Acid Bubbles (6 page)

“Ohmigod!“ was what I said. As I came in a flood all up her arm and across her left buttock. She laughed, giggling like a teenage girl.

“You're playing this really well, Peter.” She said this with what appeared to be some amusement.

I was stunned, bloody speechless, bloody embarrassed by my twenty-second performance. She just laughed some more and moved to lie completely on top of me, holding my neck and performing very sensuous gentle nibbling kisses to my ear.

“So, you're a seventeen-year-old virgin who knows nothing?” she continued.

“And I'm not very good at sex,” I said. I was telling the truth.

“Not good at sex, you lying bastard? I'm going to teach you everything you taught me.” She said this as almost a threat, a soft lapping threat, but to me I was going head first into the unknown. Within minutes, trapped beneath her hot beautiful body, life was returning, lust was returning.

One hour and forty-five minutes later, I'd gone from a totally inexperienced virgin to a rampant stud. The learning curve was so rapid that it had me worried. Something was not right. The music played on and I didn't recognise a single song. Somebody had stolen Radio One and turned it into the adventure in the bland. My body seemed to know things I didn't have any clue about, to go places I'd never even thought of. It was as if I'd been born genetically programmed to be a willing and athletic lover. Bloody hell, I was one hell of a fast learner! I liked what I learned to the extent that I was insatiable. I wanted more, much more, and I wanted to soak my body in the experience. I wanted more now!

“Come on, Sam, let's do this all day. I feel I can keep going for hours,” I said.

“No!” she said.

“Why? I want it, I want you, all of you, I want to consume every bit of you,” I said. I was one sexy and very randy young bastard.

“No, you must get up. Mike will be here at twelve,” she said.

“Mike who?” I asked.

“Mike who you are going to play pool with later. Mike my husband. So stop messing about pretending to be seventeen and get dressed now,” she said.

“You've got a fucking husband?” I said.

She just rolled her eyes and walked back into the changing room, this time to clean herself of us, and to get dressed for the town.

I knew these people, this I'd already figured. I hadn't a clue how I knew Sam who was actually Samantha. I knew Mike, I played pool with him, and he was her bloody husband!

The song “We gotta get out of this place. If it's the last thing we ever do” came into my head. I had to make an excuse. I'd just had a life changing experience and didn't think I could stand playing pool with a man whose wife had just given me all these sensuous gifts. He might see the truth in my smile.

Walking into the bathroom to go to the loo was a pivotal moment that would change the rest of my life. It's hard to describe the fear this moment instilled in my mind. What started this reaction was my reflection in the full-length mirror at the back of the dressing room. This had been unnoticed as I staggered in to take a piss with my now forgotten terrible hangover. The large mirror was a little misty from the steam of the shower. The image was indistinct, like looking at somebody through a thick fog.

What was standing before me wasn't me, it was a different me, but it wasn't another person, it was still me. Overnight I'd put on several kilos, possibly eight or ten. My hair was much blonder, longer, and I was different! I couldn't put my finger on it. The hangover was coming back with a vengeance as I struggled with this strange vision. What was so different? It was a mystery that wasn't going to be solved by standing there, gaping at a disturbing misty image.

Then I saw it. On the dressing table was a telephone, not a telephone like I'd ever seen before. Why was I focusing on the telephone? These people had money. They could afford unique things that could only be purchased in London. The phone had touched a nerve memory. It had triggered a feeling of strangeness. Something was different. Something was wrong. I was groping in the dark for an answer, any answer, or any clue as to what was causing this feeling of being disorientated with the world. On the top of the linen basket was a newspaper. It was a copy of the
Daily Mail
, on the front page a picture of the Prime Minister. I didn't recognise him. Then and only then did I see the date. It was August 23
^rd
1973. The
Daily Mail
had said so. It wouldn't lie, would it?

“What day is it?” I asked.

“It's Saturday,” Sam shouted from the shower.

