2. The Book of Knowledge. 4. 4. The Man who

The BOOK of KNOWLEDGE,
a novel by Alexandra Kryuchkova
in the “PLAYING ANOTHER REALITY” series

PART 2. ANOTHER REALITY

Day No. 4

CHAPTER 4.4. The MAN WHO…

I woke up from a phone call.

“Hello,” a young male voice said. “Sorry to bother you, but… perhaps you are the only one who can help us.”

I realized whose voice it was, and shuddered involuntarily. We had met only a couple of times, briefly, in a past life. He was… Although it didn’t matter. I already knew everything. In order not to waste precious time, that almost gone, I asked the main thing:

“The address!”

I sat on the bed with my head in my hands, convulsively thinking what to take with me. It seemed I had forgotten something. I tried to recall what, but in vain. However, there was no time left.

I found myself in the hospital corridor. The one who had called me came towards me, greeted me quietly, silently pointing to the right door. There were some people next to him. A lot of them. I didn’t look at them. Why should I know about? Nothing mattered then anymore…

The hardest was opening the door. With my eyes closed, I touched the doorknob. With a deep breath of hospital air, I pulled the door towards me and stopped the others with a gesture. I stepped in looking at the floor. I closed the door behind me. It was hard to look at Him. I forced myself to look. He was lying on the bed with his eyes closed. Some kind of sensors. There was a window on the right. He was there alone. I came up, sat on the chair on the left. I put my favorite icon on the bedside table. With holy oil, I drew a cross on his forehead, a bit of Epiphany water put on his lips. I took his right hand, helplessly stretched along the body. The main thing was not to cry. I had no right to cry. I put in his palm thirty-three candles, lit from the Jerusalem Easter fire. It certainly wouldn’t keep them. So, holding his fingers shut with my left hand, I lit the candles with my right. I looked at the icon, silently reciting prayers. From time to time I looked at him through the fiery flame. He was very far away, outside there. The Saint looked at me as if trying to say something. What?..

The candles burned out. I took off my hand and his palm fell helplessly onto the bed. I knew I had to help him. Me, not others. Sometimes I know, it has nothing to do with me, or I can’t help. But that day it was different feeling. It was me to help him. And I could do it. And not just I could, but I must. “What exactly and only you, Alice, can do here and now? What do you owe him? Recall it!” But the answer didn’t come and there was no more time to think.

I took out my mobile phone and called my godmother. Her husband was a priest. Without explanation, I asked him to the phone, but “He is at the liturgy!” I dialed RAM to ask her for help. I knew already what I was going to do in a couple of minutes. “The subscriber is temporarily unavailable.”

The last person I could turn to was my Teacher.

“What’s wrong, Alice?” I heard his calm voice and breathed a sigh of relief.

“I need help. That Man Who…”

“I see, you don’t need to continue,” he cut me off in mid-sentence. “You have already done everything for him. Even more than you had to, hadn’t you? Go home.”

“Not everything, I know it, because I can’t leave here. Some Force doesn’t let me go. I can’t understand or recall what I must do.”

The Teacher interrupted me again, not letting me go on, “You have no right to risk yourself. I can’t come. I’m out of the city.”

“I must find him. He will tell me what to do.”

“After all he had done to you?”

“I have no time.”

The Teacher sighed.

“When you become a ram, it’s useless to argue with you … How are you going to get out?”

Suddenly I realized what I had forgotten at home. The disc with mantras was the easiest way to get out. I went over other options in my mind.

“Through the circle.”

“How do you plan to return?”

I sighed heavily keeping silent. There used to be someone around me before.

“Alice, even the most experienced people are not able to stay in the area where you are going to for a long time without any danger. Of leaving their physical body forever, for example.”

“I must do it.”

“Well, I’ll try to give you a sign when I feel you are running out of energy. In any case, if something goes wrong, you will instantly come back as soon as you say the code word. Now decide and tell me what that word is. Or a phrase. You will recall it There at the right time in the right place.”

Without thinking, I automatically replied, “I can’t.”

“You are in your repertoire as usual. You can do anything! But let it be as you said. How many minutes do I have to connect to you There?”

“I have to stretch my spine and gather people.”

We said goodbye. I sighed, lay down on the floor to make panther and other exercises. Just in case of a sudden fall. I got up and approached him. I took his hand again.

“Help me…” I asked him softly.

I took an icon from the bedside table and put it to my heart. “I can’t do otherwise,” but the Saint looked at me sadly. I put the icon back on the bedside table.

I opened the door abruptly. Everyone froze looking at me and waiting to hear something from me. Silently I gestured them to go into the ward. I counted them. Not enough, we needed to call someone else in order to make the circle wider and the whirlwind more powerful. I looked at the one who had called me.

“Call doctors here too.”

