by N. J. Mercer
As he zipped a pocket on his small rucksack, the air became charged with psychoelectrical energy, and Baccharus materialised in his apartment for the second time that day. Preoccupied with running through a mental checklist of the items in his bag, Johnny ignored the cherub, who ended up entertaining himself by playing some of the CDs that were lying around. Four tracks of heavy metal later, Johnny’s preparations were complete, and he finally acknowledged his familiar. “So, is Sascha ready?” he asked.
“He said he’ll be done by the time we get to his place,” replied Baccharus.
Johnny nodded with approval. “Good man to be ready at such short notice.”
“The best!”
“Did you tell him everything?”
“Of course.”
“Let’s get out of here!”
The mission was officially under way. Before he closed the front door, Johnny felt the urge to give his home a long, lingering look, as if he were saying goodbye to an old friend … it was not a good sign.
Baccharus flew slowly alongside Johnny as they left the building. He would have caused quite a stir had he been spotted, but it was late and dark, and being psychic meant that both keeper and familiar could sense that there was nobody around to gawp.
The pair stopped at the top of the apartment building’s steep driveway where, parked in all its glory, stood the rusting hulk that was Johnny’s motorhome, a Ford Transit van that had undergone a bespoke conversion to camping vehicle. Having owned it for many years, Johnny and Baccharus were oblivious to its rather tatty appearance. It may not have been pretty, however, the camper had proved its worth many times over as the main transport for Johnny and the few friends who helped him in his work for the Agency; of this select group, Sascha was the longest-serving and most important member. Johnny and Baccharus both paused to look fondly at the vehicle before they entered it.
“So, when did you start her up last?” asked the familiar.
“Last week, I start her up regularly – every Sunday morning. Didn’t get round to it today though, too busy. You’ve got to keep the engine ticking over, you know. I think the last time I actually drove her anywhere outside of London was the last mission.”
Baccharus shuddered as he remembered the case. “The last mission, oh yeah, that must have been four months ago then, the voodoo-witch soul-thief who was collecting spirits for her doll’s house, oh yes, twisted, very twisted. I don’t think she’ll ever recover from the fright you gave her, Johnny.”
Johnny had a wicked smile on his face as he recollected the details of that particular assignment. “Let’s get moving, Bach.”
Keeper and familiar entered the unexpectedly comfortable living space of the motorhome through its side door. A quick inspection of various meters confirmed that the battery was charged and the water supply topped up. Keeping his transport ready to roll had become a routine for Johnny, one that had proved useful many times over. His frequent checks on oil, engine coolant, tyre pressure and a number of other essentials ensured that despite its run-down appearance, the vehicle remained sound. This was about the limit of his mechanical skills.
Johnny belted himself into the broad, generously padded driver’s seat while Baccharus sat in the front beside him. The familiar’s usual role on these journeys was to deliver snacks and drinks from the kitchen to the driver’s cabin and, more importantly, to brew the coffee. If he got bored with his trips to the fridge and cupboards, which he often did, there was a choice of bunks for him to crash out on. With a single turn of the ignition key, the diesel clattered into life, and after an initial belch of black smoke the engine turned over smoothly. They were on their way, and the first stop was Sascha’s house; a light rain prompted Johnny to start the squeaky wipers five minutes into the journey.
The motorhome rumbled gently through London’s suburbs, passing endless rows of terraced and semi-detached houses. Neon signs from the occasional parade of shops and take-aways reflected multi-coloured light off the damp road. The wet Sunday evening and late hour ensured the streets were quiet, which not only made it easier to drive, it also meant there was less psychic noise. Every person projected a unique aura, their psychic signature – energy to which Johnny was very sensitive. The more people there were around, the greater their psychic presence, and the disturbance this produced in Johnny’s mind could become very tiresome; tonight this was not the case.
