Part II:
Adam Falls

There was a clock on the wall, old and garish. It was a Swiss souvenir, a cuckoo-clock carved in wood. It was gaudy, by and large, and ugly on the outside. Inside it lived a bird.

It whooped its tune at the top of the hour in a flat and mechanical bray.

It made his skin crawl.

Adam's. The boy in the bay-window.

It ticked and tocked and filled the room with brassy bits of time.

Outside in the street, people hurried by, their umbrellas bobbing in decorum and their raincoats long and trim and grey. Clenched to their sides were the drenched affairs of the day printed in smudgy ink and vended in street-corner cafés.

Thunder rumbled somewhere.

It was a minute to five in the afternoon. Soon, the bird of wood would poke its head into this world and egg us on.

Adam waited at his window. He had six minutes to go. He really hated that clock.

In the street, cars rushed by slowly, their headlamps yellow in the gloom, wipers frantic this way and that to keep the rain at bay.

The clock ticked on. Within, in its nest of gears and springs and invisible things of dusty brass, the bird was getting ready to pounce. Adam removed his glasses and everything was a blur. He fogged the lenses individually and meticulously buffed them on the hem of his shirt.

Time ticked by and lo! the bird sprang forth. It startled the boy despite himself. He put his glasses on. They were thick and heavy and clumsy in a very academic way.

The rain was ending.

This was good, he thought in the cuckoo's din.

The door snapped shut and the bird was gone and the quiet was back and the time was a minute past five.

At five past five, Adam Falls would leave. Twenty-four seconds more and he'd cease to exist.

He breathed deeply and sighed himself calm.

Beyond the street lay the other side, a whole new world of places and things he had never even seen.

He thought he would see them today.

His chair was old and ungainly and unappealing but he knew it well. Adam's spindly arms were surprisingly strong. They manoeuvred the contraption with a sense of grace that was out of place in this room with its wooden floor.

And so, at five past five, he wheeled himself down the corridor, through parlour and hall alike and, happily, out the door.

The rain's remains touched his face, the fine and drizzly tail-end of the storm. High above, thunder mumbled empty threats. There was no rainbow in the sky.

Adam was on the veranda.

Rainwater gullies swept candy wrappers and cigarette-ends down drains deep, dark and dank.

A double-decker bus with a busty blonde on its side laboured by. Who is Celestia de Lamour? read the caption.

Just ask Google, thought the boy.

Just ask Google! leered the girl.

Or don't.

The bus passed by and the rain just gave up the ghost. Adam gave the other side one last, longing look. His heart beat faster and excitement was a quiver in his nerves. He saw no people. No-one was going home over there.

The canopy of bobbing umbrellas parted obligingly, making him cruise the sidewalk sheltered only by the piss-rainy roof o' the sky.

A traffic light interrupted. Don't Walk. He stopped.

Don't Walk.

He didn't.

People everywhere were turning a blind eye.

In the end, the light had a change of heart.

The traffic reigned in. It pooled like the great Red Sea. Adam felt like Moses.

Walk.

Soon he was gaining on the other side. A concrete ramp led to the pavement. He mounted it, eyes glued to everything.

The buildings here, the shops and cafés, apartments with tiny verandas and, here and there, roses arched cheerily over mute and wooden doorways, yes, everything was just as he'd thought.

He mounted the sidewalk and realization struck. It took only a nanosecond of his time but it came too late. Already, he could feel his chair tilting precariously to the right.

Styrofoam! The entire place was made of Styrofoam! The trees where no dogs would pee, the pavement cracks-and-all, the buildings and the lamp-posts, letter-slots in front-door entrances securely shut and bolted on the inside.

The place was not for him. He had always known.

The sidewalk creaked and buckled and bent and broke. Adam groped for balance. His right hand came away with nothing. In his left was a rain-drop, a latecomer to the storm.

People on buses were reading or dosing or just sitting there with vacant expressions.

He fell right through the sidewalk. There was no time to scream. His chair disappeared from the reality of here as it fell into the bottomless void below.

Adam couldn't see a thing. The darkness was complete in this place where the world didn't go. The wind was a roar in his ears and a ruffle in his hair and a plucking at his clothes. He had lost his glasses.

He fell and fell and the darkness yielded nothing. He thought of hitting bottom and wished he could pull up his legs.

The wind was quite ferocious. It threatened to rip his shirt off his back and pluck the hair from his scalp. He daren't open his eyes.

So he fell and fell and time rushed by indifferently.

Back in his room, spiders moved in with the wooden cuckoo-bird.

