment I looked at the painting, but then the memory was gone.

     I could hear the man coming. It seemed the opportunity to run had gone. But I did not know the way back to the door - and in any case I wanted to hear what the man had to say.

     The man came into the room with a tray of food and drink. There was bread, cheese, butter, and a bowl of fruit. There were also two tall glasses of fruit juice. He put the tray down on a low table in the middle of the room, and then sat down opposite me, on a second sofa.

     He gestured that I should eat, but I shook my head.

     The man nodded in response, and then paused, looking out of the window, as if getting ready to speak.

     He then looked back at me.

     “I am the boy from the dream” he said.

     I looked at him, eyes very wide for a moment, wanting to believe him, but afraid that I was being tricked.

     He did look like the boy. I felt he looked the way the boy would have looked if he had grown up to be a man in his thirties.

     “All through my childhood I was ill.” he said. “But I – I found this place. This is another den. It was meeting you that woke me up, and taught me what to do. There was only one way out of my illness. Later on, when I grew up, I found the way of coming here with the entirety of myself, and I disappeared from my life, and left the illness behind.”

     “But I’ve always been looking for you.”

     “Don’t get me wrong.  I don’t expect anything from you, but I want you to know, I never stopped looking for you.”

      The man got up and went to the window.

    The man’s words had a disturbingly complex effect on me. I felt as he spoke that he was acting speaking almost flawlessly from a script, but this thought kept becoming the idea that the man had been wanting to tell me these things for years, and now he was saying what he had rehearsed. And the way he had moved as got up had irresistibly made me think of the boy from the dream. On an impulse, I went and gave him a hug sideways on to his body.

     He turned himself, and I hugged him with our bodies fully against each other. I was aware that there were tears in his eyes. But I was acutely aware of how a woman hugging a man is her pressing her breasts and her belly against him, and I was frightened of him misinterpreting my movement toward physical contact.

     The man did not push his crotch toward mine, but the way he hugged me communicated his desire for me.

     Too much desire, too little love.

     I backed away from him, but at the same moment he also stepped back.

     “I need to tell you” he said “so you can orientate yourself. This whole place is the same as the valley in the mountains with the den.  Its existence is separate from the existence of the ordinary world.”

     These words came out precise and produced no feeling of him talking from a script. They did reorientate me, but other circumstances blocked me from getting the wide perspective – I should have remembered then about the Corridor, but the problem of the place had somehow, erroneously, become entangled in the enigma of the design on the man’s t-shirt, and the thought of the dream about the boy took me implacably toward my past, and away from what could have woken my memories.

     So instead of remembering the Corridor, I felt wonder at the thought that I was in a ‘nowhere place’ like the one from my experience as a twelve year old.

     The man suddenly ushered me along a new corridor that led from the room, a corridor that was set back from the cliff wall, but which had small windows opening onto what seemed to be a long narrow room, facing the view, on the left of the hallway. There was a bathroom and toilet on the right, which the man pointed out to me. The hallway ended in another, short passageway, at right angles, lit by a big window – we turned toward the window and then went right into a bright room, with a double bed against the back wall, facing the view.

     The man stayed at the door, as I went in.

   “This is your room” he said, with strong emphasis, which somehow made me feel he was making something happen with his words.  “Its yours, while you’re here.”

     “Have a wash, if you want” he continued. “Chill out, take it easy, and then come back to the living room, and I’ll tell you everything else.”

     I did what the man had suggested. Or at least, I went to the bathroom, and then returned to the bedroom. My mind was racing, and I kept nearly remembering something that seemed to be fundamental.

     I liked the bedroom. This feeling was partly to do with an idea that the man had made it my space in the house – a protected space, with a barrier he could not cross without permission – but also because it had its own view of the forested hills and grasslands outside.

    Its existence is separate from the existence of the ordinary world.

     Looking at the horizon, toward the sky and the hills, I knew this was true.

     I felt a shiver go through me.

     But in that case, was he the boy from the dream?

     I went back to the living room, and found the man sitting on the sofa. He got up when I arrived and moved to the other sofa, which was in fact a kind of long cane chair, with fitted cushions on the seat and back.

     I sat down opposite him.

     “If this is not the ordinary world, where is everything from?” I asked, gesturing at the food, and at everything around.

     The man laughed, in a pleasant way, as if he was surprised by my choice of question.

     “I – I haunt the town I come from - as its very own shoplifter from another dimension. My connection between the town and this house has become so strong that I can go to anywhere I remember in the town, and back to anywhere in this house. If I go into a shop at night whatever I am touching, and intend to bring with me, or whatever I am carrying – it comes with me.”

     I was very ill for a long time – I feel in some way I have paid for everything in advance with the pain. And anyway  - I am creating a foothold here for everyone."

     The man sounded pensive as he said this – but again, I had an odd feeling of his words being pre-prepared, and somehow out of focus, so that their sincerity, or lack of it, was not perceptible.

   I looked at the man’s t-shirt.

     “You have to do the things” he said,  pointing to the pattern, “which might lead to a life-changingly positive outcome, but which will lead to some kind of more usual  positive outcome if this does not happen.”

     The man’s words were a description of what the diagram meant.

     I nodded. But where did the diagram come from, if the man knew about it?

     The man saw my question in my eyes. But then it was as if he was jolted in some way, as if he had nearly fainted.

    “Hang on” he said. “I think I need to rest. We could rest together if you want.”

    He went to a cupboard and took out two large duvets and two pillows, and laid everything down on the floor, creating a bed between the two sofas. Then he stood opposite me, by the cane-chair sofa, and looked at me - now with a slightly pleading look in his eyes.

     “I saw your dream”  he said, pointing to the design on his t-shirt.  Sometimes, when I’m lucky, I dream your dreams.”

     I felt very moved, and aware of a ‘ring of truth’ about what the man had said. Somehow something that should have seemed ultimately intrusive had been made to appear as an expression of love. But this would only be true if the man was the boy, as he was claiming…

     The man looked at me again, and my eyes met his. He looked wistful, and lonely, and his expression made me believe that he was tired, and simultaneously it reminded me of the boy from the dream.

     He got in between the two duvets.

     “Lets rest together” he said. “How bad could the worst outcome be?”

     He lay down, and after a moment of lying on his back, he turned and lay facing away from me.

     I didn’t know what to do. For a moment I was convinced the man was right, and that the result of lying down with him could only be wonderful or good in an ordinary way. But I remained frozen on the sofa, as if some other, unfocused form of intelligence was holding me there.

     And then I realised. If the man was not to be trusted, the diagram indicated I should not lie down with him. Because the worst outcome would be to fall into a trap set up by an impostor who was manipulating me.

      But how did he know about the dreams?

     Moments went by, and I remained sitting down, trying to get clear about the situation, and thinking that the idea of just lying down and resting was very attractive.

     After a while, the man began to shudder, a shudder that started as a very mild shaking, and then slowly became more convulsive. I felt sure that it was a convulsion of extreme sadness.  I went and knelt down by the man, and put my hand on his shoulder. He stopped shaking, and after a while he turned over and lay facing me, but with his eyes closed. He reached for my hand and pressed it warmly. I had to fight the urge to lie down alongside him.

     I got up, intending to sit on the sofa again, but then on an impulse I went to the window. I stood looking at the hills - looking at the southward horizon.

    And then I remembered everything. I remembered Rob, and the last five years of my life, and I remembered the lake house and everything that had happened.

     The shock was intense. I started to feel sick in my stomach, and I was on the edge of fainting.

     I looked over at the man. He had turned over again on his side, facing the opposite direction from where I had been sitting.

      I left the room in the direction from which we had come when we arrived. I tried to remember the way back to the door that led outside. Without too much difficulty I found it, but it was locked. I searched for a while for a key, thinking as I did so about the transition from being with Steven on the hill, to being on the cliff-top. It felt clear the man had been manipulating me with his statements about the party, and the ‘burst’ – that he had been deceiving me with vital false elements from which I would confabulate the rest.

     I thought about confronting the man. I had felt only affection from him, as opposed to aggression – so my hope was that once his deception was unmasked, he would back away from his plan, and help me to get back. The man in fact could even be the boy from the dream all along –if somehow he had gone wrong somehow in growing up, to the extent that he was prepared to manipulate me.

     With this thought I returned to the living room. The man was still lying in the same position, and he appeared to be asleep, judging by the gentle rise and fall of his breathing. Looking at his face I was given an impression of vulnerability, an impression I sensed was primarily the result of seeing him asleep. And then  I knew with certainty – he was not the boy from the dream. There was something cold about him that he was disguising.

      I went along the hallway to the bedroom the man had said was mine, closed the door, and sat down on the bed facing the view of the hills.

    For a while I attempted to get back to the hill above the lake by stopping my thoughts, and imagining the place in as much detail as possible. Nothing happened - after a while I found that I was staring at the sunlit spaces through the window, with my left hand making a repeating figure- of-eight pattern on the bed.

