Heart of Stone (4 page)

Tyra reeled back, breaking the
connection and starring at the rock in disbelief. “It’s
alive!”

Simon chuckled. “Very much so.
Actually everything is ‘alive’ as you call it but Thex didn’t start
out as that piece of rock, he was once a living breathing man like
me. Let me have a word with him for a sec”. He walked over to the
the crystal and rested his forehead against it for a moment or two
then moved away. “Try again now”.

The rock’s a him?
Tyra reached her hand out again to touch the rock,
closed her eyes again remade the connection in her mind. “Hello
Thex?”

A little less anger seemed
to roll through her mind this time.
“At
least say my name right, it’s a ‘th’ as in ‘those’ not a ‘th’ as in
‘thing’ and I’m sorry”
said the voice in
her head “
I’ve been trapped in here a
very, very long time. I've been waiting for you since you were
born. I’ve wanted you from that moment but everyone, first Simon
and then Jack and Annie, kept telling me to wait, to wait.
All-spirit do they have any idea of how long I’ve
waited?
”

“
I, um...” Her mum had met
Thex? Tyra was so lost for words to express how she felt, talking
to a rock, she ended up with only questions. “I didn’t know, I’m
sorry, what do you want from me, how can I help?”

“
You are the prophesied
one who can free me. I just need you to love me Tyra, love me and
accept me, please
”. The man’s plea tore at
Tyra’s soul.

“
I don't see how love alone
is going to free you. You're the one aren't you that's been in my
dreams my whole life. I certainly have affection for you even if I
wouldn't go as far as calling it love but I don't see how any of
that is going to get you out of that rock”.

Simon thinks there is a
way. It was long ago foretold that humans would be born with
compassion so strong that they could release us but first they
would need to liberate themselves and learn to love us.

Simon and Tyra stayed with
Thex for a while, Tyra getting to know him a bit and Simon having a
discussion with him she wasn’t privy to. Thex’s final words to Tyra
had been to “
surrender yourself to Simon's
teaching. You have much to learn, and I’m being selfish when I say
the sooner you learn the better for me, please Tyra.”
When they left Tyra had very damp eyes.

Back upstairs in the kitchen Simon
leaned against the cupboard. He had the handgun back in his hand.
“We need to go into town. I need to work tonight and we need to
sort out about your guns. There are times that I might need to be
elsewhere and you’ll need to be able to protect yourself”. He
winced. “Unfortunately they got to your uncle when I was last away.
I felt his terror but came back too late.” He let out a deep sigh
then handed the gun to Tyra. “This is a Walther PPK, made famous I
believe by a certain fictional spy. It takes a nine millimetre
round and has the advantage that the front sight and the trigger
guard aren’t likely to catch on clothing if you have to pull it out
of an inside pocket quickly. It will kill at close range. Make sure
you have it on you at ALL times”.

Tyra felt the weight of the gun in her
hand, not too heavy. “I have a gun license for a basic shotgun and
rifle for vermin control but nothing like this or the amount of
weapons that must be in that safe. The police are going to say I
don’t have an adequate reason for them”.

Simon nodded. “That’s why we need to
go into Boswell, we’ll give them a reason.”

“
And report last night,”
Tyra could hardly forget her fright from the evening
before.

“
We won’t because the cops
can’t touch ‘them’, and it would be dangerous for them to even try.
We’ll go to the pub instead”.

Tyra raised her eyebrows, she still
didn’t even know who ‘them’ was, but she was starting to get a
sense of Simon’s character and guessed he’d only explain further
when he felt like it.

Tyra thought Simon would have zapped
himself into town rather than ride with her in the car but he
seemed happy enough to be a passenger. She put the Sube into low
gear and kept the revs up, vaguely remembering her four-wheel
driving instructor having once said that these 4WD station wagons
didn’t have a lot of torque low down. Although none of the car
nerds she’d ever met seemed to be able to explain exactly what
torque was. She secretly expected they didn’t really know either.
Once she got going she kept a steady pace until they were up and
out of the crater. Whether by Simon’s mental powers or luck the
trip out wasn’t too bad. She’d have to look at getting a better
track benched into the hill, whatever that would cost she didn’t
want to think about right now.

“
Simon, I’ve had a
recurring nightmare all my life. Not about me but about a gorgeous
man with long fine braids of blue black hair. That’s
Thex?”

“
You know it
is.”

“
Oh come on please, what
about a bit of ‘what-when-why’?”

“
A hundred thousand years
ago, more or less, a species of being that was trapped between the
planes of existence wanted out. We think they might have been the
souls of some of the more evolved dinosaur predators that roamed
your earth before an asteroid hit them 650,000 years ago. Most life
reincarnated into equivalent animal forms but possibly not all.
Life in The Between probably isn’t that great so we guess it was a
case of the grass being very much greener on the other side.
They’re basically egoistic greed driven creatures but they didn’t
want to suffer on the plane of existence below them, which is where
they really belong, so they went to the next level above instead.
Over time they had evolved in The Between and developed technology.
They found a way to use a substance called dark light, a kind of
anti-light if you will, to create doorways to this plane. They have
more of an affinity with the mineral world than they do plant or
animal life. Your world and others like it were rich in durable
minerals and pretty gems so they decided that this part of the
universe would be a good place ‘set up shop’, build an empire and
have a life of luxury. They hid so well on your planet that most of
your kind have never suspected they even exist, except very early
on when they openly posed as gods. Thex and his team tried to stop
them from entering your plane of existence in the first place or at
the very least to engage them in battle and force them back to
where they came from. The Din as we call them used one of their
dark light portals to enter directly onto Thex’s ship and they also
used a variant of the same technology to trap Thex and his
surviving crew members in a form of matter from which they were
unable to use their mental powers to escape from.”

