After returning to the warehouse, and settling in to the various rooms that seemed to have meaning for my explorations, I found myself unable to shake the feeling that I had really missed something important.

I went over and over my notes and checked each of the photos I’d taken to establish the space. The reexamination went on for a few weeks, in the midst of the other parts of my work that were going on as usual, or seemingly so. For I still needed to retain my cover, and found myself tired each day from juggling the two identities.

One, the familiar everyday version I had originally adopted when I first was sent underground, and the second, the returning identity as a researcher, explorer, participant in a great mission. Both coexisted uncomfortably within me as each day opened more detail on the work at hand.

When I looked at the notes and matched the images, I was hoping to see a glimmer or shift, some clue that would reveal a message, a contact, an anomaly that would indicate others who were also involved in this work of revelation of the unseen or unknown. I imagined that if I returned to the set-up rooms they might have shifted slightly due to my having seen and examined them. Or that the beings behind them may have known I was looking for them and they tried to rise to the surface of the objects that held them captive.

So I went back to the nice dark-haired research assistant, who once more gave me the keys and led me to the warehouse that was past the garden, beyond the patio. It’s like a garden shed, I laughed to myself, if a garden shed were a strip mall. I’d often wished for just such a shed, a private little work space to dream, make my own cuppa, write a little, make root cuttings and start seeds. It wasn’t to be with the apartment life in a busy city that my cover demanded.

At the door this time I saw someone just leaving, stiff clipboard under her arm, looking official but frazzled in her lab coat uniform. She acted as if she didn’t see us coming toward the door, but my keen training picked up her deflection right away. She fumbled a bit with her head down as she relocked the door and scooted over to the side path at the back of the main building.

“That’s our object archive manager,” he told me. She’s overworked these days – because of all the budget cuts she’s doing two jobs.”

“Why don’t you help her out?”

“I’m not at her level yet at all, plus I’m only doing the minimum here and taking on other people’s jobs at the same time.”

“Why all the reorganization?”

“Didn’t you hear? We are closing down many of our branch facilities and bringing artifacts back here, but it means that we have to get rid of many of our holdings here too.”

“What about PW?”

“Never heard of it. I think that this is something I can’t know. No clearance.”

I was stunned to hear that PW wasn’t part of his system, and wasn’t anywhere in any listings. So maybe I wasn’t part of this system either. Anyway, somehow I had the necessary ID to get in here, and that was what mattered right then.

“Oh dear, the room setups have all changed!” I cried – to no one in particular because once again I’d been left alone in the building, with a key in my hand and a paper map I’d drawn the last time so I could revisit the areas that seemed they could hold something of interest.

The lavender room was replaced with a jumble of objects in boxes. Not very archival, I thought to myself. The chairs were upturned on the table, the cabinet with the drawer had been moved and laid on its side, doors and drawer taped shut for transit. On the floor was a tiny fingernail sized half moon of ivory – it must have escaped the game tube when it was being packed.

I pocketed it and began to poke around more. There was other stuff on the floor, just swept into a pile in the corner, but nothing caught my attention. I turned on the inner search light that we trainees had called the headlamp, and focused hard on the objects in front of me. Nothing to see.

Without the aroma of the lavender or the warm qualities of the throw cushions and table setup, the room such as it was looked corporate, phony, like a furniture store display. A display obviously in transition. At the back, along the wall, had been a small painting, but that had been removed and packed away. The carpet was rolled up and stood in the corner behind the pile of sweepings. I lifted it out and allowed it to unroll. A beautiful antique Turkish carpet, natural dyes of reds, yellows, and blues mixed with white and black in a most unusual design.

I thought it was unusual because the center of the carpet was an empty white space, as if it were unfinished. This is where the round table had stood, so I hadn’t noticed it when the room was set up. Beautiful white wool finely worked outlined in a lozenge shape of radiant colour and intricate form. The carpet, though seeming antique, looked entirely new.

Of course I sat on it once it was opened, and yes, I sat right in the centre of that white lozenge. I really expected something to happen, some contact or communication. I sat with eyes open. I sat with eyes closed. I laid down. It was nice to take a break but that was it. Nothing more.

Disappointed, I had to laugh at my naivete. Why would I assume that it would be possible for me to just sit on a carpet and discover new territory? I’d been out of the game for a long time, but that was no excuse. I rolled the carpet back up, but the unrolled it again to take a photo. It was truly beautiful. Then I put it back as it had been, standing in the corner leaning against the wall like a fallen pillar.

“I don’t understand what it is I’m doing here,” I thought just then. “I’m barking up the wrong tree.” The warehouse the archives all that I’d been so fascinated with seemed to me to be a red herring, my quest was to happen somewhere else in another way. I felt my mind was more open and more clear since I’d had a few moments to just sit.

That is when it all started to happen, very quickly. The objects shimmered slightly. Then more. “Is it an earthquake?” I asked myself, and looked again. For I was not shaking, nor was the floor. Only the objects. Shimmering, shaking, blurring, they flashed in and out of physical presence. I knew I needed to understand them but how was I to know what they were doing?

Was this like the old seances at the turn of the 20th century, when spirits moved objects to make their presence known? Or was this something that happened to objects all the time and for some reason I was tuned in to perceiving it? I knew this experience was part of my quest, and just as I had been giving up on it all, it came forward as an encouragement. In the mirror I saw my blurring image, looking a bit like the archivist whose home I’d visited.
I saw the same chaotic hair, the same blur at the mouth. And I looked closely at that reflection in the mirror but it wouldn’t stablize, it wouldn’t become still enough for me to actually see.

The background looked like a forest, not a warehouse, but when I turned it was still a warehouse, and when I looked again it was not a forest at all. That forest was one I knew and knew well. Familiar as an old friend, this was where I had walked each week when training for this research work. I stopped trying to see it in the mirror, the blurring was too disturbing to me. Instead, I looked inside myself. Closing my eyes, I saw the forest all around me, canopy above and cedar boughs beneath my feet. The scent was richly aromatic with all the moss and fir trees exuding their powerful medicine into the air for all to benefit and become healed.

I laid down on the cedar boughs and felt a breeze as if someone were waving boughs over my body from head to toe. A sacred brushing, a cleansing, a power invocation. I was ready. I kept my eyes closed but began to hum in harmony with the scent of the place and the waving of the branches and the life force all around. I took it into myself, and in a way I can’t say in words, I began to understand.

I knew where I was to be, where I was to look. PW was a western object collection that may be harmful but first I was to discover what exactly it was being collected for, either for good or to harm. I couldn’t work for anyone who would cause harm or who meant harm. If I tried, there was no energy to go forward. I would even become sick. My inner compass had been set many years ago in a time when there was no compromise allowed.

I knew that travel was the way for me to find the clues for PW – not outer travel, unless that was commanded to me from the inner communications, but inner travel, with inner companions, along inner pathways to the home of the grail and the other sacred paraphernalia of our homecoming.