I drifted off immediately. After a moment of disorientation, I found myself in what felt like another lucid dream state; with the notable exception that some outside force was controlling my motions, for the moment. I was able to look around me all I liked, but I couldn't stop moving. I was going somewhere specific, and I was in a hurry.
Flights of stairs are a fairly common dream symbol. Some say that they represent progress, or the struggle to get from one place in your life to some other place. That notion seemed to fit in here, because I was gliding down a huge, spiral staircase, wherever I was headed. The staircase itself was a good fifty feet wide, and the steps looked to be made of white marble. The balustrades on each side appeared to be made of burnished gold, supported by carved ivory balusters. Each of the ivory balustrade supports was carved into a different likeness. Some figures were human, some were animals and some were creatures that had never existed on planet Earth. As I realized that I was looking at representations of life on other planets, an old saying came back to me; one that was strong, and had an undeniable ring of truth to it, as if God himself were speaking to me: "All life is connected."
Somehow, this led me to understand that all life, everywhere in the universe, is linked to all other life everywhere else in the universe. Every time a living thing killed another living thing, it killed a little part of itself in the process. This didn't affect predatory animals too much; they were so low down on the karmic scale that it couldn't do them much in the way of harm. But predatory intelligent beings were affected drastically by it. The more they killed, the lesser they became, inside. I began to understand how Charles Manson had ended up the way he had. He'd probably killed so many people in previous lifetimes that by the time he got to this one he hadn't had much left in the way of a soul. Once he passed from this life, he was probably going to end up all the way down at the bottom of the karmic ladder, facing an eons long climb back up to the point of being classifiable as an intelligent being once again.
It was an unsettling thought, to say the least...the kind of thought that could make a person leery of killing anything, and particularly leery of taking the life of any intelligent being, regardless of species (and there's more than one intelligent species on this planet. We humans aren't the only ones).
I turned back to watching where I was going. Beyond the balustrades, there wasn't much to see. It was nothing but clouds out there, with no landscape in sight below. I looked back the way I'd come. The curve of the stairway was so gradual, and the stairway itself so vast, that the clouds obscured it both behind and before me beyond a distance of a mile or so. Even at fifty feet wide, at a distance of a mile the stairway tended to dwindle to a point, thanks to the mechanics of perspective. It swelled from a point in the distance to a fifty-foot-wide stairway right where I was, then dwindled away to a point below me, so that all I could see were clouds and two miles' worth of staircase. As a direct result of this, I couldn't see all that much of the stairway except for the part of it I happened to be passing over at the moment.
I wasn't walking down the stairway, either. I was gliding just above the steps, in an upright orientation, as if I were sliding down a gargantuan spiral slide in a standing position. And I was moving fast; the stairs were blurring past my feet too fast to be made out individually, as if I were shooting down a highway at a hundred miles per hour---yet the wind around me was as gentle as a spring breeze, just barely ruffling my hair.
Somewhere along the line the bottom of the staircase finally came into view. It met with the roof of a mammoth stone building that stuck up through the clouds, and entered the roof through a huge opening in it at one end. I plunged through the opening, decelerating at a rate that probably would have had me hurling my lunch all over everything in front of me if this had been an actual physical event.
The slope of the stairway began to level off. Over the space of a hundred-foot drop it curved up and smoothed out until it became the floor of a corridor fully as wide as the staircase had been, and equally high. Both sides of the corridor were lined with doors---huge things the size of barn doors. But, eerily enough, the doors weren't mounted on walls. The foot sills rested on the corridor floor, but nothing supported the doors themselves; there was no wall for the door frames to be mounted to. The spaces between and above the doors simply looked out into open sky, and wind blew in freely through the space where the walls should have been.
Each door I passed was numbered, but the numbers weren't sequential. Instead of being in the usual ascending or descending order, with odd numbers on one side of the corridor and even numbers on the others, the numbers seemed to come at random; 1927 was next to 1632, which was across from 2122, which was next to 200010, which was right across the way from 17.
The corridor seemed to stretch away into infinity ahead of me, and the doors in the far distance were either unnumbered or else the numbers weren't prominent enough to be detected at that range. That didn't quite make sense, since the numbers on the doors I could see were almost ten feet high---but then again, there wasn't a whole lot about this place that made sense in the terms I was accustomed to, anyway.
