Dreams Entangled excerpt from Chapter One Pirin Basamendi rarely made mistakes, but she had this time. Why, she kept asking herself, had she handed over the ohskal, her amatchi’s sacred lightning stone, to someone she’d only just met? It started with Jessica, her childhood candy-shoplifting BFF, the first girl who ever brought her to orgasm, for years the only other lesbian in her orbit, still the smartest person she knew. Pirin trusted Jessica Winter completely, unreservedly, told her (almost) everything. And now Jess trusted Frederika Peng, talked and talked about how Fred was “the real deal, absolutely the one,” about Fred’s quirky sense of humor, Fred’s sexily subtle German accent, Fred’s PhD, Fred’s impressive geochemistry lab, Fred’s even more impressive geochemistry expertise. “And good-looking too,” noted delicately, blondly beautiful Jessica. Not surprising, perhaps, that when Jess brought the good-looking real deal over to have a quick drink before all three of them went to Newburyport for that meet-my-new-girlfriend dinner, Fred immediately spotted the ohskal Pirin had forgotten to put away and marched straight over to it for a closer look. So, okay, no biggie—not until Fred took the ohskal out of its box without even asking. “Well, this is handsome,” she said, one eyebrow cambering as she held the ohskal up to the light. “Star quartz. Exceptionally clear.” Then she turned the handaxe-sized stone to examine its other side. “Oh! An ammonite fossil—in pyrite I’d say, given that dull-brass finish. Superbly preserved spiral. Easy to see all those Fibonacci-sequence details. With the quartz crystals growing off its backside. Where’d you get it? Ever had it tested?” Inhaling slowly, Pirin shut her eyes against the sudden steam of hmmph! encircling her head and stiffened to restrain her temper and her mouth and her hands. Fred failed to see this because that would have required looking at something besides the ohskal. But Jessica noticed. She slid alongside Fred, gently took possession of the stone, picked up the wooden box from which Fred had plucked it, and handed both to Pirin with a plea in her apologetic smile. “Mmm,” Pirin heard herself hum, a useful sound that could mean almost anything, disguise almost anything. My own damn fault, she managed not to say, for leaving Amatchi’s ohskal lying around in an open box where anyone can put their brazen paws all over it—paws that don’t deserve to be warned about the ohskal’s razor-sharp edges. She snugged the stone into its box’s plush cloth folds before walking it over to the cabinet beneath her TV and stowing it out of sight. “No,” she said, “it’s never been tested.” Damn. Too curt. One glimpse at Jess’s face mirrored how thoroughly her irritation had hardened the shadows darkening her own already angular features, the abundant eyebrows furrowing above near-black eyes gone ominous-dead just like always when something pissed her off. She knew it all added up to too much of the truth of her, a truth Jessica had seen often enough—too often maybe. But not Fred. Relent, Basamendi, relent. “We, uh, never played with it or anything, cuz it was my grandmother’s.” Pirin spoke almost softly. “She said it’s come down through many generations. From, she used to say, before the beginning of time as we now conceive it.” “Any idea where that is?” Fred persisted, apparently oblivious of Jessica’s glare. With Jessica’s eyes begging please be nice, please, Pirin inhaled again and smiled, first at Jess, next at Fred as her fingers raked her cropped, near-black hair, an old habit that usually helped soothe her pique. “I asked that once when I was a kid. My grandmother brought me over to our globe, spun it around, pointed at southeast Asia, and said ‘Handik ihes egin genuen’.” Jessica’s eyes widened as she gazed up at Pirin. “Jeez, Pir, I’ve never heard that one before. What’s it mean?” “It means ‘We fled from there’.” “From southeast Asia, before the beginning of time,” murmured Jessica. “I’d sure as hell like to hear that story—” But Fred was still stuck on the ohskal itself. “Star quartz with pyrite isn’t all that unusual,” she declared. “But a pyrite ammonite fossil so well-preserved, that’s not quite so common.” Pirin nodded, even kept on smiling; she wasn’t ready to relay what little she recalled of her amatchi’s tales about who fled what—so sure, let’s babble about the ohskal. “Well, it’ll throw off quite bright colors, depending on the light.” “Really?” Fred glanced over at the ohskal-harboring cabinet. “I’d love to test it, get a look at its molecular structure.” And no worries, Fred assured her—the testing would be “non-destructive—no