‘Do you think that now is the best time for this?’ asked Charlie. ‘Won’t you at least sleep on it?’
‘You don’t have to help me,’ she told him. ‘I am more than capable of operating the machine by myself.’
‘You know I cannot let you do that. There is always a chance you will not find your way back by yourself. If you insist on doing this, I have no choice but to help you.’
She turned to face him.
‘We all have a choice. Those pigs had the choice to leave me alone, but they ignored it. Now it is payback time.’
‘Emmy, will you just stop and think about what you are doing. One guy insulted you and you are talking about blacking out an entire town. Do you not think you are overreacting?’
‘No, I don’t think I’m overreacting. Besides, who knows what will happen. All I am doing is putting a hypothesis to the test.’
When she reached the laboratory, she left the main lights off and only turned on the desk lamps. She did not want the soldiers or her grandfather to know she was working late.
The air retained a faint odour of vomit, but compared to what she had endured just recently, this no longer bothered her. She did not attach any of the life support monitors and climbed straight onto the slab. Charlie took up his usual position at the monitoring station.
‘Give me full power,’ Emmy called out.
‘Are you crazy?’ replied Charlie. ‘You’re only going as far as the town. That would take less than point one of a percent of that power to get you there. You cannot control that level of input; you will overshoot the town by light years.’
‘You underestimate how far I have come along since those early experiments. It’s no longer about three dimensions. I don’t need to travel through space, I can travel between space.’
She could tell that Charlie was reluctant to follow her instruction.
‘If you don’t do it, I will come back later and do it myself,’ she added. ‘The choice is yours.’
‘No,’ he replied. ‘This choice is entirely yours.’
He turned the dial until the output was at level 10. What happened next was out of his hands. He sat back in his chair and waited. Next to the monitor was the override switch. If he pressed it, the machine would shut down and Emmy would be returned instantly to her body. He raised his arm until his hand was hovering directly above the switch. The slightest hint of trouble and he would not hesitate to press it.
***
Lucas was sitting at his desk filling out forms. As well as disorder, those Americans had managed to create a substantial amount of paperwork for him. Before this, he did not realise how complicated it was to prosecute a foreign national. When he saw young Jimmy approach the station, he was actually glad of the distraction.
‘How can I help you, Jimmy?’
The young man was flushed and out of breath. Due to his simple outlook on life, it was rare to see him in a state of panic. Jimmy was by his very nature the town’s most easy going resident.
‘F-f-fire,’ he began, nervously. ‘The pub is on fire – you’ve got to do something!’
Lucas left his desk immediately and ran to the window. The police station was at the top of Main Street and looked down onto the entire town. Being the largest building, the top floor of the Sly Fox was clear to see. Lucas saw no sign that it was on fire.
‘Are you sure, Jimmy; I can’t see anything.’
‘It’s big, Officer Black. I think the whole town may burn down if you don’t do something.’
Lucas was still sceptical. He had not received a call and telephone would certainly have been quicker than sending Jimmy running on foot. He did, however, have a duty to investigate and so he called Karl Fletcher, the town fire marshal and arranged to meet him on site. He then grabbed his hat and ran out to the car.
He drove quickly and within thirty seconds he was at the door of the pub. Everything appeared to be in order from the outside. He entered to find the pub running normally. Mindy was clearing a table by the door and he asked her if there were any problems.
‘A fire?’ she replied, somewhat surprised. ‘I don’t know what stories young Jimmy has been telling you, but we are certainly not on fire, I can tell you that.’
Lucas was relieved, but also frustrated. Jimmy was not the sort to make up stories and the boy’s fear appeared genuine.
‘Has Jimmy been in here tonight?’ he asked.
‘I haven’t seen him in here since Thursday,’ replied Mindy. ‘Do you think somebody may have put him up to it?’
Lucas shook his head.
‘I don’t think so. I mean, those Carlton boys are always giving him bother, but they’ve already received a public order notice this week. They aren’t dumb enough to risk getting into more trouble.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘I’ll go see if I can find Jimmy and ask for his side of the story. There’s nothing else to do really.’
As Lucas exited the pub, the fire marshal was just arriving in his truck.
‘Where’s the fire, Lucas?’ the marshal asked.
‘False alarm,’ the policeman replied. ‘Sorry to waste your time, but everything here is normal.’
Lucas opened his car door and was about to get inside when he was greeted by a most peculiar sight. Jimmy was running down Main Street towards him, but he was not alone. The young man had a crowd of a dozen people following behind and every one of them had their hands full. Some bore handheld fire extinguishers and others carried buckets. Jimmy had clearly spread the word and help was arriving in abundance. The only thing missing was the fire.
