“CONFESSION of a GHOST”
a novel by Alexandra Kryuchkova
in the “PLAYING ANOTHER REALITY” series
25 BEFORE/16 AFTER. HOUSE No. 6
*****SPIDER*****
***
Somewhere in the Universe
We continued our way towards the mountain range, and the centaurs were still rushing past us. I looked back. Gigantic red poppies were blooming, shrouded in misty haze, at the place of Neptune’s palace.
“Never look back,” the Guardian whispered. “Life is moving forward. Heaven is non-linear, it’s multidimensional. Here you can get into different times and scenarios, track cause and effect correlations. However, it’s impossible to change events in the realized sectors, and there are too many options in the upcoming ones.”
“Why a poppy field?”
“Everyone sees their own on the Staircase. Neptune is fond of dreams, and poppies evoke sleep, intoxicate the mind. But now we are walking through the golden field of eared wheat. In the Sphere of Service, you’ll grow a rich harvest, plowing for others, as they say on Earth. Neptune is in charge of the Sphere of Status, career, bosses, achievement of goals. Your bosses will be dreamers-illusionists. Work will tie you hand and foot, not giving the opportunity to realize your own path. Difficulties in promotion, strength tests, wages that don’t correspond to the invested forces.”
“The mountains far away, are they in House No. 6 too?”
“Yes, but Saturn’s territory begins there.”
“What are the chances that I won’t go crazy, won’t drink?”
“There’s always a chance for everyone. Serve the world. As long as you create worlds, nothing bad happens. By the way, the son of Neptune is the winged horse Pegasus, a favorite of the Muses and poets, gives inspiration and elevates to the Literary Olympus. Many talents die because of drugs and madness, leave early. However, the formula of drug addiction can be played out vice versa. Helping addicts, you don’t acquire addiction yourself. Neptune in the Sphere of Service helps those who suffer through healing of souls. I’ll send to you addicted to wine drinking, and you’ll help them as you can.”
Suddenly, a handsome Centaur stopped next to us and offered to give us a lift to the border.
“Who are you shooting at here?” I asked along the way.
“At Scorpio!” the Centaur declared enthusiastically. “‘And behold, a white horse, and its rider had a bow, and a crown was given to him, and he came out conquering, and to conquer.’ These are words from the Revelation! There is the Constellation of the Crown not far from here. We are shooting at Scorpio, whose sting is located on the Burnt Road, from our Jupiter’s Constellation of Sagittarius, where the Path of Light begins, to unlock the Ring of Time! One day the sting will be defeated, and at the junction of Scorpio and Sagittarius, where the tunnel to the center of the Galaxy is located, the door to Heaven will open. We’ll definitely win! Our patron Jupiter brings happiness and possesses the wisdom of Knowledge.”
“It’s here, Rukh, where the part of the Milky Way is visible to humans,” the Guardian added. “There are also beautiful Lagoon and Omega nebulae, and the Black Hole, and the Magical City – the triple star Albaldach, discovered by the ancient Arabs. Neptune in Sagittarius feels good, he serves as a Guide to our Reality, controls the Sign of Piscis, the last Sign of the Circle of Time, a symbol of the transition into the Timelessness of Immortality. Neptune is the symbol of the Mystery and all Secrets. Jupiter rules Sagittarius, that means Knowledge, and helps Neptune with Piscis, all together means Secret Knowledge. He shoots at Scorpio, but his target is Piscis. Not by accident Christians marked themselves with the sign of Piscis.”
“I will make you fishers of men!” exclaimed the Centaur.
“Jupiter defeats Evil, the lower Self, by shooting at Scorpio so that on the Burnt Road unbinding from the earthly occurs, thereby the Rings of Saturn, or Time, become unlocked, the Door to Heaven opens, and through Neptune – the Guide – the transition to the Subtle World takes place, right?”
“You’ve got the meaning correctly,” said the Guardian. “Every soul on Earth needs to pass through the 30th degree of Scorpio.”
“I can’t go further,” the Centaur stopped at the beginning of the mountain range. “We have reached the domain of Saturn! Good luck, Rukh!”
The Guardian and I began our ascent along the narrow path in complete silence. Having climbed a lonely rocky peak, I remembered,
“It’s in the 30th degree of Scorpio that my House No. 6 begins, but you didn’t tell me about that degree!”
