And our antiquarian is good .... "- said a man with a hoarse and quiet voice, who had just entered the antiques shop ..."You haven't changed much over the centuries", you are still the shy romantic boy in love with Antilla ... of my Antilla "-Mills was horrified, was crossed by a millennial thrill ... despite being a powerful vampire broken to all experiences, he knew that the ignoble being in front of him (introduced himself as a client, passionate about literature) was his ancient and fearful enemy ...
THE RETURN OF AKH BAKARTall, imposing, Persian features, thin face yet full of vigor, magnetic gaze, indomitable and winning spirit, of an out of the ordinary power, combined with a cynicism that is typical of rulers ...He was, for the occasion, dressed in a very common beige Burberry coat, over a dark blue polo shirt ... and a foulardHer long, raven hair was tied back in a ponytail, and she sat in one of the Louis XVI chairs placed near the shop's office table ...It was a Saturday afternoon at the end of February, a clear day, warm and temperate weather, a cloudless sky ...You could hear the footsteps of people passing through Cavendish Square, intent on various chores, some for shopping, some for tourism, or simply strolling, before evening.After a few minutes of silence, Mills stepped forward: "What did you come to do? "-He asked, not without a tremor,- "I came to close the accounts we have outstanding ..." - was the reply- "How do you manage to be alive after millennia? "Mills had a vague suspicion ... in fact, looking back on it, he remembered that King Akbar was using some wizards, intent on experimenting on vampirism or similar states, and probably ... they had managed to turn it into something hideous, even worse than a vampire ...What, though ... this was ignoring him"Anyway, don't worry ..." - he added, in an almost solemn voice"It's not you I'm looking for ... in fact I need you for a job ...""Mills ... Rashid ... antiquarium .... what should I call you? I know that you can travel in time both forward and backward, future and past .. while I can only move towards the future ... ""You have to do one thing for me: go to the year 1979, in north-eastern Italy, there is a small village in the Alps of which I will give you the coordinates ... well .. go and find Alan Bauer""he knows a universal secret, on matter, which cannot be revealed to ordinary humans: it is a secret handed down from family to family, and he is the custodian ... but in the following years, the eighties, he revealed its principles to a girlfriend of his, who spread the word among various people, and then unpleasant things happened, for us supernatural beings, let's say ... "-Mills thought about it for a few seconds, then accepted.And his time travel began.Whirlpools of a thousand colors, lines of energy passed through his mind, he flew in spaces difficult to describe, where mathematical formulas hovered and crossed all around him, in a total and omniscient universe ...But something happened and made him change path, in space-time ... he woke up shortly after in a large green meadow, spring, with some trees, a grove and a small pond.He got up, and, behind the hills, he saw a village, with a town in the background, and he started walking, taken by a magical feeling ...THE COUNTRY OF NOT BEINGIn the distance there was the backdrop of a city, with tall buildings, an architecture Mills had never seen. Closer, low houses, with simple shapes, but very particular at the same time ...after less than twenty minutes of walking on those meadows and on gentle hills, he finally met some people, who, at first sight, seemed the same as him (so to speak ...) or at least human ..."Hello to you! "- he exclaimed-" do you speak Italian? Do you speak English? "-And it was with a pleasant surprise that he discovered that they spoke both Italian and English (and probably other languages too) ...So he started asking other questions, namely the name of the city, or the place, what year it is ... and all those stupid questions that characters in fantasy novels ask themselves ...One of the men, very kindly, replied that the city was called "Not-be-land" and was part of an unspecified state ,,, with the same name ..."Ah... ok... and what style are those houses? They seem very beautiful to me, an absurd intersection between so many styles that I have seen ,,, but I would not know how to place them in a specific style ... "There was no answer."I see that you are of different nationalities: Europeans, Americans, Indians, Asians, Africans ..."But while understanding the basic concept of his sentence, the natives did not comment ... it was as if he had said things with half meaning ... and the other half contained qualifying adjectives based on places that probablythey had read in the history books ... which they considered very antiquated ..."Mmm ... he thought to himself ..." "I must have come across one of those common freaks outbreak ... who want to achieve anarchy in the real sense ,,, but they succeeded ,, casserole ,, and look at the imposing and beautiful buildings that are further on ... "!Then he continued with other, more specific questions:"How old are those buildings? And those houses? "No answer yet. The natives must have understood the word "case", as they realized that they had instinctively turned their heads back, with a gentle smile, but with a nod of the head, then, they made it clear that the whole question did not fit their way. to express themselves.Mills, who, after all, had an intelligence superior to ordinary