Chapter 13

“Where did you go?” both Alodar and Darlene asked.

I blinked. I felt like I was on the verge of understanding something. Alternative, bubble universes! We were all in our own worlds, and some of them merged, and some of us had fallen into other people’s worlds. Darlene’s was probably occupied England, or perhaps France, and she was the last soldier holding out against the inevitable, waiting for someone to rescue her, knowing no one would come, but still holding out.

“You were both there,” I said. “Don’t you remember?”

“We didn’t go anywhere,” Alodar said. “You left.”

“But that was a pretty nice trick with the shield thing,” Darlene said. “Can you teach that?”

I moved closer to Alodar, close enough to take his hand. I did so and he nearly freaked out.

“What the hell?” he asked, pulling his hand free from mine.

“I think I know how to get out of here,” I said, leaving my hand available to him. I held my other hand out to Darlene. “Darlene, take my hand.”

“Are we going to pray together?” Darlene asked.

You know, most people pray only after they have exhausted all other options, and there was nothing left but surrender, and maybe we should pray first, then exhaust our options, but I don’t think what I was about to do was prayer, but asking her to take my hand with nothing but an open hand gesture felt as sacred as praying. She took my hand. We looked to Alodar. He frowned, but took my hand. The sky above the foxhole was ripe with fire and ice, like an alien storm raging. I made a shield, increasing the solidity, but also altering the frequency, changing its color from its normal blue, moving it down to green. We slipped through the Earth, free falling. We stretched out in our bubble, like parachutists in free fall, only, no wind blowing up in our faces. Perhaps being astronauts was a better analogy. I feared letting go, that they may tumble away. I think they shared the fear, because they held onto me, and Alodar took Darlene’s free hand.

We broke free from the Earth and fell through space. Bubble worlds were everywhere. We crashed into another bubble world, landing on a table, surrounded by people holding a séance. The people at the table broke their hand holding and ran away in a start, but didn’t leave the room. Alodar complained about his leg, pushing Darlene off of him. Don’t ask me how he ended up on his back with Darlene on him. I would have been happy for her to have fallen on me. Her face was dirty and I just wanted to wipe it clean via kissing. I don’t know if you remember the television series, “Voyagers,” but I felt like I was in an episode, simply crash landing into a scene and having to figure out what’s going on in order to fix it.

“Fuck!” someone said. “You channeled spirits right into the flesh?!”

One of the women from the home stepped up to me, the only one to have gotten on her feet, and curtseyed. “Oh, Great Spirit, we have summoned you to help fight the demons who have trapped us in this home.”

I opened my mouth to express skepticism about demons, when Alodar said, “Of course we’ll help you with your demons.”

I turned to him. Darlene had him on his feet. “We will?” I asked.

“Jon, don’t break their illusion,” Alodar said.

“Why wouldn’t you want them to know their fighting Germans?” Darlene asked.

“The demons are Germans?” someone asked.

I walked over to the window and looked out into the front yard. It was night time. There was a tree. There was a bizarre squirrel sitting on the porch rail, looking at the window. A spot light shone from an air craft. Militant grays were policing the area. Were we all seeing our own interpretations of reality? I turned back to Alodar.

“What do you see?” I asked.

“No!” he said, pointing at me. “Don’t get me drawn up into this.”

“If we don’t discuss it, how do we figure it out and get out of here?” I asked.

“You don’t get out of here by discussing it! That solidifies it,” Alodar said. “There isn’t supposed to be a discussion. There isn’t supposed to be a group effort. You are born into the world alone and you exit through death alone.”

“How do you explain twins?” I asked.

“You’re being absurd,” Alodar said.

“Am I? You say you’re born alone, but at minimum there is mother present, or you wouldn’t be pushed out,” I said.

“So, you’re saying we should petition the Great Mother?” the woman who addressed me earlier asked.

“You’re making this difficult,” Alodar said. “You’re making it into problems that have to be solved.”

“I don’t see problems,” I said. “I see gifts. Gifts are the circumstances that either bring us closer together or drive us a part.”

One of the séance participants raised her hands. “I find that particularly interesting, Great Spirit. You’re saying if I face hardships and my husband leaves, it was the Universe telling him he was in the wrong place, but I had to experience those problems, too, so how should I relate to them?”

“As evidence he wasn’t committed to you or a resolution?” I asked. “I don’t know.”

“Oh, Great Spirit,” another asked.

“Okay, whoa, hold it. My name is Jon,” I interrupted.

They introduced themselves. There was Mike, Harold, Kim, Olympe, and Huette. The women were dressed in corsets that were tight enough to be ‘sexy’ modern adaptation and not a genuine traditional style. Harold and Mike were in old styled, pen suits, one with a pocket watch and the other with a leather wrist watch. Altogether I got the sense they were Steam Punk characters.

“Jon, if you participate in their reality, you risk getting us stuck here,” Alodar said.

“So, how do you propose we get out?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t know how you got us here! That’s why you should have left me where you found me, but you didn’t listen to me, and now I am here, and you’re responsible for getting me the rest the way out,” Alodar said.

“Do you still want me to kill you?” I asked.

“You got us out of the last place, get us out of this,” Alodar said.

I nodded. I went over and took Alodar’s hand. I reached for Darlene’s hand, but she held back.

“We can’t leave them here,” Darlene said.

“Oh, yeah, we can,” Alodar said. “This is their consensus reality. Let them have it.”

I let go of Alodar’s hand and bowed properly to Darlene. “Thank you for reminding me, Darlene,” I said. I turned to the séance folks. “I know a way out, but you have join our circle. We have to hold hands.”

