The Seventh Direction

PART ONE: The Flow. Episode 5

[And so now the main-body, which begins thereabouts one year before the main-body comes to be written —Author Aces— A.A.]

___Windows and portals

Room 514, within the East Mountain-territory Hospital, glowed, radiant with extraordinary bright light . . . the drawn grey drapes did little to veil it from the outside world. So much so, that for one long moment one dreary window shone brighter than the rest. For one long moment as if a fire raged within.

It was half-past Twilight when the impossible occurred in room 514; and anyone outside the building, happening to look up, could've easily attributed the blazing glass to the reflection of a setting Sun. The fact is, however, room 514 had location in the east-wing, facing east, and in this part of the world the Sun set in the west . . .

(So what IS going on up there? "No! Impossible Andrea. And why are you grinning!? Tell me, where does that come from? I do NOT find this funny!")

And the light blew through the glass, and spread out across the yard, turning to invisible as it merged with lingering daylight. Down into a darkening Wood, it was betrayed by a sudden upsurge of wind and raving leaves (whooooosh!)—by an otherworldly music, echoing. By a dirt-devil rising in the wake. By three wind-blasted squirrels (down on ground, in the small Wooded Park), fur-spiked and chasing their tails. By a wrinkled, airborne, old brown paper bag (rising up, falling), desperately trying to escape the bluster. By an old cane-shaped piece of white-washed driftwood, which had no business being there but came exposed when a cluster of ferns spread apart in the "breeze" like the proverbial Red Sea. By a massive showering of crimson, projectile, overripe crab apples. By other flotsam. By a little jetsam. By two clinking pop bottles set side by each on an old teetering, tottering, crimson-red-splotching picnic table. By a late-season dreadfully bewildered robin's egg which (luckily) was hitching a ride to the ground on a burnt-orange, fluttering-down maple leaf. By a very unlucky, long-forgotten Christmas ornament, hung up in the park late last December but freed now and fast-falling from a Blue (shatter!) Spruce tree. By a couple of furiously flapping, mating, good old turtledoves. And last—but not least—by a wide-eyed partridge hanging out in a no-longer fruit-bearing pear tree, and (whooooosh!) vanished into the night. The still ringing Dark Wood echoed back toward silence then, like a fading silvery chord, when out of the trees came a low-flying, long-screeching hawk: Keeeee-arrr! Gliding up, soaring—up, up and hovering—odd, if she didn't suddenly downdraft and head straight for the still bright window. She landed on the sill . . .

The window of 514 was quite a sight to behold at that moment (not that it hadn't been throughout the entire blazing moment!), what with Hawk fanning her wings to land as the light faded-out in time . . . not so unlike the proverbial raven captured briefly in the Full of the Moon on the darkest of darkest of nights! And it might seem at a glance that Hawk had a tale to tell, or a message to deliver. Or something. But there was little more to tell now. Little more to see. For mighty Hawk, with the spanning of her wings, had brought the scene to a close.

All was captured now by the swift-coupling arms of night. Hawk—to the unaware—was but an unseen shadow perched on an insignificant stoop, standing by. The pane of room 514 had diminished to dreary (the portal was apparently closed)—and the regiment of windows on the east-wing wall showed grey again, chiseled uniformly into the baked red-brick of the old County Hospital.

                         .........................

Inside all the while, hot, standard, domineering, hospital-issue fluorescence illuminated 514 once more. A strange, residual tension hung heavy in the air. And there in the center stood Andrea, fixed and staring at the upper corner of the room.