Unlike her alter-ego she was naked and covered in a sticky fluid as if she was newly born and for a brief moment she felt dismayed as she realised she was without hair. But the incredible wash of sensation buoyed her up, jolting her with savage portents of freedom. She could do what ever she liked and nobody could stop her, not her school teachers, her father or Moonbeam.
She gazed agog at her father’s lover, who in kind gaped in stunned silence, obviously shaken by this new apparition, naked and bold; at Paul, who had betrayed her and at her other self, weak and frightened. Amanda was fearful but she had her fear under control. The hatred for Moonbeam smouldered and burnt inside but it was not sensible to attack now.
Calmly she picked up the knife and walked towards Camilla. Here was a strong woman who knew what she wanted, albeit dressed like a company executive.
For a moment her cool evaporated when she turned to face the looking-glass. The mirror was now a doorway into a colossal chamber lit by red sunlight-mysterious and exotic. It was only a few seconds before she rallied and looked to Camilla for guidance. Amanda was ready to kill the cat, torture it if need be to proof her worth and escape from the clutches of normality and boredom. She felt a twinge of loss when she thought about her father. She loved him but he was too much under the influence of his soppy new-age girlfriend-drawing away from the decadent and the satanic.
But the woman from The Order of the Arboreal Orb was not interested in completing the initiation ceremony. She immediately stepped through the mirror into the peculiar vestibule. Amanda using all the daring that had been instilled in her since she was an infant followed, she did not even look back at Paul, Moonbeam and her other self. It was as if these people had nothing more to do with her, feeble characters who no longer had dominion over her.
She was convinced this was the right direction, the pathway guiding her to the secrets of Ashbury Manor. Of course she was scared, but a decision had to be made and she knew it was the correct one.
There was no friction when she stepped through the looking glass, nothing that clung to her or hindered her egress; it was as if she was walking through an open door.
Once she stood within the chamber the humidity was palpable, bringing a sweat to her body. It was like entering on a mild spring day one of the tropical greenhouses at Kew Gardens. Assailed by an overwhelming odour of rotting vegetation, of arboreal growth and decay, she stood on the sloping floor, made up of slabs of stone, tinged with a thin layer of green moss and the diseased yellow of fungus. She gazed around her in wonder.
The next few minutes passed in a blur of horror as Lucius Peake as if sleepwalking passed through the mirror and was attacked by a dog sized insect. It issued from a hole in the centre of a mosaic depicting a giant eye, laid out at the bottom of the dip in the floor. The creature having smeared its three proboscises into Douglas’s eyes and mouth, somehow controlling his movements directly through his brain, forced him back into the library. But he soon emerged dragging a screaming and kicking Moonbeam.
Held tightly around the stomach by Lucius’ well-muscled arms, shrieking uncontrollable, her limbs flailing in all directions, Moonbeam was turned towards the imperious figure of Camilla, who stared intently at the struggling woman. Immediately Moonbeam’s turbulent movements and high pitched screeching ceased as the two women’s eyes meet. The zombie form then lowered the inert but free standing body to the ground and backed off. Her shape was as still as a statue as she stood in front of Camilla, her eyes wide-open but vacant.
A brief smile of triumph crossed Amanda’s face as she witnessed the subjection of her enemy, now under the control of the business woman. She marvelled at the way Camilla had complete power over Moonbeam, thinking at the same time what she could do with such powers.
“How do you do that,” she whispered, after the shock of the last few minutes had worn off. She looked around in bewilderment as the unreality of the situation crept up on her again
“You need years of practice in the arts of domination before you can master supremacy over another. There are limitations though. For instance I can make her move forward, stop and sit.”
As she said these words, Moonbeam walked a few steps, sat, stood up, turned and moved back to the position she had started from.
“I can even get this hippy to eat meat.”
Taking a sausage roll from her pocket Camilla passed it to Moonbeam, who expressionlessly began to munch on the morsel.
“For ultimate control, for getting the powerless to carry out complex tasks, you need the Arboreal Forms as intermediaries.”
Camilla pointed to the creature that had once been Lucius Peake. His limbs twitched sporadically as the tiny organic tendrils beneath the skin of his face and arms flexed.
So many questions to ask thought Amanda, as she swivelled around, taking in once more the immense cathedral sized space.
“Where in hell are we,” she managed to say at last.