Head-over-heels he fell and heels-over-head again, clutching his raindrop and doing his best.

High above, in the world where he had lived, supersonic planes ripped the fabric of the sky. Ruins bloomed like smouldering wounds in the intricate grid of derelict streets where scavenger dogs were want to be found.

The wind roared and tore at his ears and his clothes and his hair and he wished he could wish it away.

'And so you can.’

'What?’ The wind plucked the word from his mouth and smashed it in the face of nothing at all. There was a voice in the dark and it spoke in his head.

'You seem surprised,’ it said. Mountain ranges rose and fell on strange and undiscovered worlds. Galaxies hatched and stretched and spiralled forth lazily like cobwebs on a cosmic mantelpiece somewhere.

'Well,’ said Adam. 'I am a little incredulous.’ Pulsars pulsed and quasars quased and black holes bent their light. 'I'm losing my mind here, aren't I?’ Back home, scientist-priests with austere expressions and tremendous amounts of knowledge were cultivating genetically-authentic wheat and sweet potatoes in convoluted hydroponic media.

The Voice smiled. Adam wasn't sure how he knew this and neither am I.

'No, you haven't lost your mind. Only your world and the rest of the whole, entire universe.’

'Whatever should I do?’ Adam's words were mute in the terrible din of the wind. 'I can't reach my wheelchair and I seem to have lost my glasses. And this wind! An insufferable thing!’

'Oh, just wish it away,’ sighed the Voice.

'Wish ..?’

'Yes, it smiled. 'Just wish it away.’ So Adam did. The silence that followed was deep and complete and absolutely everywhere. It struck him a physical blow. It caught him off guard and he gasped his lungs full of nothing at all.

'Wow.’ The word was like thunder in the silence. His hair went limp in the still. His clothes calmed down. Nearby, his wheelchair tumbled on. It seemed unimpressed by Adam's feat.

'There,’ said the Voice. 'Is that better?

'Are you my oversoul?’ The silence was sublime.

Aeons passed like moments full of red giants and white dwarfs and black holes brimming with invisible light.

'That I am,’ said the Voice.

Adam fell through abandoned karmic cycles just hanging there like rusty roller-coaster rails etched by a rain-grim sky. There was nothing left in them but prophesies long-since fulfilled, the ghosts of things sowed, the spectres of things reaped.

He sensed the echoes of lives lived and lived again, of cosmic dramas and tragedies far too terrible for words.

They were like after-images on the retina of time. They were tainted with blood and the unspeakable torment of the Human Experience in general.

Yes, one waxes lyrical.

'Are you God?’

'Me?’ said the Voice. 'No.’ It was smiling again. Perhaps it was just being modest, Adam thought.

'Then it's no use,’ he said. He was disappointed. He needed divine intervention. He wanted to stop falling. He longed for the feel of solid sidewalks under his wheels.

'No, it isn't,’ the Voice agreed. 'I can't give you back the world. I can't create you a new one either. Alas Adam, those I can't.’

'Then,' if you'll pardon my asking ' what can you do?’

'Well, let's see, said the voice. 'I could keep you company. But I've been doing that all along, haven't I?

'I really wouldn't know.

'And I could hand you your glasses so you could see the darkness more clearly. Or I could play you a ditty on my fiddle. I could do you any number of favours, come to think.

'I could be your Most Peculiar Man.’

'You're not making sense, now, Adam interjected.

'No, I aren't, am I? conceded the voice in the dark.

The wheelchair turned and tumbled quietly through the void. So did Adam's glasses, apparently, but he couldn't see them. In his left hand were the damp remains of his rain-drop.

'I could give you a photo-opportunity, the Voice prattled. 'Or a shot at redemption. I could call you Betty and be your longest, most hopelessly-lost pal.

'And what do I do? said Adam. 'Hang out here and call you El?

'That'd be nice, said the Voice. 'But useless wouldn't ye think?

'Then what?’

'Remember the wind, Adam? Remember how you wished it away?’

'Yes? That had been only epochs ago, just a sliver of time in the greater scheme of things. Everything was so relative out here between distant alpha and bitter omega. 'Go on.

'Well, wish on, said the Voice.

'What? Adam was flummoxed again.

'Be my guest!

'You mean I should just wish it all back? Don't you know how many times I've tried doing that?

'But you've been going about it the wrong way, Adam.’

'Will you show me the right way then?’

'Of course I will, said the Voice.’

'To get back to the world?’

'Sure.’

'But you said you couldn't do that just a millennium ago.’

