Nick Arus
I had a dream of flying. I drew the eight of wands from the Tarot. Eight wands flying over peaceful countryside. My business had just folded, leaving me with debts and a fortnightly pittance from the government. The dreams grew, took over my nights and my days.
People kept making demands. I had been comfortably off, my time flexible. I helped people change old car engines, let them use the telephone, gave lifts and free advice, drank with people and listened to their problems, brought life and humour to parties. Now I struggled to be my former self for others’ sakes. All I needed was space and time. The lease on my house was not renewed, the bank pressed me, brown envelopes piled up on the doormat. All I needed was space and time.
The dreams grew stronger and more detailed. Now there was a girl who flew with me, always ahead and above. We flew on filmy wings of immense strength, silently and steadily over peaceful countryside. I always followed, she never spoke. I didn’t know where we were flying to, nor did it occur to me to wonder. We were between space, outside time. I hated the mornings.
My wife was supportive. She was one of those extraordinary people to whom another’s happiness means more than their own. I suppose she loved me. An Earth sign, she understood nothing about flying, was happiest in the garden on a Spring morning. When I went to work for a local flying school she made me sandwiches and kept my supper warm.
I worked six days a week for my flying. No money, but I learnt to fly microlights, those noisy two-stroke powered kites with their unlikely prehistoric silhouettes. I took bookings, did paperwork and spanner work, organised publicity and dispensed enthusiasm. I got my licence and planned out my future career as an instructor.
Family life became difficult as the workload grew. My finances were in an appalling condition and we were soon to become homeless. My children ceased to expect anything of me. The dreams stopped and my flying remained indifferent. Sometimes, on a calm and sunlit day with the engine throttled back, I would momentarily fly in that dream sky before the physical demands of machine and environment reasserted themselves. More often I was apprehensive as the turbulent sky played with my device of sticks and string and I would return to the ground with a feeling of relief, a feeling which rapidly changed to disgust at my failure to be as one with the air, to fashion my dream as other pilots seemed to do in their machines.
In early Spring the dreams returned, but they had changed. Now the two of us would fly towards a bank of gathering darkness into which sank a blood-red sun. Under us an endless, twisted forest lurked in glowering twilight. Thrusting from the threatening cloudbank there was always a gleaming pinnacle bathed in golden light from below. I knew we must reach this island of light, and that below it was our final landing place.
Then the dream changed again. Now flight became an effort for the first time. The air seemed viscous, and subtle currents pushed me from my track, but I still felt powerful. Only when I looked down at the grim landscape below did my wings falter and my mind begin to cloud over. I tried to catch up with the girl, to warn her of the dangers of the forest and urge her to the pinnacle, but the air became like treacle and I could not close the distance. Suddenly the girl dipped a wing and began to spiral down. As she passed my altitude I saw her face for the first time. She was painfully beautiful, but in that brief instant as I fell truly in love for the first time she seemed to grow older and somehow smaller. I tried to cry out her name, but I did not know it. She fell faster into the spiral, and I dived to follow. My speed built rapidly, but she dropped still faster into the darker layers below.
I was in an almost vertical dive now, and she was a small limp bundle of rags crashing helplessly into the clutching treetops. My mind dived in pursuit, eager to embrace oblivion, but my treacherous body clung to life and refused to follow. Buffeting and straining against the stall, I pulled out of the hurtling descent scant feet above the treetops. My last glimpse was of her bones glistening whitely in a small clearing, then my wings were beating laboriously as I climbed heavily towards the last vestiges of daylight. I emptied my mind of all but the desire to reach the pinnacle, which was no longer in sight. The air grew darker and thicker, and I could not tell if I was gaining height or descending. My body ached and I longed to give up the struggle and let myself fall to the forest, yet each time I eased my climb for an instant I saw those bones among the forest roots, and terror made my torn wings beat again. Pain and panic grew together. The blackness seemed to deepen in front of me.
In an instant I realised I was falling, not flying, then there was a crushing impact and I awoke.
Every morning I woke bathed in sweat and greeted the sun with a relief I had never felt before. In my days I was flying more often and more competently now, but too often an unaccountable dread would grasp me as I came in to land. I would abort, climb on full power to two thousand feet and circle for minutes on end until my pulse and breathing returned to normal. I told no-one of my private battle with the dream, and determined to overcome it.
Coming in to a short, difficult strip one day in a crosswind I felt the demon in my mind. I shut it out. I was high and fast over the threshold when it went dark and I saw the bones. I pulled in the bar and opened the throttle wide, at last completing my dream dive to add my bones to hers.