     I started thinking about the boy from the dream. More than ever before I was remembering him clearly. And suddenly I was having an experience of ‘hearing’ the boy talking to me. In a way this experience was not that different from deliberate imagining – it wasn’t as intense as simply hallucinating a voice – and yet everything I heard felt to me like an insight being conveyed to me.

     I heard the boy say “I died that morning, after the dream.”

     Then he continued, “but in a way, I’m alive in you.”

     I hitched up my skirt a little to be settled  more comfortably in my cross-legged position on the bed, still looking out through the window.

      I love you.

     “You’re alright” the voice of the boy continued, reassuring me – his way of saying I love you in return.  “You’re in a similar position to me, in a way being inside this house is like being inside the man, but you’re still alive.”

    “Who is he?” I asked, but asking this question seemed to be the wrong direction, or maybe it was just that did he did not know the answer.

     I felt that the boy had grown up within me, that over the years he had grown up, living a faint shadow of his life. It was a man who had just spoken, a man the same age as me. I felt incredibly tender toward him. Meeting him when he had been alive had woken me as a woman, in a way that had nothing  directly to do with sexuality – in meeting him I had experienced a love that was fundamental in me, that was me. And now he was living within me, a man living within a woman.

    I felt a warm, fuzzy sensation underneath my navel.

    The boy’s voice again.

     “You look wonderful – but wearing the clothes the man chose for you, it makes things worse. You must intend your way back to your own clothes.”

     I shuddered, and started to envisage the loose cotton trousers and the others things I had been wearing on the hill. I was listening for the boy’s voice, but I didn’t hear it again. Tears started to roll down my cheeks – I wanted to hear his voice again.

     But when I opened my eyes again I was wearing my own clothes.

Steven

     I was staring, with my tree-vision, toward the flat plates of smooth rock in the wall of the canyon opposite me.

    And then, as if an eye had opened, or had been fully detected, I was seeing through the rectangular stone plates to a coloured interior space within the rock – a space of vertical walls, flat floors and ceilings, a space of many different  objects, some on the walls, some on the floor, a cool, subtle display of colours and textures arrayed around and beneath rectangular voids of air.

      My visual perception had deepened, had become more coloured and intricate, though at the same time it had become less tactile, less visceral – a dimension of feeling had been taken from it, as if it had minimised itself in order to extend further.

   A moment later I realised I was seeing brightly lit rooms in an interior space cut into the rock. This gave me the feeling that perhaps the lights of these rooms had just been switched on.

   There were three extraordinary abstract paintings on a wall facing me, within the nearest room, and a thin, wiry sculpture to the right of them, maybe five feet high.

  Feeling dizzy, I discovered I was standing, in human form, in front of the glass of the window, maybe ten feet away.

    There was a flash of light, light that seemed to come from inside me, like a memory suddenly releasing its energy, and I felt suddenly that I was being pulled through an ocean, a kind of bright underwater world.

     I stumbled, slightly, and then recovered my balance. Now everything was in total focus. I was in my human body, in a wide, brightly lit subterranean room, full of abstract mosaics, paintings, and video screens, with thin pillars here and there, and easy chairs clustered in groups.

     On a wall thirty feet away in front of me there were the three abstract paintings that I had just  seen in the room by the canyon.

     I was looking around me, to my right, thinking about how the paintings seemed to have moved from one place to another, when there was a final transition. There was a sudden flicker of light and movement as a girl cartwheeled past me very fast, stopping abruptly before hitting the wall with the paintings. But when she came back toward me – she was a woman rather than a girl, with an indeterminate age, but she was extremely slim and evidently had a gymnast’s suppleness - when she came back toward me she smilingly pointed to three people who were standing casually in front of me, a little to my left.

     There was a man, and two other women. There was an air of sparkling bonhomie about all of them, as if they were all quietly sharing a joke with me. They all in fact seemed familiar, as if I had known them for ages.

      “You half recognise us, don’t you?” said one of the other women, the older of the two.

     I nodded, in a friendly way. I knew them all, but I couldn’t remember how I knew them.

     The man said he was called Col, a name which was utterly familiar to me – he had the calm, piercing thoughtfulness and sharp features of a scholar eagle… This was what I had always thought in the past. And I had also thought –that he was an eagle without a sky, and therefore not an eagle…

     I was shocked by what I was remembering. But these memories came without any further context or detail.

     The man was looking at me. Smiling, he ushered me to a pair of easy chairs that were placed opposite each other, a few feet to my left. Twenty feet beyond in this direction was a large wall screen, turned off, and the space between was covered in a beautiful thick rug, with a fluidly geometrical pattern, gold on crimson. Col was indicating that we should sit in the chairs. Instead I continued between them and went and stood half way across the rug.

    Col asked me to take a few steps back on the rug, for some reason, and he stood opposite me, six feet away, so that the centre of the rug, and of its radiating gold pattern, was between us.

     I was trying to work out how I knew them all - and suddenly I found I was seeing my life as a world of days that had spaces of blackness in between them. And what I saw was that the spaces of blackness, when I had been asleep, were times when I could not remember what I had experienced because it had been too extraordinary.

     And I saw that there were paths which ran through these spaces of blackness involving consistent, ongoing encounters that had been taking place for years. Not only that, these paths ran through the ‘day’ or waking zones of my life as well. And then I was perceiving a phrase for these paths, an act of perception that seemed simultaneously to involve a memory, as if I had perceived or heard the name before.

     But then Col spoke the name.

     “highways of the continuum”

      I looked into his eyes, and I was feeling a kind of ecstatic astonishment as I did so, because of what I had understood, because of what the name revealed, if you had forgotten, and I knew I had forgotten thousands of times.

     But then I felt Col receding from me, as if he was shielding himself from too much intensity, it was if he was suddenly twenty feet away, and looking over my left shoulder.

   And I knew something else. It wasn’t just that Col was not willing to fully take part in this insight, although this was part of what I had understood. I realised that he had been characterising the Deep Hotel pathways as highways of the continuum, that he had been looking towards these very specifically as he spoke. And what he had said was true, but in a subtle way it was not true.

     The Deep Hotel paths were indeed highways of the continuum, but they could never be seen as paradigmatic of these highways, because they were low, rather than high…  They were not highways in the fullest sense - they were not the astonishing, beautiful highways of the upper reaches of the World… They were, low, hidden paths with acutely restricted access, rather than free open paths high up in the spaces of the continuum…

     “All of what you are seeing is completely true”, said Col “but it is still the case that it was valuable for you to solve the problem of how you knew us.”

     I couldn’t deny what he had just said. I wanted desperately to remember about the continuum and its pathways.

     I sat down, on the rug, and Col did the same, sitting opposite me.

     I looked at him, and at the others,  and I realised that, although I now felt sure that I had been meeting them recurrently for a long time, during the phase of my day that I had been accustomed to call ‘sleep’, I could not quite remember any of the details. Events that had taken place with them kept being recollected for a split second, and then kept disappearing before I could bring them into focus.

     One of the two easy chairs I had walked between had been angled toward me, and the woman in the green dress was sitting in it with her legs tucked sideways underneath her. The “gymnast” woman was perched on the floor alongside her, in a very brilliantly balanced crouching position. As I looked at her she went into a different position, with her knees up, balancing herself on her sternum, a position which I once heard a yoga teacher describe as ‘the cosmic egg’. The woman made this change of position seem like a move to another way of looking at me, or of communicating with me.

   “This is Rithven” said the man.

     She smiled at me, an elfin smile, but piercing, as if trying to jolt my memories.

     “And this is Ada” Col was pointing to the woman in the chair.

      Ada was very attractive, and her dark green dress was flambouyant in a very feminine way – it had a satin finish, and a full calf-length skirt that came out from her body as if she was wearing a petticoat underneath. She looked like a pop star, but the kind of pop star who would have a Ph.D  and who would go off to live with an anthropologist in Peru after making two albums.

     I looked at her, thinking about her name.

     “Ada” I said, “like Ada Lovelace”. I was thinking about Byron’s daughter, who had been a mathematician, and who had been involved with the invention of the first computer.

     “Yes, said Ada, laughing. There’s a story about that. I’ve told you it before, but unless you remember, I’ll tell you again - and maybe that’ll help you remember!”

     Ada’s eyes glittered playfully at me.

     Col then drew my attention to the third woman, who was now sitting on the floor to my left, a few feet from him.

     She was sitting on her ankles, her knees in front of her, with her hands on her knees.

     “I’m Jane” she said. A calm abstracted warmth came from her. She looked as if she was in her fifties, but quietly there was a vibrant quality about her that was reminiscent of someone much younger. She had dark wavy hair that had streaks of grey in it. She was wearing a faded top with an orange splash-pattern that seemed to have been done with the batik method, a cream coloured waist-cut jacket, and worn, cream-coloured slacks. She had an ethnic-looking bracelet that seemed to be a wire bangle strung with tiny violet beads.

    Jane was very likeable, but she made me think of people who are involved on some level with amazing things, but never really allow themselves to be swept up by them. As I looked at her, I remembered a friendly but business-fixated woman who I had once met – she had been running a company that organised trips to India and the Himalayas.