Camilla smiled with bleak humour. “Ashbury Manor of course, the real Ashbury Manor, but you can call it Hell if you like, many do. For us it is a playground, a place of opportunity, but above all it is a terminus for other destinations.”
There was a pause in which time Amanda heard a sound, a susurration, almost inaudible, issuing from the huge archway.
“This chamber, if you were religiously inclined, you might call Hell’s Gate,” Camilla continued. “But plenty of time for questions later. We must make haste; a long and arduous journey awaits us.”
Striding purposefully up the slope, away from the eye mosaic, Camilla made for the entrance that yawned cavernously. Amanda, slightly out of breath after climbing the incline, Lucius and Moonbeam behind, could only see a few meters into the tunnel, whose towering uneven walls, enveloped in green fronds and vines, were lit by the red illumination of the sunlight. But beyond was only darkness.
The massive stone columns, thirty or forty meters high and ten meters thick, standing on either side, slicked with a mysterious amber fluid, were like two gigantic redwoods, making her head spin as she stretched her neck to get a better look. The portico supported by the columns was just as immense; a solid slab of stone carved to resemble the eye of a malevolent god. The craftsmanship was otherworldly but still infected with the ubiquitous vegetation.
An unbearable odour of vegetable rot gushed from the black entrance, making Amanda gag. But it was not only this preventing her from following Camilla.
Crawling and shuffling obscenely on every surface within, were a multitude of cockroaches. On closer inspection, as one of the creatures perambulated towards her feet, she saw they were smaller versions of the insectile beast attached to Lucius. Their bodies were composed of tiny, wriggling, worm-like organic strands of many colours. in ceaseless motion. There was a wide variety of bodily forms; some had no legs and moved like slugs, others had an endless array like millipedes, some had thin elongated bodies and others were broad and fat; their dimensions ranged from the size of small rats to tiny specks. But all consumed Amanda with a gut wrenching revulsion.
“Oh God, I’m not going in there,” she said.
Camilla, who had turned around as she was about to be enveloped in darkness, stared long and hard; a penetrating look suddenly filled with hostility. But just as quickly the hostility faded to be replaced by wry amusement.
“Come on. Don’t let a few bugs upset you.”
As Amanda stood in silence considering her next move, the abundance of plant life began to emit a faint emerald glow, lighting the interior with a green luminescence.
What was revealed staggered her. A corridor of vast proportions, the angled lines of the walls, the souring buttresses and arches of the roof, as elaborate as a gothic cathedral, stretching into a dark distance; warped, transformed by alien foliage, an undergrowth of exotic forms. Diseased but multicoloured toadstools the size of houses clung parasitically to shattered pillars, palm trees and massive ferns clustered everywhere, even growing on the buttresses; black and purple coloured hanging moss fell from the arches like shrouds or funereal curtains.
By now the emerald tinge revealing the corridor was complemented by the radiance of the other plants, a rich decadent colouration, a mixture of purples, reds and greens. For a while as she stared transfixed, she was puzzled by a constant rippling movement of the bizarre flora, until with a jolt she understood. The motion was caused by thousands upon thousands of the Arboreal Forms, swarming on every leaf and bough.
“Beautiful isn’t it. Probably the greatest single creation ever devised by mankind, total genius,” said Camilla as she nonchalantly strolled down an aisle running down the middle of the growth infected edifice.
Beautiful was an understatement, thought Amanda as, mustering her will power, she walked on. Lucius had picked up the comatose form of Moonbeam like a monster in an old B-movie and tagged along behind her, the three figures walking in single file.
The insects or Arboreal Forms as Camilla called them inexplicably kept off the main path, strewn with broken brickwork and mixed with pods, seeds and strange fruit. Instead they massed on the gigantic stems and trunks crowding densely at the edges. Over their heads along entangled branches, vines and creepers, they swarmed like the massed ranks of army ants. It was difficult to see the trees and plants close up beneath the clouds of diverse bodies, but when there were gaps Amanda was shocked to see human faces; arms and legs encased in thick bark or the skin of fungus.
She stopped in her tracks, her mouth open in disbelieve, ready to run back the way she had come.
Camilla had disappeared behind a turn in the path and Lucius had stopped, so controlling her repulsion of the myriad, crawling entities with great difficulty, she stepped, very carefully, to the side.
The creatures undulated, swayed, climbed on each other to get away from her as if she was sprayed with some extremely powerful insect repellent. Mystified by this immunity but very grateful all the same, she reached out her hand to the nearest trunk, the tiny beasts spilling away like a wave.
