Satisfied that they were all right Mont Vinsita closed up the whole room, all its contents, Rasputeeeen and Bobby Rewind in a book. As reality folded in on itself the edges of the giant tome became evident. She had grown to the size of a house and her head almost touched the ceiling of her cave. She then shrank and the book shrank with her. She now sat human size and looked at the cover of the now normal sized book in her lap. On the cover it read “The Diary of Bobby Rewind”. A lioness friend of Mont Mont Vinsita’s had lent it to her recently. The words on the cover of the book were etched in red Gothic letters on a black background. She opened it and randomly selected a page. The instant she opened the page Sydny Smith the little cherub flew out of it.
“Hello Sydny.” said Mont Vinsita.
“Hello high priestess.” said Sydny.
“So what’s the score on your experiments in finding a portal between Earth and Eden?”
“Well.... seeing as you and just about everyone else I know seem to know about it I may as well tell you. My experiments on the vortex Plato and I discovered seem to have turned around so that it now feels as if it is the vortex that is experimenting on me!”
“How so?” asked the high priestess.
“Well.... let’s start with where I’ve just come from.”
“Please do.” said Mont Mont Vinsita.
“I recently escaped the clutches of Malthus the evil dragon. I then flew over The Desolation of Cain far from the borders of Eden. I thought I was a goner. Any manner of atrocity could have jumped out at any minute. I was counting my last few seconds of temporal existence as we understand it when “SCHLUP!”.
“SCHLUP?” said Mont Vinsita.
“SCHLUP!”
“Why SCHLUP?”
“SCHLUP! Because a watery tendril that didn’t seem to be one of the normal residents of Cain dragged me into a pond as I was flying at speed over it!”
“Then you ended up here?”
“No I did not high priestess!”
“Well where then?”
“I was pulled into the vortex again, spat out and then caught another glimpse of Earth through the eyes of Bobby Rewind. He seemed to be at a festival and was reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I was just acclimatising when I had visitations from Sekhmet and Baphomet.
“They were on Earth?”
“Not exactly. They seemed to be inhabiting their own sphere and wanted to chat about my recent experiences.”
“Did you?”
“Yes. It seems that my experiments have attracted the attention of quite a few of Eden’s inhabitants.”
“Are you surprised?”
“Not really.”
“So what happened then?”
“Well Sekhmet seduced me as you would expect and Baphomet scared the shit out of me in order to show me what would happen to any humans that deserved it. I suggested to Sekhmet that a chat over a cup of magick mushroom tea in Eden might be nice at a later date.”
“Did she agree?”
“Yes and then she laughed and swung me about by the penis.”
“So would you say that they are now both involved?”
“In an advisory capacity at the moment I think.”
“So what happened next?”
“After Baphomet left I returned to the festival inside Bobby Rewind and then, in the blink of an eye, I was sucked into one of the abstract expressionist, absurdist or surreal planes of existence I think.”
“Go on.”
“Well the vortex returned and after the effects were over I stood facing a giant rocking horse like the ones you hear about in Earth tales.”
“Dada.” said Mont Mont Vinsita.
“Indeed.” said Sydny Smith.
“So what happened next?”
“It spoke.”
“What did it say?” asked the high priestess grinning.
“Hierarchy! is the present the present of no pagan.”
“What did you say?” asked Mont Vinsita.
“Well strangely I can remember the exact words.” said Sydny looking confused.
“What words can you remember?” asked the high priestess.
“I said.... “Empire is have no bosses uniformity.” The freaky thing is that I intended to say it!”
“Wow!” said Mont Mont Vinsita.
“The rocking horse then said.... “present day the drugs No Revolutionary belonged to Noble Savage has hierarchy!” He then flew off repeating the phrase “day the Subculture and the should Subculture Pirate.” I just kept shouting “No Hierarchy! No Hierarchy!””
“Far out.” said Mont Vinsita.
“Well that’s not all. Whereas the horse and me were talking suspended in a blank void as soon as it flew away it left a trail of scenery. Like a three dimensional strip. There was part of a road, part of a tree and part of a hillock which I then partly sat on. A wizard with a question mark for a head rose out of the ground directly in front of me and although he didn’t have a mouth a voice that matched his body movements said.... “No hierarchy! of the equivalent that was Rome. The anathema is an to employ it. The Pirate hierarchy. That the barbarity No hierarchy!” I then said.... “wishes the subtlety the Pagans.”
He bowed and then disappeared.
