Diamond Sky (Diamond Sky Trilogy Book 1) (15 page)

The insult seemed to hang in the air.
Emmy
had had enough. She stood up and turned around to tell this ape what she
thought of him.

He was sipping from a pint and as she prepared herself to
speak, he spat a mouthful of beer onto her face. The shock hit her first. It
hit her hard and it penetrated deep. Then she experienced disgust. The beer was
sticky, pungent and had come from the dirty, possibly disease riddled mouth of
a complete scumbag. Lastly, she felt humiliated.

Behind the troll, his friends laughed with savage delight.
The liquid stung her eyes and as she rubbed it clear, she became aware that
more and more people were looking at her. None offered to help. She was a young
woman, just twenty two years old, who had been assaulted by an older man in a
bar and not one person offered her assistance. They all just stared with the
same judgemental look on their faces, as if
Emmy
had
brought this on herself. This was even worse than before. All that she could do
was to flee. She knocked over a chair as she ran and with it laughter erupted
all around her.

When she got outside, she carried on running until she got
to the bottom of the street and then fell to her knees in a fit of tears. She
did not attempt to hold them back. They were not only a release for her inner
pain, but also helped to cleanse her face of the vileness that stained it.

‘
Emmy
, I am so sorry.’

She did not need to look up to know that it was Charlie. He
had followed her out of the pub. Whether or not he saw what happened did not
matter. If he tried to stand up to those men he would only have received a
beating anyway. There was nothing that he could have done for her then and
nothing that he could do for her now.

‘It’s not your fault,’ she told him. ‘You were only trying
to help me. I knew this would happen, yet I came anyway. I brought it on
myself.’

‘You know that isn’t true. You have done nothing wrong.
We’ll go to Lucas and he can sort those goons out.’

‘No; that will only make things worse. These people cannot
be changed; don’t you see that? If we involve Lucas, it will only make it
harder for us both.’

‘So you are going to let them get away with this?’

She stood up and wiped the tears from her eyes. Her knees
were covered in dust and she could still smell the putrid mixture of beer and
saliva on her face. She felt dirty and shameful.

‘The people of this town belong in the dark ages,’ she said.
‘And the dark ages is exactly where I intend to send them.’

***

Lucy came back from the toilets to find her table empty.
She looked around for
Emmy
, but her new acquaintance
was nowhere to be seen. She also noticed that the Chinese guy whom
Emmy
had earlier sat with was also absent. Mindy was close
by, apparently dealing with some troublemakers, although Lucy had not noticed
the men being rowdy.

‘Hi Mindy,’ she said, interrupting the landlady from giving
what appeared to be some sort of lecture. ‘You didn’t happen to see where that
girl I was with went,
did
you? She works at the
observatory.’

Mindy shot one of the men a harsh glance, before replying to
Lucy.

‘She left just a short while ago, dear. Her grandfather is
very old and she often gets called away to look after him at short notice. If
she comes back, I will be sure to tell her you asked after her.’

Lucy could not help but feel that something was a little
off. She enjoyed making a new friend and was disappointed she had not gotten to
spend more time with her. The encounter did, however, give her an idea.
Emmy
worked at the observatory, which obviously meant this
area was a good place for studying the night sky. Following the trouble with
her car she had forgotten what brought her to the outback in the first place;
the stars.

She went up to her room and grabbed her rucksack, into which
she placed her father’s urn, a pair of binoculars and some snacks. It was a
clear night and there was no moon. The conditions could not be any more
perfect. All of the constellations would be visible. It was time for Lucy to
revisit some childhood friends.

Chapter 15

Upon her return to the observatory,
Emmy
was a bushfire of emotion. Her earlier humiliation had turned into anger. It
was not a blind rage that she felt, but a much sharper, focused type of wrath.
Her mind was set on an idea and nothing would dissuade her from that goal.

‘Do you think that now is the best time for this?’ asked
Charlie. ‘Won’t you at least sleep on it?’

‘You don’t have to help me,’ she told him. ‘I am more than
capable of operating the machine by myself.’

‘You know I cannot let you do that. There is always a chance
you will not find your way back by yourself. If you insist on doing this, I
have no choice but to help you.’

She turned to face him.

‘We all have a choice. Those pigs had the choice to leave me
alone, but they ignored it. Now it is payback time.’

‘
Emmy
, will you just stop and
think about what you are doing. One guy insulted you and you are talking about
blacking out an entire town. Do you not think you are overreacting?’

‘No, I don’t think I’m overreacting. Besides, who knows what
will happen. All I am doing is putting a hypothesis to the test.’

When she reached the laboratory, she left the main lights
off and only turned on the desk lamps. She did not want the soldiers or her
grandfather to know she was working late.

The air retained a faint odour of vomit, but compared to
what she had endured just recently, this no longer bothered her. She did not
attach any of the life support monitors and climbed straight onto the slab.
Charlie took up his usual position at the monitoring station.

‘Give me full power,’
Emmy
called
out.

