Shift (13 page)

Doubt and conviction, fighting within his mind—grappling, tumbling, slashing. The count stuck on twenty-seven, the words like a mantra repeated over and over.

Then descending. Twenty-six, twenty-five. It was the only way. He had to succeed!

The light-headedness returned, the elongating sounds. Se-ve-n-teeeeeeen . . .

Now! Rise up. There's nothing to hold you down. You feel compelled to rise. Your body expels you.

He was rising, floating free. He opened his eyes and . . . 

There was something wrong. He could see too much. He could see the ceiling, four walls, the floor—all without moving his head. And . . . was that his body?

He peered through the twilight gloom. Everything was so dark and hazy. It was definitely his room at the Rectory Clinic and it had to be his body four, five feet below him but . . . why was it rippling. Why was everything rippling?

And why was he looking in every direction at once?

He tried to reach out with an arm but . . . nothing happened. Not even to the body on the bed. Did he have no form in this existence?

He tried to turn his head and . . . the room shifted. His bed moved towards the wall, the window moved closer—a bright rectangle of light and colour.

Was he moving along the ceiling? Was he flying?

He willed himself farther. The room lurched, the window grew. He could see outside now. Trees, lawns, greens, blues and browns. The whole streaked and shimmering as though the window was covered in a wash of pouring rain.

He was free! He'd separated.

And he could move just by looking and thinking himself there.

Excitement—pure and unrestrained. The window beckoning, the sky, the clouds. One thought and he'd be away, flying with the birds . . . 

Ow!

Pain hit him the moment he willed himself through the window. One second his world was awash with light, the next he was being dragged back inside the darkened room. He'd never experienced a pain like it—sharp and intense, and coming from what appeared to be every inch of his being.

Was it the membrane? Had he stretched it to its limit and it had pulled him back like a piece of elastic?

He tried the window again, slower this time. Thinking himself closer, willing himself forward . . . 

He felt the resistance like a dull ache. An ache that sharpened into pain when he stretched farther and went when he retreated.

It had to be the membrane.

Shit! To have come so far . . . 

He glanced towards the window. It was out there. The possibility. Flight without limitation. One stretch and he'd be there. All those stories of out-of-body flight couldn't be wrong. Okay, all the volunteers he'd tested had been fakes or honestly deluded, but that didn't mean they all were. The stories had to have originated from somewhere. So many accounts from so many cultures. There had to be some basis in fact. Someone must have succeeded.

And it was so close. A stretch away. All he had to do was break the chord. Doctors did it every day. Umbilical chords. That's what it'd be like. A brief moment of pain and then freedom.

Or death.

What if he couldn't reconnect to his body? What if the membrane was essential to the process? He'd be cast out, a ghost, sucked up into the first bright white light and scattered to the eleven horizons. He had to stop the experiment, go back, it was too dangerous to continue.

But if he didn't try . . . 

This was his last hope, his edge, turn away now and he might never get the chance again. It had taken him months to get to the ceiling, who could tell if he could ever recreate this situation again.

Indecision. He edged back and forth along the ceiling. Where to next? The window or back to his body?

Or prison? Indicted for murder, no chance of parole. Or worse, chopped up and licked by that sick little pervert, Pendennis.

He hovered over the bed, one last glance at his body then . . . 

The window. He held the rippling image in his mind, looking for a tree, something on the other side that he could focus on, aim for, fix in his mind and pull towards him as fast as he dare.

He saw a branch, tuned everything else out, concentrated, braced himself. There! Now!

Light hit him from every angle. And pain—searing, debilitating, screaming at the top of your lungs pain. He was tumbling, falling, screaming—the sky, lawns, grey stone walls, clouds and trees blurring all around him.

But he was outside, dozens of yards from the window and the pain was receding fast.

And he could fly!

It was incredible. He was like a flying singularity—no mass, no shape, just an eyeball in the sky looking everywhere at once.

