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.And then he'd be clinically dead.But only for a few seconds.Just time for him to separate and fly free.And underlying everything would be the knowledge, the certainty, that the finest medical team in the world were observing close by.One word from them and the dial would be cranked back up to one hundred.It would work! He knew it would!He memorised the script, burned it into his subconscious.It wasn't words any more, it was real.He could smell the hospital ward, see the nurse.Down he went, taking himself deeper, following his prepared script of self-hypnotic induction.The hospital ward sharpened, overhead lights, sounds from the corridors.The nurse smiling as she counted—eighty-three, seventy-five.A feeling of light-headedness.Vision clouding, sounds elongating.No! This was wrong.His chest was tightening, his breathing laboured.Stop! Pull back! Enough!The nurse smiled through his failing vision, started turning the dial back up, reversing the count.No! A strengthening resolve.He couldn't back out now.There was no other option.He had to go on!Doubt and conviction, fighting within his mind—grappling, tumbling, slashing.The count stuck on twenty-seven, the words like a mantra repeated over and over.Then descending.Twenty-six, twenty-five.It was the only way.He had to succeed!The light-headedness returned, the elongating sounds.Se-ve-n-teeeeeeen.Now! Rise up.There's nothing to hold you down.You feel compelled to rise.Your body expels you.He was rising, floating free.He opened his eyes and.There was something wrong.He could see too much.He could see the ceiling, four walls, the floor—all without moving his head.And.was that his body?He peered through the twilight gloom.Everything was so dark and hazy.It was definitely his room at the Rectory Clinic and it had to be his body four, five feet below him but.why was it rippling.Why was everything rippling?And why was he looking in every direction at once?He tried to reach out with an arm but.nothing happened.Not even to the body on the bed.Did he have no form in this existence?He tried to turn his head and.the room shifted.His bed moved towards the wall, the window moved closer—a bright rectangle of light and colour.Was he moving along the ceiling? Was he flying?He willed himself farther.The room lurched, the window grew.He could see outside now.Trees, lawns, greens, blues and browns.The whole streaked and shimmering as though the window was covered in a wash of pouring rain.He was free! He'd separated.And he could move just by looking and thinking himself there.Excitement—pure and unrestrained.The window beckoning, the sky, the clouds.One thought and he'd be away, flying with the birds.Ow!Pain hit him the moment he willed himself through the window.One second his world was awash with light, the next he was being dragged back inside the darkened room.He'd never experienced a pain like it—sharp and intense, and coming from what appeared to be every inch of his being.Was it the membrane? Had he stretched it to its limit and it had pulled him back like a piece of elastic?He tried the window again, slower this time.Thinking himself closer, willing himself forward.He felt the resistance like a dull ache.An ache that sharpened into pain when he stretched farther and went when he retreated.It had to be the membrane.Shit! To have come so far.He glanced towards the window.It was out there.The possibility.Flight without limitation.One stretch and he'd be there.All those stories of out-of-body flight couldn't be wrong.Okay, all the volunteers he'd tested had been fakes or honestly deluded, but that didn't mean they all were.The stories had to have originated from somewhere.So many accounts from so many cultures.There had to be some basis in fact.Someone must have succeeded.And it was so close.A stretch away.All he had to do was break the chord.Doctors did it every day.Umbilical chords.That's what it'd be like.A brief moment of pain and then freedom.Or death.What if he couldn't reconnect to his body? What if the membrane was essential to the process? He'd be cast out, a ghost, sucked up into the first bright white light and scattered to the eleven horizons.He had to stop the experiment, go back, it was too dangerous to continue.But if he didn't try.This was his last hope, his edge, turn away now and he might never get the chance again [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]