He nodded obediently and left. I came up to the window. There was light outside. I had to go into Darkness. I didn’t know how it would end. Behind me, there were people expecting the impossible from me. I wasn’t scared, a strange feeling that it all wasn’t only for him. It was me who needed that.

The door opened. Some more people came in. They looked at me questioning.

“Don’t ask me anything. You will do what I say. Silently. No matter what. Even if you feel like screaming. Or leaving. Or something else.”

I gathered their phones, switched them off. I showed them to form a circle. Everything was ready. They looked at me like I was crazy. I didn’t care. I knew only that I must. So I had to.

“No matter what I do, no matter what I say, no matter how I behave, you must not react to anything. Your task is not to let me out of this circle and to keep your hands together.”

I cast another glance at the Light. The one outside the window. Mentally I turned to RAM and the Teacher for help.

I step inside the circle. I touched the back of the one who had called me. I closed my eyes. “Help me!” I took the first step… The second… The third… Be braver, Alice! Faster. Stronger. Let yourself go! And then I felt the Force picking me up like at the seminar in the mountains, spinning me more and more with every turn, twisting, spiraling my astral body, forming a terrible, almost hurricane-like whirlwind. Constantly increasing its speed, the Force threw my physical body into the bodies of people with all its might. From the outside, I looked like a bird that wanted to break free, but its cage was locked by those standing in the circle. My physical arms whipped them backhand flying in a whirl. Fine. So it was important that they didn’t allow the bird to escape from the circle and fly out the window.

And there it was, the familiar sound, as if a cork popped out of a bottle.

I got in the Void. Great. Everything went according to plan. The Abyss, intermediate state. I had not to fall down and not to return. It was very wobbly. You couldn’t fall. There was nowhere to fall. “Where are you?” I said quietly, but there was no one around. Silence. I instantly moved through the space, scanning the sector up and down. He wasn’t there. He went further. ‘Where are you?” I asked again. “Where to look for you?!” I was frantically trying to figure out where to go. I needed a hint. I recalled my Temple of the Soul. It had four doors. One of them was the transition point between Another and the Earthly Realities, the second was the door to the Universe, the third, overgrown with white flowers, led to the Higher Spheres with Light Souls. He might be there. I mentally imagined myself at the first Door to the Temple. I opened it, and my Moon Cat ran towards me.

“Not now, Moony,” I said flying past him to the Door to the Higher Spheres, but the Patriarch blocked my way.

“Is He there?” I asked, pointing to the Door to the Higher Spheres.

The Patriarch was sadly silent.

“I need to find Him.”

“No need,” the Patriarch said thoughtfully and sighed.

“But I have to do something, right?”

“You have,” he replied sadly.

I didn’t have time to think. I came up to the Door and open it a little.

“No, Alice. He is not there,” the Patriarch said quietly.

I turned around.

“Where is he?”

“You must not go where he is.”

I looked at the right corridor of the Temple. There was almost no light there. At the end of the corridor, there was the last, yet never opened by me, the Fourth Door. Once we had walked along that corridor, the doors of the rooms had opened to me on both sides and I had been shown… mortal sins there! I flew down the corridor in a flash. The Patriarch appeared in front of me right at the Fourth Door.

“I must do it!” My voice almost burst into a scream.

He shook his head.

“You must not do THAT.”

“Why not?”

“You just have to recall.”

“What am I supposed to recall?”

“What you haven’t done yet.”

There was no time for recalling. Grabbing the virtual doorknob, I pushed it hard towards myself. It didn’t open being locked up, but I recalled, that once the Patriarch had given to me there the Egyptian sign, Ankh, the Key. So the key instantly appeared in my palm. I inserted it into the virtual lock, turned it and froze for a moment. I took a deep breath, “I don’t care. I have to find him!” and I opened the Door abruptly.

There was some Dark Light burning there. Everything was on fire. Another kind of fire, not like on the Earth. A dark crimson space. I saw the ruins of an old city. There were stones on the road. Somewhere in the distance I could see lonely trees already long withered. A desert. Stone desert. The earth was covered with cracks. Something was buzzing. Smelled like sulfur. Some shadows. Scary, disfigured faces. A City of the Dead. I heard a wild, heart-rending laughter behind me.

“Why did you come here?” Someone hissed. “This is not your Door!”

I didn’t turn around trying to keep walking. I looked only into the distance repeating mentally, “Where are you? Where are you?!”

Shadows surrounded me blocking my way. It was very stuffy there. I started to suffocate. I kept tripping over something and was about to fall. As usual, I didn’t watch my step.

“What are you doing here? Get back to where you came from! Have you forgotten what the One you’re looking for here did?”

I didn’t pay attention to shouts and grins, but suddenly I heard,

“She’s got the Key in her hand! The Key!”

