Short Science Fiction Story Review - Patrice Chaplin - The Mountain Wind

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2015 – Mammoth / Robinson’s Press – Spoiler alerts. The story leads to an unexpected guest appearance by one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, Salvador Dali. It begins with the Roman Catholic church nervously hiding away documents from throughout history relating to mysterious power centres in Spain and Hungary. People visiting these areas have reported travelling through wormholes to other dimensions or meeting entities visiting Earth from such places. A few such travellers have not returned, possibly by choice rather than through any kind of sinister abduction. As the wormhole entrances are not leading to any kind of Christian Heaven or Hell, the church gathers up any record of them and buries them in the Vatican Vaults. In 1965, they run into problems when Dali paints a study called Perpignan Station (a real painting), depicting the station as the centre of the universe. (he really did call it that). Some of the painting’s imagery is Christian (the infant child at the centre of a cruciform ‘cross’-roads of beams of light. A railway engine seems to be levitated, and various onlookers including Dali (painted twice) look on. It is a fabulous work of art, and though in the fictional story the church debate taking it for their censored archive, they find it sufficiently surreal and off-beat to be open to too many other interpretations and already too famous to risk controversy by summoning its removal. The story hints that Dali may have actually travelled to the stars from the quiet Spanish station, which would certainly have served him well for many journeys as he lived near there. An imaginative idea, as if any artist seems other-worldly, it is Dali. You can see the painting at the link given here. Arthur Chappell