‘Are you crazy?’ replied Charlie. ‘You’re only going as far
as the town. That would take less than point one of a percent of that power to
get you there. You cannot control that level of input; you will overshoot the
town by light years.’

‘You underestimate how far I have come along since those
early experiments. It’s no longer about three dimensions. I don’t need to
travel through space, I can travel
between
space
.’

She could tell that Charlie was reluctant to follow her
instruction.

‘If you don’t do it, I will come back later and do it
myself,’ she added. ‘The choice is yours.’

‘No,’ he replied. ‘This choice is entirely yours.’

He turned the dial until the output was at level 10. What
happened next was out of his hands. He sat back in his chair and waited. Next to
the monitor was the override switch. If he pressed it, the machine would shut
down and
Emmy
would be returned instantly to her
body. He raised his arm until his hand was hovering directly above the switch.
The slightest hint of trouble and he would not hesitate to press it.

***

Lucas was sat at his desk filling out forms. As well as
disorder, those Americans had managed to create a substantial amount of
paperwork for him. Before this, he did not realise how complicated it was to
prosecute a foreign national. When he saw young Jimmy approach the station, he
was actually glad of the distraction.

‘How can I help you, Jimmy?’

The young man was flushed and out of breath. Due to his
simple outlook on life, it was rare to see him in a state of panic. Jimmy was
by his very nature the town’s most easy going resident.

‘F-f-fire,’ he began, nervously. ‘The pub is on fire –
you’ve got to do something!’

Lucas left his desk immediately and ran to the window. The
police station was at the top of Main Street and looked down onto the entire
town. Being the largest building, the top floor of the Sly Fox was clear to
see. Lucas saw no sign that it was on fire.

‘Are you sure,
Jimmy
; I can’t see
anything.’

‘It’s big, Officer Black. I think the whole town may burn
down if you don’t do something.’

Lucas was still sceptical. He had not received a call and
telephone would certainly have been quicker than sending Jimmy running on foot.
He did, however, have a duty to investigate and so he called Karl Fletcher, the
town fire marshal and arranged to meet him on site. He then grabbed his hat and
ran out to the car.

He drove quickly and within thirty seconds he was at the
door of the
pub. Everything appeared to be in order from the outside. He
entered to find the pub running normally. Mindy was clearing a table by the
door and he asked her if there were any problems.

‘A fire?’ she replied, somewhat surprised. ‘I don’t know
what stories young Jimmy has been telling you, but we are certainly not on
fire, I can tell you that.’

Lucas was relieved, but also frustrated. Jimmy was not the
sort to make up stories and the boy’s fear appeared genuine.

‘Has Jimmy been in here tonight?’ he asked.

‘I haven’t seen him in here since Thursday,’ replied Mindy.
‘Do you think somebody may have put him up to it?’

Lucas shook his head.

‘I don’t think so. I mean, those Carlton boys are always
giving him bother, but they’ve already received a public order notice this
week. They aren’t dumb enough to risk getting into more trouble.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘I’ll go see if I can find Jimmy and ask for his side of the
story. There’s nothing else to do really.’

As Lucas exited the pub, the fire marshal was just arriving
in his truck.

‘Where’s the fire, Lucas?’ the marshal asked.

‘False alarm,’ the policeman replied. ‘Sorry to waste your
time, but everything here is normal.’

Lucas opened his car door and was about to get inside when
he was greeted by a most peculiar sight. Jimmy was running down Main Street
towards him, but he was not alone. The young man had a crowd of a dozen people
following behind and every one of them had their hands full. Some bore handheld
fire extinguishers and others carried buckets. Jimmy had clearly spread the
word and help was arriving in abundance. The only thing missing was the fire.

***

Emmy
felt the rush and then in
an instant she was floating high above the observatory. She knew that Charlie
had obeyed her instruction and put the machine on full power, because she felt
clarity of perception like she had never felt before. The energy around her
came into sharp focus and for the first time she could distinguish minute
detail. This was astral travelling in HD. Termite mounds glowed with the
electric buzz of city skyscrapers and their inhabitants lit up the earth around
them like a lava flow. Animals covered the fields and the kangaroos constructed
neon highways as they bounded below.

Emmy
could see the town taking
shape in the distance. That was where she wanted to be, but before her will
could take her there, something else caught her attention. The light of life
was peppered randomly across the landscape, but there was one place where a
pattern formed. Two bright points were contained within a solid circle of
light. It was like nothing she had encountered before.

Her instincts told her that the two forms at the centre were
human, but the outer circle was harder to judge. It appeared to be closing in
on the people, whilst constantly rotating like a marching parade. When she got
closer, she could make out the individual entities rise and fall with a
staccato motion she had bore witness to just a moment earlier. They were
kangaroos, but their behaviour was anything but normal.

She willed herself into the centre of the circle. The energy
signatures within contained a disparity in size that indicated either an adult
and child or that one of them was seated whilst the other stood. The circle of
light was closing in all of the time, but there was no reaction from the two
figures. In the darkness of reality, they would be oblivious to the animals
until they came much closer.