'Yes, I did, the Voice agreed. 'And no, I can't. You can though. After all, it is your world, isn't it?’

'So I get to create my own reality?’

'Don't we all?’

'A world,’ Adam marvelled, 'all of my own making? One with blue skies and fluffy-white cumulus and thunderheads over wheat fields broad and undulating? A complex biosphere slowly dying at the destructive hand of post-industrial man?’

The Voice just laughed. 'It's not so simple, Adam!’

'It's not?’

'No,’ it said. 'You're not just going to imagine it all. You're going to focus your consciousness. It will be your tool. You'll be making choices consciously, untold scores of them, and your consciousness will manifest them.’

Adam found it all very interesting but he could think of nothing to say.

'Adam?’ For the first time, the Voice sounded solemn. Grave, even. 'Do you understand?’

'Where do I start?’ said Adam. Now he was the one smiling in the dark.

'With a choice of course.’

'What kind?’ Again, Adam could feel the thrill of excitement quiver in his nerves. It was like the time in his room, just minutes before the bird would blurt the hour and fleeting centuries before the whole of the place would be obliterated by bombs built and funded by democratic governments the world-over.

'This will sound strange to you, said the voice of his oversoul, 'but there are a number of morphic inferences that you must choose from.’

'What are those?’

'Inferences? It's technical. It's like Paint by Numbers, only so much more.’

'Are they like possible destinies?’

'Yes, if you like,’ said the Voice. 'Well, more like parallel universes, really. So, on the other hand, they're not just destinies. They're more like scenarios dictated by your karmic debt. They're based on your needs as you grow to sentiency.’

'Will you help me, El?’ The name just slipped out. Adam didn't fancy Betty at all.

'No,’ said the Voice.

'But you're my oversoul!’

'That I am, Adam, but the choice is entirely yours. In fact,’ the Voice assumed a rather pedantic tone: 'You've chosen already.’

'I have?’ Adam didn't follow. 'I don't follow,’ he said. He thought the Voice excessively dramatic.

'It's like this,’ it said, the voice. 'You're Adam Falls, the boy in the bay-window. As a person, you're unique. You naturally resonate to certain ...’ It groped for a word. 'You synchronize with certain frequencies. The choice you'll be making is already encoded within you. You choose simply by being.

'But you must be honest. You must follow your heart. When you see the options before you, you will know instinctively which to choose. Only you can know. It is your heart.’

'All right.’ Adam spoke uncertainly. It felt like signing a contract full of pitfalls concealed with phrases of Latin. 'Then let's do it. If that's okay.’

'Yes, it's okay.’ The Voice was smiling again. 'Now listen carefully. We have three morphic inferences. Inference Green, Inference Red and Inference Blue. Speak the one of your choice, but take your time, let your heart decide. And so be honest.

'Do you follow, Adam?’

Now he did.

'There's one more thing,’ said the voice in the dark.

'Yes? said the boy.

'It's greed. Whatever you do, do not be greedy. Choose one inference only. Green, Red or Blue. Understand?

Understood.

* * *

Part III
Morphic Inference Blue


Hear now if ye will the telling of Danann,
remembered not by mind of man
or ancient script or record in the stars,
nurtured not by temple ruin or holy men
or sacred place
with enigmatic faces carved in stone.


'Yeah?’ said Adam. He squinted over a corn-ear to see as his toe drew an S in the sand. Or what he thought of as an S. 'This is not an epiphany, David, this is a mental revolution, a break-free into the outer limits.’ He closed his eyes and ploughed his teeth through the corn, freckles everywhere, some of them hiding in wayward strands of hair all waxy. 'Wherever they are. You know?

'I know,’ said David. He stood by the old wagon-wheel, his good hand in his pocket and the other small and deformed and quite useless as it dangled down his chest.

Over by the Richards' place old Mrs Kantelknoop was calling to her chickens. She let them roost in her closet. They knew her accent.

'You're right. And I've been thinking. Don't you think this is where nanotechnology is taking us?

The wheel was large and neglected and it came from a long-gone age. Engraved in the rough-hewn smithy-iron of its rim were the rhyming lines of an old and haunting poem half lost to time.


Remembered be Tuatha de Danann
by ancient hill alone,
deep in slumber in the lap of time
as time itself swirls slowly by
in streams that run and ebb and flow
through dreams of children not yet known.


David knew it off by heart. Everybody did.

'Now there's a thought,’ said Adam, bits of corn flying yellowly everywhere. He was no tidy eater and this pleased Jacques-Pierre de la Vivienne la Rouge. He lay at Adam's feet, his long and greying snout between his paws.

