I arrive back at my bed having picked up my pyjama top on the way. Although there is no sense of warmth or cold I feel better for being clothed after a fashion as nakedness makes me feel far more vulnerable than is reasonable. Somehow I can hide from this reality in my pyjamas as though they not only gave me smidgeon of dignity but also provided a sense of security, as though they were body armour.
I sit on the bed again and try to speak but still nothing comes forth from my mouth although I can feel my mouth moving and my vocal chords vibrating. I try shouting and this leads to a violent coughing fit and yet I hear nothing coming from my body at all. I snap my finger. I hear that without problem.
I am confused.
I'm not sure what to do next. I am beginning to feel a sense of fear arising as I think of trying the trip again a level lower. I can't work out though how I will know whether or not I am back at my bed. I consider simply going down the slope to find whatever lies at the bottom although I worry that I may not be able to find my way back up. I am beginning to feel the panic of being lost.
Feelings I note are returning and I begin to feel thirst and hunger.
With a sudden lurch I feel time start again and I am no longer outside it and with it comes my voice and emotions and bodily functions. I am back - somewhere.
I sense I am being watched.
I call out, how lovely it feels to hear my voice, it sweeps away the sense of isolated loneliness that has begun to envelop me.
Is someone there? I get no reply and here of course my ability to relate this fails with language. How can I describe being watched when there is no light? Where do I even begin to tell you what it was like? There was a presence, for want of a better word, in this chamber.
I am sitting on the edge of the lip, my legs sloping downwards. It is most uncomfortable. It is as though I am being examined from the outside in. I have a sense of nakedness. No that is an inadequate word, yes physically naked but more than that mentally naked, everything exposed and examined, every word and thought and emotion. That old cliché about life flashing before your eyes is inadequate but will serve a certain purpose in trying explain what I experience in the hours that follow, at last it feels like hours and my internal clock is usually pretty accurate. Nothing flashed before my eyes but everything was laid bare and was examined by something other than myself. It was painful, not physically but emotionally and stressful and that in turn brought on physical symptoms. I knew eventually something far worse than nakedness or fear, for the first time in my life I felt absolute terror.
It ended abruptly and I was alone again or so it seemed to me.
I'm not ashamed to say that I cried at this point and sobbed for a long time before crawling up into the bed and falling into sleep. This time I knew I had slept as I was in the flow of time and there was past and present and future.
When I awoke, I was both hungry and thirsty. I tried licking the damp wall but it provided little comfort.
It was then I heard the sound of water, a trickle but water nevertheless off to my right. Carefully I made my way along the ledge and at the third pipe I found a little stream coming from the hole in the wall and here I slaked my thirst. It was more than water. As I drank my hunger flowed away and I felt strength return to my body. I indulged in the liquid till I felt fully sated.
Time pressed upon me ever more forcefully and I was ready to tackle the rest of the sloping floor. On hands and knees I began to move down the slope. Pain was now present in my joints and the floor hurt to move on sending tingling pain through every nerve. As I descended the smoothness gave way to roughness and I had to contemplate standing up. I did try but the pain in my feet was intense but nothing like as intense as wondering what the next step forward might find. I thought to try a little echo location but there was none, no echo, no sense of space at all filtered in to my mind.
I sat down on my buttocks and wrapped my arms around my legs and wondered what on earth was happening to me. I wept again. A soul wrenching sobbing. It felt as though everything was being pulled out of me and I was being stretched like a rubber toy. In the midst of this I thought I heard a noise but realised it must only be myself. I was alone. Terribly alone. Lost. Abandoned. Choose the words for none I can think of will fit what I experienced in that awful place.
Again I felt a presence but this time not examining me but hunting me, chasing me, bearing down upon me and I could have sworn that I heard the same sound again, that of a hound baying but that had to be my imagination.
I felt the need to escape to move on but how? The only way was down. I moved on all fours as fast as I could trying to escape the feeling of being hunted. It seemed like hours I moved this way ever further down, the slope getting steeper.
It was then that I found a space before my hand and I stumbled. Gathering my wits after a real fright I felt and there was indeed a hole. The floor gave way to nothingness. I lay on my stomach and stretched my hands and arms as far down as I could but could feel nothing. No sense of depth. It could have been two metres deep or several thousand for all I could discern. Did it have a bottom? Was this the way out? How I longed for some object to drop into the hole so that I could listen and gauge the depth.
I realised as I pulled myself upright that the sense of being hounded was receding and with that came relief.
I decided to move round the hole in the floor to try and gauge its size and perhaps find some clue as to what it was, would I find a ladder down which I could make my escape.
I took off my pyjama top and folded it neatly and left if by the side and started off on my journey. I assumed in my mind that the hole was circular and even and so it proved to be. I took my time sweeping with my hands thoroughly over every surface ahead. It was uniform as far as I could gather and strangely here there was no sense of pain other than the usual one would expect crawling over what I now took to be concrete. It seemed as though many hours passed before I came back to my pyjama top.