“The degree of the Spider, the Sun and Piscis, the zero point of Ophiuchus, at which the Higher merges with the Lower. A degree of Magic, a two-faced degree. The eloquence and magical charm of Pluto, on the one hand, black magic and behind-the-scenes intrigues, on the other. It sounds in unison with the Neptunian Pluto. Either you’ll become a Spider-sorcerer, skillfully weaving intrigues and luring innocent souls into your nets, dragging them into the abyss to prevent them from opening the door to Heaven, or you’ll have to fight the Spider when you find yourself in the place of his potential victim. The Warriors of Light are not afraid of anyone, are they?”
I sighed heavily as I sat down on the rock by the door to House No. 7 to take a break from the steep climb. The Guardian sat down next to me. We watched the restless centaurs rushing on the red-hot field already far away beneath us, unceasingly shooting.
“In that degree, Rukh, there are the Scales at the door to Heaven. The two bowls of the Scales shouldn’t be in equilibrium, as many people think. The door will open only when Good outweighs Evil. The degree is the symbol of Justice.”
“Will I call for justice at work?”
“In the area of Service to the world,” the Guardian smiled.
“And then, having served,” I smiled, dreaming of reaching the 30th degree of Scorpio on Earth as soon as possible, “I’ll come to the Heavenly Scales, and the door will open for me, and I’ll return to you, here, home, right?”
“Of course, my soul. However, people for a reason have a proverb that says, ‘The quieter is the ride, the farther away you’ll be’.”
“Centaurs, apparently, are not familiar with such proverb!”
“But you incarnate not as a centaur!”
***
Library of the Universe
“Angel, will anyone love me on Earth?”
“Heaven loves you, my soul.”
The book didn’t open, as before, at one of the pages, but sheets of checkered paper, written with a pen, fell out of it.
“What’s this?” I asked in surprise.
“The tale about the Magical City destroyed by the Emperor. The last one you wrote on Earth in that script, it wasn’t published.”
“I am the Soul of that Magical City. Once upon a time built in honor of that Emperor. The main street of which was named after him. Which Temple of the Heart daily prayed for his health, and these prayers were carried directly to God by those angels who were constantly moving back and forth along the Stairway to Heaven.”
*****DONKEY*****
***
Moscow
“Look, Ray, what I’ve found! Handmade gifts and postcards from my employees, ‘To our beloved and the best CEO in the world on her birthday’. Wow, so many signatures! Only yours is missing!”
“I’m here now. This is the photo of us dancing at the New Year party. It’s symbolic – two Forces, of Darkness and of Light, are in the dance of the Universe.”
“Here is Brother with me. Everyone considered me his sister, and we are not even distant relatives!”
“So much you remember, Alice. They all loved you, and obeyed, and respected, although you were much younger. Brother loved you too. You shouldn’t have left. For nine months your name was an unspoken taboo, and then we were celebrating another 8th of March, he asked, ‘What if … Alice returns?’ Everyone breathed a sigh of relief and wanted you back.”
“One shouldn’t go back. ‘After’ will never be like ‘Before’.”
“If you could go back to ‘Before’, would you still leave?”
“Choice without choice, Ray. We met with Brother at some exhibition later, he forgave me and let me go, but we used to congratulate each other on holidays. I love him with Universal Love. He was the only one with whom I felt like behind a stone wall.”
“Okay, who is this, do you remember?” Ray pointed to another photo.
“Oh, well,” I laughed, “this boss invited me to a cafe and came with a woman. She looked at me appreciating and said she didn’t mind. She had been his mistress for many years, promising to divorce her husband if my boss got divorced as well, after that they would have got married. So the boss divorced, his mistress didn’t. He decided to restore the balance and offered me a fake marriage.”
“And those two, the guy with the gray-haired man?”
“They were also my bosses and divided me among themselves for a year in advance, who of them would go with me on a business trip to Austria and Germany, to Italy and Finland. The boy-boss was afraid of the gray-haired boss, so he didn’t show his feelings. The gray-haired old man wasn’t afraid of anything, so even at meetings, in the presence of the same boy and not only, he suddenly asked what color my underwear was that day and when I would give up.”
“You were lucky with bosses!” Ray chuckled.
