Time Trance of the Gods (Book One)

By Linda Talbot

Book One of Time Trance of the Gods is a collection of stories that move through time with a mingling of mortals and ancient gods. Aphrodite's Option -the first, and longest, story is about power sharing between the sexes. Venal Elias struggles with female domination; dogged by the memory of an over possessive mother, he is pitched into weird events involving gods and ancient spirits borne from the past to the near future. He encounters an ancient matriarchy and the ubiquitous influence of Aphrodite. He is joined by Saul, who is mysteriously moved from London to somewhere in Greece, while Pandora, with her nasty box of tricks, is never far away. But that thin ray of hope still lies at the bottom of her box.Then there are the bizarre events in Fool's Errand, where Barry Fitzgerald meets a motley selection of men and gods on his harrowing quest for gold, after the world's wealth vanishes overnight.
Enjoy Luke the Fluke, a skit on Perseus and the Medusa. And in Loss, meet Dionysos, god of the vine, as he haunts present day Naxos, with Britt, a discontented woman whose life unfolds with tragic echoes of Ariadne, who was abandoned on Naxos by Theseus.
In other tales there are disconcerting glimpses into the future, from the cloned daughters in The Ichor of Ilyus Benz to in, The Memory of Myth, the space flight through a wormhole into another universe, where the gods inhabit a broken city.
Travel with these magical manifestations of man's imagination into my new worlds of equally bizarre enhantment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Linda Talbot
• Release date: Jan 18, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301210619

Linda Talbot

Linda Talbot has written fantasy for children and adults and for many years reviewed art, theatre and books in London. She now lives in Crete. She published "Fantasy Book of Food"; rhymes, stories and recipes for children and "Five Rides by a River" - about Suffolk, seen from a bicycle! She contributed a chapter to a book about Conroy Maddox, the British surrealist and features on art to "Topos" the German landscape magazine. She published short stories with the British Fantasy Society as well as stories and poetry in other magazines. And she launched "Wordweavers", an online supplement of poetry and fiction, published in conjunction with The Cretan International Community.

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Time Trance of the Gods

BOOK ONE

By Linda Talbot

Smashwords Edition

Copyright Linda Talbot ~ January 2013

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Table of Contents

Time Trance of the Gods - Introduction

Aphrodite's Option

Transformation

The Empusae

Movements Of The Moon

The Matriarchy

The Sacrifice

Hecate

Renewal

Fool's Errand

London

Flight

The Ichor of Ilyus Benz

Luke the Fluke

Loss

Nemesis

Thalassaea

The Memory of Myth

About the author

Time Trance Of The Gods

Introduction

The ancient gods are borne through time in this collection of stories based mostly on ancient myth. For what may have happened in the past could well have parallels in the present and be re-enacted with the influence of technology or some man-made catastrophe in the future.

Aphrodite's Option

Transformation

Elias stirs. Opens his eyes. Strains against a low, unyielding light. Dimly he perceives blue hills, a surging sea. He lies on a beach, radically re-carved.

He strives to recall. A void. Painfully he finds his feet. His silk shift is sand-stained and torn.

He walked unsteadily towards the hills. To his left the mesmerised Aegean heaved. To his right, a road ran blackly. Silence, save for the sea. Where were the people? Why did the low light not change? Where was he? Who was he?

He reached the road, headed for the hills. His legs faltered but he made the squat white village. No one.

He peered into an interior. A couple lay, apparently asleep. He passed to the next house. A young woman sprawled on the floor. He entered, tentatively touched her. She was dead, with evidence of burning.

He went into other homes. All the inhabitants had been burned and were dead. How had he survived? As though in response, a low wind rose and cooled his fevered flesh.

Elias was gross. He fattened on the proceeds of narcotics, trading through a consistently expanding network, needing an increasing degree of surveillance.

He had lived in a neo-Classical fantasy with twenty rooms dedicated to specific indulgences, from the mixing of music on advanced technical devices and a selection of literary erotica, to a room filled with semi-precious stones, shaped by the elements into the suggestive and grotesque.

In the basement, furnished with Asian silks and custom built couches, he had kept his harem; seven women hand-picked from around the world for their sensuality, purity and compliance.

He had dressed in hand made luxury; after dark, in loose flowing robes of heavy Chinese silk, designed to slough off in sensuous folds as he approached the sexual bed.

He was inventive and insatiable, frequently bringing to the bed samples of the music he had personally mixed and selecting a passage of arousal from one of the books.

