My friend Jerry was chauffeuring me around. I was grumpy with a hangover self inflicted at a party I didn't want go to. The Portuguese landscape with its cute villages, ancient chapels, wood burning bread ovens and blackened kilns usually does it for me. But I didn't want to feel good, I was too annoyed with myself. Why would I be so stupid and punish myself. I knew too well how I'd feel the next day.
We passed a couple cute donkeys, even they didn't do for me.
And then I see her: a woman being pushed out of a tower in a stone mansion. It's like a movie projected over reality. "Jerry, you have to stop." We drove back and checked it out. The house was abandoned and run down. There was no sign of people, animals, nada.
I was awake now.
And that's how it started. It was my first vision. The second one happened two weeks later.
I was alone and on my way to an English friend, an artist who was painting chairs for me. Really cool chairs in animal pattern for our Wild Life art show. Wildlife, wild life, such a clever title. Up-cycling wasn't a word yet but we did it anyway. After dismantling rows and rows of cinema chairs into individual seats he painted them for the restaurant we just added to the arty halls. The gallery didn't make enough money on it's own so I figured food is art like Octopus ink blackened pasta on white artisan plates with a poisonous green pesto sauce...
I chose a new country road I hadn't checked out yet. I was thinking of Zebras and snakes and tigers when I saw this really amazing old gate, softly curved like huge wings. I hit the brakes to take a picture. I love those rusty tractors and car wrecks in the yard, like anything in the fascinating spiral of decay.
And there they were: three figures, parents with a child perhaps, ten steps behind the gates staring at me. Okay. No. I won't take a picture. I better turn around... turning my wheels to the other side the same three people stare at me from the end of a dirt path in front of a farmhouse.
Not really people, more like statues. White, weird, motionless. A creepy feel crawled up my spine, I sped off and forgot all about my appointment.