Between

by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  He was hopelessly lost and the fogs were damp and clammy. Gregorio pulled the old anorak around him, trying to keep warm. He was more sorry about the swirling foggy blindness than anything else. He had originally arrived in fog, travelled a high arched path of fog, and now he was lost in fogs yet again.

  He had run until he was sick. He had stopped only when he saw the huge swirling barrier of mist rise up before him, and leaning over, had spewed at his feet. He’d actually felt better afterwards. It was as if he’d spat something out, fear maybe, or perhaps anger. But now he was cold and he desperately wanted to see.

  There was the danger of Pigseed or Warl or another of the gang creeping up on him when he couldn’t even avoid them in the fog. Not that he could run any further. He was weak and exhausted and felt very ill. Now he was also cold. Maybe he’d vomited out fear, but he was as sure as hell frightened again now.

  They had stopped chasing him quite soon after he’d darted away. The pounding footsteps behind him had stopped, the echoes of a few sniggering catcalls, Warl’s loud cackle, and then nothing but the breeze in his hair. The stink of the camp fire had died away, but Gregorio had kept running. He had only slowed when he came up against the mist.

  Now, stretching out a careful hand, he felt rock. Cold damp stone, which he started to climb. He didn’t think he’d have the energy, but somehow he managed, and he climbed high. He couldn’t see that he was high, but he could feel it. The air was fresh and cut sharp even through the murk. There was a pleasant cleansing fragrance to it. He’d always loved the mountains and had lived either on them or at their base ever since he was a little boy, and now he didn’t find it difficult to discover a foothold or feel for a crevice or ledge to cling to. It all seemed comfortable and vaguely familiar, not just the exercise of the climb or the craggy touch of rock against his groping fingers, but the dependable solidity beneath his feet, the scent of moss and the sounds of the wind. Somehow, ridiculously but dependably, it felt like home. He also realised it wasn’t sapping the remainder of his strength, it was adding to it. He started to smile.

  Then, out of the clouds, came the last thing he might have expected. A small plump hand reached out and grabbed his fingers. His great flat palm closed around it, delicate and safe within his own. It began to pull him towards it. He went willingly. Then, even more amazingly, he heard the loud and unmistakable squawk of a Macaw.

  “Hurry up,” said Daisy. “It’s chilly. Are you hungry? I’ve just baked pancakes.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  There was no further sensation of speed, nor did they seem as distant from the elements beneath them. Primo lifted his feet, bare beneath his usual loose trousers, expecting the somersaulting turbulence to soak his toes. The waves heaved, thrown by some untouchable force, crashing, hurtling, singing. The music was innate, a violence of melody without discord. Wilmot hovered but the ocean below continued to revolve.

  Already Primo was gripping within the light of Wilmot’s aura, that sheen of energy which had surrounded him since they left the fourth plane forests. It had a tangibility and Primo felt it kept him safely close. Now Wilmot reached out from within his brilliance, and took Primo’s hand. The shock of contact was remarkable. Primo thought it was the first time they had purposefully touched and he remembered electricity and the dangerous charge it might ignite. This was that, but more. The shock was orgasmic. Primo gasped and clung.

  Wilmot, recognising the reaction, smiled. “Not me, dear boy. It is simply the attraction of a lower to a higher vibration. In life I was often accused of having, and shamelessly using, a certain charisma. But it is hardly required that you fall in love with me here. Vibrational magnetism demands an attachment without unusual affection. This is an effect you will acquire yourself as you rise to the higher planes.”

  His clutch to Wilmot trembled. “It’s all a rather remarkable experience.” Then Primo laughed. “Now I’m even talking like you.”

  “I have decided to involve you in an even more remarkable experience,” Wilmot said. “You might say it is most improper and almost without precedence, but then, I can hardly be expected to conform to respectable normality, even as a Heavenly guide. Are you ready for anything?”

  “You can fucking bet on it,” said Primo.