“And this is my very first Neapolitan boss. One day he threw a plate with fish at me. During the lunch break, he shouted in Italian, ‘Fish!’, but it didn’t mean that his cook had to serve him fish for lunch, since ‘Fish’ turned out to be the name of an employee in Telecom Italy, with whom I urgently needed to connect him. The next boss didn’t pay money for the project, an inventory with confiscation of property started in his office, while he sat reading my poems.”
“Don’t you think there aren’t enough photos here, Alice?” Ray asked, but I just shrugged my shoulders. “How’s the handle doing?”
“Go there, I don’t know where!”
“The worst mark to you. It’s clearly hidden in a place you’ve been to. Or at someone with whom you once communicated, but …?”
“Where or to whom I don’t want to return as a matter of principle?”
“Do you remember why you came to me in Pushkino?” Ray asked as he moved to the next box. “I remembered everything well until the moment of our return from Venice, then my memory was knocked out. I began to realize myself only two years later. And you?”
“I can’t say that I don’t remember only one segment of my life. When I look at things or photos, or get inside myself in the Past and talk with my friends on Athos, or visit the Court, I remember those fragments and immediately forget them. And it’s not the way they say on Earth, all life will flash from A to Z at once.”
“Imagine that in 24 days you won’t be able to return either here or to Earth. What were your favorite places?”
“Athos,” I answered without hesitation.
“Again the same! I mean in the city!”
“Church of St. Peter and Paul, the Metochion of Optina Pustyn. I walked downtown on holidays. Bookstores! They are like entire Universes! In summer, it’s Nikolina Gora. And … perhaps that’s all.”
“And now vice versa, what places would you bypass? Do you want to visit the cemetery? To admire the grave?”
“I’m not a vampire!”
“How about visiting someone to say goodbye?”
“I don’t seem to have anyone left here.”
“Did you feel anyone alive in the Court?”
“God, it’s so hard to remember even what happened yesterday!” I scrolled through picture by picture. “Some schoolchildren, children. Oh yes! There was a Boy and a two-faced Woman! Maybe they are somehow connected. I think I mentioned them to Joice, but I have no idea who they are!”
“That’s not true,” Ray objected categorically. “You don’t want to remember. So it hurts there. And if it hurts, you need to go there! Nobody wants to go back to pain. All the devils know this very well. If the handle was hidden, it’s somewhere there. Find out from your memory who these Boy and Woman are, and what, or who binds them.”
I was lost in thoughts, remembering the strange face of the Woman, when something stirred to my left. I returned into reality, shifted my gaze to the left and jumped up, closing my eyes in horror,
“Spider!”
***
Ouranoupoli
I opened my eyes on Athos in Janis’ shop. It was raining, sometimes the weather deteriorated there too. Leah brought coffee.
“Janis has left for Athos, and St. Matrona has gone away today.”
“Matrona? Strange… Yesterday I remembered the Saints who helped in illnesses, and I forgot Matrona! How could I! After all, I was…”
Suddenly, the Monk who I thought was following me appeared on the other side of the street. I took a step away from Me in the Past not listening to what was said next. The Monk shook his head sadly and disappeared instantly.
“Wow!” Leah exclaimed. “Every day you were straight by Matrona! How lucky you were!”
I didn’t remember what I was doing straight by Matrona, but I decided to return to her convent at night and, just in case, ask for forgiveness.
“Scorpions are coming here more often!” Leah complained. “I’ve never seen them before! All summer they’re showing up here and there, and right in my room! Yesterday, I was in bed and saw something moving on the ceiling. I turned on the light, and there it was! Horror! Scorpions personify Evil, which means that now Evil has reached Athos.”
An Athos monk entered the shop, Leah spoke to him in Greek. He looked at me and said something with a smile.
“He sees a lot of Darkness around you,” Leah translated, “but you are closer to the Light than others. The closer you get to the light, the greater your shadow becomes. So do scorpions torture you at home too?”
“And scorpions. And spiders. And snakes.”
***
Intercession Convent, Moscow
Everyone brought flowers to St. Matrona, and the nuns at the relics distributed the blessed petals to those who followed. Once on Christmas, in a terrible frost, I stood in line to her relics for about 5 hours, and kept the petals at home for emergency, but they remained untouched. I knelt by the relics and apologized for forgetting to tell Dimitra about her. St. Matrona was canonized by Patriarch Alexey II, in whose Cathedral I sang as a child, and during her lifetime she loved the same icon as I did, “Seeking for the Perished,” and never parted with it.