humans, began to reflect, and very soon came to the deduction that these people, this community, whatever the historical period (which seemed quite close to his anyway. .that is, the 2000s) .. were of a parallel dimension, in a world where language had changed, and above all the philosophical concept of quantifying, classifying things was not the same as we have or any civilization, let's say, from societies ancient onwards ...One of the characters stepped forward ... seemed to have understood Mills' embarrassment ... out of nowhere he materialized a book, on his hand ... and handed it to him.The book (similar to those old tomes of fantasy novels) opened as if by magic ... and images came out floating in the air ... the story of their civilization ...He learned that this civilization was born from the ashes of Atlantis, several millennia ago, and had followed a path parallel to humanity, had lived for centuries in small remote villages of the Amazon, where no one had ever gone looking for them, and when they had reached a philosophical and technical progress so advanced that they could move dimensionally, they had done it ... in fact their usual home is on Alpha Centauri, several light years from us ...Then, one of them suddenly stepped forward and said:We are just like you ...""But our civilization has no barriers of rationality and conformity ...""We have, in our grammar, abolished the verb" to be ", so there are no definitions of objects, things, concepts, or beings, humans, animals, plants"Mills listened, amazed ..."So we cannot say that one thing" It's beautiful, ugly, high, low, lively, boring, fast or slow ... "Things exist but we, in our minds, do not catalog them ""But if you talk to me in this way, trying to explain these concepts to me, it means that for better or for worse you know what normal societies are like, like mine for example"Mills replied"I am one of the Elders ... you see, I can use the verb" to be "... to explain this concept to you, who come from the other side of a dimensional mirror ... or from normal human societies ,,, also if I perceived that there is (still the verb to be) something strange in you ... "- "anyway, I told you ,,, since the Elders have studied all the syntactic, grammatical, and thought forms of all civilizations for us" Aliens "(therefore all those who have normally lived on planet Earth) well ,,, we can express ourselves completely, to make you understandthe concepts that form our thinking, and therefore our society."Human beings - of every time, era, and geographical area - waste time - and therefore energy - defining things, objects, people, and everything they see and hearprobably for an atavistic fear ... and for a sense of control of what is outside of us ... but by doing so, defining everything, with qualifying adjectives - such as: this is more beautiful than that ... I am good, you are not and a thousand other examples ... there is a detachment between beings and the surrounding matter ... instead it should be the opposite ...Let's say we are a bit like your Buddhists ,,, or Taoists ,, a little bit Zen ,,,, if you allow me the comparison ,,,Only with the difference that we have this thought for millennia, and since in our minds we have totally canceled the difference between the ego and the matter, not wasting neuronal cells - the energy is concentrated to the maximum ... the result leads to quasi-omnipotence. "Mills listened fascinated, amazed, with a little anxiety, too ... and it seemed that all his millennial heaviness had been melted and released into the air ... he felt magnificently light, and free ..."Do you want an example ,,, a small example of what we can do? The elder askedsuddenly Mills no longer saw the landscape ... the city and the small village in front had disappeared ,,, but he did not even have time to turn his head, that he saw that there were ,,, or rather, the beings in front of him they had MOVED ALL THE CITY ,,, all there was ,,, in front of him ,,, with telekinetic powers ,,,After recovering from the shock, he was invited by one of them to come closer to the city, to witness daily life, their normal and cultural activities ...there was a kind of gymnasium, a palaforum, with hundreds of young people inside, who repeated in unison:"I eat food that I don't know, I don't ask myself where it comes from, I listen to music but I don't know who wrote it, I enjoy the Art of Humanity, but I don't ask myself anything else""Well, train masses of young people in this kind of thinking ,,,," - Mills said with a hint of intellectual challenge ..."You continue not to understand ,,, Mr. Mills ... this is not a massifying thought, indeed it is a thought that makes the Mind totally free"- "Maybe but it inspires me a bit 'of fear ... it reminds me of certain regimes of the past ... or of a dystopian film ...""But no ,,, trust me ..." "you have read too many novels by Philip Dick ... or by George Orwell ..." "ha ha ha"Mills, strolling with his new friends through the streets of the city, realized that after all, people seemed serene and began to wonder how the economy and work worked, since potentially everyone had unlimited powers, so he could create objects from nothing, even ... no need to work ..."" Money is out, in this system .. boh ... it seems highly Utopian ... "" oh well .. let's go look for a restaurant ,, a bar, a pizzeria ,,, if there are any ... "He found nothing that resembled a pizzeria, a restaurant, or even a bar ... and in fact he began to notice that he had not yet seen anyone in the act of eating ,,,After