The Blackberry Walk

Chapter 5 What began as a mosh had become crowd surfing. I could feel the girls hands on my back like cilia cells transporting me further and further away from the station and from the village, transporting me still further beyond the landmarks I saw from the hill. We must have travelled some distance, since the scenery I saw was quite different. Expanses made way for hills, hills where we saw other moon-flowers, blue-ish ones and yellowish ones, each with small bulbous petals like some kind of aloe; and as we journeyed on, the hills became taller and steeper as we went further and deeper in to the terrain. I was stricken with fear. The conductor had said the train would wait, but how long was ‘a while.’ A while could be only half an hour. Would the train leave without me? How long would it take me to find my way back to the station anyway? The station became, to my mind, a kind of anchor point, a bastion planted in this truly alien terrain. Nothing was familiar. The giggling girls, cute as can be as they carried me, didn’t quite feel like people. Each had all the mannerisms of people, all the normal behaviours of little girls, but again I wondered how did they get here? Where are their parents? And if they aren’t any parents, how were they born? Such mundane modernist sentiments consumed my STEM-addled mind, as a clearing emerged beyond the hills passed. Here, you could see for quite a distance. My eyes were drawn to the taller hills which bounded the horizon, then to the blue dot in the sky we call. But only after my eyes drew downwards from our home did I see, planted squarely in the centre of the expanse, a stepped ziggurat reaching up to the heavens. Now, I’ve visited London and seen truly tall skyscrapers: this was not as tall as, say, the Shard. But, stood against a barren and flat environ, this ziggurat was truly overwhelming and - forgive me for saying it again - alien. Was this how the conquistadors saw Chichen Itza, as some humongous but hidden pyramid used for who knows what purpose? First sight of the ziggurat sent shivers down my spine. If I were a captured conquistador, the sight of one would have no doubt meant certain death, and that I was to be sacrificed to some demon, the head left behind to be counted amongst the many other sacrifices made there. Though, in spite of such associations, the sight of the ziggurat calmed me. Whether it was caused by some kind of ego-death or caused by hysterics from my back’s tickling by the many infant hands, I felt no fear nor threat from this temple to the unknown. Was this the black magic of a demon calming the sacrifice so as to relax his flesh before the feast, some kind of force by which the mind is made supple? Such thoughts drifted through me. But, in that supple and suggestive state, nothing very much bothered me. Being before the ziggurat was so calming. I had the conductor’s approval, after all: who else was I to trust? To the ziggurat, we headed straight, and once we arrived there, the girls sat me down by the entrance. One of the girls, slightly more mature than the rest, then climbed up a couple of the ziggurat’s steps, opened a kind of hidden cupboard in the step, and pulls out from there a dozen or so mitre-like hats, each with a ruby in it’s centre. The hats were passed around the children, and, without any fuss, jealousy nor communication, those who required a hat received one, and those who didn’t passed theirs along. The girl passing out the hats, clearly some kind of leader of the group, then descended step by step to the entrance. There, she sang a spell in their unplaceable lunar tongue, and the two halves of this granite-looking door parted, yielding an entrance way. The hatted girls who surrounded me walked me in to the ziggurat, leaving the unhatted ones behind, waving and giggling. The door shut. It was pitch black. Flame torches were lit to light the room. Through all this, I mustn’t omit to mention, I was giddy as a gadfly. What began as an openness and an implicit trust, no doubt emanating from the potency of this structure or what lay within, had become a kind of euphoria tickling in my bosom, almost begging to be released in laughter and merry song. It was no wonder the giddiness was getting to me, for we approached the centrepiece of this ceremonial place: a sarcophagus. The sarcophagus was made of a similar opaque-yet-sparkling granite-looking rock as the door, only this time there was a kind of reddish-pink hue to the stone. ‘Some kind of locally mined igneous rock perhaps?’, my doped-out mind wondered. The girls wearing their funny hats led me to the sarcophagus, and the head-girl pointed at me with her staff - where in the chronology she obtained this staff which greatly exceeded her height I can’t quite recall - and I, as willing as a lemming, crawled into the Sarcophagus, turned onto my back, and instinctively crossed my arms over my chest. I closed my eyes and took in this great joyous energy I felt all around me, an energy that felt like a return, like a great homecoming of the prodigal son. All around me, I could hear the girls singing in voices transcendent, singing what sounded like nursery rhymes, though I couldn’t understand the words. They went round in a kind of roundel, each singer delayed from the previous, and I could hear the melody circle around me like a helterskelter of song. And as I nodded off into what might have been the most peaceful slumber I had ever felt, more proximate than their singing I could hear the sound of granite scraping granite. In time the darkness of my shut eyes made way for the true darkness of enclosure: I had been shut inside. “Rest.” This motherly voice reverberated throughout the sarcophagus. A frisson fell through my spine like one I had never felt before. “Rest, and rest deeply. Reach for my arms.” It felt as if these arms were descending, approaching in for an embrace. I reached up; but my arms themselves didn’t move- though it certainly felt as if they did. And upon my cheek I