The gnarled convoluted bark was revealed and something else too, a head half submerged, one eye covered in the knotty wood, the other twitching uncontrollable and a mouth also moving but spasmodically, chocked with rotting flora. An arm jerked imploringly, almost catching hold of Amanda, but she moved instinctively, stifling a gasp of dismay.
“Camilla!”
At the sound of her cry, Camilla returned, a look of impatience on her face. Amanda waited for her to arrive, watching in disgust as the Arboreal Forms flowed back, engulfing the head and arm.
“There is a person trapped in the tree,” she said pointing at the spot.
“Ah, so you have noticed the victims of Ashbury Manor,” Camilla said grinning to herself. “You will find Sarah Boswell here somewhere and the unfortunate William Barrett. The architecture is sustained by the nutrients of their suffering; without them the whole building would collapse.”
“Jeez, it’s so sick!”
“Look here young woman, if you don’t like it you can return home now to your daddy. You don’t want to give up the greatest opportunity you could possible have, do you?”
Her instincts were telling her to flee but Camilla’s commanding tone was stronger. The realisation that she had passed her initiation gave her a sudden unexpected stab of pride.
She was now a bono fide member of the Order of the Arboreal Orb, the most secretive, exclusive occult society in the world. Everything around her was frightening, extremely perplexing but also strikingly gorgeous; a decadent verdure of pain but also of exuberant life.
“No I suppose I don’t, but I have so many questions. Is it possible to ask them while we walk?” Amanda replied after a long pause.
“No, I need to think. Plenty of time later for questions.”
Gritting her teeth she continued after the business woman. Another thought came to her then, a disturbing one. What if rather then a member of the Order she was a willing dupe, being lead blindly on by Camilla to her doom, a victim like all the others.
She was beginning to become aware of other trapped bodies in the undergrowth, a shaking limb here, a sheet of skin mottled with parasitic growths over there. One figure was not as encased in vegetable matter as the others. His arms were held tight behind his back and his feet were swallowed by the thick rind of a tropical fern, whose overarching greenery scraped the roof. The flowing stream of Arboreal Forms moved over him like a current and the man’s mouth opened wide suddenly and a form like a centipede scrambled out. A groan of inarticulate suffering escaped his mouth and his anguished eyes locked onto Amanda’s.
Nausea twisted her stomach and she retched. Turning her head away she forced herself to focus on the back of Camilla’s retreating blue jacket. But still the insidious idea she was a mere tool, a useful fool, destined to end up in this hellish jungle or some other horrific place, played on her mind.
For a moment she envied her other self safe behind the mirror in the cosy everyday world.
Using all the reserves of will she had at her disposal she carried on walking. There was no going back she thought, no way of back tracking. She knew deep down she was committed to her task, first to learn from Camilla, to uncover awful and dreadful knowledge and then to raise through the ranks of the Order of the Arboreal Orb, gaining power. So what if weak and pathetic individuals ended up as victims, their pain and misery used as an energy source for this succulent decadent beauty. It was worth it. Hadn’t she always thought this way, weren’t the beliefs her father held in his Satanist period the same, weren’t the messages of the books she read, the films she watched, the lyrics of the music she listened to saying the same thing?
“Stop being a loser and get on with living,” she muttered, striding with more purpose, but keeping her eyes firmly fixed on the path ahead. The knife she still held in her hand she griped tighter.
Before long the infested nave came to its end in another soaring arch of gothic stone, every conceivable form of clinging and parasitical plant dangling like organic drapes from its edges. Amanda passed underneath still marvelling at the luxuriant and exotically coloured foliation, the bright red and yellow flowers like gaping mouths with shifting stamens, the giant purple mushrooms sprouting everywhere, but she tried to keep her eyes away from the trapped men and women immersed in vegetation.
Camilla was waiting for her in an even larger space beyond the archway, its walls forming a circle hundreds of metres high topped by a glass dome held together by black iron girders as thick as tree trunks. Looking up at it, Amanda felt dizzy so immense did it seem, high above her like the sky itself. This chamber the size of a small town made her feel tiny and insignificant like a house would appear to a fly.
