Star Climbs The Wall

When do we know we are truly psychic? How can we recognise that our experience of insight is more than just a very common sixth sense? In the ‘work in progress’ extract below  from my new novel At The Maison d’Estella ,  Star - also called Stella, begins to recognise the greater depths of her psychic gifts and get to grips with what they imply.

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… In all the times I played here with Mae as a child, I’d never been inside this place. We found it forbidding then, like a witch’s castle. Now I peered into the  pitch black and smelled the rotting leaves and the faint ripe scent of dead animals. But then I looked upwards to see that the tower held a bowl of lighter night sky, enclosing the belt of Orion the Hunter.  

Halfway up the wall was a platform. ‘That’s for us,’ said Ludovic.   ‘You must be joking,’ I said.  ‘I’ll show you,’ he said. ‘It’s possible. I tried it. You have to do it rock-climber style.’

He made me face the wall and stood behind me. I could feel his chest against my shoulder blades, his thighs against mine. Then he took my hands and made me reach up and curl my fingers into stone crevasses. He reached down, slipped off my shoes and showed my feet where to grip. So we climbed the wall, he like a crab’s shell on my back. He smelled faintly of sweat and turpentine and his breath was like honey on my cheek.

After some hauling, gasping and giggling we were standing upright on the platform in the darkness. I peered through a glassless window into the mantle of the night, screwing up my eyes to make out the giant trees, each with its own core of darkness.

Suddenly a wave of intense feeling rippled through me from my heels to my head and back again. All at once I could sense every living being who had ever been in this spot on the earth - from eighteenth century gardeners, back to seventeenth century revellers, back to Roman camp  followers, back even further to Celtish men in hoods, following one after another, in a line. The place was teeming with these people, talking, shouting, pushing. My head and my body were aching with their presence on the surface of my time.

Ludovic gripped my arm tight and pushed me forward. ‘Look! North!’ he said. So I turned my head towards the North,  where the polluting lights of the town no longer stained the night. There, the sky had retrieved to its dense night-time  blackness and the stars were intense points of light. Orion, Calliope, the Pleiades and Pisces were all there, shapely in their dispensation. Perhaps the gods were here with us, to witness to the events of this night.

I shivered….

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Not done yet, but it’s on its way…..Wxx

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