alterations to the specimen.” Micro-CT scans, nano-CT scans, quick turnaround—just a week or three. Another hum vibrated through Pirin’s chest, the same meld of irritation and distrust. But she quashed it, and not just for Jessica’s sake; she was also tempted. Way. Too. Tempted. She’d been curious about the ohskal for as long as she could remember. Then, when ninety-one-year-old Amatchi handed it to her one quiet evening, kissed her goodnight, and never woke up again, Pirin’s grief flared into a desire to find answers to all the questions she’d neglected to ask. Amatchi hadn’t ever called the ohskal a star quartz, nor described its backside spiral as an ammonite fossil, but the gemologist Pirin showed it to did, then offered to buy it. She declined (the dude babbled way too much about “auras”). Instead she’d wait and hope some answers to her myriad questions might surface in the fullness of time. Four years on, however, those questions lingered, as did Pirin’s sense of nagging disappointment: The ohskal had never shown itself to her as anything but a damn rock. In stark contrast, the damn rock had shown plenty to Amatchi as well as at least some of the grandmothers who preceded her. This ohskal, Amatchi indicated, was special—nothing like the traditional green or gray polished stone long reputed to keep your house safe from lightning if you plunked it narrow-side-up in the ground outside your door. Certainly, Pirin never once saw Amatchi do anything like this with her ohskal. Instead, she scrunched an old steel axe-head into the dirt next to the back stoop alongside a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley, leaving a few inches of the sharp end sticking out. Kinda like a boot-scraper, Pirin always thought. So why, she’d asked, use an axe-head when you have an actual ohskal that, Amatchi had long implied, would be preferable to metal when it came to steering lightning? Because, Amatchi explained, unlike any metal axe-head ever, this ohskal protected the woman whom it claimed, not the woman’s etche—her house. Such a special ohskal manifested old-time “lurbegia”—deep-earth truth: ancient myth and magic that, for Pirin anyway, amounted to little more than corrupted history and wishful thinking contorting each other. For Amatchi, however, “lurbegia” was neither myth nor magic. It offered a means to comprehend fundamental, underlying reality. And if you happened to be Amatchi’s granddaughter, it offered stories, too. Amatchi told and retold the ohskal’s stories in ways so immediate and indelible that Pirin could envision the people in them, even sense the rhythms, if not the specifics, of the long, immensely dangerous journey they endured. Pirin dubbed these yarns Amatchi’s Favorite Fables—not unlike other families’ stories of Santa Claus, she occasionally joked (but never in front of Amatchi): First, in your child-innocence, you believe it all, until you grasp how preposterous it is—yet it remains so appealing that you keep playing along and, if pressed, mumble something about the virtues of metaphor. Of course, Amatchi saw the eye rolls and small frowny headshakes that quite eloquently expressed Pirin’s unspoken skepticism. But she never wavered. “You are a child of your times,” she once told Pirin with amused benevolence. “And your times, too, suffer from the rigid mindsets of fearful people.” The ohskal had always showed her things, Amatchi said. “Egunen batean ulertuko duzu,” she then repeated—one day you will understand. And despite her old-world roots and increasing fragility, Amatchi could not be easily disdained. She was, right to the end, a deeply intelligent, astute, intuitive woman. Farsighted and wise in so many ineffable, unlikely ways that she attributed to her ohskal. Still, when Pirin pushed for details about what the ohskal had communicated and how and when, Amatchi’s responses stretched well beyond scientific reasoning. When Pirin pointed this out, Amatchi merely said “Zientziak bere mugak ditu.” Science has its limits. True enough. This, however, did not prevent Pirin from concluding that the power of the ohskal depended entirely on one’s willingness to believe in the power of the ohskal. Yet… Yet in the four years since taking possession of that same rock, Pirin regularly remembered those sunny afternoons when Amatchi, ensconced in a comfortable chair near the south-facing windows in her room, lifted the ohskal to the sunlight, staring at it almost dreamily while the sun’s rays refracted through its craggy array of hexagonal crystals to cast vivid streaks of colored, occasionally coiled light across the walls and across her face