'Yes, said David as he shook himself by the hand, the large and healthy right and the insipid left in a loose and mindful grip. 'Yes, brilliant, Adam. Brilliant. It's the stuff guys like Tesla were alluding to.’

'You know, I often wonder,’ said Adam. His toe drew two parallel lines down the centre of the S. It was meant to be a symbol, I think. 'Speaking of these outer-limit things, metaphysics, what if music were the …'

'The food of life?’ David's smile was wholesome and handsome and broad and honest and just beautiful. It was a beaming kind of smile, rich with health and humour and spark of youth.

'No,’ said Adam. He was searching for a word here, a very particular word. 'How's platform? he tried. 'Or interface? Music. Could it be some sort of crossing point, David?’ The corn lay forgotten in his hand.

'You know,’ he said, 'like the upper part of the lower of two vertically-spaced converging objects also ultimately forms the lower regions of the upper object? Only, like two-dimensionally? Like this?’ He held the corn and his upturned hand roughly horizontally to indicate two objects approaching one-another in a vertical fashion.

'You mean horizontally?’ said David. He'd let go of his left hand now. His right was back in its pocket where he kept the lucky-charm microchip. He'd found it down on the dump a few days before and ever since then he'd been feeling untowardly propitious to make the very least of it.

'No, vertically,’ said Adam, 'in terms of their relative positioning. The objects themselves, of course, are horizontal, but they're more than that – they're three-dimensional, so that would make them vertical too.’

'Ah, yes,’ said David. 'I see. Like two two-dimensional circles converging to make a figure-of-eight until their Vesica Pisces consumes both circles and, ultimately, only one new circle remains?’

'Yes, exactly,’ said Adam. The booger he was pulling from his nose at that time was a phenomenal thing. 'But it's all about the first instant of overlap, that precise moment when the initial, infinitely-small intersection occurs.'

'Yes, yes, I understand,’ said David and slumped against the wheel. Some of its spokes were still painted an ancient hue of red. On its rim the words of the poem marched on:


To this day they live, these wise ones of Danann,
by grassy mound inside of which
the Stone of Kings and other things
of great antiquity are found.
Sacred sword that cuts the soul
and hallowed gourd that once the Blood of Man did hold.


Personally, David could never understand why the First Folk left behind this particular wheel. It would have been so much simpler just to engrave the poem on a stone or such.


They came to Eire from the sky, the ancient De Danann,
their names the names within the stone,
the stone itself, some say, the stone where Jacob lay
and dreamt his dream of wrestling gods and angels
beaming light.
They came to Eire from the sky and here their children
grew
and travelled far and shared the wondrous things they
knew.


'I wonder,’ David wondered. 'Like an interface between spheres you say?’

'Yeah,’ said Adam and wiped his finger. He gave the corn a last, disinterested look and dropped it for Jacques. 'Say, who was the violinist anyway?’

'An interface between dimensions – music! Ah, that's great, Adam!’ Again his hands were at each other, shaking away madly. His arms, such as they were, crossed over his chest.

Adam had found a bit of straw and was probing between his teeth for wayward kernels – those stubborn little bastards you only got from corn, the ones that even stuck to your palate just not to be swallowed. Amazing, the tenacity they have.

'Was he the one over from Henckelding? The one with the uncontrollable cough?’

'The one – who?’ said David.

'The fiddler,’ said Adam.

'No, he came from Snooper Heyns'. Had the most peculiar disposition as I recall.’

'Pale-looking one,’ Adam remembered and wiped his nose. 'Hat and tails.’

'Yeah, I still swear he kept the rat in his topper.’ Above David, high above, the hues of dusk were brilliantly absorbed into the misty and turbulent fibre of great and ancient Cumulus – golds and purples and hues of red, rich and warm and thick, swells of glowing grey and ivory-white full of light – shifting, changing. Evening was here and it was beautiful.

'Then how come he was accused of hiding the three-sided penny huh, David?’ David lightly fondled the microchip. He liked the feel of it, deep-down in the recess of his right pocket.

He had no idea what manner of things resided in his left. Once, he had persuaded the fire-eating lady at the faire to take a peek for him, but she never could see much after her accident.

'The story of the three-sided penny,’ said David with indignation, 'is that, dear Adam, the artefact needed a place to be kept. And later, of course, to be hidden lest it be coveted.

'We covet,' said this David, 'because we fear. We think as animals and we fear as animals. We think of physical preservation here, in this physical world. We see with physical eyes and we see not. We sleep. Maybe to dream. And then, in the end, we quote the bard.’

