A haze, which Pieter supposed was tainted air, swirled densely around him. Heads popped out of this grimy mist and waggled stiffly, heads that roared nonsense, fists that punched the air.
Taut necks, hunched backs, cropped hair, foreheads that crumpled with a dull brand of concentration...Pieter mimicked this stance in an effort to align himself with the future men’s hopes, strove to decode the symbols that triggered their militant cries and felt the hunger behind their hope of foreseeing events, a desire for winning that gnawed at them.
The brightly lit symbols sharpened in significance. Understanding now, Pieter snapped his fingers. He seized up a coil-tailed apparatus beside one of the squares, held it to his ear, then shouted at the numerals. He had become one of these men, a willing participant in a fatally sombre game that hung upon decisions and held him in survival defence mode. Every heartbeat balanced on the flashing information; each breath another gasp of lifeforce for screaming down a price.
And at the end of his day in that sordid cavern, after having located the one Alcor expected him to assist: a man whose heart was muddied with anguish, Pieter followed the fellow, invisibly, into the cool night air and noticed him to be impervious to the moon and stars. He observed as the fellow switched off his mechanical side and donned a happy-chap expression so as not to glare at passers-by with the cold intensity of a currency servant. The fellow marched to his chariot—an astonishing contraption of shining red that cocooned him roundly—and in this he returned to his dwelling through streets awash with artificial luminaries.
Alcor’s sapphire eyes...The chime of sylvan bells...Spirals of aquamarine starlight...The Dream Sphere’s Devic Great Hall had summoned Pieter back.
‘That was utterly horrible,’ Pieter told Alcor. ‘Tell me, Master, that I never have to return to that place and those creatures.’
‘That place,’ said Alcor, a wistful smile touching his eyes, ‘is your world, the world you dwell in during your waking hours.’
‘The earthly realm!’
‘And those creatures aren’t unlike you, less the devic wisdom of course.’
‘Hampered joy! Limited peace! A wild, voracious race that feeds on itself? I have heard untruths in my time, but...a species like ours? From our forest in the world below? ’Tis almost an insult, Master.’
He thought awhile, however, remembering Elysium’s gold-obsessed invaders, the species which chose to clash violently with nature, and wondered for once if his notion that their warlike ways ensured their extinction might have been naive. Would these meddlers flourish in a world grown older?
Before Pieter could wonder any longer, Alcor asked him if he wished to continue his assignment. Pieter admitted he couldn’t be sure and mulled over what sort of insight he could offer a being such as the haze breather, insight that wouldn’t be ignored. It was an ignorant one he would be dealing with after all. He would arrive at a decision before his next slumbering journey.
On waking, he joined his clan at the campfire, gazed at the dusk-streaked heavens, sipped Remembrance Essence and recalled only vaguely his visit to the Dream Sphere. He knew he’d visited the timeframe of someone discontented, but couldn’t remember what he had witnessed while there. What he did remember was the sort of timeframe the person lived in. It had virtually gleamed with artificiality.
Many a time throughout the morning, squirrels had scampered over Pieter’s sleeping wagon and nibbled at acorns in the still-warm ashes. Now that their day had drawn to a close, they nodded good evening to him and dashed back to their treetop homes.
Pieter spent his night rambling Elysium’s forests and at the first hint of daylight returned to the campfire, now dissolved into a stream of smoke. When the robin trilled her herald to the dawn, he settled into his sleeping wagon once more and surrendered to the Dream Sphere’s luminosity.
‘And what is your decision?’ Alcor asked upon ushering Pieter into the Devic Great Hall. ‘Will you continue with this assignment?’
Now free of his earthly mind and able to glean memories of the last Dream Sphere visit, Pieter promised Alcor he would. ‘I hope to do all I can to assist this fellow’s evolution.’ Although Pieter’s thirst for growth and desire for Kindness Merits was strong in him, his motivation lay in the compassion he felt for the future creature. The assignment was his to make what betterment he could to another being’s existence. Whether he could help, he wasn’t at all certain.
Through the Dream Sphere’s wheel of transcendence he went.
Whirl of colour.
