Leoni bristled: ‘Look, I know it’s going to be tough and it won’t be “fun”, OK? I accept there might be some risks – thanks for warning me. But this is something I need to do and I’ve made up my mind.’ She turned to Bannerman: ‘I guess you’re right. I don’t have to wait for you to get back to start the DMT. If you say I’m ready, then I’m ready.’
Bannerman passed the buck: ‘You’re ready only if you feel you’re ready.’
‘Then I guess I’m ready. Let’s do it.’
At ten a.m. on Thursday, with her heart beating a little faster than normal, Leoni reported to the lab in the basement of the research block.
Her only ‘duty’ in the previous two days had been to undergo tedious medical tests of her respiration, liver function and blood pressure, as well as an ECG and seemingly endless requests for samples of her blood and urine. Otherwise she was free but felt so terrified and alarmed at the prospect of socialising that she contrived to keep herself to herself, even avoiding the restrooms if another volunteer was present. She also acted hostile and monosyllabic at communal meals. There was one guy, maybe eight or ten years older than her, a mature student taking courses at UC Berkeley, who dressed like a hippie and tried to get her talking a few times. He had a nice voice – sounded British – but on each occasion she’d cold-shouldered him. The only thing she wanted to do was stay in her bare, quiet room filling the pages of a sketch pad with scenes and details from the land where everything is known. The two suns in the sky, the strange green flowers, the Blue Angel, the cow-beetles, the tree-birds and the girl with chestnut hair – all were there.
Who was the girl? How had she come to be in the Angel’s realm? And why had Leoni felt such a strong connection to her? As though in search of a coded message she’d made a dozen different sketches of her, recalling every detail of her pretty, tomboyish face, but was none the wiser.
Perhaps DMT would take her to a place where she could find answers?
Both Monbiot and Shapira were waiting for her in the lab. They had her sign a wad of consent forms and ushered her down a long corridor lined with plastic chairs and into a curtained-off treatment room fitted out with a hospital bed, IV stands, medicine cabinets and a handbasin. She lay down on the bed and looked at the ceiling. Then Shapira rolled up Leoni’s sleeve, prepped her arm with surgical wipes and inserted an IV line into her forearm vein. ‘DMT fumarate,’ Monbiot explained. ‘We’re starting you off on a low dose – 0.2 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. Some people don’t even experience any effects at that level but it gives you a chance to get familiar with the general set-up and prepares you for a larger dose tomorrow.’
Out of the corner of her eye Leoni could see Monbiot flushing a syringe into the IV line. Fifteen seconds later she heard a loud buzzing and crackling in her ears and felt dizzy and disorientated as though she were being rocketed up into the sky on a spinning carousel.
A tremendous feeling of pressure, as though something were literally about to explode, filled her brain.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Within seconds the treatment room had ceased to exist for Leoni – as if it had been blasted into tiny splinters and blown away in the slip-stream of her fantastic ascent. Her own body, Doctors Monbiot and Shapira, UC Irvine, North America and all the other ingredients of everyday reality were simply gone, and all she knew was the whirlwind of pure force that impelled her upwards in a seemingly endless, vertiginous rush.
Then, with no slowing of her rate of climb, an incredible seething mass of rich, deeply saturated colours, coiled into intricate knots like the bodies of a thousand serpents, rising into nested wave patterns and decorated with bright dots, exploded across her field of vision. The spectacle was vast, breathtaking, devastating. Writhing and pulsating with its own inner light, it filled her with an indescribable sense of menace. She couldn’t shut out the colours or ignore them. They had invaded every corner of her consciousness and demanded her attention.
