PART THREE - PARIS
- 5 -
The sun beating down on his back, the sound of cool water tumbling and falling, the soft green grass beneath his bare feet, by now Gabe could recognise his recurring dream world. He knew that he was dreaming and he did not want to wake from it. In the dream world he felt good, he felt right. His body was no longer a mass of awkward aches and pains, but a soft, supple comfortable thing.
Instinctively, he felt himself drawn to the sound of water. He had been in this place before, he knew the attraction the water had to him. As he walked barefoot in the grass, he felt the presence of another body just behind him, although he seemed unable to turn to see it. Somehow he could tell that the other presence was none other than the goddess Venus. He could feel the force of her power flowing all over his naked body, making his skin tingle and all the hairs on his body stand on end.
Seeing the silver ripple of falling water in the fountain, Gabe walked toward it in a trance like state, still feeling the presence of the goddess over his shoulder. He stood beside the stone wall around the fountain's pool and looked into the clear water, watching the waves and ripples as the fountain's rain fell down into it. The presence behind him drew closer. He felt a soft hand on his naked back, the very touch of which caused him to become light headed and swoon.
"Come, my son, and look into my mirror," came the melodic voice ringing in Gabe's ears, "Come and see what the mirror has to tell you."
Gabe peered into the fountain, watched the ripples of the falling water, stared into it, becoming lost and detached from all around him until all he could see was waves on the water, and all he could here was falling splashes. As he drifted in this strange state, the waves began to form themselves into words and pictures, symbols and phrases.
At first, Gabe could make no sense of the swirling shapes. Patterns of lines and crosses formed and disappeared before his eyes before he could hope to decipher them. There was, however, a certain familiarity in these rows of shapes and symbols, he had seen them somewhere before. Gradually, those symbols started turning to letters, some recognisable ones and others from all kinds of different alphabets, and Gabe began to see individual words that he recognised.
One group of words stood out to him. It said "the fortunate ones", grew large in his vision and then burst into tiny lines, disappearing and reforming into other new letters. The phrase seemed familiar to him, but he could not remember from where and he had no time to think about it as he was faced with a new set of words and letters to try and understand.