At midnight, I was about to go to the Tower to see Joice, when I was drawn to the building opposite the convent. Wandering through its empty and dark labyrinths with spider traps in the corners, I couldn’t figure out what it was. Finally, I climbed onto the roof and shuddered in surprise!
“Alice! How are you? Do you miss it too?” the two-faced Woman flew up to me, took my hand and continued to say something, while I was wondering in vain, who she was, what her name was. “I often come back here in my dreams. Alice, do you remember? Do you remember? I’m so glad to see you in my dream! So tell me, have you seen him? What about mom? How is it there? Is everything fine?”
The Woman looked at me hopefully, but I was speechless.
“You know, I still keep his poems! And yours too! And I keep those books that you gave me. And the verse you wrote back then. And your ‘Temple of the Heart’. And…”
“Are you a keeper?” I asked, but the Woman continued to speak incoherently, sighing.
“You are like me… And they… they all… I told him, and them, that you… Do you remember? It seems that I’m going to wake up now! Come here again, okay?”
“What’s your name?” I asked timidly, embarrassed that I couldn’t remember.
The Woman looked at me in surprise and said, “I am Love,” and instantly disappeared.
***
Tower of Ouranoupoli
“Talk to the Woman,” Joice concluded after listening to my story. “Love can’t wish Evil. Love can help only.”
“I don’t know where she lives, how often she visits the roof of that abandoned building in her dreams. How to find her?”
“By the power of thought, Alice. What about your diary in the Library?”
“I tried to scroll it quickly and ended hanging over. I don’t know what to look for. I hardly wrote my plans about exit.”
“You can hardly be sure of that without scrolling through everything.”
***
Library of the Universe
“… I found myself a hostage. I went to the negotiations, and they locked me in their meeting room to make the person they needed come for me… I am a donkey, from time to time they show me a carrot when I’m already completely tired. Carrots were shown and … work on. I work a lot. And over myself. It’s as if a restless creature lives inside, constantly urging me on, scolding and irritating my astral body when I stop — if in the evening / at night I didn’t do anything in terms of my Path (creative). All the time I’m afraid to be late and not be in time, as if tomorrow never comes. Panic attitude to Time – to nights and weekends (during the day I have earthly work). This sensation grows each year, which makes my astral body even more irritated and vibrating more strongly. I don’t know where I’m supposed to arrive. I’m going in the direction the signs lead me to and doing what I can do for the moment…”
“We take a solution of lacquer colloxylin, resins in a mixture of organic solvents and a polyisocyanate based on monomeric diisocyanates of an aliphatic structure. The proportion is 100:5. The pot life of the mixture is 8 hours at 20C. The prose of my life, an excerpt from a seminar on lacquer painting materials, with a recipe for preparing two-component nitrourethane varnishes… They called me from TV, I had to be filmed. How to tell the boss? At previous jobs, everyone understood what it meant to me and that one was rarely invited for free and I wasn’t lying. Filming means filming. Hungary means Hungary. Got to go – go. How to tell it to my actual boss? It’s easier to lie about some toothache. I don’t want to lie at all … I know why I worked at my last job. The sister of the owner sent me to the spiritual seminar of Raisa Mansurova. If I hadn’t met her, there would be no ‘Another Reality’ series. Periodically I think about the 3rd book – there is no opportunity to go out into the Flow to write it. An idea came along the ‘tail’, I like to weave tails in prose – to mix Times, Spaces …”
“One guy at work said, ‘you’re like this,’ and I told him, ‘you don’t know me at all, what I am, at all.’ When I was the boss, I tried to communicate with employees not only on work topics, each of them had their own soul, their way, their sorrows and joys. I knew when one’s wife gave birth, whose daughter entered which institute, what flowers they grew in the country. They even shared bulbs with me. When evil people came, mine ones helped me. Once I found a picture on my office door, a frog in the beak of a heron strangling it with its paws, with the inscription ‘Never give up!’ Then the evil man did nasty things, and when he got out, they put a festive ribbon on the door with the inscription ‘Happy Victory Day!’ We made a feast for the whole world, moved the tables in my office, bought food, and I sang my poems to them playing the guitar.”