Then, suddenly … WHOOSH! It happened fast. One second Leoni was outside that terrifying wall of colours, mesmerised and threatened by it. The next second … BAM! She was projected through it into a glassy geometrical space. The space was dominated by a large cylindrical machine lit up like a Christmas tree by hundreds of green and yellow LEDs flashing on and off in coordinated sequences. It seemed to be part metal, part organic, and was surmounted by a brainlike central dome divided into hemispheres. Attached to it by a spiral tube was a funnel, resembling an old-fashioned phonograph, and at least a dozen waving tentacles – some wiry, some fleshy – of varying lengths and thicknesses. As ridiculous as a cheap prop in a low-budget sci-fi movie, the whole bizarre apparatus protruded up through the middle of the floor where it was tended by five pallid humanoids about the height and build of eight-year-olds. They wore colourful clothes – reds, yellows and greens – but had the wizened faces of ancient gnomes.
Although she felt afraid, and deeply disorientated, Leoni drifted closer – her previous experience of the out-of-body state helped her to negotiate this alien new reality – and as she approached them the little beings turned towards her. They can see me, she realised with a shock – for she had believed herself invisible in her aerial form.
Of course we can see you, came back a reply. The words were not spoken aloud, yet she heard them inside her mind.
They can see me, thought Leoni, and they’re telepathic.
She framed a thought as a question: ‘Who are you?’
‘We’re the switchboard operators,’ one of the entities replied, again without speaking aloud. He gestured towards the machine. ‘We’re here to put you through …’
‘Put me through to who???’
At this the five humanoids looked at each other and made an elaborate dumbshow of puzzlement with their small hands turned palms upward and baffled expressions on their wrinkled faces. Finally one of them, a little taller than the others, stepped forward: ‘Not who,’ he said. ‘Where. We’re here to transmit you. Please tell us where you would like to go.’
‘Whaddya mean? Like to Europe? Africa? Mexico? Are you some sort of travel agency?’
The taller being took another step towards her and now Leoni noticed that he was holding a long flexible wand made of some silver substance with the liquid sheen of mercury. ‘This is the first time you’ve used this technology?’ he asked – but it was more of a statement.
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘The technology that brought you here?’ He gestured around the room and Leoni confirmed her first impression that its walls were made of clear glass – or some material resembling glass – set at freakish, impossible angles and joined overhead into a crystalline pyramidal ceiling. Beyond, on all sides, and beneath the transparent floor – very scary, this – she could see … nothing. Just pitch-black night, stretching for ever in all directions. It was as though she were suspended in a shard of light over a bottomless pit of endless darkness.
Wanting to answer the question about technology, she summoned an image in her mind of her meat body lying on the bed back in the lab at UC Irvine, of the IV line in her arm, and of Dr Monbiot pushing down the plunger in the hypodermic that had flushed the DMT into her system. At once the tall being extended his hand and touched the tip of his wand against the shoulder of Leoni’s aerial body.
The effect was dramatic. Her feelings of disorientation and confusion were banished, a mood of calm settled over her, and her mental processes seemed to sharpen and clarify.
‘I know where I want to go,’ she said, and the thought evoked an immediate burst of whirring and clicking from the machine. The little beings rushed to their stations at various points around it, and its tentacles reached out towards her aerial body and drew her down – she made no attempt to resist – until she was peering into the phonograph funnel.
Now that she was up close it seemed …
… Big enough to swallow her.
With no obvious transition Leoni found herse
lf inside it and moving through it at amazing speed. Its walls and sides gyrated around her, becoming a blur, she had the sense of dropping downwards, and then – WHAM! THWOCK! – she was back in a body again, subject to gravity, and dumped on her ass beneath the twin suns, and amongst the familiar iridescent green flowers, of the land where everything is known.
She looked around but there were no monstrous man-eating trees in sight. Then she heard the electrifying voice of the Blue Angel: ‘I’m so glad you’ve found your way to this technology. Now we can really get some work done.’
Leoni had tumbled out of the sky onto a steep slope leading up to a ridge, and the voice seemed to be coming from the other side of the ridge. She climbed the slope and, at the summit, found herself looking down at the Blue Angel seated on the hillside a few steps below. Dressed in a scarlet robe spun from some magnificent and unearthly material, the Angel was looking down at the distant rooftops of an immense circular city, surrounded by a high metallic wall, commanding the floor of a lush green valley – a futuristic city of pyramids and glass towers, canals and hanging gardens, jade obelisks and crystal ziggurats, but one that seemed devoid of life and movement.
