Crow Of Thorns

by Richard Mosses

  She breathes softly in my ear before nibbling it, her breasts pushing against me.

  I kiss her warm cheek and then her rich lips. I'm hard and ready. I feel myself start to throb with my pulse. Her tongue worms its way inside and teases mine.

  I want to touch all of her. I run my hand over her ass, her thighs, and lightly tickle up the inside of her legs. Eager but not yet invited to explore further.

  We wrestle my clothes off and I'm pleased to be free of their weight and damp cling. She takes my cock in her hand and runs an exquisitely sharp finger along the underside. It jerks up and bobs back down. An electric pulse hits my brain.

  I kiss her hard and find the damp stickiness between her legs. Complicated folds of soft leaves. A hard bud that she almost pulls away from when I first touch it. But she uses her own hand to encourage me to continue. Midori throws her head back and cries out. She folds a leg over my hip as we lie side by side and urgently guides me inside her. Hotter and much more thick and sticky than I expected. More like gel than human lubricant. She grinds against me and I thrust back. Each of us breaking the rhythm before relenting to the others pace.

  I feel it building all along my cock and I just throw it all away, bucking and sliding, then she squeezes and I explode. I stay inside pulsing each time she squeezes. We lie together in a timeless space.

  Eventually I come back, and she does too. We hug and kiss and regretfully separate. I find my clothes and peel them back on. Midori simply replaces her mask and yet she wears more than me.

  We embrace and part without words.

  I open my eyes in the tunnel feeling hollow and ravenously hungry. My limbs ache, deep down to the bone. My joints are stiff and cold. I feel like I could snap. There's a damp patch in my underwear. I get up and go to the supermarket.

  Walking along aisles I stare at tins and dry packets. How can I sleep with a creature in the spirit world and yet shy away from a flesh and blood woman in the living world? Is one a pornographic fantasy image, just mental masturbation, while the other is complications, real emotions, baggage? I feel twinges of guilt, and perhaps Midori was making me open to suggestion with her perfume. Who am I kidding? I was a willing participant without being drugged.

  Thinking of Rachael reminds me of what she said about my mother. I might not need to talk to her, but in the hospital I realised she might have a need to talk to me.

  I carry my shopping back to the tent and give her a call. I'm almost glad when it goes through to the answer machine. I leave a short hello and hang up. Now she'll call me at some random moment.

  Janice is just about packed when I drop by her tent. “All set?”

  “Yeah. I've left it all in this note.” She thrusts into my hand a small piece of paper torn from an envelope.

  I see a fairly long description of Brutus' day. When he takes his meals, how to prepare them, when he takes his walks. It must have been hastily written with a very fine pencil. “This is a pretty tight schedule.”

  “He's a creature of habit. His food is all here. Just make sure he gets enough water with the dry stuff. I'll be back on Wednesday. Brutus you behave for Uncle Nik, you hear?” Brutus whines and lays his ears flat against his head which rests on the special blanket on the floor of Janice's tent.

  “I'll see you Wednesday, then.”

  Janice walks off and I try to figure out when I next need to feed or walk the dog. I've got a couple of hours, so leave Brutus in the tent and make a late lunch.

  Mum calls while I'm mixing the right amount of dry feed with canned meat. “Kolya, you called.”

  “Hi Mum, just give me a second. I'm feeding a dog.”

  “When did you get a dog? Don't you have enough to worry about?”

  “It's a neighbour's. I agreed to look after it for a couple of days.” Brutus is eating his food like it won't be there for long. He probably eats better and more regularly than I do. “I signed the papers. I guess I'll see the official document next time I see Kathryn. Nothing I could do would convince her otherwise.”

  “I'm sorry to hear that, Kolya. You tried your best.”

  I'm not sure I did. Maybe I wanted to be free. I just was too much of a coward to face it fully, too filled with shame to try and make it work. “Yeah. I even offered to move back, but it was too little too late.”