Johnny drove with his window open a few inches, enjoying the cool, refreshing breeze that came through the gap. It was not long before he was parking on a quiet dead-end street lined with more of the ubiquitous terrace houses. These ones were particularly old and had front doors that opened onto the footpath. The journey had taken about twenty minutes.
“You just wait in here and keep a look-out,” he told Baccharus. Even at this early stage of the mission, Johnny wanted to make sure there was a pair of friendly eyes watching the street. Contrary to their mode of transport, it was not a journey of leisure they had set out upon. They were doing the work of the Agency and there would be enemies around, in this case, some of the worst imaginable, the Disciples of Disorder.
Johnny knocked on the door of house number twenty-four, and a tall, lean figure answered. He had high cheekbones, bulbous light blue eyes behind circular glasses and dark brown hair parted approximately down the centre that extended to his neck. Sascha was an old schoolmate from whom there were no secrets, and at present he looked rather flustered.
“Are you ready to head off?” asked Johnny matter-of-factly. Familiarity had long ago negated the need for pleasantries between the two of them.
“Just give me a few more minutes. Come on in and make yourself a tea or something,” Sascha replied hurriedly before rushing back into the house, leaving his friend standing alone on the doorstep. Johnny supposed Sascha was completing last-minute preparations for the journey ahead. Despite the tight schedule he did not hurry him, just in case he forgot one of his electronic gadgets – important devices that had saved their skins on many occasions.
Johnny stepped inside the porch, closed the door and entered the small front room. Even though Sascha was out of sight, Johnny could hear him frantically rummaging at the top of the nearby staircase. The television had been left on, and the weather forecast drew his attention: it warned of sporadic wind and rain across the country over the next few days, and to Johnny’s dismay it appeared to be worse in the north.
“Baccharus is in the van, Sasch. You know how quickly he gets bored, he’ll start fiddling and probably end up wrecking something,” Johnny shouted up the steps.
“Won’t be long, Johnny. Have a seat – chill,” Sascha hollered back.
Johnny decided to stand, they had a good few hours of driving ahead of them, and this would probably be the only chance he had to straighten out his legs for a while. With hands in his pockets, he sauntered nosily around the small, cosy lounge. He smirked at the outdated soft furnishings the previous owner had left behind; items Sascha could never be bothered to get rid of. An untidy pile of computing magazines and CDs above the fireplace caught his eye, and he picked up a vintage Gunners album, one he had enjoyed listening to many times over. The CD beneath it raised an eyebrow: a Beethoven symphony – Sascha’s musical taste had always been eclectic.
“Nobody seems to know exactly what we’re heading into,” Johnny shouted back up the stairs. He wanted to gauge how his friend felt about the new assignment.
“Oh, really … should I be worried about that?” came the entirely honest and unconcerned reply.
Johnny smiled at Sascha’s instinctively carefree response and continued to pry. Stacks of A4 paper with scrawled writing and technical diagrams were scattered about the place. Textbooks, mainly on electronics and physics, were piled on every shelf and stuffed into various nooks and crannies. A few old mugs and an open packet of biscuits lay on the coffee table amongst these books and papers; Johnny helped himself to a bourbon cream.
**
Sascha worked as an academic in one of London�
��s prestigious universities; his field was electronic engineering. Gradually gaining recognition as a pioneering researcher, his expertise was becoming increasingly sought after by multinational corporations and even the government. Johnny remembered their school days when, as the new boy, he first struck up a tentative friendship with Sascha, his easy-going genius classmate. They were both thirteen years old at the time. Sascha was by far the brightest student in the year, a truly brilliant mind to whom academic insights came effortlessly. The same quirk of fate that had made him such a brilliant student had also given him a quiet and withdrawn personality, particularly around strangers. These character traits combined with his tall frame and disinterest in most transient adolescent concerns made him a target of low-level school bullying. Johnny had never hesitated in intervening whenever his friend was on the receiving end of any harassment from the other boys. Even as a young man, Johnny found any form of victimisation intolerable, and more than once he found himself playing minder to Sascha. Later in life, Johnny realised that it was not some heroic sense of justice that made him like this, but actually, it was because his mainly dormant psychic ability was functional enough for him to experience the negative energy associated with bullying, even at this early age. Ultimately, he had to get involved; it was to stop the pain he felt in himself. For this reason, the young Sascha became quite attached to Johnny, who, at first, did not much care for him; eventually, as they matured and got to know each other better, Johnny started to value and respect his friend’s intellect and gentle nature. Sascha never veered from the brilliance he demonstrated in school, going on to write scores of scientific papers and achieving the acclaim of his peers. Many of the journals in which his work had been published were sitting right here, somewhere, in his small front room.