There was less vegetation here then the previous ‘room’ but the gigantic scale of the trees growing here compensated for their lack in numbers. Lumpy branches of contorted wood issued from the bulbous black trunks, similar to banyan trees, and undulated over the iron girders, drooping sickly green tendril-like leaves into the dizzying heights. It was possible that it was all one tree so interwoven were the trunks and branches.
But the arena like space in between was free of organic life except where the roots of the trees broke the surface of crumbling stone to form humps and hillocks of bark. All was illuminated softly in an eerie emerald light coming from two moons or planets floating in a starless void seen through the glass dome, their surfaces tinted green as if infected with gangrene.
With a feeling of relieve, Amanda realised she could not see any of the Arboreal Forms in this enormous space. But just as she was relaxing, a movement across one of the branches spanning the dome made her flinch. She could not help but look in the direction of the scuttling movement and she gasped. The form was indistinct in the faint light but its sheer bulk loomed high above her, an Arboreal Form that had to be at least eight meters in length straddling the branch with its multiple limbs. Once this shape had been discerned, other shadowy forms, hulking and insectile, could be seen in the undergrowth, high above her head and in the distant trees.
It was difficult keeping up with Camilla, so fast did she walk, striding ahead as if she was late for a business appointment. She was heading straight towards an oblong arch on the left discernable between the looming trees. Vast carved symbols, hieroglyphics of obscure and sinister meaning, had been chiselled around its architrave, there occult significance intimidating and overwhelming.
Sweat covered her body as she ran to keep up with the older woman, her heart beating faster with the exertion, but she looked around her with the same appalled fascination as before. She saw other gaping entrances, one far away directly behind her and a gigantic cavern of an entrance facing the one they had left. It was obscured by distance and the undergrowth sprouting from the strange trees.
She noticed that the floor of the immense hall was decorated in faded colours, each slab of coloured stone representing a piece of an ancient and root ruptured jigsaw, a picture so big that she could not make any sense of it. But she passed over fragments, depictions of hideous mouthparts, reptilian scales, deformed human faces and eyes, thousands of eyes, humanoid but all with the stare of insanity.
Catching up with Camilla, the business woman unexpectedly stopped in her tracks and faced Amanda, who tried to control her fast and rapid breathing, wiping sweat away from her forehead. The loping gorilla like form of Lucius with the inert body of Moonbeam cradled in his alien controlled arms came up to them. Camilla was giving Amanda one of her wry humourless smiles, staring in all directions and for a few minutes there was silence in which could be heard the displacement of foliage by the gargantuan forms overhead.
“It’s not fair to keep you totally in the dark,” said Camilla, breaking the silence. “This place is the hub, the hallway where the corridors branch off to the different rooms and chambers of Ashbury Manor. The Manor as constructed by George Browne, an architectural genius if ever there was one, is a representation of the Ten Universes. Each room symbolises an actual emanation or sphere of the Arboreal Orb with doors exiting onto those spheres. The one we are standing in is the Earth or Earths, the lowest and lease perfect of the emanations.”
“Over there,” she pointed towards the oblong arch, “is the beginning of the Corridor of the Future, where every possibility has a doorway leading to it. And that way is the entrance to the Corridor of the Past.” Her finger indicated the other far-off archway.
“Our destination is a future where the Order of the Arboreal Orb commands and controls.” Camilla began to walk, turning her back on Amanda.
“But where does that go?”
Amanda had her eyes on the gaping black wound that opened up cavernously at the head of this preternatural hall, a dark hole that seemed to have been broken into the very fabric of reality; and something beyond imagining, beyond comprehension lurked there in abysmal darkness, a thing that moved like a spider.
“That is the gateway to the other Nine Universes, to the Arboreal Orb itself. For us to attempt to enter would entail our consumption by Mogoloth, The Devourer of Souls, that guards the path. We would spend eternity in its labyrinthine innards, slowly, very slowly decomposing in its digestive juices.”
After these words had been spoken the older woman moved on again, her face set in an inscrutable mask and Lucius shuffled forward following the silent command of the entity that had absorbed his brain, knocking Amanda aside and sending her sprawling onto the hard stone floor.
The fall jolted her from her trance of horror and wonderment and was replaced instantly with simple humiliation. Without much thought except embarrassment she quickly sprang to her feet and ran as fast as she could, past the shambling zombie with its human baggage (with an inward jolt, equal to the force of the fall, Amanda finally comprehended that Lucius was no longer Lucius but a tool made of flesh) and slowed down only when she reached Camilla.