      I looked back at Col.

     “When I set off I was with Tamsin, and I’m sure she – left with me…” Is she here? Where is she?”

     It was Jane who spoke.

     “Tamsin is not here. She went in a different direction from you. She is with a being who lives on the fringe of this world. She is now safe – she was in danger, but now she is not.

     Can you take me to her?

     “No” said Jane. “But when you leave here, before you solidify back in the Corridor, you just need to envisage Tamsin, and that will take you to her”

     “Thank you” I said.

     “We’re going to give you two things.” “They will be gifts of knowledge, one of which will be chosen by you.”

    Ada suddenly got up and gestured toward the screen.

     “Knowledge here is acquired through becoming what you are studying” she said. “The screen is just a starting point, to trigger the real process.”

   Ada got me to sit facing the screen and sat down on my right.

     I wanted to ask about the danger Tamsin had been facing. Jane had walked off, with both Col, and Rithven.

    “What has been happening to Tamsin?” I asked.

      “Well, it would make a long story, and what has happened has not been easy to see, but we know for certain that she has avoided falling under the sway of the being she has encountered.”

     Suddenly the screen was on, showing a strange shape, forming itself in a widening process of spherically wrapping around itself – it was a spiral, but in three dimensions, something I had never seen before.

     “I’m going to show you topography.” said Ada.

     She said this in a slightly wide-eyed way, that let me know something extraordinary was about to happen.

     I was watching the three dimensional spiral forming itself, curling round itself, its single linear axis widening as it curled round itself like a sea-shell.

     I framed the thought that it was like a sea-shell, and then I was a sea-shell, filled with the sound of the sea. But I was also the sea, a vast underwater world of sea, that somehow felt simultaneously like the sky, because it was bright, not dark, as if was water that somehow had its own light.

     And then I was simultaneously the sea, the sound of the sea, and a three-dimensional lattice suspended without gravity, with no down or up in any direction – a lattice made up of shapes that I recognised to be octahedrons. I remembered that diamonds could form as octahedral crystals. And at that point the sea became fluid diamond, and the lattice became filled-in with solid tetrahedral diamonds that were distributed in spiral lines that went upwards through the lattice, the spirals running through each other clockwise, and anti-clockwise, and all of them waving slightly with the movement of the ocean.

     For a long time at this point I saw what I believed to be the history of human geometry, which I saw superimposed on the planet – intricate diagrams and linear arrays mutated and progressed like a metamorphosing insect: within a wider, mutating space of distribution that made up the sky, and was always much stranger than its child on the planet beneath it.

     Then – at the end, I was Ada. Ada, who had exceptionally beautiful music playing in her head, as she watched a fluidly transforming world of patterns of violet, green, and black patterns on the screen.

     Being the warm sensuality of Ada - as she felt the delight embodied in the music and the oneiric abstraction of the screen – was a very captivating experience.

   There was a sound behind, and when she turned round I became Rithven doing a series of astonishing gymnast’s somersaults.

     Ada then turned back, and I knew that she was offering me a direction I could take. I was aware of this, and I knew I was on a threshold, a fundamental threshold – and then I was thinking of Tamsin, alone in another world somewhere, and Ffion, and the others. I had a fugitive image of a hand, that seemed somehow more like a paw, going upwards alongside the throat, into a swiftly closing metal loop.

    “You can learn to dance through metamorphosis,” said Ada. “Here you can take any form you want, and you can dance the transformation of your form.”

     Suddenly I was Ada’s femininity and sensuality and delight in an intensely, delicately expressive dance of fluid alteration, like a space of flame, or water without gravity – with all of the movement being a feminine abandon in the form of a blissful, delighted expression of the music into transformational movement. A delicate, wild cry of joy, sustained and intensifying.

     When it came to an end I was shocked by the beauty of what I had just experienced. It would only be later that I would bring into full focus the knowledge that although Ada had a breathtaking sensuality, she somehow had less love than human women.

     I was back centred in my own body.

     I didn’t look at Ada.

     “So, I get to make my own choice, now.” I asked.

     “Yes” she said.

      I heard a lot in her yes. It was as if my perception was now very finely attuned, as if becoming Ada’s perception of the music had heightened me. I couldn’t work out what it was exactly I had heard, but I knew this was a crucial moment.

     “Show me climatology, I said. “Show me meteorology - the atmosphere of the planet.”

     Ada smiled at me, with genuine warmth in her expression, and with a twinkle in her eye that made me feel she was impressed.

     Are you sure you don't want me to show you something else, like music? She said laughing. The atmospheres of music have a lot in common with the planet’s atmosphere – songs and pieces of music make up an incredible sky…”

     I could tell she didn’t expect me to change my mind. There was something very genuine about what she had said. I knew, in the deepest possible way, that Ada loved music.

     “Show me the planet’s atmosphere.” I said.

     Ada nodded, smiling. There was now a sadness about her, a wistfulness. As if she was sad to see me go, or was even longing to follow me.

     For a faint, unfocused moment – it was like an ordinary process of envisaging – I became a spherical world of air, feeling the sun on one side, and the light of the stars on the other. This was a powerful moment (there was also the feeling of calmness in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, and of turbulence lower down), but then, a moment later, it was as if I was diverted by my determination to reach Tamsin, but maybe also by the world which I was leaving. The wrench sideways from being the whole atmosphere was strikingly emphatic.

   I was several hundred feet above the ground. I could see the lake, but for some reason I was a mile west of the lake, looking down at the ground, reaching toward Tamsin, envisaging her.

     I wasn’t focused at all on being in the air. My attention was given to envisaging Tamsin – her smile, her eyes, her whole way of being – and simultaneously I was focused on the sun, as a source of energy for what I was doing.

     There was a moment when I was feeling Tamsin’s way of being and feeling the warmth of her eyes as she looked out toward green foliage through a window.  Then there was a kind of visceral ‘click’ which was inseparable from a feeling of moving instantaneously to a position several feet away from where I had just been.  I was suddenly aware that I was seeing Tamsin’s fair hair, as if a view of her hair had coalesced out of the yellow sunlight. She was sitting cross-legged on a bed, and I was seeing her from behind, and a bit to the left. There was an astonishing view of wooded hills and glades through the window. I knew this was no ordinary view. I focused on Tamsin but also simultaneously on the room and the world visible through the window.

     There was a searing flash of light, and for a moment I was in extreme pain, throughout my entire body. I blacked out.

     When I came round – it seemed to be only a moment later – I was lying on a wood floor, and Tamsin was shaking me on the shoulder.

     “Are you alright?” she said. “You fainted. And before you were screaming. Are you hurt somewhere?”

     I thought about how I felt.

     “I – I seem to be fine” I said, raising myself onto an arm.

     Tamsin had tears in her eyes.

     “I’m so glad to see you” she said.

     Tamsin had quietly told me everything that had happened to her. Before starting on the description, she had looked outside, and then closed the door. We sat on the floor near the window.

     “I think we have to get out of here” I said, at the end. “We have to find the way out, and disappear into the trees. Lets hope this is somewhere near to the house.”

     We had both stood up.

    “But it looks different out there from anything we’ve seen, doesn’t it?” I said.

     “Yes, it’s more open” – said Tamsin. “There are more open spaces, as if maybe its drier here… I don’t know, drier, hotter…”

     “What did the man say about it?”

     “I don’t think he said anything about it. He just agreed when I said it was a beautiful view. He was very enthusiastic, but he didn’t really say anything about it…”

     “Well, we do have windows here, but the only problem is that they don’t open.”

     We spent some time walking through the house looking for ways to escape from it. For whatever reason we both felt, as we searched, that for now we were the only people there. The main thing that struck me was that beyond the bedroom where we had started, in the opposite direction from the living room, there was a short hallway – round two corners along short passageways leading from the bedroom door - that culminated in a tall, wide window opposite a pine tree whose branches reached very close to the house. The ground was only twenty feet away, and the glass did not look too thick - it looked like ordinary window glass.

     We returned to the bedroom, and after discussing what we should do for a while, I went to the bathroom that was along the hallway in the direction of the living room.

     When I came out of the bathroom I turned left into the corridor, instead of to the right, with the intention of having another look at the painting in the living room. As I did this, an over-confidence remaining from my escape from the Deep Hotel was surely in effect – there had been an unspoken agreement between me and Tamsin that we should stay together. Tamsin was sitting on the floor in the open doorway of the bedroom, with a view along the passageway, but the painting was round the corner.

    When I got into the room a woman was standing looking at the painting. The room was L shaped, and the painting was around the corner of the room, so I had gone out of sight of Tamsin by the time I saw the woman.

      She was a very attractive woman, who seemed in some way to be faintly familiar. She had delicate beautiful features, large, sensual eyes, and curly dark hair. She was wearing a white blouse, which was tucked into a violet-coloured skirt that came down just below her knees. Her blouse was slightly transparent, and her breasts were visibly clasped in the lacy cups of a white bra.

     As she saw me, she was admiring the painting.

     “Incredible” she whispered, very quietly, gesturing with her eyes to this record of Tamsin’s dream diagram. 

