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    To Dream Atlantis
    To Dream Atlantis
    To Dream Atlantis
    Ebook107 pages1 hour

    To Dream Atlantis

    By Alfred D. Byrd

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    About this ebook

    Obsessed by visions of Atlantis, a wealthy student of the occult is led by prophetic verses from continent to continent in quest of those who can further his knowledge of the foundered land. As he gathers around him a circle of adepts, he learns that his mission is no less than to raise the continent anew and restore to it a brilliant civilization cut off in a single day in its prime. Is he about to achieve the dream of mystics throughout the ages or repeat what led to Atlantis' fall?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAlfred D. Byrd
    Release dateJun 25, 2018
    ISBN9780463427286
    To Dream Atlantis
    Author

    Alfred D. Byrd

    I'm a graduate of Hazel Park High School, Hazel Park MI, and I've earned a B. S. in Medical Technology at Michigan State University and an M. S. in Microbiology at the University of Kentucky.My interests are Christian theology and history, Civil War history, science fiction, and fantasy. I've published a number of works, in prose or in epic verse, on these subjects.A number of my works are available from Amazon and other major on-line book distributors. I've also sold four short stories or novellas to science fiction or fantasy anthologies.

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      Book preview

      To Dream Atlantis - Alfred D. Byrd

      TO DREAM ATLANTIS

      Alfred D. Byrd

      TO DREAM ATLANTIS

      Copyright © 2006, 2018 by Alfred D. Byrd

      All rights reserved.

      No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or taping, or by any information-storage retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

      This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons or events is coincidental.

      Cover image: Detail from Volcano, by Lionel Walden, public domain.

      Table of Contents

      ONE

      TWO

      THREE

      FOUR

      FIVE

      SIX

      SEVEN

      ONE

      From his private jet’s window, Owen gazed at a landscape that his imagination filled with wonder. Gaps in the cloud deck showed him wide roadways, green fields, and white buildings on rolling plains between the Alleghenies and the Atlantic. Works of human hands on those plains showed to all eyes a civilization of power and pride. That civilization, despite its underlying fragility, wore an air of invincibility. Surely, Atlantis in its prime looked from the air like America.

      Owen shook his head at his strange thoughts. They had parted him, despite his wealth, from the world around him. Their strangeness had followed him through private tutoring as a child, through an exclusive prep school in which he had been hazed or shunned for his love of vanished lands, and through college and graduate school in which he had pursued studies of which his academic advisors had hardly approved. His strangeness, too, brought looks of bewilderment and distrust to the eyes of his financial advisors on boards of funds and foundations that his parents had left for him to run. An orphan never really belongs to the world around him.

      Thoughts of Atlantis never lay far from his mind’s surface. Dreaming or waking, he saw temples with roofs of gold above canals on a mountain-ringed plain. In his heart, he belonged to the foundered continent. From his jet’s vantage, he viewed the landscape below him, not as part of the America in which his body dwelt, but as part of the lost land that was his spiritual home.

      That home was part of his legacy from his parents, whom he knew only through old pictures and letters and through stories told to him by those who had met the tragic couple. Shortly after his birth, his parents had died, leaving him a mansion outside Boston, vast wealth, a servant devoted to his every whim, and a library filled with books on vanished realms.

      The books had filled his childhood’s lonely hours with fancies that had never left him as an adult. As often on flights home from board meetings, he imagined that, somewhere below the clouds, his parents lived on, having survived their disappearance in a small aircraft over the Atlantic. They were looking for their home and for their only child. Someday, when they found him, they would take him where he belonged.

      Every orphan dreams a dream like mine. Smiling sadly at his imagination’s folly, Owen laid his head against his seat’s headrest. He closed his eyes…

      Gazing at the saffron-hued glow of dawn over water, he felt around his body, a body thinner and firmer than he recalled its being, the stiffness of starched linen and the warmth and weight of jewelry of gold. His hands, stretched towards the dawn, were bloody. Blood dripped from a blade in his right hand.

