Wormwood by John Ivan Coby - HTML preview

Chapter Ninety

SOME KIND OF MAGIC

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Adam silently snaked up the Mystic River towards Mimo’s waterfall. He was flying in Zeke’s manually-controlled, levitation, triangle disc, which he borrowed especially for this trip. The gritty determination he felt, as he penetrated deeper into the mysterious Delphian Forest, reminded him of the day he drove to Stanwell Park with the intent of launching from the big hill for the very first time. The fear and resolve he felt were the same.

He was on a mission to attempt the dangerous and difficult quickening into the mind plane, via the Fish . The objective was to become permanently telepathic in the same fashion that Griffin managed to do it. He understood that the experience could kill him, or worse it could leave him profoundly mad, totally crazed out of his mind. He understood that Fish was extremely powerful stuff and extremely dangerous, particularly for non-telepaths. He felt, though, that his limited experience with LSD, and his extensive practical knowledge of Nitrous Oxide, had prepared him, better than most non-telepaths, for the attempted initiation into the mind plane .

The triangle disc skimmed a foot above the mirror surface of the river. Adam, from time to time, marvelled at the forest that surrounded him. He had never seen trees so tall in all his life. Although he couldn’t remember ever being in a place like this, he nonetheless experienced flashes of déjà vu. As well, memories of Nitrous trips briefly surfaced into his consciousness. His mind began to drift, but he kept his cool. He got the feeling that maybe it was the place that was doing it, that maybe the whole forest was some kind of magic.

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Over the years, there had been much discussion between Adam and Ambriel about Adam passing through the Fish. She discouraged him at every opportunity. Sometimes she did not even wish to hear about it. As well, Ben discouraged his father, pleading with him to leave the idea alone. But Adam could not. It was as if he had drifted into a powerful vortex from which he was unable to break free. He wanted to be telepathic. He wanted to be like his wife and his son. He wanted to fly his own ship and wear his own skin. He

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wanted to achieve all these things because Griffin had. And if Griffin could, surely, he could as well.

He had spoken at length to Rion and Griffin about Mimo and the location of her home in the upper reaches of the Mystic River. Rion described Mimo’s waterfall to him and the small jetty on the bank of the river from which a path led to her stone cottage snuggled in the trifurcation of an elder tree.

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They were visiting Rama. Adam waited for everyone to fall asleep before he sneaked out of the house and flew away in the disc. He took some food and water, and he

‘borrowed’ Ambriel’s crystal container of Fish , which he thought he would not need. He had high hopes that he could pass through the initiation using Mimo’s Fish , just like Griffin.

He flew down the Eos valley to the coast, then turned left and flew north to the Mystic River. From there he flew inland staying low above the surface of the water, like he was instructed, deep into the mysterious Delphian Forest.

It was simple, Rion told him, he had to keep following the river until he came to the waterfall, then it was just another couple of miles to the jetty. Rion explained to Adam how Griffin’s meeting with Mimo was prearranged and how he wasn’t sure whether she would be agreeable to seeing Adam without prior notice. Adam was very philosophical about the situation. He explained that worrying about such things was like worrying about dying. He said that he preferred to deal with it when it happened, not before.

Prior to putting all his hopes in Mimo, Adam begged Thebe to take him through the Fish. She flatly refused saying that it would have been highly dangerous and most likely fatal. She wanted no part of it. When Adam complained about her doing it for Lucy, Thebe explained that Lucy was a special case because she was a hybrid, an offspring from the union of an Earth mother and an alien father. Thebe explained that Lucy was already half telepathic before she passed through the Fish . It was at this point that Adam realised that Mimo, the medicine woman of the Delphian Forest, was his last and only hope.