    With her words she instantly triggered an impression (which in fact was primarily caused by me wanting to be positive toward her) that we were conspirators, and that she was on the side of me and Tamsin.

     With a vulnerable looking urgency – she was looking in the direction of the door through which I had come – she grasped me tightly by the arm, pressing herself against me as if she was frightened, and said, in an urgent whisper

     “Quickly - in here.”

    And she pulled me towards a door opposite the painting, a door which was in the opposite direction from the windows of the house.

     I went with her.

     Once inside the room, she closed the door.

     “Thank you” she said with intense, excited emphasis, like someone who has been through a long ordeal, but simultaneously like someone who has been longing for something, or someone, for a long time. There was a very feminine quality about the words.

     She hugged me tightly, for a very brief moment, and then stepped back.

     "I’ll explain" she said.

     But first – she paused for a second, with a slightly girlish smile playing across her face.

     “But first – look at me” she said.  “Do you remember me?”

     There was a poignant, slightly pleading look in her eyes. She was biting her lip, as if she was afraid I would not remember.

     I had just been in a similar situation in the Deep Hotel, but the similarity did not occur to me.  

     And then I remembered. She looked like a woman who I used to see as a child, who worked in a bank. I used to find this woman immensely attractive, although it wasn't quite a feeling of ‘falling in love’ a feeling that would occasionally sweep me away when I met a beautiful girl. I had been quite young – maybe between the ages of 8 and 12 – but I had seen her on countless occasions.  I used to watch her walking across the bank foyer, in her just-below knee-length skirts, and I used to feel that she was very beautiful.

Tamsin

     I had heard the toilet flushing, and I had heard Steven’s steps in the corridor. I had been thinking about the boy from my childhood dream experience – the boy the man had pretended to be – and I did not immediately respond to what I had heard. It was only when I thought I faintly heard a woman’s voice, maybe in the living room, that I was triggered into movement. I went quickly and nervously down the corridor – and found an empty room. I went along the bright passageway with the continuous windows, and not finding Steven in the room beyond that, I went back and went to the room with the door opposite the painting which had been ‘drawn’ somehow from what I had seen in my dream. I was suddenly feeling very shocked by the existence of this painting. I tried the door of the room – it was locked.  But on a shelf alongside it, I immediately noticed a mortice-lock key made of some kind of green metal. I tried this key in the key-hole, and it fitted the lock. There was no-one in the smallish room beyond the door, a room lit by a lamp in the corner, and no-one in the rooms beyond that, which were also lit by electric lights.

   I didn’t stay long there – I had become afraid that the lights would be turned out, and I would never find my way back.

   I closed the door of the room opposite the painting, and paused for a moment to think. It was then that I heard a faint muffled giggle – a woman’s voice. But the sound seemed to come from the other end of the back wall of the room.

   The sound of the woman giggling did not sound in itself like a malicious response to my predicament. It sounded more like a snatch of an exchange which had reached a level of volume high enough to hear. But on the other hand it did not completely sound like that, because I was not able to hear anything at all after the sound – it was as if the sound had reached a certain level, and coincidentally at that moment a door had been opened and then closed.

     I started searching for a way to the other room behind the living room. I could find no way of getting to it, and I could only find one other room that I knew shared a wall with this room.

Several times as I searched I heard  the voices of two women laughing, or talking happily together, and the voices seemed to come from somewhere in the vicinity of the space beyond the back wall of the living room, although sometimes they sounded much further back into the cliff.  The voices were always muffled, I could never quite catch anything, and in any case, most of the times it just was laughter that I heard. There was always the quality of hearing a louder, exuberant moment in the distance, but of only hearing it because a door had been opened at the time of the sound.

      In some vague way I felt that I was being taunted, and that the taunt was of the kind involved in sexual rivalry. As if I was being told that I had not had the power of attraction necessary to hold on to Steven. But this impression had no substance that I could examine, and I tried not to dwell on it.

     After a while the voices became those of a woman and a man. Again it was the sound of laughter, or exuberant, playful conversation. The voice of the man was not Steven’s voice, but nor did it seem to be the voice of the man who I had met.

      I had started to feel shocked by the extent of the intrusion revealed by the painting, and by the man’s deep-level knowledge of my dream as a child. My awareness of this intrusion had been suppressed by my elation at seeing through the man’s trick, by my experience of remembering the boy from the dream, and by the arrival of Steven. I had no doubt fear had been involved in my failure to focus on the man’s ability to know about my dreams, but I felt also that I had been lulled both by the man treating such an ability as an everyday thing, and by my last impression of vulnerability and earnestness on the part of the man, when I was watching him asleep.

     Had he been asleep? I thought.

     As I searched through the rooms I was aware that there were many extraordinary paintings and pieces of sculpture, scattered here and there amongst books, and other objects that were more decorative or functional in nature, such as vases and bowls, and lamps with intricate, coloured shades. I became frightened that I would recognise something else from one of my dreams, or that I would take in something disturbing, that would haunt me afterwards. I also had a growing fear of the back rooms - the fear that the lights would go out.

     I found myself back in the living room. I heard  voices again, a woman and a man laughing, sharing a joke together, but this time very distant. It was from the direction of the back wall, on the right, but it seemed further away than it had at any point before. But despite, them being faint, there was a quality of joy and excitement about the voices that was very striking.

     “They’re too far off” I found myself saying, to myself, without speaking. My words had a poignant, anguised tone. I was grinding my teeth.

     “They’re too far off” I repeated the words to myself, not really thinking about them.

     “Too far off - or too close” I heard these words like a kind of playful absent-minded continuation, coming from myself.

    Despite the surreal, impersonal quality of the idea – or maybe because of it – I suddenly felt sure that I should give up the search, return to ‘my’ bedroom, and not listen for the voices at all. It seemed it was up to Steven to extricate himself, the way I had done, and I felt that in some way listening to the voices was not a good thing. I did not really understand why it was not good, but I felt sure now the experience was being given to me by the inhabitant of the house, and I thought I should be active, rather than passively listening.

     When I sat down cross-legged  on the bed, facing the view, I was not thinking about falling asleep. In fact given how stressed and miserable I felt, it would not have occurred to me this was possible. I sat cross-legged facing the partly forested hills in the distance. A bit to the right there was a part of a ridge which was mostly grass-covered, with just a few trees silhouetted at the top, each one on its own. It looked like a beautiful place – I wanted to be there, rather than trapped in this insane labyrinth in the cliffs.

    Looking at the place calmed me, and somehow I fell asleep.

    The next thing I knew I was flying several hundred feet above the ground, and I was in the form of a falcon. In the dream, or whatever it was, this was a normal state of affairs. I was a falcon flying above forests and glades. And then a few seconds later I realised what was happening – that it was a dream, and that in the dream I was flying as a falcon. Somehow the intensity and pleasure of the discovery did not wake me up – perhaps its power to shock was less because of recent events – and the dream maintained itself.

     It was very enjoyable to be a falcon. I could feel the sun on my body and wings, and I could feel the air sensually ruffling my feathers. The movements of my wing feathers guided my movements in the air, as I thought about them I worked out what I was doing. The knowledge had been there, and then briefly it disappeared when I thought about it, returning once I had experimented and worked out the nature of what I was.

     It felt very beautiful to raise the feathers of a wing and swing round in a curve through the sky, feeling the joy of the motion and exquisite tingling of the pinions of the raised wing feathers.

     I was a female falcon, and this femaleness was something felt across all of myself.

     I was flying above terrain that looked like the country I had been looking at through the window. And in the dream I believed, without questioning the belief,  that I was in fact outside the cliff house, heading away from it at a good speed, high above the air. Or rather I believed that this was happening to me, but that my ordinary body was likely to be back asleep on the bed.

     Suddenly an extremely strong wind started to blow.

      It came from behind me, from the direction of the cliff-house. There were two tiny gusts, a  second apart, and then a vast hurtling mountain of air, like a hurricane arriving. The wind had the quality of being both hot and cold, and for a moment I felt it was like a gigantic hand reaching out for me, but then I felt it was something more impersonal.

    For a few moments I managed somehow to keep flying in the rushing storm of air. And then I was tumbled over, propelled forward, as I spun slowly, sideways in air that now felt more like water.  I tumbled forward, over and over - into blackness.

     *

     When I woke up I was lying full length on the bed, rather than sitting on it, and Steven was lying on the bed with me, fast asleep. I was lying on my back, and Steven was lying on his side facing me, with his right arm across my chest, near my breasts, but not touching them. I extricated myself immediately from Steven’s arm, trying as I did so to remember everything that had happened.

     I stood alongside the bed, my body towards Steven, but my ears listening for movements in the house, and my eyes looking at the light outside to try to work out the time.

     The house was completely silent, the way it had been earlier – and given what had happened this renewed silence could only have an eerie aspect. It seemed to be late afternoon outside, or early evening, there was a shallow tilt to the sunlight, and the sun had disappeared to the west, so that no direct light was coming into the room.