The
Daily Mail
was Thursdays.
Shit
. Today was the 25
^th
… I went out on the 17
^th
…

This was the point where I fainted. It might have been all the alcohol from the night before, but the night before wasn't in The Cauldron back in August 1971.

Not so bright, and in fact very, very late!

I'd walked out of The Cauldron over two years before! Two fucking years before! God this is crazy!

I've got to get out of this place, if it's the last thing I ever do. Somebody was playing an evil trick on me, though the sex was amazing!

Back in the here and now, I was still reeling from my first terrifying cancer dream. The following evenings when darkness started to fall and the hands of tiredness were pulling me towards sleep, I was plagued with the terror of reliving the gut-wrenching experience. After a few anxious evenings the nights turned into ones filled with peaceful sleep. I only dreamt in the mediocre normal with vague and hazy experiences, most forgotten by morning. I started to crave the total life experience the tactile dream had given me. My life was so grey in its everyday pain I had to return to the total sensations of a crystal clear reality. This was the point where I started to fear going to sleep and dreaming the mundane for the rest of my life, however long that would be.

I supposed twenty days had passed, and even the urges to have more of the intense other dimension were fading. It was like I'd almost dreamt a dream. Had I experienced it at all? This is what I started to believe until the night it happened again. I was dreaming the usual mixture of disjointed nonsense until I felt a shift, and I'd moved back into the super real. It started with a feeling of oncoming terror.

The initial reason for this dread was that beneath my feet I started to feel pain. It came from below as a sensation of burning, a hot pressure building against the underside of my soles. At this point the visual took over. I was in a black void, a complete area of empty, black, cold space. In this cold void I wasn't sure my eyes were open. I was looking but I couldn't see. The pain in my feet continued to grow and below me the merest suggestion of grey was starting to appear. From my previous experience with those flesh-eating androgynous creatures this oncoming greyness was not a good omen. The onrush carried with it anxious fear. This greyness was in the process of change becoming darker and darker with every passing second. In my gut I could feel the cancer demons approaching. I was slipping back into that world of terror.

What happened next took my breath away. I was shocked that I'd forgotten so many of the incredible sensations of living at a molecular level. My breath was coming in heavy gasps as the fear grew, and I could sense the molecules of air passing through my throat. This sensation alone was addictive. The pain in my feet had evened off to the sensation you would receive standing on a pebbly beach. I was fearful but had to look down. What lay beneath my feet was black tarmac, neatly laid black tarmac. All around my body I could feel a pressure building and coming from every direction. I couldn't understand how I could see the tarmac when I couldn't see anything else.

So there I was in this long-awaited for dimension, and I was in a black void standing on a strip of tarmac. “Was it a road?” I asked myself. In fact what was the purpose of this? It stayed in stasis like this for some while. Time didn't seem to matter. Suddenly, I could hear at almost a canine level what sounded like the onrush of stampeding horses, or the rumbling of heavy guns creating carnage on some distant battlefield. This sensation of sound grew until it became audible to the normal human ear. Around me everything was changing for the better or the worse, with the onrush of the noise bringing such fear I could feel sweat oozing from every single pore on my body. Individual beads of water pushed out by fear, driven by dread.

All around the void was in flux, becoming lighter with the increasing volume of the onrushing wall of sound. The noise wasn't loud. I don't think it was loud, but it was assaulting my senses. Given my new ability to hear at this molecular level, I couldn't discern how loud, loud could be. This sound engulfed my entire being, as was blank whiteness. I was now standing in a void of white being crushed by an oncoming barrage of sound.

Change came with breathless speed. In the white, tiny black flecks appeared. These grew and with this my apprehension that this was a swarm of cancer demons starting to grow. Everything started to fill in around me until I was surrounded by a whole universe of colour. I was falling or was I standing as the new universe introduced itself to me? Perhaps I was being introduced to the universe, or someone was asking if I could join. The price I had to pay might be too much, the inner me was going to be crushed to dust by the onrush of the super sensation.