Then the half tree bent a bough towards me and said.... “Take Freebooter, the and no employees belonged work. The Subculture! Drugs whether the Pagan become U.S.A. is the equality No Gangboss!”
Well all I could think of saying was.... “The Gory the Roman to the Pirate hierarchy!”
The half tree then said.... “that was the the Pirate.”
I looked at the tree in a moment of confusion. It carried on and all became clear....
“Enjoy incarnation No Subculture Revolution! equivalent freedom and no and freedom equivalent Revolution! Subculture No incarnation Enjoy the Pirate that was hierarchy! to the Pirate the Roman The Gory No Gangboss!”
All I could say to this shocking hypothesis was.... “The equality U.S.A. is become Subculture!”
The tree leaned forward and whispered in my ear.... “the Pagan whether Drugs work.”
“I flew into the air so astounded was I. I rounded on the tree and said in no mean terms.... “The belonged and no employees Freebooter, Take the Pagans The subtlety wishes No hierarchy!”
The tree laughed and said....
“The barbarity that hierarchy!”
I nodded gravely.
The tree somehow looked concerned for me and swung close to my ear again.... “it.” the tree said.
“it?” I asked.
“it.” the tree replied. Scenery started spreading everywhere and the tree became whole and fields and woodland spread this way and that. It was gorgeous! The tree laughed again and said in an enthusiastic voice.... “The Pirate to employ is an anathema to The their civilisation. equivalent of the hierarchy! No hierarchy!”
I realised that the tree had been joking earlier and I laughed. This amused the tree even more and we danced and danced about. As the tree started kicking its roots up in the air crazy music accompanied us. It had springs uncoiling and cuckoos and hooters and cockerels crowing and bells and twittering birds. There was no discernible rhythm. I must say I couldn’t stop laughing. The tree then sang a song.
“Sing it Sydny sing it!” enthused Mont Mont Vinsita.
“OK but try and picture those sounds going with it.”
Sydny started singing....
“the day is,
of course visionary,
has become the has always hierarchy!
Noble Savage,
has belonged to,
Revolutionary No Drugs the present day uniformity.
have no bosses,
is Empire Pagan,
No of the present is the present hierarchy No.”
“It all went tits up then.” said Bobby suddenly finishing his song.
“Why what happened?” asked the high priestess.
“Well while the tree and me were having a laugh a clown dressed as a copper from Earth tales rode up to us on a monocycle. He had a flashing light on his conical police helmet. He tried to put handcuffs on the tree’s two biggest branches. But the tree wasn’t having any of it. The tree knocked the copperclown down and bellowed at him.”
“What did it bellow?” asked the high priestess.
“IT!”
“IT?”
“IT!”
“What happened then?” asked Mont Mont Vinsita.
“The copperclown got up and rode away. The tree then produced a top hat and gestured that I should jump into it. I bowed in mid-air and then flew into the hat and “SCHLUP!” I rose up fast through the stage of the last electrically amplified gig at Glastonbury Festival 1999.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah.... Bobby Rewind, DJ Smutley and Paulrisk@aol.com’s band Sunsnake were playing in the “Lost Vagueness” marquee between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. on the Monday morning in front of a couple of hundred people. The sound engineer Rik was doing the P.A. with some Spanish Anarchists he knew and worked with. It was kicking! Members of the audience were joining in and everything! For the eight or so minutes I was there they were playing a tune called “Bassfixx”.
“Sing it Sydny sing it!” said Mont Mont Vinsita.
Music started emanating from an unspecified source around the cave. It involved 303 and 808 synthesiser sounds and had thudding four to the floor beats and cycles of breakbeats. Swirling keyboard washes and staccato DJ scratching wound around long rasping clarinet notes forming a four bar rising and falling Jazz melody. An accordion came in and matched the clarinet notes. One of the Spanish Anarchists had got on stage and joined in. All the sounds that Sydny had experienced at the gig were evoked in the cave. Bobby’s clarinet and Paulrisk@aol.com’s keyboard rose and fell in pitch in oozing waves of harmony. Sydny then started singing in DJ Smutley’s voice....
“As
sad as something lost at sea,
A voice that cries remember me,
For once I was the king of gods,
Invincible against all odds,
As sure as fire or loving rain,
I walked besides the princess of pain,
The burning, dripping, melted man,
One half Prometheus and one half Pan.”
Then the little cherub started singing in Bobby’s voice....
