The Pole Shift

Sean and Mnem have powers

A/N I have performed zero editing of previous chapters. I'm just going to get on with the story.

After a week of organizing, the house Sean had neglected became respectably clean. He surveyed the work, feeling as if he alone were responsible for the change.  He looked at some eucalypt leaves in a vodka bottle saying:

                "The woman's touch,  means so much." Something his father use to say, but Janet hissed like a cat, calling him disrespectful of her, of himself and things in general. Sean bristled, he wanted a drink and had hoped to find something in the clean up. He was suspicious that they had found some long forgotten bottle and binned it.

                Sean struggled to hold her eye and peered through the kitchen window and up the hill. Mnem was there under the trees.

                "I know what you're thinking."  Said Janet who stopped her hard work to eye him.

                "Oh yeah - what?"

                "Boobs." Sean faltered and turned to her annoyed.

                "Lock me up and throw away the key - I like her!" Janet tooted, and  John who hadn't left her side struggled not to giggle. Sean was reminded of the neighbour's kids and terrible memories pushed at him, they had locked him up, and made him eat dog food. Then they were killed horribly whilst he got drunk. He returned John's smile in a way he hoped was friendly.

                "Mnem's a dreamer, I don't think she's anyone's sort. She won't get that you fancy her but just go along with you, she'll break your heart.  You seem the type to be honest." Janet went back to the floor boards then added, "why don't you concentrate on harnessing that supposed power."

                 Sean couldn't conjure the vibration control he wielded a week earlier. It was as if he was floating on top of an ocean looking into its depths, seeing the complexity of a world he wasn't quite sure how to interact with. He feared he would be submerged, taken over, like not being able to awaken from sleep paralysis.

                "It's there, I can't reach..." he trailed off, the whispering would fill him when he thought about it and he shied away, fearful.  He didn't tell them he was scared, Janet would call him a coward. He had asked Janet what Prophet thought, looking at her lumpy earlob that had scabbed and now healed. Janet just shook her head.

                 "Where's Mnem?" Said Sean, knowing full well. He returned to the subject most on his mind. It was true that he was taken with her, and ignored that he had been encouraged by a friendly nature. The dark haired woman spent much of her time wandering around the island with Tess at her heel,  the Labrador clearly preferred her company but Sean didn't mind, perhaps she might like him more because of it? Sean would watch as Mnem stood under the Mountain Ash. His head would cock as she touched enormous trunks with finger tips. Sure,  she was weird, but Sean decided he liked that in a girl and spent much of his thoughts on how he might impress her.

         Sean eased himself out of the domestic scene of house cleaning. He half expected John to follow, shouldn't the lad be more interested in manly company rather than cleaning a house with a sixteen year old girl? Then he checked himself, John was thirteen he'd be more than interested in a sixteen year old girl. Anyway, what exactly was he doing? He was forty three and was mooning after a twenty seven year old.

                'That's more natural" He said aloud.  Suddenly, a sensation rushed through him, it wasn't to do with the excitement he felt for Mnem, it was physical like pins and needles. The whispers he had been suppressing rose like a wave striking a beach. He fell to his knees with his hands over his ears. The whispers formed into a voice, not Prophet's or the deep voiced man, something made up of many voices:

                "Make a rod of gold, that is your means, your device."

                 The communication ended, and he was left on the lawn looking up at Mnem twenty paces away and under the trees. She looked back with strange eyes. Did he glimpse another figure in red fleet away? There came an orange bloom like dawn's blush then faded.

         Mnem's eyes were not friendly, they were darkly blank, her jet hair spread in a sudden wind, like unfurling crow's wings.  She held something that she worked at with her fingers. Tess, his dog, snarled at him. Then she put whatever it was she was holding in a pocket, Tess wagged her tail and Mnem paced towards him smiling.