  “Have you seen that girl, Rachael?”

  “We had dinner last night. That didn't go so well either. She wanted something I couldn't give her.” Then I had sex with a plant woman.

  “She knows it's still early days for you. She'll come around.”

  “Yeah. Maybe.”

  “You sound a bit down.”

  “I'm okay. Just bone deep tired. Got a lot on my mind. How are you keeping?”

  “Usual aches and pains. Nothing I can't handle.”

  “You should go on holiday. Somewhere sunny and hot.”

  “Who would go with me?”

  “Can't you go on a cruise? Meet some new friends that way.”

  “I'm too old for that. Besides, first sign of sun and I'll shrivel up.”

  “The mutt's finished its dinner, so I need to walk it now.”

  “Take care, Nikolasha.”

  “Night, Mum.”

  Picking up warm shit in a plastic bag is something everyone should do before they die. Sloshing through melting snow I see Silk and Malky lurking about. Practically joined at the hip those two. Are they eyeing up Janice's tent? Perhaps it's better I'm about to keep them away than just make sure the dog's looked after. Brutus barks at them.

  “Away an shite wee man,” Malky says, pointing in some vague direction. He nods to me.

  “How are you two gentleman on a fine night like this?”

  Silk looks at me like I'm speaking Swahili. “Whit you sayin'?”

  “I was asking how you were.”

  “Aye. No bad. Yerself?”

  “I'm carrying a bag of warm dog crap.”

  “A-hu. Malky wiz jist sayin he could smell somethin bad comin. Ah thought he wiz jist coverin for a fart.”

  I put the bag into the bin attached to the lamppost. “I'll see you later.”

  Back at Janice's tent I'm in time to meet one of her neighbours. “You drew the short straw,” she says, nodding at the dog.

  I smile and shrug. At least I don't have to live next to Janice. “I'm Nik. I used to be over there, but now I'm down in the tunnel.”

  “There's a tunnel?”

  “Yeah. Ancient railway system. Even the station's gone.”

  “Is it no damp down there?”

  “Better than up here.”

  She climbs into her tent and I put Brutus back in Janice's. Will he be warm enough tonight? With the snow melting he should be fine. He's got a fur coat after all.

  Chapter 17

  Walking home from work it's hard to keep my mind on track. I still need to help Stevie and I did promise Janice some herbs, but I want to see Midori again. I'm pretty sure that would be a bad idea.

  Corbie swoops in to land on my shoulder. I move at the last moment so he over shoots and lands hard on the ground.

  “What the fuck did you do that for?” Corbie says.

  “That's how I felt yesterday wading in with the whole socialist spirit world thing with Midori. She nearly carved me up.”

  “What's that got to do with me?”

  “You're the one that wound me up and sent me off in her direction.”

  “What are you talkin about?”

  “All that revolution stuff you were feeding me.”

  “Jeezus. You're a big boy. I ain't responsible for you going off on one. I was just foolin around.”

  “Like you were when I got my insides carved up by some dog-headed bitch's hand?” “Hey, I was just tryin to help and you know that.”

  “Your help is getting me into trouble.”

  “Chill out, Dude. You're make too big a deal outta all this. Hey, listen. I tried to get to this technological Otherworld of yours. No can do. You sure it's rea
l?”

  “You mean unlike the imaginary places with the crazy plant ladies and the antlered huntsmen gods?”

  “Okay. I take your point. Could you take me with you, next time you go?”

  “No. I don't think so.”

  “After all I've done for you, this is how you repay me?”

  “Chill out, Dude,” I say. “It's not a big deal.”

  “Touché.”

  “I just don't know if I can trust you. Why should I help you get into somewhere you yourself said would be a huge source of power? I don't know who you're working for. One minute you're citing the Great Spirits, the next your inciting me to revolution against them. Don't get me wrong. I'm glad you're not following me around twenty four seven, but you do keep disappearing for long periods with no by your leave. Just what is your deal, Dude?”