As the selected woman lay in readiness, he held the book high in his right hand, while his left began to trace her flesh.

And he devised sonorous spells of dominance. Standing some distance away, he recited these sexual incantations, probing the woman's eyes with his, like a mongoose mesmerising a snake. When he finally lowered himself, the woman simpered like a small beast on heat.

One woman - Kekashan - brought from India, was a trained temple dancer. For her he had small images of Priapus made in eighteen carat gold which he hung on a fine chain and placed ritually around her waist. As she danced, the figures bounced and jangled in endless anticipation.

For Liv, a towering blonde from Sweden, he had a flexible, fine mesh net made in sterling silver which slipped over her sun-bronzed limbs like a second skin. The denial of her flesh as he strove to penetrate the mesh drove him to a frenzy and he would climax in bloodied ecstasy.

Loanga, an acrobat from Africa, was smeared with perfume oils and released to slither through the shadows, Elias following her fragrance, but frustrated as she slid from his grasp, tumbling and ducking through the house, until curling of her own volition, in some dark corner, where, half crushed, he covered her.

Eleni from the Peloponnese, shrank from water, having almost drowned as a child. He buried her up to the neck in sand facing the oncoming tide, on the beach below the house. Tenderly Elias placed wet weed and pearl white shells in her splayed black hair.

As the sea encroached, he loosened the sand until Eleni could begin to wriggle upwards, panic-stricken and grasping Elias tightly about the neck. As her limbs worked towards the surface, he covered her, the sea lapping his legs, her sand-encrusted limbs harsh against his.

He regularly devised fresh titillations, drawn from literature and imagination. He took a constant range of drugs, measuring and regulating, to achieve the desired effect. His women were given drugs only as rigorously rationed rewards for some particular act of excess or humiliation.

He was closely acquainted with the gods. He felt their presence as he walked the shore and watched the semen of Uranus flowing at his feet.

He saw Europa on the bull in the field by the rutted river bed and Zeus as the weird white swan rearing, its wings wide as clouds, to cover Leda shivering in the sand.

He understood primeval impetus; the elemental thrust and transformation, the unimpeded violations, ritually observed before man's prudish prohibitions.

Occasionally Nikos, a fellow manipulator of narcotics, joined Elias in the room built beyond the women's quarters. Nikos, refined and adept at embroidery, frequented clubs where his calling code, sewn in chain and Cretan stitch on his white silk shirt, was interpreted. It called for the callous, to which Elias inventively responded.

Elias passed beyond the village of inexplicable dead. Numbed and carelessly exposed, he walked into the sour light and for the first time, recognised the hills. He reached the great house. Its neo-Classical grace was unscathed. He began to recall.

He felt the presence of the dead as he entered. The silence was profound. The Persian carpets lay in place. The rich brown strata of the walnut table and chairs swam in the filtered light.

He passed to the library. The books stood in order on the shelves, their sensuality suspended. In the music room the equipment was unperturbed. The house was waiting.

Elias slowed and moved towards the bedroom. He hesitated at the half open door. Listened. With three fingers he pushed the door fully open.

The women were lying, lightly interlinked on the great bed, as though they had converged and clung in sudden terror.

Elias touched Eleni. She was stiff. With a tenderness he had never shown when they were alive, he touched the others, lingering in disbelief over each stiffened body, gazing into the open eyes and mechanically muttering an incantation. But the utterance fell on frozen ears. Like him, the women were not burned. Naked, they crystallised like unsullied porcelain. Elias summoned his pampered bulk to wrestle with the limbs, extricating one from another, laying each woman with arms close to her sides on the cold green tiles.

He sat on the redundant bed and gazed at the motionless flesh. He looked each woman squarely in the eye, striving to deduce in death, what he had overlooked in life. But Elias would never know how the women had felt, how each essentially differed from the other, the potential that had been brutalised by his demands.

He could not weep. He was sealed in shock. Eventually he rose and lifted Kekashan from the tiles that had intensified the coldness of her flesh.

He carried her along the hall lined with meticulous reproductions of Mughul miniatures to the pool that glimmered blue green among tree peonies and rose acacias. He slid her gently into the water. She floated, her black hair undulating like fine weed among the artificial islands planted with water lilies.

Elias watched her for a long time. His isolation crept like long fingers with nails of ice, from his guts to his traumatised mind. It held him as rigid as the lifeless women.

