Lost World

The air hums with summer heat, sounds muted by a blanket of mid-day lassitude. Will Barlow can hear the stream if he listens for it; also the occasional buzz of a cicada and the call of a whipbird in the rainforest.

“Picture a tranquil scene from nature,” the course leader told them. “This is your quiet place, where you go to relax.”

He led them through a process of relaxing their muscles and their minds. “Now place yourself in your scene,” he said eventually. “Feel the forces of nature …” And in his mind Will is there. He feels the weight of summer as all movement slows; the flight of a raucous cockatoo a slow, languid passing, it’s call muted by heat and distance.

He knows he’s sitting in an uncomfortable, upright chair, hands on his knees, eyes closed – but, deep inside, the leader’s voice has led him to the verandah of the Lost World guesthouse, overlooking the valley to Mount Widgee. The upper slopes are darkly forested and cows graze listlessly in paddocks below.

Part of him knows it’s bullshit; the meditation or relaxation, whatever they call it, with its routine to relax the mind and focus inward. He only agreed to come because his doctor told him it might help him lower his stress levels; cure the ulcer acid-eating its way through the wall of his stomach in defiance of all the antibiotics – and because of the blackouts.

Nobody knows about the blackouts. Not even Doctor Seymour. Hours lost, God alone knows where!

But despite his scepticism, Will likes the philosophy behind the course; the concept of self-help and self-control. He’s never had time for wimps who run to others for help.

But he knows his life is out of control. He’s let work take over– and he’s willing to try almost anything to regain control. Even meditation.

Lost World was the perfect choice for Will’s tranquil place in every respect. Each time they had stayed at the tiny guesthouse below the cliffs it had been a refuge where his children never bickered, chores and work were left behind, and he and Mary could unwind and reconnect.

Now, with reluctance, he follows the leader’s carefully modulated voice back through his levels to the reality of an upright chair and a room full of people.

It’s already 9 pm and he wonders, for a moment, if he’s had a blackout – but the experience of Lost World was vividly real.

“Try to go through a relaxation cycle at least once before you come back tomorrow,” the leader urges as he wraps up the meeting.

Will arrives home with a feeling of wellbeing, even while his rational mind scorns the experience. He sleeps better than he has in months.

He’s up ten minutes early, relaxed and refreshed, set on going through a relaxation cycle before breakfast. It’s not as easy as it was last night. He has difficulty remembering the order of the colours he needs to let flood through his mind, and thoughts of the day keep intruding. He’s no sooner at Lost world before Timmy comes charging into the room, demanding his morning hug and kiss.

Work is worse than usual and, after a morning putting out corporate bushfires, he tackles the mound of paperwork on his desk. At 6 pm he packs his briefcase with files that need analysis and notices with satisfaction that, as usual, he is the last to leave.

Only when he arrives home does he remember he’s due back in town by 7 pm. I don’t have the time, he tells himself as he turns into the driveway.

But Mary will have none of it. “You said you enjoyed it, and you’ve paid for it, so you should jolly well attend,” she says. “Get up early to work if you like; but go tonight!”

A quick bite and he’s back in the car, arriving at the Relaxation Centre only ten minutes late. He’s shocked to discover that taking control of your life includes being on time for meetings.

His visit to Lost World is even more vivid and Will recalls everything about the valley with remarkable clarity.

Reluctantly, he retreats from his private place and follows the leader’s instructions as he introduces the Screen of the Mind visualisation tools, through which, he tells them, they can cure their ailments and ensure physical wellbeing.

It all seems awfully hocus-pocus; visualising a raw and angry ulcer in a harsh black border, then superimposing a white-bordered picture of what he presumes the lining of a normal, healthy stomach would look like. The leader assures them it’s not the accuracy of the visualisation that’s important, merely their belief in what they’re seeing. But Will feels a fraud. In comparison, his visualisation of Lost World had been intensely real.

That night his sleep is deep and dream-free, and he wakes early and refreshed. This time he locks himself in his study, steeling himself to ignore the contents of his briefcase as he descends through his levels to spend ten minutes in the Lost World valley.

Somehow the papers lose their urgency and he’s more positive about facing the day than he’s been for a long time.

Soon Will is on top of the world. He finds time to attend the nightly lectures, visits the Lost World in his head each morning and is absolutely killing it at work.

Better still, the gnawing pain in his stomach begins to abate as he daily visualises the ulcer closed and cured on the Screen of the Mind.

The course is complete, but the following week Will begins to explore the full potential of the valley in his mind. Without the stricture of the group sessions, he can spend longer there. He pictures the valley in the four seasons; baked hot and sultry in summer, filled in autumn-coloured splendour; barren and frost-burnt in winter; and bursting with fresh growth after spring rains.