felt the softest kiss. Then the visions began. Chapter 6 I write with regret, dear reader, but I don’t want to share what I saw in these visions. Too personal, they were, far too personal. What I saw, to describe it more generally, was my life: my future, should I continue on the track I’m now travelling. Little changed in the life that I saw from how it is today, time’s metronome continuing to tick along. And... how should I put this... as time passed the life I saw began to lose its colour. There was something to it so mundane, mundane in the sense of mud or dirt. It was all so terribly lonely. A small crack of light shone in to the sarcophagus as I heard the granite scrape granite once again. Then I saw the pale-faced elven girls beaming their smiles at me - it was awfully embarrassing. Here I was, a grown man lying down, my face wet with tears, and these girls all stood there looking to me expectantly, as if I’d come back with some kind of great wisdom or knowledge. I had nothing of the sort. I journeyed into Hades to find my soul and, like Orpheus, lost her there forever. We each carry such a hole in our hearts, I reckon. Sometimes in days of jubilance and joy, the drunkenness of our happiness makes us forget that hole is there; but at our lowest, when life’s at its hardest in our failure and grief, that hole aches, it bleeds, and it throbs in its inflammation. Such was this experience: the grief in my core, the unfulfilledness, the weakness, which every man spends his life suturing to no avail, poured out of my heart’s hole like a scabbed wound opened afresh. These girls didn’t reflect my pains one bit, not an ounce of empathy. No doubt they could see my agony - my face was painted with it - but they grinned and guffawed just as they did before. Lifting me by the hand from my granite encasement, the head priestess girl walked me out of the ziggurat, the rest of the girls trailing behind. And, in the dazzling sunlight, made ever-more dazzling by the silvery lunar surface, we retraced our steps back to the village. We arrived, and the head priestess organised the girls who paraded back with us from the ziggurat, along with the many more with whom we joined in the village. The girls were arranged so they could all face me, and began to wave. “Bye bye!” they chanted so unnaturally, as if the phrase were a foreign incantation. “Bye bye!” they said in unison, as if you were a guest concluding a primary school assembly. Their joy radiated like the sun; I could hardly face them. They shone too bright. I turned my back to them so as to protect my eyes, and began my ascent up the hill from which I came. But there, standing just behind the hill’s crest stood the conductor, watching over all that had happened. Though in his shadows any emotion upon his face I could perceive would be no more accurate than a reading of a Rorschach ink splodge, what I saw in him - what I felt in him looking down at me - was one of knowing. Whether rightly or wrongly, I had the strong sense that he knew. He knew about the meaning of these lunar children, he knew about the ziggurat, about the ritual, and most of all, he knew how I felt. Though he was a good few hundred yards away, I could just sense that even without discerning my face he could see my hollowness laid bare. I turned my head back to the lunar children, and I saw their radiant faces beaming with light one last time. They still stood there, just where I had left them, continuing to wave me off. I managed a weak smile back. Then I continued my ascent towards the conductor. “Ah, sir, you’ve returned, you’ve been gone for so long, it’s good to see you again.” So long? It’s been an hour at most I’ve been away surely? Pouncing upon my quizzical face, the conductor - with the aloof glee of a teller of riddles divulging an answer to a struggling guesser - said to me, “It’s been three days you’ve been away for.” My first response was a knee-jerk of irritation at his demeanour. But once it sank in how long had past, it began to horrify me so much time had elided without my noticing. “Three days? You must be joking, it couldn’t have been three days.” But before the conductor had even the chance to answer, my belly beat him to it with an almighty rumble, which, though I doubt it could be the case, I certainly hope was inaudible the children down below. To this, the conductor let out a howling cackle, a laugh which went on and on far longer than the incident was funny. This strange man, there is no way he could be a professional. Wiping away the laughter’s tears, the conductor led me back to the station; and there waiting at the two platforms were two trains, one Star-bound, the other Earth-bound. “Sir,” the conductor spoke, this time in a more serious tone, “there are two trains at the platform. The first train you see, the one nearest, is heading back to Earth. If you board this train, sir, you will head straight back to the tunnel which brought you here - you may be a little late for work, but time will adjust itself, no trouble. The other train, you see, is our train, the train which brought us here to the Moon. But Sir! Please bear in mind sir, that this is the last train you can change to which can take you home until this train turns back around at the terminus stop, The Firmament. Please choose wisely sir. My colleague on the Earth-bound service is very friendly, so if you choose to return, please don’t be afraid of losing my company.” And at this, the she-shadow conductor on the train for the return journey popped her head out from the first car of the train. She gave me a little wave and blew a kiss. Odd, but she seemed sweet enough. Were these trains all operated by shadow-people? A real choice was put before me: do I continue off into the deep black sea of space, or do I return to the steady comfort of dry land? The conductor began to stare at me and winced, clearly noticing my umming and arring. “Sir, you haven’t got very long to decide, the Earth-bound train is due to depart soon. Please decide soon.”