“
So where do I come
in?”

“
There’s a prophecy that
says that ‘the heart of stone by love be freed’.”

“
So I have to fall in love
with him or something?”

“
Not in the limited human
sense of love. Our love is one of total acceptance of another, an
acceptance so deep we do not try to change the other. We don’t try
and own, possess or control each other like most human spouses do.
We enjoy the outer personality and container of the person as a
unique and temporary expression of the all-spirit and honour it as
such. Although to be perfectly frank our lives are not quite as
temporary as yours. At the same time we acknowledge that the
eternal all-spirit within each of us is one and the same. Our true
love is when we love another person literally as part of ourselves
and we don’t necessarily limit it to one person as your kind often
do”.

Tyra frowned “But why me? Couldn’t one
of you have done that? And let’s be honest here, the guy seems nice
but how am I going to make myself love him? Most of all, how is all
that going to free him from the stone?”

“
To be perfectly honest we
don’t know why it needs a human although the development of
compassion is one the key lessons of this plane and we believe it's
what's needed to get him and the others free. Many of us have come
and tried to connect with the trapped but while we can love them it
doesn’t seem to be enough to reascend them out of their current
form back into their true form. I did the ritual of union with Thex
but to no avail, although our minds are now linked most of the time
and he has experienced much of this world through me. When I first
had the prophecy...”

“
Whoa up there! You’re the
one who had the prophecy? You’re the boy in my dream?”

Simon simply nodded, he wasn’t one to
spend time confirming the obvious. “Thex’s father asked me to do a
follow up prophecy. What I got was pictures instead of words. The
all-spirit showed me seven humans, on the brink of ascension from
their own plane of existence, who would learn our ways of love,
find enlightenment and liberate both themselves and the trapped. It
showed me a way. I’ve been waiting thousands upon thousands of
years for you humans to get your act together and reach the point
you could help us. Humans nearly evolved to that point twelve
thousand years ago when the last global culture reached its peak.
They were mostly coastal sea-going people, living throughout the
ice free tropics and subtropics. They all but got wiped out when
the climate warmed. All thanks to the enemy messing with this
planet’s ionosphere so that they could have a planet warmer to
their lizard liking. When the temperature reached a critical
threshold point a sudden mass melting of the glaciers flooded most
of the urban areas of the time under a couple of hundred feet of
water and silt. Human civilization only recently re-evolved to the
necessary stage, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, about the same
time most humans started realising that the planet’s resources were
running out and that both the biosphere and the world economy were
on borrowed time.”

“
But Simon, or is it
Shimon, I’m just a soon to be retired librarian. If you wanted an
enlightened person you should have gone looking for a sage in India
or Tibet or maybe some new-ager in California. I wouldn’t have the
faintest idea of how to achieve what you want from me.”

“
You can call me Simon,
it's a more modern name that your culture relates to easier. I was
named Shimon as I can at times hear the will of the all-spirit,
Shimon simply means one who hears. Liberating yourself it isn’t
something you ‘achieve’, in fact quite the opposite. We need to
undo you. As for love, you don’t fall into it, you simply remove
the blockages in in its way. If you will accept me (he emphasised
the ‘accept’) I will guide you.”

They both lapsed into thought for the
rest of the trip into town.

Tyra wondered how you go about
‘undoing’ a person. She’d finally gotten some information but she
wasn’t liking it. She felt like she was being set up to fail big
time. Maybe Simon was getting alzheimers in his old age, after all
100,000 years was an awfully long time to remember a prophecy. She
peered intently down the road.

In the passenger seat Simon did his
best to refrain from laughing as he read Tyra’s thoughts. For Simon
time was just another mental construct.

Sergeant Michael Wilson looked up from
his desk and groaned. “Simon, to what do I owe the
misfortune...”

“
Oh, don’t be like that
Michael. I happened to hear those government money grubbers down
south were cutting funding for the town’s youth centre and thought
I might help out”. Simon handed Michael a fairly thick unsealed
envelope.

Michael looked inside the envelope and
drew breath, a frown wrinkling his brow. “That would certainly keep
the centre going for the kids but I’ve got to ask you Simon, this
is not a bribe for anything is it?”

Simon straightened himself as if
insulted. “Now Michael, if I’d asked for something then given it to
you that would be a bribe but I’ve asked nothing and given it to
you so it must be a gift mustn't it?”.

Michael, still frowning dubiously at
the envelope, as if it would leap up and bite him at any moment,
pushed it to the side of his desk for further consideration. He
tilted his head in Tyra’s direction “You haven’t introduced
me.”

“
Tyra Aguila Goodwin this
is Sergeant Michael Wilson, our only and much overworked law
enforcement in the town.

Michael extended his hand, firmly
grasping Tyra’s hand. “Pleased to meet you Tyra, I’m sorry about
your uncle. The CIB are stilling looking into the case but I have
to admit it has us puzzled. There hasn’t been any DNA found on the
body or at the site it was found. Nothing that would indicate who
or even what did it. Forensics will take another look but it
doesn’t look hopeful. Are you planning to sell Jack’s place or move
into our tiny little town?”

Tyra shrugged her shoulders, “I don’t
know yet. I just thought I’d better come up and see what needed
sorting out here. Mum’s looking after the funeral and the transfer
of the family’s trust which Jack administered. I found a gun safe
at Uncle Jack’s cabin and hoped I could transfer them into my name
rather than hand them in.”

“
Hmm”, Michael considered
her for a moment. “Do you have a gun license?”

“
Yes, here you go”, Tyra
placed the card on the sergeant's desk.