Emmy
wondered who these people
were. It was late and very few people would venture away from town at this
time. Then another thought occurred to her. What if they had not come from the
town; what if they were not people in the human sense at all? The only way to
find out was to reveal her presence to them. If they were living, they would be
completely oblivious to her existence. She moved into the centre of the circle
and passed directly between them. Then she waited.

***

Lucas was having trouble keeping the crowd in order.
Jimmy had certainly been convincing in his storytelling. Many of those gathered
to help put out the absent fire were not fully dressed or in their night
clothes. He saw his Uncle Harry amongst the faces. The old man was not looking
in great shape. As well as having to deal with having his chickens stolen, he
had clearly allowed for his sleep to be interrupted by coming out to help as he
was wearing his dressing gown and slippers. It was not a particularly warm
night and he ran the risk of catching a cold or worse. All for the sake of some
dumb prank.

Jimmy was the only person among the crowd not to be confused
by the sight of the flame free pub. He had acquired an extinguisher from
somewhere and he held it in his hands as if poised and ready for action. Lucas
grabbed hold of the boy’s arm and pulled him to one side.

‘You better have a good reason for this, Jimmy. A lot of
folks are going to be pretty angry when they find out that you’ve dragged them
out of bed for nothing. There is also a two hundred dollar fine for wasting the
fire marshal’s time.’

Jimmy looked back at the policeman with confusion on his
face.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he replied. ‘Haven’t I done
good bringing everybody here; how else will we put out the fire when it
starts?’

‘Jimmy, did you not listen to what I have just said? You
cannot go wasting everybody’s time like this...’

Lucas trailed off as he struggled to digest Jimmy’s earlier
response. Something the boy said was off somehow.

‘Jimmy, can you repeat what you just told me.’

The young man shrugged.

‘I asked if I had done good bringing everyone here.’

‘No, Jimmy, after that. You said something about the fire;
what was it?’

‘I was just pointing out that with all of these people we
will have a better chance of putting out the fire when it starts.’

Lucas took a step back. Was this a warning, a threat or had
the boy genuinely gone crazy?

The crowd were growing inpatient. He needed to get answers
fast. If there was about to be an arson attack, then having half of the town
gathered at the crime scene just before it happened was extremely dangerous.
These people had come to help, but were they about to be the victims?

‘Jimmy,’ Lucas began, ‘I have one question for you and you
have to give me an honest answer. Is somebody going to deliberately start a
fire here?’

The young man shook his head.

‘Not deliberately, officer, but it is going to happen. And
if I were you, I would not stand so close to that window.’

***

Emmy
was completely enthralled
by the image before her. The smaller energy remained still, but the larger one
had transformed as soon as she made her presence known. First it turned into an
old man; diseased and frail. Then like watching a life played in reverse at
high speed, the years fell away, removing decades in just seconds. In her
current form,
Emmy
had only the memory of emotions to
guide her actions. She assumed she would feel fear if she were still in her
body and reasoned that it would be wise to adopt caution.

Unlike in the hospital, the figure did not seem surprised or
curious that she was there. The man or ghost rather, had a friendly face, so
different from the ones that cast judgement in the pub. He looked down at his
arms then back at
Emmy
and down to his arms again. He
was trying to tell her something; but what? What was it about his arms? She
glanced down at her arms, except that she did not have any. She was nothing but
a discombobulation of mind without matter. Was that what it was trying to tell
her? Did it want to know what she looked like?

During the course of the project
Emmy
set many goals that she wished to attain. This list mostly consisted of places
or scenarios she wanted to see. It never occurred to her to turn the focus
inward and observe herself. She was composed entirely of energy and whilst she
had sought greater control of that energy, the question had now been raised as
to whether she could manipulate and reshape it at will.

To begin the astral journey, she used a mantra. To reveal
her true spirit, she reverted to the same technique. All the while centring her
full focus on memories of the physical; of what it felt like to feel her
muscles moving.

I have hands; I can feel

I have hands; I can feel

I have hands; I can feel

She continued with the mantra and as she did so her ethereal
body began to take shape. She progressed from her arms into a torso and then
focussed all of her thoughts into her face. No detail escaped her as she attempted
to project all that she was and had ever been into recreating a formless copy
of her body. Without a mirror, the only way for her to judge her success was in
the reaction of the spirit man.

He smiled.

Though his physiognomy was of a young man in his prime, his
smile contained the warmth of age. He glanced down at the shapeless energy
beside him and then back at
Emmy
. Again, she felt
that he was trying to tell her something, but this time she could not discern
what that something was.

She floated towards him. He remained smiling, but his body
retreated from her. It was not a considerable movement, but it was enough to
keep enough separation between them that there could be no contact. This got
Emmy
thinking. Was physical contact even possible between
two non physical entities? There was only one logical way for her to find out.