Entangled (26 page)

‘Don’t punish yourself with such thoughts,’ Hond replied. He coughed – it was a wet sound, and for the first time Ria saw he had been wounded. A blade had passed through his side in the heat of the battle and now, when he breathed – and he did so with difficulty – flecks of blood appeared around his mouth. His voice was shaking with pain and exhaustion: ‘We’ve lost our brother – no power can bring him back – but you mustn’t blame yourself. If we hadn’t fought these wolves today’ – he gestured with disgust at the slain Illimani who lay all around – ‘we would have had to fight them tomorrow and good men would still have died.’ He slumped in her arms and almost fell but struggled to speak: ‘The Uglies. How do you know them? Are we safe with them?’

‘We’re safe, Hond. They’re my friends. You saw that in the battle …’

‘They saved our lives.’ He was racked by a fit of bloody coughing. ‘Some died for us. Why?’

‘I’ll tell you everything. But not now.’ Her fear and desperation mounting, Ria looked around for Brindle, couldn’t see him and sent out her thought-voice:
‘Hond’s dying, Brindle. I need your help. I need the magic the Uglies can do. I need you to sing him better.’

‘What’s that?’ Hond asked, almost as though he’d heard her.

‘Nothing. It’s – I can’t explain right now – it’s the way I speak to the Uglies.’

‘Speak to the Uglies? How can you speak to the Uglies? They can’t even make words. I don’t know why they fought for us in the battle but I don’t trust them. I’ve never trusted them. Let’s make a run for it now, while none of them are looking.’

‘We can’t make a run for it, Hond! You need healing for your wound or you’re going to die.’

He disagreed: ‘It’s not that bad. I’m not going to die! I can make it back to camp, see the medicine man, get fixed up.’ He staggered again. This time Ria wasn’t able to support his weight and they sank together
to the ground only a few paces away from Rill. ‘Who are those bastards we fought?’ Hond rasped. ‘Are they demons or men?’

‘They are called the Illimani. They bleed like men, they smell like men and I think they are men. But their leader is truly a demon and he commands thousands of them. They’re here to wipe us out.’

‘How do you know this?’

‘The Uglies told me.’

As she answered, Brindle’s thought-voice was back inside her head:
‘Please tell brother don’t be afraid. Don’t be angry. We ready to try healing now.’
Looking up, Ria saw that a ring of Uglies had gathered round. One of them was Trenko! She felt a surge of hope.

Hond was at once belligerent. ‘What’s happening?’ he muttered. Ignoring Ria’s protests, coughing more blood, he struggled to his feet.

Leoni had grown used to the idea that her transparent, diaphanous aerial body was not subject to physical laws and could not be seen, harmed or detained by physical beings. But now she knew she was not invulnerable in this form and
could
be seen, harmed and detained by other non-physical entities. This was why Sulpa had been able to follow her on her flight to the sky, had succeeded in fastening his hands like a vice around her throat, and was now transporting her towards his chainsaw teeth while maintaining a repulsive, appraising, leeringly sexual eye contact with her.

Despite the alligator face, the look in the monster’s eyes was familiar. Leoni’s father had given her just such a knowing look each time he had forced himself into her bed.

(
‘It’s what Jack wanted.’
)

A howl of fury burst out of her and she fought Sulpa’s grip, twisting and turning. Then something else new and utterly unexpected happened. Her transparent aerial body began to change. She felt hair sprouting, teeth and claws growing, the rumble of a roar rising in her chest, and in a rapid blur of motion, spitting and hissing, she underwent a spectacular metamorphosis into the savage form of a mountain lion. Unimaginable strength flooded through her, taking Sulpa by surprise. She lashed out at him with a paw, clawing his left eye out of its socket, and broke free of his stranglehold.

No tunnel of light had brought them here between worlds where they floated twenty feet apart like two astronauts in a vacuum – nothing above them, nothing below them, nothing beside them, absolutely nothing at all in this realm of air except Leoni the lioness and Sulpa the alligator-man.

He put his human hand to his dangling eye and reinserted it into the gaping socket. ‘You have injured me,’ he said. The words, which were not spoken out loud, took shape inside her head like shards of ice.

‘I haven’t even started!’ she spat. ‘You’re Jack and you ruined my life.’

‘Ah!’ he exclaimed with mock dismay. ‘A hero seeking revenge!’ His good eye glared at her – the other had turned opaque, like the white of a poached egg. ‘But you have me at a disadvantage … I have ruined so many lives. Please do refresh my memory.’

Before Leoni could unload a lifetime of hatred the scene before her shivered, returned with full force, and blinked off again into complete darkness. She felt a vast force at work, pulling her away. Far away. The next thing she knew – WHOOSH! WHAM! – she exploded back through a torrent of colours and dropped down into her body in the treatment room at UC Irvine.

Gasping for breath, she opened her eyes, sat up and looked around, half expecting that Sulpa had followed her even here. Instead she found Doctors Monbiot and Shapira standing on either side of her, staring at her as though they had seen a ghost.

Which, in a sense, they had.

Leoni couldn’t bear looking at the three wiry black hairs growing out of Dr Shapira’s chin. They were hideous. But when she focused on Monbiot his lipless face and small circular spectacles proved to be equally disconcerting.

