Supernatural Sensuality

The biting sub Antarctic blizzard was in full swing just after midnight. Anything alive was either inside or battened down behind whatever shelter it could find. Cows and sheep tried to huddle behind the twenty meter high pine wind break that ran along the boundary of the property and the two dogs had dug a hole in what was left of the lawn to try and keep warm with each other under the heavily rusted 1980's Ford Cortina that had skidded diagonally toward the back door that afternoon as he made a quick bolt inside out of the weather.

The cracked windscreen and broken headlights complimented the rather dilapidated three bedroom bungalow with faded paint, chipped windowsills and dirty windows as it stood on an ordinary South Island country street. Both looked forlorn and completely miserable. This was weather that was for sure. On some level every sentient life form must have appreciated its insignificance compared to the unbridled power of Mother Nature raging across the night sky, and tried to get out of the way.

Even the timber fence facing the street, stained with diesel and engine oil many moons ago, gave testimony to the harsh climate, as what was left of it bent and buckled but somehow, like the few very hardy trees that were left, didn't fall. It suited the property to a tee with the muddy tyre tracks showing the evidence of far too many mornings that a seedy driver rushed to work late and lost traction, with both his car and his grip on the start of the day.

The back door was shut but the broken windows were frosted over as the curtains danced and whirled with each other. A broken coffee mug and an empty bottle of whisky lay on the floor as the kitchen door slammed repeatedly in an attempt to come off its hinges. At the front of the house, past the swinging knotted mouldy shower over bath curtains tied at one end and the frozen toilet bowl with no cistern and a twenty litre bucket beside it, past the filing cabinet holding the side door in place, right down the far end one room had the door shut.

Inside the room the paisley wallpaper seemed to drift in and out of phase. The ceiling gave the illusion of rising and falling in time with the fat man's chest and the two bar radiant heater looked translucent as the air around it shimmered and the carpet got crispy. The fat man's chest continued to rise and fall, oblivious to all of this, as he tried to suck the paint off the ceiling in a deep snoring sleep, which could very easily have been his last.

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Inside the dream the feeling of a nagging intrusion came again and again, like when a cook cracks an egg open to get the gloop out, an intrusion trying to crack my mind open, except when my mind cracked open there was nothing there to scoop out, so the nagging intrusion crawled inside and went to sleep.

Inside the dream I was sweating profusely. I must have been in a shack working on something because I couldn't see the sun, but the heat was intolerable. I was parched and my mouth felt like a birdcage. I looked up into darkness but the sun seemed to be slowly rising from under my feet.

You sometimes know in dreams whether it is or isn't real but all I knew was that the heat was tangible; tangible and final. I wasn't scared. I didn't really feel anything except the heat. Then the ground erupted in flames.

"So this is what the end of everything feels like."

Piezoelectric sirens shrieked in the darkness above, louder and louder waking the intrusion that was asleep inside my mind. The sound now came in physical waves that knocked me off my feet and I fell. I kept falling and expected to eventually melt into the searing flames but instead felt a solid thud as my mind eventually reconnected with my body and hit the bed. My tongue bled from biting it with the impact of the fall, and the wail got louder and the ground got hotter. A window shattered and...

Wait, what?

I very nearly didn't feel the blast of freezing air hit my face but it was enough to jolt me back to the shrill scream of the smoke alarm.

"Fuck me!"

I jumped off the bed and tripped over my boots, falling head first into the heater and gashing my forehead open to match my bleeding tongue. At least the impact ripped the power lead from the wall socket and the heater was off; my rapidly blistering skin another entire matter. That smoke alarm was drilling my temples so I grabbed the door handle and seared my hand for my efforts.

"Fucking...!"

I put my sweatshirt over my burnt hand and turned the knob, opening the door to let the icy air flood the room but the smoke alarm would not shut up. My head and hand both really hurt but all I could focus on was getting some quiet to get back to reality, so I ran for a kitchen chair. I dragged it roughly up the hallway in my still semi-conscious state, multi coloured paint chips landed on the floor like a trail of snowflakes as the chair bounced off the repeatedly painted over walls.

