K - Echoes Chapter Eleven

Soft turf cushioned Shieldsley's footsteps as he made his way
through the wood, pausing occasionally to listen to the night sounds,
the scampering of some unseen creature through the dark undergrowth,
the hooting of an owl sitting cocooned in his high altar of moonlit
leaves. The woman had vanished, had slipped out of his cabin and into
the surrounding leaves like a swimmer diving into still, dark water.
The ripples had spread, then receded, and the water was again as calm
as a mirror. The night was as it was before she had appeared to him,
yet he still searched for her.

He remembered (as he often did) being a child, and waking from a dream
where his enormous strides had taken him over roof tops, soaring
through the clouds and up into the starry kaleidoscope of space before
landing in a country far distant from his own. He had felt
consciousness tugging at him, pulling him away from this glorious
emotion of total power, depriving him of the ability to surpass the
fragile confines of the mortal world and assume the status of a god. He
had resisted, had tried to cling to the dream, to reject reality and
accept the domination of his imagination, but he had woken up anyway.
The ten minutes he took to walk to school that day disgusted him. Only
hours before, one stride had taken him to the Sahara Desert, the
Himalayas, wherever he wanted.

He felt the same way now. He was fighting his way through the
undergrowth in the vain pursuit of a dream, yet his lips still tingled
from her touch, and the scents that surrounded her, of the raw beauty
of nature, lingered strongly in his memory.

The undergrowth gave way and he emerged into a wide clearing. The
trees stopped suddenly on all sides, and were replaced by deep,
yellowish grass which shone faintly in the silver light. Shieldsley was
suddenly aware that the night had become hotter, that the air was
thicker and that he could wade through it like treacle. The silence had
been replaced by the endless chirp of crickets, chattering and humming,
buried in the long grass. He stopped, and far above the stars seemed
nearer, and their light was more urgent, pulsing more than
twinkling.

"I'm glad you followed me, Henry. Most people would run away. Tell
others they'd seen a ghost and then put it down to their over-active
imagination and forget all about me."

She stood in the centre of the clearing, and her silver robe swayed in
a breeze that he could not feel. The air about her seemed more fluid,
freer than the pocket of humidity in which he seemed imprisoned, and
her clothes not so much glowed in the moonlight than were a part of it.
She was naked, yet robed in a shimmering chrysalis of white fire that
shot up sparks to join their fellows burning in the black heights. A
second later, she again wore only a silver robe.

"Why are you here, Henry Shieldsley? Is it because you fear death? Are
you afraid of dying for your country?"

He spoke, but felt as insane as if he were baying at the moon. "I
don't fear death. Only a pointless death. I don't want to die for fat
politicians drowning in their own cigar smoke. I think I'd rather die
here. I feel...I belong here."

"You don't belong here. This is my wood. You are trespassing."

"Your wood?"

"Of course." The woman disappeared in a burst of blinding light, and a
white cloud billowed from the spot, poured over Shieldsley, and faded
into the tightly-woven line of trees behind him. For a brief moment, he
smelled the clean scent of a landscape purified by rain and lightning,
and then light exploded behind him, and when he spun round, the woman
was perched high in a tree, balancing impossibly on a slender,
leaf-laden branch.

"I do make exceptions to people I like, and you, I think, are one of
them. I like your music, Mr Henry Shieldsley. It soothes me, helps me
to sleep when the sun becomes too glaring. I suppose, according to you
mortals, I have my cousin to blame for that."

"What?! My...my music? I paint, yes, but..."

"Your painting is music to my eyes, my love! Or this that phrase quite
correct?" She paused, and smiled mischievously. "Now, I think we've
established that I can just about accept you living in my wood. Until
your war is over, I suppose. Then, you'll have to return and face the
music, I suppose. The music! Well there I go again!"

