Dragonfly Dreams, Part Fourteen

Frank Mason was running through the jungle. Any other person would have been overwhelmed by the immense, sticky heat and the smothering greenness of the Brazilian jungle. But Frank was in another place…a safe place inside his head. His body was running on autopilot.

The music! The music wouldn’t stop. Over and over, Billie Holiday’s voice rang out inside his skull:

Momma may have and Poppa may have
But God Bless the Child that’s got his own

And floating in front of his face…a dragonfly. Small and golden, the insect floated just out of his reach, although Frank was trying with all his might to catch it. He knew…just knew…that if he caught it and stopped the buzzing that everything would be alright. But it always seemed to be just a little bit in front of his clutching fingers. And still the songs of Billie Holiday kept playing…over and over inside his fevered brain.

Quickly covering ground, it didn’t take him long to enter parts of the jungle that were largely unexplored. The jungle began to fall back into clearing as his feet stumbled over rocks jutting up out of the ground. After almost tripping and splitting his head open, he finally stopped and looked down. No….they weren’t rocks. They were….they were….

“Bricks,” he whispered, looking up to see that the dragonfly had vanished. He wasn’t surprised. The music had stopped also. Somehow he knew that both the song and the insect had never been there anyway. They had just been illusions….ways to distract him….ways to make him enter into the jungle and find….this place.

Staring around in amazement, Frank saw that he was in the midst of a ruined city. Large, stone bricks lay like tombstones….marking the death of a civilization that had once stood in the middle of the Brazilian rainforest. From the appearance of the ruins, it looked as though nobody had lived here…or even had stepped foot here….for hundreds (if not thousands) of years.

Tall stone pillars rose up like soldiers to his left. Streaming from their tops, large green vines snaked their way to the ground. Frank saw that there were small yellow and red snakes crawling in the vines. He wasn’t too sure if they were poisonous or not, but he decided to err on the side of safety. He pulled away from the vines, eyeing a snake that was crawling dangerously close to his left foot.

On his right, the ground was clearer. He walked that way and was amazed to see the remains of what once was probably a paved road. It had been cobbled with smooth stones and could have served as a main way into the city. He stepped carefully among the stones which remained of the ruined street.

Now that the music has stopped, he sensed that everything was quiet….eerily so. It wasn’t just that he didn’t hear the sounds of the city which he wouldn’t have expected anyway. It was that he didn’t hear ANY sounds….no birds, no monkeys, and not even the buzzing of insects. There weren’t any sounds at all….not even the wind. It was like death had settled on the ruins and was forbidding even the breath of the wind to stir the air. Frank wondered if he was walking toward his own demise.

But he had come this far. He tried to remember what Irza had tried to tell him…but that was all a blur. He remembered the old woman’s nurse whispering something in his ear while he stared at Irza’s one good eye and Billie Holiday’s voice filled his head like a siren song….leading him to his fate. The rest of it was just like a deep dream….easily forgotten.

Now that he was on the street which had apparently led into the heart of the city, he started looking to his left and right. He could make out the remains of buildings now. Most of them were long gone, leaving only a basic outline of rocks to mark their location. There were a few that were still standing…though barely. Large weeds and even trees had started to grow inside most of these husks of a dead civilization. However, he was surprised to pass one house which looked surprisingly in good condition. The front yard was free of weeds and vines, the walls looked sturdy, and even the roof was still on the structure. None of the other buildings had that….

And then he noticed that there was someone standing in the doorway of the house….watching him. It startled him and he almost gave a yelp of terror….but then he noticed. It wasn’t a person standing there. It was a monkey…a very large monkey. He knew that it wasn’t a gorilla. They were only found in Africa. So what in the heck was this large monkey doing in Brazil?

The monkey was large…almost as tall as a short human. He guessed that it would have to be at least 4 and ½ feet tall. It didn’t move….it didn’t grunt….it didn’t even appear to breathe. It just stood in the door of the little house and watched him. He felt unnerved by the feel of the monkey’s eyes upon him, but he didn’t stop walking. He saw with some interest that the monkey was wearing a necklace….with a large stone dragonfly on it. What was it with the dragonflies around here?

Rising in front of him, a large stone pyramid rose to the heavens. It wasn’t very large, but it was larger than any of the other buildings…or ruins of buildings…in the area. He seemed to be headed toward this building.

“A temple,” he whispered to himself, “It was a temple.”

He didn’t know how he knew that….he just knew. He took one more nervous glance back over his shoulder. The monkey was gone.

Soon, he came to the base of the temple. The ruined steps of this once great building stretched almost straight up. He knew that he was supposed to climb them….make his way to the small dark door at the top. But as he stared upward, all of the steps seemed to flow together. He felt dizzy and sick. Perhaps if he just rested a bit then things would clear up. He wondered where the monkey had gone. Had it gone to get friends….were they coming back to rip him apart?

Behind him, he heard the rustle of feet on stone. He froze. He knew that it had to be the monkey. It had waited until he was too tired to fight back…and now it was going to attack. He turned to face the rabid jaws of the beast.

It wasn’t the monkey.

“You?” he asked in amazement as he saw the last person in the world he expected to see.

Until next week….class dismissed.