      The blood’s source was a body on a wide altar of black stone. His mind shied from learning what that body had been. Not for myself did I kill it, he told himself, but for the god. In any case, the body was no longer his responsibility. Acolytes, golden-skinned and golden-eyed youths dressed as he was, were cutting the body into pieces and laying these onto a fire.

      The smoke from this, rising to greet the dawn, recalled his gaze to the eastern horizon. This, in brightening light, lay beyond a broad harbor dotted with ships and ringed with majestic buildings. He knew himself as a priest calling the sun from the sea east of the Land. He was chanting in a language that tantalized him with its familiarity. His mind turned the chanting into verse in the language that he had learned as a child of a distant future:

      Dawn recalls the Land from darkness; sunlight turns the night to day.

      Rise, O Sleeper, from inaction; now is time to work and pray.

      What you do will change the future. Sloth will end it; strength will free.

      Seize, O Waker, waiting greatness! What you choose is what will be.

      The sun’s upper rim, spilling gold across the harbor’s waters, rewarded his prayer with light’s blessing. A chant of triumph and supplication poured from his throat…

      A voice had answered the chant. Strange words — Pasulen, Tenmores, TaLellon — rang in his mind. When he awoke, blinking in confusion, he learned that the voice had been his pilot’s, his servant’s, announcing to him that the jet was about to land, and telling him to fasten his seatbelt. So much for my dream.

      Still, as the jet landed, the dream and the verse within it stayed in his mind. The dream had been far from his first of a foundered land, but the dream was the first that had held verse that he recalled awake. It told me to rise and seize…

      Waiting greatness. More easily said than defined.

      His dream’s verse reminded him of a verse of Scripture that he had heard in the church that he attended, more out of social obligation of his inherited wealth than out of belief in the church’s doctrines. From the church’s pulpit, its pastor had read, Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.

      The verse had excited Owen with its applicability to his own dreams, but, when he had asked the pastor to interpret them, he had seemed confused, even alarmed, at the orphan’s words. It was one thing to recite a scripture on dreams, another to deal with them. Owen felt that the pastor had no idea of what the verse meant.

      For that matter, Owen himself was unsure of what the dream meant to him. Just as it was far from the first of his dreams of a foundered land, the dream was far from the first with a barbaric sacrifice’s imagery. Still, this dream was the most vivid of those dreams. From it, he recalled the sweetness of incense amid a reek of burning flesh. From the dream, he recalled the stiffness of blood drying on his hands. He recalled thoughts of another mind within his…

      Uneasy with those thoughts, he tried to distance himself from them with techniques of analysis that he had learned as a student. More than of anything else, the dream and the verse reminded him of his parents’ books. Trying to be objective about his obsession, he thought, Is what I saw in my dream something that my subconscious created from Plato and his commentators?

      No, the dream was too vivid to be just a construct of my subconscious. In the privacy of his jet’s cabin, he still saw the dawn-lit harbor, heard the verses that he, the priest, had chanted, touched a knife’s hilt…

      Debarkation distracted Owen from the dream awhile. In a terminal’s concourse, as his servant was wheeling luggage towards a waiting Bentley, a street preacher shouted a verse at jeering bystanders: Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits, whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.

      Try your own spirit! Owen thought bitterly. However true the preacher’s message might be, it offended Owen for the preacher to force him to listen to it. Religion should be private, not public. Still, when Owen visited the Land in dreams, it troubled him little that all citizens there must worship Earth-Shaker…

      While the servant drove Owen home, the dream recurred to him. To clear his mind of it, he mentioned it to the servant. He, alone of all of Owen’s regular acquaintances, might hear it with sympathy. Owen caught a tone both of eagerness and of dread in the servant’s response to the dream. Your parents, sir, had many such a dream before their disappearance. One such dream called them to their final journey…

      Owen listened avidly to the servant’s account of that journey and of a fruitless search for an aircraft that had never reached its destination in Spain. The account joined him to tall, proud-featured, yet sad-eyed persons who regarded him from pictures in

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