  “Okay, okay. I guess I had that comin. I was sent to teach you by the Great Spirits, that's true. But that doesn't mean I don't have my own thoughts, that I don't want to be free. I just wanted to get high. To break through the walls, man. Next thing I know, like you, I'm part of this crazy world and all the crazy shit that goes with it. My teacher was from Siberia. Only spoke Russian. I was called in the middle of the Cold War. How fucked up was that? Someone was having a serious joke at my expense.”

  At least I could've talked with him. “My mum is from Novosibirsk,” I say.

  “You sounded like you were on board,” Corbie says. “Like you wanted a fight. I thought you wanted to change things. Why'd you chicken out?”

  “I didn't understand how the spirit world worked. You managed to leave that bit out of my teaching. Let me carry on thinking it was some kind of feudal slavery system going on.”

  “I can't help it if you hear what you wanna hear. You've not exactly been the most cooperative student a guy could hope for. You do keep surprisin me, but not always for the right reasons.”

  I'm embarrassed. He's right. I've not helped, I've gotten by. Any cleverness on my part is more about getting round doing things the hard way. Maybe I haven't listened enough. I wanted to hear how horrible it all is to justify my own reticence to really get involved, give me something to rebel against. I really should be too old for this kind of crap.

  When Kathryn first told me she was pregnant – we were pregnant – I thought that was the end of my life. No more parties, no spare income, no luxuries, just sleepless nights, more than usual anyway, a financial black hole and clinging on to the edge of terror that my kids would come to harm. She was ecstatic, I was faking it.

  It was nothing like that. Well actually it was everything like that. I'm still terrified. But the fundamental basis changed. With only a wife, part of me could still be selfish, self-indulgent, but with Lucas and then Sam, I felt I'd moved across to another world. A whole new perspective of life opened up in a way you can't ever fully explain or share with anyone who hasn't crossed that Rubicon. It's a new state of being. Sure it was hard those first three or four years, especially when Lucas was two and Sam was just born.

  I accepted my role, then I welcomed it, and then I owned it. Of course I had ten months to get used to the idea. I've had a lifetime to get used to the idea of being a shaman. No, I was teased with it for a lifetime. No wonder I've not yet truly accepted it. I've said the words. I've believed them to be true. But in my heart I've been faking it.

  I stop and turn towards Corbie, disturbing the flow of people on the pavement. “Can we start again?”

  “We don't need to do that,” Corbie says. “We just need to find a way to trust one another.”

  “Isn't that the same thing?”

  “I didn't get you sick. I didn't scare your family. Please believe me, you have my sympathy. To be honest, I'm not sure how much more I can teach you.” Corbie sighs. “I did fail you though. I didn't give you the full tour. I could've made sure you knew how it all fitted together. But now you're goin to places I can't reach. I can hardly conceive them. I don't wanna exploit them – just see with my own eyes.”

  He's right. I do need to learn to trust him, because this little speech sounds like crap to me. Do I risk it? Do I show him this new space? And what if I find he's just spinning me a line and next thing I know the Powers That Be are moving in. He has helped me this far considering how much of a pain I must be to deal with. It would be good to be free to talk to someone about it, to share it all. I just don't know.

  “If I'm going to meet these aliens I'm going to need a wingman.”

  “How long you been waitin to use that one?”

  “It just came to me.”

  “Really?”

  Using the speakers on my laptop I play the synthetic drum track and my synthetic drum along with it. Unless Corbie finds another way through, without access to this he's not going anywhere without me.

  In the technological Otherworld it is close to dawn. Corbie stands on my shoulder, stunned into silence. The mounds of webbing still lie in the Gardens where the Tent City is. There's something wrong about me being Virgil. I've barely visited here myself. I head towards the Tree of Life, if that's what it is here.

  Now my eye is a little more sensitive to it I see that the other trees, and even the grass underfoot, have an inner flow moving through circuitry or optic fibre. I can't be certain whether it's data, pure energy, or something else. Everything looks organic, but is actually synthetic.

