Tales from The Children of The Sea, Volume 1, The Last Wooden House

by Jann Burner

On the opposite side of the stream, Harry spied a quick movement through the dense greenery and was surprised to see a young boy emerge from the vines all wet and dripping as if he had just crawled from the chill dampness of the purple fluid. Soon the child passed. And then, after awhile, Harry noticed another child and then a pair. They seemed to be quite happy, some alone, some arm in arm, boys and girls together playing their way downstream, passing quite close to him and yet apparently unaware of his presence and completely oblivious to his passing. There seemed to be some sort of invisible barrier that prevented their seeing him, for, time and time again, one or another of the children would pass close enough for him to reach out and touch. At these times they would look in his direction and yet not sense his presence. Gradually, as he drew nearer to the entrance to the cave, he noticed that the children became younger and younger. By the time he stood just outside the mouth of the large cavern, the children had become mere babies gurgling and cooing sounds of bliss and contentment, seemingly bubbling up from the large pool that filled the yawning mouth of the cave. Overhead, the sheer face of the cliff rose high into the air, beyond his field of perception

  Curious and still somewhat dumbfounded by his recent encounter with And, Harry felt himself subtly drawn around the pool with its gurgling babies and into the very mouth of the cave. As he entered, the first thing he noticed was the cold. After the warm, humid vapors of the jungle, the inside of the cavern was freezing. Moving toward the rear of the cave, he noticed a small passage at the very back lit by a pale glow of unknown origin. He hesitated at the start of the passage and wondered what new manner of strangeness was sure to lay ahead.

  He stood silently appraising his odds of ever reaching his desired goal when he felt a gentle nudge against his right leg. He glanced down and saw that one of the babies from the pool had strayed the pack. As he stooped to recover the child, a shrill voice commanded him in harsh tones, "Don't you dare contaminate that child with your earthly stench!"

  Harry jumped in surprise and quickly looked about for the source of the sound. At first, he could see nothing in the shadowy darkness, but then the sound of high pitched breathing drew his eye to the very rear of the passage and there, lit by the vague glow from some distant beyond, stood the creature. It was a very small, rubbery-looking ugly doll, all pasty damp and pale as death with long, scraggly hair hanging in damp ringlets about its little hunched shoulders. It stood with its fists clenched at its sides, heaving its chest and emitting wheezing sounds as if it were terribly afraid or terribly mad. The only color displayed upon the otherwise pale body were two aqua-blue lines drawn horizontally beneath the creatures deep-set black eyes, giving it the look of some outraged, aboriginal pygmy warrior. Harry leaned over to peer at the creature in the passage way. The little man (without benefit of cloth concealment, there was no doubt regarding its sex) stood no higher than twelve inches, possibly fourteen on its tiptoes.

  "I beg your pardon?" Harry answered, squinting into the darkness. The little man stood shaking in frustrated rage and then delivered an explosive two minute monologue which ended when he abruptly turned and stalked off down the dimly lit passageway. Harry was most confused. The creature's language and his own were obviously the same because he clearly understood the last phrase uttered to be "FOLLOW ME!" delivered in the voice of an adult male, but the lengthy part preceding the first phrase was totally indecipherable. At times, the creature's voice sounded like the mating plea of a humpbacked whale, while at other times, it sounded like a phonograph record slowing to a gradual stop. At some points, it would begin a phrase sounding like a young woman, only to end the same phrase sounding exactly like a very old man. Most confusing and difficult to follow.

  What Harry did not realize, of course, was that he had inadvertently stumbled into the ice caverns presided over by that infamous character known as Nth Degree, the sometimes transparent, sometimes opaque thought-form who, chameleon-like, was able to take on the emotional color and hue of that which surrounded him. He was an amorphous, plastic-fantastic entity that grows and glows and shrinks and gives off curious odors that ranged from subtly pleasant to most foul indeed. His size seemed to be determined by the company he kept. Around individuals of relative innocence, he might have appeared to be quite small, whereas when in the company of the perverted or the obsessed, he might grow to truly gargantuan proportions. It was as if his nature fed off the negative energy of others. To some, the caverns of colored ice presided over by Nth Degree might be compared to Hades, with Nth Degree as the devil incarnate or the grim reaper-Death! But, nothing would be further from the truth, for in the ice caverns there was no death, there were merely those poor individuals who had become trapped for a time in the vise-like grip of their own worst passions and prejudices-prisoners of their own device. These were the deluded ones who had stopped somewhere along the road of life and for whom life had suddenly become a prison instead of a prism. These individuals thus became the walking dead marching in slow time. Each and every one a prison of trapped light and color, shadow and substance, a veritable Pompeii in colored ice. These were men and women caught mid-stride somewhere along the road of life and abruptly projected here and apparently frozen within the specific color of their particular passion. Together, they constituted the army of the ages passing through eternity, for in the caves of Nth Degree there was no speech spoken, no music heard, no laughter, no song of celebration, no minor victories and no death...only dying.