***
Emmy felt the rush and then in an instant she was floating high above the observatory. She knew that Charlie had obeyed her instruction and put the machine on full power, because she felt clarity of perception like she had never felt before. The energy around her came into sharp focus and for the first time she could distinguish minute detail. This was astral travelling in HD. Termite mounds glowed with the electric buzz of city skyscrapers and their inhabitants lit up the earth around them like a lava flow. Animals covered the fields and the kangaroos constructed neon highways as they bounded below.
Emmy could see the town taking shape in the distance. That was where she wanted to be, but before her will could take her there, something else caught her attention. The light of life was peppered randomly across the landscape, but there was one place where a pattern formed. Two bright points were contained within a solid circle of light. It was like nothing she had encountered before.
Her instincts told her that the two forms at the centre were human, but the outer circle was harder to judge. It appeared to be closing in on the people, whilst constantly rotating like a marching parade. When she got closer, she could make out the individual entities rise and fall with a staccato motion she had bore witness to just a moment earlier. They were kangaroos, but their behaviour was anything but normal.
She willed herself into the centre of the circle. The energy signatures within contained a disparity in size that indicated either an adult and child or that one of them was seated whilst the other stood. The circle of light was closing in all of the time, but there was no reaction from the two figures. In the darkness of reality, they would be oblivious to the animals until they came much closer.
Emmy wondered who these people were. It was late and very few people would venture away from town at this time. Then another thought occurred to her. What if they had not come from the town; what if they were not people in the human sense at all? The only way to find out was to reveal her presence to them. If they were living, they would be completely oblivious to her existence. She moved into the centre of the circle and passed directly between them. Then she waited.
***
Lucas was having trouble keeping the crowd in order. Jimmy had certainly been convincing in his storytelling. Many of those gathered to help put out the absent fire were not fully dressed or in their night clothes. He saw his Uncle Harry among
st the faces. The old man was not looking in great shape. As well as having to deal with having his chickens stolen, he had clearly allowed for his sleep to be interrupted by coming out to help as he was wearing his dressing gown and slippers. It was not a particularly warm night and he ran the risk of catching a cold or worse. All for the sake of some dumb prank.
Jimmy was the only person among the crowd not to be confused by the sight of the flame free pub. He had acquired an extinguisher from somewhere and he held it in his hands as if poised and ready for action. Lucas grabbed hold of the boy’s arm and pulled him to one side.
‘You better have a good reason for this, Jimmy. A lot of folks are going to be pretty angry when they find out that you’ve dragged them out of bed for nothing. There is also a two hundred dollar fine for wasting the fire marshal’s time.’
Jimmy looked back at the policeman with confusion on his face.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he replied. ‘Haven’t I done good bringing everybody here; how else will we put out the fire when it starts?’
‘Jimmy, did you not listen to what I have just said? You cannot go wasting everybody’s time like this...’
Lucas trailed off as he struggled to digest Jimmy’s earlier response. Something the boy said was off somehow.
‘Jimmy, can you repeat what you just told me.’
The young man shrugged.
‘I asked if I had done good bringing everyone here.’
‘No, Jimmy, after that. You said something about the fire; what was it?’
‘I was just pointing out that with all of these people we will have a better chance of putting out the fire when it starts.’
Lucas took a step back. Was this a warning, a threat or had the boy genuinely gone crazy?
The crowd were growing inpatient. He needed to get answers fast. If there was about to be an arson attack, then having half of the town gathered at the crime scene just before it happened was extremely dangerous. These people had come to help, but were they about to be the victims?
‘Jimmy,’ Lucas began, ‘I have one question for you and you have to give me an honest answer. Is somebody going to deliberately start a fire here?’
The young man shook his head.
‘Not deliberately, officer, but it is going to happen. And if I were you, I would not stand so close to that window.’
***
Emmy was completely enthralled by the image before her. The smaller energy remained still, but the larger one had transformed as soon as she made her presence known. First it turned into an old man; diseased and frail. Then like watching a life played in reverse at high speed, the years fell away, removing decades in just seconds. In her current form, Emmy had only the memory of emotions to guide her actions. She assumed she would feel fear if she were still in her body and reasoned that it would be wise to adopt caution.
Unlike in the hospital, the figure did not seem surprised or curious that she was there. The man or ghost rather, had a friendly face, so different from the ones that cast judgement in the pub. He looked down at his arms then back at Emmy and down to his arms again. He was trying to tell her something; but what? What was it about his arms? She glanced down at her arms, except that she did not have any. She was nothing but a discombobulation of mind without matter. Was that what it was trying to tell her? Did it want to know what she looked like?
During the course of the project Emmy set many goals that she wished to attain. This list mostly consisted of places or scenarios she wanted to see. It never occurred to her to turn the focus inward and observe herself. She was composed entirely of energy and whilst she had sought greater control of that energy, the question had now been raised as to whether she could manipulate and reshape it at will.
To begin the astral journey, she used a mantra. To reveal her true spirit, she reverted to the same technique. All the while centring her full focus on memories of the physical; of what it felt like to feel her muscles moving.