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After flying all through the second night, navigating by moonlight, of which there was not much under the dense canopy of the forest, and natural phosphorescence, of which there was a ubiquitous abundance, Adam finally arrived at Mimo’s waterfall, which he heard thundering from miles downriver. He flew into the roaring, mist-saturated

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cathedral of the waterfall, where he got completely drenched, which didn’t matter because he was in the tropics. After a pause, to look around, he decided to fly the triangle disc vertically up the front of the 300-foot-high cascade, and further up, and up, above the canopy of the trees and into the brilliant light of the sunsrise. Up there, in the open space, he marvelled at the endless expanse of spaced-out elder trees with their enormous crowns high above the forest canopy. And up there, above the sentience of the planet, he experienced flashbacks to his time hang gliding high above the trees and cliffs and waterfalls of the Illawarra escarpment.

Adam did not remain up high for long, though. He remembered Rion warning him to stay low because the indigenous Ilf did not appreciate anyone venturing into their domain from above. He had a brief look around then descended back down below the canopy to the top of the waterfall. From there he slowly glided upriver looking for a jetty.

In all this time he had not seen one Ilf. He imagined that in such a vast jungle he was almost invisible, however he was mistaken. The jungle was full of eyes. His whole trip up the Mystic River had been under secret surveillance by many Ilf who were invisible to him because of their perfect camouflage.

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The river was quieter up above the waterfall. All the mist and thunder receded into the distance as Adam glided upstream just above the now-mirror surface. As he rounded a bend he came into a cove. He spotted a jetty up ahead, projecting out from a narrow beach. Standing on the jetty, Adam saw a woman who, even from a distance, appeared to be of advancing years. He approached slowly, trying his best to look friendly and non-threatening.

There was a boat tied to the jetty. It was low and round with a type of domed, canvas cover. He stopped his approach about twenty feet from the jetty and smiled and waved.

To his relief, Mimo smiled back.

With absolutely no speech, just a wave of understanding, she conveyed to Adam that she knew everything about him and his reason for arriving.

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She sat him down on a chair facing a wall. On the wall she drew a point, with a pencil, exactly at his eye level. She knew that he knew what to do. She placed another chair, which she would sit on, with its back to his. No words were spoken or would ever be spoken.

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From a side table, she retrieved a small crystal container and opened it. With a fine set of silver tweezers, she took one grain of Fish and placed it on Adam’s tongue. She then took another grain and placed it on her own tongue and swallowed it. An understanding was given him that she would help him ‘launch’, however he would be on his own during

‘the flight’ and ‘the final landing’. She would get him ‘in’, which was the hard, frightening part because every conceivable obstacle would be placed in his way to frighten and distract him, and deflect him from his goal. In his mind he understood all this to be quite normal, so he sat there, fully compliant and receptive, ready for the trance he imagined would come, ready for the distractions. He imagined it would come in a similar fashion it came with Nitrous Oxide.

He was calm and ready. He locked his gaze on the dot on the wall, straightened his spine and began to breathe his special breath. After so many years, he still knew exactly what to do.

First discipline … Stillness

Second discipline … Breath

Third discipline … Thought

To sit at the feet of the Master

Silent and still and focused

Silent and still at the feet of the Master

Back straight … mind focused … breathing still

Not wanting anything … not expecting anything … not thinking

Mindset to …

I will not move no matter what happens

I will not lose my concentration no matter what happens I will practice non‐reaction no matter what happens

Doing nothing

Thinking nothing

Not moving

Not reacting

Just being

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He zeroed in on the dot. He saw nothing but dot. As the Fish kicked in, he began to hear the rhythmic beat of a foreign planet. He felt a presence behind him. The eternal question was asked of him once again.

‘Trust or don’t trust?’

‘Trust.’

It was as if his back opened up and an ancient entity, calm, brave and full of knowledge, entered into his being and merged with it. It was Mimo. Suddenly her knowledge became his knowledge. His focus became immovable and his back became ruler-straight like an iron bar.

His breath became deeper, slower, smoother and more rhythmic. She was doing it through him, setting him up for the rush that was about to come, like a damburst washing everything in existence away. For him it was like hanging onto a pole in the midst of a raging torrent. To let go, to lose his focus, to panic, to succumb to fear, was to lose his objective reality.

