Background

I grew up in Cleigh a small village a few miles south of Oban in Scotland. My father was a game keeper and to give him all the credit he deserves raised me on my own since my birth. You may guess from this that I never knew my mother. I’m told she was a remarkable woman and her death in a car accident very nearly resulted in my own, and severely affected my father.

In a lot of ways he withdrew from the world, although his job as a gamekeeper meant that he spent a lot of time in the hills and on the moors, and when possible he would take me with him. As a result I learnt to fish, and hunt, how to shoot (mainly to control the Red Deer Herds), and how to ride. There are lots of places you can only go on foot but riding a horse is considerably less tiring and less intrusive than a quad bike. A side effect of all this was that I learnt how to survive in the mountains where in the space of an hour it can go from 20oC and fine sunshine, to 5oC, a force 5 gale, and torrential rain mixed with sleet, or where you can become fog bound and lose all sense of direction and potentially fall to your death or slip, break a limb, and die of exposure.

As I grew older and started thinking about future careers and school became more intense, and I became more of my own person, my enthusiasm for these things ebbed in favour of books and my all-time favourite pastime drawing.>/p>

Ever since I can remember I have been able to draw. It was something that was often commented on as a child, how real my pictures looked and how much above my years I was able to draw. By the time it came around to GCSE choices, Art and Design – Fine Art, and Art and Design – Graphic Communication were foregone conclusions as far as subjects were concerned. It was during my first year of my GCSE’s that I discovered my talent has a sinister element to it.

I had spent most of a Saturday painting a work I was particularly proud of. It was an Eagle perched high in a crag, a scene I’d been lucky enough to witness a few days earlier. It had taken me all day to paint the picture, and it was a really good picture. As I sat studying it, my hand resting lightly on the edge of the painting, I felt it change or did I? I felt cold. A cold wet wind blew across my face billowing my hair, as the bird took flight apparently startled by me looking at it, and breaking the mood. I put the picture down in haste and went to bed.

I left the picture alone all the next day afraid to touch it, but in the end curiosity got the better of me and I went and looked at it again. It was still there, still the same picture. I studied it. Nothing happened. Carefully I picked it up, and looked again. I felt cold again. I dropped it in fright. Slowly I steadied myself, and carefully picked it up again. Nothing happened until I physically made contact with the surface of the picture, then it went cold. I studied it some more, slowly feeling myself drawn into the picture. I felt as if with one small step I could be there standing on that crag. I dropped the picture in fright and the feeling vanished. I hid the picture. A few weeks went by and a nagging feeling kept circulating in my head, was it my imagination, was it a one off, or was it some strange talent I possessed?

There was a view I was fond of.. I often hiked up into the hills just to sit there and watch the play of the sun, clouds, and sky. It wasn’t too far away I could walk it in a few hours. I’d never drawn it until that point. The first drawing I did didn’t work, but then it hadn’t felt the same when I’d been drawing it. Neither did the second, or third. The fourth almost did.. I could sense something but something was missing. On the fifth attempt I had a picture that went cold to the touch when I concentrated on it.

It took me several days to pluck up the courage to see whether I really could step into the picture. Thankfully the weather was reasonably good.. that is not to say that by the time I returned home I was not wet, tired, and cold. I was now more scared than ever.. I had created a picture of a place I knew well, concentrated on it whilst holding it until it had gone cold, then continued to study it until I could picture myself there, and then stepped into the picture, arriving almost exactly where I had pictured myself, except I was holding the picture in my hand and it was no longer cold.

That first trip did teach me one thing.. if I went somewhere then being able to get back easily would be a significant bonus. Logically if I could create a picture that would enable me to go somewhere then I should also be able to create a picture that would enable me to get home. To this end I set about creating a picture of my room.. again it took me several attempts before I got one that worked.

There was one other lesson I learnt in that first year, one that got me a lecture from my father on being properly prepared and letting him know where I was going in advance. In this instance I’d created a picture that took me a considerable distance away, and travelled there only to find that my “home” picture failed to work. I couldn’t explain why at the time, but experimentation with my other pictures revealed that they only had a limited number of uses before they no longer activated.

My next discovery was also an accident, and this one really scares me and I’ve never pursued this beyond my initial discovery.. to do so would reveal my secret. I had created a sketch of my best friend Katherine and unconsciously slipped into the same mode as I did when creating my “travelling” pictures. Picture finished I’d left it on my work table for several days, before picking it up to critically access my work. Having it in my hand and studying it carefully it had gone cold, like the travelling pictures did. This time however I had no feeling that I could step into the picture. I concentrated harder, suddenly I felt myself falling, my world whirling about me. In fright I let go of the picture, the feeling leaving me as I returned to my room.

It wasn’t until that night as I replayed the days events whilst trying to sleep that I had a very disquieting thought based upon the images I’d experienced during those few seconds of falling. It was a thought that was to be confirmed by Katherine the next day, when she said she’d had a strange experience late Sunday morning where she’d had a strange, but brief, feeling like somebody was inside her head.

My latest discovery however is the most useful to date, as it removes the limitation inherent in my early travelling pictures. If I pre-prepare the background of the picture using the same technique as for the main picture itself, which in itself can take several days, and then drawn the picture, the physical structure of the material upon which the picture is painted is significantly altered. If fact to date I have not been able to find any mechanism that will do any harm to one of these pictures, fire – no matter how hot – doesn’t seem to even char the surface. Attempting to break them with axes or sledge hammers leaves no marks and has resulted in several actually being broken in the process. Bleach and acid (at least those in the school labs) have no effect, nor any other chemical I can conveniently locate at home, have any affect either.