One Three One: A Time-Shifting Gnostic Hooligan Road Novel (28 page)

Even having become highly useful to Bugs Rabbit’s organisation had made no improvements to poor Jim’s wretched existence. Playing the muscleman Zampano, Jim Feather had been the surprise hit of
Gelsomania!
, Bugs’ musical adaptation of Fellini’s movie. But despite the musical’s continued success this past decade, still no permanent lodgings in Cágliari had been made available to Jim. Indeed, he’d been forced at one point to sleep in his own dressing room – creeping back with a skeleton key once the janitors had left for the night.

Kept out of sight except for his stage performances as Zampano and monitored by Bugs throughout press interviews, Jim had failed for years in his various attempts to contact friends or engage with sympathetic authorities. Eventually, hitting upon the notion that the media required a proper Sob Story, Jim had – at the end of an interview with a well-known freelance photo journalist – concocted a tale about needing a bone marrow transplant. Bugs had smelled a plot, but could hardly have told the journalist to keep such a human-interest story out of his report.
This
then was the news article which had gone around the world and which had been picked up by Jim’s long-lost twin brother Reverend Jim Featherian, an Armenian Pastor and himself a great bear of a man who was now sitting beside me itching to continue their tale.

Sitting squarely upon his ancient wooden dining chair – highly incongruous in these unpopulated brackenish pastures – the Reverend Jim took my hands in his own hands and stared smiling into my eyes. How happy he was to be here, to have discovered at last his lost twin. The Reverend was much larger, much
chunkier than his Native American brother. Still fixing my eyes with his own enlightened peepers, the Reverend leaned forward conspiratorially and continued.

How touched I was by this genuine bromance on to which I’d stumbled. How inspired each man was by this new permanence in his life. I lay back and listened as Jim Feather skinned up another big one.

But despite the power of their reunion, neither brother had yet had any bright ideas as to how they should now proceed. Jim Feather’s inspiringly obstinate refusal to carry papers of any kind had now left him more tied down to his local landscape than his own Cherokee Nation back in the USA. I needed to explain to the pair the precise religious trajectory that Jim’s antagonists were on.

So problematic was poor Jim Feather’s current life situation, however, that we had not yet even discussed my own reasons for turning up out of the blue at Bidil ’e Pira. Indeed, so preoccupied were the pair that neither of them had thought to ask. They didn’t even look surprised, just happy to have company. I needed, however, to get my own Mission on the move, and now spoke up to explain myself to the brothers. Out it all tumbled. I explained how there are Time Tunnels at certain specific ancient Sardinian locations, how most of them are accessed through carved stone Doorways, and how all of them provide interface with the far distant past. At first my barrage of garrulous verbiage sounded like preposterous spew even to myself, but my riotous words were not falling on such stony ground as I’d feared, and were even being received with nodding heads and warm smiles not in the least patronising. The Reverend Jim Featherian accepted happily my notion that Sardinia’s lost stone Doorways could indeed be interfaces with other worlds more ancient, and spoke up in defence of my words.

The Reverend then pointed out that sacred holes and junctions with the earth still played their important part in modern Armenian Christianity. Having taken on Christianity earlier than Rome, Armenian holy ones had simply integrated into
their rituals these subterranean practices so viciously stamped out elsewhere by St. Paul’s Roman Church.

We all walked over to the great tomb itself and clambered about at the overgrown façade around the carved entrance stone, this one a particularly fine monolith which jutted out of the ground more heftily than any I’d seen even in photographs. But ancient
cart tracks right across the façade had long ago broken up the glorious continuous stone frontage and created a deep hollow way along the length of the great mound, itself now surmounted with olive trees and nature. Indeed, everyone passing this place along the normal route would have mistaken it for a natural ridge. Perfect. Jim Feather climbed down into the passageway and disappeared entirely for twenty long minutes, whilst the Rev and myself tried to apply my experiences at Puttu Oes and Goronna to our current situation. Then out of the far end of the mound I saw Jim appear. He burst forth suddenly, clutching his head and reeling around dizzily. The Rev and I sprinted over to him, but Jim was suffering and rolling about on the hot grass.

The Headless, of course! Then Jim collapsed upon the ground as though in a coma. For two full hours, his desperate brother ministered to Jim’s suffering mind and sweating body. Of the hole from which he’d escaped the mound there was no sign whatsoever. Then, as the sun was approaching the far western horizon and twilight beckoned, our erstwhile Native American shaman suddenly sat bolt upright and smiled with the smile of the newly enlightened. For Jim had travelled deep within the mound and met all manner of people, figures, ghosts of the past. Moreover, Jim was convinced that these sacred Doorways could be of genuine use as his own escape route. He stared at me triumphantly, oozing an otherworldly glow.

Quickly and efficiently, the three of us devised a plan of action, one that we all trusted could achieve my necessary end results of Time Travel. First, the two brothers would burn incense within the great chamber. Then, they would chant together as I drank cognac infused with fourteen powdered 3.75 mg Zopiclone sleeping pills to push me deep under. Copying my previous actions at the entrance to Goronna, my accomplices would then thrust my head into the entrance of the great Doorway, both then tending to my presumably headless body until my shout alerted them to my return. It did feel strange, though, two blokes instead of Blessèd Anna. Besides, sliding intoxicated into the Past was quite the opposite manner in which I’d previously arrived. Quite naturally, I wished again for the bang, I wanted the turbo jets, the rocketry, the fusillade of my humanness flung across the millennia. Headless me this time? Confident they that dare guess. Not no, not yes. Then without more ado, Jim Feather and his Reverend brother each grasped one of my shoulders, then bade me kneel before the great carved hole at the foot of Bidil ’e Pira’s Doorway. Next, as the pair thrust my head into the hole, Jim Feather started up that same lusty chant that he himself had learned just two hours previously during his own subterranean encounter with the Headless.