But it urged him at last to get up and heavily return along the hall. One by one, he carried the women to the pool and eased them into the water. Then he threw off his torn robe and slowly lowered himself.

He nudged the women into a shape like a blossoming flower which he eased across the pool until it spun with the momentum. But it bumped into the artificial islands and the flower disintegrated.

Elias splashed in deeper, striving to recreate the floating flower but the bodies drifted in arbitrary directions. At last he hauled them one by one from the water and laid them on the blue and gold tiles to form the letter E. They were, yet were no longer, his. He had determined their lives, had sustained and violated them.

Elias left the women lying in his name. He could not look back. He moved, unseeing, to the bed and lay numbed, in silence. He believed himself the only person left alive. Which god had decreed this death?

Eventually he wearily rose and went to the ground floor terrace overlooking the hills. They dimmed, as the light at last began to change. Darkness crept; a surreptitious balm, obliterating the abandoned world.

Elias, still naked, shivered. Then began to sweat. He sought a silk robe which cooled his fever. He sank into a deep damask chair and fitful forgetfulness. But at dawn he fully awoke. The fever had been succeeded by a creeping cold. And fear. It filtered through every pore.

He went again to the terrace bordered by Moroccan pots of roses. Elias fingered the petal of a rose and was assailed by connotations of the flesh. He plucked a large red bloom and breathed its essence. He dropped it in despair. The petals fell away and, as he watched, withered.

When he looked up and out towards the hills, touched by a livid and unnatural light, he saw a woman walking from their still black base. She was starkly white, black haired, her body strung with roses as red as the bloom now shrunken and brown on the ground.

The roses swung like pools of airborne blood. Some fell to lie on the rock-strewn earth. Her body bore smears of red. The roses' thorns caught her flesh as she walked and bled, the drops running into the red of the fallen petals.

One moment the woman neared, the next she seemed to be still at the mountains' base.

Elias left the terrace. He watched her fluctuating in her drift of petals. He willed her to walk towards him but she maintained her distance, until all the roses had floated from her flesh. The branch of thorns remained. Then fresh roses began to bloom between the thorns. They obscured the whiteness of her flesh, until only her face with its indistinguishable features and her long black hair, were visible.

Above the hills the light now was sallow, spawning illusion. Was the woman real? Had Elias formed her from vacuity? She wavered and as he drew near enough to distinguish the contours of her face, she began to dissolve. He hurried. Her hair flowed, dimmed and disappeared. He stood over a scatter of red rose petals, already withering.

Saul woke. He was in London; a city of still identifiable centuries in tact but with a burden of decomposing dead.

Saul saw his manuscript on the table; each page in place, each early Greek philosopher of his treatise, investigated, discussed, with a final evaluation. What of Thales, Alcmaeon and Zeno now? He had written a special section on Empedocles, exploring his claim that the universe was comprised of the four elements and influenced by love and strife, each periodically dominating the other. A perfect sphere formed under love, which was shattered when strife interceded. But life was eternal.

The curiosity and deductive powers of these philosophers, sustained for so long, would whirl for ever in the sphere where all words converge, unheard by humanity.

Saul moved, his limbs slothful, as though still subject to shock. He gathered his papers, clutching them close; his sole connection with a former existence. He knew, by some inexplicable instinct, the population was decimated.

He looked at his face, unburned, in the mirror. He took a chair onto the balcony by the bedroom, looked out over the rooftops, silent in the low light. St Paul's Cathedral - inveterate survivor - rose; rounded and aloof. Saul felt involuntary tears well. Insupportable isolation.

He slept and was compelled to wander the world, among man's artefacts that were evidence of time; three Minoan women, embodying verve, black hair coiled and strung with jewels in a fresco in Bronze Age Knossos, a family fishing and fowling, for eternity, astride their narrow boats on the teeming marsh in a tomb painting in western Thebes. A seventeenth century Mughal rug with peacocks and cranes, partridges and doves woven in wool of thirteen colours and the twelve symbol satin robe worn in nineteenth century China by Emperor Tao-kuang.

But these exquisite objects were evidence of wealth in the hands of a few, like those voted for by the majority who had died through some accident or secret, arbitrary decision. A nutron bomb?

And Saul passed through the common home, oppressed with practicality; personal pickings clumsily converging yet redolent with humanity's idiosyncrasies; warm witnesses to death.

