A moment later, the drawing began.
The skin underneath the perimeter
of glass was lifted somehow, and with it, a slight anchor for his
diminishing awareness was cast. It was a tenuous thread, but it was
there, and Brian clung to it with a desperate slippery hope.
Another
pop
of a
match, and another slightly chilly circle was placed on the
opposite side of his spine, and he this time he could feel the heat
at the cente, before his flesh was pulled up in a little
hemisphere.
The anchor for his consciousness was more than
doubled; the two circles seemed to complete a circuit for the
energy that had been eating away at him to flow through, and he
felt the currents start to circulate around his spine—still not
going very far, he could very clearly feel the blockages below—but
with the flow came a palpably stronger link to awareness.
Cups. He was now alert enough to
realize that this was the Chinese healing treatment he’d vaguely
read about, where glass bowls of varying sizes were placed on the
skin (
and isn’t flame involved
somehow?
he wondered). He remembered it
had something to do with the flow of chi –ki in the Japanese
tradition—through the body’s meridians—a chart he remembered from a
shiatsu class in college flashed into his head, lines of force
traveling like a roadmap across a human torso, and with that
memory, the glass circles on his back seemed to pulse, as if the
recognition of their purpose added to their power.
The cups were now aligning the full length of his
spine, and he had a strange image of himself as some sort of
stegosaurus as imagined by Tesla, with glass and fleshy bumps
filled with energy that seemed to crackle between them traveling up
and down his body. The blocks that that woman had sensed were
painfully obvious now, like dark holes in his back contrasting with
the glowing force of the energy flow. He could hear the voices more
clearly now around him as well, Sullivan and the Woman and two
others, a man and a woman, who were discussing… kitty litter?
“Yes, we found that Zot really needed to have his
own… ah, the patient stirs.” The new woman’s voice suddenly shifted
from conversational to a more intense directness. “Brian. Please do
not move. I am Elyse, and my partner Alan and I are trying to open
channels of ki which have been twisted and blocked during your
ordeal.” She paused. “I can tell you’re aware of the flow right
now. Softening the blocks will be… difficult for you.”
Another voice, male this time, came from his other
side. “Brian, I’m Alan. We’re going to begin trying to work through
this in a moment. Your part will be to breathe, to move the air
through your body and add its force to ours.” The voice paused, and
Brian could hear the gravity of concern through the soft tone.
“It’s going to be very hard, Brian. Just remember, as we work
through it, that the energy wants to be free, and so it is actually
trying to help us.” Another pause, then “… no matter what it feels
like.”
With that, Brian felt their hands each touch one of
globes, towards the middle of his back, and the energy cousing
between them began to expand, bands growing thicker, edging closer
to the dark blockages… and then they touched, and Brian
screamed.
The pain was tiered in distinct levels. There was
the point at which the energy met the darkness, which drove like a
spike into his flesh, a raw kind of tearing sensation as the energy
eroded and broke against the black twists. At the same time the
energy was trying to find other routes of escape, and each of the
points where his skin was drawn up into the cups felt like a
miniature volcano, bubbling and seething with a vicious
determination to explode into bloody release.
Then there was the burning. It covered his skin,
making it feel as though it were being ripped off as a single piece
in every direction from his body, a million pricks of flame flaying
him simultaneously. This pain didn’t pulse or ebb as the others
did; this one simply manifest at a level of excruciation. And began
to rise from there.
Brian’s hoarse scream was cut off suddenly as Elyse
and Alan slid the globes in their hands softly along his spine, and
the energy was pushed even more strongly into the tangles of
darkness that seemed to eat into his flesh like acid. He floated in
the shock of new pain, trying to find something to hold on to and
keep the pain from driving him into the madness that he felt
gibbering up inside. Everywhere his mind went, though, only brought
him back to the pain that suffused him. There was no way to do
anything more than draw another shuddering breath and try to scream
through the agony.