while she nodded and murmured. As if she and the ohskal were in conversation. And then, within days, even hours, Amatchi would say or do something that could only be described as prescient. “How’d you do that?” Pirin once asked. “Does the ohskal tell you more than just old-time stories?” Amatchi smiled and said something cryptic about dreams and insight, concluding with “Argi egokia denean”—when the light is right—before she winked and added “Aldi egokia denean.” When the time is right. Yeah, yeah, but a scabrous, sharp-edged chunk of rock able to protect chosen old women from lightning, show them ancient tales, make them preternaturally intuitive? Before Pirin could embrace any of it, she’d have to see it rationally explained. Plus, of course, whatever was rationally explained would also have to be tested and verified. Not gonna hold my breath, Pirin thought. But, hey, scientists have a lo-o-o-ong way to go before they discover every damn thing everywhere, so Pirin had to acknowledge that maybe Amatchi’s take on the ohskal was not entirely impossible. So what if Jessica’s pushy geochemist could spot something in the ohskal’s see-through hexagons, in its crystals’ helically-arranged atoms and trapped electrons? Something capable of reconciling those mythic links to lightning and “lurbegia” with the empirical world Pirin lived in. Because the ohskal was all she had left of Amatchi, and oh Basandere, how she missed that old woman still… Upon being asked what various scans of the ohskal might reveal, Fred regaled Pirin with incomprehensible jargon which, when translated, came with too many squishy maybes and possiblys that added up to not a whole lot. But, Fred reminded her, this is always how it goes with scientific endeavor. “We talk about ‘hypotheses’ and ‘experiments’ for a reason. We won’t learn anything about your specimen if we don’t look.” Pirin didn’t much like the way Fred kept describing Amatchi’s sacred lightning stone as a “specimen”, but once lubricated by several glasses of wine at the hip new restaurant on Water Street (where Fred happily paid for dinner), she agreed to consider allowing Jessica’s geochemist to examine the damn rock. A few days later, after gazing at “the specimen” for an entire evening in fruitless hope it might somehow offer up a hint about how to proceed, she called Jessica. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll do it. As long as it’s only non-destructive testing, understood?” “Great!” Jessica enthused. “I’m coming up to spend Sunday with my mum, so I can stop at your place Monday morning to pick it up and then give it to Fred as soon as she gets back from Germany.” ❖ When Pirin handed the ohskal to Jessica, she tamped down a thin, sharp trickle of apprehension, repeated the stuff about only non-destructive testing, then drove off to interview a couple of claimants involved in what her colleagues thought was a typically minor, one-off fraud scheme. By day’s end, she’d uncovered a much larger organized scam, juicy enough to attract her boss’s exuberant praise. Not even this, however, alleviated the strange queasiness that had gripped her all day. Nor did working out that evening on her elliptical till her legs trembled. Likely nothing would’ve prevented the nightmare, either—the one about another geochemist who noticed the ohskal in Fred’s lab: Micro-CT scanning and nano-CT scanning just wouldn’t be enough, he insisted. Oh no, we need x-ray diffraction and x-ray fluorescence and nuclear magnetic resonance and optical microscopy and electron microprobe analysis—which meant making thin sections, grinding some of the specimen down to powder. And Fred agreed. “She’ll never know if we’re careful about what we take,” Fred told the other geochemist. “A little here, a little there…” Pirin startled awake sweaty and shivering. Amatchi had always said the ohskal must never be cut up, never be heated, and on Amatchi’s last night on this earth, as Pirin took the ohskal into her hands, she’d promised to always care for the sacred lightning stone, always. “Egunen batean ulertuko duzu,” Amatchi whispered one more time, the last words she ever heard her grandmother speak. One day you will understand. And now—now she had betrayed her promise… “Jess!” Pirin yelled into her phone before she’d even rolled out of bed. “Have you still got it? Please tell me you still got it!” To her credit, Jessica understood. “Change your mind, Basamendi?” “Yes! Do you still have it?” “As it happens, I do. Fred won’t be back till next Monday.” “Esker Amari!” Pirin back-flopped onto her bed, suddenly out of breath. “I remember that one. Means, um, ‘Thanks to the Mothers,’ right?” “Right. Gold star for you, Winter. I want it back. Today.” “Okay.” Jessica didn’t sound surprised. “I left it at the office, but I’ll bring it home tonight. I won’t be returning to the village till Sunday, so if you want it right away, feel free to come by my place after work.” “Yes. Done. When will you get home?” “Let’s say six. And bring wine in lieu of that gold star. I’m gonna need it cuz I’m not even at work yet and I already feel like shit.” |