He floated from the sinister silence, high above the city; its hysterical machinations suspended. The Bank of England, dour dealer with the national debt, government's needs and banker to the world, stood impotently irrelevant. The golden scales of justice weighed the air on the roof of the Old Bailey in Newgate Street. He could see through the walls of Guildhall, where the giants Gog and Magog were immutably sealed in time.

As he rose, the land wavered, the sullied light loosing illusion. Spires tilted. High rise blocks swam, their windows ethereal aspects of the sky. Only the Thames wove, unchanged, defying disintegration.

Saul opened eyes, unusually oppressed with sleep. He lay by a turbulent sea. Beyond the beach he saw pulsating hills and a prominent white house.

Stiffly, he found his feet, then saw his thesis lying in the sand, ragged yet still in order; the words of seeking and analysis legibly alive. He scooped it up.

Elias lay in the bedroom echoing with the sound of the sea. It might have been washing the walls of the great house, the breaking of the monumental waves thrown back like thunder by the black hills.

He did not return to the pool. The women lay in the pristine E, their flesh inexplicably preserved. Elias closed his eyes and visualised the woman strung with roses. He reached for her bleeding flesh and it fell like the rose petals, from his hands.

Without the means of manipulation he was impotent; ungainly hands and devious mind equally at a loss. Yet he needed neither food nor drink. He lived in a limbo unrelated to the physical.

Slowly, unbidden, white figures begin to move through his mind. They gain substance and detail; men and women, lost and vulnerably naked.

Elias focuses. He gathers them tightly, until flesh closes on flesh. Their confusion increases. Some grow inflamed and begin to obsessively unite.

Eagerly, Elias clutches the air, vicariously sharing their heightened emotion. He leaves the bed, striving to keep the men and women clearly in mind. But they fluctuate, in bizarre liaisons.

He went to the beach. At the back, near the redundant road stood great stacks of glistening white marble and black lava. He grasped a marble square. It was weightless. He laid it carefully on a flat piece of sand. He returned to lift a clean cut section of lava; feather light and demon dark which he placed next to the marble.

Within the hour he had laid an enormous board as though for a giant chess challenge on the empty beach. Instantly he felt a sense of order restored. Often he had played chess with Nikos. His mind had craved the discipline after dissipation. It moved through ingenuity yet was unable to universally speculate.

It had not occurred to Elias to question his existence, to wonder how and why the cosmos was created, although he had an empathy with monstrous myth; denying its authenticity yet instinctively identifying with the gods' excesses.

Now he feared the manipulating earth force. He needed to have control. He had mastered his limited world. He had looked no further than his degenerate domain. All that now remained lay in his head. Soluble men and women, beyond the jurisdiction of his will.

He looked at the board; blanks for potential play. Already Elias envisaged the creatures in his mind, reconstituted and coerced into a series of obligatory games. A contest for essential favours. He would offer the illusion of protection; his house, his body, an aura of privileged existence built on sand.

But the people who had been so actively intense, had vanished. Elias concentrated. Felt the need nagging his flesh. But his head swam blackly.

He stepped onto a marble square. Planted both feet firmly. Closed his eyes. He strove to recall the feel and odour of female flesh. But his skin was cold and uncomforted.

He moved onto a black square. A curious warmth rose, as though the earth beneath the lava still simmered. He passed from frigidity to warmth across the board, pausing to concentrate on the human form as though to will it into existence. Now he did not seek sensuality. Only the reassurance he was not alone. But the people he conjured had no substance.

Then he saw the woman strung with roses. She stood in statuesque indifference at the far end of the board. Her eyes were levelled at the sea. Her blood-streaked arms hung loosely at her sides.

She stepped onto the board, her feet suspended slightly above its surface. She moved from black to white, drops of blood staining the slabs. The petals fell and the roses grew again. Yet she drew no nearer. Elias started towards her. She dimmed. Disappeared. He sank on a cold marble slab, head in hands.

When he looked up he saw the distant figure of a man. He was clutching papers and walked as though intoxicated. Suddenly he paused and saw Elias in the centre of his chequer board.

Saul quickened. A pale sun filtered through the disorientating light, strengthened and flashed off the marble surfaces. Saul looked away and when he turned again, saw Elias slowly rise and walk towards him.

The heavy man paused at a distance. Assessed Saul. Came closer. He held out a hand.

Elias Vandoris.

Saul Usiskin. He too held out his hand. He recoiled from the flabbiness of the Greek's handshake but tried to smile into his apprehensive eyes.

What has happened? asked Saul.

Elias shook his head and raised his arms in