“Turn on, tune in, turn on and roam,
Fly across the river Styx,
Diwali lights will lead us home,
Focused in on a bass fix,
If music be the wine of gods,
Play or dance it’s all the same,
Fight the power against the odds,
Never silent and never tame.”
The music then went through varying levels of thudding insistence and wailing harmony. Electric guitar and bass melodies courted the acceleration of rhythms. A tambourine punctuated every second beat. The sound of two girls singing Eastern European, Asian and North African style mantras filled the cave. On-stage at Glastonbury two Traveller women from Scandinavia had jumped up on stage and started wailing with incredible force. Their voices had all the passion and focus necessary to court the energy in the tent. They later admitted to Sunsnake that neither of them had ever been on a stage before and the band were enthralled at their natural aptitude for it. There were no discernible words in their mantras but their falling and rising crescendos evoked a euphoric hysteria.
As Sydny carried on singing the lyrics from the gig Mont Mont Vinsita started twirling about in her purple sari with the sound of her ankle bells tinkling and jangling in time to the music that rippled around the rock walls. Sydny flew about the cave in excited spirals.
The little cherub then sung the two vocal parts again and instead of singing “never silent and never tame” he sang “spark up on that sacred flame”. It seemed he was now singing with both Smutley and Bobby’s voices at the same time! He kept repeating this until the music hit a massive crescendo and ended with voices wailing around the cave with Sydny and Mont Vinsita singing in harmony with the other voices as the last line was repeated and repeated.
The music stopped.
“Excellent!” enthused the high priestess. She started laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
“You truly are to The Goddess a most remarkable Jester!” she said.
“Why thank you.” said Sydny grinning. He stopped dancing and carried on his tale.
“After that song finished I was shot straight upwards through the roof of the marquee the band were playing in and when I seemed to be passing through the canvass I did not appear on the other side of the tent but up through the book you were holding!”
“Were you in Bobby’s body when you were at the gig?” asked the high priestess.
“Yes.” replied the little cherub.
“Were you in his body when you levitated to the top of the tent?”
“No.” replied Sydny.
“So he was left to carry on with the gig?”
“Yes.” replied Sydny.
“Good.” said Mont Mont Vinsita.
“A strange thing happened to Bobby while I was inside him.”
“What?”
“He was swaying his head from side to side and he caught a glimpse of a flashing light. He closed his eyes and it left an electric trail in his mind. It then formed the shape of a neon smiley with a cross for one eye and a spiral for the other. As it was grinning it stuck its tongue out of the corner of its mouth. Four flecks of neon sweat had been shaken off and hung in mid-air around its face. It was bright yellow. That was the last thing I saw when I suddenly left Bobby Rewind’s body. What amazes me is the fact that this time I was transported from one location on Earth to another.... namely here.”
“Well we’re not exactly on Earth Sydny.” said Mont Mont Vinsita.
“I thought you were Earth-bound and only able to travel in space and time. I didn’t know you had physical access to other planes of existence. You’ve only ever visited me as a psychic pen pal before.”
“I know. It was after the symbiotic relationship between Eden and Earth when the forces of Cain were driven out of The Forest of Able that I realised that I could move my cave through the doors of perception.”
“Wow!” said Sydny.
“It seems that our paths are similar Sydny Smith.”
“Yeah but at least you have a choice where and when to go.”
“Not quite. Follow me.” As she said this she led him to the cave mouth entrance.
Outside chaos had taken hold and the view from the cave was one of ever changing abstractions expressed in swirling patterns that seemed vaguely paisley one minute, vaguely fractal the next, then there was a flash of white light, then concentric paisley patterns again and then a glimpse of some undersea environment and then another glimpse of fractal spirals. The cherub and the high priestess stared at this psychedelic maelstrom in a state of mute fascination. After a short space in time Sydny spoke.
“We seem to be looking at a place that defies time and space.”
“Perhaps a place between realities.” added Mont Mont Vinsita.
“I have seen glimpses of this place before.” said Sydny.
“As have I.” added Vinsita.
“Did you expect this?” asked the cherub.
“No.... for some weeks now the scene has been different each time I poke my head out of the cave. My only forms of travel have involved astrally projecting without any physical form.”
“That’s a bit risky isn’t it?” asked Sydny.
“Well yes but it’s the only way I can get about at the moment. I never actually physically leave my home. I fear that if I did it wouldn’t be there when I wanted to re-enter it.”
“We must be in some kind of air bubble or else we aren’t in need of oxygen here.” said Sydny.
