by N. J. Mercer
When his vision was about to black out entirely, it flickered instead for an instant, like a television tuning in to a weak broadcast signal, and it returned again. He could see that he was still sitting in the woodland clearing, and to his utmost surprise, he was colour-blind. Everything around him was visible only as shades of grey, even the burning camp fire. Fortunately, this lack of colour was compensated for by an increased clarity in the detail of what could be seen. The darkness of the night could hide nothing from Johnny, every feature of the surrounding woodland was there for him to behold.
Baccharus and Theodora had disappeared. He looked around; they were nowhere to be seen. Where the old woman had been sitting facing him, there was instead a strange black circle suspended in the air. He stood up, and as he did so he noted how this simple action felt so different, there was no effort in it, as if the thought alone was enough to make him upright without the message having to pass through its natural route of brain to spinal cord to leg muscle. He felt directly interfaced with the world around him.
It was after standing up like this that Johnny received the shock of his life. He looked down and recoiled as he observed his own physical form sitting dead still on the ground precisely as he had been when drinking the old woman’s brew, eyes open and unblinking. He looked closer. There was no doubt in it, here was a flawless replica of himself frozen in time. He reached out to touch it, and his hand passed through the body in such a way that it was impossible to know whether it was he or the replica that was the phantom. Johnny had to grudgingly accept that he was now one of two: a version of him sat cross-legged, still and lifeless on the ground, and the other wandered about in a colourless world in another dimension. This was the only explanation that came even close to explaining the strange state of affairs that confronted him. Oh well, thought Johnny, maybe it was a trap by the Disciples of Disorder after all. He must have died after being poisoned by the old woman, and now here he was, in spirit form.
His attention focused once again on the circle of perfect blackness which remained suspended before him, about three feet from the ground and three feet across. The only way he could explain it was as a gap in reality, a portion of the picture where the canvas had a hole punched straight through it.
He walked around to investigate this phenomenon. The circle seemed to have only one dimension, there was no side profile to it, and from the rear it was not visible at all. In fact, from behind, one could just walk through the region where it was supposed to be as if it was not present. The circle only existed when it was viewed from the front, where Johnny had first seen it. For a few minutes, Johnny marvelled at this strangest of objects, if indeed it could even be called an object. Then he made the decision to reach out and touch it. As his hand made hesitant contact with the blackness, Johnny became aware of a vibration running through his entire body, a feeling accompanied by the sensation of an electrical charge; it was similar to what he felt in the presence of psychic energy, something with which he was quite familiar. Experimentally, he plunged his hand into the centre of the black circle, and it disappeared up to the wrist, just at the point where he broke through the supposed surface. Promptly, he withdrew his hand and it reappeared again, intact. Johnny tried this a few more times with the same result, his hand disappearing then reappearing, always accompanied by the sensation of static and strange vibrations through his body. He walked a few metres away from the bizarre circle and stood there, looking at it intently, when Theodora’s words came to mind. With two determined strides, he threw himself head-first into the blackness, desperately hoping what she had said was go through and not to the circle. Just like before, he felt the vibration as his body was swallowed by the black surface. He really did not know what to expect as he crossed what he hoped was a gate of sorts.
Having entered the other side, Johnny looked around with expectation and curiosity, and then he panicked – surrounding him was only a void filled with blackness. He turned around sharply to see if there was any sign of an exit. Even if the black circle was still there (which he doubted), it would have been impossible to discern its location within the empty space where he now hung.
He floated in limbo, removed from all that had ever existed. The emptiness was suffocating. With nothing else to focus on, his attention shifted to his own body which he could still see despite there being no illuminating light – which was disconcerting. But he was grateful for this view, just as he was grateful for still being able to move his limbs.
What happened? he asked himself. He must have done something wrong; maybe it was how he entered the black circle, had he taken a wrong turn through the gate and become stuck between dimensions? All these thoughts flew through his mind. He tried to move; there was nothing to move against, nothing to move to. Maybe he was moving, without any landmark to judge motion by how would he ever know? Was he falling through infinity? As these questions rapidly entered and left his mind they pushed out the initial blind panic he had felt on entering the void. When his consciousness was too tired to contemplate any more, the fear returned once again. Was this to be his fate, to spend eternity in nothingness? Bleak despair soon replaced the fear.
Except for the view of his body, he existed in complete sensory deprivation. There was nothing to track the passage of time here. Judging by the number of thoughts that had rushed through his mind, and sheer guesswork, he concluded that he must have been in this non-place for a good few hours. He looked around again as he had done on countless previous occasions, and still there was not the hint of anything. He concluded that Boyd had been right, that this was all an elaborate trap … one he had walked right into. He even congratulated the Disciples on the brilliance of how they had got him here, the way they had primed him with the dream, how they had misled him through its images. The old woman, Theodora, was probably a demon in disguise; maybe it was Edward Devilliers himself.