  “It will be shockingly uncomfortable,” continued Wilmot. “Indeed, it may be the most painful experience you have ever encountered. Does this dissuade you?”

  “Of course it doesn’t,” said Primo.

  “Remember only this,” said Wilmot. “You must not attempt to release my hold on your hand. I doubt you would accomplish such a thing however hard you tried, but in panic, you might achieve something of the kind. You must not. Is this understood?”

  “Fuck off,” said Primo, wild with exhilaration.

  “Indeed,” nodded Wilmot. “And I can naturally assure you, should you require any such assurance, that you will encounter no thing and no sensation that you literally cannot bear. You may not fully appreciate your own potential, but believe me, I do.”

  “I’m not scared,” said Primo loudly over the crashing of the waves and their strange music.

  “Fear is hardly something I expect of you,” said Wilmot. “So let us begin.”

  They did not move. There seemed nothing to begin. Then, as Primo watched, holding his breath, the oceans became insane. The rolling, tossing violence of each wave became an immensity of crescendo. The colours leapt and the water became fire. Everything spun in an orchestra of creation. The spray twisted into white spirals, water to foam, foam into crystal cities. The music was huge enough to ride. Primo breathed water.

  They rose higher. Wilmot’s grip on Primo’s hand burned. There was more fire above. Below the storm, while above the volcano of the clouds spat golden flame. Primo thought, “He’s taking me to hell after all.” The pain began very suddenly and was more ferocious than he had even expected.

  It ripped through him and tore him apart. Wilmot had warned him not to release his hand, whatever panic might inspire it. Primo clung. He would not have tried to escape had God Himself appeared to order it. Wilmot was the only safety, the only sanity in a torment of impossibility.

  Through his head, bursting the skull and frying his mind, down through every particle of his body until even each toe was agony, the pain travelled. It explored his capability until it found his very last vestiges of strength, and rested there, licking at the edges of his spirit. Inside, in absolute surrender, he screamed, but his throat was too tortured to make the sound and his screams ravaged only in silence. His eyes were squeezed shut in horror, concentrating on stretching what more he could take.

  “Open your eyes,” said Wilmot. He had to say it twice. “It will be better,” Wilmot said gently, “if you open your eyes.”

  Primo tried. He blinked. His eyes were swollen, the veins cemented into pain. But he opened them, very slowly, and sighed. He had closed his sight on a ravenous destruction of deformity, the distortion of everything beautiful into a tempest of monstrosity. Now all pain vanished. He opened his eyes again on total calm.

  At first he could not understand what he was seeing. His mind was unable to translate his vision into tangibility. He had no concept of comparison. It took time. Then he began to comprehend.

  There was nothing solid and it did not need to be solid because indeed, nothing had ever been solid anyway. The rushing excitement of atom upon atom was glorious within itself. The colours were colours that had never been seen before, each utterly individual and unique. Each state was symbolic of another, and that other was symbolic of itself. Movement was intrinsic within each static option, each singular was doubled, each multiple alone.

  There were endless rolling meadows but they could not be seen. They could be felt in the perfumes and the touch of breeze, in the sheening of light and shade and the whisper of utterly poignant nostalgia.

  There were parks and woods, mountains, lakes and seas, but all were there in essence and not in the rigidity of visible f
act. They slumbered, woke, and slept again, their essence fluctuating beside the minds of the spirits that travelled within them. It was living symbolism and so abundantly exciting that Primo thought he would cry, but did not, because he had lost tears, lost eyes, lost face and head and body. He looked down at himself. He still felt Wilmot’s hand crushing his own in a steel grip, but there was no hand. Both he and Wilmot were pure golden aura, drifting like warm serenity on the perfumed currents.

  Music threaded him to his own essence and entwined with the melody of the plane. It was creation in composition. He could sense it all and so touch everything but there was only the flooding delirium of pure beauty, translating itself gradually into knowledge.