Back in the room I clambered onto it and balanced precariously on tip toes to pull the battery out. I mean how hard could it be? That's the thing with the twelve foot stud in these old places, apart from being bloody cold the high ceilings give the impression of spacious living but it's a bugger to reach them when you need to. I stretched as far as I could go to just reach the clip and finally I ripped the nine volt battery out plug and all. The piezo seemed to get even louder if that was possible, or maybe it was just my head.

"Shit, that's right."

New fire regulations meant that Mum had made the electrician hard wire them in when she was still alive, for the insurance. All I wanted at the moment was for some quiet, so I climbed down, went and got the mallet I keep beside the bed and, hurriedly climbing back up (without falling off) proceeded to bash seven shades of shit out of both it and the ceiling around it until the piezo went to a feeble squeal and then finally died a tortuous death. With the quiet my brain started to function and reality returned. Standing on the chair, mallet in hand, I surveyed the result of my idiocy. Dream or not, that was almost it. And that's when it happened.

"You gotta stop drinking so much boy," a sultry female voice hissed inside my ear.

I literally fell off my chair in shock, too slow to tuck my chin in time and managing to knock myself out as the base of my skull hit the floor splattering my blood in an almost perfect circle on the now semi liquid carpet as my hair melted into it.

"Well, that was lucky," the same voice purred with a good deal more compassion as I drifted off back into the space where my mind once was.

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The pain came to me as I tried to peel the carpet from my blistered scalp the next morning. It was daylight so I must have been out for several hours. My mind cracked again and reality fell on me. I was alone. I'd almost done it properly this time. I smiled through the pain at the irony, the heat and the parched thirst. Then I remembered the voice. She was right of course; I'd always drunk too much but never had a hallucination when I was awake.

"Is that you God?" I laughed.

"Fuck off idiot!" I imagined the reply.

Whatever she was, it was the push I needed to shift my mind. Of course my stupidity almost cremating me alive had absolutely nothing to do with it.

It was a face numbing whisker freezing morning when I eventually dragged my very sorry Non compos mentis shell out of bed. The wind had dropped and there was a stillness you only get in these types of places. If there were any birds in these trees they were still well and truly hunkered down after last night. I opened the back door and staggered out onto my patio to have a piss as I do most mornings. I find it refreshing to expose my most sensitive organ to the elements and the sight of the steam rising as my stream melts through the frost covered ground was genuinely satisfying. My lungs burnt with each icy breath and my mind kept humming the Patterson Hood lyric over and over again, "It's fucking great to be alive."

It felt like I was there for hours; time distorts for peak experiences and after last night's episode a simple morning piss was exactly that. The memory of that female voice returned to me like a mallet and I made a promise to myself that I would definitely drink less to avoid what was left of my shell ending up like the plastic casing of my smoke alarm. I went inside, scoffed four Weet Bix in hot water with raw sugar, showered, and even remembered to put deodorant on and brush my teeth before I got dressed for work, and left.

The mundanely mind melting morning of shoving plastic granules into ten gallon hoppers, monitoring the extrusion jig's operating temperature, ensuring water was flowing and cleaning the clogged waste from the cutting saw, while stacking the extrusions into specified lengths as determined by the software didn't help my acuity. Basically it was everything the Teflon overcoat brigade didn't have to do.

"Fuck me," I did a degree for this?

"Well if you could have watched the drinking, boy. You may have even started your own cult!"

I started to shiver and sweat; the blisters on my scalp weeping. What was this? Psychosis? Alcoholic Dementia? Schizophrenia? So now I'm hearing my own special sky faery while I'm wide awake and working? There's a name for that.

"Sorry boy," a much softer sultry sound appeared between my temples, "But I can't have you slipping back. You have something to do for me."

What did I do? What would you do? I bloody panicked!

