Free The Unlimited Dream Company by J. G. Ballard

took off down river, lazily trailing the pike’s viscera. The damp sand carried its reflection, slick with the fish’s blood running into the water.
    I stepped on to the beach, which was littered with driftwood and hundreds of coarse feathers. A canvas bag filled with Father Wingate’s archaeological tools still lay onthe sand, beside a fresh crevice in the pebble bank exposed by the splash-wave of the plunging Cessna. Some six feet long and ten inches deep, this stony shelf was wide enough to take a man. I was tempted to see if it would fit me, and imagined myself lying in it, like Arthur at Avalon or some messiah sleeping for ever in his riverine tomb.
    Ten feet from me the sand glittered with silver light, a dissolving mirror leaking into the river. A gondola of the Ferris wheel lay in the shallow water among the Edwardian pillars. Dislodged by the night’s storm, a section of Stark’s amusement pier had collapsed into the river, carrying part of the merry-go-round with it. A small winged horse lay among the debris on the wet beach.
    I remembered my dream, and the bodies of the frantic birds colliding above the fairground as they scrambled around me in the whirling air. Soon after dawn the river had disgorged this antique Pegasus on to the same beach where I had swum ashore. I approached the horse and pulled it on to the bank. The fresh paint silvered my hands, leaving a speckled trail across the sand.
    As I wiped the paint on to the grass, the pelicans watched me from the flowerbeds. The same vivid light flared from their plumage. The foliage of the willows and ornamental firs seemed to have been retouched by a psychedelic gardener with a taste for garish colours. A magpie swooped across the overlit lawn, feathers brilliant as a macaw’s.
    Stimulated by this display of light, I stared into the stained water. The storm had disturbed the river, and a congregation of eels swarmed in the shallows. Heavy-bodied fish moved about in the deeper water, as if they had made their home in the drowned fuselage of the Cessna. I thought of Mrs St Cloud and our strange and violent sex together, and of the birth we had mimicked of an adult child. Already, responding to the nervous irritation of this Sunday morning light, I felt a new surge of sexual potency.
    As I left the St Clouds’ garden and entered the park Ipassed a fallow deer rubbing its muzzle against a silver birch. Only half-playfully, I tried to seize its hind-quarters, feeling the same sexual attack towards this timid creature that I felt even for the trees and the soil underfoot. I wanted to celebrate the light that covered the still drowsing town, spill my semen over the polite fences and bijou gardens, burst into the bedrooms where these account executives and insurance brokers lazed over their Sunday papers and copulate at the foot of their beds with their night-sweet wives and daughters.
    But was I still trapped in Shepperton?
    For the next hour, while the streets were deserted, I carried out a complete circuit of the town. Following the line of the motorway, where my first escape attempt had been baulked, I set off towards London, where the open fields gave way to a series of quiet lakes and water-filled gravel pits linked by causeways of sand. Leaving behind the last of the houses on the east of Shepperton, I climbed through a hedge and walked across a field of poppies to the nearest of the lakes.
    An abandoned gravel conveyor and the rusting shells of two cars lay in the shallow pools. As I approached them, the air swayed around me. Ignoring this, I pressed on. Suddenly the perspectives of lakes and causeways inverted warningly. The muddy ground swerved around me, and then fled away on all sides, while a distant cluster of nettles on a concrete outcrop rushed towards me, gathering around my legs as if to embrace me.
    Without a second thought I there and then gave up all attempts to escape from Shepperton. My mind was still not ready to take its leave of this