CHAPTER 6 — THE DISTANT SEA
Jane could feel a serene, gentle breeze on her face. At first, there was only the blackness of unconsciousness. Then the breeze drifted across her, and she could hear the whispering of her name.
Jane.
She opened her eyes to the strange, stark light of the world where she found herself. There were trees all around her, and she could hear the sound of water flowing. The tree trunks were dark brown and looked hard and wiry like wax. The leaves were almost all brown, like one would expect in autumn, but it was not quite like that. These leaves looked perfectly healthy, as though brown was their natural colour. There was a light floral scent on the wind as Jane breathed the cool air deeply.
She looked up and saw that the sky was incandescent red with streaks of cloud across it. The clouds didn’t seem to reflect the red in the sky and kept an off-white colour, which struck Jane as strange. They drifted towards the left of the sky with streaks coming out of their lateral forms.
Jane had paid a lot of attention to star formations; her time in the countryside had given her a view of them that most people would never know. The stars above her now were different. There were more of them and they were brighter. Jane thought there must have been a million distinct points of light streaked across the sky, varying in intensity, brightness and color. Trees enclosed the area on either side of her, but she could see the sky through a big gap in the canopy of leaves above; it was a beautiful, distant sea.
She stood where she was for an amount of time she could not discern, staring at the beautiful sky. Then the world around her began to grow brighter. The stars faded slowly as a sun rose somewhere through the trees to her right, casting dusty, orange shafts of light through the trees. Then she heard his voice in her mind, whispering again.
Jane.
She looked to the water for the source of the voice and then farther across it. There was a man sitting on a bench on the other side of the water. He had a book in his hands, but she could not see the title. It had an old, tattered look to it, as though it was not quite meant for reading, but perhaps more of an adornment found in a restaurant or an old-style pub. He was holding the book open, but not reading it; he was looking directly at her.
“Hello,” she heard herself say aloud, although she was unprepared to say anything.
“Hello, Jane.”
“What’s your name?”
“My name’s Max.” He paused and then looked briefly to his right at the scenery before him. He turned back to her, smiling. “Do you like it here?” he asked.
“Yes, it’s beautiful. But I don’t know where we are.”
“Well, this is very far from the place you call home. Would you like to come across so we can talk?”
“Okay.”
She found herself desperately wanting to go to this man and talk to him. Oddly, it was in the dream that the word she had been searching for to describe him in her waking life came to her: enigmatic. She walked to the water’s edge without thinking, but then she hesitated. She was staring down at the slow-moving, glass-like water when she heard his voice again in that strange way she had before, not aloud, but like a whisper in her mind.
You can cross the water, Jane. You just have to move the rocks. There are some behind you.
She looked up at him, then behind her. She found that, indeed, a pile of large stones stood behind her in a clearing near one of the trees.
“They’re too heavy for me, Max.”
No they’re not. Not if you lift them with your thoughts.
“How do I do that?”
You need to reach out with your mind. Feel the texture of the rock. Feel every surface and then grip it, like you would grip something physically, except you’re doing it with your imagination.
“Alright,” she replied. Somehow, in this strange place, she found that everything made sense to her. The idea that she could lift the rocks with her thoughts seemed perfectly natural. She turned around again and focussed on the top-most rock. She did as he said and felt every surface. She was surprised to find that she could do this. She felt the coldness of the stone; the taste of dirt and dank water filled her mind as though she had actually touched the rocks to her lips.
She tugged on the rock with her mind, hesitantly at first. Then she lifted it. The rock rose upward obligingly by two feet, and then just as suddenly fell back on the pile, breaking into two pieces with a crashing sound that rolled back towards her in the thin, cool air. She felt enormous frustration.
Try again Jane.
She heard Max’s comforting voice drift over her mind with that same gentle, sonic lull. She looked behind at him, and he nodded. She turned around and again focussed her thoughts on the rocks. This time she was determined, and the next rock rose into the air obediently. She lifted it across the grass and placed it down in the water. It made a plopping sound as it landed, and water splashed up around it. She smiled and was overcome with a feeling of satisfaction.
Very good, Jane. Now the rest of them, keep going, he said.
