Garth Dutton

Cold Wind From The South (Part 2) – A Short Story

Part 2 in a three part series…

Cold Wind From The South (Part 2)
© Garth Dutton, 2007

    “Pro And Secret Cop Find New God In Seaside Bar!” screamed the headlines of
the ‘Weekly Tabloid.’ The text went on to describe, then take apart, everything that
Pauline and Smyth had said in the interview with the reporter.
    Smyth was angry. “They’ve made a complete laughing stock of us,” he said. “A
mix of primitive animism, Gaia Hypothesis and complete garbage, that’s what it says.”
    Pauline was unperturbed. “Don’t worry, love,” she said. “This whole process is
going to be self-generating.”
And so it seemed. The ‘Tabloid’ came out mid-week, and about 100
people came down from Adelaide on the next Saturday, to see where the ‘event’ had
happened. It was the same on the Sunday. The hotel did a roaring trade on both days, and
the plantation-wood-fired train from Adelaide had its best number of passengers for some
time.
    Mail started to flow in as well. Smyth was worried. “How can we possibly answer
these letters?” he said, and frowned. “Some are asking all sorts of complex theological
questions.”
    Pauline thought about that. “The original vision in the bar is all that really
counts,” she said. “We tell the truth… We are still sorting out the implications of the
experience.” She shrugged. “Really, we don’t have to sort out a whole doctrine ourselves.
Others are doing it for us.”
    She handed him a letter. He read it, and shook his head in disbelief. The writer
had said that everything people see and think goes into the living Feminine Earth Spirit’s
collective consciousness. She now sees far out into space with our space probes. The
writer also said that the few nuclear weapons kept to re-direct any asteroids that threaten
the planet, means that the Earth Spirit herself, via us, has now created defenses against a
disaster such as befell the dinosaurs, her previous guardians. “Your vision has been a
revelation to me. Thank you so much.” wrote the writer.
    “This is getting out of hand,” said Smyth, in despair. “The whole ‘vision’ or
‘revelation’, or whatever you want to call it, was something I just made up on the spot.”
“Men ‘see’, but have no confidence in their insights,” Pauline said, and hugged
him. “Women know an important insight when they come across one. The Feminine
Earth Spirit seems to have chosen a man to receive the insights, and chosen a woman to
interpret them. Neat I think, don’t you?”
    Smyth felt her warm body pressed against his, and knew the ice within him had
nearly melted. His personal Ice Age was almost over. He could hardly believe the
transformation she had wrought. Instead of being a despised relic left over from a hated
regime, he was now held in awe by many people. It was the same for her. Opportunities
to speak to groups of people came in at a steady rate, and as they kept to a modest fee,
kept coming. They bought a small but very tasteful house in Victor Harbor. Things
were on a roller coaster ride which was bringing both status and wealth. It seemed
nothing could go wrong.
    But one night Smyth had a dream. Somehow, he knew that Pauline had just been
speaking to an audience. Now it was his turn to speak. He went to the microphone and
began to address the people in the hall. He had no memory of the words he spoke, but his
attention became focused on a man about one third of the way back in the hall.
    Suddenly Smyth saw through the man’s eyes instead of his own. It was a strange
feeling watching himself speaking on the stage, almost like seeing a film. Then he saw
other things. Ice…white topped and pale blue below… grottos of it… vast landscapes of
it. Clear, pristine, beautiful; a whole planet of ice; a totally perfect world of ice that had
replaced the sins, pollution and disasters of mankind. As the man in the audience, he felt
himself rise to his feet, take out his pistol, take aim first at Pauline, fire, then shoot the
speaking figure at the microphone. Smyth felt the bullets strike home, and awoke
screaming and bathed in sweat. Pauline was mopping his brow and talking to him, but her
words didn’t register.
    Waking reality sank in. “A dream, only a nightmare…”he stammered. Pauline got
him to spell out every detail before it slipped from his mind, as dreams mostly do. Then
she picked up the bedroom phone and rang the police.
    “We’ve had a tip-off,” she said.”Possible assassination attempt on both of us at
one of the public talks we’ll be giving in the next few weeks. Sorry, I can’t reveal my
sources… Likely someone in the ‘Church of the Natural Balance’ is behind it. This
man has got a vision of a perfect world without people. A total Ice Age. They are
working to get the Earth back to correct operating temperature, this man is working for a
total victory for the Cold. So they’ve got a problem. Sorry that’s all I can tell you…
Thank you…” She put down the phone.
     Smyth got up, went to the kitchen fridge, and poured himself a stiff drink. He
needed it. “Did I have a nightmare, and only that, or was it a vision of the future?” he
asked Pauline, without really expecting an answer. He decided it was only a nightmare.
“Perhaps you shouldn’t have called the police.”
    Pauline poured herself a drink. “It was a nightmare and some of them can be very
real,” she said. “But certainly not a vision from the future.” She clinked her glass against
his, and said. “Collective consciousness at work. Someone was mentally rehearsing what
they intended to do. With luck, they’d now know that you’d know they were in the
audience. Warriors sometime fight battles with dreams.”

Tags: adelaide, author, garth dutton, greenhouse effect

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