Well, what do you know? A holy hermit, apparently; judging from the Crome Effect, one of those poor mortals who would one day be classed as “psychic.” The radiation from this one was so intense his abilities had probably driven him crazy, so he must have fled human society and somehow wound up here in the dunes. Mystery explained. I allowed myself a smile.
The electromagnetic anomaly was still unaccounted for, however… I scowled and turned my head, scanning. Now it seemed unclear, diffuse, further away. Now it faded out. Strange.
The fiddle music stopped. The Crome waves intensified a moment, and then the beehive shook slightly as the center mat was pushed aside. A snow-white beard flowed out, followed by the wrinkled and bespectacled face to which it was attached. The hermit turned to look straight at me, though I had been sitting perfectly motionless out of his line of sight.
“Did yez wish a word with me, then?” asked the hermit.
I blinked. Foolish to be surprised, though, with all the other weirdness here. “I was only admiring your, uh, art,” I replied. “It wasn’t my intention to disturb you.”
We regarded each other for a moment. He wrinkled his brow.
“Have They sent yez to console me fleshly lusts?” he inquired.
Gosh, how sweet. “No,” I answered.
“Dat’s good, then.” He relaxed. “They’re always parading them foreign beauties before my eyes and that last one was more than a man of my years can do justice to, to tell yez the truth of it. Yez’ll excuse me a moment, pray.”
He vanished back into the beehive, and it shook and creaked with his rustling around in there. I wondered if I should disappear and decided against doing so; he might go looking for me, and I’d just as soon he didn’t find my camp. Besides, I was curious. What was a Celtic anchorite doing in California, let alone in the vicinity of Pismo Beach?
So I waited, and after a moment he emerged from the beehive and dropped into the willows below, and came across his lawn toward me. I got up and descended the side of the dune to meet him, scanning him as I went. When we got within four meters of one another we both stopped abruptly. He was scanning me, albeit in a very unfocussed and inefficient way.
I don’t know what he perceived, but I saw a tiny elderly mortal whose body glowed and flashed with a surrounding halo of blue radiation. He wore a sealskin loincloth and a kind of tabard of woven eelgrass to which had been sewn thousands of seagull feathers, tiny white ones. His ancient spectacles were tied on with string. Apart from advanced age he was in excellent health, without so much as an infected tooth.
He peered at me suspiciously, cocking his head.
“Yez ain’t from Them,” he stated.
“No,” I admitted. “Who are They?”
“Why, the Ascended Masters,” he answered, as though I were crazy to ask. “Them fellows up on Mount Shasta, ye know. The Inheritors of Lemuria.”
O-kay. “No, I haven’t heard of them, Señor, I ‘m only from Monterey,” I replied cautiously. “My name is Dolores Concepción Mendoza, and I have come here on holiday to sketch wildflowers.”
“O, I don’t know about that.” He looked me up and down. “Yez got a look about yez of the Deathless Ones.”
Whoops. So much for keeping a cover identity around a psychic. I thought fast, which is to say I accessed Smith’s History of Mystical Esoteric Cults, Volumes 1–10; blinked, smiled, and said: “The White Fraternity does not reveal itself to all men. You are to be commended on your sharp sight, Brother. But I have come here, as I said, for the wild flowers that grow here in these dunes, to collect them for their rare properties. Look into my heart and you will see that I speak the truth.”
He scanned me a moment and nodded. “So, dat’s all right. Yez ain’t of any Order I ever seen though. What Discipline do yez follow?”
“The Mystical Sisterhood of Orion,” I improvised. “We, uh, live in caves in the Pyrenees and observe absolute chastity. We also preserve the healing arts of the exiled Moors. A traveler brought us word of the rare flowers here, and I have been sent to collect them for our studies.”
“Well!” The anchorite’s thin chest swelled with pride. “Yez couldn’t have come to a more salubrious place for medicines. These dunes is the best place for the corporeal body yez ever saw. How long d’yez think I’ve lived here, without ever a day of sickness or care? Forty years, I tell yez, forty years since the Lima run aground out there and I come ashore. And in all that time, not one pain nor pang. It’s the superior vibrations, ye know.”
“I don’t doubt it,” I affirmed solemnly.
“The most powerful vibrations in the world, right here in these dunes, and I have that straight from the Ascended Masters Themselves. Why, They come here all the time to enjoy the beneficial vibrational effects.” He nodded with certainty.
“Really?” I wondered when he was going to ask if I had a piece of cheese about me. “They come here often, do They?”
“Indeed They do. I’ll introduce yez, maybe.”
“That would be charming, though I’m sure They’re quite busy. Still, I hope you’ll give Them my best regards.” I made to withdraw. “And now, Señor, I must set about my appointed task. Good day.” Poor old lunatic.
He bid me an effusive farewell and I climbed away across the sand, giggling to myself. Well, this was one for the cultural anthropologists: a classic California crackpot, years and years before the breed was supposed to be common here. Worth an amusing sidebar on my official report, perhaps.
I put him out of my mind and went back to my field lab, where I had a good afternoon’s work undisturbed by weird lights or electromagnetic pulses. Not that there weren’t plenty of both, but now that I knew their origin I could afford to ignore them, couldn’t I? And ignore them I did, though blue lightning came down and danced at the water’s edge as I dug clams for my supper, and blue aurorae shimmered over my driftwood fire as I sipped tequila. When the level in the flask grew low enough I took to singing old Gypsy songs at them. I thought I sounded like a wounded coyote, but the blue lights seemed to like it. They followed me back to my bivvy and flitted off politely when I crawled in to sleep.
“I thought I’d bring yez a few clams for breakfast, there,” sounded a voice close to my ear, as a net bag clattered down before my face. I managed to avoid erupting through the roof of my bivvy and scrambled out on knees and elbows instead. The hermit was inspecting my field lab with great interest.
“Ain’t dat fascinatin’, now?” He held a glass slide up to the light and peered through it. “The Sisterhood’s got all the latest appurtenances, I can see dat.”
“Yes.” I got hastily to my feet. “And thank you so very much for the clams, Señor, how gracious of you; may I offer you a cup of coffee?” Not much danger in a security breach where a looney was involved, but he might break something.
“Coffee.” With a wistful smile he handed me back my slide. “My, I ain’t had coffee since the Lima. ’Course it’s bad for yez, ye know, or so They tell me. All them alkaloids.”
How’d he know that? Maybe he’d been a chemist before he’d gone to sea. “Er—we of the Sisterhood can neutralize all toxins before they harm our, uh, atomic structures,” I told him. Well, it wasn’t exactly a he.
He looked impressed. “Dat’s a fine trick, to be sure. The Ascended Masters can do that one, but I can’t, ye know, not till I’ve made me transition to the next Astral Plane. Got any tea?”
With a growing sense of unreality I set up my camp stove and prepared his tea and my badly needed coffee. He watched alertly, commenting with httle enthusiastic cries and noddings of his head on all the advanced technological marvels I employed.