Friday, January 14, 2005

Moon Lovers

Dave and Julia only ever meet on moonlit nights. They find the moonlight romantic, and night time is the only time when they can get away from their partners. Dave's excuse to his wife is that he is down the pub. Julia's excuse to her husband is that she is playing bingo.

They always meet in the same field, on the same hill, 3 miles away from town, the moon lighting the edges of their faces, cold like the wind through the trees, alone, together, desperate, passionate.
"I love you more than anything," says Julia, pulling Dave closer to her.
"I know," says Dave, his face partially in shadow.
She continues, the wind in her hair: "You're like....the world in my hands, in my head, in this moonlit sky, you're everything I want, over and over and over again, all in my head, like the rustling of the trees, like the quiet breeze which strokes my soul, holding me, forever in this field, like time is standing still. They'll never know the places we go to inside ourselves, to escape everything else, like it's all too much, it's all too much but we run away, we run away and into each other, and we're like one, like one whole, like the whole sky and the moon as well."

One night, a moonlit night is due, but the sky is cloudy. They still meet, alone in complete darkness. The wind howls through the nearby trees, a spooky sound made even more so by the fact that they can't see them.
"What's that over there????" Julia wispers, surprised. They see a light in the nearby trees.
"Somebody's there!" wispers Dave. "What's that sound???"
"It's like a....scraping sound!" says Julia. "And the rustling of branches!"

Then suddenly there is a scream. Dave and Julia freeze in horror. They look, the light is no longer there.
"Quick, let's get out of here!" wispers Julia frantically, turning to run away.
"No, somebody might need our help!" says Dave, grabbing her arm. "We have to investigate!" They run towards where the scream came from, but when they get there, there is nobody there.
"Weird..." says Julia.

They go home, agreeing to meet back there at dawn. The next day, they go back to the same spot.
"Look!" says Dave, pointing to an arrow on a tree, pointing upwards.
"I can see something!" says Julia. "There's something hanging up there!"
Dave begins to climb up the tree. "It's a key!" he says, once near to it. He climbs back down.
"This is REALLY weird!" says Julia.
"I wonder what it unlocks...?" says Dave.

At night, they both dream of a cave in the woods on a hill. The following day they go in search of the cave. Inside, they find a rusty old doorway.
"Try the key, Dave!" says Julia. The door unlocks. They open it, revealing a passageway.
"Let's see where it goes," says Dave. They walk along it. It is dark and full of spiders. It seams neverending. Eventually, after about an hour of walking, they come across another door. The key opens this door as well, and they emerge into the basement of an old house.

It's the biggest, oldest house you could imagine, dark, disturbing, intruiging, abandoned like an old ruined castle full of lurking shadows and dusty smells hiding in the corners of secret rooms without furniture.

"I was wondering how long it would be until you two turned up," a voice behind them surprises them.
"Who ARE you????" asks Julia.
"Nevermind who I am," says the man. "Familiarity will only serve as a distraction." He moves closer. "I have important things to tell you. There are many dimensions other than those which you are experiencing. You can access them through your dreams. Let me show you how..." He holds out his hand. In it are two tablets. They look at him, shocked. "Take them, they will show you the way..."

They take the tablets and swallow them. Within minutes they both collapse to the floor...

The next thing they are aware of, they are talking to God. He doesn't have a human form. He is just this big ball of energy, communicating to them through pure thought. They know what they have to do. They diagonally point their arms towards their own thoughts, cloudy and visualised above them as colourful vapour. They start to get pulled out of themselves in a new direction they didn't know existed. This is not up, down, left, right, forwards, backwards or diagonal versions of any of these. Instead, they travel in a direction which can only be explained as all directions at once but also no directions at once, inwards and outwards at the same time until they are no longer there, but somewhere else entirely, with new scientific laws, new colours, new sounds, new senses, new everything. Or was it old? Where were they anyway? Or did "where" not even exist here? Yes, that's right, they were existing outside of Space-time, in dimensions composed entirely of theoretical concepts.
"I like this new place," Julia would have said, had she been able to speak, but instead the colour yellow emerged from the left elbow of a person she was thinking about.
"I know exactly what you mean," Dave would have said, but his mouth was now an imaginary cow, dancing inwards towards ideas about oil paintings being thrown towards sheep on stilts. They travel (a version of) sideways and land what would be upside-down (but in this dimension it is wobble-wobble-elbow-sausage) on a triangular planet populated entirely by upright, talking cows.
"We are the mib mib mibby cows!" says one of them, and promtly hang-glides towards the theory of evolution.

During this hallucinatory trip, the man strips their helpless bodies of their clothes, and takes photographs of them in unusual positions (often with colourful scarves draped around them), to add to his collection in his Special Room of Collected Things.

The End.

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