Hermione's flat in Bayswater was beautifully furnished, with many expensive ornaments. When she had settled Jim in front of the TV she went along to the kitchen and returned with two bone china mugs of coffee. 'No, don't hold it, it will burn you,' she said, putting one of the steaming drinks down beside him.
After a while, Hermione emerged from behind a screen and put a pebble down onto the floor beside an orchid. Then she took a candle and walked around in a circle, to each of the other stones she had laid, and muttered an invocation at each one. When she had completed the circuit, which enclosed the settee, she picked up a knife, the same long bronze dagger she had had in her laboratory, and followed the same circular perambulation, pausing at each stone to mutter something and to wave the knife in the air in a vaguely sensuous and what seemed to be a meaningful way. Jim felt the same tingle he had felt when she had moved her finger around the edge of the table.
'You must take your clothes off as well,' she said, softly, 'before you come into the circle. I will stand here and welcome you,' and she moved to one of the stones in front of the settee with her back to it, facing Jim.'
Jim did as she asked, and moved towards her.
'Now I must kiss you,' she said as Jim stood between the stones of the circle, and she kissed him on the lips. In a sudden embarrassment Jim sat down quickly onto the floor and clasped his hands about his knees. Hermione went over to the settee and sat down on it.
'Walk to each of the stones in turn and feel the energy it contains,' she said. Jim got up to do as she instructed. 'Do you feel a sort of peace when you place your hand over them,' she asked, and without waiting for Jim to answer, she got up from the settee and came over to where he was kneeling.
'This one is from Sabah, on the island of Borneo,' she said, picking the stone up and giving it to Jim to hold. It was quite heavy for its size and had a blue tinge. 'Eclogite,' she said. 'It comes from very deep within the Earth and immense forces have pushed it to the surface. And this is pegmatite,' she handed Jim a large and very jagged rock that was, on closer inspection, Jim saw, a few very large crystals set within an intergrowth of much smaller ones and protruding from them. 'This is a crystal of quartz,' Hermione leaned over to show him, 'and this is iron carbonate, and this one...' the weight of one of her breasts rested on his knee, 'is feldspar. Why don't we go into the bedroom?' she asked, casually.
'Ariadne wouldn't like it,' replied Jim. The answer came fluently from his lips because it was the truth, although he felt a fool the moment he said it.
'Okay,' she said. 'Regression first.' She switched on the cassette recorder. 'I want you to go back to the moment you first saw the lights over Virginia Water lake. The red and the green. Remember. Watch the light and remember. Take yourself back to the evening you saw lights appear over Virginia water lake.' She spun the bronze dagger in front of his face, suspended by a piece of his hair. Mixed into the hair she had plaited a red thread.
The next few minutes were rather clumsy, but then Jim found himself back at the lake, the instant before he had first noticed the lights. 'What do you see?' Hermione asked.
'An aircraft is coming overhead,' he said. 'Everything is very quiet. Eerily quiet,' he frowned. 'The aircraft does not seem to be moving.' Jim was silent for a while.
'What sort of aeroplane is it?' asked Hermione.
'I can't see,' Jim replied. 'I can only see the lights on each side of the fuselage. I cannot see the wings.' There was another interval of silence.
'What is happening?' asked Hermione.
'The lights seem no nearer and I cannot go any further because of the water. There are no lights on the wings. It must be coming towards me because I can see both the red and green lights on the fuselage, but it doesn't seem to be moving. Oh no! This is crazy! The lights have parted. It isn't an aircraft at all! It can't be!'
'Have you approached the lake shore?'
'I have come down to the water's edge where...what in the name of...!'
'Tell me what you can see,' said Hermione.
'A blue and white disc has just descended from the clouds. It is falling slowly towards the lake. I don't like this.' There was another silence.
'It is hovering just above the lake, and the red light and the green light have moved beside it,' said Jim. 'oOwww! Jim suddenly turned his head upwards and screwed his eyes up as though he was looking into the sun. 'Tell me what you see,' Hermione asked, casually.
'A light! Jim explained. 'Who are you?'
'I cannot see you.'
What is happening now?' asked Hermione. There was a long silence. 'What is happening Jim,' asked Hermione again.
'I am inside,' he said, now in a quiet and relaxed tone of voice.
'Inside what?' asked Hermione.
'They are talking to me. I am lying on a table. There is a light above me. A probe. They are going to put a probe into me.'
'No they are not,' said Hermione.
'There is a probe,' said Jim. 'They are going to examine me. It is sharp. A probe.'
'No there is not. Pull yourself together. Tell me the truth! Where are you? What are you doing?' There was a silence. Jim began to laugh.
'They are talking to me. There is no probe. I can understand them perfectly. They do not speak, but I can hear them perfectly as though they are a part of me. They speak as though they are a part of me. They want me to walk along this path. It is so beautiful here in the evening. So quiet. Even the ducks have fallen silent.'
'What are they saying?' asked Hermione.
'She is telling me I must be examined. She must examine me. She is a part of me.'
'How will she do it?' asked Hermione. 'This examination. How will she do it?'
'I don't know.'
'Will she examine you with a knife?'
'If you want me to.'
'Can you feel the knife against your flesh?'
'I can feel it.'
'What is happening now?'
'I can feel a point against my flesh. They tell me it is a probe. She is asking me if I will let her examine me. She wants to know if I am ready to confront myself.'