“There have been some abstract visitations like this amongst the cave’s random travelling recently. None of them seemed to be a threat to me or my home so far.”
“Interesting.” said Sydny.
Suddenly the vortex appeared. It took up all the space outside the cave.
In the middle distance a black spot appeared.
The cherub and the high priestess stared at it.
In what can only be described as a second in time (as humans understand it) the black spot grew to the size and the shape of a thousand foot high black pyramid that almost blotted out their vision.
Whether or not it had grown or had merely moved towards them at an incredible speed was impossible to say.
Sydny and Mont Vinsita looked at one another in shock and then looked back at this mammoth visitation.
A giant eye then suddenly blinked open in the centre of the pyramid.
The pupil was so dilated that an iris was not in evidence.
This giant black sphere set in the centre of a massive oval of white momentarily disappeared as the pyramid blinked at them.
“Hello triangular creature.” said Sydny Smith.
The triangular creature blinked again.
After a short period of time Sydny said “Interesting.”
“What’s interesting?” said Mont Mont Vinsita still looking at the
visitation.
“Well all the creatures in Eden can communicate with each other. So it either chooses not to speak or it cannot understand us. This poses some interesting questions. I cannot believe it’s from Earth.”
The creature blinked again.
“It’s kinda’ cute.” said the high priestess.
“Maybe it can’t hear us.” said Sydny. He lifted his tiny red hands to his mouth and shouted.
“HELLO TRIANGULAR CREATURE!”
The creature blinked at them.
“Maybe it doesn’t use sonic vibrations.” said Mont Vinsita.
“Maybe it’s not from Eden or Earth.”
The triangular creature blinked at them.
“It’s kinda’ cute.” the high priestess said again.
Sydny started waving his arms about and danced around in the air in the cave mouth. His wings flapped wildly.
After some moments of this the triangular creature started blinking in some form of repeated cycles of Morse code. It was like an eye-lid ballet involving stroboscopic glimpses of eyeball and then blackness.
Openopencloseopenclosecloseopencloseopenopenopenopen.
Each beat involved a blink in-between it which was so fast it couldn’t be judged in the same way as the definite one beat spaces when the eye was shut.
As Sydny and the triangular creature became more feverish Mont Mont Vinsita laughed and started twirling about in her purple paisley sari. Her earrings sparkled and her ankle-bells began tinkling and jangling.
The effect of the creature’s blinking threw wild shadows around the cave walls and bathed Mont Vinsita and the little cherub in
flashing bursts of light.
Openopencloseopenclosecloseopencloseopenopenopenopen.
Suddenly it stopped with its eye half-open.
Sydny and Mont Mont Vinsita stopped dancing.
The creature opened its eye.
Mont Vinsita and Sydny both twirled around once.
The eye then began to blink again at quite a fast pace.
The high priestess and Sydny Smith began to dance again.
“This is the correct way to behave when encountering alien life-forms that you have hitherto not met.” Mont Mont Vinsita thought as they danced and danced.
Suddenly the dancing mutually slowed down to a slow groove. After a couple of minutes they all stopped.
Sydny and Mont Mont Vinsita both clapped and the triangular creature blinked a couple of times.
An aperture then opened in the base of the creature’s pyramidal structure. Although the pyramid itself was black the aperture was black too. Although heavily camouflaged it was definitely possible to make out this entrance that had not been there before.
“Wow!” said Sydny Smith.
“I wonder.... is it a sexual orifice, an oral orifice or a door-way?” said Mont Vinsita.
“Maybe it’s all three.” said the little cherub.
“Maybe it’s the end of some cosmic gynaecological instrument that’s been pushed through the entrance to The Goddess’s womb to see how the Egg is doing.” suggested Mont Mont Vinsita.
“I wonder who the eye belongs to then?” said Sydny.
“Good question.”
“Jeeeesus maybe it’s the end of a cosmic penis and it’s not a pyramid after all!” said Sydny.
“Possible but unlikely Sydny. I can see its pyramidal shape quite clearly.”
“Oh blimey!” Sydny said suddenly.
“What?” said Mont Mont Vinsita.
“I think I know what it is!”
“What?” asked the high priestess.
“I think it’s one of the gate-ways between the Egg and what exists outside the cosmic womb that we reside in. The chaos around it is not a parallel dimension but the “manna” or personal environment or aura of the creature. That door-way may be some kind of rebirthing tube!”