By now, Adam was sitting on his hind with his feet in the road. Beside him lay Jacques-Pierre de la Vivienne la Rouge. His whiskers were turning grey. His eye-balls jumped, Adam saw, as dreams tickled them in the ribs. He could see fleas scurrying to and fro. Tiny and busy little buggers on a mission entirely of their own.

Maybe Adam had ADD.

'What's all this to do with Littlewilly Rancid?’ Adam squinted at David. He still had corn in his teeth. 'C'mon, David, he couldn't be accused of hiding the penny and the rat in his top-hat! Not while we were watching those miserable circuis elephants on their large and rusty stools! No way!’

'Oh right you are,’ David laughed. He threw up his miniature and mishappen hand in a stunted gesture of eureka. The other remained in its pocket. 'Rancid was indeed not accused of both, he said. 'He was accused of only one of these things. At a time.’


Among the maidens of Dannan was born to Eth and Luthian
the fairest one whose beauty and whose charm
like shining light of angel face this world and Heaven did embrace:
Idres of the trav'ling race Tuatha de Dannan,
who in their wondrous wagons went
throughout the land to bring the truth of gods to men.

With crystal orb and magic spell these seers of Dannan
their tales did tell to those who dwelt the Isles
since days of yore
when war was planted in their minds
and mind reduced to little more than garish pit of savag'ry.
Uprooted lay the Tree of Sanity.


* * *



Part III
Morphic Inference Green


Once from the sky did Adman fly to see the wonders of Dannan:
Those ancient hills, the grassy mounds inside of which
the Stone of Kings and other things of pure antiquity were found.
By light of dawn the fields he strolled
and lo! he saw
the beauty that from Eth and Luthian was born.


Adam was astonished. The story of Littlewilly Rancid seemed to shift and change at will.

It goes back – oh, I couldn't figure the years.

'I don't get it,’ he said at length. David was a silhouette back-lit by glowing oranges and yellows and rusty gold as his line of sight with the sun was snuffed out by planetary curvature.

Darkness bloomed and stepped forth, her evening-gown bespangled in a galaxy's worth of stars. Her hair was wildly besotted with the kink it got as it blew and tumbled on the sigh and the soar of the solar wind.

'Me either,’ said David and checked his cheek for beard. 'What's more, Rancid's the one who jammed the portcullis.’

'Oh, you don't say,’ said Adam. His voice shook.

On the whitewash of the wall where he stood were stencilled the known half of the Half-known Poem:


And so the tale of Adman-Ra and Idres of Dannan:
He a god from high above and she the daughter of a man.
Adman rode the sun and ruled the night by light of moon
while Idres in her secret room did wait for pain of birth
and flood of life as life's blood flowed.
In dark exchange her life she gave for life to god-child she did owe.


'The one at the escape way? The portcullis?’ David’s face was bathed in the light of a brand-new moon.

For it was rising there, on the brink of the east, like Osiris-of-the-Skies. Like Isis of old, lifting her veil and blowing the night her very last kiss, silver and fragile and bitterly, bitterly cold.

The night revelled in it.

'Yeah,’ said David. ‘The one they knew of on the Other Side. Really, Adam.’

'Littlewilly Rancid.’ On the movie-screen of Adam's mind flickered a memory faded to sepia by age and deliberate neglect. By avoidance.

It was the memory of how he had come to meet the fiddler from Snooper Heyns' place.

It had happened in Uncle Francis' study at the summer holidays of 1968. We were children then and England English still. Uncle wasn't home and we were snooping about his study.

It was risky. We were trespassing and we knew it. In fact, we savoured every moment as we crept in and tasted the scent of maple on the air. Maple and danger. We loved the scent of danger in those days. We loved the idea of not getting caught by the skin of our teeth.

I was the first to start reading.

'Littlewilly Rancid,' read the first words of the first line on the first page of Uncle Francis' third manuscript, 'was a very peculiar man.'

What an extraordinary opening to a perfectly preposterous parody, I thought.

My eyes were drawn inexorably to the next paragraph and I let them go.

'A clever one, undoubtedly, cunning in a shifty, wily way very few of us ever really understood. He was, not to be brazen, a fox of a thing. His repute every bit as ill as his disposition.'

Some of the others – George and Dick, I think – were peeking over my shoulder for a glimpse of Uncle's words:

'He was a tall one, lanky-rather-than-lean. His overcoat as shabby as the wing of a rain-wet bat. And as shaggy as the hair on a very hairy hound.