  Into this cheerless salon of frozen suffering Harry walked, following the trail of Nth Degree. Finally, after the initial shock, for Nth Degree wasn't used to observing individuals walk into his domain, he graciously agreed to lead Harry on a tour of the cavern maze, with the private hope, no doubt, of placing him in an appropriate alcove somewhere within the multi-leveled catacombs. In the course of the tour Harry learned that each level of the subterranean complex harbored entities of bolder and more vibrant color and combinations of color. Whereas the upper levels seemed to house individuals of relatively pale coloration, the lower levels held the brighter and more vibrant colors until some poor souls stood frozen in mid-stride like multicolored birds--veritable peacocks in colored ice, with each and every color signaling an intense and very specific flaw and obsession. But though these people were frozen, they were not hopelessly stuck: there was a way out. Over time, perhaps hundreds of years, each entity would have the opportunity to examine his or her own problems, and gradually, through understanding, become one unified color or another and then, by diminishing the intensity of their individual color, process up through the levels until they finally became as clear and innocent once again as children and went spilling out of the cave mouth in the infrared stream of emotional run-off. At that point, as children, they would flow out and over the countryside to irrigate humankind with a truer sense of what is, as well as what can be, for though loneliness will make you strong, in the end, it is only love that will set you free.

  As they descended through the lower levels, Nth Degree began to expand in size, as if gaining sustenance from the frozen ones standing about, here and there, in the small alcoves and passageways. In time, he became monstrous in size, like a gas-filled balloon filling all the available space. Harry soon found himself pressed against the wall by his host's fleshy body and only by scrunching down along the floor could he catch a brief glimpse of one of the painted bird-like humanoids in the near distance. As they moved through the deeper passages, Nth Degree's speech became lower and slower.

  "The light is so bright and we are like prisms," whispered Nth Degree in his husky baritone.

  Harry stopped to stare open-mouthed as Nth Degree pointed out specific examples of these human crystals, glittering with brilliant light somewhere deep within the earth.

  "Aren't the colors stunning!" muttered his host.

  Harry could only stare. And each and every one a different color, hue and shade, like hothouse flowers frozen in icy amber.

>   "Each color has its positive, as well as negative aspects, but in trapped entities, the light does not seem to pass through, but remains trapped within, with seemingly no means of escape. In the egocentric prism, the helpless victim is walled in by the very light which he refracts. The ego dies in its own glass cage, but--" said Nth Degree, gesturing with a long arm suddenly grown grotesquely heavy and dank, "The solution is simple--LOVE IT! Embrace it! Surrender to it!" And then, turning to Harry, he delivered his next line in a breathy whisper that smelled like freshly escaped sewer gas from the bowels of Hell. "The reason for the block is also the reason for the breakthrough. Maya is a hard mistress..." he nodded, "stern but just, teaching a difficult lesson; while some things work, others don't, but in the end, when the dreamer finally awakes, it is all just illusion..."

  And then at an even lower level, Harry found himself pressed against the floor by the great rolling belly of Nth Degree. As he watched and listened in disbelief, the creature turned its now massive head in his direction, spilling great masses of dank, dark hair like fields of rotting hay, and gesturing down, indicated yet other, even deeper levels where the really "serious" cases were kept.

  "Woe the feeble physical envelope that must endure the pressure of that awesome spiritual cramp called mortality!" he said. Harry felt faint inhaling the vile fumes of Nth Degree's breath and body odor. He longed to be a simple idea and fade away or perhaps a defective electric light and just flicker out. Questions and answers; answers and questions...

  Later, at a higher level, where Nth Degree once again resumed more normal physical proportions, Harry explained his quest and how he happened to stumble into the ice caverns. Hearing this, Nth Degree actually began to cry real tears, causing his blue eye makeup (which he wore, he said, to feign indifference) to run down his now reasonably proportioned cheeks.

  "Yes!" he said. He too, long, long ago had been on such a quest and "Yes!" he, too, had almost taken his own life on the very same banks of the river Elin and "Yes!" he too had had a similar encounter with the great leather-winged beast that feeds on stray thoughts and becomes reborn within the eternal pool of fire. They were both ecstatic with their great sharing.

