The Shadow Project (19 page)

S
omething powerful reached deep inside to pull Danny out of his body. It was nothing like the time they used the helmet on him at the Project. It seemed as though he was gripped by invisible hands, then
extracted
, like a cork from a bottle. And when he came out, he could see the doorway. It hung in space directly in front of him, an unearthly luminous green triangle like nothing he had ever seen before. It was about six feet high—a lot taller than he was—and floating without support in the air. When you looked into it, strange shapes pulsed and writhed.

Danny felt twisted, as if somebody had taken him and turned him inside out, so he was now facing in a direction no mortal human was supposed to face. It was a hideous sensation, but while he wanted desperately to turn away from that doorway, something held him firm. His stomach revolted, and for a moment he was sure he
would throw up. His fear increased to downright terror. There was a pounding in his ears. The writhing shapes swam closer to the surface of reality and reached for him. Danny tried desperately to back away. Nothing in the universe would persuade him to step into that doorway. It led, he knew deep in his heart, to the darkest pit of oblivion.

Despite himself, Danny stepped into the doorway.

O
pal was intrigued by the crescent. The points were upward, like a boat. Or like the pictures of the Isis headdress in the coffee-table book they had at home. The caption said it represented the moon, but she'd never seen a crescent moon on its back like that.

She reached out to touch the crescent, then hesitated. It occurred to her that she was out of her body now, but there had been no sensation of leaving it, none of the sensations she associated with the psychotronic helmet. She glanced behind her, just to make sure, and there she was, seated in the chair, her head bowed a little, her eyes half closed. No one had strapped her in, but contrary to Project theory, she didn't seem to be falling down. What she could see of her eyes were vacant, as if she was in a trance.

Opal turned back toward the floating crescent. Hector had mentioned that it would change color, and
so it had, but not much. The silver had transformed into a luminous grayish bluish…sort of silver. But the thing had grown enormous since she glanced away from it. It floated in the air before her and, strangely enough, she thought she could hear the sound of running water.

Fleetingly she wondered again how much Uncle Hector
really
knew, how much he wasn't telling them. Then she bowed her head and stepped into the crescent.

M
ichael felt nervous but excited. He was still in his physical body, but the doorway, a massive glowing purple square, was already beginning to manifest in front of him. He glanced around at the others. A thief, a grandmother, a girl. Some team fighting for the Powers of Light! But, of course, matters of
sohanti
were not the way those at the Project believed them to be. Magic was never a question of brute force or weaponry. Magic was a matter of the human heart.

And not only magic…

He glanced at Opal again. She was one of the loveliest girls he'd ever seen. He'd noticed her the day he joined the Project, found himself wondering how he could get to know her. And now that he
had
gotten to know her, he wanted to know her better. Wanted to…

He pulled his mind back to the task at hand. Some
situations could only be endured. There were many things in life he wanted but couldn't have.

The doorway solidified and Michael slipped from his body to pass through it.

I
t was the same, only different.

Danny didn't know what he expected from astral reality, but this wasn't it. He was standing on the edge of a desert, near the pylon gateway of a walled city. The place looked solid as the rocks its stone was quarried from, and the temperature felt pleasantly warm. A reddish sun hung low in the sky beyond some distant dunes. It was a bit of a surprise to get here—he hadn't really believed the doorway business or whatever Hector said—but apart from that, it was much like the out-of-body experiences he'd had before. It felt as if he'd been sent off to North Africa.

What
was
strange was the light. Even though it was still daytime—that big sun definitely hadn't set—there was an ultraviolet tinge across the scene and a hint of the flatness you got when you saw a landscape under a full moon. If you weren't careful, you could talk yourself into
thinking there was something creepy going on.

