Sara's Story - by Jonathan Malory - Chapter V - Angelica Platt

The fog was there as it always was on the water crossing to the island; Mister Arkansas had been there chatting with the skipper as she arrived.

‘It was a bit different to the first one; I actually saw something this time, like a spirit leaving his body.’ Sara was giving Jonathan her report. She wanted to be away from him before he realised she was holding something back, yet didn’t want to seem impatient and out of control.

‘The experiences should be enhanced each time.’ Said Mister Arkansas.

Sara wondered if he ever consumed anything other than those lime things, even out here amid the atmospheric haze.

‘You were fortunate not to be spotted leaving those trees; could have been very, tricky.’ His tones sounded thicker and more poignant shrouded in the thick mist as they were, mingled with the chug and putter of diesel combustion and rotting wood. Oh, they were enhanced all right.

‘I think I might be close to making a real discovery.’ That much, at least, was true. ‘Clues are becoming conspicuous.’ Sara had never really felt claustrophobic before but she thought it must feel a bit like this, surrounded by an impenetrable blanket with the penetrating Mister Arkansas and his ubiquitous Lime Ricky the only picture in view. The boat ride was a long one.

‘Did you see any more of that hole?’ His features disappeared for an instant as he leaned back into the fog to pick something up, ‘Your trou profond.’

‘It was there again,’ Bigger than before, much deeper. ‘I don’t really know what to make of that.’ Sara wasn’t sure whether she should be feeling guilt at holding back information from her benefactor, or if she should be afraid that Mister Arkansas may not be all he seemed.

Whatever, Jonathan gave a little grunt and walked off toward the petit bridge to continue his clambake with the skipper, leaving Sara alone to ponder the sequence of events in the Door.

The liquid blackness had seemed infinitely far away. The magnetic fields were ebbing and swelling like a nodding old gentleman needing sleep, first lazily then snapping in a new direction as opposing forces were being acted upon. There had been something different in there this time; like a voice without substance, no sound. A thought perhaps, but not. It was an image of a note, written by another girl like Sara, hidden behind the shrine in the temple. Sara couldn’t read the note in the image but she was sure it existed. These thoughts occupied her mind for the rest of the boat trip.

As she had already given her report to Jonathan on the boat, she was free to wander about as she pleased. Sara wasted no time in heading straight for the temple.

She looked over the ornate rail of the little bridge over the inlet, there was a swan shaped boat bobbing in the water. When inside the temple she lit three incense sticks from a tall red candle, why she did this wasn’t clear to her, she wanted to rush up behind the shrine and seek out the note but it didn’t seem right.

She nodded her head to the shrine three times with the burning sticks help up in front of her face, threw a coin into the shrine and set the sticks into some sand in a golden container.

Sara wondered if what she was doing was entirely sane and thought about how her life had changed since she came here and that she wouldn’t want to go back. This place was everything.

But she needed to know; had to see the note, before she could think the low railing was behind her and she had an arm around the shrine with the note in her hand. She was outside back on the bridge before the realised what she was doing. The writing was jumpy; like the author had been riding along a bumpy road or inside a rickety train. At the top it said ‘DO NOT READ ON THE ISLAND!’

Sara had come this far, received directions to the note from beyond reality; may as well go with the flow of the situation. She went across the bridge and down the emerald bank and climbed aboard the swan; it had pedals inside, so she pedalled. Sara churned the waters of the mini Amazon tributary, brushing under weeping willows, for ten minutes or more, before she was at the edge of the island heading for the mists.

DO NOT READ ON THE ISLAND!

Dear Angelica Platt,

I write this letter to myself in a rare moment of clarity; hoping it will make sense to me, or others at a later date. I’ve been in the employ of Jonathan Arkansas for a little over a year; still not sure what it is I’m supposed to be doing, the Door takes me to dying people and I report back what I perceive for purposes unknown.

It all makes sense on the island, I know if I ever read this note there it will seem preposterous and be thrown away. There is a complex lucidity connected to the island that makes the world at large appear mundane; a mythical energy that enhances thought.

All the knowledge, collected since my first breath, residing within the neural pathways of my brain is available for perusal when on the island. Yet there is something else, perhaps sinister.

I am uncertain, a form of mind control that inflates an insatiable urge to want to return when I am away. I feel it now after all this time. I have trained myself to control it for the sake of sanity, current feelings are but a pinprick against the torrent of anguish that washed over my every nerve when first I stepped from the Door onto the alien soils of southern Madagascar. Here I am again on part of the same route I took a year ago to get home, chugging through the desert, destination Cape Town.

The need to be home is the same, but the anguish is greatly belittled, I fear another. The hole in the Door is ever present, it seems to hunger for me. I am greatly concerned.

There is no way out that I can see. Travelling by the Door is as much a necessity as returning home once I alight. Even out here, in the stark reality of a parched wasteland, I cannot believe Jonathan Arkansas is evil. I do not know what, if any, his connection is with the hole. I know only that I am sure he pretends ignorance, where there is none.

Angelica Platt.