There was only nothingness. Johnny, exhausted by going through the same thoughts over and over again, finally gave himself up to the nothingness; he embraced oblivion. The void that had originally been the source of so much anxiety for him became an increasingly peaceful place. Possessed by a deep melancholy, he closed his eyes, and as he closed his eyes the very form of his body that for so long had been the only thing present in the void faded away from existence altogether. Now it did not matter if Johnny had his eyes open or closed; now he existed only as a thought, his own consciousness, forever contemplating being in the absence of all else. With the passage of time, the thought slowed down. Johnny became a single wave of energy, a consciousness in its simplest form, and he found a strange completeness in this – he knew only peace. He could have remained there, hanging in space, for millennia or just a second. To him it would have been the same.
A voice interrupted this eternal peace, and at first, he paid no heed to it. “Johnny,” it whispered repeatedly until it occurred to him that he might have recognised the name.
“Johnny,” the voice whispered again. It reminded him of something; something he did not care for, so he returned to peaceful oblivion. “Johnny,” the voice whispered back at him. Again, he listened and did not act.
A thousand times came that single whisper, a thousand times he ignored it; a little less on each subsequent occasion. Every time he heard it, it stirred him, ever so slightly, slowly lifting him from his singular state of being.
“Johnny,” it whispered again, time and time again.
Following one of these whispers, a mere suggestion of a thought flashed into existence for an instant and died. It continued to do this every time the whisper was repeated until, finally, after countless further repetitions it remained in his mind as a thought fully-formed, a memory returning.
Johnny no longer knew the peace of being a wave of pure energy. A more complex consciousness returned to him. He was able to contemplate again and he remembered a very different existence.
“Johnny,” whispered the voice.
Johnny, he thought, Johnny.
Johnny, repeated his consciousness, its newly born self-awareness overriding the previous singular state of being forever, and the flashing void became multi-coloured. Johnny, I am Johnny; I am Johnny. The purple maelstrom started to coalesce into recognisable shapes.
“I am Johnny,” repeated his consciousness. This sentiment was no longer solely a thought; it now had a voice, a sound. Johnny was substance once again, a solid living mass, a whole body.
“I am Johnny M.!” he cried out aloud into the psychedelic ether through which he floated.
The vague shapes that were forming around him slowly became recognisable images, misplaced in space and time. Scenes from Johnny’s past played themselves out before him as if he were watching a cinema screen that filled his entire visual field. There were giant images of his mother and father, transparent and ghostly, talking to him, bending over him as if he were just an infant. The images faded into mist, and he was left flying through space towards a rapidly spinning planet Earth. He had a perfect view of what he guessed was the solar system; the sun, moon and stars could be seen clearly, and superimposed upon this view of space there flashed countless more ghostly images. They were of all the people he had ever seen or known, acting out unrelated scenes from different points in his life; old girlfriends, school teachers, the man from the corner shop where he bought his comics.
Johnny started to tumble through the ghostly images before him. The spinning Earth which drifted in and out of his point of view as he repeatedly turned head over heels grew ever larger the closer he got. Soon, he was so close that the planet dominated all he could see, and the ghosts from his past stopped. When he finally penetrated the atmosphere, he was no longer tumbling; instead, he plummeted towards the surface, accelerating faster and faster. Now that he was surrounded by air, the sensation of speed was all too apparent. He could feel the wind rushing through his hair and over his body; he felt exhilarated like he had never felt before, even in his dreams. The high velocity of the fall made it almost impossible to breathe so he focused his mind, and through psychic manipulation he deflected the wind, creating a bubble of breathable air around him, mitigating any adverse aerodynamic effects.
It was not long before he was once again close enough to see the three mountains that had haunted his dreams for so long; his descent was taking him to the point where this journey had started, the place where he had sipped the old woman’s brew. As the ground approached, the detail of what he could see progressively increased. The trees, the faint point of light that was the fire and, eventually, the figures around it, all became clear. Johnny closed his eyes, controlled his breathing and focused his mind. The muscles clenched in his jaw, and the tendons on his neck sprang up as he concentrated on willing his descent to slow down. Steadily, his free-fall succumbed to his conscious control; this was a level of psychic manipulation he had never before achieved.
Four pairs of eyes watched him as he returned from the sky. Johnny recognised only two of the figures looking up at him as he approached; one was the old woman, who smiled and slowly shook her head from side to side in disbelief, and the other was Baccharus, who appeared to be restrained by two bearded men Johnny had never seen before. He was still quite high up when he heard his familiar yelling at him, “Johnny! Johnny! I don’t believe it; you’re alive.” Finally, slowly, his feet touched down on to Earth once again.