They passed under the arch and found themselves in a corridor only eleven or twelve meters in width and the same in height, but whose length stretched into an impenetrable expanse of distance. The first few kilometres were lit with the ubiquitous green glow emitted from the foliage clinging to the walls, plant life just as exotic as the rest. Arboreal Forms, not huge like those in the oversized domed hall they had left but relatively small, crawled and slithered abhorrently.
Further and further on they went and she began to see a pattern emerging in the endless corridor. After what seemed hours of walking but was probably a fraction of that time, when the nauseating vegetable stink had lost its power due it its constant presence, they came at regular intervals to glass domed atriums, strange skies seen through the iron ribbed glass; night time skies crowded with scintillating jewelled constellations and outlandish moons, or just a cold void, an absence of all light; and daytime skies with red coloured dying suns or unbelievably intense orbs of scorching light ready to explode. In each atrium there was a rounded cavity in the floor like a well sunk into the earth surrounded by a low brick wall. An opening in the wall led to an iron ladder leading downward to a tiny pinprick of light, far, far below.
Her eyes were turned to the porthole shaped windows on both sides, the size of giant transparent plates, framed with riveted steel. The supernaturally thick glass was tinged green with lichen and moss, but the spellbinding landscapes they revealed made Amanda stare with shock and amazement.
Rolling dunes through one window extended to distant mountains as black as night like lowering storm clouds, jagged with rocky peaks and pinnacles. But these dunes were not made of tiny grains of sand but faceted crystals heaped like pirate treasure on an immense scale, covering everything. They blazed with multi-coloured light, reflected sunlight, blinding Amanda briefly. Smashed structures, ruined buildings like skyscrapers, reared above the crystal sand, victims of some unimaginable apocalypse, deserted and eroded by the constant wind induced movement of the jewel-like grains.
An impenetrable rainforest crowded against another window in another atrium. A huge slab of concrete, a few paces off down an incline of a prominence, could be seen through the sail sized ferns and entangled undergrowth, covered in bright red tubular blooms and exotic green and purple plants. The block with broad metal wires sticking out of its uneven top was the vestige of a massive construction long since collapsed and overtaken by the propagating forest.
By now Amanda was so used to frightful wonders that when a dog sized insect similar to a grasshopper crawled from behind the concrete bloke she was only mildly surprised.
Camilla hardly said a word, striding determinedly forward. Questions about what she was seeing crowded Amanda’s mind but she felt too intimated by Camilla’s brisk movements to put them into words. But once Camilla did offer an explanation.
“What you see are possible futures. We are making our way to one particular future. Now hurry along, please.”
Amanda had lost all track of time, her legs were aching, sweat soaked her body and the marvels on each side of her were now mere blurs in her mind. She began to wonder if they were ever going to stop. But just when she was ready to complain they came to a halt in one particular atrium.
Resting on the circular wall around the lip of the hole in the floor, she caught her breath and stared at the oval window.
The landscape beyond was oddly familiar, a river seen from above as if the window was set into a high tower. The wide fast moving river had broken its original banks, submerging non-descript housing beneath its waters. Palms grow along the bank and bunched together at certain places in between more decrepit looking houses; houses Amanda recognised as normal English suburban dwellings but gone to seed. Tropical weeds and plants sprang from the small gardens with washing stretched on lines waiting to dry. The few carts pulled by malnourished horses moving slowly on the cracked and crumbling roads looked ramshackle. Above it hung a blazing yellow sun.
“Now give me the knife. This is where we say goodbye to Ashbury Manor,” said Camilla, sitting next to Amanda on the wall and staring straight ahead at the humid land through the glass. “And hello to our future.”
After Amanda had given the knife to her, Camilla got up and looked intently at Lucius: The thing on his head pulsed gently and he clumped to the iron ladder. He draped the prone Moonbeam over his broad shoulders and began to descend the well-like cavity. She swung herself over the edge and followed the zombie, leaving Amanda to stare down into the vertiginous depths.
The rounded brick walls went on and on into the blackness, the hardy outlandish vines and creepers managing to cling precariously to its sides, until at the bottom could be detected a tiny prick of illumination. Amanda’s stomach flipped and she felt dizzy standing on the edge, her eyes fixated on the sheer drop. Eventually Camilla’s voice echoed up to her like a cry of a demon from the pit.
“Come on, we haven’t got all day and don’t worry-it’s only half a mile down.”
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