I came to in a pile of twisted wreckage, the engine revving its guts out now the propeller was broken. I was miraculously unhurt; witnesses had seen me dive into the ground at seventy miles an hour, but I had no cuts, no bruises. I crawled out of the debris then went into the house and took a card from the Tarot. The eight of wands: flying over peaceful countryside.
In early Spring the dreams returned. My flying had improved, was technically good, people were pleased with my instruction, but my marriage was over. I needed something, I needed solitude. I decided on a trip.
I was soothed by the familiar rituals of rigging and the routine of pre-flight checks. I took a sleeping bag, some cash and five gallons of spare fuel.
I took no charts, had no destination in mind. Airborne, the fancy took me to fly round the Northern coastline, sleeping on beaches and finding fuel where I could. Flying North along the shattered edge of the land, I noticed nothing. I looked back over the last five years and felt their emptiness crawl over me like a damp frost.
A near-miss with a Navy jet brought me back to the business of flying, and I turned inland to avoid the firing range. An hour later I was back at the coast and heading North again, now above unending white beaches. I landed on firm sand below the tideline to refuel in the mid-afternoon and ate an orange. Later, as the Eastern horizon dimmed and the waters rose, I took off and flew on my uncaring way.
As the first stars came out I realised I could no longer see the ground well enough to ascertain if this section of beach was suitable for a landing. It did not seem to matter. I put the machine into a shallow dive, aiming to put down just past a series of salmon nets connecting land to sea ahead of me. I had seen the small fire burning near my selected landing site, but it did not register until I flared for touchdown. I struggled with the steering as the nose wheel hit soft sand, then switched off as the machine came to rest fifty feet from the small circle of firelight.
A girl in a hastily-arranged towel ran towards me, not sure if my arrival was intentional or if I was safe. Her name was Elspeth, and she was from the village a mile away over the dunes. I never saw her by day, but in dusk and fire-flicker she was hauntingly beautiful. She shared her food and played guitar to me, and I drowned in her body to the crash of the waves and the rush of the undertow. In the morning the fire was out and she was gone.
I flew North again, stopping once for fuel in a pasture behind a garage on the edge of a small seaside town. I felt clean, refreshed and empty, a blank sheet of paper waiting for inspiration to cover me with meaning. I turned the corner around midday, and flew West along the inhospitable and spectacular top edge of the country.
There were no towns or villages now, and no traffic or petrol stations on the winding clifftop road beneath me. My fuel was getting low and I was flying into worsening weather from the West. Landing sites were few, and I knew I was in trouble. The lighthouse on the far headland where the cliffs turn Southward again disappeared in a squall as I fought the machine down through the violent air to a small but hopefully smooth patch of sheep-spotted grassland. As I tied down the wing and took what shelter I could under it I congratulated myself on getting down in one piece in such atrocious conditions; I was a pilot once more, not simply a fugitive.
Ten minutes later a Land Rover appeared, bumping over the trackless moor from the West. Behind the wheel was a woman with long dark hair and green eyes. For a moment I thought it was Elspeth, the beach girl of the previous night’s dream stop, but she was older. She asked if I was alright, then I got into the vehicle and she took me to her house.
Fiona lived in an old stone house on the edge of a cliff. Her nearest neighbours were the lighthouse keepers. Many small signs told me a man lived here with her, but she said nothing and was alone. She drew me a bath and cooked a meal for the two of us, then we made love by crackling firelight. At some point in the heat of our lovemaking I became convinced that she was the same woman I had enjoyed on the beach, and a shudder ran through me. It passed unnoticed in the cut and thrust, and later she covered me with a blanket and left the room. I had dreams of falling.
In the morning she woke me early and told me I must leave. She put a can of fuel in the Land Rover and drove me to my landing ground on the moor. The machine was undamaged. I filled up and made a difficult take off. I circled to wave, but the Rover was already bumping its way across the dreary moorland landscape. I flew South and East, heading home to sort out the mess. I had no plan, but I felt more positive than I had in weeks and was able to concentrate fully on my flying.
My direct route home took me over a large mountain range. On the far side and in sight of the coast a massive downdraught caught the machine and slammed me into a steep hillside.
I came to in great pain and realised I was in a hospital bed. Some time later a nurse came in. The nurse was Fiona. I was dizzy and strangely terrified, possessed by a dread and nameless fear I had neither the energy nor the will to identify.
Nurse Fiona told me that I was lucky to be alive, and that I was just going for a small operation. She pulled off her nurses cap. Long dark hair fell down, and she was Elspeth. She gave me an injection, and as I lost consciousness she smiled coldly.
When I woke I was a eunuch. They told me they couldn’t save my boys.
The dreams have all stopped. I sold the tarot cards on Ebay.
Nick Arus