“Wait, you want us to leave this house?” Mike asked.

Huette didn’t hesitate. She rushed up and took my hand. “Take me,” she said. “I give myself to you.”

“Okay, slow down, I am just getting us out of here and back to Safe Haven. You should have your full memories back by then,” I said.

Olympe came up and took Huette’s free hand. “I swear, Huette, you will fuck anyone who smashes your table.”

“How many tables has she broken?” Darlene asked.

Kim took Olympe’s hand. “Every séance, probably a dozen?”

“It’s not been a dozen,” Huette said. She looked at me and smiled. “I’ve been told that’s the price for channeling. Feel free to collect.”

The girls looked to Mike and Harold and Kim. Kim put on rose colored goggles and took Olympe’s hand, saying, “well, if ya’ are leaving, I ain’t staying in this spook house by myself.” Harold was a big man, looking like a firefighter who just stepped out of a calendar. He had a goofy smile, a goofier laugh, and a bulge on his back where his wings would be. I would later learn, he is an angel, with a full set of wings, but at the time they were concealed under a trench coat. He took Darlene’s hand. He and Kim held out their hands to him. Come to think of it, I was reminded of the guy from ‘Always’ who came in on a “wing and a prayer.”

“Come on, baby,” Kim said.

“I am not your baby,” Mike said, protesting movement and labels. He was a scrawny man, the cliché hunchback magician who had been steeped over one too many books and left the ‘tell’ in his body. He looked at his watch which was a curious thing to do. Was he reinforcing a spatial time reference point? “I’m not sure about all of this.”

“If we stay here, we will die,” Olympe said.

“If we leave here, we will die,” Mike argued.

“Mike,” I said, calmly. “People die. The choice you have today is, will you die here alone, or die with us, because we aren’t staying.”

Mike took a moment to deliberate. It was one of those waits where I was ready to say ‘fuck it, stay here then,’ and even got out of the circle, joined Huette’s hand to Alodar’s, and went over to Mike and intentionally take his hand and bring him to the circle. I took Harold’s hand and Kim took Mike’s. The circle was now complete, and at this point, I didn’t care that we weren’t girl boy girl, I just wanted to get on with it.

Everyone looked to me. I tried to remember what I had done prior. Oh yeah, ‘lite’ shields, but match the shield frequency to the energy of the local environment. I formed a bubble around us, the orb was green, I took it down in frequency, passing through yellow, orange, but as we approached red, the whole house seemed to vibrate, dishes broke, and so I took it back up. Passing back though green there was clearly love and sunshine, and puppies advancing on the house, and flowers blooming, and the grays were getting it on. The squirrel on the porch found a friend and they hugged and their tails came up to form a heart. Don’t ask me how I knew all of this. I just knew. Intuition or histrionics, who cares. It was. When I hit the right frequency, we fell, which in this world was Indigo. We fell through the floor, through the basement, through the earth, and into an Indigo sky, that either late evening, or an ominous morning, and then out into space, leaving the bubble world behind.

Mike started freaking out. “Let go, I want to go back, I don’t want to do this, let go let go…” and he fought so much that our circle was likely to fragment and send us scattered though out the darkness, Kim broke free first, and then I, to save myself and the others, let go. Mike fell. I don’t know if you have ever parachuted. I have. I have been in true freefall looking a woman in the eye, in arms reach. In the movies, when one person pulls the parachute cord, it looks like the person gets jerked up back into the sky, relative to the camera. That’s not what happens. When I pull the chute, I decelerate, but the person holding the camera, the girl I was just eye to eye with, practically disappears from view, because she continues to free fall. This is how fast Mike accelerated away from us, and why he appeared to disappear from view.

I managed to grab Kim’s hand and brought stability back to the circle. Below, I saw the dot that was Mike blow up like a balloon. His own sphere of protection burst around him, like an airbag inflating. From our perspective, his fall came to a halt below us, and we were plummeting into him, with no way to steer around him. We passed right through his sphere, past the UFO, back into the house, passing him, he was looking relieved and pained at the same time, and back through the basement, Earth, and then back into space.

We all had the sensation that we were falling, but no way to discern actual movement. The UFO from Mike’s world was suddenly edging up beside us. Tie Fighter’s did a fly by, noisily shooting lasers at us, lighting up my shields, which meant, what? There were individual bubble realities, which were ours, contained in a greater bubble reality? Clearly, bubble realities could be shared, and overlapping, and without perspective, it was going to be difficult to discern which and what overlapped and where. A balloon full of bubbles pushing up against each other, merging, popping, shrinking, expanding, and then I heard the three witches, “Bubbles, bubbles, toil and troubles…” and for a moment I thought saw a bubble that contain them whizz by, and one of the three was West, and they were all staring over a crystal, a bubble, looking at us as we fell, and in the crystal, I saw the cyclone that all the bubbles went whirling around in, and a sexy lady on a bike whizzed by, nearly drawing me in, but the guys in the row boat distracted me from her as they waved. And then the Tie Fighters did another pass, lighting us up.

“They’re tracking us,” Kim said, and I was compelled to say, “Not this ship, sister,” but I bit it, cause I wasn’t prepare to enter the Lucas bubble, and not because I didn’t want to but because I knew I wouldn’t leave that place. Willingly.

“Oh my God!” Kim said. “They’re going to kill us!”

Her personal shield mushroomed, again like an airbag inflating, but because we were connected, it was like two parachutes colliding and ruffling together, and then we were all suddenly drawn into her world.