Eventually eleven thirty came around and it was time for lunch. Larry came over to my work station with the usual expression of his raised left eyebrow.

"Ye driving mate or...?"

"Na mate, maybe tomorrow. I'm not doing so good."

"Well tell me about it over a pint then," he smiled. "And no shit, who da fuck are ye and what have you done with Gerry? I can see the state of ye. Ye been staring at goats, aye mean ghosts, again?"

It was an old joke between us, but it worked. God Bless the C.I.A. and whatever shitty drugs they were on when they thought up that one.

"Yeah, Na, fuck it then, reckon one won't stop climate change."

"Atta Boy!"

He laughed in the car park, "Ye know we've got to get pulled in that piece of shite one day don't ye Jerry. What are ye doing mate, trying to get busted."

We got in and as I cranked the engine the radio came on, "...you must not be drinking enough" George Thoroughgood opined over a shredding riff. Turning left out of the driveway and left again onto the main drag I'd only got a couple of hundred yards down the road and my smoke alarm went off in my head again, the same piezo electric wail shredding my skull. Wincing, I gritted my teeth and kept going.

FUCK PSYCHOSIS!

An elbow in my ribs jolted me back to reality.

"Ye, this not gonna cut it" Larry jolted me back to the wail morphing into the police siren.

"Oh Jeezus. Fucking wonderful. That's exactly what I need," I growled as I pulled over.

"On the up Jer; they could have stopped ye on the way back."

"Yeah I s'pose."

"Good morning Sir, just a random breath test. License please," a female voice came through the window. She was confident but not officious and after I blew zero she went to check my registration on the computer.

After five minutes she returned.

"I see this car isn't registered in your name Sir. Care to explain?"

"Yeah, sorry. It was Mum's car before she died and I never got around to changing it over."

"How long ago was that Sir?"

I had to think, "A couple years I guess. It's just nice to keep getting the renewals with her name on it. It's sort of like she's still here," my voice cracked slightly. This caught me off guard. Wow, two years already and it still cut me deeply.

"I understand that Sir, "she replied softly, "but you're going to have to get onto it soon, or you're going to keep getting stopped and then your ordinary car maintenance will come in for some proper scrutiny. There's also one more piece of advice I might offer?"

She took off her sunglasses so I could see her eyes. They were a deep translucent blue with no definable characteristics behind them, not cold but so indescribably deep you got the feeling of enormous power below the confident surface.

I bowed my head and the same sultry voice from last night whispered behind my right ear, "You gotta stop drinking so much boy"

My brain froze. It wasn't just the words. It was the voice; the very same one.

"Uh... "But she was gone. I watched her walk back to the police car; the uniform showing off her very taut slim figure. It wasn't a strut or a swagger, but it oozed a confident sensuality that certainly matched her voice.

"Jer, ye are one dead lucky son of a bitch", Larry slapped my shoulder laughing.

His laughter soon evaporated.

"Mate, I think I'm losing my mind," I growled.

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I told him about last night and the voice, that voice...

Larry sat for a minute, staring off into forever and then looked at me with an expression somewhere between cynicism and concern, "Well Jer, put ye this way. You lost your Da, then your Ma, then ye bain fucks off and ye been working like a navvy ever since. Good to know ye not drinking anymore."

"Yeah but not any less either aye."

Humour always was his strong suit.

"Ye just need a break, but dunnae listen to me; what would I fucking know."

"Yeah tell me something I don't know, but I've got to pay the bills."

"Ye a long time dead mate, just remember that.

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Life was going to carry on as usual unless I did something about it. I took stock of what my future was looking like and did slightly cut back my drinking. I cleared the overdue bills, changed the car registration over and started getting some exercise. The weather eased up and it wasn't long before the 'nor wester' winds came around, drying everything out and life started to feel warmer. I got the yard in order, the lawns mowed and the rest of my property properly fenced. I was meandering along and even had some coin in the bank. That's when it happened, again, and enough had to be enough.