  Primo began to know. The deepest knowing of the deepest things, the entire secrets of the universe, became his possessions by right. He understood in a second everything that he had ever cared to wonder on, and everything he had never even contemplated to discover. Then his knowledge spread to universal spirit and he knew things he could not hope to understand. He grasped things he could not grasp and saw things he could not see.

  He became aware of the other spirits around him. Their minds touched his briefly, and moved on. He could not enter their thoughts but they entered his, alighting in humour and delight, until Primo felt he had been threaded through light and spun into spangles. He felt he had become music itself, recreated into its first tunefulness.

  Then Wilmot drew him closer, his invisible fingers entwining into a touch more intimate and involved, new peaks of music and colour. A sublimity of joy awoke in Primo and sent him flying.

  Wilmot said softly into his mind, “The planes of the Summerlands which separate all souls, are not fashioned by space. They are created by the state of mind. It is the soul which makes his own temporal existence whatever that may be. I wanted you to see beyond your own assumptions. I wrenched your state of mind from its preconceptions. I remade you. You now see my place and this is where I live. This is all my home. You are on the ninth plane.”

  Primo whispered. “How can I be?”

  “I have just told you how,” Wilmot said patiently. “But it cannot last long. Once I released your hand, you would spiral back so quickly that it could burst your soul. Even within my protection, theoretically you could expire.”

  “I’m dead. You’re saying I could die again?”

  “No. But you could become so damaged that your mind would take lifetimes to recover. I have rearranged your mind but it would quickly become deranged if I forced it to continue in a state it cannot properly contain. Since I do not intend either of these dangers to actualise, we will now return to the fourth plane. The trip home will not be painful. It will simply entail cool convalescence, but you must not remove your hand from mine until we pass the fogbanks. Are you ready?”

  “No,” said Primo. “How could I be? I want to stay here. I don’t actually care if I die again. This marvel is worth exploding for.”

  Wilmot laughed. “We will come again one day,” he said, and the beauty fled away.

  By the moon glitter of her pool, Georgia lay entrapped in silence. Within the shadowed enclosure of her own eyelids, she continued to see the endless expanses of her plane, but could also concentrate on the tiny details she wanted to enlarge. She made herself as small as the specks of pollen on the flowers beside her shoulders. She bathed herself in light. She thought then only of Romano.

  Her focus became so minute that all vibrations ceased. She passed from the bursting speed of the Summerlands to the slow swinging clouds of physical life. Light became shadow.

  She could watch him gradually impinging on the back of her mind, just as she might see a moving photograph but from a distance, through smoked glass and without clarity of sound. What she could not see, she imagined, for she knew already exactly what he would be like. Then what she imagined became the truth, Romano entered her thoughts, and smiled in his sleep, and saw her.

  She lay down beside him and entwined her legs between his, as she always had each night when they shared their lives. She felt the warmth of him and he curled closer, bringing the curves of her body against the curves of his. She felt the echo of his dreams as closely as she felt his arms around her. She snuggled in and breathed Earth breath. She whispered into his ear and told him how much she loved him. Then she kissed him. “I am not dead,” she said. “I live. Oh my beloved, I am with you so often and think of you as you think of me. There’s no need to miss me, for I am here.” And in every way she knew how, she made love to the man she still loved.

  It was a day perhaps, before he moved from the bed. Eventually Primo got up only because the harpy demanded it.

  The curtains of the room had lulled him for all the time he had taken to think about what had happened and to relive and remember, hanging desperately onto the remaining echoes of what he had learned. He clung to each scrap of the experience that still made any sense. Most of it, now he was back in tangibility and the appearance of physical solidity, made no sense at all. He could no longer imagine how he had seen invisibility or touch abstract colour. The soaring excitement of pure knowledge floated now out of reach. His mind was no longer Wilmot’s, it was merely his own, and it could not grasp what it had done.