I finally drifted to a stop, directly in front of - and facing - a huge double door. The doors were gold in color; the door handles were a flaming scarlet. The number painted on the door in huge lettering was 1873.
I stepped forward a little uncertainly and laid my hands on the handles. I couldn't be certain that this was the right thing to do, but it seemed to be what was expected of me. I rotated the handles downward, since they were the type that were pivoted to the door at the ends closest to the center, and free at the outer ends---and felt something click inside them.
The doors swung open without me having to push on them---and what I found on the other side made just as little sense as the rest of the place I was in: Instead of open sky on the other side, as there should have been, there was a very ordinary, Earthlike landscape!
I stepped through the doorway onto solid ground. When I looked back, the doorway was gone---vanished as completely as if it had never been in the first place. There was no sign of the eerie building. I was standing in the center of an open pasture.
The pasture was as real as anything I'd ever encountered in the physical world. I realized with something of a jolt that I was in the physical world, again---and in the body I'd occupied in a previous lifetime---in the year 1873 A.D...almost a century before I'd been born in my current lifetime.
I looked around uncertainly; even as I turned, memories began flooding across my mind as I recognized the place---an entire awareness of a whole other lifetime. There was the stone wall I'd helped rebuild after a storm had brought an aged oak tree down on it; the color of the newer stones and mortar still hadn't weathered down to match the surrounding materials yet.
The aromas of fresh cut hay, narcissus and manure mingled in the mid-morning air. I looked down at myself; instead of my black T-shirt, vest, blue jeans, blue canvas belt with the steel "Styx" buckle and my Adidas cross-trainers, I was wearing Victorian era clothing and heavy, clumsy leather boots that were about as comfortable as cast iron. I felt a little as if I'd stepped out of a PBS broadcast of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. This was definitely late nineteenth century British clothing...
There was a watering trough set up beside the fence just ahead. I was heading toward it. I had very little control over where I was going. My past-life self was the one in control of this body, and I could only manage minor changes in what he was doing. I managed to divert our head as we walked past the trough, and catch a glimpse of our features. I was surprised to realize that, except for the difference in the way we wore our hair, we looked pretty much the same as I did in my own time; I had the same features and physical form. I found myself wondering if people regularly manifested similar appearances from one lifetime to the next, but I had no idea whether this was the case or not.
And then, suddenly, things changed for the worse: A horse bolted over the crest of the hill on the other side of the fence, screaming in terror, and hurdled the fence, missing us by less than a yard. We ducked to the side automatically, wondering what in the world had spooked Dasher into behaving like this; he was normally such a placid beast!
Two more horses appeared over the hill, eyes rolling in terror, and vaulted the fence, safely off to one side of us. We suddenly understood why; we heard, in our head, a terrified cry: "Alex!! Help us!!"
It was Bridget's mind-touch---and she was in terrible danger! Flames danced in her mind's eye, hungry as wandering indigents in the hot season, devouring dry wood and hay at a prodigious rate.
On the heels of Bridget's silent cry came Sir Alfred's: "Alex! Swarthmoore has struck again! We are trapped in the barn!"
The mind-touch broke up into violent coughing, and we received a strong sense of Sir Alfred choking to death on the heavy smoke inside the barn.
At that instant, a change of wind brought the smell of smoke to our nostrils. And it wasn't the gentle tang of a cooking fire---this was the reek of an all-out building fire!
We vaulted the fence and broke into a run; names and identities, life circumstances and particulars flooded into my awareness: Sir Alfred Vaughn was my fiancee's uncle, and the owner of this estate; Bridget Stevenson was my fiancee; I was Alexander Robbins, soon to marry Bridget, and perhaps one day to be the inheritor of these lands when Bridget's uncle passed away. We lived seven leagues to the southwest of the town of Chelmsford, England; our Queen was Her Royal Highness Victoria.
