by K.Z. Freeman
4
It’s another month after that before something extraordinary happens. After a discussion about selling our home to move someplace else, we contact a real-estate agent to come and assess the property. The lady is pleasant enough and offers a shabby, although fair price for the 50 parcels of land, most of which lies overgrown by stretches of forest or low-standing shrubs.
It’s late evening when Sabrine, our real-estate agent, leaves smiling, with Maya and me watching her car speeding down the dirt road pluming smoke behind the vehicle, when on the edge of my hearing I notice the sound of an electric coil. I am instantly aware of a subtle shift in my mental state. A fear creeps in me.
It’s when I look about to behold the slow beauty of a turning season that I notice the thing. In the dark-blue sky of the coming night, I see a white brilliance, an elliptical shape. It hangs above the trees. Motionless.
They say that the third eye, when opened, doesn’t differentiate illusion from reality, but recognizes the two as one inseparable motion. I am at a point willing to accept that to be my condition, and that my third eye has drawn its gaze. I have to believe it, because the alternative is that I have gone insane.
But belief itself implies a lie. Those three letters are in the very word. Lie. And you believe that lie until it is proven as true and you no longer have to believe, but know.
At this moment, no matter how hard I try to think of something else, something reasonable, I know there is something above the threes. Something not from here but from some other place altogether unknowable. It’s not long until Maya sees me staring and looks in the same direction as well.
“Do you hear it?” I ask.
“I’ve heard it before. What the heck is it?”
“Why didn’t you say something about it?”
“Why didn’t you?” she responds.
I am suddenly shaken by a revelation, looking at the thing. I grasp the truth – I had always painted it too. Painted it above the lake; a black elliptical shape barely noticeable from the pigments around it.
The sound it emits transmutes into a throbbing and then an even louder and more disturbing set of sense-impacts. A tracer appears behind the shape as it moves deeper into the forest.
The two of us hesitate for a moment. Then share a look. I rush into the house to get some coats and follow Maya into the forest. The light remains up ahead, imbuing the tops of the canopies with light.
“It’s all coming true, isn’t it?” she asks me.
“I’m not sure I know what you mean,” I tell her, watching my step and crushing small branches underfoot.
“You’ve always told me that, what we think, we become. You’ve thought of this for nearly ten years now and it’s finally becoming true.”
“I don’t think I can manifest something like this,” I tell her.
“But what if you did?”
I say nothing. There is something in the air. Something altogether new yet familiar, as though I am treading upon the first layers of untouched and freshly fallen snow.
The nights have gotten cold and our breaths mist before us.
“You’ll stay by me, wont’ you?” I finally ask her, scared out of my mind yet walking and following the travelling light.
Her voice makes me wish I could see her face in the dark. “I want to wake up next to you,” she says, “that will never change, and I wish to smell and feel you in the morning. I won’t let you drift away, Martin. Ever.”
All at once I am struck with an intense need to confess all my love for her, and to wave her goodbye at the same instant. As though I know this to be our last trail to find the illusive witch that is my sanity. A part of me tells me not to panic, while the other says she will die today. My knees are shaking.
“You remain all I think about even when all I paint is something else,” I begin, allowing my words to escape me. “When the moon sets, you’re all I wish to have and I will love you now and until the day that I die. And when we shall die no more, I will find you behind the clouds.”
She finds my hand in the moonlit dark. Her grip is firm bordering on painful, and she leads me onward.
“Ever since you painted him in my portrait,” she says, “he has walked in my dreams and I don’t know why.”
We say nothing more, stumbling between the grey trees until our minds are struck by something moving ahead.
I think to truly describe the horror of its appearance I would be forced to discover new words quite outside of the human vocabulary. The impossibility of it makes me realize the full extent of what we are doing. The fog grows thicker ahead, seemingly luminescent only as much as the moon allows it, yet strangely more so. I feel a cold wetness between my toes seeping through the fabric of my shoes and our every step is a wet squelch.
“Sodding hell!” I hiss.
“Ssshh!” Maya silences me, as the sound above begins to slow down to a steady, oscillating hum and I realize I have no concept of how long the two of us have been walking hand in hand.
A thing forms on the precipice of my vision, a bending of shadow that doesn’t know what shape to take. It is heavy like my memories, my thoughts and my love for her. Sensations rush by me.
Days where I feel everything at once and moments when I feel nothing at all converge into a single instant where I am paralyzed by fear.
She pulls me deeper into the muck. Water slowly rises to our knees and the light above us trails every movement. I see how my mind has been unfolding inside itself but has now reached out beyond. I hesitate to move as the sheer impossibility of it bids me to stay in place.
“Don’t. I’m afraid,” I admit to her.
“Me too,” she says and we stop. “Let’s go back, I can’t take the sound anymore.”
It’s me who walks ahead this time, beyond the still water turning into black before me and over to the edge of an infinite drop. And on that edge, where a sound of something remarkable below dances with something above, I see the oscillating ellipse descend down into the water, blinding me and turning it into steam, choking the area with mist and leaving behind a hole darker than space. There is silence. Then an outpouring of everything all at once in a great crested wave that crashes against the trees and the rocks and washes away the dirt and the muck and the haze of confusion. The sound of doom envelops me, tosses me about – her hand in mine the one singular centre – as I lose myself in a place where all dimensions dissolve in the absolute.
I wake to the sound of her breathing and the chirping of birds. There’s a headache scraping its way along my cranium, but I regret nothing. A red down unfolds wetly from the east. We are soaked.
This day I know something has happened both illuminating and inconceivable in its reality. I know one day my mind will comprehend it, or it may not. One day her mind will understand too. But it is not this day. One day we shall speak of this again, when the stars are right. But it too is not this day. One day she will see me and I will see her. But it is not this day. This day I only wish all of these things. This day I only hope. Yet one day that hope will blossom, and that might as well begin this day. For it is a beautiful day.
We never found that lake again, nor did we ever search again.
