playing tricks on them? Was it the food that was making them see things that were not there, ghosts and chimaeras where there were none?
There could be no doubt. There was, indeed, a triumphal expression on the old man’s face, if even for a tiny moment in time that if you had blinked you would have missed it.
‘As a gesture of gratitude, there will be a visual feast to compliment the meal you’ve just had. The effect will be temporary. Farewell, friends. Thank you for taking this on. Good luck.’
Suddenly the space, the square Katerina, Vasilis, Lara and Aristo were standing in and the hanging balconies and cities and every nook and cranny was filled with figures, human-looking, but glowing as if to say thank you. At least the four visitors felt this was what they were telling them.
And they saw it, the promised show up in the sky and all around them, the whole landscape and its inhabitants becoming one giant collection of images, merging and changing shape and form as one entity, unwrapped and revealed before their eyes in all its glory and beauty. Naked bodies slim as wraiths, bathed in light and words, formed dazzling patterns and multi-storey formations on the ground in front of their feet.
The ground became a mosaic, at the same time solid and fluid. Katerina, Vasilis, Lara and Aristo felt as if they were swimming with the landscape around them in one delicious soup, with taste and smell unknown and indescribable, but undeniably pleasant.
As the colours changed around them, they were on an emotional rollercoaster themselves as on a demonstration of the gamut of feelings. As suddenly as it began, the show fell like dominoes and vanished. That was the message that it was time for them to leave. The four visitors found themselves in a vacuum. They had one foot through the door of the next destination. They pushed the door to open.
CHAPTER 62
Cyprus
Present day
They left the realm of the cliff people behind and came to the territory of the people of the mist. Once clear of the gorge, there was nothing on the other side, but a chasm, and beyond that and all around them they were surrounded by a white space like a dense all-absorbing mist, sucking energy from all living things, the edge a sheer drop into depth unknown.
They almost crashed into some unidentifiable forms in the middle of a thick mist soaked in fog. Some strange short humanoid figures appeared.
‘Thank you for saving us.’ They said with one voice.
What a luscious silky voice they had.
‘How did we do that?’ Katerina asked.
‘You helped our enemies. The curse has been lifted. We got tired of their constant mutations and attacks. We are twins as are all our friends here.’
Katerina seemed to have continued as the four visitors’ spokesperson in this part of their journey inside the bizarre worlds of the cave inside Mount Zalakas. ‘We are glad to have been of assistance. Now, please tell us how to proceed to the next stage.’
The plain started to fill with pair after pair exiting their low-hung dwellings, as if the signal was given that all was clear. Katerina and the others looked down at them, bewitched.
Within minutes they were surrounded by a throb-bing throng, and probed by desperate, curious, willing and prying hands. Assaulted was more like it, but it felt affectionate, and, assuming that it was the local habit and also that the locals had not seen anything like their visitors before, Katerina and the others did not react for fear of offending them. The locals made them feel right at home.
‘You had placed under your care some children of our neighbours. There is something you should know about those children. They were the result of an experiment to produce the ideal ruler, when our royal line died.
‘They were taken by our neighbours as hostages, in the hope that, if we were rudderless, we would be rendered incapacitated. That act did not destroy us, but it did cause us irrevocable damage. The structure of our society could not survive such upheaval following the removal of its hierarchical head, and it almost collapsed, as everybody wanted to rule and demagogues appeared to plague us and seduce us.
‘The extreme perfect democracy that followed kept stirring the pot of discontent — a bit of disloyalty here, envy and animosity there, you get the picture — into a vortex that placed us at each other’s throats.’
‘Just like in Athens and the modern world.’ Katerina said.
‘The children are made out of the genes of Plato, Aristotle and Pericles and DNA collected on one of our trips through the portals. We wanted to adopt Plato’s rule of the philosophers as the way of government for our society and to use Socrates’ dialectic method to confuse and defeat our enemies and we wanted Aristotle and Pericles, because we admired them too.
‘Now, because of the conflicting philosophies and ideologies of their “fathers”, the children are in terrible internal conflict and we must help untangle the webs of their minds that are fighting a novel civil war, giving the term infighting a new meaning. If we don’t solve that internal war, we could not resolve ours. And there lies the crux of the matter, what you must do to help us. That will be your test for the opening up of the final stretch of road out of here.’
‘But how can we help you?’ As Katerina said this she had a strange image of being at a weekend camp on personal development and bonding and having to lead the process for solving a challenge, a test.
‘Your blood will do that. We only need a little bit. It has been foretold that the blood of the visitors will save us.’
Vasilis, Katerina, Lara and Aristo looked at each other. They did not need words to say the thought they knew each of them shared. They had become a blood bank. This was the blood donation van. Call to all fans. Climb aboard. Would there ever be enough? Thank God they had some time to recover. That lovely meal certainly helped.
The blood transfusion seemed to work for the children and the rest of the inhabitants of this place, but it had a curious and dangerous side effect. It started to randomly open up portals around the place. The expected screams of the crowd did not materialise.
They had already admitted that they used portals to other worlds for their experiments. This meant that they must have seen this firework-like portal-opening display before. Perhaps it was an event that occurred frequently, at regular or even irregular intervals. It seemed it was definitely not just a one-off occurrence, a side effect of the blood transfusion.
These people admitted that they had also used the portals believing they were calling for the help those doors of hope hid. They thought they saw the promise behind those places that seemed so much better than their own. Well, anything would in their desperate situation.
But the portals turned out to be a curse. They knew now that they should no longer use them and should no longer let anyone come out of them. The four visitors had done all they could for them. They would have to do the rest themselves.
At least now they had a fighting chance to rebuild their lives. It was time to go. The people thanked their benefactors and they in turn wished them luck.
A gelatinous substance began to seep out from the sheer rock turning itself into Ruinands who were repeatedly hurling themselves at Katerina and the others at great speed.
When Katerina and the others thought they had seen from the Ruinands all they had had to throw at them, more Ruinands appeared from all directions surrounding them. Katerina and the others muttered under their breaths: “Not more of them”.
They felt like the four “musketeers”, four friends in the same boiling pot. They thought they were finished; they were so vastly outnumbered.
But when they thought the game was up, the Ruinand lookalikes were then transformed into white light, angel-like creatures that spoke with one voice.
‘We bring a message for you and for the future.’