     My body had the memory of Steven’s arm on me. I felt, thinking about it, that the man – or whatever he was – was trying to throw me and Steven together. We would have a reason to not escape, and go back, if we were having an affair. I had a feeling that whatever he wanted from us – whatever was causing him to manipulate us and keep us captive - was on a level detached from all ordinary issues of possessiveness.

     I shuddered.

     Going around the bed, I attempted to wake Steven. He was deeply asleep. I decided to pull him onto his back, and then up, calling out to him at the same time. I did this, with great difficulty, struck by the heaviness of an inert human body. Steven had a relatively broad chest, and was nearly six foot tall, but he was slim, with very little fat on his body. Nonetheless it was a strain in particular to pull his head and torso up off the bed.

     I shook him, his head lolling, and although he straightened, and half opened his eyes, he did not in fact wake. I felt that when he opened his eyes he was seeing something other than the room.

     I lowered him back, but kept trying to wake him.

     He stayed in a half-awake, trance state, sometimes muttering faint indistinguishable words in a voice that was smoothly produced using a range that was different from the one he normally used. I realised that all of his facial movements were different from normal as well, in an unplaceable way, although it occurred to me that the Steven trance persona I was encountering seemed much more like a woman than a man, and in a disturbingly ‘real’, earnest way.  He was not at all ‘camp’ and did not make me think of a man imitating a woman.

    “Well, let’s hope you’re not pregnant” I said to him, suddenly – the words coming from nowhere.

    He was now silent, and had stopped moving. I wondered if the words had had an effect on him, but nothing else happened.

    It had been five minutes since I started trying to wake him. I was thinking of going to get some water to pour on his face, but then I shook his shoulder again.

     And he opened his eyes, and it was Steven looking at me.

     “Tamsin!” he said, looking shocked, and he shook himself, with what looked like a voluntary movement that then became a massive involuntary jolt or shudder, as if an electric shock had gone through him.

     He stood up and hugged me.

     “We have to get out of here.” he said, in a low, urgent voice.

    I saw that the colour had drained from his face. For a moment he seemed disasociated, his eyes not properly focusing.

     He shook his head. “I cant remember what happened, just feelings, flashes that I keep – losing. I just remember the beginning.”

     “Are you OK? I asked. “How do you feel physically?  I mean – you look pale.”

     He said he was alright, and then gestured me to follow him. But then he doubled back to the window.

     “I’m going to break the big window by jumping through it. The only thing is – after I’ve broken it, you must jump immediately. Be ready - if he catches you when I’m outside then I won’t be able to get back in.”

     I felt genuinely terrified as we went rapidly  through the short hallways that went around the back of the bedroom, and another room beyond it, it to the hallway with the tall window. I thought the man would be waiting by the window, or round the corner, in the next stretch of window passageway.

     There was no-one there, in the first hallway, with its view of the pine-tree, or in the second one, with its separated windows.

     “Stay there, back against the wall” said Steven. I took a step back to the place he had indicated. I was on the angle of the passageway, a little to the right of the tall window – maybe seven feet from it.

     “Shouldn’t you put something around your head, to prevent concussion?

     “No time.”

     I felt frightened for him, and worried that he was displaying a kind of cussed male attitude that could lead to him being badly hurt. But he was probably right.

     He went back to the far end of the hallway leading to the mirror, turned, paused for a second, and then ran full tilt at the window. At the end he threw himself off his left leg, and spun himself half round with his arm up protecting his head. As he leapt he let out  a furious cry – a gigantic scream of anger that sounded like the scream of a bird of prey.

     The window broke and Steven plummeted forward into the branches of the pine tree. Glass  falling all around him, he grabbed hold of a branch which swung down to another one. He lost his grip on the first branch, but somehow he had caught the lower  one, one –handed, and he was down on the ground.

     I knew I had to jump. I had got into the window, with a large residual shard of glass alarmingly on my left.

    Steven screamed – “NOOOW!!!”

    And I was propelled forward by his cry – I threw myself toward the tree, caught the same branch that Steven had – held onto it furiously like a cat, and when it lowered me down I was not jolted loose. Instead the branch snapped – and I dropped, with a fall slightly impeded by other branches, onto Steven, who somehow swivelled and half-caught me, falling over in the process, so that Steven hit the ground, and I fell partly onto him, and partly onto the ground.

     I stood up, and helped Steven to stand. We both seemed to be alright.

   We set off down the slope, moving with caution down what was a relatively steep hill. When we reached flat ground we broke into a fast walk, avoiding open spaces where we could be seen from the cliffs.

   We chose our route on the basis we should get out of sight of the wall of cliffs, walking south up an open forested slope. Beyond this hill, there was another slightly higher one, with some open grassy space on it. At the top of the second hill, we looked back at the cliffs, through a gap between oaks and sweet chestnuts.

   The cliffs were an unbroken wall of rock, with no windows set into them. We could see what we  were sure was the tree into which we had jumped. There was no window above it, and no lines of windows on either side.

   There was nothing to say, after we had become convinced we were looking at the place we had come from.

     Steven clasped my upper arm for a moment, giving it a firm, momentary squeeze. Then I turned, and I was aware that Steven turned with me.

     “We have to keep going” I said.

     “Yes” said Steven.

    As we walked, I suddenly had a strong feeling that everything which had happened since I woke up on the bed had been part of the process of escaping. Everything had been a building of a charge, so that Steven would throw himself at the window with full force and would  scream in a way that had been part of what broke the window, and so that I would climb into a space of broken glass and throw myself onto a tree from twenty feet above the ground. It was hard to focus everything I understood at that moment, but what I grasped was that our escape had primarily been an act of intent, even though on another level it had involved the energies and motions of bodies.

Steven

    As we walked my thoughts were very muddled and complex. I knew we needed a plan for the direction we should take, apart from simply getting further away from the cliffs. I also knew that soon we would have to make or find a shelter for the night, and I felt that after sorting out somewhere to sleep we should try to get back to the hill by the lake, simply by attempting to return to the same state that seemed to have propelled us out of the Corridor. But was this not the Corridor? Ada had talked about “a being  who lives on the fringe of this world”.

     Where we were was evidently not the Deep Hotel. But there was something about the sky which seemed a fraction more blue than it had above the terrains around the lake house – earlier I had felt it had maybe even been slightly blue-violet. And overall, everything seemed more southern – if not mediterranean, then somewhere in that direction. There were evergreen oaks here and there. I had not seen these before, and they were definitely a tree from more southerly areas than England. Everything felt like England, but not quite… The big glades and open areas of hill-land seemed to be the result of a lower amount of rainfall, although it might be they were partly the result of a larger number of grazing animals. We kept disturbing large herds of deer, and goats. And at one point, through the trunks of a narrow stand of silver birch, we saw twenty or thirty horses, grazing amongst gorse, many of them looking at us inquisitively.

    But on top of these lines of thought, I kept trying to remember what had happened to me after meeting the woman in the house in the cliffs. I remembered that  in the moment after realising that she looked like the woman from my childhood I had suddenly become this woman.  This had been an astonishingly – captivatingly - positive experience, I had known her whole way of being, her moods, attitudes, feelings, the specific nature of the feeling of being her, and of being her sensuality   This had happened in a short span of time and then – nothing. I could remember nothing. Or rather, I had the memory that I had been with the being whose house it was – who it seemed could take different forms, either female or male – but it was all like jumbled, fugitive dreams, and nothing at all would come into focus.  I remembered the being – who was in male form at this point - having been there a moment before at the very end. And along with this memory came the feeling that I had been with him for a long time, and that a vast amount of extremely intense things had happened. Given that I could remember nothing about these events, this was a very disturbing thought.

   When John had had his similar experience in the Deep Hotel he had been able to remember most of it afterwards. And he had become Kate, a woman he was in love with, and then afterwards someone who it seemed could have been a female version of him. I, on the other hand had become both Ada  and Rithven, and then had become a woman to whom I had been attracted as a child, a woman who had primarily stirred sensual attraction rather than love and longing. There was something about this difference that set alarm bells ringing in me. Before we went to sleep, the last night we had spent at the lake house, Ffion had told me about Shona’s warning. It occurred to me that I had absorbed this warning to some degree, but not nearly well enough. I had been far too confident after my  escape from the Deep Hotel, and I now wondered whether that had been an escape at all – had it been a disguised release in the direction of the real trap?

   I told Tamsin what I could remember about what had happened when I went to look at the painting. And she told me about her experience of being a falcon. What I found alarming about her falcon experience was that in some sense she had already travelled beyond where we currently were, but then had been pulled back to the cliff house. But somehow I did not feel that any trouble we were in was of that kind, and it was possible to shrug off this fear that our trajectory would merely repeat the sequence of Tamsin’s dream.

    I couldn’t really remember anything about how to build a shelter. We had to work quickly. The sun was setting, and it would evidently be dark in an hour.

     We found a large fallen oak tree, and we placed thin branches against this, and then wove bracken stems and other plants into the branches.

     We had to huddle together, for warmth. Tamsin put her arms around me, and fitted herself against me, shivering as she did this, presumably from the cold.