Green, a fabulous green, had appeared all around, and was transforming itself into the most beautiful country landscape I'd ever seen. It was spoiled by man's invention, the tarmac my bare feet were standing on belonged to the platform of a very small country railway station. I was standing quite still. I hadn't tried to move. The noise I could hear was a train coming, and the feeling of dread had disappeared with the onset of all this beauty. I was now excited and full of desire to know more.

Standing on that platform I started to survey my surroundings. The place was beautiful with its hanging baskets and perfect paint on the ornate woodwork. This place possessed everything and more. A stationmaster's office announced itself in gold, gilt paint on the immaculate, clean window glass. Fire buckets full of sand lined up against the wall glistening in the sunlight. The whole thing was a complete experience as if placed there from some period movie.

The difference was I knew at some level deep inside this was not my construction. I wasn't dreaming this vision I'd been invited into it. I was a guest in a dimension I didn't yet understand. There was always the lurking suspicion in the background that things could revert back to the damp, yellow nightmare of painful death I'd visited before. This thought was fading as my eyes began to absorb this new world. Everything around me was an intense kaleidoscope of colour where I could sense the intensity of each shade with my inner feelings. An intense pleasure flooded through my being, what a delight to be allowed into this paradise.

The train was out of sight around a curve in the track that disappeared down a beautiful deep flower filled verdant valley. As the train approached I could feel a new sensation pressing against my body. The pressure grew until my outer shell gave way and a sensation flooded through my life. A wind of pleasure was in the literal sense passing through me giving an intense feeling almost like a warm wind playing in a reed bed, touching every part of my soul, my heart, my mind. The intensity of pleasure grew more and more with the onrush of the train. All my senses were on fire and the train still hadn't appeared around the long steel curve. The onrushing iron monster was several hundred yards away out of view. My senses were becoming saturated to the point where I couldn't believe there would be any more pleasure available. I was mistaken. The train came into view, and the joy was several hundred percent more than I'd ever experienced in all my life. I thought I was going to die of pleasure. Was this possibly a new torture?

Then, for some reason, I looked away from the magnetic attraction of the train and down to my feet which were bare. The rest of my body was a greater surprise because I was dressed in what looked like a tweed suit from the 1950s. Was I in the 1950s? No, I was not in England in that decade, I was sure of this. I could feel something in my pocket and with quick inspection discovered it was a mobile phone, not something from a decade long passed.

However, this was no ordinary mobile phone. It was heavier, more robust, and somehow not quite from my now, but from a different version of the modern world of now. This convinced me that I'd moved not into a dream but into an alternative universe. I don't think I was dreaming, I think I was alive and awake in a very similar but fundamentally different dimension. This fantastic place offered great beauty and had the promise of infinite sensations of new delight. The worry that came into my mind even when surrounded by all this beauty was if this place could offer infinite sensations of delight, could it slip to somewhere populated by cruel Demons willing to give an infinity of horror and pain.

The train was approaching at speed. Each passing second it consumed the track coming towards me. I could feel the vibrations of the molecules in the rails coming up through the platform into my sensitive feet. The appearance of a little round stationmaster was a shocking surprise. I thought I was alone at this quiet country station. I assumed he was the man in charge because he was wearing a uniform that would not look out of place on a Third World dictator. He took no notice of me and began to wave a flag of incredibly flamboyant colours. The dazzling cloth covered most shades of the rainbow. His exuberant waving of this fabulous flag exerted some power over the train. He was moving it backwards and forwards with a zestful vigour.

The train audibly slowing until the stationmaster had appeared, returned to full power. The locomotive was under orders from whoever this strange little man was not to stop. I was disappointed the train was going straight through, because pushing before this monster of iron and steel was a wave of pure ecstasy permeating itself through every fibre of my being. I understood at a very deep level on this particular occasion the train was not to stop. I also understood that in the future this would be a stopping point, but not today. So why was I standing there?