“Johnny, you’re alive!” Baccharus shouted again, beside himself with joy, struggling desperately to free his little arms from the two men who held him so tightly.
“Welcome back, Johnny!” Theodora said, and Johnny immediately recognised her voice as the whisper in the void.
“Let him go now,” ordered the old woman firmly, and the two bearded men, who looked even younger than Johnny, released Baccharus, who flapped joyously to his keeper.
“What’s going on?” asked Johnny; Baccharus was the first to answer.
“I thought you were dead, Johnny! A minute after you took the drink, you just burst into light and flame! I went crazy! I really thought you were dead.”
Confused, Johnny looked to where he had been sitting before his journey into the void, only to see charred ground. The scene was entirely consistent with what Baccharus had described and he was glad to have arrived without having to witness his own body alight.
“I’m back; don’t worry,” Johnny reassured his familiar. Baccharus was intimately linked to Johnny on the psychic plane and did not have to rely solely on the five senses to confirm the presence of his keeper; the psychic beacon projected by the man who had arrived from the sky was undisputedly that of Johnny, and somehow it seemed more potent.
“I saw you glowing and burning right in front of me; I thought you were finished. What happened?” the familiar asked earnestly.
Johnny turned to Theodora. “I might ask you the same question,” he said.
The old woman had not stopped smiling, and there was awe in the way she looked at Johnny. “You have completed a unique personal journey, Johnny, a journey of rebirth, one through which you have entered a higher state of consciousness. You have seen the essence of your being and its link to the universe. Meditate on what happened when you get a chance; for now, utilise all that is new within you. Time is short.”
Johnny glanced at his watch. She’s right, he thought. They did not have long to stop the Disciples. By his own perception he had been away for an age; over here, around the camp fire, very little actual time had passed. It was all very difficult to understand, he would heed the old woman’s advice and dwell on what had occurred later.
Theodora turned to the two scruffily dressed young men who had been restraining Baccharus. “Erkan, Ashtiaq, go back and tell the others our work is done. We are leaving.”
“Yes, Theodora.” They nodded respectfully. With a nervous smile and another nod directed at both Johnny and Baccharus, they ran out of the woods with the old woman’s message.
“I owe you an apology, Baccharus, but you had to be restrained,” said the old woman before she turned her attention back to Johnny. “When your old form disintegrated, Johnny, your familiar thought we had killed you, and naturally, he went on the warpath.”
“I just went crazy. I’m the one who should be apologising,” Baccharus said to Theodora. “Firing those bolts and then launching myself at you like that … I am so sorry.”
Johnny noticed strands of singed hair sticking out comically from the side of Theodora’s head.
“It is what any faithful familiar would have done,” replied the old woman graciously. Johnny spotted several holes burnt into her blanket wrappings and felt embarrassed.
Baccharus must have caused quite a scene.
“You need to go now, Johnny. You and Baccharus should return to your friends so that you all may confront the lord of Hilvern together.”
Johnny nodded, it was time to play out the final scenes of this assignment. Assignment, he thought; it no longer seemed a strong enough description for what they were setting out to achieve. What they were on, he decided, was a mission.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t thank you,” he said to the old woman. “Without you calling to me like you did, without your guidance, I would never have been awakened. I would have been lost to the void forever.”
“I was serving my purpose, Johnny, I need no thanks. To guide you when you came was the message that was passed down through generations of Earth
witches. I’m just honoured that it all happened during my time and that it was I who aided you. I know our efforts have not been in vain because I can sense the changes in you already. In the void, you existed for a while in the form of your most basic life essence: pure consciousness. From this consciousness you became a thought and you knew yourself, and therefore the universe came to be – do not be fooled into believing this process takes place the other way around, that, my young friend, is the oldest trick in the book! It is the will alone that makes us what we are, Johnny. It is what determines where you are, and it is what shapes all around you. Remember this, Johnny, for your will is going to be tested many times.”
Johnny tried to absorb every word Theodora spoke. He could see truth in it and desperately wanted to sit down again around the fire to reflect on all she had told him; there simply was not going to be enough time for that. He had to move quickly now and confront Disorder. The old woman walked over to Johnny, took his hand and kissed it. She smiled, and with a wink at Baccharus she turned and walked away. Johnny and his familiar watched her exit the clearing opposite to where they had entered. As she made her way into the surrounding woods, the two young bearded men came back to help. They fussed over her as she walked and she shooed them away, chastising them for their efforts.
“Go to your friends, Johnny!” she called without turning back, before melting into the trees and the darkness with her two companions.