    I had always been immensely  attracted to Tamsin, and this intimacy moved me, and aroused me. But I made sure that none of my movements were suggestive of desire.

     “We have to find the highest hill we can find, tomorrow.” said Tamsin.

    “Yes, yes” I said, grateful to her both for displacing my attention toward our disturbing situation, and for her positivity.

     It was hours before I got to sleep. I would be awake for five or ten minutes, and then I would nearly fall asleep, but each time I would be jolted awake by a horrible dream that I could not quite remember. There was a viscerally unpleasant feeling that these hypnagogic dreams shared, and this specific feeling was new to me, even though I had had similar experiences in the past. At one point, I had an image from a dream of a kind of ghost-maggot, crawling in my body, and the spike of revulsion that came with this dream was the most intense instance of the feeling that came with the dreams. I became very afraid. And the fact that I was cold and uncomfortable did not help.

     I was thinking about the being who me and Tamsin had met, and wondering what he had done to me. I kept on getting an image of someone reaching into my head with grey ethereal fingers and twisting and warping what they found there.

     When I woke it was full light. I was cold but did not feel too uncomfortable – I was used to sleeping on the ground, from having spent a lot of time sleeping in tents. Tamsin was pressed against me fast asleep. I listened to the birdsong, and I felt fresh and positive. I thought about the horror of the night before, and it disturbed me when I relived it in memory, but somehow it felt distant, irrelevant, as if the morning had had the power to dispel whatever had been involved in the experience. I felt lucid, and full of delight about the place where we were.

   My only concern now – and it was of course an intense concern – was about Ffion and the others.

    I was also very thirsty, and very hungry.

   I wanted to leave Tamsin to sleep, because I did not know how disturbed her night’s sleep had been. Certainly for the first few hours I had been changing position a lot, and I guessed there had been little sleep until later.

     But in the end I woke her.

     “We should go and look for the hill,” I said. “And for water, and anything we can eat”

     We had gone up a short slope which turned out to lead to the top of an escarpment. Beyond this hill was a valley, or a wide are of flattish ground, and four miles in the distance there were the gentle slopes and long, flat top of a hill twice the height of the one  on which we were standing. There were a few trees on the hill, but most of the top seemed to be open downland. To the right the hill dropped down a little, and the continuation was covered in trees. The top was maybe a mile across, and to the east it dropped down suddenly into lower hills, which again were forested. Judging by the sun the hill was to the south of us, and a little to the east.

     Tamsin had found wild strawberries, which was an extremely welcome discovery. Further down the slope they were everywhere, and we ate a large number of them. Even though they became cloying and unsatisfying very rapidly, it still felt good that we had given our stomachs something to digest.

   We were also lucky that the valley had a stream in it, a small winding stream, the water flowing past large patches of watercress. There were also masses of a pinkish-purple flower that I thought might be called purple loosestrife.

   We checked quickly upstream for dead animals, or dung, and having found nothing we drank urgently, feeling very fortunate – the water tasted wonderful, clean and cool, with the soft, bright taste of water that has recently been in the sky.

   Two hours later we were more than half way up what seemed to be the main slope of the hill. Looking out to the east we could see ranges of hills, almost all of them a patchwork of open spaces and trees. Nothing of what we could see looked like the near continuous forest of the area around the lake house. The only thing that was keeping us calm was that near the base of the hill we had found a path. This path went up the hill in a series of zig-zags, and our hope now was that when we got to the top, and looked from the opposite side, we would see Melford in the distance. We had no reason to believe we were to the north of Melford, but the very existence of a path was cheering – it would surely lead us somewhere in the end where we would find people who would help us orientate ourselves.

      As we got near the top of the hill it flattened out into spaces of bracken and heather, between scrubby oak trees, and hawthorn bushes, and silver birch trees. We passed a tree with honeysuckle growing in it, its flowers looking exquisite and almost alien, in their intricate clusters. The air was filled with their dreamy, evocative scent.

        We followed the path round some gorse bushes and found ourselves in a wide area of bracken and heather with patches of grass in between.

       There was a woman walking towards us along the path. She smiled at us, and waved. She was wearing a long lilac dress. She was slim, and from a distance gave the impression of being in her fifties or forties, but as we got nearer, I began to feel she could be much younger.

     We met at a place where another path crossed ours.   The woman brushed her hands on her dress, and said, laughing  –

     “I’ve just released a rabbit from a snare.”

     She took Tamsin’s hands, and pressed them in a warm gesture of greeting, and then did the same with me.

     “My name is Miranda” she said. “Well done, getting here”

     I didn’t know if she meant the hill, or something else.

     We told her our names. The woman gestured that we should sit down on some grass by the path.

     “Where is here?” I said, smiling, and wondering how difficult a question this would be to answer.

     She laughed, and looked at us for a moment, as if gauging our understanding.

     “ Well, here is a kind of ‘nextdoor’” - a bit beyond the Corridor, but closely connected to it. But from your point of view, it’s where you get to understand answers like that one!”

     She laughed again, her eyes twinkling.

      “And from an overall point of view you might say that this is my small arcadia. Miranda’s arcadia.”

     “So do you live here?” asked Tamsin.

    “Well, most of the time I’m far away - but this is a place to which I return.”

     I was looking at her, and I had a bizarre double feeling – a feeling both that she was much older than us, and at the same time much younger. I had an image of a young woman – intensely alive, and bright, somewhere in the countryside near a village, at a time I knew was many hundreds of years ago, perhaps sometime in the 1400s.

     I shook my head, struck by the sense of vitality, and nowness in the image.

     The woman looked at me.

“You just had a glimpse of me at the time when I was becoming aware of the threshold” she said.

     I paused. “How long have you been - coming here?” I had not known quite how to complete my question.

     “A long time. I have been intensely lucky, though of course I had to learn to take advantage of my luck.  This… dream-island … has been here for much longer than the Corridor.”

     I kept getting an image of a woman in her twenties, with curly dark hair, and with an incredible wild vitality, an exuberant intelligence and sensuality. What shocked me was that I felt this was who she had been when she was younger, but that she had not lost this way of being - in fact this vitality had been intensifying. I felt suddenly there was far more to her than I could see.

    The woman looked at me.

    “Yes – the woman you are seeing is also me, in fact she is more me than I am.”

     Tamsin was looking at the woman with eyes open very wide. There was an excitement in her face I had never seen before.

     But… can I ask, said Tamsin,  “who are  you? I mean - what do you… do?”

     The woman laughed. “I like your change of question”

     “You could say I’m an explorer of eternity. And that’s what I will be for as long as I manage to stay alive. I explore the spheres and dimensions of the world, out of love for the world. And love is everything we thought it was, and much more. When you love, in a magical sense, you become who and what you love, you become a new manifestation of those who you love, and of those worlds who you love.”

     Tamsin seemed to be following what the woman was saying with intense concentration.

     “Are you… a human being, like us?”

     “I’m human-across-a-threshold. The potentials of human beings are much vaster than is generally thought. I’m a human explorer of eternity! Unlike the being who you encountered earlier, who is not human, and is not an explorer of eternity.”

     “What is he?” I asked.

     “He’s a familiast. He creates illusions of deep familiarity by perceiving your memories – he appears to you in the form of someone met fleetingly who you’ve always loved, without you ever having had the chance to explore this love But he lives off the energy of those he encounters and blocks them from becoming who they are.

     He loves to see emergence worlds like this one – and if this love wasn’t genuine he would not have managed to set up his domain so that it has a window on mine – but he doesn’t want to take any risks by actually going into these worlds, let alone going further out, through outward doors... He is someone who lives by the sea and wants to hear people tell their ocean stories, and wants to look at what has washed up on the shore, if people bring it to him, but he will never leave his house, let alone go out on the ocean.”

     “And now – I have to tell you. There were two rabbits.”   The woman was looking at me.

    “You were the other one” she said

     “I was walking in the countryside in the ordinary world, and at the same time I was faintly aware of you both here, in my world.”

     And I heard a noise at the foot of a hedge. It was a rabbit in a snare. Sometimes it is the time to intervene. You can only do it when it is the time. It is in the interests of everyone that we all primarily keep moving forward, and only intervene when the time is right. I released the rabbit from the snare. And then I came here. Early this morning.”

     The familiast had left an entity within you - a kind of clone, a new being. And he had succeeded in doing this because one of your selves – a female self you created very early in the likeness of a woman you used to see as a child -”

     “The woman from the bank” I said.

     “Yes,” she said, laughing. “The familiast set things up so that this female self would be enamoured of the intruder entity, so that she would be emotionally connected to him by sensuality, sexuality, and love – enough love for it to work. You were in deep trouble –one way or another you would have ended up back in the parent familiast’s world.

     However - I simply showed your female self who the new familiast entity was – I let her see its essence, rather than how it wanted to be seen. Once she could see it clearly she rejected it, and at that point it literally had no source of energy. It was in fact surrounded by your energy world, none of which would give it any energy, and because of that, it was annihilated…”

     I felt faint, on the edge of vomiting. I felt sure I had gone white.