  The Upper World is a world of intellect, of control, or Nous. The Lower World is one of bodily appetite, of wild indulgence, of animal lust, or Epithymia. There was a third part of the psyche, Thymos, which corresponds to emotions, passions and thinking. I don't know if it fits this place. Thymos could be the Middle World. But I think that the Middle World is just a reflection of the Living World, a vast lobby to the other Worlds.

  It doesn't make sense at first that the seeming spiritual side of technology is connected with emotion and passion. But technology has always been about passion, and emotion. People lust after these objects, covet them, connect to them and with them better sometimes than with other humans. We've fed ourselves tales of cold robots and unfeeling machines performing acts of murder that humans have shown themselves quite capable of equalling without them.

  The aliens, the explorers, that I've met are made from inorganic matter but have the same problems with spirit and soul. Perhaps we distrust our technology as we distrust our emotions and passions. That's why we've never really explored this side of the spirit world any more than the living world.

  Perhaps this is not a matter of a spiritual side to technology so much as the emotional, passionate side of life is being expressed through mechanical and informatic form.

  “What the holy fuck is that?” Corbie says. He's seen the Tree.

  Beams of light pulse into the tree, others are emitted from it. The light is almost invisible as this world wakes up. I can hear a high pitched modulation, like an old dial-up modem communicating with a server. The smell of fresh plastic is strong.

  “That's pretty much what I said when I saw it.”

  “Seriously, Dude. What in the name of all that is holy is that twisted abomination?”

  “Abomination? It is exactly what it looks like, the Tree of Life, but made from inorganic matter. It is transmitting data, I think. Energy too, probably. No different to what the one you're used to does. Of course this could be the Tree of Knowledge instead.”

  Then it hits me. I feel that cold draining feeling. Illumination. Never a truer word spoken in jest. The Tree of Knowledge is exactly what this is. The partner to the Tree of Life. We eat its fruit daily. This space is the spiritual reflection of knowledge. Somehow our shamans have been divorced from this as much as the alien explorers had been from life.

  So where did I go last time I came here? The Upper or Lower World of this Tree, or somewhere else entirely? Another Underworld? If we go back maybe I'll get a better idea.

  “It's an abomination. They've taken the Tree of Life and grafted electronics into it.”

  “I don't
see that. It's a different Tree. It has what it needs – data ports. This has been here since the beginning. We've maybe fallen in and out of love with it, but this feels more like where I was being called to. Information, data, is just as much part of us as life. Look at DNA. It's a code. Data.”

  “I'll accept that it's part of the Living World, but this is the spiritual world.”

  “There's no communication in the spirit worlds? No information. No data. Why do you think my GPS system works? Maybe it isn't just a visual projection of my mind working; maybe I'm tapping into this place too.”

  “I'm not convinced.”

  “So apart from an abomination, what is this then?”

  “It's an attack, if not a corruption by some force,” Corbie says. “Those aliens of yours takin over from another angle. They've body snatched the entire Tree of Life.”

  “It was like this before I met them. You should listen to yourself. That's not an explanation for what is in front of you. It's just paranoia.”

  “No, Man. This is all that technology crap slippin in and undermining nature. We need to fight this.”

  “I never took you for a back to the Stone Age type. Though, come to think of it, that's when we know we started using tools. Technology. So I guess you're more a back to the primordial ooze type. Knowledge has been with us since the beginning. Mind, Body and Spirit, right? The Living World is Body, the Otherworld connected to the Tree of Life is Spirit. Maybe this is Mind. Crick saw the serpent of DNA while tripping on LSD. They're linked together like DNA itself. Wrapped round each other, forming the third part, life.”

  “I didn't say we had to throw our technology in the sea. I just think this isn't nature, Man. The spirit world is natural and untainted. It's a reflection of the past when things were in balance.”