Clatter of shade.
Laughter of snowdrops.
Taste of stars.
And there again was that dutiful trooper...
<><> <><><> <><>
...marching towards revolving glass doors. Matthew P Weissler, as the sign on his office and credit cards confirmed, with a presence that was neither striking nor displeasing; a lean, bordering on lanky, physique; hair the colour of perished leaves; a pallid complexion that bronzed in summer; and a passion for golf, mathematics, swimming, and any music capable of giving him goosebumps. He was Matthew P Weissler, and he was in this building to get things straightened out.
Today he wanted to see those shares hiking. He’d be giving Gillings good news. Stable news. Perhaps not megaton lightning news, only because mega expectations weren’t forecast on today’s money scene.
He called a meeting, discussed the impacts of the Champion meltdown and told Plimpton on the trading floor to roll up the Gallilani deal. A nod from his assistant and he was in there with Charlie Sanders, straightening his tie while Charlie yelled into the phone. The tie was a particularly slippery form of silk, not his favourite shade of green. Were his eyes really that colour? Bernadette seemed to think so. She’d dolled-up the house and now her renovator’s eye was trained on him. We’ve got to get you less conservative. Bernadette’s current motto.
It was then, while he waited with toe-tapping impatience, that he discovered the art piece. It sat on one side of Charlie’s desk, pushed up against a cluttered clump of papers and supported by a bottle opener and an autographed football. Comfortable, yet regal, even in Charlie’s nest of mess.
Despite its mundane, even forgettable appearance, Matthew couldn’t take his eyes off it. An eagle. Nothing unusual about that, but the thing somehow beckoned him as if it had a life of its own, inviting him to examine its texture.
Placing a hand on the eagle, he glanced at Charlie, who gestured, as he barked orders to his caller, for Matthew to pick it up. It was cool to the touch. Earthen. Iron and white gold studded its back and tail. Quite possibly a memento collected on a trip to the islands. He trailed his fingers over the smooth undulating wings and felt strangely comforted.
A memory came whirling back to him, something he couldn’t be sure he’d ever replayed until now. It gripped him in a wild, fearful, free-falling state. Although Charlie was still booming into the phone, and the traffic and the yells of the guys on the bank’s trading floor rumbled on, he remained undistracted, shutting his eyes and allowing himself to be engulfed by the rushing sensation that was drawing him backwards out of 2008 and plonking him into his childhood. Early childhood. Infancy more like it.
He was looking down at two fat little bare feet that were still unsteady at each step, and he could see a puffy plastic bubble surrounding his hips. In place of the familiar neck-tie on his chest was a bib with green and blue building blocks listing the alphabet.
Here he looked up, way up into the jacaranda tree, flowering light purple and sprinkling the grass with shadows, and noticed the faint circling of a bird. The bird flew closer and zoomed into the jacaranda.
Perching in the bough closest to him, the bird lifted its wings and began to...talk? No! A memory? But yes, the bird had spoken, although not by opening its beak to babble like a cartoon character. Communicating through thoughts. Words that came to him in another’s voice. And although not yet two years of age, Matthew understood completely. What the bird said was where the memory went va
gue. Hadn’t he been told something important? Something that might have even pertained to now?
Matthew didn’t know why he’d supposed this.
Another hurling of colour. Another random memory. Winding wheels, fortress gates...velvet cloaks...pebbly roads. Way before his time though. Medieval almost, and yet he knew it well. How? What was going on?
‘It’s a great little artefact that one,’ said Charlie, putting down the phone. ‘Got it when I was in Oslo last month. Not cheap. Not too new either.’
Waking to present-day, Matthew nodded. As though stung, he returned the sculpture to Charlie’s desk, letting the strange images leave along with it. ‘How old do you think?’
‘Dunno. Over a hundred-and-fifty I’d say. At least. Now, where are the reports you wanted me to see?’
Matthew looked one last time at the bird. He shook off a shudder. Snatched of his sense of the present a moment ago, he had almost forgotten his whereabouts. How could a crummy little carving have done that?
