The Salamander by Morris West

Author:Morris West [West, Morris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760638498
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2017-07-30T16:00:00+00:00

BOOK THREE

We have changed all that.

Molière: Le Médecin malgré lui.

Three

I WOKE – or dreamed I woke – in absolute darkness and absolute silence. I was – or dreamed I was – floating in undetermined space in a timeless continuum. I was not sad; I was not happy; I was not in pain; I simply was. At first, that was enough: the floating and the dreaming and the simply being. Then I began to be uneasy, faintly at first, then more and more acutely. Something was absent. I could not define what it was. I could not define anything. My mind was a swirl of mist. I was groping, without hands, into nowhere.

The mist dispersed slowly in drifts and eddies. Slowly and intermittently, I began to collect the scattered parts of myself. My thumb encountered my fingertips. My tongue met my palate. My eyelids blinked. Somewhere out in the fog my feet brushed, one against the other. Then the parts became a whole and I was aware that my body and I were still together. I was able to lift my hand – both my hands – and run them over my face and shoulders and breast and belly and genitals. I was there, naked and lying on a hard flat surface, warm to the touch.

Then, panic engulfed me. I was buried alive. I was blind. I was deaf. I was dumb. When I cried out, no sound would issue from my parched constricted throat. I broke out into a sweat of terror and curled myself into a foetal ball, huddling away from the horror of nothingness. The panic rose and fell, endlessly, like waves on a beach, but slowly, slowly, it subsided to a ripple, constant, threatening, but, mercifully, no longer a madness. The mist about my mind was tendrils now and cobwebs, but at least I knew I had a mind, and must, somehow, begin to use it.

First I directed my body to uncurl itself; and, reluctantly, my body obeyed. Then I asked my fingers to explore my immediate ambience. The slab on which I lay felt like marble or smooth stone. It terminated a few centimetres either side of my body; and above it and all around there was empty space. Below it, my fingers encountered a floor, not paved, but rough to the touch. The floor was colder than my slab. How far it stretched, I did not know. Enough that I had found a foot-hold in reality.

Now I must make a search of my inward self, testing for time-holds and memory-pegs. This was more difficult. Inside my skull was a kaleidoscope that made patterns, fragmented them, rearranged them, dissolved them into monochrome fluid. I was lifted on a wave of panic, dropped into despair, tumbled over and over in an undertow, floated free again.

At last one picture held, one peg was firm; a woman walking through a cloud of pigeons, a man in a green pullover sitting at a table watching her. I could go forward from that.

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