35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

128
EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
his face apart. It was a perplexing spectacle. Soon both of us just
stood there laughing, as if that were our mission on earth: to stand
there forever, laughing.
It was only after what seemed like ages that we became aware of
another presence, other laughter. Esther stood a few feet away,
pointing at us and convulsing with her own mighty hilarity. She
tried to speak, but she’d obviously lost the knack, too.
Next, I wasn’t laughing anymore. There was a ball of energy in
my head that felt like a dwarf star rapidly outgrowing the little bowl
of bone it had been confined to. I could feel its searing white light
seeping through the fissures in my cranium. Surges of euphoria
coursed up my spinal column and spouted in a fountain of rapture
through the myriad channels of a glowing brain. I gasped, throwing
back my head to gaze upon the flares of heaven, the starry signs, the
twinkling messages that had been there, so plain, since the beginning
of time.
As light as the light streaming through my nerves, I moved across
the silken sand, down to where the sea heaved its dark skin over the
planet’s mighty beating heart.
‘Can I watch you?’ a voice said.
Crouched in the sand a couple of yards away, chin resting on
knees, arms folded around calves, was Velocity. She looked about
three years old. ‘Yes, of course,’ I replied. It made me feel fatherly.
This prompted a bizarre conversation in which everything I said,
the moment I’d said it, seemed to mean something else. Each
sentence contained a sexual double entendre, but I only realised it
after I’d spoken. Then the flesh melted off her tiny, elfin face, and I
saw the skull beneath it, feral, mocking, vacant – dead.
I can’t be standing here talking to skeletons, I thought – it seemed
perfectly rational at the time – and abruptly walked off.
I found Ray.
‘Having fun?’ he asked, his smile making him look like Punch.
‘Fun? Who’s Fun?’ I was convinced it was someone’s name.
‘She is,’ Ray said, pointing.
A beam of power shot from his finger. I followed it to where it
had materialised a girl whose long, thick brown hair streamed with
flowers. She danced like an incarnation of the thundering music,