The Psychic Circle: Chapter 16

Senra sat in the centre of the opening in the forest, away from the noise of humanity. Away from the collective angst, frustration and desperation that made up the pulse of the city’s heartbeat.

Here amongst the unpruned plants and the untamed animals, she could connect with the One Mind. It was the very consciousness of the Earth which she sought now. The girl Nikki Brown got away, but my Craig will bring her back soon, she thought, not worried at all. What she wanted to know was the location of the Crystal. It was time to turn legend into facts.

If she wasn’t careful, her impatience was going to get the better of her. She often found that communing with the One Mind was like trying to find the eye of a blue whale, to get it to notice her. It was a vast consciousness, made up of every thought, be it human, animal, plant, soil and stone, and there was no index to the flow.

Senra’s own mind interpreted the experience as a weightless drifting journey over a broad river which was suspended nowhere, and existed everywhere. It was not a river of water, but of images of people, mountains, animals and plants, past and present, all fading into each other so that there was no clear boundary between were one ended and the other began. Flowing, forever moving, and forever adding their consciousness to the One Mind.

On a previous session with the One Mind, she had shared the consciousness of a mountain and saw it – no, felt it – change from a plain to a peak, in a time span that simultaneously felt like a microsecond and a billion years. She had become obsessed with clocks for a week afterwards. Her internal sense of time had been completely thrown off, because mountains didn’t think in seconds, they thought one thousand five hundred years at a time. This time, she focused on maintaining her sense of individuality as she drifted on, seeking, watching, feeling...

She now saw something in the Mind River below. It was faint, the memory of a memory. But it was massive... an amorphous shape which came from somewhere else entered the Mind River to become a part of the One Mind. As it did, every other thing in the One Mind shifted momentarily in the direction opposite to its normal flow. Then, after some random motion, the Mind River flowed in its normal direction again.

But something was different about it. The flow was either slightly slower or slightly faster than how she remembered it to be before the mass entered it. The faintness of the large shape, which had changed the One Mind in such a subtle yet profound way, meant that it was a distant memory. Could it be the meteorite crash where the Crystal was said to be found?

Senra dove into the place where the shape had joined the One Mind. She saw it descending and had to pass her consciousness through many others to reach it. Tree memories, soil, rock, and some large prehistoric reptiles – she struggled to keep her mind from sharing consciousness with them as she kept descending. But the shape she hoped was the meteorite was fading too fast. Senra was frantic, and went ever deeper, knowing that she was nearing the Ancient Depths.

She lost sight of the shape. Looking down, she could see a darker, thicker River beneath the one on top. No individual shapes could be made out from the tar-like substance... for Senra, going that deep meant losing her personal consciousness forever. She accepted defeat and allowed herself to ascend slowly, still seeking the meteor shape. It was at that moment that her concentration lapsed, and she unwittingly melded her consciousness with and ancient sycamore tree on her way to the surface of the One Mind. She gasped, but was lost in tree-mind for an hour.

When she finally surfaced from the One Mind into her own body, Senra took several minutes to remember how to blink, move her muscles, and to get rid of the ghost limb feeling of having more fingers and toes and leaves than she actually had. How annoying.

She slowly rose from the ground, dusting herself off and looked up to face a bear. She blinked and it growled. Calmly, she channelled the consciousness of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and let out an even deeper, primal growl. She had never seen a bear’s widen with horrific surprise, but it was more amusing than she could have imagined. It turned and ran away on all fours.

She strolled back to the city, as her mind went over what she had experienced (minus her life as a tree). She had been close to the truth she sought, she was sure of it. She kicked a branch out of her way, irritated to no end.

Patience... after one hundred and fifteen years she had run out of patience. Power was the virtue she wanted. Patience could go to hell.

***

Alexia was Nikki.

The Nikki, who was also Alexia, was crouched in a corner of the room she (they) knew, the room where Mr Brown had left her, whimpering ,sobbing until her throat was sore, clawing at herself, at her arms and neck, tugging at her torn dress.

No, no, no, no, no, no. No. He had broken her with what he had done to her, broken that last piece of her which she had tried to keep away from him, the piece that reminded her that she was a person after all. Now she was...

Nothing.

She wanted to be nothing, now. She wanted to be anything but what he had made her. She was Pain. Nikki tied two torn ends of her dress together, but it wasn’t going to be the same again, ever.

