I’m walking in the desert. The pure white sun in the heat-bleached sky is so intense it will burn out my eyes if I gaze at it. I’m an insect under the concentrated glare of a magnifying lens. If the rippling, colourless sand beneath my feet were any hotter, it would liquefy to glass.
I stop and peer about me, turning in a slow circle, but there’s nothing to see for miles. The desert is flat – no wind, and therefore no dunes. I feel as if I’m the only man in the world, and maybe I am, but the thought doesn’t alarm me. On the contrary, I feel calm, unburdened. My mind, for once, is unfettered.
Even the fact that the sun is beating down mercilessly, and that I have no food or water, is not a problem. I can leave here whenever I like. I don’t know how I know this, but the knowledge reassures me all the same. Although the landscape is featureless, I seem to be walking towards something, though I don’t know what it is. Perhaps I’ll know it when I find it, but for now I’m simply enjoying the tightening and relaxing of muscles in my legs as I walk, the sense of freedom. My shadow stretches out long and dark in front of me. Does that mean it’s morning or afternoon? I don’t know, and I don’t really care.
Then I’m on my knees and I get the feeling I’ve found what I’m looking for. I push my hands into the sand, forcing my fingers in all the way up to the third knuckle – and then deeper still, until both of my hands are engulfed to the wrist.
I close my eyes and concentrate. Like a plug in a socket, I’m connected to the earth, drawing out its energy. Primal sources are involved here; you might even call it magic, if magic wasn’t simply a power source that we don’t understand, and therefore can’t explain.
My fingers wiggle beneath the earth, like bait to attract prey. Eventually I have what I need and I grasp it and begin to pull at it, hauling it from the ground.
It’s wet, and at first it writhes, but as the sun hits it, it transforms, adapting to its surroundings, becoming clay and stone and root matter. But that’s fine, because its energy is in my hands now, and I can forge it, shape it to my will. My fingers move deftly as the heart takes shape beneath them, each valve, each vein rendered in the minutest detail. Once I’ve finished, the heart responds, feeding off my energy and its own, which are now one and the same, adopting yet another disguise, forming a shell around itself.
A shell of blackest obsidian.
There’s a gap then, a sense not of time passing, but of nothingness, of oblivion. When I next become aware I’m drifting upwards, or at least I get the impression that I am. There’s a world beyond the surface and I’m rising towards it, I’m being reborn. I feel… regret.
Someone speaks my name, and I open my eyes.
I see blurs of light and dark, which my brain tells me is a face. But isn’t that always the way? Aren’t our brains conditioned to – what’s the word? – anthropomorphise the random patterns in trees and clouds and rocks? I remember the curtains in the room in my gran’s house that I sometimes slept in as a kid, whose pattern was a busy psychedelic riot of leaves and flowers, stalks and vines. My mind conjured so many faces from those brightly coloured swirls and shapes that after a while the curtains began to scare me so much I couldn’t look at them. Lying in bed I’d sense all the secret faces peering out, all the eyes staring at me. Sometimes I’d cover my ears to block out the sound of breathing from the faces in the curtains.
The dark blur of the mouth in the face hovering above me widens, grows blacker, as it speaks my name again. I blink and suddenly the face comes into focus, and I’m surprised to discover it’s one I recognise.
‘Clover,’ I say.
She smiles. ‘Back with us, are you?’