'His shoulders slumped with the weight of Littlewilly's fiddle. It slept in the box he carried in a back-pack – psychedelic stickers and neon-coloured Peace-signs pasted to its sides.

'Now it was a particularly chilly morning in Westbrook County when the endless meander of Rancid's life brought him to that most inauspicious acquaintance with young Master Adam.' Uncle Francis had no problem with extra-long sentences, we saw.

'He was the miller's son from downstream Abernethy-way, this Adam. Related in law to the Genderlings up the valley, it was said, they of the freckles and the red, red hair. Sheepish green eyes.

'He had come to town to see a man about a horse. His father's mill-mule had collapsed and this time by George they were going to get themselves the feistiest and ballsiest steed in town.

'In those days, of course, Abelgengle only had the one horse. It was a one-horse town and the horse was a mare. Adam did the deal.

'Mare or no mare by George.

'Besides, to Adam's thinking, she had to be at least the ballsiest mare in all of town, even if only on account of being the one and only. It was all really rather relative and Adam grinned contentedly as he led his girl-horse home.

'Back in town the Finnish ironsmith with the preposterous name happily re-counted his coins. In the smithy, the furnace was roaring and the iron was calling and already his palms were itching for the hammer's hold. The sweat on his face was cooling as Adam lead away the mare with the limp to the left and the sore fore knee.'

By now, my heart was racing. Uncle Francis was writing our story! Dick's and mine! He was telling of how we ended up by the old wagon wheel with Jacques-Pierre de la Vivienne la Rouge panting happily at our feet.

A slut on a second-floor someplace sang an area from La Traviata and we just stood there with no place to go and no place to come from either. Just us and the dog.

He never did much care for corn, did that old hound. But me? I must've put away an ear a day for a couple of weeks a year.

There was graffiti on a wall:


On greenest isle on misty day was born fair Eva de Dannan,
her father Adman in the sky,
her mother's spirit in the sun.
Among the creatures of the wild
to womanhood she grew.
She knew the lore of all the land as Wicca women do.

For womanhood to her did come, this waifish daughter of Dannan.
And on her Day, her sixteenth Day,
did speak her father from above;
The sun, they say, did ne'er shine and neither moon nor star.
From far a voice like thunder rolled and filled the world
with mighty roar as spake the godly Adman-Ra:


Sneaky Uncle was on about the day the fiddler had come to town, the one whose name I never really could recall. He who, in the end, had hidden the Three-sided Ducat and come back at once to steal the magician's rat.

Who Littlewilly Rancid really was was anybody's guess. He was an enigma we all loved to misunderstand. He was the De Dannans' mystic man. The gypsies who came along once in a while. With them, he had travelled all of Tuscany back in the 1930s. They had made a living together. They made it by playing the fiddle and telling people their hearts.

Just days after they parted, the world had a seizure and the soldiers came. They took Mother Eba and Grampa Onkel and their clan.

Rancid never saw them again. But they did haunt his dreams. Their laughter haunted him most. Their laughter had been beautiful. Their hearts had been in that laughter they’d had.

They had been the ones, the gypsies De Dannan, who taught Littlewilly Rancid the Unread Riddle when he was only sixteen.

So many years later he would bring it to Ablegengle and who knows what?


'Oh, daughter of the gods and Thuatha de Dannan,
thou liv'st among the animals as not a goddess nor as man!
The lore of all the land ye know but hence to know the truth:
The choice be thine to live as man or god divine
but mark these words forsooth as man
undying youth and cleverness be thine.

'And hark ye well, young Eva of Dannan,
yea, heed the voice of truth: Thy wisdom as a goddess
likens prudence craved by man
to awkwardness of youth.'
Thus thundered Adman-Ra to Eva on the moor.
Her intellect was human, her judgment also poor.



* * *


Part IV
Eve's Terrible Mistake


'The Fall of Eve'

She boldly looked up to the sky, the Wiccan of Dannan,
and spake the anger in her heart:

'Old man Adman-Ra for whom my mother had to die,
thou speakst to me of choice whilst without choice does Idres lie
beneath this sky where no light shines upon the earth.
Hark ye well these words of mine for words they are of oath!'

So spake Eva de Dannan as all the worlds did wait.
Words of fury were her words which soon would seal her fate:

'It was Idres of the Isles you craved, her daughter you did sire,
in wind and rain does lie her grave, her tombstone be desire!
Aye hark ye well these words for words they are of oath '
yea on this day I swear to thee that I shall have them both!'