As I pulled it on having had no luck in finding anything I wondered what to do. I realised I was tired. Very tired. I needed sleep and rest. Although it would take a long time I decided to head upwards and try and find my bed and the little stream of liquid. I strained to hear that sound of trickling liquid but found it missing. Perhaps as I moved up I would audibly locate it and be able to head towards it and locate my bed with the minimum of effort.
I did manage in time to make out the sound and as soon as I was sated I found my bed and slept. Of course I have no idea how long I slept and time in the sense of day and night was completely absent and my body clock gave no indication of where I was.
I awoke and rubbed at my right eye which was itchy beyond belief. I rubbed and rubbed and saw stars. This was the first indication I had had that my optic nerves were still intact.
What now? I had no idea, part of me wanted to crawl under bedclothes and hide and hope it would all go away, part of me was becoming angry and frustrated. Was this a puzzle and I was missing a piece? How for example did my mattress remain here? Why was it here at all? Why was I here? What was going on? I tortured myself for a long time during that waking period. I kept worrying away at questions to which I had no answer and couldn't possibly know the answer yet I persevered despite the mental torture. I did avoid thinking about the presence I felt. I kept that part of the experience well out of sight at the back of my mind trying very hard to persuade myself that it was my mind playing tricks on me as it had done when I was a child and saw monsters in shadows in bed at night. Children so easily see things that aren't there as their minds make sense of what is around them and I felt I was like a child in dark bedroom trying to make sense of what I felt around me. I was pretty sure it was all in my mind.
I felt the need to stand up and stretch. I ran my hands through my hair.
The sense of not being alone returned with a vengeance. No matter how much I tried to convince myself it was a figment of imagination I failed. It felt very very real. I was being hounded again. I needed t
o move.
Somewhere something snapped, now I am not sure if it was an audible snap or just a mental one. I started to scream and run blindly, spinning, rolling, obscenities pouring out of my mind I was attacking the force that was around me with everything I could muster in my armoury, I lost all sense of intelligence or mind control of any sort. I was reduced to little more than a screaming hounded animal. I think everything I had poured out of me in anger and fear until at last there was nothing. The feeling of the presence was just as real but it had neither receded not advanced during this verbal and mental assault. Rather as I lay on the ground with my energy expended, panting for breath, it felt as though it had simply absorbed it all or perhaps more accurately a feeling that it had been like blotting paper simply soaking it all up.
A sense of calmness came with the exhaustion that filled my entire body. I felt empty and drained and not a lot better to be honest. I was however thirsty beyond anything I had known in my life. I felt close to death and longed for cool, cool water to flow over me and into me and rehydrate me.
I was lying on the sloping side and my head was upwards and the noise was like music to my ears. I heard the sound of water trickling and moving all around me. Water touched my lips gently and I opened my mouth and let it flow in to my body, the flow increased and I luxuriated in the water flowing over my head and body, oblivious to my soaking pyjamas I rejoiced in this mercy of water.
I was sated and still the water tumbled and fell over my body and I rolled on to my back and let it hit my head and cleanse me. I luxuriated in this for some time before I realised that not only was the noise increasing but also the volume of water. I felt myself begin to be lifted by the water and start to slide down the slope. Instinctively I fought against this and began to struggle up the slope towards the ledge. I had my hand on the ledge and pulled myself up with difficulty to a sitting position. For a moment I was relieved and felt myself safe from what was fast becoming a torrent of water pouring out from the small holes I had felt just below the ledge on my earlier explorations. I noticed as my legs dangled over the edge that the water was not only rising but beginning to swirl. None of this made sense to me as I thought there is a big hole at the bottom of this place surely the water must be pouring away then I realised it must be have a solid bottom but quickly dismissed that idea as I couldn't then account for the swirling motion that could only be accommodated by an open hole. You may well ask how was able under such circumstances to think such thoughts, was I not panicked by the water and the noise and of course I ought to have been but rather I found myself as I sat there in a place of peace where I was quite distant from what happening and felt happily able to analyse what was happening. The panic that had driven me upwards had vanished in a flash.
I felt the force, the presence. It became ever more powerful. I sensed communication, a suggestion I should ease myself into the now boiling water. I knew I would drown in the maelstrom below as I couldn't swim. It would be a form of suicide I argued. Or rather when I say argued that would suggest a dialogue of which there was none even though there was a communication of sorts.
Trust. Trust. Give yourself over and surrender. Slide in to my waters.
These are the bizarre kind of thoughts that were flooding my brain. I resisted until it became almost impossible, it was like the tug of gravity, the inevitability of the fall. I was being nudged to the very edge of a decision and yet not forced. It became unbearable.
I gave in. Of my own free will I acceded to the sense of surrender and slid in to the waters with great fear rising as I found myself almost committed beyond stopping.
Time almost seemed to stop as I hung there for just a moment in time between the solidity of the ledge and safety and letting go into the hands of water desperately grasping at my body. A deliciousness caught between worlds where fear peaked and then vanished as the word TRUST hammered into my brain.