Obviously for some reason. My journey the other night into another dimension was to be killed with great pain and terror by the cancer demons. Was today's experience going to attack me in a different way? Kill me with the experience of pleasure, with joy, with sheer intense delight?

The contraption, and I say that because it was no modern train, was from the age of steam, but not any age of steam we've experienced. This monster was from an arcane age of steam we never knew existed. It was sleeker, somewhat wilder and noisier than any steam train I'd ever seen. What's more, the carriages contained slightly more glass than normal rolling stock. The impression was almost of greenhouses on wheels, a moving Victorian hothouse. I don't think the train was so hugely different from anything in the earthly world of the 1950s. What made this so different was I could feel every single part of it, its weight, its movement, its heat, its fire, its approach. This mechanical marvel represented the most wonderful vehicle I've ever seen coming towards me. It was a physical delight of steel and fire invading all my senses.

I knew it wasn't going to stop. I was hoping the joy blowing through my body moving every molecule in a wonderful distracting way wasn't going to abate. These sensations illustrated that all the joy I'd ever experienced before was a mere shadow of the delights possible in this universe. For a reason I could never explain music was playing in my head. One moment a sort of Mozart concerto was playing, the very next it had changed to “Century Have You love”. This song was by the Ice Crystals Type 9. The music was almost mushbie, had this universe seen the hidden nerd in me? I understood music I'd never heard before. I knew this music and it didn't exist in my dimension. I was shocked and intrigued to discover I knew more about this place than I thought.

I was on the verge of exploding with the effects of sheer joy and love as the train rumbled through the station pushing out great clouds of white vanilla flavoured steam. The windows as it passed by glistened with the flashing brilliance of the sunshine and butterfly filled light.

The next thing flowing through my head was the biggest sensation of all. There was only one person on the train. That person was the reason for the train, the reason for all this joy. It was a girl of about twenty-five years old I supposed. She was standing, calmly holding the back of a seat. She was almost a
petite
girl with short glossy hair and the most delicious and completely wondrous smile I have ever seen in my entire life. As the train passed I also saw my reflections passing by as if in a slow motion movie. Frame by frame I built up a picture of myself in the reflection. And what a reflection it was. I was quite young, athletic, handsome and, to my great surprise, me but not me!

Her stunning luminous eyes stared straight through my soul. My joy peaked in a flood of pure ecstasy. If at this point in my life, or any other life for that matter, I had died, it would've been the perfect moment. So, even if the existence of the perfect day is impossible as I once said, there are perfect moments.

The train rattled loudly in its rush through the station. As it did so the joy inside me stayed at this wonderful peak, a peak is something that by the very nature of the word cannot possibly last. True to everything I've said before, it did not. The joy slowly faded away, the winds of ecstasy were dying down inside my body, this sensation died to an ember though it did not leave me in the complete sense. I was left with a residue running through my body's memory. I didn't know this at the time, but this moment joy and love would be ingrained in my earthly soul forever.

I was desperate to know more about this girl, to see her again, to find out everything about her. Anything less would be unacceptable. Driven by molecular desire I wanted her to be near me forever.

The big problem with alternative realities you come into through sleep is to seek constant gratification you must always remain asleep. Once desire is sated you wake up, or I think that's how it works. If these wonderful places were to be in my life I would have to sleep a lot more. The greenness, the vivid brightness and clarity of the day, started to fade to grey, then to white, then to a sensation impossible to describe. It contained great calmness with joy.

I was startled when I awoke to discover I didn't live in that universe. At only the second visit to another dimension I was addicted, forgetting where I came from, once in there not realising any other world existed. I could not control my entry to this other place, so how was I to get back? Moments in the molecular dreamscape were precious and would become more so.

I woke, it was 4:30am, and within short hours I knew two things: one, somehow I'd encountered a new great love in non-reality, giving me a joy that beat so hard in my chest it gave me pain. This place, this new world, could I go there again? Could I make myself go there at will? I had no idea.