Then he felt a soft line drawn across his palm, and
instinctively he grabbed it, twisting his wrist in a circle to
grasp the loop of rope that Sullivan had given him more tightly. A
bright line of energy cut through the wash of pain surrounding him,
and instantly he could feel every inch along the length of rope, as
it looped around his hands and flowed out to… to the strong hands
of Sullivan, loops flowing over his palms and across the backs of
his hands, and again the rope moved out to… to the woman’s hands,
this time, the Wiccan that Brian didn’t know the name of yet.
But as he felt her hands on the
rope, as his mind’s eye expanded with it to where it met her skin,
he knew her far more deeply and intimately than if he’d spent hours
with her. It was not about the collection of facts and statistics
that normally make up a person’s identity, the things he felt were
far more important than that. He could feel
her
, and with it came her peaceful
strength and determination to help heal him.
He drew on that strength, pulling it back along the
woven rope, past Sullivan’s hands again, which also added their raw
and wild power to him, with an unspoken but very clear “Go get ‘em,
tiger” added.
Brian came back from the momentary respite to his
body, to the pain, to the twisting shadows that had been planted by
the ‘pressors and Vashte’s mistake. The pain was greater than
before; Elyse and Alan had managed to erode the dark knots until
they were hard, unyielding balls of roiling pain, smaller but still
blocking the flow of energies between the glass cups with their
tiny draws of flesh. Though he couldn’t see it, Brian’s flesh under
the cups was now a dark and angry purple, the flesh close to
bursting from the energies that were drawing beneath it.
The pain was greater… but Brian
found that the strength he drew along the rope made his awareness
larger than the pain, larger than just the tortured vessel his body
had become. He looked at the darkness they were battling with an
awareness that was now dispassionately removed from the agonizing
sensation… and he saw, with a cold clarity, just how
wrong
they were. They
were ugliness incarnate, planted in his flesh by the Repressors and
their tools, and they offended him.
He got mad. He got to work.
His awareness poured around the
cups, diving into the lines of energies that they conducted, and
like a body surfer riding a wave he let the current carry him.
Instead of a soft beach, though, they were carrying him towards a
hard reef of coiled wrongness, that frustrated the sweet taste of
the
ki
seeking
release.
But his awareness could see the coils, could see
where they lay across each other and pulled their own darkness into
themselves… and it could shape into a fine spike of power, a pick
that drove into the first knot and sank between the coils like they
were soft wood, not all the way through but deep into them.
And the energy guided by Alan and
Elyse could feel that attack, and sensed a victory. The waves of ki
washed over Brian’s sharp awareness and worked it into the knot,
loosening it bit by bit, the darkness boiling inchoately with the
frustrated rage of being inexorably overcome. For Brian didn’t give
back any ground, simply worked forward through the knot, until
finally it dissolved in a silent roar of release as the
ki
surged up past it,
joining the line of current connecting the cups above, and again he
rode it, Alan and Elyse moving the cups to give him that extra
drive, this time going deeper into the next knot with the first
thrust. It took less time, not because the shadow twist was any
less deep but because the energy had increased exponentially as it
danced across and through his body.
The last two knots of painful darkness dissolved
almost at the first touch of Brian’s mind spike driving through
them with the roaring power now flowing freely through the cups.
The mounds of flesh under each glass globe were no longer a bright
purple, and the burning had subsided to a glowing warmth that
covered his sweat-covered skin and kept it from growing chill. As
the last ball of pain dissolved, he felt the now-unfettered energy
swirl through him, the pulse of the flow gradually merging with the
slow beat of his heart and the two disappearing within each other
just as he realized Alan and Elyse had removed the last of the cups
from his back.
He opened his eyes.
V
“You need a Focus.”