a while he found himself in a metropolitan alley, which reminded him a little of Hong Kong, of the 90s ... (he had been there, on one of his travels)or he had seen it in "Blade Runner" ,,, bohThe narrow alley led to a building with an entrance, which gave to a kind of huge shed ... and walking there he found himself inside in a short time.The shed was dark and apparently there was not a living soul ... he had the courage to go inside, and he walked for a few meters, when suddenly, a huge roar shook the air, it seemed like the apocalypse ... he heard people shouting outside...and from inside the shed he could glimpse a gigantic shadow that stood out along the entire height of the place ... it was like a huge being, of biblical proportions, walking slowly, a deformed, hungry, hideous monster, which began to devour everything he found ... you could hear the horrid noises, the agonizing cries of people trying to escape ...Terrified, he took a few more steps towards the inside of the shed, which had parts in the dim light, you could see some doors that gave perhaps to secondary exits ...He opened a door, found himself in a very long corridor, began to run ... at the end of the corridor, he was in a kind of platform that seemed to be placed above a gigantic greenhouse, with futuristic corridors with glass or plexiglass windows ...There were several plants, with the strangest shapes ... creepers, carnivorous plants, perhaps ... but he still ventured along one of the corridors ... eventually he came to a small room, where he found a closed door with an inscription :FIND THE KEY THAT OPENS ALL DOORSThere was a small armchair, he sat down, prey to fatigue, and fell into a heavy sleep ...He woke up in a natural history cabinet, in 1760: the soft afternoon light filtered through the windows ... around him were various objects: a figurine of a Japanese idol resting on the table, a Rembrandt painting hanging on the wall , a machine to obtain a vacuum, some Louis XV armchairs, a "commode" in Charles Boulle style ...He loved that room, that air ... it seemed like a world made for him, but he didn't understand why it had happened right now, just when he was escaping to another world, which did not belong to him.He wandered around the premises, large enough, to look for something, a book, a document, an object ... that would help him carry out the key to the problem, that is, to understand why he was there, in that point of space and time ...His uncommon intuition led him, with his gaze, towards a very particular object: a kind of globe that opened halfway ... he lifted it and saw that inside there were some maps, apparently geographical, one different from the 'other ...The first map depicted Turkey, and precisely the area of Anatolia ... and there was an annotation, in Italian, at the bottom right, like a sentence containing a woman's name ... Mills, for the moment , did not give it importance.The second map depicted a precise area of the Alps, that is, an almost remote village, bordered by three mountains, with no connections to other villages ... bottom rightthere was another entry, also in Italian.This time Mills, intrigued, tried to read the note:"Here Alan betrayed me for the second time ... M.G."..............A shiver shook Mills, who, after all these travels in space-time dimensions, had lost almost all of his supernatural power, and was once again "humanized", with an intelligenceand a sensitivity out of the ordinary.The thrill was caused by the fact that she recognized the handwriting of whoever wrote the note: Antilla Kurk, or her ancient love, as well as a very powerful witch, later known as Mary Gordon (M.G.)There was also a third map, but first he wanted to take a look at the note of the first, the Anatolian one ...In Renaissance Italian, it was written: "I am trapped in an ancient, exotic world that I do not know, I hope someone will come to save me- signed Anna Guarini. ""Anna ..." - Mills gasped- "it can't be ... it's pure madness ..."And in the throes of a confused state of thoughts, a thousand images appeared in his mind, conjectures, hypotheses, reasoning at the speed of light ...It was not possible that Anna Guarini, a musician who really lived in the Italian Renaissance, whose character she had used to write one of her fictional stories (Le Dame di Ferrara), had really ended up in such a distant space-time, indeed, even in ' ancient Anatolia, and probably just around the time he lived as a penniless musician, before being turned into a vampire.For a moment he had a flashback and remembered that he had met Anna, together with her composer friend Luzzasco, one spring day, on her short journey, passing through Ferrara, in those years ...Being immortal had its boring sides, in fact all the historical periods were familiar to him, even if, not having the gift of obiquity, he had not lived in all places, but mainly in Europe.Then there was the fact of King Akh-bakhar ... why was he so angry with Alan Bauer? He suddenly remembered his not so beloved "mission" on behalf of that King he hated, but in the end it was important to discover different mysteries that hovered throughout this complex story, made of magic, mysterious bonds between people and places .. ."I absolutely have to find Alan Bauer" - he thought. "It is the key to everything, the missing link that connects all these stories and these people ..."and this, was the end of this chapter
YOU ARE READING
Antiquarium
General FictionA Fictional Opera, in 7 parts, featuring a Witch, a Vampire, Aliens, and a human with super powers