A Strange Journey

Desktops

Deserted Cricket Pitch

Loose Thread - A Dream

I watch the traffic race. On the motorway once more, driving a long curve as a lorry hurtles toward me in the fast lane, and on the wrong side of the road. It passes within a hair's breadth, and then another, and then another still. Why does the traffic all head in the opposite direction? Just what do these drivers know that I don't?

I seize the wheel and spin the car round, desperate to avoid being swallowed in the oncoming rush, and a mile or two down the road I pull into a service station.

The cleansing relief of a shower. I strip and enter a warm square room, red walls pulsing in time, skeined and translucent. I trace the arterial flow and the water feels good against my skin. I'm cleansed. Emerging into nakedness I find my carelessly discarded clothing amiss. The money's gone too, a leather wallet displaced.

So why are these ladies lying in a flotsam wave of jettisoned clothing? I return through a curtained bedroom in search of some scant covering, but try as I might, there is none to be found. Only the discarded garmentry of three betousled ladies. They gaze at me as I lose all interest in being reunited with either my missing clothes or my missing wallet. This state of being will suffice.

Out again, and this time into the light of a service station restaurant area. I join the wending queue, snaking between ropes ever closer toward the metalled breakfast tureens that stretch away ever further into the distance. The sweet burnt incense of cooking bacon. A man taps softly on my shoulder. I turn and see he cradles a 'phone loosely in the angle of his neck, his head contorted to trap it in place.

"I hear you had some problems back there, " he says, conducting a simultaneous conversation down the 'phone to a distant colleague.

"I'll ring ahead and clear the way for you, shall I?"

Sensing this as a threat, not a promise, I beat a hasty retreat before the troops arrive.

Now transported to an overgrown garden, I spy an archway at the end of a long neglected lawn. It is but a skeletal wooden frame to a door that hangs here no more. I admire the view. A smooth verdant pasture across which several walkers pass quietly on their way. This view is most calming.

My eyes are drawn inexorably to a familiar figure in the foreground. There she is, rooting, as ever, in the grass for some delicate morsel of discarded food. A white-as-snow Retriever. I call her name, and her head rises momentarily from her food-fuelled reverie. She sees me, and heads off languidly across the pasture. I pass through the garden-arch and follow.

Try as I may to catch her, she maintains an even distance between us. Other walkers pass by in the opposite direction as the pursuit continues. One couple hold a brace of dogs straining at the leash. A white Retriever too, but it's not the one I'm seeking. She's disappeared from the scene, and now before me lies a white building. I enter.

The interior of the building is lit dimly. There are no windows, but the yellowing artificial light betrays hints of decaying opulence - an abandoned Victorian mansion shuttered from time. I look down, and there are stirrings of recognition as my eyes trace the snaking patterns of an intricately woven carpet. I crawled this way once as a baby, and the patterns are stamped indelibly in my mind. I remember it now. I was in search of a spinning top lodged beneath the curlicued feet of an imposing wooden dresser. My first moves to freedom, I would have been no more than a few months old at the time.

My thoughts are disrupted by the appearance of a maid in a long black dress. She floats down the hall, and I follow her along a corridor that takes us further and further into the building. We pass two symmetrical flights of descending stairs, one on either side, then the maid disappears from view leaving me on my own. What's this before me? Another white door. I reach for the handle. At first it seems locked, then the handle turns and the door falls open. I enter.

This strange annex appears cut off from the rest of the building. It's a house in its own right, a holiday home by the seaside, but it's a long time since it's been used as such. The stale air inside is musty and becalmed; there's a thick, grey patina of dust coating every surface.

As my eyes grow accustomed to the light, I see a figure lying on the bench that runs the full circumference of the room. The figure rises up, ancient cob-webs and dust falling away to reveal her form. An elderly lady who indignantly demands to know just what I think I'm doing here. I make my apologies, back out carefully through the door and close it behind me. The lady sinks down again on the bench, but not to sleep. She resumes her vigilant watch as I make out the shape of two slumbering children on the bench beside her. This room is a dead end.

Shaking my head, I retrace my steps back along the corridor. As I return, I see the maid once more. She disappears down the set of stairs to my left-hand side, then re-emerges a moment later. She's aged seven years during that time, and her hair has turned grey. I watch her again as she makes her way across to the stairs on my right-hand side, and now I follow her down.

As we descend, I notice the air here is hot,turgid and acidic to the taste. The maid reaches a large landing area, and passes a thick-set man with horns on his head. She turns to go down a further set of stairs, and once again disappears from view. My path is blocked by the man, so I can follow her no further

"Do you really want to go down there?" he asks.

The answer is obvious. I turn back the way I came, and mount the stairs as quickly as I can before he has the opportunity to seize me and throw me down to the basement below. My heart pounds. I have to get out, and quick. I emerge back in the long corridor and race down it as fast as I can. As I flee, I spot a huge glass case on my left-hand side, divided into three segments.

My blood runs cold. Each segment of the case contains a cadaverous Gothic tableau. The one closest to me contains a corpse with a whitened face, a blood-red cross marked on his forehead. The next is filled with two skeletons. The final segment, the one furthest away, features two posed bodies - the first, dressed as a doctor, stands to the back of the case; the second, his patient, sits waiting.

As I run past this macabre exhibit, the lamps illuminating the corridor start to spin and pulse, changing colour from purple to green and back, casting a ghostly glow over the proceedings. I see a lady bathed in ethereal light hovering before me. She's cross-legged, Buddha-like, and exerts a calming presence. And then, at last, I reach the end of the corridor and the door to the pasture surrounding the mansion.

Before I have the chance to exit, I find a book thrust into my hands. I open it, and reading from back to front I see the writing toward the end is scribbled and erratic. It reminds me of the entries I used to make in my Journal of Dreams so many years ago. The writing at the front is, however, neat and tidy. And then the penny drops. I wrote those words in the book right back at the service station. I put them there deliberately to leave a trail to my thoughts.

A loose thread ....