The reports were received good-naturedly. For all Charlie’s compliments, Matthew should have been pleased with the outcome. The emphasis was to be on the should. Irritated with his boss and not knowing why, Matthew stalked from the office.
His annoyance grew throughout the day. Judgements made about colleagues, which he’d normally ignore, today seemed to bite at him. Even the remark about blond-headed poser Adam Harrow, fuelled by Celia’s disgust at the ‘forgive me’ roses Harrow ordered regularly for each woman he cheated on, became an aggravation to Matthew, a mite fanging at his throat. He found himself leaping out of his seat at intervals, grumbling to Celia about the gossip. It wasn’t at all characteristic.
In the restroom mirror he noticed the colour rising in his face. Maybe he had a virus; the prickly temperature increase and dizzy lapse in Charlie’s office were enough to indicate he wasn’t his usual self.
But sickness prompted weakness and a need for sleep, and Matthew felt very much awake, readier than ever to shout down the hyenas that afternoon.
After a highly successful day, he headed home feeling empty. ‘So I succeeded,’ he said with a sigh. ‘Succeeded at what?’
Before dinner he read Chapter Seven of a self-help book he’d untypically rescued from a garbage bin. When he got to the chapter that followed: ‘The Ritual of Accumulation’, he threw the book at the wall. ‘What do you suggest we do then, Conan Dalesford?’ he muttered. ‘Ditch all our worldly possessions and live on buffalo grass?’ He should have left it in the garbage where it belonged.
His narky behaviour continued throughout dinner. He got restless around the kids and snapped at his wife for being ‘trivial’ about Vanuatu. After apologising he went roaming the neighbourhood, numb to everything, very much alone in his people-rich world.
The moon was full and round. ‘Explains the anger,’ he told himself. His astrology-mad sister-in-law had told him the full moon triggered restlessness in those with a Cancerian Rising Sign. ‘Maybe I should have been born there,’ he said, nodding at the moon. A regular moon child. Homesick for the luminary that ruled his personality.
The silence broke. A flutter of wings ruffled the dreamy calm. Matthew searched the branches overhead. Gumleaves of blue, tipped with silver, parted to reveal...What was it? An eagle? His heart jumped. He scanned the leaves some more, only to see it wasn’t a bird at all, but a bat. A silly little fruit bat, struggling to untangle itself from the branches. It hung upside down for a while, studying him with cherry-coloured eyes.
The bat's gaze was hypnotic. Immobilising. Matthew continued to stare, unable to free himself from the redness. Now everything had become red, a blur of scarlet blotting out the night, even the moon.
When this blanket of colour, which beckoned and caressed and embraced him, finally let go of his vision to vanish, he saw not the bat but a bird. The bird had a downward-curving beak. It blinked at him suspiciously in the way an eagle would, but there were no eagles in this part of the world.
It spoke to him! Without a voice, it said, ‘Do you plan to waste the remainder of your life as well?’
Matthew looked away. Steadied his shaking body. No eagle met his sight when he turned again to the branches. Only the bat. The bat grunted, angry probably at its lack of privacy, then flip-flopped its wings and soared off, evidently in search of accommodation elsewhere.
‘I’m delirious,’ Matthew said in a gasp. ‘And I’m talking to myself as well.’
He sat by the tree and stared at the sky. His eyes misted over. The stars looked better as wet silver blurs.
‘I’ve gone mad,’ he growled.
Sleep overcame him. The faint sound of a young voice whisked past. ‘Master, I mean it this time. I will not visit the timeframe of that fellow ever again. Too much ire! He can visit me here in the Dream Sphere, though, if you wish...if you honestly think it would help.’
The tree trunk supported Matthew’s head as he transcended one world for another...where everything made sense, at least until it was time to wake up.
* * * *
Sleep had soothed Matthew. Leaning forward from the tree trunk, he stretched out his arms and blearily observed the playground. The square face of his German watch glowed an eerie green. Almost midnight. He mashed a hand against the leaf-strewn ground in readiness for jumping to his feet, but before he knew it his body froze, rendering him motionless. All that he saw faded and swirled, and morphed into a rose-strewn wishing-well built of stone.