There was yet another name, burning darkly in my mind---Sir Eldrich Sable, Lord of Swarthmoore, a great estate situated on the far side of Chelmsford. Lord Swarthmoore had only the year before caused a great upset in the Town Council, and had then taken advantage of it to elect himself Mayor. With that power in hand, from that day onward he had launched an insidious campaign to gain control of all the lands in and about the township. Bridget's uncle had uncovered the plot and exposed him to the regional Lord Prosecutor, dashing Swarthmoore's plot to bits. Lord Swarthmoore had sworn vengeance upon Sir Alfred...and he'd lived up to the dark meaning of his family name.
Terrible troubles had befallen Sir Alfred and his estate ever since that lamentable day, and there was little doubt as to the cause of those troubles. Lord Swarthmoore was a cold and dark man, cruel and heartless. Setting fire to an enemy's barn while he and his niece were trapped within would be just the sort of thing to gladden his black heart!
We ran frantically in the direction the panicking horses were coming from. Three more galloped past us as we crested the hill, nearly running us down. We managed to avoid them at no greater expense than that of a bruised shoulder, and hesitated for an instant on the hilltop.
Below us, we saw thick, black smoke billowing from the great barn situated behind Vaughn Manor; it was going up like dry tinder.
We screamed, "No!!!"---and pelted down the hill pell-mell. Workers were streaming toward the barn from the fields beyond, but they were too far away to reach it in time enough to do any good. By the time they established a bucket brigade, the blaze would be beyond controlling. We had to reach the barn quickly, and open it before the fire reached Bridget and Sir Alfred!
As we neared the barn, we caught a glimpse of a man running from the blaze. He was dressed richly---like a nobleman---but all in black. And we knew of only one nobleman who dressed solely in black. The man paused for an instant, turning to look back at the blazing barn---and we knew for certain who was responsible for the fire, and the danger our fiancee and her uncle were in: Swarthmoore!
He favored us with a mocking smile, raised his right hand to show us the carpenter's hammer in it, saluted sardonically with his left hand---the Devil's hand---and then disappeared in an eyeblink, vanishing from sight as completely as if he had never existed.
We snarled in outrage. Sir Alfred had told me that he had learned that Lord Swarthmoore was capable of appearing and disappearing when and where he wished, but we hadn't believed him---until now. We tucked our chin in and ran all the harder.
We reached the barn well before anyone else, and found the main door locked. The big, wooden bar that normally held the door closed at night had been slid into place and nailed down! We cast about frantocally for some means of removing the nails; another hammer, or perhaps a prybar; but there were none to be had. We struggled to tear the bar free, but it was too solidly anchored to move.
The sound of Bridget's scream cut through the roar of the flames and the smoke. We could feel her pain and fear, and that drove us frantic. We struggled to think. Swarthmoore would have sealed all the ground level exits from the barn in the same manner, so trying to open any of the barn's other doors would likely be useless; they would be sealed as well. Taking the time to check them would most likely waste more time than Bridget and Sir Alfred had left.
BUT...! Inspiration struck like a hammer blow: Swarthmoore probably thought not to seal the hayloft doors!
We looked up, and found the hayloft doors standing open. Smoke poured from the opening, and the beam that supported the loft pulley was ablaze, but at least the opening wasn't blocked by flames...yet.
We remembered the teachings Sir Alfred had recently begun with us---the art of the Spirit Flight. To date, we had only been able to make an object as large and heavy as a hay bale lift from the ground and float about, but that had only been practice---an exercise in curiosity. This was life or death, now, and desperation drove us. We gritted our teeth, drew the Power to ourselves and directed it upward. We rose from the ground. We felt a fierce surge of elation at the success of the endeavor, but it was short-lived. Bridget's next scream ripped through our concentration, and we fell back to the ground from an altitude of ten feet. The impact of the landing was numbing. It nearly drove the wind from us, and left us feeling as if both ankles were broken.
We made a Sending to Bridget: "Bridget! I am coming for you! But do not scream again! It could be my undoing!"
We could feel her receipt of the message, but she made no response. We grimly put our pain from our mind, threw our full effort into flight once more, and lifted from the ground...
And then a thunderous crack from overhead shattered our concentration like so much fragile crystal. We looked up, to find the pulley support beam coming down upon us, blazing like the fires of Hades, itself.
We felt a shattering blow to our
head, and then darkness claimed us.