Brian looked up from the glass of Earl Grey at
Ada, the Wiccan priestess, who was seated on the floor cross-legged
in front of the plush couch he lay in. Sullivan sat next to him to
the left, one burly arm cast out behind Brian’s head. Elyse was on
his other side, her hand gently rubbing his arm, with Alan next to
her massaging her neck. The two healers had paid a price in tension
from the exertions of the evening, and back rubs had been exchanged
all around before Ada had called them all into the living room for,
as she put it, a War Council.
“I’m not trying to be a smartass, but just to be
sure: you’re not talking about a car, are you?”
She smiled. “No. A Focus in your particular branch
of the Path is a sort of funnel… no, that’s not right. An aiming
device, perhaps would be more accurate… a way for the energies
which you can create with your art to be sent through them towards
whatever task is necessary to be done.”
“What is it?”
“Better to ask
who
is it, unless you are the kind
of Man who objectifies that much.” Her voice held just the
slightest note of disapproval, and Brian found himself glad that he
was not that kind of Man, not at all. “Have you ever met a person
who, when they walk into a room, will make both men and women catch
their breath? The kind of person who can’t help but draw your eye,
your ear, your attention? Not the ones who seek it, through garish
decoration or expensive baubles; the ones who seem to do it without
trying.”
Brian thought immediately of an actor he’d known in
college, James Marqueson, a man with a deeply resonant voice and a
presence that had brought to life the both the roles on the stage
and the drama in his personal life. He recalled Marqueson’s
obliviousness to his effect on the opposite (and often the same)
sex. “Yeah, I’ve known some people like that. Lucky bastards.”
“Sometimes, perhaps. They often have more problems
than you would think, though. Imagine trying to find time to be
alone when everyone wants your company. Imagine trying to be
inconspicuous in a crowd when every eye is turned to you.”
“Regardless, those people are natural focal points
for the energy that you produce. Most of them end up in some field
that makes use of their natural draw for the public eye, whether it
be acting, educating, or politics.”
“The thing is, while the power you create is
immense, you can control it up to a certain point, but no further.
With the mark Vashte laid on you, your rope work will cause even
more Power to accumulate, and without a release and a direction to
send them, you’ll again become a target for the Repressors.”
“Couldn’t I just… not do rope
work? After all, I
do
have vanilla sex occasionally...”
“Could you? Of course that would be the easiest
answer. Look inside yourself; could you lead a fulfilled life
without ever using your weaving patterns again?”
Brian bowed his head again to his tea, and did as
she asked, looking into his own desires and needs… and finding a
true need to use the strands to weave round and through the others
he interacted with on that sort of level, to find that connection.
He tried to take it out, to push it aside, but even as it moved
within his mind it always came back.
He felt Sullivan’s hand tighten on his shoulder
sympathetically. “Don’t worry, bucko, it’s always that way when you
find a fetish. Hell, you have it easy; you can untie your knots and
start over. I’m eventually going to run out of skin to stick the
inky needle into.”
Alan reached over and patted his thigh. “Elyse and
I tried to be vanilla, what, dear, four separate times during our
relationship? We would throw away the shackles, rip up—oh, on one
occasion, we actually burned them—all our copies of Skin Two and
the Beauty books. We’d decide that this time we would meditate, do
yoga, try scrapbooking, anything to keep our filthy minds from
going back to that degrading nasty habit… ”
Elyse laughed and tousled her
husband’s hair, dyed a bright blue and contrasting with her
brilliant gold and purple locks. “Well,
you
did, dear, you were always the
stronger one. Me, I had a stash, always. And so,” she turned back
to Brian, “the pain of being in full lotus began to feel sweet, the
yoga began to be nude and pushing past the point of comfort, the
scrapbooks started becoming lined with black leather with little
chains bounding each of the pictures… and then one night it would
all come to a head, and he’d be happily spanking my ass while I
screamed and loved every minute of it. For some,” she looked at Ada
on the floor, who nodded, “it’s just a spice, an occasional foray
into their darker side. But for some of us, the darker side is not
a side that we can ever get away from, it is too much a part of us.
It is just the way our motherboards are wired.”