Which there was. He could see that the minute he looked at the others. He knew them, all right, but they didn't look the way they normally did. Opal's hair had changed color and her face filled out. Still pretty, but more approachable now; and he liked that. She had nicer clothes, too: a long linen dress thing that came down almost to her ankles and clung a bit along the way. Michael seemed older and a bit thinner. But the thing was, his clothes were almost gone. He was wearing sandals and a sort of linen kilt. Looked good in it, too—nice body tone; Danny noticed to his disgust that Opal was surreptitiously eyeing his muscles.

But the big difference was his Nan. Shouldn't have recognized her at all, but he did. She wasn't old anymore. Well, not
as
old. Still on the wrong side of forty, but her hair was gray now where it had been mostly white. Looked a whole lot fitter. She was wearing a short white tunic thing and all the blue veins had disappeared from her legs.

He realized suddenly that they were all staring at him. “You look different,” Danny said.

“
We
look different?” Opal echoed. She gave him a big, wide grin. “You should talk!”

His Nan did a strange thing. She produced a little mirror with a flourish that would have done justice to
a conjurer, then stretched it so that he was looking at a full-length reflection of himself: taller, darker, and a lot more handsome than he'd been half an hour ago. Like Michael, he now seemed to be wearing just a kilt. Like Michael, he now had a muscular body. Danny blinked. “How did you do that?” He wasn't sure whether he meant the mirror trick or the way he looked like a film star.

“Didn't do anything, me,” Dorothy said. “Most people look different on the Astral. More like their real selves, their
inside
selves. It's a dreamworld, see? You know how you meet up with people in a dream and you know them right away even though they don't look a bit like they do in normal life?”

Danny wasn't sure he did. “Naw, Nan, I meant the mirror. How did you do that with the mirror?”

“You can do stuff like that here once you get the hang of it,” Dorothy said. “Remember what Hector told you—it's another reality. The laws of physics aren't the same. Might look like some old corner of our world, but it isn't. Take a squint at that flower.”

Danny looked. There was a paved roadway leading to the pylon gate. Beside it, just a step or two from where he was standing, there was a small clump of grass and a bright red flower, something like a poppy. “What about it?”

“Look normal to you?”

Danny stared. “Looks normal to me, Nan.”

“How do you think it grows? And the bit of grass, come to that?”

Opal said suddenly, “It's growing out of sand.” She took a step forward, then stopped. “But that's—”

“That's impossible,” Dorothy finished for her. “Can't grow flowers without soil. Might get a bit of rough grass to grow in sand if you were very lucky and had the right conditions, but not a nice green clump like that, and definitely not a flower. Take a closer look at it, Danny.”

Danny hunkered down to peer at the flower. “No scent,” he said.

“Not many flowers have perfume here,” Dorothy said. “In fact I'm not sure
any
of them do. No bees either, so I suppose they've got nothing to attract. But that's not it. Get in a bit closer than that, pretend you're a telescope or something. Look right into the middle of it.”

Danny glanced at his Nan, then bent forward. As his face approached the flower, something happened that was even weirder than the mirror business. His whole field of vision opened up. For a split second it seemed as if he was zooming in, not like a telescope but a microscope, deeper and deeper into the heart of the flower, then into a universe of swirling atoms that comprised the flower, then into a network of luminous filaments that made up the atoms, floating and linking and breaking apart in the
black depths of space itself. The sensation made him feel like he was falling, nauseous and dizzy, so that he jerked back abruptly.

The flower was just a flower. Growing out of desert sand…

“See the spiderweb, did you?” Dorothy asked.

Danny looked at her stupidly. “Spiderweb?”

“The threads. Nice shining threads. Did you get that far?”

“Yes,” Danny said. “Yes, I did.” They were beautiful.

“You can do that with anything here,” Dorothy said. She glanced at the other two and smiled. “Any of you can. Just get up close and personal and you can see right into anything—flowers, the sand, the stonework in that wall, anything you like. Thing is, if you can get down deep enough to see the spiderweb like Danny did, you can change stuff once you get the hang of it. That's how I made the mirror out of thin air, 'cause even thin air has atoms in it and every atom has the threads.”