He was plummeting backwards into the well, falling listlessly into its depths. And then he was landing, the soles of his shoes sinking into a spongey carpet of pine needles. Around him grew a magnificent forest, the type he’d hiked through in Bavaria—although the trees here were decidedly older. Peace. A feeling of been-here-beforeness.
A flurry of movement caught Matthew’s eye. He turned to see someone strikingly small in stature regarding him wordlessly, not unlike a gigantic-eyed child, with hair sticking out all over the place. Proud yet wholesome in appearance, like a Kalahari bushman.
A thin curling mouth twisted itself into an amiable grin. ‘Hiyo!’
A child who still couldn’t say ‘hello’. Was he really a child this young though? The individual before Matthew was a bizarre blend of baby and teenager. Naivety in conflict with wisdom. Innocent trust at odds with a slightly mocking impishness. In no way was the little guy threatening.
So Matthew took a sharp stride towards him and said, ‘Where the fu—’ then gulped back his words. What was he thinking? He was speaking to a youngster. ‘Where the frack am I, who the frack are you and what the frack is going on?’
The boy wasn’t at all taken aback by this form of greeting. ‘I’m Pieter of the Brumlynds,’ he said, ‘and I’m helping you with your destiny.’
‘What destiny?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Pieter with a shrug. ‘Where exactly in your life are you?’
Matthew groaned. ‘How am I supposed to know? Jeezus! I’m thirty-four, I’ve got a demanding career, an extravagant wife and two kids who I doubt even know I exist, and I’m in the throes of a nervous breakdown. Obvious, isn’t it? I mean, you yourself, Peter of the Pumpkins or whoever you are, you illustrate this perfectly, the fact that I’m going mad.’
‘I am not illustrating anything,’ corrected Pieter.
‘Christ! I’m hallucinating, and even my hallucinations answer me back.’ Matthew rested his forehead in his hands. ‘My boss, the guys at work, my family...everybody! Everybody answers me back. Why can’t I just live?’
Pieter tilted his head to one side. ‘Excuse me, sir, but I am not the avatar you mentioned twice. I’m an elf.’
‘Did you just say you’re an...No, this is getting too weird.’
‘As well as that, I was not “answering” you “back”.’
‘See what I mean?’ Deep down, Matthew knew he was acting hopelessly sorry for himself.
‘I was merely asking you where you were so I could more accurately direct you in your
destiny. Secondly, I do not like to be referred to as a “hallucination” as I am no such thing. Had I been solid in form, as you are, I would probably have been insulted.’
Cautiously, Matthew lifted his head to study the hallucination. Who would have thought it might have an opinion? It felt things! ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled, unsure whether apologising to figments of his own imagination made him any crazier.
‘Where do you live?’ the strange boy asked cheerily. He was unfazed by Matthew’s confusion.
‘Cabarita Heights.’
‘Where’s Cabarita Heights? Somewhere high in the heavens?’
Matthew snorted. ‘It’s a suburb of Sydney. Aus-tra-li-a.’
‘And the planet?’ Pieter inquired.
‘Are you out of your mind?’ Matthew then realised the same question might apply to him, personally. ‘I live in the world. The world! If you’re inferring I’m off the planet—’
‘What world?’ chirped Pieter. ‘There are many worlds other than yours, you know.’
Okay. Why fight it? He would play along and see where it led. ‘Earth,’ he said. ‘Planet Earth.’
‘Uh-huh.’
Could it be true the boy wasn’t being impudent?
‘And what timeframe? You’d be the kind to have a timeframe wouldn’t you?’
‘If you’re talking about the year, it’s 2008, and the month, since we’re being fairly particular here, is March.’
‘Where are you in your soul connection?’
‘Huh?’
‘Oh, I see. Never mind that question. All right, now that I have your details, I can finally give you an answer regarding your destiny.’
‘And that is?’
‘That is that—’
‘Yes, yes, what?’ Matthew was suddenly excited at the thought of the meaning of life, or, more importantly, that the meaning of his life would have some light shone on it, if only a glimmer, to inspire hope for the future.
The Golding Page 3