Shadowline Drift: A Metaphysical Thriller Read Online Free Page B

benesha on his forehead. Then he pulled up Jake’s shirt and smeared the paste over his chest and abdomen.
    Except for the polite-society handshake, Jake didn’t like being touched by strangers—not that it happened much, a man his size. He made people uncomfortable. He blew out a short breath and let Mawgis rub the mixture on him. Mawgis covered his own skin the same way, then sat back down on the thick, woven-leaf mat across from him. The flame beneath the tall silver teapot had gone out.
    Jake waited for the first effects to start —nausea, a woozy feeling. He didn’t know what to expect. Minutes passed and nothing happened. He sneaked a look at his watch.
    The benesha started to dry, making Jake’s skin feel tight and dirtier than it already was. With his mud-smeared face and torso, he felt like an aborigine—or a patron at an expensive spa. The contrasting images made him laugh aloud. Mawgis’s mouth spread into a grin, responding to Jake’s laughter. Or maybe at the sight Jake presented. Or maybe, Jake thought suddenly, at the knowledge that the Tabna was pulling his leg.
    The older man picked up a handful of the pea-sized stones from the small mound near the teapot and began rattling them in his palms. A soothing sound. He chanted so low, Jake could barely hear him. The translator hissed static. He pulled it from his ear. His mind wandered.
    He wondered again how Mawgis had known about President Delacort. In the eighteen months Father Canas had spent with the tribe, Mawgis had no doubt learned a thing or two from the priest about the outside world. The Salesian could have told him the name of the American president. But even if the Tabna chief had known Delacort’s name and title and the fact that he’d been a senator earlier, how did he figure out Jake had been born the year Delacort had originally been elected?
    An image of the tall, almost gangly Delacort formed in his mind. Not as Jake usually saw him—on television giving an address or answering questions at a press conference, his dress immaculate, his hair cut military short—but in his bedroom. He stood in front of a mirror. A tailor knelt at his feet, pinning a pair of pants to the proper length. Delacort held a phone to his ear. The scene, bizarre in its normality, made Jake feel like a voyeur peeping through the White House windows. The gauzy sleeve of a woman’s peignoir poked from a drawer. Delacort was a widower. Jake wondered who his lover might be, or if he wore the peignoir himself.
    The image faded as gently as it had come. Jake stole a look at Mawgis. The Tabna stopped his chanting.
    “ An interesting way to travel, is it not?” Mawgis asked. “No passport. No jet lag.”
    Tabna words for passport or jet lag didn ’t exist, but that hardly mattered since Mawgis’s lips weren’t moving.
    “ Benesha is hallucinogenic,” Jake said. He didn’t feel stoned, not like he had on the peyote, but stoned he was—he knew that much at least.
    “ Not at all. Benesha is a travel facilitator. Where else would you like to go? Tibet? France?”
    “ Hallucinogenic.”
    “Oh no,” Mawgis insisted. “What you experience is happening at the moment you see it. With some practice you’ll be able to hear and smell the image as well. For instance, I know that Delacort was on the phone with his social secretary getting an update on his agenda for the day, and that the coffee in his cup was amaretto-flavored.”
    Update. Agenda. Amaretto . Definitely not Tabna words. Not even in the Tabna consciousness. But this was his hallucination, not Mawgis’s, and those words were common enough for him. He stood up. By stretching his arms above his head, he could almost touch the lower corner of the hut’s A-framed roof. Outside, the howler monkeys were at it again with their storming ahoooowagh roar. There seemed nothing to do except wait for the monkeys to move on and the drug’s effects to wear off.
    “ Remember,” Mawgis said, his mouth moving now,