He circled the clinic grounds, diving, soaring, accelerating. This was true mind over matter. He could turn on a thought and accelerate at will. No need for wings to beat or thermals to soar on. All he needed was to think, move, and he moved; think, fast, and he accelerated; think, there, and he was on his way.

He climbed, he soared, he swooped. He changed direction in an instant; no G-force, no screeching tyres, no mechanical roar. Think and turn, think and accelerate, think and stop.

He stopped. Hovering hundreds of feet above a shifting landscape that shimmered and swayed. Was it his eyes? Features were sharp one second and blurred the next. Maybe that's what passed for vision in these higher realms, maybe he needed time to acclimatise? It was like peering out at the world through a rippling veil.

Not that any of that mattered. He could fly!

He focussed his mind on a cloud, pulled it towards him, barrelled through, a sensation of mist and whites and greys and . . . he was out the other side. Into the blue above, a vast blue that stretched from horizon to horizon. Below him, if there was any such direction as below any more, dabs of white cumulus marched across fields of green and brown. The whole—the sky, the sun, the earth—presented to him as one all-encompassing image. 360 degree, up down, left right, back and forth vision.

Incredible. Unfathomable. And it was all his. He could fly!

He compressed his mind, imagined himself an arrow, sleek and fast. Down, he commanded. Down fast!

The world lurched, the blues dissolved into foggy white then streaky green. The ground rising fast. He turned at the last second, the last microsecond, pulling up, cresting a tree, descending again, dipping into fields, pulling up over woods and lines of houses. And then he was rising again, spiralling and blurring into and above the clouds. How fast could he go? How high?

He pushed his new-found ability to the limit, accelerating and accelerating, the world reduced to a stream of colour and then . . .

Blackness.

He stopped dead.

Everything had gone—colours, features, everything. Had he flown into space?

But if so where was the sun? He couldn't have flown that far could he? Where were the stars?

Panic. What if he'd travelled along another axis? The f or the g or any of the higher dimensional axes for that matter. What if he'd been gliding along the edge of the dimensional divide—a few centimetres, a few microns within the higher dimensions yet still in contact with the physical world? And then veered off course, pulled away from the boundary into a world where his senses didn't work. He could be surrounded by features he couldn't see or feel.

And which way was back?

He didn't dare move. He had no bearings, no idea which way he was facing or from which direction he'd come. The world he knew could be a few centimetres away or a million miles. With ten axes of movement to choose from, which way was home?

He concentrated harder. There had to be something out there. Maybe if he waited long enough his vision would clear?

He waited. Everything was so black, so silent. No smells, no sounds, nothing.

Or was there? It was more of a feeling than an image but was that something in the distance? A patch of grey amidst the black. Small, barely discernible . . .

He embraced it. Not stopping to think, not wanting to think. Blotting everything out except that tiny patch of grey and wishing it larger and larger, focussing, pulling, sucking it towards him.

It grew. Discernible now. A patch of grey covering a sixth of his vision, with other patches within it. Lighter shades of grey, maybe a hint of blue.

He pulled harder, making it grow and grow until . . .

He tumbled through. Above him was a cloud, below were fields or was that a wood?

He stopped. He was back. Not above the clinic, or anywhere he recognised. But at least it was Earth.

Relief. If he'd had lungs he would have cried out.

He hovered for a while trying to work out his bearings. He was maybe two hundred feet above the ground. Everything below looked calm and peaceful. Not a sound . . .

Which was when it struck him. He hadn't heard a sound since he'd left his body. Not a bird, a car, nothing. And there were no smells. No feeling of wind as he flew. The only sense that appeared to function here was sight. Or what passed for sight in these upper realms.

But how was he going to get back? All he could see below were woods and fields. It could be anywhere in England. Or Northern Europe for that matter. Should he gain height and look for a town?

And risk flying off into the void again?

Definitely not. He clung to the visible surface of the planet, dropping lower to just above tree height. If he kept going in one direction—aimed for that clump of trees across the field—he was bound to find a road eventually and from there a larger road until he found something he recognised.