  "Yes!" cried Nth Degree, he, too, had even constructed an instrument for the creation of music. It was a stringed instrument, and, once in a great while, he would still find an isolated spot within his icy domain where a particularly grief-stricken spirit stood trapped within the confines of its own device and play his music. He had found playing to be the same as praying and he often prayed for those trapped within cells of their own creation.

  When Harry inquired why he had remained within the lonely caverns, Nth Degree explained that when he initially came upon the scene, there was no caretaker and often as not, the babies would drown in their own emotional run-off. Tears fell from his eyes as he recalled witnessing, for the first time, a spiritual entity, long-entrapped within the passion of its own prejudice, finally succeed in thawing itself through the sheer power of love, only to drown as an innocent child in the purple infrared pool. "Well, it was just too much!" he said, "Sort of like watching a caterpillar change into a beautiful butterfly, only to get run over by a truck." And thus he became trapped, as he put it, by his own compassion: tethered to the frozen catacombs by the traces of habit, as surely as any "natural" resident. A psychic lifeguard stationed for eternity alongside a bottomless pool. Quartermaster to The Corps. Supply sergeant to the Army of The Ages. A spiritual midwife assisting in the process of birth and rebirth. A cryogenic technician.

  "But why do the babies drown like that? It doesn't seem fair, after all they've been through?"

  Nth Degree simply looked at Harry and shrugged his now tiny little shoulders. "That's life."

  Harry walked toward the front of the cave, to where the pool extended out into the light, and pointed off down the hill. "Where does the stream go?"

  Nth Degree walked up beside him, his little eyes cringing against the bright jungle day. "Well", he said hesitantly, "it flows back down through the Imagination until it reaches the forest of Content and there, it is absorbed by the deluded ones during periods of deep sleep and becomes known to them as their dreams, their day dreams, as well as their night dreams, and often as not their nightmares."

  They both stood by the pool, gazing off down stream, thinking their private thoughts and watching a couple of children playing their way along the shore, frolicking in and out of the bushes.

  "And that's it?"

  "Oh no," replied Nth Degree, "certainly not. That just implies the beginning of a new cycle. Think of it like rain that falls to the earth and gathers in pools, only to be recycled through evaporation into moisture which forms the cloud. In this case, the cloud of dreams formed by the sleeping ones falls eventually into a great pool that is called the Lake of Illusion. It is one large point of condensation. It is one vast reservoir into which flow all the dreams of those who still believe in the sanctity of sleep. And in the middle of the Lake of Illusion, there are fourteen ghostly islands. These small, nameless islands are continuously enveloped in a strange bluish fog that whiffs up from the smooth glassy surface of the lake. They sit clustered in the mist like ancient gnarled fingers, extending up through the dreamy vapors of pure illusion. They are separated only by very narrow channels. Warnings from olden times, and before, specifically state that all free men and sons of The Dreamer should be especially wary when trying to thread their way through these foggy straits, for in trying to cross the lake or navigate from island to island, one is apt to become transfixed and hypnotized by the dream-dramas generated within the smooth glassy surface and reflected upward through the bluish mists. If one hesitates and glances down upon the dramatic unfolding within the Lake of Illusion for even a minute, one will almost certainly become caught up in the veritable sea of mediocrity and drown."

  Harry sat on a ledge by the cave mouth and Nth Degree perched next to him on a small rock. From their position they could look out over the stream as it wound its way down the hill and out over miles and miles of jungle.

  "And these islands have no names?"

  "They have no individual names, only numbers, but collectively, they are referred to as the TV-Channels."

  Harry thought for a moment. "But what is the purpose of such a horrible sounding place and where is this Lake of Illusion located?"

  Nth Degree picked up a small, soft blue stone and began reapplying his eye makeup (which earlier tears had washed away.) "It serves as a buffer zone between the Imagination and Paradise: between the world of three-dimensional illusion and the world of the spirit. It is The Gate through which all have to pass at least once. It is right above us."

  "Right above us?"

  "Yes, that's correct. Now let me show you the way...."

  Harry was incredulous. "Show me the way? Now hold on a minute, my friend. Maybe I just don't want to go there."

  Nth Degree casually tossed the blue stone away and looked up at Harry with a feigned expression of utter indifference. "Well," he replied, "you certainly can't stay here and there's no turning back at this point."