There was an initial explosion, not around him, but him. He was the explosion. Every fibre of his being burst away from every other fibre and flew out into the vast void in an ever-expanding sphere.

He lost all construct of his own entity. He expanded into the universe, and beyond, until he became the universe, every subatomic nanoparticle of it.

Gradually, the formlessness of light and darkness, and shade and colour, began to coalesce into one infinite, spinning Mandelbrot set into which he began to fall. He fell and fell, seemingly forever, as the space around him twisted in torsional patterns impossible to describe with even the most advanced physics.

At one point everything suddenly stopped. He was in a kind of room, except it was a mock-up of a room. The walls were made of tubular perimeter frames with white canvas stretched within them with rope. The dimensions of the room looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t remember where. He saw a small gargoyle-like creature appear on top of one of the frames and grin at him. The canvas frames then morphed into actual walls, which formed an actual room that looked even more familiar, but he still couldn’t make a connection. Suddenly, three demons appeared in front of him. They appeared as young men who looked like Punks.

He sensed extreme malevolence from them. They frightened him to the core. From somewhere deep within his soul, a passionate cry came for help.

‘Dear Jesus … please save me …’

In the next instant, a Lion, a huge Lion carrying three shields before Him, appeared behind him in spherical vision. The Lion was all asserted and purposeful and in no mood for

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devils. With bold steps He strode forward, straight through him, and with the shields He pulverized those Punks into eternal oblivion. They were literally blown to smitherines, disintegrated.

A gentle rain began to fall and two nice ladies that shone in their own light, wearing long gowns, nurtured him and showed him kindness in a beautiful green meadow. And there was a babbling brook and he got down close to it and saw a green lizard resting on a damp stone there. And the forest was wet with rain all around him and he saw the first two fingers of his right hand morph into a little leprechaun who smiled at him.

He began to accelerate again, shrinking as he fractally torsioned through the Mandelbrot set into a universe within a singularity. By now, Mimo was long gone. He was on his own, and yet, he got a strong feeling that he wasn’t on his own at all. He got the feeling that he had never, ever, been on his own.

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Out of the fathomless infinitude he became reconstructed. The swirling mathematics gradually crystallized into form. The indefinable became time and space again. The dot, which was at the centre of his unflinching focus, and the wall behind it, emerged out of the mist of a psychedelic mindscape.

The first thing he noticed was the rubber hose still being held in his mouth by his left hand. He calmly removed it and let his hand drop by his side, taking the hose with it. He next noticed the blue cabinet of the Nitrous Oxide machine that stood against the wall in front of him. He flipped the switch to off like he had done so many times before.

The room was dark except for bands of light that filtered through the partially-open venetians. It was silent. He thought maybe that a cassette may have played through, but he wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure if there even was a cassette.

The next thing he noticed was that he was completely soaked-through with his own perspiration.

He stayed calm.

He looked left and recognized the antique, dental cabinet that stood against the left wall.

On top of it was an open appointment book. He noticed that the date was September 23, 1975, and that there were no appointments booked for that day.

He stayed calm.

He looked right and saw the doorway that led to the small, back room. He realized that he was in his surgery. He had not yet looked behind him. He hesitated. A wave of fear passed through him but he fought it off. The fear came from the intense uncertainty he began to feel

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about whether he was in a trip or whether he had just come back from a trip. He couldn’t tell what was real.

He summoned all his courage and turned around. There, lying comfortably in the patient’s chair, was a tall, slender, young girl with fire-red hair, that was cut short, and perfect Celtic skin. Her eyes were closed and she was holding a rubber hose in her mouth. It appeared to him that she was blissfully tripped-out on Nitrous Oxide. She was completely serene and she seemed to be in total control. He thought he saw a subtle glow about her, a soft light, which appeared to be emanating from her very being.

He shook his head because he couldn’t believe his eyes.

He tried to remember the last time he spoke, or what he said, but he couldn’t.

Almost as if it had a mind of its own, his mouth opened and uttered the word,

‘Nancy?’

THE END

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WORMWOOD

Copyright © 2020 JOHN I COBY

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