“I love this House. Everything in it is mine. Not just close to me, but mine. There is a thin line between close in spirit and 100% yours. And if I leave here, like people returning from the monastery to the world, this House will still forever remain mine. An amazing feeling, independent on other people in the House, or on anything else. The House and me, me and the House. There are places where the information flow is the same, but the energy is alien. Everything is beautiful, clean and fluffy there, but not mine. Everything here is NOT fluffy, NOT beautiful, NOT clean, but it’s more precious than those white smooth walls and tables, those places where there is not a single gram of dust, winter reigns forever, and you want to run away. Everything breathes here – walls, floor, ceiling. Everything is saturated with the Spirit, of which I’m a part. Besides, my books and portraits of those I met in the Library of the Universe live here too, as my small gift to the House. Ghosts love this House, and so do I. This is their home. It looks like a Temple, like a monastery, as if I came here for tonsure monastic vows to serve the world, leaving the world outside the door … I poured water into the kettle and walked along the corridor, when I suddenly ran into the Master of the House, to whom I was very grateful, he smiled and asked,
“So are you on duty now?”
I laughed and nodded.
“How do you like your duty?”
“Like all … duties!”
I don’t know if I’m ready to live long enough here, but this House will forever live in me, even when I am no longer in it, or in this, still not fully accepted by me, alien Earthly Reality.”
“Which side of the elephant is to be described to you? He was 50. A tall, handsome man, who looked damn like a famous actor, pointed me with his hand to a chair next to his desk. He was in white. I was in a black silk dress with thin ribbons tied with bows on my shoulders. I sat down and silently put an A4 sheet of paper in front of him. He silently read it, nervously drumming his fingers on the desk, and asked a question already familiar to me. I nodded affirmatively. He looked into my eyes, meditating, sighed, and said quietly, almost under his breath, calmly and even somehow cynically, “Sooner or later… you’ll apparently become… mine.”
He glanced at his colleague, and then abruptly got up from the desk, took my hand and led me away. It was a strange building, a semi-circle, and the corridors too. I tried not to look around, just at him. He walked fast, I could hardly keep up with him. We came to some secret room, but it was closed.
“Wait for me here. Don’t go anywhere.”
I nodded, leaned against the wall by the door, and tried not to think about anything. He returned, opened the secret room, let me in, and closed the door behind him with the key. The room was flooded with sunshine. I involuntarily squinted and turned away from the window. I stood with my back to the high table. He came close to me and for some reason almost whispered,
“You are very beautiful, but you’ve already been told this a hundred times by others.”
He looked at the table, which meant “Sit down here”, and, given my height, took my hand and asked,
“Help needed?”
I said neither “yes” nor “no”. I silently got up on tiptoe. He grabbed me by the waist and put on the edge of the table. He silently looked into the eyes. It seemed like an eternity passed. Then he leaned close to me, gently brushed my loose hair behind my back.
“May I do it?” he asked again, almost in a whisper, touching the thin ribbons of my dress tied into beautiful bows on the shoulders.
I nodded silently and shuddered involuntarily. He untied them somehow very slowly and thoughtfully. The dress slid down to the waist. Under the dress, there was nothing on top except my body. He pulled my hands back.
“Are you afraid?” he asked softly, and I silently nodded. “So are you a coward? It’s normal, I’m… scared too! Hush!”
His fingers slid over my breast… no, I couldn’t look at it and closed my eyes.
“Don’t close your eyes, please!”
I opened my eyes and… shuddered, biting my lips.
“Look in my eyes!”
We looked into each other’s eyes. I was falling somewhere. I don’t even remember the color of his eyes right now.
“Painful?”
I shook my head negatively. He neatly tied the bows around my shoulders.
“Let’s go?”
We slowly returned along the same corridor. In a semi-circle. As we said goodbye, he just as calmly and cynically voiced to me two options for our further communication.
“I hope you don’t have to come often to me here,” he stated and asked to call him when I got to work. I did.
“Relax… It’s okay… for now… bye?”
And it seemed to me that he had been even sad to say that “bye”, and I would forget neither him, nor the syringe in his right hand, nor that cancer department of the hospital <…> in the summer of that year <…>.”