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Chapter Two Ever since that terrifying Wednesday, Gracie blamed the damn rock—the one she brought home when the office got shut down and everyone was told to work remotely till further notice. Since she wasn’t into rocks, she’d glanced only briefly at the raggedy, lopsided gush of clear crystal spears she’d agreed to look after till her work buddy Jessica could reclaim it. That would have to wait, however: Jessica was stuck in the hospital struggling to breathe. For the record, Gracie had nearly forgotten to take the rock with her. She’d been focused on “the important stuff—my laptop an’ ’specially the silver flash drive in the righthand drawer”. Understandable: In her muddled state just before she collapsed, Jessica had unintentionally obliterated a passel of unsaved document revisions, and somehow the silver flash drive contained the only surviving copies. The “wooden box with the sparkly stone inside” was an afterthought. “No big deal,” Jessica had taken the trouble to explain from the ER between tea-kettle wheezes while Gracie rummaged through the drawer in question. “Just, y’know, it’s not mine an’ I promised…t’ take…extra special….” Gracie doesn’t remember if Jessica ever finished that sentence. But she does remember spotting the little oakwood box and briefly checking inside—yep, a “sparkly stone”—before putting the box in the canvas bag with the rest of Jessica’s hurriedly collected office stuff, and, once home, uploading everything on the flash drive to the Institute’s cloud where Jessica could eventually deal with it. The oakwood box ended up forgotten on the small desk in her bedroom’s gloomiest corner until the next day when, after a morning working at said desk, Gracie took a break, and, noticing the box’s intricately carved decoration (way more interesting than what it held), picked it up before ambling to the overstuffed chair next to her little living room’s only window to enjoy its view of the expansive park across the street. There she nibbled her lunch, pleased to have just learned that at least Jessica was no sicker. Pleased, too, that for the rest of the day, while the Institute finalized various work-from-home protocols, she’d been freed from further online meetings. Freed from inevitably noticing her own insipid onscreen image and wishing that everything about her didn’t look so…beige. As Gracie gazed out her living room window at the park, she was—well, not exactly happy, but at least comfortable. Relaxed. That’s when, out of curiosity, she opened the wooden box again, gingerly lifted the stone to the light streaming in the window, which refracted slightly through those clear crystal spears… It was a beautiful day. Until it wasn’t. In a matter of seconds on that unseasonably warm, seemingly innocent Wednesday, the sun disappeared behind ominous dark clouds and a rush of wind-thunder-rain—lots of it all at once—inundated the park. The scene was biblically cinematic and Gracie was enthralled. Then lightning lit up her world. She watched a single bolt in the roiling sky above the park split into three—a vast, electrified trident plunging down from the blackened heavens. All three of the trident’s tines struck simultaneously. One gouged the middle of the park’s soccer field, another cleaved a mid-sized oak across the street, the third attacked the utility pole thirty feet from her third-floor window—together inciting a single immense BOOM! that shook the ground, the building, the window, and every cell in Grace Gwyllt Olwyn’s body. Shook her right out of the chair, too, maybe out of time itself: From the middle of her living room, she watched mesmerized as a thin spear of ghostly, pale-blue electricity streaked horizontally from the utility pole through the open window to touch the “sparkly stone” she couldn’t remember leaving on the windowsill. This instantly provoked violent pulses of blinding, headache-inducing light that burst into coils of every color imaginable. Maybe she screamed. Her head hurt that much. Just as instantly, the pale-blue thread of lightning withdrew, taking its impossibly intense lightshow with it. Moments