“Sydny.... quell your excitement. There’s a problem with this picture. Aren’t all of the organisms that exist or who have ever lived on Earth and in Eden supposed to be simultaneously reborn into thee Heavens as one being when thee Egg becomes thee Embryo and then emerges from thee Cosmic Womb as thee Baby ov thee Macrocosmic Race?”
“Oh God! Maybe a member ov thee Macrocosmic Race wants a sample from thee Egg! It could be a case of cosmic gene splicing!”
“Stop panicking Sydny it may merely be a test.”
“What test?”
“Well what is wrong with this picture?”
“Well I suppose if we were to enter that door-way we would be leaving everybody behind. Folk would worry about us and that wouldn’t be fair.”
“True.” agreed the high priestess. Sydny carried on.
“I suppose if we were to traverse that gate-way then we would either stay on the other side or we would experience something that we could not report back on.”
“True Sydny Smith. We must report an incident like this before taking the opportunity merely for ourselves.”
Sydny looked long and hard at the doorway that had opened while Mont Mont Vinsita’s words echoed around in his head. The darkness seemed to partially engulf him as he concentrated his vision on the black orifice before him. He blinked to break the hypnotic effect it was having on him.
Suddenly he was Bobby Rewind.
He was standing on a dance-hall floor around the back of Taco Joe’s under some railway arches in Brixton in Saaaarrrff Lundun. He’d had a really strong MDMA pill called an “apple”. WAS IT STRONG!”
After he’d sat and swooned as the initial rush had carried him along he had finally got his legs back and hit the dance-floor. He’d managed a few minutes of extravagant shaking and twisting but a wave of sound had hit him like an electric shock. It was late summer 1995 and this party was all four to the floor Techno and hard core Gabba. The Gabba tracks were super fast and as manic as a pneumatic drill. In fact Sydny Strange and Bobby Rewind stopped and danced to a pneumatic drill when they were walking home from a Gabba rave on LSD a few years earlier. Sydny Strange was at the party at Taco Joe’s too. Shiva was there but she was going out with the clarinettist Ricardo at the time.
Bobby had hit the dance-floor and the Gabba end of the evening had hit Bobby’s highly sensitised mind. After his attempt at dancing he had hung on the gravity and electrical waves circling in the air around him. He was tripping out so much that he had actually seen some of them.
He’d closed his eyes whilst standing in the middle of the hall with people dancing around him. His head was faced upward and his eyes were shut. Inside his head he was looking at a pyramid with an eye in the middle of it.
He’d had a glimpse of it but where he’d normally took hallucinatory glimpses like this as read he’d reacted differently this time. He had somehow willed himself to stay in communication with this visitation. In his mind he decided to ask some questions. In his mind he had decided to try and talk to this gargantuan hallucination. To Bobby the pyramid oozed with psychedelic colours that covered its surface like the projections from an oil wheel.
“What are you?” asked Bobby. “For you aren’t the drab authoritarian design that’s prominent on American currency. Is this an aspect of you and the American dollar another? I prefer you in this guise.”
Suddenly a door opened at the base of the pyramid directly under the giant eye of its centre. The door-way was a black entrance with what looked like road markings leading off into the structure. The road did not seem to have an end. The markings seemed to disappear into the darkness.
Bobby then had a flashback to an experience he’d had in 1985.
He’d been at a party behind the White Hart Pub that sat at the entrance to Kingston Bridge in Southwest London. He and his mate Sancho Panza had gotten really really stoned on marijuana for the first time in their lives. They’d had pipes of hash oil and grass and had enjoyed the smoke in the back garden of the pub. A few of their mates had been smoking for a year or so and had advanced their smoking practices as you would expect.
When Bobby asked whether or not he’d be able to drive home his mates had laughed. A few minutes later he was holding a pint of bitter and he froze. For a full half-hour he sat and stared at the pint in total immobility. He couldn’t even put his lips to it. This had greatly amused passers-by. He couldn’t understand how his mates were managing to dance on the stuff. Sancho was in the same state as Bobby. After the half-hour still pause they drank, laughed and danced. Bobby felt elated. Bobby and Sancho left the party with Bobby driving his Austin 1300 with hydro-elastic suspension.
So here were a couple of twenty one-year-old Punk Rockers driving on the after-glow of their first thorough marijuana experience. Bobby drove via Tolworth and the “Toby Jug” and bombed it down the A3 towards New Malden.
Bobby went off in a dream.