Leoni had not forgotten the Angel’s promise to show her ‘Jack’, the mysterious source of all her pain. But as she scrambled down to her side she asked instead: ‘You mean I can get to you whenever I want to with DMT? Is that the technology you’re talking about? Is that what makes the veil between worlds thin?’
‘Yes – a molecular technology, older than the stars. The machine elves seeded it in many worlds to effect transit and linked it to hyper-dimensional switchboards they control.’
‘I went through one of those switchboards. I think I met the machine elves.’
‘They like to play games, but many in the transit process are distracted by them and the switchboards don’t always send you where you want to go … Much time is wasted. Much confusion caused …’ In the Angel’s hands there had appeared a small device, a little like a laptop computer. She flicked up the screen, revealing a control panel, pointed to the city and turned a dial: ‘Do you like it like this?’ she asked.
To Leoni’s astonishment the sky above the rooftops began to change colour as the dial was turned. It had started off blue but now strobed through green, yellow and magenta before returning to blue and beginning the cycle again. The effect was mesmerising. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I like it very much.’ She had a strong intuition that the flickering colours were reprogramming her brain, but she didn’t mind. Then the Blue Angel reached over, plunged a long silver needle deep into her left temple and used the needle as a catheter to implant a thin filament of crystal.
The operation was fast, shocking and intrusive.
‘Why did you do that?’ Leoni yelled as the needle was withdrawn, ‘I trusted you.’
‘I haven’t broken your trust. I’ve made some adjustments to simplify your transits in future. When you next use the technology it will take you where I want you to go without the delay of passing through a switchboard …’
‘You’ve made some adjustments to what? My meat body is back on a hospital bed in UC Irvine. I don’t even understand what sort of body – or brain – I have here … And what do you mean about taking me where you want me to go?’
‘Don’t you remember, Leoni, when we last spoke? I told you I have plans for you. I have a purpose for you to fulfil …’
‘There you go again. You’re going to transit me, wherever you want, to fulfil your purpose. But you haven’t even told me what this purpose is or asked me if I want to fulfil it for you. Don’t you need my permission? Or do you get to do whatever you like because you’re an angel?’ Leoni hesitated: ‘That is what you are, right?
‘Gods, angels, spirits, demons – we have many names.’
‘There’s more than one of you?’
‘We are legion. But this is talk for another time. I have work for you now.’
Leoni could feel herself getting annoyed: ‘You still haven’t asked my permission to involve me in any of this … work.’
‘I do not need to ask your permission.’
‘Ha!’ Leoni was amazed at her own boldness: ‘You bet your ass you do!’
The Angel smiled: ‘You misunderstand me. I do not mean to disrespect your sovereignty. It’s true I have chosen you for this work – and I did that without your consent. But the nature of the task is such that it would be pointless for you to undertake it unless you accede to it wholeheartedly.’
Leoni was trying to figure out exactly what this meant. ‘So your plans don’t involve forcing me to do anything?’
‘I could not do so even if I wished to. You are my choice for this task. But if you do not accept then I will choose another.’
‘What made you choose me?’ Leoni asked.
‘You are human, you are female and you live in the twenty-first century. These were all essential prerequisites.’
‘Hey, I’ve got news for you! Women hold up half the sky. There are about four billion of us. What makes me different?’
‘You were abandoned at birth. Your first five years were spent in an orphanage …’
‘Nobody wanted me …’
‘But at last you were adopted …’
‘I’d given up hope. Longing to have a mother and father, seeing the other kids go off to happy homes – it all hurt too much. Just after I was five my dreams came true. For the next three years I thought I was in heaven. Then I found out I’d been adopted by the parents from hell.’