She spoke quickly and smoothly, and the ground, already smoothly
undulating towards the far end of the clearing, seemed to sway beneath
Shieldsley. For a second, he was on a boat sailing through a steamy-hot
ocean, and a man stood before him, his eyes raised to the sky while his
trembling hands clutched a woolly fleece which glittered like gold in
the blazing sun. He awoke to find the deep, springy grass cushioning
his head, and the woman standing above him, floating ten feet in the
air. Come to think of it, perhaps that wasn't so strange, because it
was so humid and the air was probably thick enough to walk on. He
blinked away droplets of sweat from his eyes, and she was standing in
the grass, and tiny flecks of silver glittered all over her robe.

"Did you have pleasant dreams, Henry? I fear you have slept too long
and it is nearly morning. Perhaps you will play some music to me while
I sleep? After all, my music is dreams to your mind." She frowned, and
a shower of light fell from her forehead and fell into the grass, where
tall stalks immediately began to sprout, snaking above the blades and
then exploding into white blossom. "Oh dear. I'm not quite sure I
intended that to happen." She cupped her hands below her mouth, and
blew towards the new-born flowers, and it seemed to Shieldsley that
they disintegrated in the same way as they had been constructed,
shattering into a cloud of brightness which rose and blew back into the
woman's face. She breathed in sharply, and the cloud disappeared inside
her.

"I do apologise. Not just for that, but for the way I greeted you. You
must have been terrified, waking up in your dark little room to find a
strange woman standing there and forcing herself onto you. I hope I'm
not normally like that. It's just been so long since any man like you
visited me."

"I wasn't terrified." Shieldsley had been stunned into silence for the
last few minutes, struck with awe at the incredible sights which had
bombarded his senses. If this was a dream, it was one he going to try
to make the most of, and it was time for him to start playing along
with the game, whatever it was. "I was...a bit surprised perhaps. It's
not everyday that you find beautiful women forcing their way into your
cabin without even unlocking the door. I would even go as far as to say
that you are the one who was trespassing, not me."

"I'm pleased to discover that Henry Shieldsley has a tongue to match
his looks, although that's probably not the best choice of words
considering what happened between us in your hideaway. She smiled, and
her tongue darted between her teeth. He felt the same excitement well
up within him as when he had first seen this woman, and first felt her
shining body press against his.

"I see the flames of desire dancing in your eyes. We've only just met,
Henry. Imagine you'd met me at a party. You're drunk, I'm drunk, the
whole world's drunk for all we care. You stare into my eyes, I stare
into yours, we kiss, we roll on the ground, we make love. Passionately,
but drunkenly and mistakenly. We don't really know each other. You wake
in the morning with a pounding headache and a naked woman lying next to
you in bed. You think, "Shit, what the hell's her name?" and pack her
off as soon as possible. A good story, don't you think? Imagine that
now is the morning after. In my case, however, I don't want to be
packed off. I want to get to know you, Henry. I want your music to
please me. We have all the time and all the space in the world. We have
all the space beyond the world, if that's what it takes. Then, when we
really know each other, when I feel truly relaxed in your company,
perhaps things could...change, so to speak."

Shieldsley rose from the grass, and looked down into the woman's face.
In each of her eyes, his face gleamed back at him. "One moment you make
flowers rise up from the ground. You breathe, and they..they disappear.
Then, you utter the most materialistic load of crap I've ever heard.
What do you expect me to make of you? Clearly, I'm dreaming. Things
like this don't happen in my world. This is like some fairy
tale!"

"Unbelievable things often happen in your world, Henry Shieldsley.
Things are happening in the east that few know about, yet. People are
being carried in trains to places of mass extermination. Millions of
people. You will be made to believe in that. I do not expect you to
believe in me, but I can assure you that if this is a dream, you will
never wake up. Paint me a painting, Henry Shieldsley. Make me some
music.
Tomorrow. I will be standing by you all day."

She disappeared, but there was no brilliant flash of light to mark her
departure. Instead, she faded like her flowers, evaporating into a
cloud of tiny white sparks which separated and darted into the
undergrowth.

He was now alone, and really felt his loneliness, for the first time
since he had fled north and hid in this strange wood. The clearing
gaped and yawned before him, as empty of trees as his heart felt empty
of hope, of belief. The impulses that had driven him away from the
fighting now seemed bereft of the ideological importance to which they
had once been attached. The woman had appeared to him a matter of hours
beforehand, yet it was already her face which filled his thoughts, and
at that moment, he believed that if she clicked her pearl-white fingers
and told him to give up this ridiculous charade and give himself up to
the fortunes of war, he would willingly go. And yet at the same time,
his reasoning told him that he had become fixated with a dream, an
insubstantial nothing which would fade into forgetfulness when morning
came.