One night he pictures the valley in a mighty storm, the wind raging across the paddocks as clouds sweep the mountain and the trees lash themselves in a frenzy. The vision shakes Will to the core. He’s never seen a storm at Lost World and would have believed himself incapable of imagining the malevolent forces unleashed in his mind. Rushing through the colours to terminate the session, he finds himself anything but relaxed and determines never to visualise Lost World in this way again.

Instead, Will explores during his twice-daily sessions, taking long walks in the rainforest where waterfalls join the stream and giant strangler figs and hoop pines tower overhead, elk and staghorn ferns thick in their branches.

After three weeks Will’s ulcer has disappeared, and he is making light of his workload at the office. People congratulate him and he finds he can leave early with an empty briefcase.

Only at home is there a sour note as Will’s morning and evenings alone in his study lengthen. “Do you know you spent two hours in there this evening,” Mary says, after interrupting a session. “What do you do that takes so long?”

Will tries to explain about the need to relax; to visit his place in nature and use the Screen of the Mind to cure his ulcer. It’s the first time he’s told Mary what happens in the sessions, and he doesn’t notice her expression change from annoyance to incredulous anger. “I thought it might help overcome your obsession with work. Instead, you’ve become obsessed with something else!” She storms out of the room.

No longer kept away by their mother, the children frequently interrupt Will’s sessions, demanding bedtime stories just as he’s about to explore a new aspect of his valley. “I’ll come in a minute,” he shouts, fully intending to withdraw from the session slowly before kissing them goodnight. But it completely slips his mind as he discovers a crystal pool around a bend in the river he hasn’t explored before.

“What’s wrong with you?” Mary hisses an hour later. “Timmy was almost hysterical this evening. He says you haven’t kissed him goodnight for more than a week, and Sarah was crying for you for half an hour before she fell asleep.”

Will has no answer and promises to limit the sessions to half an hour, morning and night. And for the next week he does so, setting the alarm on his phone.

But something’s missing; something he can’t identify. It nags and nags until he feels his anxiety return. And the strangest pictures begin to flash through his subconscious each time he descends the white spiral to the core of his being. As he emerges on the verandah of the guesthouse, he sees a flash of something, so brief he can’t put it in context. One time it’s an avocado, half rotten; another it’s the sound of flies buzzing heavy in the air. Once it’s a smell, sickly sweet.

He feels there’s a third level of existence, something beyond the inner self he explores during his relaxation. Try as he might, he can’t delve beyond the bottom of the spiral into the hidden chamber.

Despite the half-hour limit to his morning and evening sessions, Will becomes increasingly obsessed with his visualised world. As the weeks and months pass, his work output drops to an even lower level than it was before. Instead of eating, he sneaks an hour at lunch to escape to his valley. People whisper behind his back – but compared to the Lost World, work now seems unimportant.

Each day the third level of consciousness seems closer, the glimpses more real. He can feel hot plastic in the sun; a smooth wooden handle in his hands. There’s a heaviness, as if he is carrying a great weight. And, as much as Will wants to explore this level, his anticipation is tinged with dread.

At home things are worse. Will ignores Timmy and Sarah, bored by their silly problems. Mary too leads a life of trivia and Will tunes out when she speaks of her day. The family withdraws from his disinterest and that suits him fine.

One Friday Mary announces that she and the children are going to visit her mother for the weekend. For Will it’s the perfect time to have a really good session in the valley. He’ll spend the day there; explore all its moods.

Saying the briefest of goodbyes, he gives them all a cursory kiss, barely noticing the way the children turn their heads away. As soon as the car is out of sight, he makes himself a coffee and puts it on the desk amid the scattered doodles that have replaced the piles of work he used to bring home. Today his mind will be free to take him wherever it wants.

Will uses the quiet of the house to focus completely, reaching a level of relaxation beyond anything he’s experienced before.

To his conscious mind’s surprise, there’s no glimpse of the third level before Will emerges on the guesthouse verandah. But the scene in the valley is as never before. Nature has unleashed its demons in a way that made even the storm he’d visualised before seem insignificant.

Black clouds boil over the edge of Mount Widgee, like chariots from hell descending on the guesthouse. Then a powerful wind howls in, causing the trees to groan in agony, leaves, bark and whole branches tearing loose. Lightning spikes among the peaks and thunder shakes the cliffs.

Will hears glass breaking as a loose window smashes itself to pieces, but is powerless to do anything about it. He’s drawn only to the valley, the pastures where cows normally graze now a lifeless plain of flying debris.

He rises from his chair, zips up an unfamiliar thick, grey jacket and sets out into the maelstrom. His conscious mind rails against the risk but he finds, as he watches unfamiliar walking boots tread the well-remembered path to the gate, that he no longer has control over the person that is Will at Lost World.