The wrath of Adman-Ra did earn young Eva of Dannan;
she spake the anger of her youth, the cunning of her clan.

The world they say did shake that day and hills and tombstones fell.
The fury in the skies above was worse than tales can tell.

'Thy words be words of ignorance and arrogance and greed!
Thy place be neither earth nor sky but depth of hell indeed!'

Upon her Day, her sixteenth Day, was cast bold Eva de Dannan
into the void where lived no god nor ever dwelt a man.

In darkness did the ages pass as time swirled slowly by
in streams that ebbed and flowed and twirled
through dreams of children of another world.
And all the while she mourned her Eire that from emptiness was born.



* * *

Part V
Adam's Unbearable Sacrifice

It was a magnificent clock. An antique imported from Belgium in the childhood days of a century long since dead and gone. Solid mahogany everywhere, inlays of ivory and intricately-crafted copper, a face like a halo of Roman numerals.

Its pendulum moved with quiet decorum and infallible, unwavering precision.

It was a grandfather clock and nothing lived inside.

Adam really loved it.

He adored the way its hands moved inexorably onward, forever into the future, always dragging the present along and making it wilt into the past.

He was sitting at his window, Adam, looking at the street outside. It was a beautiful day. It was late autumn and the sky had a rusty tinge to its usual depth of blue. Evening was here and it was lovely.

Outside, in the street, cabs and delivery vehicles had pictures of assorted consumables on their sides. They drove by orderly. Pedestrians draped prim and often expensive raincoats over their arms. Some used their umbrellas as walking sticks.

On either side of his window pane, ornate in stained glass and intricate inlays of lead, was the image of a tall and rather slender tree. Serpents coiled about their trunks, slickness of scale and flick of tongue clear in the glow of the evening sun.

It was ten to five in the afternoon.

In his lap lay a book. An anthology of poems. He had wanted to read it for the longest time.

He crossed his legs and opened the book at will. The pages were old and grainy and quite thick, like parchment.

A full-page colour plate caught his eye, a Renaissance study of a woman on a dark and ugly moor. Her hair tumbled abundantly over swell of breast and pride of back. Her frame, slender and striking and milky-white, wore a robe of deep, sapphire blue.

The Tempting of Eve, read the caption in Courier New.

Her brow was turned with impudence to the sky, dark and heavy with cloud. Something was afoot up there.

She showed no fear, he saw. Only rage and defiance.

Just below the ceiling high above, Adam's bay-window formed a wide and gentle arch. In it were more pictures in the glass. At their centre, entangled in leafy growth of ornamental vine, was an apple so red it looked like a drop of blood.

'Eve as Venus,' pondered Adam. Extraordinary. Clearly Bohemian.

The girl held a lamb in the crook of her arm and threatened the angry sky with a gnarled and wicked-looking staff.

Adam thought of Moses.

The clock ticked on.

An angel of glass wielded a sword in one of its beatific hands.

The picture in the book came with a poem. It marched on in meticulous lines full of subtle rhythm and hidden rhyme. Its title, Adam saw, was The Fall of Eve.

At eight minutes before the hour of five, he started to read.

The clock ticked on inexorably. The traffic flowed endlessly. Pedestrians carried their raincoats home. Somewhere, in a third-world country where banana trees grew, someone was selling a child.

And on he read. His mind embraced the reality of the woman on the moor, the one with the sheep and the crooked staff and the long and slender neck.

She was Eve and she was faced with choice. Adam really related to that.

The picture was very dramatic. What it did not show, though, was Eve's greed.

The poem, on the other hand, was quite candid: 'Aye hark ye well these words for words they are of oath, yea on this day I swear to thee that I shall have them both!'

'Oh no! moaned Adam. 'No, not greed!

He wished he could intervene. He wished he could appear beside the girl in the painting and make things right. 'Choose honourably,’ he urged. 'Not with greed!’

But the lines on the page marched on resolutely.

The serpents in the pane were eerily real in the light of the evening sun. The angel brandished its sword menacingly. The apple glowed red.

Greed seized the day. God's wrath was great. The world shook.

The sky was torn asunder and, at five to five precisely, Eve was cast forever into the void.

Adam sat up straight in his wingback chair. His heart raced. So did his breath. His palms were clammy. At once, he longed for his oversoul, for its comforting voice in the dark. Surely someone would help the girl on the moor!

Outside, beyond the street, lay the other side where he didn't belong.

She would fall and fall and fall forever, he knew. She would cease to exist yet exist always.

