Julius gently lifted Margarita’s hand from his chest, let his gaze travel along her slender hips, and rose quietly from the bed.

He opened the blinds. Outside, a vast, glowing tunnel was cleaving through buildings and trees. From far away came a low, turbine‑like hum.

Julius felt his body go numb. He took a step back.

‘Margarita…’ he whispered.

Julius lay with his eyes closed. His breathing was uneven. Like scraps of coloured paper, lights shifted before his eyes—red into black and back again. Each flash made his body shudder, yet he kept moving through the tunnel.

‘What do you see?’ Babaji asked.

‘There’s a conflict. A man and a woman. She is taking revenge. There’s a bitter grievance in her—perhaps for a daughter; I’m not told. But she has the right. Her pain has repeated many times.’

‘Can you describe her? And where is this happening?’

‘In a square. It looks like a station. She’s beautiful. Everyone is dancing. But the man isn’t telling the truth; he pretends he doesn’t remember. She thinks this will last for ever. It won’t. Something else is expected of her.’

Julius looked down at his body from the height of the ceiling. The cold was leaving him. Babaji’s palm was warm—like a doorway back into life.

Inspired by Michael Newton’s Journey of Souls.

Georgy raised his head from cover just as a grenade exploded a step away. A shard tore off his left arm. Deafened, feeling no pain, he got to his feet and looked around. Every member of his reconnaissance team was dead; the mutilated bodies were strewn with earth and the branches of felled trees. The shelling ceased; the smoke thinned. Georgy was standing on his own arm. He picked it up from the ground and started back the way the group had come in the night.

He walked roughly a kilometre before a rear‑service lorry found him and carried him—still conscious—to the medics.

After the war Georgy Ivanovich lived more than sixty‑five years without an arm, and never again in his life went to a hospital. From then on a routine blood test felt to him like a battle with the Germans. Even in old age he could still fell livestock with a single blow of his remaining hand, yet his mind clouded at the mere mention of a clinic.

His daughter, grandson and great‑granddaughter have carried a lifelong fear of blood loss.

Billionaire Jeremy Groteks—owner of Caravel Slums and JuduWudu Enterprise, principal promoter of West Coast golf tournaments and sponsor of the Connecticut Spurs—has disappeared.

He vanished on his private island off Hawai‘i. The last people to see him were fishermen—he was with his Labrador, Carlos. The disappearance was reported by Carlos himself, who telephoned the police via a AI system.

Groteks’s wife insists her husband spent the night at home, in Mountain Bountain. In the morning he took a tuna sandwich, the dog, and went out for a walk.

How he ended up in the Pacific is unknown. The businessman’s elderly mother is worried: Carlos usually rang her, not the police.

Police do not rule out the possibility that Groteks teleported into another dimension. He has long invested in projects of this kind and financed research into transcendent states.

The California state police are investigating.

Series: “Notes of a Californian”.