Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [4]
This had been true enough. When she drank, Lisa-Beth lost her sense of daylight even faster than her sense of balance.
‘There,’ the Mother had concluded. ‘When these changes are in your blood, you are no longer one with the common rhythm of things. We live to the world’s sense of time, and become one with it until we never even notice its power over us. To break that rhythm… to stand aside from time… much needs to be changed within your body. Wine alone could never bring you to Shaktyanda.’
And then she’d started explaining the muscle techniques.
Kadak‐‘oh!’‐kadak‐‘oh!’‐kadak, went the machine under Lisa-Beth. Perfect timing: without thinking, she’d started working the man/bed in time with her own private rhythms. It was like a meditation, like the chanting of monks, like the words repeated over and over by the Mesmerists in Paris until their victims’ minds were taken miles out of their own bodies. The rhythm of the noise, of Lisa-Beth’s muscles as they clenched and unclenched inside her, lazily performing the techniques of Mother Dutt. The timbers of the house kept squealing in tempo, making Lisa-Beth wonder how long it’d be before the fumes made her start thinking it was the apes from the zoo she could hear. Not just the apes that were there now, but all the apes who’d ever lived and died in the building, all the generations laid on top of each other, all their screeching and shrieking brought together in a single chorus. Entirely by accident, then, she’d entered the no-time of Shaktyanda.
Kadak‐‘oh!’‐kadak‐‘oh!’‐kadak went the man, the bed, the machine, and the apes that haunted the walls. The question was, how long had she been doing this? How long had she been sitting on top of her bed-beast? Seconds or hours? No: she doubted the man could have stood it for hours. Still, she couldn’t help hoping that she was speeding up her own body-time rather than slowing it down. Back in the House, a month into the teaching, Mother Dutt had talked Lisa-Beth through a procedure – the gentleman hadn’t objected – In which time seemed to be suspended indefinitely, in which Lisa-Beth’s body stopped altogether and whole new worlds unfolded from a single moment. For that one moment, endless as it seemed, time had no longer been just a question of numbers on a clock face. Time had been a thing.
Whenever Lisa-Beth had tried to explain that to anybody afterwards, it had sounded like madness. Besides, there was no money in that kind of talk. Unless you were French.
It was, the Mother had said, all about control over one’s own body, about the time inside oneself, so only during the ‘rites’ could the rhythms best be synchronised. That was why the Houses run by men had no understanding of the tantra, she’d said. Then again, the Mother had once claimed that she’d been able to actually roll time backwards during the vital act. Lisa-Beth had always wondered what it might feel like, to deal with a client in reverse. As disappointing as it felt the right way round, she supposed.
‘But one must be careful,’ the Mother had warned her and Little Rose one day. ‘Everyone who understands these things understands that there are difficulties. Because there must be difficulties.’
‘The pox?’ Lisa-Beth had ventured.
‘Demons,’ the Mother had explained.
‘Oh,’ Lisa-Beth had said, trying not to sound too bored.
The kadak‐‘oh!’‐kadak‐‘oh!’‐kadak was still going on, somewhere in another world. Lisa-Beth was reaching that point in the tantra where memory folded in on itself, where the old sensations buried deep down in the body came back to haunt the skin, woken