  Logic always terrified Harry. "Seems like I've heard that before, but why would I even want to go to the Lake of Illusion and risk drowning in a 'sea of mediocrity'?"

  "Stop whining. You're just suffering growing pains, spiritual teething. You've got to cross the Lake of Illusion and thread your way among the TV-Channels in order to enter Paradise."

  "Ah...Paradise."

  Nth Degree looked at Harry with feigned disdain. "Yes, Paradise and," he added with great dignity, "on the other side of Paradise, lies The Big Sea. In any case," he cautioned, "you must be very, very careful and not utter a sound, least the natural residents of Paradise discover a pretender in their midst. Not good."

  “Sounds like risky business to me..."

  "Oh, don't worry, you'll find a way, after all, you can only do what you can do as well as you can. Always remem
ber that we're all just babies here, don't you see? We're all just pretenders in the void."

  And with the matter settled, Nth Degree proceeded to lead the way down a particularly steep, dark passage. After awhile, Harry began to grow uneasy in the confining space and his breathing became agitated. Finally Nth Degree turned in the tunnel and looked at him.

  "Settle down, Harry," he said. "This is a soul exercise, all else is just flash and style. Not to worry, deep down you really know what you're doing."

  Somehow this seemed to work and he did settle down and proceeded to take it one step at a time. "Not to worry." As they moved up through a series of switchbacks, Harry asked his guide why he didn't come along to Paradise? Nth Degree answered that he was in paradise as long as he could assist lost souls become reborn to the world of positive experience. Harry nodded thoughtfully in agreement and then, after a while, Nth Degree stopped and pointed ahead. "Go with God, my friend..." he said and then quickly slipped back into the darkness from whence he had come.

  With Nth Degree gone Harry was forced to shuffle through the cool stony passage on his knees, feeling his way with his hands. The passage began to narrow, until it seemed to lay like a coiled snake pointing upward at a steep thirty degree angle. Soon the ascent grew so steep that he found himself slipping back, time and time again. For every two feet of forward progress he seemed to slip back one. And then the cool surface of the stone substrata began to feel damp, like the skin of a living thing and then he heard the first of the...sounds. Dull sounds like tennis balls being bounced across a wooden floor, but then later, as the incline grew steeper, the sounds changed. They begin to sound like hard glass marbles being dropped on cement-hundreds of them-and then at the very steepest section, it sounded like he was walking over a couple of inches of shattered glass, breaking it underfoot and creating a sound of squeaking, giving an impression of living sound, like rats. It made the small hairs at the base of his neck stand. He chose not to think about the distraction and focused his mind on placing one foot in front of the other. The slow climbing pace assumed prominence in his mind and he almost succeeded in forgetting the squeaking shrieks in the darkness. Soon the air grew warmer and more humid until the walls of the rocky tunnel were dripping with some liquid substance. And then the stony passage began to grow smaller and tighter, until he had to place both of his arms over his head in order to squeeze along. All about him he felt immense pressure until he was no longer sure if he was crawling through the tunnel or whether the tunnel was digesting him. It was difficult to breathe and impossible to turn back. He began to fear that Nth Degree had played some monstrous trick on him. He felt as if he had been unwittingly fed to the mountain.

  And then he thought he saw a light. It was a small light, a pinpoint of brightness somewhere above him and then it was gone and soon the vertical chimney was squeezing him upward like a snake in a tube, or like a fetus in a womb pushing toward the world. And then there was a second light and it was much brighter than the first. It illuminated the innards of the tight constricting tube in a flash, like a cosmic X-ray, and he was once again reminded how much the twisting of the small passage resembled the innards of a gigantic serpent all grayish pink and lined around with tiny ridges like pulsing nerves frozen in stone.

  It seemed like Harry had been crawling toward the light for a long while, perhaps days and days, perhaps years. There was no time. He had memory of passing through seven distinct levels or stony plateaus within the passage. At each plateau, there was a flattened spot, no doubt worn away by the fevered bodies of countless other questors. And then, after a suitable rest and period of reflection, he would proceed further along the narrow channel that seemed to contain and squeeze him along like a partially digested seedpod enroute to some particularly disquieting end. As he approached the light he could not help but close his eyes for the light was very bright and continued to grow brighter. It made his eyes water and sting. He felt terribly lonely.