He advanced, slowly at first, making sure he didn't lose contact with the physical world, then accelerating, little by little, as his confidence returned. He became aware of ploughed fields, a barn, a house, a track, a road.

He turned sharply, dropping down between the high grass banks that bordered the road, a country lane by the look of it. He swept along it, a few feet above the metalled surface, twisting and turning between high banks of grass and hedge. His world contracted between the hedgerows, his all-round vision reigned in by turf and twig.

And then he saw it. Flashing yellow and orange on the periphery of his perception, lighting up the leafless gaps in the hedgerow.

He stopped—curious but apprehensive. What the hell was it?

He rose slowly above the line of hedge. A hundred yards away, a giant snake of pulsing fire cut across the fields from horizon to horizon, its image sharp and clear, its edges distinct. The only shimmer coming from the pulses of yellows and oranges that shot along its length.

What the hell was it? Was it alive?

He dropped lower, using the hedge as cover. Fire trickled through the gaps like a long line of setting suns. Could it be power lines? It was straight enough. Did electricity seep into the higher dimensions? Did it become visible?

Or was it a ley line? He bobbed above the hedge line for a second before dropping down again. It could be either. It could be a higher dimensional killer worm for all he knew.

But if it was a ley line . . .

He tried to reconcile the fiery line he was seeing now with the segment of blue line he'd captured once with an imager. Of course the blue was irrelevant. But there'd been no indication of a pulse. Or anything like the power that this fiery line appeared to radiate. Leys were seen as weak lines of unknown energy. An energy with a higher dimensional component, something that you could map with an imager or dowse with a rod but . . . nothing on this scale.

He bobbed up for another look. Had the line shifted position at all? Power lines and ley lines wouldn't move . . .

But neither would a killer worm . . . if it was asleep.

Indecision. Reason versus imagination. An imagination fuelled on every science fiction film he'd ever seen. It would be a snake, a worm, a gigantic tentacle of an even more gigantic planet-sucking beast.

Or something harmless, something natural—a new energy source that could revolutionise science.

He drifted along the road, continuing his journey, keeping down below hedge height, monitoring the flashes of colour from his right. The road twisted to the left then swung back to the right. Back towards the line. He could see it now, up ahead, crossing the road at hedge height. He floated towards it. The slightest change in its position and he'd blur himself into the sky.

But it didn't move. It hung there, a glowing pipe of colour, a man's height in diameter.

He looked for a pole, a pylon, something to prove it was a power line. Nothing. What proof was there for a ley line? A link to an ancient monument? An old church?

What proof was there for a killer worm? Instant immolation, snapping jaws?

He ascended, using a tree by the side of the road as a guide. The line spread across the road and beyond as far as he could see. And was that another? Over to the left, running almost parallel along the far horizon.

Curiosity. Cat-killer and beguiler of scientific minds. Could he really return home without checking this out?

He drifted away from the road, following the line into the field. It wouldn't take long. A quick trip along the line and back. A minute at the most. He could turn back at any time.

He set off, paralleling the line's course. Accelerating. It was so much easier to follow, so bright, so sharp, its features didn't blur and streak like the rest of the world.

And it was no longer straight. It curved slightly and dipped. And there was its companion. Another pulsing line of fire swinging in from the left. Were they going to join?

He gained height, fixing his sights on two objects—a cloud above and the line below—marvelling at the fact that he could focus on two objects at the same time almost 180 degrees apart. Using the cloud to gain height while keeping the line in sight—his anchor to the physical world, his protection against straying into the void.

Hazy patchwork fields spread out below, their colours drab against the brightness of the two lines that swept together, curled around each other then separated again. Both lines tracing a similar path—sometimes separated by inches, sometimes by hundreds of metres—cutting a broad straight channel from horizon to horizon. That was no power line. But neither was it typical of a ley. Some lines were twinned but most were not.