She lifted all the rocks as she had done the first until there was a pathway across the water. Then she walked out over the stones, unafraid. Once on the other side, Max stood to greet her. As he did, the golden brown trees became a backdrop to his tall, slim figure, and he became a silhouette as he blocked most of the light from the rising sun. He held out his hand, and she extended hers to shake it.
“Nice to meet you, Jane.”
“Nice to meet you, Max.”
He began to walk through the clearing between the trees on the other side. She followed along, walking by his side.
“Is this a dream?” she asked, walking forward merrily, delighted at the beauty of the place and intrigued by this unusual person she had just met.
He looked down at her and smiled, squinting slightly in the sunlight. “In a manner of speaking, yes. Your body is asleep, your mind is awake. Your consciousness has travelled here at my behest. I wanted to meet you and tell you about some important things that are coming.”
“Who are you? I don’t think you’re a…” She struggled to find the word.
“A person?”
“Yes, a person. A…human being?”
He smiled. “You don’t think I’m human?”
She thought about this for a moment, then answered, “No…no, not really.”
“Well, that would be correct, Jane,” he said. His brow furrowed into lines when he said this, an act that reminded her of her father. Max continued, “I’m not really. I was human once. I spent a lifetime as a human, but that was a long time ago.”
“So what are you now?”
“Something else,” he said after a moment. Then he continued, “I’m not exactly like you, Jane.” He stopped walking and looked down at her. His brow furrowed again just slightly as he seemed to consider this.
“Why did you make me come here?” she asked.
“Well, the main reason is because you can do things other people can’t, and that’s what I’m most interested in. That’s what’s most important.”
“But that only happens sometimes with little things. Like last week when I wanted my milk and I knocked it off the table.”
“Yes, but little things can grow over time. A trickle of water can become a river very quickly and without much warning.” He paused and his face grew serious. “And that can attract a lot of attention.”
They walked into a clear area with no trees. The light shone brightly now in Jane’s eyes. There was a landscape before them that was completely alien to her. It was filled with rocks and unusual trees of all kinds. There were vibrant colors—purples, reds and oranges—across the ground hundreds of feet below them. The unusual red hues of the sky seemed to intensify the coloring effect.
It seemed as though a second sun was in the sky—a smaller one farther in the distance—and it was something so novel to Jane that her mind could hardly grasp it. Her jaw gaped open as she stared in awe at what was in front of her. There was a word that she cou
ld associate with what she was seeing, but it was just beyond her reach. Her father had used it once when they were outside and he was telling her about the stars. The word began with a “b.” But Dad’s been different since the accident…
“Binary, Jane. That’s the word you’re looking for. Yes, this is a binary star system. There are several planets, and this is the only inhabitable world. There’s a small pre-industrial population on the other side of the planet. They, of course, don’t know we’re here. Even if they did, they probably wouldn’t be able to see us; we’re not physically present, exactly.” He smiled then, greatly, as though this was very funny to him.
She supposed it was kind of funny, but her young mind suspected she was missing the humour of the joke entirely.
“You mean…?”
“Yes, extra-terrestrials.”
“Well…what do they look like?” She found herself incredibly excited at the prospect of seeing aliens. She was surprised to find that she wasn’t frightened at all.
Max looked at her and laughed. “That’s well beyond the scope of this visit. And by the way,” he said, standing in front of her, blocking the tremendous light of the rising sun, “don’t worry about your father.”
He appeared to her like a giant then. She cast her eyes to the ground. She could feel the tears welling up. The tall, kind man knelt in front of her and looked into her eyes.
“It will be fine, Jane.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll be watching you as well.”
This prospect lifted her spirits tremendously, and she found her worries disappearing for the first time since the accident. What a strange dream, she thought.
“So,” he said, standing up, “let me tell you about the things that are concerning me, okay, Jane?” He stood and they began walking across the edge of the massive cliff.
Jane looked far below them at the dense purple and orange canopy of trees. Then she looked out beyond them past a couple of miles of forest. In the distance, the land was flat and barren, and she could see a herd of animals running together in a group. To Jane, they seemed like dinosaurs. She knew, given the distance, that the animals must have been enormous. She had seen an elephant at the zoo once, but these animals would have to be bigger than that for her to see them from where she was.