later, the storm and her headache evaporated. Moments after that the sun returned. Gracie required a bit longer to shake off enough of her astonishment and fear to grasp that she’d come through unscathed and to risk inching back toward the window. Still perched on the windowsill, the rock appeared entirely normal, just as crystal clear as before. It wasn’t even hot (Gracie touched it—very carefully—to make sure). Outside, a few people had already ventured forth to examine the scorched gash in the park’s soccer field and the scattered debris from the eviscerated oak, while a downed live wire from the stricken utility pole sparked and whipped across the sidewalk and into the street, halting traffic. Just as the police arrived to cordon off the area, Gracie realized the power was out. She also noticed a small frayed hole in her window’s screen where, she assumed, the pale-blue lightning bolt had entered and exited. Also, whenever she closed her eyes for longer than a normal blink, behind her eyelids she saw savagely bright lightwhirls alive with every color she’d ever seen or imagined. A heartbeat later, her head throbbed painfully for a few minutes in cadence with the erupting light. This bizarre effect lasted all day before subsiding with nightfall, and Gracie dared to hope for a quiet, mundane evening, which was exactly what she got. But then everything changed—because of the dream. At least that’s what she believed, and she hasn’t encountered a damn thing since to persuade her otherwise. ❖ Back when she was in college, Gracie often had dreams that were indistinguishable from ordinary waking life. Many mornings, she’d rouse recalling details of conversations she’d later discover had never happened. So she learned to wait for those she dreamed about to offer up a sign that the conversations she thought she’d had were real; at least half the time she’d figure out that no, it really had all been just a dream. This latest just-a-dream, at least, was different. It gave itself away while it was happening, which made it worth writing down afterward:
❖ When Gracie woke up, she remembered none of the woman’s words. Those details were lost to pain just like the lightning headache, this time persisting for about ten minutes before it abruptly ceased. Headache aside, Gracie certainly found the experience intriguing; in her whole life, she’d had only one other lucid dream. Yet she was disappointed, too, since she just couldn’t remember what the woman at the campfire said. No time to dwell on a dream, though. Soon enough, Gracie’s boss’s head would pop onscreen; a mere phone conversation, while “adequate”, just didn’t sufficiently replicate the “invaluable” experience of face-to-face office interactions, especially now that actual face-to-face anything had been indefinitely suspended. So it would have to be screentime—what Gracie thought of (with a wince) as “beigetime.” She already knew what he wanted: “results”—in the form of colorful charts and graphs as cartoonish as she could make them, because “the raw data’s boring as hell and nobody cares about why this crosstab instead of that crosstab.” She’d already run the data through the appropriate scripts and algorithms, even developed the report’s outline—but she was behind on her cartoon production. As she shuffled out of bed with cartoons on the brain, she spotted something scribbled on the pad of paper she always kept on her bedside table. The writing was childlike, primitive:
For just a second, Gracie’s stomach corkscrewed, her breathing halted. A wave of nebulous fear coursed through her. That name—Ansosho Eletun…yes, that was the hooded woman from her dream who stared at her from across the campfire. Also, she recognized her own scrawl, even though it seemed to have been written by her left hand. Yet she was sure she’d slept the night through—so when could she have written down anything…? Oh god, she realized, I won’t be able to control this— She would damn well try though. She peered at those fifty words. They did make some sort of stilted, archaic sense. But what were the Tales of the Mothers? What were the Motherworld’s Resonant Rhythms? After a mercifully quick meeting with her boss, she undertook a futile hour of internet digging using a variety of search engines and search terms related to dreams—and didn’t find a single relevant digital crumb. “What’d you expect?” Gracie grumbled after stomping away from the computer in frustration. “It was just a dream. And hell, dreams aren’t supposed to make sense.” Dreams fade quickly, too, if you let them. By the time she brewed a pot of coffee and ate some granola, she’d moved on. |