Oh why must people be greedy? he thought. Why are they so voracious? The world is a place of gluttony. Desire and avarice. Covetousness, acquisitiveness, indulgence

Adam beseeched the stained-glass images. The apple was ripe and red and ready to be picked. The angel brandished its blade.

Eve's choice had been self-gratifying and dissolute. She had obeyed her own sense of excess, her rapacity, her own lusty immoderation.

For this she was cast into the void and humanity doomed to live in a world of miserliness and licentiousness and intemperance and hedonism. Cupidity. Parsimoniousness and Frugality

He looked beyond the traffic passing by his window. On the other side, the hole in the Styrofoam still gaped at autumn's evening sky.

Abruptly, at a minute to five, it occurred to him. He would save Eve. He, Adam Falls, the boy in the bay-window.

He who had chosen without greed and honoured his word.

The thought of hurling himself down the hole in the pavement terrified him.

Eternity was a very, very long time. He knew this. It was such a long time it couldn't be measured in terms of time at all. Eternity, he thought, existed outside of time altogether. It was a universe unto its own.

It was hell, Adam knew. And he knew he must endure it again. This time, without choice. He must save Eve from her own greed and ignorance.

At five-o'-clock exactly, Adam would leave. By ten past, he would have vanished from the face of the earth once more.

His legs shook with terror as they walked him to the door. Perspiration beaded on his brow and smeared his palms. He took his jacket from its hook and put it on.

From deep inside the grandfather clock came the familiar whirring as it prepared to strike the hour. Time was upon him. He must leave.

'You haven't finished the poem, Adam.’

'Oversoul?’ He halted mid-step. He was overjoyed.

The clock chimed. Its music was round and refined and dignified and quite dramatic. It was warm in a profound sort of way.

'It is I,’ said the Voice in the din.

'Have you come to help me? Will you help Eve?’

'No. And no,’ it said. 'I am here to remind you of the poem's ending. You must read it.’

'I have no time, said Adam. 'I must –’

'No,’ said the Voice. It spoke earnestly inside Adam's head. 'Take a minute. Read the last verse. Eve is safe.’

'I don't have a minute,’ Adam insisted. Late-afternoon sunlight touched the stained glass and sprinkled bits of colour everywhere.

The clock fell silent. The hour had come. Adam really didn't have a minute to spare.

'Did you help her?’ he asked.

'No.’

'Then who? Her own oversoul?’

'I am her oversoul.’

'What happened El?’ Adam was exasperated. 'Did God have mercy?’

'He helps those who help themselves.’

'I must go now. You're wasting my time.’

'Eve helped herself, Adam,’ said his oversoul. 'Her wisdom is far greater than anyone thought.’

'Did she discover the morphic inferences then? Did she choose properly this time?’

'No. She simply realized that the void was the birthplace of the All. It is from the darkness and the emptiness and ignorance of the abyss that are born every world and reality and universe and star.’

Adam recognized the truth in that. For what was order without chaos? Life without death? Where was black without white? For a moment, his head spun with the yin and the yang of everything.

'She is one with the void, Adam, as are we all. Eve is the Cosmic Mother. She is the cosmos.’

'I must leave,’ Adam said at length. 'Will you come with me? Will you help me once more? Fear shouldered aside Yin and Yang alike. 'Please, Oversoul?’

'She really is the Cosmic Mother, you know.’

'All I know is that greed lives out there.’ He indicated the world beyond the window, so colourful with its serpents and its trees and apples and angels armed to the teeth. 'I know that people are dishonourable and that no good can ever come from dishonour’ He leaned against the doorframe as he spoke. His legs were lame with fear. 'You know and so do I that no good will ever come from dishonour.’

'You don't have to do this,’ said the Voice.

'If you are right –’

'Of course I am.’

'Then I shall be safe too.’ The Voice said nothing.

The clock ticked on. Soon it would be six minutes past five. Adam must hurry.

'Goodbye, Oversoul,’ he said at length.

'Goodbye, Adam,’ said his oversoul.


Thus she lived within the void, this daughter of Adman;
her father was a deity, her mother De Dannan.
Until she saw within the void the Universal Womb,
she recognised with clarity Mother Nature's loom.
For what was Eire or the sky without the void below?
The cradle its existence to the silent tomb did owe.

In deepest dark of blackest night,
from weakest spark burns brightest light:
In Eden which the void became lives Eva to this very day,
her children worlds and stars where mankind's children play.
Her face a thing of beauty yet as down she kneels to pray,
for the people of the greenest hills she never did forsake.


Ends.

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