  Harry finally crawled, stumbling and tumbling, into the neon brightness of the sudden light like a delinquent roomer evicted into the world or like a human baby born in a hospital. He slowly crawled, panting out of the dark, onto a large flat rock like the first prehistoric swamp creature to make its home on dry land. The light was so intensely bright that for a very long while, he could not open his eyes. And yet even through the skin of his tightly clenched eyelids, he could still see the swirling blue mist lazily raising over the Lake of Illusion. He could discern clearly the play and flicker of sound and image moving over the surface of the smooth glassy liquid. The mist continued to arrange and rearrange itself in ever changing, ever swirling hues of blue, shadows from the surface mixed with voices from the past, while all about, the air reeked of electrical discharge. It was as if the largest bolt of lightning imaginable had just exploded somewhere over the horizon, saturating the air with electrical energy.

  He approached the lake slowly and with much trepidation. The mists rising from the flickering surface gathered in a large iridescent cloud which hovered above the lake like an immense mothership from an advanced civilization. Around the lake, nothing grew and nothing moved, except the incessant flickering from the surface. It was literally a broiling pool of idea manifest in image and sound. The composite dreams of humanity projected from within the lake itself upon its surface like a movie onto a screen. It was a psychic compost pile.

  After awhile, Harry found that he could open his eyes against the brightness of the light. And though he was truly fascinated by the imagery and sound coming off the lake, he was smart enough to leave it alone and let it be. Without a moment's delay, and heeding Nth Degree's expert advice, he selected a stout log laying on the rocky beach and prepared to float across the Lake of Illusion upon his back. Just prior to pushing off, he plugged his ears with mud against the sounds of drama and intrigue that were rising with the mists and then, almost as an afterthought, he gathered a large handful of small stones, and laying back upon the log, pushed off across the lake. Almost immediately, he could hear the muffled cries and expectant whispers of illusory dream figures all about him. Keeping a lofty thought in mind, he carefully surrounded his body with a line of small stones and tried not to focus upon the ghostly images that were reflected up through the neon blue mists rising from the surface, like steam. A couple of times, he could see the shadows of large old sailing ships pass quite close to his small craft, but he never felt the ripple of their passing wake. A couple of other times, his hand accidentally trailed in the water, and as he glanced down, he almost became trapped within the unfolding watery drama that was being enacted below. The only thing that saved him were the stones, for whenever he would turn his head or move an arm or leg, the action would cause one of the stones to tumble into the lake, thus rippling the surface and spoiling the images momentarily, allowing him to free himself.

  As Harry's little log boat floated on and on he grew tired and from time to time felt himself on the verge of falling asleep, which in his present position would have meant eternal slumber, for no one falls asleep crossing the Lake of Illusion without immediately becoming a character in the dreams of the deluded ones, for though the images flickering in the fog were very tenuous and ghost like, the pictures reflected upon the hard smooth surface of the lake were only too crystal clear. Indeed, they constituted a whole other reality, another entire zone of consciousness, and who was to cast the final vote as to which was the more real?

  At one point, just before a stone tumbled into the dream fluid, one of the dream characters involved in some bit of soap opera-ish intrigue turned from the action and looked directly into Harry's eye, urgently beckoning him to join them beneath the surface. At that moment, had his hand not dislodged a stone, he would undoubtedly have joined them and thus become a prisoner within the lake, an entity trapped within the confines of another's dream. When the character first turned and motioned to him, he felt that terminal sense of vertigo that often assails
those who dare to peak behind the veil.

  As he continued to drift through the fog, he kept his eyes directed upward and as unfocused as possible and reflected upon his life thus far. Some moments, he felt as if he were dreaming. Other moments, he felt as if he were being dreamed. He had the persistent feeling that there was something quite important which he was forgetting or blocking out. There were secrets here. Often, he could not even recall his reason for being and, within these moments, he saw himself as just another madman on the water, soon to be another stranger on the shore...serving as an interface or intraphase between illusion and delusion...too dense for space and obviously too spaced to matter.

  But then, he would flush with embarrassment remembering that, deep below, somewhere within the catacombs of stone, a lonely creature by the name of Nth Degree scurried about looking after the well-being of those unhappy souls who had forgotten for a time that life was intended to be a prism and certainly not a prison. Reflecting thus, Harry soon felt much better and found himself, once again, able to keep his thoughts and goals aloft like large kites on a summer breeze. Nth Degree, And, Sir Vain, Random Cause, General Havoc, the wood chopper of Happy Valley and of course, Desire and his little monkey Fascination all floated above his mind's eye like outrageous personal attributes of The Dreamer himself.

  Harry's goals and desires were stressed, tested, refined and reaffirmed crossing the Lake of Illusion and any residual doubts soon evaporated like morning dew on a summer's day.