Just above the land, hovering in the sky like a beautiful lamp, was another world. It was blue in colour with large streaks of white, and Jane could make out the strange, stationary swirls of cloud that moved across its surface. It was enormous and took up a space twice the size of her outstretched palm held towards the sky. It was encircled by dim, brown rings that were almost transparent; they curved upward and disappeared behind it into a thin line.
“The thing is,” Max continued, “there are people on your world who are searching for people like you. People who can do things. People who can move things and hear things. They’ve found ways to detect it, and not all of them are good people, Jane.”
She found herself pondering what he had said. She found the concepts difficult to understand. “So, what do they want with…people like me?”
“Control, mostly. Control over their own fear. There are some bad and some good. But the man they’re sending to check on you is the one we particularly need to focus on.”
She considered the implications of what he was saying. “You mean, they’re already sending people?”
“Yes, Jane. I’m afraid you’ve been detected. So we need to focus on keeping you safe, keeping you out of their hands and off their radar for as long as possible.”
She cast her eyes downward to consider this. She found the prospect of people coming after her frightening.
“Don’t worry, Jane,” he said, “we’ll figure this out together.”
“Okay,” she said and they continued walking. They were approaching another area filled with the strange trees. There was a clear path ahead of them that cut through the trees on either side. Arcs of sunlight swept through the clear sections from the west. Large winged insects fluttered around and moved in and out of the bright beams of dusty light, oblivious to their presence. Jane closed her eyes and smiled widely. The sunlight beamed onto her face and went through her skin to a deep level.
“It was the car, wasn’t it?” she asked. Jane couldn’t remember exactly what had happened with the car two days before. “Did I move the car, Max? My mom wouldn’t tell me about it.”
“Yes you did, Jane.”
“I didn’t want to, it just happened…I couldn’t remember it afterward,” she said, realizing that she already suspected what she had done; she just hadn’t wanted to admit it to herself. Tears threatened to fall from her eyes as she looked at the ground.
Max put his hand on her shoulder. “Well Jane, you did the right thing. You would have been killed otherwise. It was a good thing.” She wiped a single tear from her eye.
“That’s why they’re coming? They found us because of the car?”
“Yes, that’s it exactly. So I need to tell you how to handle the situation when they arrive. There’s one man in particular I don’t like, Jane. I’m very troubled by the fact that he’s coming to see you. That’s why I summoned you here. He’s dangerous. You may find that out yourself eventually, but you need to know it now, too. Don’t trust him for a second. I’ve looked at him.”
Jane looked up at Max. The strange, beautiful trees swayed in the breeze behind him. She thought his face was the most beautiful one she had ever seen. But there was something hidden in his expression, something that even her young mind could detect. She was almost afraid to ask him. As she watched him, she saw the smile fade slowly from his lips, and his expression changed to one Jane had seen many times on the face of an adult when he or she had set a bad example.
“Max, what’s the other thing? The thing you don’t want to tell me?” She wasn’t sure where this impression was coming from, but she knew instinctively that he was withholding something from her, and she didn’t know why. His mouth slowly opened, and she saw the unbecoming expression of surprise spread across his face.
He turned and looked down the dusty trail that led farther into another section of the sparsely populated forest. “Amazing…that you would know that, Jane, is astonishing.” He looked back at her, and his brow furrowed—fully this time, deep lines forming above his eyes. “There is something else. Something important. But it’s too soon to talk about. Okay? You’ll just have to trust me.”
“Okay.” She was curious, but she had no problem trusting him completely. “When you looked at the man, what did you see?”
He paused and looked into her eyes. “He’ll try to trick you, Jane.”
She took one last look at the beautiful sky, the two suns that filled it and the canopy of wild color below. She could see, in the distance, another strange flock of animals running across a plain of grass tinged with red. Then she looked up again as the memory faded. She felt Max place his hand on her shoulder as the world dissolved into blackness and she floated off the surface into some space, somewhere else.
The Ethereal Vision Page 9