Her hands shook as her whimper turned into a long screaming wail and she slid down on the wood tiled floor. Dust on the floor shifted away from her. On the shelving that was fixed at hip level around half of the room, were the paper maché angels which she loved to make. They gently vibrated on the spot, then stilled.

Her wails subsided into whimpers again, when her body was too dehydrated and tired to produce any more tears. She lay still on the floor, miserable and empty.

Maybe an hour of restless stillness passed, maybe two, when the sound of the front door opening made her whole body flinch. She sat up and stared at the door of her room in utter terror.

He was back. Oh dear God. Not again. She couldn’t survive it. She couldn’t-

“-lexia!” shouted a voice that cut through the vision, coming from another time and space. Everything dissolved, and the consciousness which was Nikki’s and also Alexia’s split, and Alexia once again felt her sense of individuality. But not completely... the feelings, the pain, still lingered in her consciousness like a memory she had almost forgotten.

She was gasping, and as awareness of her own body began to return, she realised she was crouched over with her hand on her belly. She gazed up and her eyes focussed on Naomi’s lamenting face. Alexia dropped to her knees on the basement floor, her right hand finding the ground to stop her collapsing completely. She swayed and Naomi came closer to support her, but she pushed her aside and scrambled across the room to a stack of paint tins, grabbed an empty one, and threw up.

When Alexia finished, she covered the tin with a spare lid, and sat on the ground steadying her breathing. She slowly looked up at the other girls. Naomi was studying her carefully, with a caution that was also concern. Nikki was standing with her arms limp at her side, still as a silhouette, her head down.

The experience had warped Alexia’s brain... and Nikki had been holding back when she transferred her emotions. That was a mere fraction of the anguish she had to live through.

Naomi looked from Alexia to Nikki, fidgeting restlessly, starting to speak a couple of times, stopping as she lost the words again, until finally “What happened?” she urged in a strained whisper.

Alexia looked at Naomi, her mouth open, but her voice was muted by the memory of the harrowing emotions she had shared with Nikki.

Was it her place to tell Naomi that Nikki had been raped and abused by her own father? Nikki herself had not moved, and looked as if she could stand there like that forever.

“What if I read you?” Naomi said, walking up to Alexia. Naomi had deduced that she wasn’t going to get much talking from either of them, so tapping the source was the next best thing. Alexia shook herself out of her stunned demeanour, and got up, nearly stumbling in her haste.

“No! Naomi, please don’t...” Alexia moaned, backing away. “It’s... bad. Every bit as bad as Nikki said, and worse.” Alexia thought she felt bile rising again, but it was a false alarm.

Nikki spoke. “I feel it every day. The Pain.” Her lips barely moved as she spoke, and the swinging bulb cast shrinking and stretching shadows in perpetual motion. “I need the Pain to go away.” It was a stated fact. “It won’t go away, until he is gone.”

Alexia had never seen Noami at such a loss of what to do. It was like her compass that pointed her to doing the right thing was spinning without a break.

She decided to outsource the decision. “Let’s go up, we need to discuss this with the others.” Naomi beckoned them both to the stairs. Alexia went to throw the paint can she was still holding into the bin, and then went to Nikki, who was crying silently. Alex took off her jacket and put it around Nikki’s shoulders, using a gentle nudge to encourage her to walk with her. They ascended the steps in silence, Alexia and Nikki first side by side, taking each step one at a time, and Naomi following behind them.

The scene that lay before them in the lounge both confused and shocked Alexia.

Straight ahead there was a man she didn’t know sitting on the green armchair, which was no longer facing the television like the others, but had been swivelled to face the door of the basement. He had been waiting for them. His elbow was casually resting on the arm, and his fingers were held in a strange position, fingers apart, with his wrist casually rotating back and forth.

When Alexia took in more of the room, she saw Jake, Casey, and Hanson, in the kitchen, each of them with their hands raised up in the universal sign of surrender...

... each of them with a kitchen knife hovering half an arm’s length in front of their faces.

In the same moment that Alexia saw this, Naomi screamed. Alexia’s eyes narrowed and she turned back to the stranger, who was smiling. He stood up and she noticed his odd spiky hair, dyed pure white with a strip of black running down the centre.

“Hello again, Nikki.” he said in a British accent, as he walked towards them.