The Voice, by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

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                           - 9 -

That was when she realized why these men were different.
These were holy warriors, Christian holy warriors. But why
were Christian holy warriors invading a Christian nation?
And who was this Black Knight, whose prayers were now not
among them. Had he sensed her eyes upon him and come up from
behind?

She reached for a single yellow flower and picked it from
its stem, then closing her eyes, she made a wish almost as
if to draw him to her.

The Black Knight wheeled in surprise as the girl rose
from the heather. Standing amidst the sea of yellow flowers,
she appeared the image of nature itself and as she beckoned,
it stopped him cold. He knew this woman, knew her from
somewhere. But how was that possible?

***
The question was still on my mind as I struggled from the
dream and found myself staring at the red letters of the
digital clock in the half-light of the bedroom.

It was 5:55 on the morning of November 29 in the year of
our Lord 2003, of that I was sure. The city was London, my
name was Paul Fitzgerald and I had aged beyond my 52 years.
I could feel the weariness in my bones as I rose from the
bed and stared into the mirror. The dreams had been getting
more real and more intense, and now they were taking a toll.
In fact sometimes they didn't feel like dreams at all. They
felt like memories-but whose memories I didn't know.

What was worse, the memories sometimes felt like they had
followed me home, were pushing their reality into mine so
forcefully I had begun to consider them as real. In very
important ways this new reality had broken my narrow sense
of the world, eliminated the conventional boundaries that
I'd taken for granted all of my life and prepared me for
something new. What that "new" something was, I was not yet
prepared to accept. But as the waves of feeling washed over
me, it felt as if the dream was somehow gathering all of its
parts together and that somehow soon, it would emerge to
absorb everything I considered real.