Harry and Eldern stolestealthilythrough the shadows, without speaking.
Harry feltagainwith self-conscious unease his girl's heart hammering inside his fragile frame. Maybe I get to die from a heart-attack in every life, he scowled to himself.
They passed quickly through the stretch of grassland dotted with the occasional patch of bushes, whom dusk had robbed of their outlines
the first ruts and grooves tried to catch his feet.
Harry darted a look over his shoulder before the treeswould cut offblocked the plain from his sight.
He shivered slightly andfound outdiscovered/realized that he felta certainnausea combined with an aftertaste of Beramaja. Well - he needed the alcohol to think properly,andso this little bodywillwould just have to get used to it.
The beams of the young moon outlined it from one side. Thick sturdy roots sank into the ground like a wreath around its base.
Using his knife, Eldern deftly dug out a shallow, oblong ditch, piling the uprooted tufts ofdeadgrass and clumps of earth all along its perimeter. As soon as Eldern finished, he motioned to Harry to lie down intothe fresh soil. Harry gingerly laydownon his back, his legs sticking out (Of what?). Eldern backed away silently.
Was that it? Harry wondered. Apparently. So now he must meet the great Belir...** ** **
Harry closed his eyes and tried to fall asleep, but he was very, very unnerved. Trepidation edged into every nook and cranny ofthe nerves and sinews filling up his spindly girlish limbshis spindly, girlish body.
He thought of his flat back in his previous life, of his brown sofa, on which he had re-learned to loll aimlessly in the last couple of years. He though of his buddies and he thought of tobacco. He was trying to remember that taste of the first hit of a freshly lit cigarette,whenclandestinely(Such a large word out of nowhere disrupts the flow. Also, it is improperly used.) his subconsciousness utilized this dear memory, and a few seconds later the scene of a man smoking a cigarette didindeedappeared in his inner gaze (He can see his insides?).
The cigarette appeared to taste fantastically, and the delicate sound of burning plant and paper combined with the wistful beauty of a milky cloud fed by the man's luxurious exhalations. (Way too long and rambling a sentence.) His (Whose?) glass of golden beer stood on a cracked plastic counter with imitation marble veins, and golden oldies played softly in the background.
Then it turned out that he wasn't in a normal bar, but in a dollhouse. It was a shadowy and dusty dollhouse, with dusty plastic furniture. Two plastic dolls of women sat immobile in in the kitchen. A plastic pantry stood with it's door open and small plastic pies waited for someone to turn a gay plastic switch.
Outside the dollhouse, a huge cat stalked. Its green eyes glowed like stoplights. He heard honking and smelled exhaustgasses. It wasn't really a giant cat: it was a bus passing below his flat's window.
Harry dreamtof closinghe closed the window of the dollhouse,and sat down on its pink couch to watchsomeTV. The screen of the light green box light up, and a man's face with a white beard appeared on the screen. He looked into Harry's eyes. Suddenly, Harry remembered that he was asleep.
"You are asleep, yes!"
Harry thought he felt for a second the pressure of the ground beneath his sleeping body, yet much more real for him was the scene here, inside his dream. He felt dim apprehension. His thoughts swirled in a rather unorganized manner. He remembered that he had had a cigarette just now, but it was nowhere to be found.
Harry noticed,that he was suddenly dressed in a jogging gear.
Even asleep, Harry tried to not to fall into the submissive role of the receiving end of one-way questioning.
The face on the TV screen glared at Harry.
"Well," he hesitantly began, "it sounds more like a title,than a name. I don't know why..."
"You are interesting, Harry. I do have a name, a real name, and you are the first one to ever ask it. It is..." the facewaitedpaused dramatically for a beat, "So-krath-us!"
The room's furniture and walls moved and twirled like images in a mist (There are images in mist?). The dream body of the man Harry vibrated in an abrupt attack of sudden mirth.
"Sokra-what?" he asked and felt the floor of the room heave. "Your name sounds like Socrates.
The TV in front of Harrysuddenlyabruptly grew and became twicehigher thanthe height the walls of the house had been just an instant ago.
This was all a little bit too much beyond (beyond what?).
Peaks melted into furrows, depressions widened and deepened, patches of wood sprouted insignificantcertain places and disappeared in others, and soon the giant face of Socrates was looking back at him.
"You must not lose attention Harry," he croaked benevolently (How do you croak benevolently? O_o), "or we will lose each other here."
Harry looked at the mountain with a thin smile. "I come from the same world as you, man."
The mountain changed fluidly, what was a portrait made up of mighty jagged battlement of coruscating snowy peaks, crumpled and smoothed out and became a chain of green hills covered with picturesque meadows and unimpressive groves.
"Yes, yes! The cave! The shadows!" boomed Socrates. "But how is this possible?
"Oh yes, more than two thousand, I think.
Harry sipped again from his never ending cocktail and sucked at his cigarette, which he was surewashad been a Camel just a while ago, but was nowhad turned intoa fragrant Marlboro.
"I am afraid I cannot do much to help you out of your confusion, Harry," said Socrates.
"A solar powered Socrates?"
"Yes, by chance an Arjanti hunter slept under this tree, and for some reason this enabled me to communicated with him as he slept.
"I contemplate. I think. I conduct my intellectual research. And in return for helping these primitives, I get fresh data."
"Harry, you must let me enter your thoughts," boomed the voice. "I must see all that has come to pass while I have slept, and see how I can help you, if there is any way to help you."
Suddenly he wasalreadyin the lake in front of the house, descending, sinking into milky green, with the light above him diminishing progressively, until he reached a dark murky depth with hints of slimy organic things...
Harry was lying on a hard sofa, while Socrateswas sittingsat on a wooden Victorian chair,dressed in old fashioned tweeds. Harry found himselfto bein a red v-neck sweater and slacks held by suspenders. Sigmund Socrates and his patient. He looked on withhurtindignation.
"Never mind. It doesn't matter now, Harry. Thank you for this astounding new information. I feel already,that I will have to contemplate it for many months, before I can fully assimilate it."
This rebound of their tribe is a mystery. I must think about this.
Didn't the decimation happen in ancient times?
"I'm sorry to say,that, for all my sympathies for the Arjanti, they are still uneducated savages."
It is my suspicion, that they helped in the past, just to make certain that all the tribes on this peninsula are equally weak.
I almost cannot bear letting you go Harry. Why don't you do the following - upon waking, carefully break off a bough from the Shogu tree, and put it into a gourd of water. Let it sprout roots, then plant itin soil.
Strange,that, in his desperate dreaming below a tree worshiped by the natives, he would meet another soul from his own world.
Socrates and the whole scene melted away. Harry again felt the ground beneath his body. Cool night air caressed his cheeks. He opened his eyes. Eldern was crouching near by. Harry moved a leg experimentally. Yes, he had returned.
Once you picked up speed in seeing the mistakes riddling the narrative, I think you kinda bulldozed some things which could have been given the benefit of doubt. Like what glows inside a dream and how a Socrates speaks after being reincarnated some centuries ago in an alien tribal world. (or, how much we really do know about him. This one here is a jazzed up version of Nietzche's fantasies concerning him)
And it was quite my fault to not spell out in the beginning, that Harry is reincarnated in a girl's body.
P.S. the mechanics of the subconscious processes, especially when dreaming or falling asleep, are clandestine. Otherwise there would be no wall between the conscious and subconscious, otherwise there would be no defencive mechanisms, which try to hide, to deceive, against which psychoanalytical techniques are employed