There were more and more shadows around. They flocked and surrounded me from all sides so that I could hardly see ahead and move on. The noise was increasing. They couldn’t touch me, although they were trying with all their might to make me fall. They needed the Key I held in my hand, to open the Door sealed to them.

“WHERE ARE YOU?!” I screamed with all my might and…

…I saw Him slowly walking away.

“Stop!!! Please!”

He stopped. The shadows were trying to shout so that he didn’t hear my words. But he suddenly turned around. Shadows filled the space between us. They wanted him not to see me.

“GO BACK!!!”

He finally noticed me and walked towards me. They were trying to stop him, but he was coming.

“Alice… What are you doing here?”

Shadows put their hands around his neck. They whispered something in his ear trying to pull him away from me.

“I came for you. You have to return,” I said, realizing that it was too noisy there.

“What are you saying? I don’t hear…”

“Come with me! You must return!!!”

“Return?”

“Or you’ll stay here forever! This is the Wrong Door!”

The shadows shrieked, trying to outshout me.

“What did you say?”

“This is the Wrong Door!” I shouted with all my might.

I tried to take a step towards him in order to take his hand, but an invisible wall grew between us. Shadows snarled. They couldn’t touch me. They squealed making grimaces, “Give us the KEY and stay with him here forever!”

I held the Key tightly in my hand. The most powerful Shadow whispered something in his ear, and he grinned, “Are there other doors?”

“There are. You can’t get into them yet. You have to go back so you can leave through another Door later. In your time.”

He looked at me sadly, keeping silent. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a huge clock dial appeared in front of me. The minute hand showed five minutes to something. I realized with horror, my time was running out. I had to return urgently. The roar, hum and shouts became unbearable. I was about to lose my consciousness.

“Please come back!!!”

The shadows took him by the arms dragging him in the opposite direction from me.

“I can’t,” He said and started walking away into the distance.

It was unbearably hot and stuffy. There was nothing to breathe there. The air was soaked with poison. It gave me the creeps. I realized my powerlessness. He was walking away further and further. I tried to follow him, but they didn’t let me go. Someone or something. Gathering all my strength, I shouted the last thing left, “WHAT SHOULD I DO?”

He stopped for a moment and turned to me somehow doomed and silent. Then he said something I could hear no longer. I read those words on his lips, or maybe just mentally, “Forgive me.”

Instantly, my whole past life flashed before my eyes, like a movie. Everything from the moment we had once met. Frames flickered quickly, but I managed to live that life again. It was too painful. The hidden in the Subconscious burst out to the surface with terrible force overwhelming me with a wave of pain he had gifted to me and which had been waiting for its time to…

I had asked him for the opportunity to communicate with him. I wanted to be present in his life somehow. I wrote poetry to him. No, those were true spells. The best thing I had ever written on the Earth. At first, he occasionally appeared, called me. He asked how long I could love him. Then he disappeared, and I found myself in the Void again. Then he suddenly reappeared and said that he had bought me something as a gift. Another gift I didn’t need and he would never give me… Once I said a banal phrase, something similar to “Would you like some tea?” Of course, you find this funny. It’s nothing to offer a cup of tea to someone. Yes, you are a hundred times right! Absolutely nothing… Unless you know that I said this in the desert, where there is no water. No tea leaf. No kettle. It was like performing a miracle. And then… Then he disappeared for a long time. I remembered someone telling me why. He cut me out of his life. Once and forever. He considered me unworthy. Unworthy of communication with him. That night I was driving home in my car. The unworthy of anything had no point in living, and the only desire was to crash, so that I would never feel pain again… never…

I looked at the sliding hands of the dial.

Saying “I forgive you” doesn’t mean forgiving. I could say that phrase hundreds, thousands of times, but it wouldn’t change anything. Words didn’t matter There, since they used to scan our souls. Hands of the dial stopped at zero. I sobbed slowly sinking down with my fingers unclenched from impotence. The key fell out of my hand. Shadows instantly flew up to it and …

“I CAN’T!” I screamed in despair and…

…horror pierced me with an arrow – the code phrase was spoken …

A powerful Force instantly picked me up and carried me into the Flow.

I collapsed into my body…

I was afraid to open my eyes. With an incredible effort of will, I forced myself to do it. I was lying on my back in the darkness. “Where am I?”

I sat up on the bed. I had been trying for two minutes to distinguish in the darkness the outlines of the objects around me. There was another bed next to mine. Someone was sleeping there…

The mobile phone under the pillow started ringing with the familiar trill of the alarm clock. I glanced at the clock, it was twenty minutes to four. It was night. Or early morning. On the next bed, someone stirred and said in a sleepy voice, “Go to the mountains, don’t wait for me. I haven’t recovered yet…”

I recognized Svetlana’s voice. I was in the hotel. At RAM’s seminar in the mountains.

It was a dream. Just a dream…