      “Do you know what happened to me?” asked Tamsin.

     The woman nodded, with intense warmth in her eyes.

     “I think I know what you’re asking, and yes, I think I do”

      “Did the boy really exist? The boy who the… familiast used to try and – trick me… Did he exist? What happened to him?”

     “Yes – your dream as a child was real.” The woman paused.

     “The boy died that night. But his dreaming body came to you afterwards. The dreaming body of a dead person continually fades – like a fading memory – but it can in a partial sense continue if it fuses with a form of its spirit-world created by and within another person. The boy was young with an intense spirit, and you loved each other intensely, and therefore he is in fact in a sense still alive, living within you, as one of your selves. In one sense he is more him than you, because of his origin, although it is true that you provided all of the new wild, deep energy for him – so primarily he is one of the selves within you. However, what I can say is that he loves you more than it is possible to imagine.

      Tamsin was bent forward slightly, gripping her right wrist extremely tightly with her left hand. There were tears streaming down her cheeks. I knew that in part they were tears of joy, but that words would not be able to touch the emotion she was feeling.

    “And now, something astonishingly positive!” The woman laughed.

     “I’m going to show you the emergence of the Corridor. It had already been in existence, in an incomplete form of itself, for thirty years, but this is the point of the full emergence. You will see it from the point of view of one of the groups who were part of this threshold-crossing.”

     I saw Tamsin straighten herself, suddenly. She had realised before me. Even though I had been there.

      “There were many groups all around the planet who were part of what happened, and who went over with the entirety of themselves to the new parallel world. But the number of groups was not at all connected to the population of the area of the planet. In your place of origin – the island that is my place of origin as well – there were only three or four. But for instance, five Yanomami groups were part of the emergence, and crossed over, despite their whole population only being a few thousand.”

     I heard the love in the womans voice.

     “Just let go” she said.

     There was a silence. I hadn’t expected her to say this – and to stop speaking at that moment. But then I did what she had said, as well as I could. I concentrated, without thoughts, on perceiving the sky, the hilltop, the breeze.

    Suddenly everything changed. I was hearing Miranda saying ‘just let go’ again, and with a jolt everything became a kind of calm miasmic darkness, full of forms and full of feeling.

     And then I was opening my eyes, even though I did not remember having closed them.  Me and Tamsin were standing on either side of a path in front of a low grassy hill. In front of us were a man and a woman, the woman standing opposite Tamsin, who was a few feet to my left, and the man standing opposite me.

     We were at the place in Somerset, where I had been with Ffion the day before.

     The man was slim and slightly shorter than middle height. There was a wide-eyed, friendly quality about him that was very singular, but it was inseparable from a quality of fierce, wiry strength.

     The woman was very attractive. She had a wide, lovely face, with big eyes, full of a kind of calm delight. She had dark hair, slightly wavy hair, and was wearing a white dress.

     Suddenly I had a flash of being them walking up the hill together, of being the man walking up the hill with the woman on his left, of feeling how he was utterly and beautifully in love with the woman. There was an incredible intensity to this flash, both because of the power of the feeling involved, and because it felt like a vital, extremely special memory, a memory of a moment before something momentous happened.

      “Let’s sit down,” said the man.

     As we sat down, he continued, “what you just saw is where we’re going – is what you’re going to experience, but we’re going to attune you first, so you can do it, so you can sustain it.”

     I had an intuition about what we were going to experience, and I felt a kind of shocked gratitude and excited anticipation that left me speechless.

     “Miranda has given us the additional energy to make this possible” said the woman, looking at Tamsin and then at me, as she spoke. “And we are very glad to meet you, and to give you this  experience, this threshold-crossing.”

     The woman gave us both a huge smile, full of love – a smile that also had a twinkle in it that made me think of summer starlight.

     “I’m Sara” she said.

     “And my name is Arden” said the man. I noticed as he said the name that he spoke with a slight Irish accent.

     Suddenly, I was coming out of the house, as Arden, with Sara alongside me, and we were pausing for a moment on a sort of raised patio, full of cracked stones, and wild flowers. It was a very mild early-summer evening, with a gentle, but gusting breeze, that was making Sara’s skirt swirl. I knew somehow, I don’t know how, that this was the beginning of the same walk that we had glimpsed a moment before.

     “We don’t have long to bring this together”, said the future Sara who we had just seen, and who was now an unseen companion in the process, a presence located behind and to the left. “So you both need to focus”

     I watched a gust of wind arrive, and I saw Sara twirl playfully as if she had genuinely been spun round by the wind. But then immediately she stopped herself, as if not wanting to appear coquettish, and she took the lead, going down three steps onto the path. Primarily I was Arden seeing Sara, but the voices I was hearing ensured that at the same time I knew who I was, and I knew that Tamsin was living Sara’s experiences, so that looking at Sara was also simultaneously looking at Tamsin.

     “We had been here for nearly a year,” said Sara. “We had all arrived in July the year before. Seven of us. The whole thing was dreamed up by Julie and Kelvin. But mostly it was Julie’s idea. It was Julie’s estate. But it was Julie who came up with the vital, fundamental part of it.”

     Arden had paused to look at some extremely beautiful high clouds to the south east. They were obviously very high, and they were both ragged, and delicately wavy in form, not really at all like any cirrostratus clouds I had seen. Arden wordlessly pointed them out to Sara, who looked at them, and then looked back, eyes very wide, nodding happily, but saying nothing.  It was clear that not speaking on the walk had just come to them, by mutual consent.

     I walked down the steps. I was acutely, joyfully aware of Sara’s presence. We were not holding hands – we had done this countless times in the past – but today we were walking together a few feet apart, our hands two feet away from touching.

     “I didn’t really know Sara when we arrived.” Arden’s voice, and from now on it was Arden who spoke.

     “I was Kelvin’s friend, and Sara was Julie’s friend. We had all come together to attempt an exploratory, creative way of living which was about breaking across thresholds of awareness and understanding – thresholds of existence. Julie and Kelvin brought together everyone they thought would be alternative and poised enough to hold on, keep it going.

     Suddenly I was seeing a party in a living room where I was dancing with Sara, and I was aware that Tamsin was seeing it too, from the eyes of Sara.

     Sara looked astonishingly beautiful as she danced.

     Around us were four people, three women and two men. I knew that most of them had just been dancing as well.

     “Kelvin, Julie, Helen, Paulo, Rowena”

     Instantaneous impressions –

     Kelvin, a dreamy, implacable sharpness, wearing black, but somehow very positive and gentle.

     Julie –  warm and poised, a warrior thoughtfulness, enigmatic, fiercely protective of her friends.

      Helen, a scholar visionary, discovering her paintings were a doorway to wider realities.

     Paolo, a laughing, shy man, who had been through a lot, and had nearly died, and was now dedicated to becoming continually younger in spirit.  

      Rowena – a tough, edgy, woman, whose love for her friends was allied to her love of what lay beyond  the deadness of ordinary life.

     But these were fleeting impressions, there and then gone, triggered by the names. I had eyes only for Sara.

     “I fell utterly in love with Sara”. Said Arden. “This is only the third week. I could hear wonder in his voice.

     “How did we hold on so long?” There was a quiet emphasis in his voice, a quiet, ultra-intense astonishment about what had happened over the whole year that he was telling us about.

     “There were two basic principles for our community. The second one dreamed up by Julie – genuinely dreamed up, it came to her in an intense dream, and then she talked it through with Kelvin.”

     I was walking with Sara on the path alongside the dried up lake bed, We had nearly reached the foot of the slope, the place where I had been them a few minutes before.

      “There were two principles. The first was that we should collectively do everything we could to reach a new, more awake and free level of existence.

     The second was – we could not have sex with each other.”

     There was a slight pause.

     “Me and Sara were unbelievably, achingly, mind-blowingly, beautifully in love with each other.

     And that was it. That was Julie’s idea.The fundamental thing on every level was being in love. Being actively, intensely  in love, with the full approval and creative support of those around, and yet not having sex, not letting anything interrupt the intensification, the magical upward spiral.

     There was silence. A silence that was filled with the intricate song of a bird, singing from a tree to our right.

     I knew that the Arden who had been speaking had now gone, and so had the future Sara.

     I was Arden walking alongside Sara. In a direct, perceptual way I knew that Tamsin was within Sara –  faintly but continuously I felt Tamsin’s feelings, and perceived her insights as they happened. But primarily she was Sara, and I was Arden – we were living their walk together.

     And then I let go into being Arden. And as I did this he in turn let go into being Sara, her skirt blowing against her legs, her hair blowing against her neck – he had let go into being Sara, and the bright summer evening, and the song of the bird.

     And then – I was Sara. I was seeing through her eyes, feeling her movements, seeing me, Arden on her right. I was feeling her clothes against her skin, and the wind on her face and in her hair, I was feeling what she felt, the specific, lucidly sensual world of love she was at that moment.

     And then I was both of us, utterly in love, both of us at once, walking up the hill, both of us silent. Both of us knowing what was happening, each of us seeing through two sets of astonished eyes.