'Are you?' asked Hermione. 'Are you up to it? Are you up to the enormity of what you have been asked to do? Are you ready to CONFRONT yourself?'
'Yes.'
Suddenly, as though stung by an electric shock, Jim jumped up and moved out of the circle as though it was a snake pit. He had been holding the point of the knife between two of his ribs and the mark it had made was plain to see. 'I have to go,' he said hurriedly, pulling on his clothes. 'Lots to do this afternoon. Chapter to finish. Thanks for helping.'
'See you tomorrow morning,' called Hermione. 'For coffee.'
·
Jim spent the Saturday afternoon writing and checking a process that he had set up after lunch on the computer and that would be running for quite a while; a theoretical model that incorporated a temperature dependence that Jim was hardly enthusiastic about but which would make predictions he could then offer to the academic world to confirm or refute by experiment. This would be pivotal to the chapter he was drafting.
Jim went back to his flat to pack a rucksack for the journey down to the Isle of Wight. Ariadne was going to collect him at half past nine the following morning. Then he returned to the Department.
By nine o'clock in the evening, Jim was getting tired, but he had set a new process running and wanted to see the result. He switched on the small TV they had recently installed in their office and watched a chat show for an hour. Then he found an interesting documentary on the coal mines of western China.
The process was still running when Jim locked the door against any untoward intrusion by Security, took out the foam sheet that Carl kept in the corner of the room and spread it out onto the floor. An old coat hanging on the office wall would make an adequate blanket. The screen of the PC cast a deep blue light around the room and the statistics of the computer process evolved in a bright window in the top left-hand corner of the screen as he lay down near the wall.
The deep blue light from the screen cast black shadows, challenging reality.
It was six minutes past twelve o'clock. A strange stillness seemed to settle as he lay in the half darkness, and curiously, there was no sound of traffic. Jim put this down to it being Sunday morning already and tried to consider how unusual this really was late on a Saturday night, but everything had taken on a strange lightness, and he had difficulty remembering.
He listened to the silence and tried to sleep, but he could not.
A buzzing began in his ears but quickly subsided. He got up again and went to the window. The full moon hung high above the building opposite. A great bite had already reduced it substantially. Jim had had no idea that there was supposed to be a lunar eclipse that night.
By twenty-five minutes to two the moon floated in the sky like a balloon smeared thickly with dark tan shoe polish and illuminated dimly from inside by a candle. If only there were things in the sky as beautiful as this every night, Jim thought. If only balloons could orbit the Earth and wobble across the sky for us every few minutes. That would be worth looking up for. Balloons of every shape and size, traversing the sky a thousand miles high; balloons hundreds of miles across. Something in the sky near enough to relate to.
Jim looked at the clock on the wall again. One thirty-five. It was only when he had looked at it three of four times more in the space of a couple of minutes that he decided that the hands might not be moving. He tried to imagine whether this was usual as well, this lack of movement, and strained his ears for traffic noise, a distant horn, the rush of a passing taxi. But there was no noise at all. Jim's attention returned to the eclipsed moon. So still. The clock had no second hand and the minute hand seemed not to be moving. Another thirty seconds must have passed, a minute, two minutes, three, and he tried to detect a change in the position of this hand. There was none. The screen of the computer terminal glowed a deep blue. The power was alright. The digital clock in the corner of the screen...
...had stopped. 01:36:23.69. Then it changed. 01:36:23.68. The eclipsed moon hung in the sky, dimly reflecting dregs of sunlight through the open window, encased in the Earth's shadow, floating motionlessly, as though prevented from falling by a centrifugal effect that required no movement to sustain it.
There was no movement in the room at all.
Jim went back to lie on the foam sheet, and closed his eyes for what may only have been a moment or two, for he awoke almost at once, or seemed to awake, to a sound, and thinking, suddenly, that Security might be entering the lab, he lay as still as he could, looking towards the door. The lights did not come on and the lab remained lit only by the soft blue glow of the computer screen.
Then Jim saw a figure in the room. Instantly, he remembered waking once before, in his early childhood, to a similar presence. But this had been male and he had put it down to some clothes lying strangely on the chair and a trick of the light played on impressionable young eyes in the early hours of the morning. But this apparition before him seemed to be no trick of the light. She was sitting on the swivel chair in front of the table on which the coffee machine sat. And he could see, even from where he was, that it was Hermione. She seemed to be reading a book and taking no notice of him at all. He tried to convince himself that it was a trick of the moonlight, but had difficulty seeing anything else in the shape but Hermione. Oddly, Jim felt no desire to call out or to get up, as though doubting reality. It was as though time was standing still.
'Or moving sideways,' he thought; a strange thought, as though not originating wholly from himself. Jim felt his body rise from the floor and pass weightlessly through the ceiling, through a wall and out into the dark night. It seemed quite normal to him. If the moon can float, why shouldn't he?
The Peirce Building showed an aspect of itself that he had never seen before; a flat roof and a strange set of aerials that clung precariously to a metal dome. Jim tried to remember whether they had been there before, but he had never seen the building from above. He rose high into the air and felt no fear, anxious only for the process that he had left running on the computer.
Suddenly, he was engulfed in light. Beneath him, he could clearly see the buildings of London, the dome of University College, the trees of Russell Square, a landscape of buildings and roads and a speckle of windows and lights; and a stationary car far beneath him.
Then he felt himself falling; falling, falling fast, the ground hurtling towards him, down, down he went, through the ground.
Through the ground!