He dreamt that he was a small bat or something and was flying around the old war memorial on Wimbledon Common next to where his Mum and Dad lived and where he was brought up. He circled the ten-foot Celtic cross that constituted the memorial and when he returned to its front a stone doorway opened in front of him. A black corridor with what looked like road markings stretched infinitely into the darkness. He was just about to fly into it when he decided to swerve away and reconsider. Surely it’s not wise to enter an environment like that on your own. There were no other organisms with him so he opened his eyes. He looked around and Sancho Panza had gone off into a waking dream too. He slowly looked at the road in front of him and he then realised that he had stopped the Austin on the outside lane of the A3! Luckily it was about 3 a.m. and at this point in history the A3 was empty and normally devoid of traffic at this time in the morning.
“Lucky.” thought Bobby as he quickly started the engine and sped off.
He and Sancho then decided to get more used to being stoned before doing anything nearly as complex as driving.
There was a flash and Bobby once again found himself standing in front of the doorway that was in his mind in Taco Joe’s in Brixton ten years later.
He realised that the pyramid could be showing him a doorway rather than offering him one. “No it wouldn’t be right to enter this door-way without reporting it back to someone else. It feels as if it would be too much of an ultimate act if I stepped through on my own and without witnesses. Almost an act of arrogance as if I and I alone deserved it. Strange I should feel like that but it seems more like a chance to consider the implications of desire rather than a basic opportunity to act on it. Anyway entering an aperture as dark as that on one’s own may be a little unwise. Anybody who rushes into the unseen on some ego-based exploration to find some greater power could well end up in some form of purgatory if they don’t act in a collective way. Is that not so great pyramid?”
The pyramid then closed its door.
The pyramid then reopened the door but this time a bright white light streamed out of it and some words flashed stroboscopically between Bobby and the pyramid. They read....
“EVERYONE OR NO ONE!”
The words disappeared.
The pyramid then turned on a greater riot of colour and pulsed in an extremely excited manner. The air around it was filled with a light show of its own involving shafts of lightening bouncing off of it. The eye in the middle of it started blinking at an incredibly fast rate. The whole spectacle made Bobby grin on the dance-hall floor. The light from the doorway engulfed him. Maybe the writing in the sky was evidence that he’d made the correct decision. Everyone goes to Heaven or the next level or whatever or no one goes. As he experienced this burst of information the pyramid spun around and inverted so the point faced downwards. The light was now shining from what looked like the creature’s forehead. Although the eye had swivelled around too it looked exactly the same way up as soon as it had returned to its horizontal space in the middle of the pyramid. Light completely engulfed Bobby and he felt another electrical shock and nearly passed out on the dance-hall floor. He quickly opened his eyes for fear of worrying someone and stood shaking. A second later he started dancing like a whirling dervish.
This whole hallucinatory visitation at Taco Joe’s in Brixton had only taken a few seconds in “real time”.
Bobby blinked once before dancing and when he did so, with Sydny blinking with him, the human and the cherub separated.
When Sydny opened his eyes he was hovering next to Mont Mont Vinsita in her cave.
The pyramid was gone.
The high priestess turned to the little cherub.... “When it said au revoir it said it in Morse code. It also asked me to say au revoir to you too.” Mont Mont Vinsita was grinning when she said this.
“Groooooooovy!” said Sydny looking amazed.
Something significant had happened but Sydny felt he only understood a fraction of it.
“Well I wonder what The Goddess made of all that?” he said.
“I’m sure she’s impressed with the collective spirit that both you and Bobby Rewind displayed in your decision to reject the chance of entering an untrod path without revealing its existence to others first.” said Mont Mont Vinsita.
“Is that what happened?” asked Sydny with a look of shock on his face.
“Yes.” said Mont Vinsita grinning.
“I shouldn’t be surprised if we had a visit from The Goddess herself next.” said Bobby.
“Maybe you already have.” said the high priestess and winked at him.
She was still grinning when she produced “The Diary of Bobby Rewind” and opened it. Sydny was immediately sucked in.
He experienced something like an electric shock and then suddenly felt a rushing cascade of liquid pressing on the top of his head. As he realised he was travelling head-first through watery chaos it suddenly stopped and he felt as if he’d been ejected from an alternative dimension. The water spat him out and as the vortex spun into view it at once receded into the distance as he flew backwards through a lozenge shaped castle window and out over a moat.
The vortex disappeared and a dragon popped its head out of the castle window. It was Plato.
