Παραισθήσεις I

...


He could see his own reflection in a tiny pool edged with moss and lily pads, and he looked at himself for a moment, as fascinated as Narcissus. The mind reaction was beginning to settle in, slowing down his chain of thought, by seeming to increase the connotations of every idea and every bit of sensory input. Things began to take on weight and thickness that had been heretofore invisible. He paused, getting to his feet again, and looked through the tangled snarl of willows. Sunlight slanted through in a golden, dusty bar, and he watched the interplay of motes and tiny flying things for a bit before going on.

The drug had often disturbed him: his ego was too strong (or perhaps just too simple) to enjoy being eclipsed and peeled back, made a target for more sensitive emotions - they tickled at him (and sometimes maddened him) like the touch of a cat's whiskers. But this time he felt fairly calm. That was good.

He stepped into the clearing and walked straight into the circle. He stood, letting his mind run free. Yes, it was coming harder now, faster. The grass screamed green at him; it seemed that, if he bent over and rubbed his hands in it he would stand up with green paint all over his fingers and palms. He resisted a puckish urge to try the experiment...

...Coherent thought was now impossible. His teeth felt strange in his head, tiny tombstones set in pink moist earth. The world held too much light. He climbed up on the altar and lay back. His mind was becoming a jungle full of strange thought - plants that he had never seen or suspected before, a willow - jungle that had grown up around a mescaline spring. The sky was water and he hung suspended over it. The thought gave him a vertigo that seemed faraway and unimportant.

A line of old poetry occurred to him, not a nursery voice now, no; his mother had feared the drugs and the necessity of them; this verse came from the Manni - folk to the north of the desert a clan of them still living among machines that usually didn't work ... and which sometimes ate the men when they did. The lines played again and again, reminding him (in an unconnected way that was typical of the mescaline rush) of snow falling in a globe he had owned as a child, mystic and half fantastical:

Beyond the reach of human range
A drop of hell, a touch of strange

The trees which overhung the altar contained faces. He watched them with abstract fascination: Here was a dragon, green and twitching, here a wood - nymph with beckoning branch arms, here a living skull overgrown with slime. Faces. Faces.
...





St. King
The Dark Tower, The Gunslinger