Inner Legacy (3 page)

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 to 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.

I start off on the climb up the side of the banking, using various bushes to pull myself upwards.  It becomes quite steep and soon I am on all fours pushing myself upwards. What is strange is how long this climb takes, as though the slope either increases in length or I am climbing on the spot. It is the same experience as before with greyness or the edge of this reality as I now think of it. I look down and up and both distances look as they had done from the road, yet no matter how I toil I seem to remain about halfway up the hill. After what seems like an age I roll over on my back and lie exhausted and realise as I look at the sky that it is slowly losing its colour and that night is beginning to fall.

I fall asleep almost without realisation awaking refreshed at first light. Beside me lies a flagon of wine and some bread and I take breakfast halfway up the banking looking curiously at the vast valley that lies beyond and the steep sided, almost sheer walls that form the far boundary. It looks like the valley has simply sunk to lower depth and I try to recall the name and nature of this geographical formation but all that floats into my mind are two words; terminal, moraine, and I know that is not connected in anyway to what I am looking at.

Think.

I try to think, I feel I ought to think. I ought to ponder. I should be curious. My brain feels stuck in neutral. I am in the moment and know I must climb again but beyond that I appear to have nothing going on inside and yet being aware of that I seem unable to progress beyond that point. I realise I have not even questioned the flagon of weak wine and the bread or why it was there. I know this is not like me but I don't know how I know this to be true. I cannot think, no reasoning is present only a vagueness of knowledge, a simple acceptance of what is around me, like a toddler without a question just an urge to move and explore and soak up what is around me without question. It feels so safe even though part of me is shouting from a great distance this is not normal or right or sensible but the need to climb, the sensation of a full stomach and the warmth of the sun rising in the sky drown out all other head noise.

*****

This morning it is easy to reach the outcrop of rock at the top of the banking. I shield my eye from the rising sun and look towards the valley that I can see, resisting the urge to look behind me. I realise that what I am experiencing is a bit like watching a three dimensional TV, I am involved in an interactive experience which is every sense is real but behind me I know will be nothing. As I think this I realise that my brain is working again and I can question and reason.

I spent a long time making sense of the scene before my eyes and also trying hard to reason out why I was here and what was going on and when my memory had become fragmented, but I don't feel the need to explore those issues here in this brief account. I am torn as I write this between relating events as they happened and trying to interpret what happened to me and feel there is a danger that I may impose after thoughts on to the reality of the experience. If I have time I will write about what I think happened and why if not the answers ought to be blindingly obvious if you are Adam reading this and have my memoirs to hand when you are finished reading this account. I beg to read on and not delay I know you will be having a hard time decoding these words but let that not distract you from the imperative nature of the task having started reading it is essential that you read to  the end and only then will you know what to do. If these notes have fallen into other hands then read if you will without my memoir it will just be the ramblings of a madman and I wish you luck in working it out. I wish I could paint as it would be easier to that way to give an illustration of the wonderful sunken valley floor. It was obvious to me that I was high up and that the flat bottomed valley lay perhaps three hundred metres below. It looked idyllic with its meandering river and trees growing along its bank. It was flooded in sunshine and I noted only that there were no shadows at all but by now such strangeness only was noted rather than puzzled over. As for the road or the Roman soldier from this place there was no sign. I felt no need as yet to do anything although I did long to be in the valley as it looked familiar and homely and welcoming and above all it looked safe.

I sought for a way down but none was visible so descending the banking I crossed to the road and looked and was brought up sharply by the realisation that I was on the edge of a cliff and there was no gentle slope I could make progress down or even look over. I sat down cross legged and pondered.

I sensed rather than saw the change. Difficult to say what I sensed but I knew I had to turn round. I was this time startled, not only had the greyness gone but also the banking, the arch and the road and stretching behind rugged mountain heath rising to snow clad peaks. To my left there was a ragged looking forest and from that came the sound of hounds baying and the clanking of metal and with that an overwhelming sense of fear. I had to escape but where?

I looked around and there was no way out but down and that was surely only to fall to my death. I began to panic and in doing so I felt the gravel slip beneath my feet and I lost my balance as I saw a huge hound bound from the cover of the forest and so I fell.

Over the cliff I went and landed only metres below on a bed of soft moss laid out on a ledge and behind it a cave. I looked up but the shape of the cliff hid everything above from my sight. I lay there for a moment before rolling quietly into the cave. I listened and the sounds above faded into the distance and vanished.

When I was sure the noise had gone I had time then to take in the interior of the cave. A fire was burning in a hearth towards the back of the cave. There was a stone bench, rugs,furs and stores of food.  I sat down by the fire and noticed that there was a coffee pot to hand and I could think of nothing I craved more than coffee.

It wasn't a large cave and felt more like a living room in a old fashioned house in size. The view from the back of the cave framed the cliff opposite where I saw a mirror image of this cave and could see someone looking out from the back towards me. I tried various movements but the distance was so great that I couldn't be sure but I got the sense I was looking at myself. Curiouser and curiouser as Alice once said. The cave behind narrowed but did not end but seemed to stretch on in darkness. I decided it might be worth exploring after I had rested.

Once again I felt safe and I recall clearly I felt no confusion even though what I was experiencing made no sense to me. Try as I might to reason at the time in the end all I could do was accept the reality I was living in as real. I stood up to stretch and hit my head on the roof with a stunning force. I sank to my knees losing focus for a moment and then feeling the warm flow of blood trickling over my head. Yes I thought it certainly is real and that was the last I remembered until I came too some time later.

I ached. I saw it was growing dark and placed some more wood on the fire and made more coffee and washed myself from the water bag hanging on the wall, I felt and saw the dried blood come off my face and head. I felt gingerly around the my scalp and found the gash which didn't feel too bad just tender and crusted with blood.

It was a strange feeling being in that cave. Not once did I suspect there had been another occupant or owner it always felt as though it were a place prepared specially for me, laid out and waiting. I felt that so strongly it was as real a knowledge as the heat from the fire when I sat back down to drink my coffee. Tiredness began to creep up on me and gathering up rugs and furs I made myself a warm and comfortable bed beside the fire as I felt a chill of night creep into the cave.

I dreamed a dream.