“Back again Sydny?” asked the dragon.
“I think so.” said the little cherub as he hovered over the greeny/blue water beneath him.
“Say Plato.”
“What?”
“Where do I come from when I appear to shoot out of the castle window like this?”
“Good question!” enthused Plato.... “I was gonna’ tell you last time it happened but you were sucked away too quickly.”
“Last time it happened to me old friend The Worm of Tory Towers got hold of me. After a brief struggle I only just managed to high-tale it out of his castle in time to save me and Bobby from Goddess only knows what kind of fate! I’d ended up in The Desolation of Cain. As I was travelling at speed over its gruesome terrain a pool of water lashed out and grabbed me. It held me in a watery tendril and pulled me down into another one of those vortexes. Someone or something had saved me from Cain’s evil terrain.”
“HEAVY!” said Plato.
“Eventually I got spat out into the cave of the high priestess Mont Mont Vinsita.”
“Your psychic pen-pal! I remember her! We couldn’t be sure if she was an attuned human from Earth or an interdimensional humanoid being who could travel in time. You used to only get astrally projected images of her but I gather you saw her as a corporeal being.” said the dragon.
“Just so.” said Sydny.
“What happened then?” asked the dragon.
“Do you realise that I haven’t had a chance to report back to you about any of this since we began our experiments. We had a brief chat last time I was over this moat and then “SCHLUP!” I was transported away!”
“True.” said Plato.... “Do you think it’s gonna’ happen again?”
“I’m not sure. Anyway, before we have a thorough debriefing session and I carry on with my story, what was it I shot out of in the laboratory that Malthus the worm must have replicated in Anthrax’s Vivvy Section laboratory in order to try and trap me?”
“Come in and I’ll show you.” said Plato.
Sydny flew through the castle window after Plato had withdrawn his huge head. The giant dragon swung his snout towards an object sitting on one of the benches in the huge, circular room.
“My oh my.” said Sydny grinning.
The object they were both looking at was a television set from Earth.
The TV set was next to a radio, an electric toaster, a food blender, a picnic hamper and a cuddly toy. All the electrical devices were attached to some kind of Tesla coil that drew electricity out of the air around them. None of the devices were switched on.
“I knew it would cause trouble.” said the dragon. “I warned you that experimenting with the things from Earth that got sucked into Eden when we expelled Cain from Able would be taking a risk.”
“You can’t conduct experiments on yourself without an element of risk Plato. At least we don’t experiment on unwilling or unwitting life-forms like Anthrax did and Malthus does.”
“True.” said the dragon.
“I’m gonna’ turn it on.” said Sydny. “I’ve got to know whether it was indeed us or whether it was a mixture of things that brought the vortex into being. I reckon actually turning the TV on might bring something to bear on this experiment. When we turned on the electric coil “BAM!” I was sucked into Bobby’s body. Then when I resurfaced on Eden the portal was, as you say, provided by a dormant TV. If turning on the TV triggers the effects of the vortex again then it is most likely the effects of the TV that provided the conditions for the vortex in the first place. When we turned on the coil was I sucked into the dormant TV when I physically left this plane?”
“Yes you were. Well deduced.” said Plato.
“Well since the coil is still active and I still seem to be here I see turning on the TV as the next logical course of scientific action.”
“If you think it’s wise Sydny. Take a moment to consider what you have experienced so far before you do it though.”
“OK…”
Sydny hovered in mid-air for a moment and seemed deep in thought. Plato looked at him quizzically.
At length Sydny spoke…
“I reckon that as well as that bastard Malthus trying to get in on the action The Goddess herself may have had more to do with this whole business than we realise.”
“What makes you say that?” asked Plato.
“Well Mont Mont Vinsita was acting strangely when I mentioned The Goddess earlier but, apart from that, it stands to reason. All this seems to be about whether humans are eventually going to be allowed back into The Garden. We may be seeing some of the signs indicating a move in that direction. Humanity does seem to be close to an “all or nothing” scenario. Drugs seem to be a part of this too. Serpents are bound to be re-admitted into Eden but humans still seem to be hanging in the balance. I just think the Goddess is closer in on this one than we have normally come to expect in our everyday coming and going recently. I remember there was a lot of fuss in Eden when Earth tales were found that covered the subject of the popularisation of psychedelic drugs in the western hemisphere in the Nineteen Sixties. Those tales involved some humans reaching a higher level of global understanding. Now similar tales have emerged that involve us here and now. It seems that you, me, Aristotle, Rosa and even Sekhmet and Baphomet, as well as that bastard Malthus, have become some of the central characters in this particular story as it unfolds before our very eyes.”