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It was a glorious January the second morning. I had been waking up easier these days, and went through my usual morning ritual, shuffling out to the kitchen to boil the jug. With a mug of awesome smelling coffee in my right hand, I headed out to the back patio to savour my morning piss. Then, ten seconds into it things got weird. The ground started to freeze where I pissed and my stream froze in mid-air forming a crescent before it shattered over my garden. What in the bloody...

I looked up at my dream sky as my coffee mug froze and cracked in my hand. If this was another hallucination then the nagging intrusion had installed some pretty decent special effects in my mind space. I heard the piezo screaming in my skull and that voice again but this time it said something else, the same sensuous voice hissed, "You need to leave this place boy, soon!"

Apocalyptic warnings? Awesome.

As I shook my head the voice went, the sky returned to normal and the warm wind returned. The glorious morning that woke me up drew me back from the vacuum of my day dream. I thought that if this was purely me losing my mind, why was my coffee mug still cracked and frozen? After thirty six years here I'd well and truly had enough. I wasn't like the family in Amityville Horror; I listened to warnings and it was time to go.

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What did I have to lose? I had all the essential life skills, no ties and besides, I had my mortgage paid up to date and the property tidy. I got some decent comprehensive insurance, Larry helped me find a tenant, a cousin of his actually, and she ended up doing an awesome job looking after the place. So what did I do? I got the fuck out of Dodge and headed "across the ditch" to "Lucky Land". I had my backstop in place should it all go sour, and I liked a challenge. I still do. I'm no daring devil but I'm good at living without a safety net. It reminds me I'm alive.

I found my little spot of paradise on an island just off the coast and got a job on the door of the local club, which happenned to have a covered deck right on the water. My favourite times of the day were a close choice between the sunsets behind the mountains reflected on the water and the green purple clouds as the lightning strikes strafed the bay whenever a decent storm came through. The club itself wasn't amazing; a two cashier bar service area and betting terminal in the fourth spot, but it was nice. The patrons were mostly working families and retirees, as the usual neighbourhood smattering of drug induced idiots were mostly too busy overdosing to find time to honour us with their business. Bless.

I worked Wednesday to Sunday nights so had the added benefit of enjoying my weekends when most people were at work. Thursday was raffles night; we had a band on Friday and Saturday and bingo on Sunday. The only time Wednesday was busy was during the few weeks of the interstate rugby league competition, and even then everyone was well behaved. It was a sight, married couples taking oppopsing sides depending on which side of the border they grew up on. It really was good fun.

The area might have had a bit of a bad reputation from years gone by but that only meant the rents were cheap. It also meant land prices were insanely affordable. I rented a run down two bed batch with a cracked sceptic tank. The Real Estate gave it to me for dirt cheap on account I used my own chemical toilet. I got the small yard in order and after six months of renting, I was ready to buy. I put my house and land on the market back home and waited for a decent offer.

My place sold quickly and I bought a block of land halfway up the street from where I was renting with good money in the bank, even allowing for the exchange rate. Sure my block was a lesson in downsizing but it wasn't exactly suburbia and the neighbours didn't live in each other's pocket. If you wanted to be left alone, people would leave you alone, which suited me just fine. I had a highset house built so I could relax in the evenings watching the sun set over the water, with a few beers or the odd whisky.

It was wonderful; the only thing missing was some female company I could tolerate. It wasn't really important because I'm self-sufficient and have found there to be two basic types of person in the world. People either get walked over, and if they get into the habit they let everyone do it, or they do the walking over, mainly because they have to in order to survive and escape getting walked over. This may be slightly simplistic, but there isn't a lot of balance in society and it seems there are always dominant submissive relationships for the most part. Anyway, I'd not had any psychotic episodes in some time and was feeling relaxed.

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Of course things were never this simple. We were closing up one Saturday end of shift about half past midnight as I emptied the glass washer. Sheree the bar manager was restocking the bar snacks as usual and...