**
Footsteps pounded the stairs, Johnny turned around to see Sascha reappear with a large sports bag and two small backpacks.
“One second!” said his friend as he dropped the luggage at the foot of the stairs, only to run back up and return moments later with a camping rucksack.
“Oh good, you’ve got your rucksack,” said Johnny, “for a moment I thought you were going to take all this crap.” He pointed to the first set of bags.
Sascha brushed aside one of his long forelocks indignantly. “I am taking all that,” he replied. “And it’s not crap!” he added.
Johnny paused to carefully choose his words. “Look, Sascha, will you please try to cut down on the bulk? But if you think we really need all this then I’ll try not to complain.” He said this as diplomatically as possible. Johnny did not want the whole operation bogged down with excess luggage; on the other hand, he was also aware that his friend possessed many useful tools. Sascha, acknowledging Johnny’s restraint, rummaged through his luggage to find items that might be discarded, and as he did so, Johnny caught a glimpse of some of the contents.
The sports bag was full of clothing and towels, nothing surprising there, while the two small rucksacks were each full of exercise books and files. Johnny recognised these as the notes he and Sascha had collected over the years as they tried to understand the psychic forces that underpinned reality. Contained within them were various elements of their research such as records of psychic events, early work on auras, observations on paranormal phenomena and measurements taken from experiments on telekinesis; it was work that continued to the present day.
**
Johnny was thirteen when he realised something was happening to him. It started off with dreams, vivid dreams in which he was surrounded by seas of ghostly images, strange people in places he had never been to, all set against a fluid, shifting kaleidoscope of colours. Every feature of this bizarre dreamscape triggered emotions and sensations like nothing he had ever known or experienced before, even as he slept. His mind’s eye would move untiringly between every detail in the scene until, eventually, the whole bizarre journey would diminish in its sensual intensity and fade into nothingness; he would awaken from these dreams feeling refreshed and invigorated. He tried to talk about the dreams and the way they made him feel to his family and even some of his friends; it was difficult to find somebody who would listen because there was never any narrative or dialogue within these dreams. One person genuinely intrigued by what Johnny was going through was his new school friend Sascha; the dreams were a source of intellectual curiosity for him, puzzles waiting to be solved. Months passed and the dreams became increasingly vivid, and every night after his eyes closed, Johnny found himself exploring ever larger and more complex psychedelic landscapes – whole cities packed with ghosts. As the dreams intensified in this way, so did the barrage of emotions and physical sensations that went with them, to the point that it was being awake that had become vague and unclear while within the dreams was where he truly felt alive. None of this was a problem, until a few months later, when the dreams, much to Johnny’s distress, started to impinge on his waking life. The colours, ghostly images and strange sensations refused to end with his sleep, remaining with him as he went about his day – it scared him. He thought he was losing his mind, only his friend Sascha was there to reassure him, to talk to him and unburden the torment of the haunting, ever-present images.
