Beyond the Island

by John W. Steele

Chapter 3

Young Brian Mudd is proud of his ability to travel in the astral realms — until he encounters Lord Nagual, who prefers to be called “Max.” Brian becomes Max’s apprentice and finds him a harsh, even cruel master but nonetheless an effective instructor. Meanwhile, Brian is taken with Karen Frost, with whom he feels he has a karmic link. And Brian’s karma is trouble.

That evening I sat in the game room at the lodge. The cedar walls were decorated with taxidermy. Twelve-point shoulder-mounted whitetail deer, black bear, and elk hung like effigies around the room. A gigantic moose head with antlers as wide as a car bumper peered out from the crest of the arched mantle over the massive cobblestone fireplace. The moose had lustrous glass eyes, and I shuddered when I looked at them. They reminded me of Lord Nagual, and I didn’t want to deal with him now.

I opened a bottle of Stone Haven single malt and placed it on the rustic burl table before me. I’d built a small fire and I sat in an oversized leather armchair staring into the cherry embers of the fire’s heart.

At one time my life had been monotonously simple, but Lord Nagual changed all that. Nothing was simple anymore. My world now seemed like a fragmented picture puzzle with disorganized pieces spread out in a panorama of inescapable chaos. Like a rat on a sinking ship, I was backed into a corner. The events of the last few years had been soul-shattering. Though I now had everything money could offer, I often longed for the simple reality that used to be my life. Selling out had not made me a king; it had made me a slave.

It seemed like only yesterday I was an ironworker. I walked on narrow steel I-beams twenty or thirty stories above the ground. The fear that I might fall to my death at any moment forced me to focus on each act and live completely in the present. After years of sustained concentration, I was no longer distracted by internal dialogue or bouts of confusion. But I remained fatalistic about the purpose of life, and I sometimes wondered if death might not be the greatest of human blessings.

In the winter, when the building trades died, I’d end up on unemployment. Late one October, I found a book at a garage sale called Astral Projection & Psychic Discoveries. Out of boredom, I started practicing the techniques to pass the time through the cold, lonely winters. I had an uncanny ability for this sort of discipline and, in no time I was soaring in my astral body to beautiful places that defy description. That is where I encountered the terror, and it was my downfall.

After a few years of concentration exercises, I became so adept at astral travel that I could journey to mysterious and exotic realms while absorbed in the lightest form of sleep or concentration. It was as if the bottom of a bucket had broken through. I’d flow out of my physical body and travel the silver cord to any destination or dimension I had the vision to perceive.

The worlds I visited were as real as the perceptions of my day-to-day experience. I could remember with detail the splendorous vistas and haunting characters I met in these places, and they were always benign and nearly indifferent to my presence. Each voyage into the astral realms became deeper and more intense until I could no longer distinguish between what was real and what was mind-created.

After each new psychic experience, the world of ordinary reality became more tenuous and lost the verity of its rationale. I felt like I’d wandered into a cave. With every bifurcation in the tunnels, I became more and more lost until I was hopelessly swallowed up in a place beyond the island of normal awareness. The truly psychotic know they are insane, but those content with their sanity cannot see past their delusions. Doors once opened seldom close, and despite my efforts to escape these new perceptions, there was no turning back.

Proceed to Chapter 4...