A River Called Time by Courttia Newland

Author:Courttia Newland
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781838854096
Publisher: Canongate Books

7

As a younger, many years earlier, Markriss had fallen in love with photography. From that point onwards all thought, waking or sleeping, concerned the need to commit every detail of his escaping moments to the tightly wound film in his camera, imprinting them for ever on celluloid surfaces in a vain attempt at avoiding suspect recall. When he’d first discovered the form, way before Willow allowed him to use bottled chemicals to develop his photos, he used an instant camera, delighting in the slow transition from darkness to colour, blurred form to solidity, ghostly forms or environments into people and places he knew. Flapping rigid photographic paper into the wind, poised for results. And so it was probably inevitable that his spiritual body—see-saw wavering between the earthly plane and the numerous others that existed on the astral ever since he’d woken—took on the form of those seeping, half-formed images he’d captured with an eager childhood grin, depressing the camera button with a finger, breath withheld, hoping the moment was right.

Like those photos, the images invading his present were difficult to see. Unlike them, there was no development into anything even vaguely decipherable as reality. He couldn’t tell if they were fragmented or belonged to some forgotten whole. In the last few days, the images had begun to strike with increasing regularity, and even while he knew why, Markriss worried about the lack of focus they gave him, especially now, when he needed to concentrate on his surroundings more than ever. Still they came, immersive as the immediate world, nebulous as nightmares. The shape of something that might have been a woman half-veiled in shadow, swirling smoke or thick cotton. A rotating form he struggled to make more apparent, and might have been the tyres of a bike, although he’d never ridden one. A thud of noise, possibly footfall or heavy machinery, or falling concrete, or the distant boom of artillery. He didn’t know and couldn’t tell, so they remained vague, eyes blind with cataract abstraction. It scared Markriss, though he wouldn’t allow himself to admit it. Meaning could be gleaned from those fragments, had it not been masked and coded beyond understanding.

Practised adepts were wary of spontaneous projections, calling them jump-backs. Post-ascension, they were prone to flashes of past, present and future, particularly after sustained or aborted jumps. Moments of quiet meditation—recalibrations—alleviated most lasting effects, something Markriss had omitted after the panic caused by his last journey. Confusion led to his skirting normal procedure, behaving like an initiate rather than the experienced teacher he was.

He knew what had happened. Or rather, what he was doing to himself. He’d run from the task, neck-deep in procrastination, walking to temple like a man who had nothing better on his mind than to perform random errands for friends. Avoiding his future self. Fighting strangers, playing with the notion of murder, theirs or his, the possibility of ascending to become an ancestor. It was all diversionary, and as he left the Temple doors a

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