I let go.
I surrendered to the water which carried me. I didn't sink, I didn't float, I was submerged to shoulder height and then held in place by the water as though it were a living being. I was swept onwards by the water and I relaxed and felt myself safe.
I heard the noise of water fall away and the surface, calm, and I was sure that the flow of water had ceased.
I continued to be moved by the water. I lifted my arms and laid them on the top of the water and felt supported. I sensed as much as knew that the amount of water was lessening and I was being drawn ever closer to the hole as the water receded. I felt the water narrow until my hands could reach beyond where I was held. I was in a stationary position by this time held in the firm grasp of the water which had not only narrowed to about five feet but I could feel had edges running downwards as though I was encased in an icicle of fluid.
I hung there for some time or so it seemed yet rather than being fearful it felt more like being cuddled. My brain could no longer make any sense of where or what was happening and that seemed not to trouble me over much.
Then with no warning the fluid simply vanished and I was left hanging in mid air defying logic and gravity.
I started to fall. Into the hole I fell like Alice down a rabbit hole. I fell, and fell and was swallowed by the darkness and as I fell time again ceased to exist for me and falling became an academic idea.
A Solitary Roman Soldier
I am looking at myself looking at a scene. I can see the back of my head ahead of me. It is as though I am looking at an avatar who in turn is seeing the scene that I see. Time is paused.
A tarmac country road is descending between banked hedges to dip under a disused granite railway bridge and then rises again under the arch as it turns away to the righthand side and disappears. Beyond the steeply climbing road there is in the far distance a green plateau but it is obvious that it is at the distant level and without seeing it is obvious there must be a valley side ahead.
A Roman soldier complete with his shiny armour can be seen on the other side of bridge frozen in the act of running up the hill. He is just short of the righthand swing of the road.
The sun is shining and from the appearance both from my peripheral vision and all before me it is clearly early summer. The incongruity of the scene is not lost on me, a Roman soldier and a disused railway bridge and yet it all appears to be as it should be.
I soak it all up, folding my mind around the details until time flows and I am in what appeared to be my avatar and the first thing that fills my senses are the noises of insects and birds and the rich smells of summer and the gentle warmth.
Clanking.
I look up and see the soldier running his armour glinting and clinking and he disappears from sight, I am tempted to call after him but resist and instead move slowly down the narrow road that had once been a simple country track. The hedges are well kept, the grass edges well controlled. Popping my head up over the hedges I see nothing just grass and a fading away into the distance as though nothing exists beyond the immediate boundaries. Looking up the sky fills my vision, pale blue and with white clouds, the sense of a northern summer.
I wonder what is behind me. I sense the road I am walking down heading back up a short hill, given the old railway line I expect to see houses or hear some kind of human activity. Slowly I turn after having walked perhaps ten metres towards the arch and find behind me nothing appears to exist beyond that ten metre line. It simply fades away to a sort of grey despite the urge to move forward I have to go back up the hill to where I began and cross the line where I started into greyness. There is nothing and although I walk forward using the light of the world behind me it doesn't become darker, it doesn't alter in anyway, looking back I can be no more than two metres from where I began, recklessly perhaps I run forward into the greyness until my breath is ragged and then I turn round one hundred and eighty degrees. I am no more than two metres from where I began.
I ponder and understand at last the true meaning of nothingness, glad however that is clearly grey and no longer utter blackness
.
A deep breath and I walk down towards the bridge. I am drawn to the right hand side of the arch and I find myself standing in front of the granite blocks that seem to grow out of the banking like living things. Close up it is dark and damp and lies in deep shadow. I reach out and feel the surface. It brings a memory of darkness and a place I think I have been before but it just out of my reach and I cannot remember the memory I seek but am instead aware of the memories of the stone itself.
Every hand that has touched its surface, every tool that has worked it has left a memory within the stone. I touch the surface now with both hands caressing it and exploring it and drawing sensations and memories, sensing the beginning of its formation. I move forward and seem to slip inside the arch and become as one with the very rock itself. Like a thick soup my arms move through its structure and it calls out to me although it is not alive I sense its being, its existence. Understanding of its nature and its sense of time are absorbed into my being. We remain united and intimate as though dissolving in to one another as though I am myself becoming granite and the granite blocks are uniting with my molecular being.
I blink and I am outside the arch. Touching the blocks again gives nothing to me, no sense, no entering into its nature it is once more simply a damp moss covered stone that once held up the passing trains.
Entering the arch I feel the change in temperature and light. There is almost a iciness to the air. My world is now framed in the inverted U. Walking slowly forward I become aware of the valley ahead in the distance and to my right a banking that rises up to be level with the top of the bridge, there is an outcrop of rock at the top of the banking breaking free of the earth. I catch but a fleeting glimpse of shiny metal and hear a clanking. Imagination or reality? The Roman soldier or not? I am uncertain but feel a pressing urge now to climb and clamber up the banking, a need to follow.
Inner Legacy Page 3