‘An apt metaphor. And this, finally, is why I have chosen you. You were adopted to serve as an offering to Jack, and Jack is my enemy.’
‘An offering?’ Leoni repeated the words, feeling dazed. ‘I don’t think I understand.’
‘Every moment of your life after your adoption was mapped out as a sacrifice to Jack. He delights in the destruction of human potential and the undoing of innocence. Your demolition was your parents’ gift to him.’
‘But why? Why would they do that?’
‘He demands such a sacrifice of all his followers. Some are ordered to kill a child, amidst blood and fear, in some abominable way. Others are required to inflict bewildering mental and physical tortures first, sometimes extended over periods of years. This was what happened to you.’
‘So that means my parents are Jack’s followers?’
‘Yes. And there are others like them everywhere – bad people he has spoken to in dreams, good people he has corrupted and subverted. A secret cult has begun to form and its members worship him as their god. Already they number thousands. They occupy positions of power and wealth in their nations, and every one of them has offered a child like you to Jack.’
The words sounded true and at the same time made no sense. ‘I don’t even know who Jack is,’ Leoni said.
‘Do you want to know?’ the Angel asked.
‘Of course I want to know!’
In the lap of her scarlet robes the Angel still held the little device with its fold-up screen and control panel. Now she turned a second dial – not the one she’d used to adjust the sky – and the screen burst into life with a kaleidoscopic display of rotating patterns and colours. ‘Look into the screen,’ she commanded, ‘and I will show you Jack.’
Leoni had to obey. The patterns within the screen opened up into a rushing, churning vortex of sound and light and she felt her consciousness fly out of her body into the maelstrom. Once more she had the sense of passing through a tunnel – Alice down the rabbit hole, she thought – and then WHOOMF! she was back in a place that felt like Planet Earth, under a single sun, standing close to a huge crowd of naked, brutish, pale-skinned men armed with crude but lethal-looking weapons of stone, wood and bone.
At first Leoni feared they might be able to see her – perhaps in the same way that the machine elves had seen her? – but it soon became obvious she was as invisible to these weird nudists as she had been to her parents when she’d approached them in the out-of-body state.
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Increasing in confidence, she slipped unnoticed into the crowd, taking time to scrutinise the wild appearance of the men. Almost all of them were blonds with shaggy shoulder-length hair, electric-blue eyes, and teeth filed to sharp points. They were lean and muscular, built like prizefighters, and their bodies were criss-crossed with scars. Slung across their backs, almost like an item of uniform, each of them carried three short spears and a peculiar wooden baton, about two feet long, with a handle of antler at one end and a sort of spur or hook, also of antler, attached to the other end.
Who were these people? Some kind of Caucasian survivalist cult from Hell? Many wore bones through their noses and necklaces of what looked like human teeth – and that was a sight you didn’t see often, even in LA. All had crazed expressions, their blue eyes blazing, peering upward with rapt intent, and she sensed about them a tremendous and terrifying power.
That was when Leoni began to realise just how big the crowd really was and that she was in the midst of thousands of men gathered in disciplined ranks in a great circle around the perimeter of a low hill. They were staring at a squat shelter built on its summit, open on all sides but roofed at a height of about seven feet with a grid of narrow wooden slats. Then they all shouted at once – a deafening, guttural, stomach-churning yell – as a young man appeared in front of the shelter and stood with his hands outstretched to receive their salute.
What sort of person could command the approbation of an army such as this?
Enjoying the freedom of her invisible aerial body, Leoni soared up to the summit to find out.
Chapter Thirty
Tied fast to stakes ten paces apart, Rill and Hond faced one another in the centre of the woodland clearing. Rill was slumped forward against his bonds, silent now, his entrails spilling out in bloody coils from his stomach cavity, while the savage who had disembowelled him was striding towards Hond armed with a long flint knife.
Ria felt a lightning-bolt of energy jolt down her right arm as she let fly with the first of the five quartz hunting stones Merina had given her.