Fixing her gaze somewhere between the two of them she asked: ‘How long was I out?’

Monbiot checked his digital stopwatch: ‘Almost exactly fourteen minutes.’

‘Fourteen minutes?’
Leoni couldn’t believe it: ‘I feel like I’ve been away for fourteen
hours.’

‘With DMT it’s not unusual to experience expansion of time,’ Shapira cut in. ‘Sometimes you might believe yourself to be trapped in those realms for months or even years before you return. But in reality it’s rare for more than twenty minutes to pass from the beginning to the end of the trip.’ She loomed over Leoni and, in quick succession, put a stethoscope to her chest, took her blood pressure, examined her tongue and shone a bright little light into her eyes. Finally she announced: ‘You’re OK.’

‘Is there any reason why I
shouldn’t
be OK?’

‘We were a little concerned,’ the older woman explained. It was obvious she was making an effort to sound more friendly. ‘Your heart rate went way up. At one point you appeared to be choking …’

‘And you started to make these sounds,’ Monbiot added, ‘like a mountain lion. Quite unsettling to hear …’

‘Unsettling?’ Leoni laughed. ‘I guess I was making those sounds because I turned into a mountain lion near the end of my trip. I fought a monster. He was twenty feet tall with a human body and the head of an alligator. Now is that weird or what?’

‘Not so weird as it may seem,’ said Shapira. ‘Many of our volunteers have encountered such creatures, or even experienced transforming into them. They’re known technically as “therianthropes”.’ Leoni showed her unfamiliarity with the word and Shapira immediately added: ‘From the Greek
therion,
meaning “wild beast”, and
anthropos,
meaning “man”. They’re a common motif in the phenomenology of deeply altered states of consciousness. The same goes for animal transformations – like your mountain-lion experience – where the subject believes herself to have turned into some sort of animal. In tribal and hunter-gatherer societies shamans use hallucinogenic plants to reach what they describe as “the spirit world”. They say they frequently take on the forms of animals when they make such journeys and sometimes they may fight with other shamans or even demons – who will also likely be in the form of animals or therianthropes.’

In the next half-hour, Leoni fulfilled her contractual obligations as an enrolled volunteer in John Bannerman’s research programme by giving Monbiot and Shapira a blow-by-blow account – which they recorded – of the ‘phenomenology’ of her DMT experience.

‘Everyone uses that phenomenon word,’ she protested. ‘I don’t like it. It all felt very real to me.’

‘We’re not saying it
isn’t
real,’ soothed Monbiot. ‘In fact we’re not making any judgement about its reality status. We just want you to tell us what you saw in as much detail as possible. That way we can compare it with the reports of other volunteers and flag up any common features.’

So Leoni told them about the machine elves and the Blue Angel, and she told them about Sulpa, and what she had seen him do.

But she made no mention of the connection with Jack.

Because Jack was her private business.

When she left the treatment room her heart fell to see that another young woman was sitting outside in the corridor on a hard plastic chair waiting her turn. Although Leoni had been briefly introduced to all the
volunteers on the afternoon of her arrival she’d made a point of not socialising with any of them and, two days later, she couldn’t remember this girl’s name. She was tall and heavily built – verging on obese – with an angular face, prominent chin, and big round cornflower-blue eyes set very close to the bridge of a long, pinched nose. Her mousy brown hair was cut in a layered pageboy. Not a good look.

Leoni was still feeling militantly antisocial so she mumbled a greeting, the absolute minimum basic decency required, and shuffled by with her eyes averted. What she was thinking was –
Please, universe, let this person not want to have a conversation with me.
But the other woman didn’t even respond to her. At first Leoni was relieved her wish had been so easily granted, but after taking a few more steps she began to get a creepy feeling that something was wrong. She swung round.

And screamed.

Somehow, without making any sound, the young woman had sneaked up on her and now stood just inches away with her face thrust forward. For a beat there was silence. Then she hissed: ‘Jack’s here.’

‘Tell your brother please stay still,’
Brindle’s thought-voice counselled. Then, before she had time to stand, Ria felt a surge of something – some energy, some power – crackling around them like summer lightning, and Hond slumped down again beside her. ‘Don’t let them touch me,’ he growled.

‘Sorry. Have to touch,’
said Brindle.
‘Otherwise can’t heal.’

Ria’s heart was pounding. ‘THEY’RE HERE TO HEAL YOU,’ she yelled at Hond, her voice cracking with stress and frustration. ‘There isn’t time to explain this. I love you and you just have to believe me. They’ve got to touch you to make it work, and you have to stay still!’

‘Heal me?’ Hond scoffed. A big bubble of blood formed and burst on his lips. ‘They’re Uglies! What do they know?’

Brindle dropped to his haunches, looked Hond straight in the eyes, and placed his hands over the entry and exit wounds in the human’s side. Hond struggled but Ria held him fast. ‘They have a healing gift,’ she whispered. ‘It’s amazing. I’ve seen what they can do.’

‘It’s mumbo-jumbo,’ Hond protested, but it was obvious he was weakening fast. He let Brindle’s hands stay on his wounds and put up no further objection when the circle of Uglies linked arms and began to chant in a low steady monotone. At last he lay back with his head in Ria’s lap and closed his eyes, his breath rasping.