Then he turned his head to the sky, and the eastern half of the
hemisphere had turned from starry black to starry deep-blue, and he
realised that morning had already come. He started back towards the
fence-like line of trees which marked the edge of the clearing, but
stopped when the thought struck him that he was completely lost, and
had spent an unknown amount of time lying unconscious on a bed of grass
dreaming of Golden Fleeces and the sea-passage of the Argos. He would
have started panicking if he had not noticed a glimmer of light peeping
out from behind the frontier of trees some way to his left. He turned,
and several long strides took him back into the comforting shelter of
the forest. The arrival of morning had also signalled a change in the
climate, for the unbearable humidity of before had been replaced by a
pleasant, fresh coolness which Shieldsley normally associated with a
bright and dewy Spring morning. The light still seemed some way ahead,
which struck him as odd, for when he had first seen it from the
clearing, it had seemed to be only just beyond the first line of trees.
This then led him to wonder why he was following it in the first place.
If it was a hunter, or (even less likely) an early-morning stroller, it
would hardly be safe to ask him the way to his own cabin. He had to
avoid detection, at any cost.

He stopped, and leaned against the mossy bark of a suitably slanting
tree. He must have been making far too much noise crashing his way
through the brambles and ferns, and, at any moment, a hand would grab
him and he would feel twin barrels pressing painfully into his spine.
Then, that would be it. He would resist, and hopefully the hunter would
blow his brains out before he could be sent to fight and die in some
godforsaken country where he had no right to be.

Then again, there had been a point back then in the clearing when he
had decided to accept all these events as a particularly vivid dream,
and that, in reality, he was sleeping soundly in the wood-scented
comfort of his cabin. If that was so, he had nothing to fear from this
mysterious willow-the-wisp.

Perhaps this was his subconscious getting behind the wheel, forcing him
to face that which he most feared - detection, and, subsequently,
punishment. He would face this man, and kill him. Then, his mind would
at last be at rest. As for the events in the clearing, well, perhaps
they represented the idyllic, fairy-tale-like nature of his present
existence. How romantic it is for a man to live in the heart of a
summery wood, living off the fruits of nature, hidden from the
materialistic hatefulness of humankind. And the woman. Surely she was
the personification of Mother Nature, with whom he was merely flirting,
not raping like so many other people, tearing up the woodland to make
factories and houses.

Thus decided, he hurried on towards the light, which still glowed at
the same distance from him as it had always seemed to do. He was about
to consider the strangeness of this, when someone pushed him roughly
from behind and he stumbled forward, landing heavily on a prickly
surface of brambles. He felt tiny needles prick his skin but ignored
the discomfort to roll over and face the expected second assault of his
attacker, who must have tricked him and outflanked him while leaving
his lantern behind as bait.

Instead he saw nothing, only ranks and columns of trees marching off
into the half-lit distance. A light breeze brushed his cheek, which had
been scratched and torn by the thorns.

"What.."

His words were cut off by a high-pitched laugh which seemed to come
from the direction of the light. It seemed that 'Mother Nature' had
followed him, or, more precisely, had led him to this spot.

"Follow me, Henry Shieldsley! You think such strange and insubstantial
thoughts. You try to change my wood into a battlefield, the very place
from which you are trying to escape. I will lead you home to your
precious little bed, where you can sleep and attempt to deny reality.
Follow the light!"

Dreamily, he rose awkwardly and painfully to his feet and trudged
towards the light until he emerged once again from the trees to find
his own clearing and his own cabin. Its door still hung open, like a
mouth, agape, expectant. He allowed it to swallow him up and settled
down comfortably in its warm stomach while outside the night was
finally digested and replaced by the day.

If this is a dream, Shieldsley mused, while half-asleep, it is an
extraordinarily long and vivid one.