Free SYLVIE'S RIDDLE by Alan Wall Page A

Pneuma called the dark plumbing of sad bodies, th e potbellies, the gross tongues , those with soulless skins and iron brains. The pain was the low dirge of lament of a defeated army stumbling home. Soon enough she would hit the wall of elation, that resurrection into the region of Mary's colour, the azure of the abandonment of the fleshly. Pneuma had described it so beautifully. It would soon be hers. Only for now the pain, the sweats, the cramps and the cold. Such a terrible cold. She had never felt so shiveringly cold; the soul itself seemed to shiver. Shaking off the filth of its imprisonment. That was the dark matter leaving.
    She could still just manage to turn around and see the image of Pneuma, a vague vignette, framed in a white-heart plastic frame, redolent of sainthood. It made her look considerably thinner than she actually was these days, but her skin was still lit from the light within. And she also saw Owen Treadle, whom she did not choose to see at all. His ectoplasmic face was grinning, pursuing her across space and time. 'Go on, you can do it. It's not really happening, Alex. This is acting, for God's sake.' But it was rea lly happening, wasn't it? Even something only made to be re-played again and again on film still had to happen. Images could not have an afterlife unless they had a l ife first. She passed out then.
    *
    Lady Pneuma now claimed one hundred thousand members worldwide. There was no way of affirming or disproving this statement, since if she kept any records, she had not as yet made them available to anyone else. The Inland Revenue in Britain and the IRS in the States were both beginning to make some interested murmurs about all this. But Pneuma, while seemingly living at the Claymore for one half of the year, and the New York Waldorf for the other, remained elusive. Her communications with the world were carefully controlled. A DVD (Alex had it in her bag, but there was no way of playing it in the electricity-free bothie); occasional booklets; hermetic appearances on television, very infrequent, and controlled entirely by the Delta Foundation. Her followers had to turn back to the compacted wisdom brought together in the pages of The One True Elemental. There they could find it all. All that she had discovered. All she had endured. Everything she had now transcended.
    Alex was clutching her copy, even as she sank into unconsciousness. Her own copy was signed; or at least the words Lady Pneuma had been imprinted on its title-page in some manner. A few sceptical journalists who had set off in pursuit of the enigmatic lady were far from convinced that she spent her days signing books for her numerous disciples. Alex had the special copy because, after paying three hundred pounds to become an associate member, she had then spent a further four hundred to become a full initiate. This accorded her privileges, like the signed book, in which she had read – enchantingly – that the urethra had only become so engrossed and enfleshed at a late stage in female evolution. Before that it had been a translucent passageway through which light could travel freely. This had been the burden of the myth of Zeus and Danae: though encased in her tower of flesh, Danae was penetrated by the luminous shower of gold. In other words, the riches of the world of light had overcome all obstacles and seeded the womb of the future. So what did gods live on and in? Air, of course. Like Pneuma herself.
    Alex had also been entitled as a full initiate to personal communication with Lady Pneuma; this prospect had been what had prompted her to spend the extra money. In her desperation before leaving to head north the month before, she had phoned and phoned. Day after day after day. Over a hundred times. But it was always the same recorded message she found herself listening to.
    'This is Lady Pneuma. You are now a full initiate of the Delta Foundation, which has found the path of escape from a life of bodily entrapment. We are