Beyond the shelter of the guesthouse the full force of the wind is a vacuum sucking air from his chest as he turns his face away. He leans against it, careless of the debris it flings past, intent only on reaching the stream without being knocked from his feet.

Sanity dictates Will should hurry back to the shelter of the guesthouse. Instead, he finds himself wading between stepping stones where balance would be impossible, watching the water begin to dirty and the level rise from the discharge of a thousand rivulets. In half an hour it will be a torrent he cannot possibly cross. But on the unfamiliar boots take him, out into the full force of the wind and up the slope towards Mount Widgee.

Will has never explored this route in his visualisation and wonders why. He walked here during a real visit, following a steep trail to a grove of avocado, macadamia and mango trees growing in a fold of the hillside, on the banks of a shallow depression that would fill with runoff in heavy rain.

The grove had been a shaded oasis on a scorching summer’s day. Now Will is filled with dread as he faces the storm-whipped climb to trees seen darkly through the downpour.

Cattle tracks have become miniature waterways, their clay surfaces so slippery Will fears he will be swept away. Grasping tufts of grass, he pulls himself upwards. He must reach the grove – at the same time knowing it is the very last place wants to go.

He crests the edge of the depression on hands and knees, breath rasping in his throat, his body fall-covered in mud and washed half-clean again by the rain.

The canopy, once a silent retreat from the sun, now swirls uncomfortably above.

As he rises, familiar sensations batter Will’s senses. The smell of plastic in the sun; a burden so heavy he staggers under its weight; and, above all, the sweet smell of putrefaction.

Will remembers a wooden shaft in his hand, blade glinting as he shovels at dry dirt, filling the gully with soil until, at last, the plastic is covered.

Now water gushes down clay-red as it eats into recently-turned earth until a corner of black plastic shows briefly in the current. Will wants to turn away; run back down the hillside to the safety of the cabin. But he’s transfixed as the plastic flaps loose, joined first by the outline of a hand, ghastly white in the storm-dark light as it waves from the water, then by a hint of dark hair floating on the fast-flowing surface.

Will does run then. Not back down the hillside, but back into his own mind, snapping loose from the horror with an immense wrench. Safely at his desk, shaking fists clench papers into crumpled balls, his body sweat-drenched, as wet as if he’d been out in a storm.

Panting, his heart racing, Will knows he has been a witness to something terrible. He’s heard of such things; of people seeing inside the minds of others. And he curses himself for experimenting with visualisation techniques he knows so little about.

He doesn’t doubt for a minute that a woman’s corpse lies half-uncovered under a grove on the hill above Lost World, black plastic washed loose.

He knows he must report it and take the police to the dam.

But he remembers the blackouts, the lost hours. He knows too that he has a shovel in the garden shed. When did he last use it? And is its blade dark from the loam of his garden, or stained red by clay?

So Will doesn’t tell the police what he’s seen. But every day he scans the newspapers. He dare not tell Mary what he’s looking for, or why his hands shake as he searches page after meticulous page, each harder to look at than the last. And he cannot tell her of the red-hot coal that waits for him in bed every night, eating its way through the wall of his stomach, an acid drip that turns his face grey and haggard with pain. He cannot tell her of the blackouts, whole days lost where he has no recollection of what he’s done or where he’s been.

He's stopped going to his levels but sometimes, in his fractured sleep, the Screen of the Mind comes to him. And on it there is a heavy black square. And inside the square is a gaping wound, a dropper above, clear droplets forming at its lip. One by one they swell until they can hold themselves together no longer and fall into the angry vortex that is pain.

Will knows he should see a doctor before it’s too late. But he thinks of the anaesthetic sweeping him helplessly under, back to the dam, and the black plastic, and what it contains.

One night, in his dream, Will sees the ulcer convulse against one of the heavy cables surrounding it, welding itself to the slimy surface until the blood vessel bursts in a flood of red.

When the ambulance reaches the hospital, there is little time left for Will.

“He seemed to give up,” Doctor Seymour tells Mary. “It was as if he was tired of life.”

A week later, flipping through The Courier-Mail, the name Lost World catches Mary’s attention – because the valley was one of Will’s favourite places.

A Beaudesert schoolteacher has been charged with the rape and murder of a young girl who disappeared from her school a year ago, she reads. Accused of kidnapping and molesting the girl, the teacher broke down and led police to a remote hillside near Lost World, where they discovered human remains half-buried in silt at the bottom of a small dam.

Will would have hated to read that, Mary thought as she put the newspaper down with a shudder. He’d loved the place just as it was, completely unspoiled.