I have hands; I can feel
I have hands; I can feel
I have hands; I can feel
She continued with the mantra and as she did so her ethereal body began to take shape. She progressed from her arms into a torso and then focussed all of her thoughts into her face. No detail escaped her as she attempted to project all that she was and had ever been into recreating a formless copy of her body. Without a mirror, the only way for her to judge her success was in the reaction of the spirit man.
He smiled.
Though his physiognomy was of a young man in his prime, his smile contained the warmth of age. He glanced down at the shapeless energy beside him and then back at Emmy. Again, she felt that he was trying to tell her something, but this time she could not discern what that something was.
She floated towards him. He remained smiling, but his body retreated from her. It was not a considerable movement, but it was enough to keep enough separation between them that there could be no contact. This got Emmy thinking. Was physical contact even possible between two non physical entities? There was only one logical way for her to find out.
She moved closer still and without giving him any warning, she reached out and placed her hand on his shoulder. To her surprise, she found that she could indeed feel. It was not like touching something in the material world. The spectre projected its self image dressed in a smart suit. To Emmy’s touch, this did not feel like she thought it ought to. It did not feel like cotton or fabric, it was neither rough nor smooth and the resistance that it offered seemed like she could push right through it if she so wished. Then the sensation altered dramatically.
They were suddenly alone in an even greater void. The other energy, the circle of kangaroos, even the field itself; all had vanished. In the distance a single point of light appeared and then started to grow exponentially. For the first time in her astral state, Emmy could feel temperature. The light was warm and inviting. As the light took up more and more space, she realised that it was not growing, but opening. It was a doorway.
‘Not yet,’ said the spectre of the man.
He took a step back and as her arm slipped from his shoulder, the astral world to which she had grown familiar reappeared. The light and the warmth vanished back into the ether. She looked up at him with amazement. He had spoken to her. All that she knew no longer held true. This was her most convincing proof yet of actual life beyond the one that she knew. She tried to speak, but found it just as impossible as before. She looked to the spectre for guidance.
He placed a finger over his mouth. Did this mean he did not want her to speak? She waited for further clarification and he slowly shook his head. It meant that neither of them could speak even if they wanted to. The fact he did so earlier, could only be related to when they had touched. A product of that different world she had glimpsed, which was twice removed from the reality that she knew. What else could this ghostly being teach her?
She decided to challenge him.
Follow me she mouthed and then willed her entity to rise up, high above the fields. The ghost followed, but kept its distance all the while to prevent any further physical contact. His form degenerated back into the shapeless energy of before as he moved at speed alongside of her. She took him up into the stratosphere and then plummeted back down to Earth, all the while seeing if he could track and match her movements. He displayed little trouble in keeping up with her.
The next place she led him to was the town. She could have taken him to any city in the world, but she chose Jackson’s Hill. This was not because of convenience; it would have required no more effort to travel to Buenos Aires or Kathmandu. She had taken him to this town because she still had unfinished business with its inhabitants on this night.
They stopped outside of the Sly Fox. Both had returned to their human projections and Emmy gestured for the man to enter the pub.
He refused.
She swept her arm down towards the door a second time. A second time he refused to take up her offer and his once welco
ming features became stern and serious. She smiled teasingly at him then passed through the door and into the tavern.
She remembered the layout of the bar, which was just as well because she could not see it. Like every other place she visited in her astral form, it had only a defining shape and lacked the detail and colour that the material world gave it.
Judging by the amount of energy in the bar, she guessed there was roughly the same number of customers as before. She hoped that her projection would be visible to them, but like the second energy in the field they did not react to her. Disappointed, but not defeated, she carried on through the building and into the rear garden.
The plot stood adjacent to the town’s primary power generators. She continued on, but found her path blocked by the ghost of the unknown man. He raised his hand and held it palm facing outwards in a gesture instructing her to stop. How did he know what she had planned; could the dead also see the future?
She shrugged or at least performed an action that was an approximation of a shrug. The stranger understood and responded by re-emphasising his own gesture. Emmy was not going to be deterred so easily. Although she was unable to interact with material objects whilst in her astral form, she had a growing theory that certain places may offer an exception to that rule. She was composed entirely of unbidden energy and it was just possible that if she crossed into a place of high energy in the real world, a reaction may take place.
The power generators glowed before her with the intensity of a mini sun. It was raw electrical energy not compressed and imprisoned within a solid form. Emmy smiled at the ghost with a gleeful mischief before willing herself directly into the heart of the generators. She then reached out with all of her consciousness.
I am energy; I am electricity.
I am energy; I am electricity.
I am energy; I am electricity.
The world around her exploded and in an instant she found herself back in her lab. For a moment, she could still feel the electricity surging through her body. It made her feel powerful. She was a Goddess. With a wave of her hand she could smite all who opposed her.
Diamond Sky Trilogy Box Set: Books 1-3 Page 14