Every day, Sascha listened to Johnny as he described his waking dreams. He spoke of strange lights and halos around people and, most intriguingly, about how everything that he perceived in the world around him stimulated sensory and emotional responses that simply had not been there before. It was Sascha who first started to see the patterns in these descriptions, and it prompted him to postulate quite correctly that Johnny was no longer interacting with the world solely through the five senses: for him, the realm of the abstract (in which dwelt thought, emotion and energy) was now a perceptible function of reality. The friends explored this new, heightened awareness together and started slowly deciphering the torrent of sensory information Johnny was being subjected to. An example of one of their early findings was how colours, auras and vibrations could all be used to discern people’s hidden emotions; soon enough, love, hate, truthfulness and deceit were all laid out for Johnny to read after a few moments of disciplined focus. It was during these strange times that the two youths forged a lifelong friendship.
Johnny was not the first to be awakened to the gift; others had developed psychic ability long before him in a process that had been going on since humankind’s earliest history. So long as the human race existed, it would continue to give birth to psychics; it was a characteristic introduced into the species’ genetic code at the time of its inception. Most psychics never understood their ability and so never embraced it. The gift remained with them only as a curse and an impediment in their lives – many were considered to be suffering from a psychiatric disease. There were two events that set Johnny apart from these unfortunates: one was meeting his friend Sascha, whose companionship and analytical mind guided him through his ordeal, and the second was the arrival of Baccharus.
**
“Well, I suppose it’s no catwalk that we’re heading to,” said Sascha. Johnny watched him discard half the clothes he had packed and all of the towels. From the two smaller bags he brought downstairs, he selected his most relevant notes and shoved them into the now mostly empty clothes bag, dramatically shrinking the amount of baggage he was to take on the trip.
“Okay, that’s that,” he said triumphantly, and then with great reverence he held up a separate piece of luggage, his large camping rucksack. “From this … nothing stays behind,” he declared. With a smile, he opened the top of the rucksack to show Johnny its contents.
“Now that’s more like it!” said Johnny, nodding in approval. Inside was a plethora of electronics; GPS receivers, infra-red thermometer, night vision scopes, EMF detectors, motion detectors and other unrecognisable, phenomenally useful, gadgetry. All these devices were either homemade or modified in some way; nothing was off the shelf. Sascha unzipped another of the rucksack’s compartments to reveal a collection of equipment from
an army surplus store: dark camouflage clothing, a compass and a miniature tool kit. “Excellent, Sascha, your war-chest is something we definitely need to take with us,” said Johnny.
With luggage sorted, the pair prepared to leave the house. Just as he touched the door handle, Johnny stopped and turned around to face his friend and give voice to a thought that had been bothering him for some time. “When I sent Baccharus earlier, I told him to inform you about everything there was to know regarding the mission.”
Sascha noticed a touch of remorse in his voice. “Of course you did, pal. I wouldn’t expect anything less,” he replied.
“Well, as soon as I sent him I regretted it. I was hoping that Baccharus would come back and tell me you weren’t able to make it, that you were too busy or something.”
“Why is that?” Sascha asked, looking a little hurt and sounding a little confused.
Johnny took a deep breath. “Ever since I started developing psychic ability, you’ve been there with me, on a journey in which we’ve both learned many new things. I think you’ll agree with me when I say that one of the important lessons has been that the universe is not this massive benign entity full of nothingness that we were always led to believe; it’s a place full of life, sentience, energy and, most of all, danger. On every assignment we have carried out for the Agency, there have been hazards – in this particular investigation I sense there is real danger – if I say our lives are at risk, I don’t think I’m exaggerating. What I’m trying to say is that you don’t have to risk your life, friend. If anything happened to you, I would feel responsible, and I don’t think I could handle it.”
Sascha looked sombre. “Johnny, I appreciate your concern. Let me say this though: through my association with you I have been awoken to a whole new world. After coming this far, I can’t just go back and continue as if it didn’t exist. Knowing the truth about the wider universe really puts our daily struggle on Earth into perspective. I hate to say it, but it makes it look pretty insignificant. I can’t just go back to living as normal, Johnny … and besides, I don’t abandon my friends.”