© 2013 EXCERPT FROM NEW SERIES, “DELILAH, ASTRAL INVESTIGATOR”

Episode One

(Work in Progress)

I am delving into the differences between characters’ voices. Delilah, Astral Investigator, is very much a modern, young woman. The guide on her astral projections, however, hails from an ancient time and place. This is not the beginning of the novella, but the first introduction of Delilah’s spirit help-mate. He is just becoming grounded in his new reality. He’s not sure what he is or who he is. He doesn’t even know his own name yet! His speech is colored with his history and the wonderful new words, concepts, and theories he is learning from Delilah.

“She’s barely breathing!” the woman screamed in the close confines of the bedchamber. There was no one to hear a mother’s anguished pleas.

            The short, stout woman twisted a circular disc on the wall and brightened the room to a harsh glare. The sickroom had been bathed in shadows in reverence to the sleeping young woman in the small bed.

            The girl’s cheeks were flushed bright red, her dark hair sweaty and damp. A machine on the bedstead puffed a healing mist into the air. The vapor did not seem to aid the poor, sick damsel.

             Gurgling sounds filled the hush of the night as she thrashed and struggled, fighting to fill her damaged lungs. The acrid smell in the atmosphere indicated the presence of strong medicine in the modern breathing apparatus.

            The older woman dashed out of the room—the sound of gushing water, pounding feet as she rushed back in, clutching a steamy towel.

            As the grieving mother lay the cloth upon her daughter’s heaving breast, I saw the raven-haired beauty rise like a ghost out of her sublime body and stand before me.

∞

            Her name is Delilah. No last names, please. No one can see me, or so I had thought, until her violet eyes burned into my soul.

            Who am I? I don’t really know. I may be a part of Delilah—on second thought, though, probably not, since I am distinctly male and not of this era, I suspect. I may be a guiding host sent to watch over her.

            Yet, I do know I am naught the legendary, Biblical Samson. That would be just too odd!

            The first time I saw her was the result of a fever which exacerbated her acute, chronic Asthma. She penned the dream in her diary, finding it weeks or months later, only to be terrified by the repercussions of her out-of-the-body experience.

            But how could she turn away? When she had accomplished so much for a soul trapped in purgatory? When she scribbled in her journal the initial “episode” (the first new word I learned from Delilah)—fever still in residence, but no longer life-threatening—it fell upon her like crushed stone that if she allowed herself to return to the netherworld, she might become caught in a plane of existence naught of her own reality. Mayhap she would become one of the episodes herself—unknowingly experiencing the same actions for neigh onto eternity with the suffering, misery, even the physical pain, as fresh and pungent as the death itself—and no one remembers the continuous, repeated actions!

            Delilah is a do-gooder and wants to aid her contemporary, global world. She immediately perceived the deranged souls escaping from their karmic prison, as eventually they all must do, though it may take centuries. After the first episode, she analyzed the vivid dream. She concluded these projections foretold the return of crazed, frightened, ignorant souls from The Dark Ages, breaking free from their shackles.

            Delilah is a voracious reader of history. She loves antiquity and the beauty of royalty. But what of the plight of common-folk? They outnumbered royalty hundreds-of-thousands to one!

            Her self-interest is historical fiction. She loves something called “role playing” with ornate gowns and crowns and pompous etiquette. In her warped sense of reality, she steadfastly refused to study the plagues and blackness that descended on her beloved planet in medieval times.

            This has changed, however. Delilah now acknowledges and fears the bitter entities coming back to release evil onto her world. She has decided she must learn the truth of a past riddled with madness.

            I do have to suppress an amused titter at this onset for I know the first journey of flight was not from the Black Plague delirium. This episode was more current, only some forty years before the timeframe in which Delilah lives. She thought it positively ancient! Long before her birth!

            The educational analysis and hypotheses of her advanced scientific degrees revealed the continuum of time and the quantum physics of infinity—such lovely terms I have learned from Delilah’s delicious genius! Her academic accomplishments allowed her to astutely surmise the vengeance that could be unleashed on her society, and it shook her very soul!

            All matter, all energy, does not end. It is infinite. Therefore, the demented will return when they can create the most havoc in a global world that is overpopulated, depleted of natural resources, and suffering from modern plagues—the sicknesses of waste, pollution, and newly released microscopic vermin.

            The grace in Delilah’s mind? If she can help lost souls banish their demons and perversion, there will be less chaos and evil in her civilized world.

            Reading and watching the daily news after her initial dream, but still in a high-pitched fevered state, she saw for the first time what was happening to her entire planet. Yes, she’d seen it before, but suddenly it had terrifying consequences and prophetic direction.

            The direction Delilah saw was not pleasant. The episodes she investigates will reach to the past and the future. All directions of time can be entered and augmented. Delilah and I have so much to learn from each other.

            She still scribbles by hand the astral episodes in her dream diary in the dark of night by light of a single candle. It pleases me that she writes in the old-fashioned way of my lifetime. It is a bond between us. She must record the dream in scratched, cryptic letters as soon as it occurs or she loses the fine detail which is so crucial to her challenged reality.

            A few days later, she takes her rough-hewn draft and transfers it to a well-lit “screen” (another new word for me). We, together, will pen the stories that need to be told and record them on these new magical devices that seem to have outlived the Gutenberg Press.

            But I get ahead of myself. I have so much to tell! We will begin at the beginning with all the revelations that Delilah and I unwillingly share.

∞

© Copyright by author, Deborah A. Bowman, all rights reserved.