“Interesting.” mused the dragon.
“Anyway I’ll fill you in on everything that happened to me in a moment but first I want to turn this thing on again and see what happens.”
“Go on then.” said the dragon.
Sydny pulled a lever connected to the coil and switched all the appliances on. Although the coil had already been turned on this lever activated the lines of electricity that connected the coil to the appliances. Flickering tendrils of multicoloured light started waggling out from the length of the coil in all directions.
The toaster started heating up, the radio started playing “All You Need Is Love” by The Beatles and the blades in the blender started rotating at an incredible speed.
They stared at the television set.
At first there was nothingness.
Void.
A blank screen.
A grey white prelude to anything but this.
Suddenly a diagonal strip of blue sky, green grass and purple rocks drifted past. This narrow line of colours floated away in the distance like some ethereal spirit.
Suddenly a wider strip of terrain rushed by. This provided a glimpse of a whole valley.
A couple of minutes passed in time.
Suddenly two strips of scenery glided by and showed a brief relief of an adjacent mountain range.
Since two strips revealing two sections of the same mountains flew by in tandem it was then evident that these travelling glimpses of depth were not layered over the void but existed behind it.
Their true nature as long, thin cracks in an otherwise absolute white blanket of cloud then manifested itself.
Shiva and Bobby then honed into view on the top of Grizedale Pike in The Lake District.
They were kissing.
They withdrew.
Shiva and Bobby stood up, secured their rucksacks and started weaving their way down the mountainside. On the way up they had had to get down on all fours at some points but as they descended out of the clouds they were able to keep their footing.
Bobby produced a wooden, musical pipe and put it to his lips.
Sydny picked up a pipe from the castle laboratory table.
“The pipes look identical!” said Sydny.
The little cherub started playing a tune on his instrument.
Bobby started playing a tune on his instrument. The two tunes were identical.
“Wow!” said Plato the dragon.
“I didn’t think that was going to happen.“ said Sydny.
Shiva took the pipe and then blew into it. She played another set of notes and repeated them in a cycle.
Sydny involuntarily did the same at the same time just as he had done when Bobby had played!
“Right,” said Bobby, “Let’s go into that stretch of woodland over there and make love.”
“Good idea.” said Shiva.
Sydny Smith turned the television set off.
“I think that this is a good enough place to stop. We’ll catch up with the T.V. after I’ve told you what’s been happening to me.” he said grinning.
Plato the dragon (ever safety conscious) turned off all the other appliances and turned off the “Tesla” coil and the electric hum in the laboratory ground to a halt.
On the 17th July 2000 Shiva and Bobby got the results of the police blood test that was taken from Bobby during their arrest outside Greenwich Magistrate’s Court. Shiva and Bobby had a sample of blood from the same incident stored in their fridge. This second sample was provided to the public as a legal obligation by the police. This was an attempt to deter the cops from falsifying the evidence in blood test cases.
When Shiva and Bobby unfolded the blood test report it informed them that Bobby had had less alcohol than the amount necessary for them to prosecute. Bobby’s charges where drunk driving were concerned were therefore dropped but the other charges of assault and criminal damage still hung over their heads.
On 23rd of November 2000, after five court appearances at Marylebone Magistrate’s Court, a judge threw out the police charges of assault because the police had met with less than half of the requests for evidence in order to justify their case. The judge, in the absence of any representation by the police, put it on record that C.C.T.V. footage of the incident had obviously been destroyed. There had definitely been a camera on that part of the road because of the location of Greenwich Magistrate’s Court. Mug shots of Bobby with blood down his face were never provided by the police either. They seemed to have gone missing. The judge awarded Shiva, Bobby and Rasputeeeen £35 each to cover their travelling costs for four of the hearings. Shiva had had to take unpaid leave from her new job at a primary school in Plumstead in order to attend each hearing and the three of them had to chase up the travel cost money for nearly five months before they finally got cheques through the post. Rasputeeeen couldn’t cash his because he didn’t have a bank account! Efforts to get his sum awarded to him in cash fell on deaf ears. Their solicitor “lost” their case files and the fact that there was no automatic investigation into the fact that the police had stepped outside of the law in both their brutal attack on innocent people and their handling of evidence after that attack infuriated Shiva and Bobby.