  Then, when he had lain still for all the time the eagle permitted him, he allowed her to arouse him and he stood up and shrugged himself back into the small outlines of his life. But they did not satisfy him. He began to pace, furiously, going out to march under the trees. He climbed the trees, he flew over them, and he called Wilmot. He heard Wilmot’s laugh. “Why? Manage without me until you’ve trained your memory alone. If you want to go forward, first try going back. I’ll come, when you want more than just to insult me.”

  “Guides are supposed to come when they’re called,” demanded Primo.

  “No,” laughed Wilmot into his head. “They’re supposed to come when they’re needed. That’s not the same thing. And besides, I rarely ever choose to do what anyone tells me I’m supposed to.”

  “Fucking pervert,” said Primo with a reluctant shrug. “Piss off.”

  “If you insist,” said Wilmot, and even his laugh disappeared.

  Primo sat beside the forest stream and watched the sun sparkle, reflecting through the leaves above. Beneath the water surface, the weed and fish and tiny insect lava were as visible as in any clean water creek on Earth. But there was a difference. He could talk to the creatures. He could tell the frogs his ideas and ask them to come to him, and they would come. He could enter their thoughts if they were at peace and open to him. There was not much he learned there, for their minds were small and content, but he delighted in the exploration of these other levels of need, of sensation and of experience.

  But it was the harpy whom he understood. She had few needs but she knew emotion and her thoughts were direct and vibrant. When he had first known her, she had attempted to feed him and he had accepted it, though the mashed scrummage that she brought had given him no sustenance. She had come to him during those very first days after his escape from Pigseed’s gang. He had flown from the third in a fury of disgust, so high and so fast that not one third plane warrior had attempted to follow or drag him back. He had entered the fogbanks without fear, and suddenly found them warm. He already knew where he was. The gang had often raided into the first crags and valleys of the fourth, and so he knew his way. But this time, and he was delighted and thankful, instead of the revulsion of cold, clammy damp and rejecting vibration that pained sharp in his lungs, he felt welcomed. So he had lain on the bare rock, and curled his knees to his chin, and sighed, and slept. The harpy had awoken him with the razor tip of her beak in his face and a mouthful of sludge forced between his lips. They had loved each other from that moment on.

  He had made friends with all the birds and many had come to him. Some had stayed. Some had come only when he needed them, or when their own pleasure in flight and exploration had attracted them to his aura and the sparkle of the mountains. But with the harpy
it was different. For a long time they nested together on the first high, narrow border of the lower fourth. Then of course, when he moved deep into the forests, she had come too. This was her natural home.

  So when Primo flew up from his woodland base and across the pinnacled tree tops to discover the further edges of the fourth which banked the fifth, she flew with him, and helped his flight with the warm currents of her huge wingspread. He found the journey easy and pleasant and nothing stopped him until he came to the next fogs. He had seen no mist when he had travelled with Wilmot, all the levels had become one without separation, but here, with his mind his own, he was blocked by barriers of cloud. They rose in a swirling hideous freeze, billowing out to bar his passage. Beneath, visible only in patches, was a river of immense width. The fogs rose from this like witch silver. Not mountains here, but water. Primo could not pass.

  He returned home and walked for a long time in the forests. The harpy flitted above his head, moving from branch to branch. When he looked up she was there, her great head cocked to one side, regarding him. Her crest feathers, her crown of majesty, stood erect, disturbed. She knew he could not rest and therefore did not rest herself. When Primo sighed and stopped, and sat beneath the tallest tree with his back against its trunk, she came down, swooping between the outstretched branches, and roosted beside him. He put his arm around her. Instead of tucking her head beneath her wing for sleep, she snuggled it beneath his arm, lowering the dagger of her beak into her own breast feathers. Her crest flattened. Primo scratched the back of her neck, feeling below the down fluff to the spiny bumps of her skin. She cooed, then slumbered, gently snoring. Primo closed his eyes and began to dream.