Danny muttered, “Cool!” He looked at Dorothy. “Will you teach me, Nan?”

“Course I will, sweetheart. But not just now, eh? Better deal with this lot first.”

Behind them, the city gates were swinging open.

T
he creature moving through the city gates was familiar from tribal drawings. The creature moving through the city gates was a Nommo. Michael stared at it in wonder as old memories flooded back.

 

When Michael became a man, he underwent a tribal initiation that linked him to the spirits of his ancestors and revealed the royal mystery of his family name. The initiation was an important ceremony: the Dogon considered it the most important of his life and one that confirmed him as a prince of his people.

His father took him far to the south beyond the ancient trading capital of Timbuktu to a village on the banks of the Niger. There the elders locked him alone in a darkened hut for five days and nights without food or water. He emerged disorientated and curiously cleansed. He looked for his father, but his father was not there.

The women of the village escorted him into the bush and left him. For a further three days he survived on roots, leaves, and a handful of berries which gave him such violent stomach cramps that, hungry though he was, he threw the rest away. The elders found him on the night of the third day, sleeping in the fork of a tree. They gave him something to drink that turned everything in his field of vision a moonlit blue, then took him to a clearing where the entire tribe drummed and danced until dawn.

With the rising of the light, he was taken to another hut—it may have been back in the original village but by now his perceptions were so clouded he could not be sure—for circumcision with a flint knife. Then he was granted instruction. The drugged drink of the day before must still have been in his system, for there was surprisingly little pain or bleeding from the circumcision, and he was able to listen to his instruction without too much distraction. It was given by three priests so old that there was not a single black hair on their bodies.

They told him how, in ancient times, the Nommo descended from the sky in a ship that sailed on fire and thunder. Since the Nommo could not live on land, one of their kind, named Oannes, made himself a deep lake and lived there, emerging to teach men hunting and women weaving. In times of hardship, he fed the Dogon with
his body and slaked their thirst with his blood. When he could feed them no more, they nailed him to a tree so that he died. But after three days, he rose from the dead and flew back in his fiery ship to the world from whence he came.

Michael could still remember the dread he experienced when the three priests explained that the Nommos' home was a world that circled the great star Sirius, called in the Dogon tongue
Po Tolo,
the original form of Michael's family name. The coincidence of the name made him feel as if the universe had turned to look at him, placing him at the center of attention and handing him responsibilities he was ill equipped to handle.

 

He had the same dread feeling now.

The Nommo was the size of a small whale but resembled nothing he had ever seen on earth. The upper torso was vaguely humanoid, although the head was not, and the creature had legs of a kind, and feet. But the lower body was that of a great fish, ending in a fishlike tail. It floated upright in a huge, transparent tank of greenish water dragged on a wooden sled by a team of Dogon priests.

The Nommo stared out at Michael with enormous, jet-black eyes.

O
pal straightened, still annoyed by her inability to look into the full depths of the flower, but what was happening now dragged her mind from the problem completely. Once, years ago, her father had taken her to some state function at Canterbury Cathedral, where she'd watched entranced as priests in splendid robes processed along the center aisle swinging thuribles of roiling incense and chanting softly to a background drone of organ notes. But what she saw then was nothing to what she was seeing now. The priestly procession was huge—perhaps close on a thousand men. The robes were cloth of gold, reflecting redly in the setting sun. Soft organ notes underscored the rhythm of a single drum.

The procession was headed by Jesus Christ.

Opal had never seen such a beautiful man: and beautiful was the word that came to mind. He stood more than six feet tall, dressed in the flowing white robe of an
ancient Judaean. Brown hair poured in a shining torrent to his shoulders. His beard was full, his skin fluoresced, his sheer presence radiated warmth. His sandaled feet appeared to float above the ground.

Jesus looked at her benignly with his soft, blue eyes.