It was boredom that drove me.   The drugs were simply for something to do.   Acid, peyote, salvia, shrooms, they were all just things to do. I’d read Castaneda, and Huxley, and the others.   The mysticism of it passed me by, the experiences all I wanted.

I was introduced to Petrie by the friend of a friend.   I loathed him.  Petrie was too thin and smiled too much, like Death with a dirty joke he was waiting to shock you with.

“You really want this,” he said and handed me a single blue crystal.  It looked like a teardrop and felt like gel.   I didn’t ask him what it was, wasn’t interested.   He called it “HPL” and laughed.

That night it melted on my tongue, bitter and lingering.    I sat and watched static on my television and waited for the effects to kick in.

Time slowed and I could no longer move.  Not breathe nor blink nor twitch.   Each heartbeat rolled like a peal of thunder taking an hour from start to finish.    Even that stopped.  The television static was truly still now, a collage of visual gibberish.

I could not stop my thoughts.  All else had stopped but not my thoughts.   Time had ceased and only thought persisted.    There was me, and there was an eternal moment that I would never be free of.

In my mind I screamed for centuries.

And my screams were heard.

The things that live in the gaps between moments came to stare.  I cannot describe them, but they felt like the presence of the bereaved.   And they came to stare at me like a freak in a sideshow.   For milennia they came and soon I knew them all.

“Weep,” said Petrie after ten thousand years, and he pressed a glass tube to my cheek.  I blinked then, only once, and a half dozen tears fell and became blue crystal in his keeping.

He smiled and crept away, and left me timeless.

“You have to help me,” she said, “We’re of the same blood.”

Three in the morning and she’d shaken me awake, grinning broadly and asked if I would help her hide a body.

I’d  got used to this since moving into my grandfather’s house.   She came with the territory it seemed.   She was gorgeous, pale and entirely insane.   At the moment she was dressed as a combination Girl Guide and Victorian funeral mute.  Mute.  I should be so lucky.

“The same blood,” I said, “What does that mean?”     I followed her downstairs.  She paused to lick a landscape painting.   Pink cherry blossom vivid and glorious.

“That’s not real,” she said, “Just old oil paints.   And we are.  Kindred.  Kissing cousins”   She looked up impishly, her head on one side.  “Do you want to kiss me, cousin?”

“No,” I said.   “And how can we be… cousins.   You’re in my grandfather’s diary.   A pain in the backside he said.”

“Oh,” she said, “Does that mean you want to..”

“No,” I said as she clarified her question with an indelicate gesture.   “Figure of speech.  Means you’re a nuisance.”

“Oh that,” she said, “Suppose so.   We’re related through his grandfather.   Naughty fellow, Josiah.   Stumbled into mother’s grove and had his wicked way with her.   Took him weeks to get away.   Now help me with this body?”

She’d left it on the floor of the lounge.  Small and ugly, limbs twisted, mouth open, staring eyes fixed on the dusty ceiling.

 “It was him or me.”

It was a ventriloquist dummy.

“Alright,” I said wearily, “I’ll bury it in the garden.”

“Goody,” she said, “face down, with salt in its mouth, or it will come back and haunt me.  You.  Us.  Very bad.”

“Whatever,”

I picked up the little wooden and plastic figure.   A long groaning breath of freed air rasped from its mouth and I felt warm blood sticky and foul on my hands beneath its back.

Face down, I decided, with salt in its mouth.  Oh hell yes.

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Often she dreamed of towers and dragonback flying and strong hands holding hers, of golden rings blazing with power and of long tracks in the wilderness that led, finally, to nowhere at all.

At precisely 06:15 the screen in her apartment blared out its alarm and dragged her upright and attentive while she was still not yet awake.   Stretching and calisthenics until 06:30 and then a breakfast of souring milk and tasteless Libertyflakes before the long walk to work.  Her bicycle, requisitioned a month ago and, melted down, was helping to secure victory against the relentless inhuman enemies of her freedom to obey and work herself to death.

She didn’t think that thought.

Between 08:58 and 13:01 she sat at a desk with a shiny plastic table whose top didn’t quite look like wood.   Documents arrived on her left and she corrected them using a combination of voice recognition software which didn’t work and a grubby grey keyboard that mostly did. 

She dreamed often of a world of glorious cold dawns and sisters with corngold hair, of incantations and dancing barefoot in forbidden places, and of a lover as wild as drunken lightning and  as gentle as summer waking.   She dreamed of a kiss on her lips, and of wearing the necklace he’d given her, a fallen star sheathed in whispergold.

Between 13:05 and 13:25 she ate with the others in ordered rows.  Noodles and soya cubes and the news broadcast at full volume gleeful with imminent victory and sombre reminders that the enemy could strike at any time and hated hated hated the luxuries and freedom that were so commonplace here.   The noodles were undercooked and crunchy.

Between 13:29 and 17:32 she sat at her desk correcting errors and omissions.  She excised a photograph of a dead eyed man from a ministry bulletin from a year ago, it had been placed there in error.  The man had never worked there, though she was sure she’d seen him just once on the day she’d first been shown her desk.   Another error corrected.

She dreamed some nights of a long trail in the wilderness, through grass, that led nowhere.   She’d held the hand of the man who was her wildfire and told him that if she fell in battle she’d want to be buried beyond that horizon, with his necklace on her cold breast.   He’d smiled and said she would never die for he was a king, and he would never allow it.

At 17:36 she began the walk home, with all the others.   The bulletin had promised sunshine and clear weather for the evening commute.   Someone fell into step next to her, took her hand.   This didn’t happen.     He was lean and grim and she did not know him.

“Let go of me,”

“Don’t think I haven’t tried,” his accent was Scottish, his voice insistent, “I need your help”

“What?”

“You need to show me where to dig,”

It was about quarter to six and raining gently.