     How could I deserve someone so beautiful, I thought. How could I be worthy of her?

     And then I was back as just myself.

     I looked over to Sara.

     Her eyes were very wide. She was nodding at me with a look of intense astonishment and joy on her face, and almost immediately, and with intense urgency, she put a finger to her lips to stop me from speaking.

     We kept walking, nearly at the top of the hill. I focused again on the day, the birdsong, Sara, and once more I was Sara as well as myself, and she was me as well as her.

     Then we were at the top of the hill, and by this time my experience of being Sara was an experience of love that was also sensual and sexual to an astonishing degree, because I was the arousal of her body, and she was the arousal of mine. But as we looked out toward the sky, somehow we did not turn in toward each other in a sexual meltdown. This was nothing to do with the rule – that did not even occur to us – it was because a direction that was even more powerful was suggesting itself.

     Instead of turning inward we reached out, becoming what was around us, becoming the delight of the thrush singing, the quiet, deep-amber feeling of the tree.

     And then – it happened. The whole estate blew into us. In a wave that seemed to come from the south suddenly we were what was in front of us, and then also the lake bed and the slope of the hill, and then the house, and everyone in  it.

     We were the wind gusting brightly across the grass, we were a fox stalking a bird near the edge of the woods, we were the bird as it flew up, we were the love and delight of Julie, putting the very last touch onto a painting of a bird in flight, her eyes widening as she began to realise, with astonishment what  was happening, we were Rowena and Paulo dancing, still unwittingly, full of joy, on the cracked stones of the patio, we were Helen  who had been watching the dancing, suddenly standing up, aware of being us on the hill, as well as her, down by the house. Sara, Arden – she whispered to us, YES! We were Kelvin going to the window alongside Julie, balancing himself as if he was on a ship, his strong, warm playfulness seeing the small perspective from his body, and the wider perspective of all of us and the whole place - getting a twinkling corroboration from Julie, and then throwing himself into the wave of becomings. We were a column of opalescent light, shimmering like a tornado above to the right of the second hill, beyond us, we were iridescent energy lines running everywhere and through everything. We were astonishing doorways opening.

     The feeling of all of this was better than sex - but better than sex in the strange sense that it was utterly beyond sex, and yet included the wild rapture of sex within itself.

     And then at the very end, I was no longer Arden and Sara, I was Tamsin as well as myself, and she was me as well as her, and we felt the intensity of our love for each other – and then there were black gaps opening up in the sphere of everything around, gaps as black as the gaps between the stars, only they were not really black, somehow they were full of light and energy, and then they joined together, spread out across the entire space, and then we were surrounded by a sphere of the brightest, most intense light we had ever seen –

 

     There was an inconceivable brightness alongside me, a vertical immensity of feeling and intent. I was coming back from somewhere - I had come from out of the brightness, and now I  tried to remember it. In remembering it, suddenly it came back, only I knew this was now, not a memory.

    For a moment I was a sphere of people and lands and skies, the immense now of the Corridor, I felt everyone, and I felt all the places where the Corridor was joined to other worlds, and I was a cat in Patagonia, all lucidity, and focused intent, and I was the singing of a song that was given to me simultaneously by three people in different continents, one of whom was a Yanomami woman whose voice had a brightness like sunlight,  and I was two men on  a mountain  in Tuva laughing with joy, and I was the feeling of starlight  and sunlight across a spherical world of sky, and I was a flock of birds wheeling over a jungle, turning south toward the equator.

   At that moment I knew things about the Corridor that were too immense and other-worldly to be captured in words, and then they were gone, leaving no memory of them, but only the memory that the knowledge had been there, and that it still was there, waiting for the time when I would have energy to access it.

        I found I was standing with Tamsin in a small ferny glade of a forest, in what I knew was the Corridor. There were two fallow deer standing ten feet away looking at us. I looked into their eyes, and knew they were on the same level as me and Tamsin, that they had freed their lucidity, like the cat I had just encountered.

       The deer looked at both of us, and then they turned and moved out of sight.

     We were both speechless. I felt a joy that was utterly beyond my ability to express it. I looked over at Tamsin, and our eyes met. It was clear that she was feeling the same as me.

     We looked away again in the direction the deer had taken.

     There was silence for a moment. I was thinking now about Tamsin.

      “Can I give you a hug?” I said.

     She nodded, happily. I hugged her tight, and she hugged me tightly in return.

    “Take care of yourself,” she said, as we separated. I knew exactly what she meant.

    “You too.” I said.

     Although we both felt sure we were in the Corridor, we did not know where we were. Our knowledge that we had just been helped forward in extraordinary ways – by Miranda, Sara, Arden, and others – left us feeling that we were probably not far from the lake house, but we had no bearings for orientation.

     We were both extremely hungry.

     Up ahead there seemed to be a small stream. We walked to it, and found it was flowing from left to right. We drank from the stream, looking around us.  

     South was more or less on the opposite side – the sun was out, though there were big clouds to the east – and the ground in that direction seemed not to rise for some distance, though it was hard to tell. To the northeast the ground was rising quite steeply, the tree-covered slope of a hill could be seen.

     “I think that’s the hill” said Tamsin. “The hill by the house”

     “And this is the stream from the lake,”  I said “if that’s right.”

     We set off walking, going as fast as we could. There  was a very disturbing urgency in the background of our minds, that would come into the foreground the moment we knew where we were.

     It became impossible to walk on the near bank of the stream because of thick undergrowth. We had to double back a little and cross the stream on a fallen tree.

     After a short while we saw water through the trees. It was the lake.

     We stood on the bank looking at the house. It was an immense relief to see it, and to see the familiar surroundings – the grassy slope of the hill rising to the left, our starting point for our inadvertent breakthrough to other realities. But the relief could only be extremely short lived.

     What would the others have done in response to us being missing? They must have been going mad, and how could we know how long it had been? And had they attempted to find us? It was this thought in particular that was terrifying – I kept getting images of the red door in the house that twice had appeared and then disappeared.

     “There’s no smoke from the chimney” said Tamsin.

     I was biting my lip.  It was the middle of the day, so it didn’t really mean anything, but it was also true that we could hear no voices.

     “Let’s move.” I said.

     There was no way back across the stream, and we decided to take the path around the south side of the lake.

     As we walked I kept listening. But it was Tamsin who heard something.

     “I just heard voices – I’m sure.”

     We went to the bank of the lake. There were two figures on the top of the hill, one of them sitting down.   The one who was standing up seemed to be John, and I was fairly sure the other one was Kate.

         We both of us started calling out.

     “We’re here! We’re coming!”

     In the Corridor quietness our voices carried. They both heard immediately, and we were easy to see.

     We started running, and before long we were crossing the lake’s inflow on the little wooden bridge, and half-running, half-walking along the other bank. John had come towards us, but for some reason Kate had stayed up on the hill.

     I felt a kind of shiver of dread when I saw that Kate had stayed. There was something –

     John was overjoyed to see us both. He had stopped, but then after we had slowed down to a walk again, about 50 yards from him, he looked over his shoulder toward Kate, and then ran towards us.

    After saying how glad he was that we were OK, and after we had hugged, he was cut short in his celebrating.  We had both started asking where Ffion and Rob were, and it was obvious this was the reason.

     He paused, feeling the impact his words would have,

     “I was hoping they were with you, or that you knew where they were.”

     Before he had finished his sentence, we were both asking him what had happened.

     “Come and say hello to Kate”, he said. “Look, I’ll tell you the minute we’re up there. And – maybe you two coming back will sort everything immediately. Stay – stay positive, maybe that will help!”

     John literally ran back up the slope toward Kate. I didn’t know what was happening, but I admired his fortitude.

     Walking up another grassy slope, Tamsin alongside me, but so different from the time a few hours before – different in every way.

     I felt dread, and an anguished guilt about the fact that me and Tamsin had gone missing, but as we went up the hill I tried to compose myself, I tried to follow John’s advice.

     Kate greeted us with immense warmth. She was pale, and looked as if she had been crying.

     I could feel Tamsin’s eyes achingly staring at John and Kate in turn, waiting to know what had happened.

     We had told them we were OK.

     “We’ll tell you what happened to us in a moment.” I said. “It all ended well, and it was an accident that we left in the first place, though maybe we should have known - ”

     “Where is Rob?” said Tamsin cutting across me. “Where is Ffion?”

     “OK,”  said John. “We’ll tell you, and then we have to work out what to do - now you’re back with us.”

      “Rob and Ffion went – looking for you.” he said. “We assumed you had been trapped. They smoked some grass to do it, to cross into – into the Deep Hotel, to try and get you back. They just vanished instantly at the same moment – afterwards there was just the smoke in the air. We think Kate has been kind of in touch with Ffion. She’s been getting flashes with Ffion in them, but not over the last few hours, maybe because she’s tired - because Kate’s tired.”

         “When did they go?” I asked. “How long - ?”

     “They’ve been gone since yesterday evening.”

                                                                       ***




Copyright Justin Barton 2013

Part Four of The Corridor is Section 43 of Explorations.