Ancient Evil (The First Genocide Book 1) (22 page)

She explained about their abilities to
control their bodies. How they communicated through telepathy. How they could
suck in heat and light to heal or enhance their bodies.

“What happened, Rebecca? How did they give
you these powers? Did you just wake up with them one day?”

“I don’t really know how, to tell you the
truth. I remember the ritual initiation and I also know that it does not always
work. Leader has always operated on a need to know basis. As of now I do not
need to know. For all I know, the initiation was all smoke and mirrors and
something else they did changed me. I do know that I almost died before I
became one of them.”

“Tell me about the ritual,” Finn could not
keep the eagerness from his voice.

Rebecca seemed to come back to herself and
realize once again where she was. “I need to go, Finn. I have closed myself off
so that they can’t find me. I don’t know if they are calling for me. If they
find out I’m missing, if they find out that you are alive and we spoke, Leader
will go nuclear. Neither of us will survive.”

“But, she can’t really hurt you, can she?”

“Oh she can, especially if the others back
her up. With enough damage, anything can be killed. You’ll need to forgive me
for not giving you the details on how to kill one of us. I am not sure that I
trust you that much.”

“All right, I understand. Promise to tell
me when you are ready. I have the feeling it could save my life.” 

“You know they didn’t just stumble upon us
that night on the beach. They were sent.”

He nodded, “I guessed as much. It was my
research, wasn’t it? They were part of the conspiracy of silence and confusion
that has been holding back parapsychological research, aren’t they?”

“Yeah. The others have let things slip over
the years. They never came out and said it, but I am pretty sure they don’t
want the world to know about telepathy, psychokinesis, remote viewing and
certainly not about shape shifting. Disbelief can be a wonderful cloak for us.”

An alarm went off. They both jumped.

“Intruder alert. Intruder alert.” A voice
with a slight Welsh accent said.

“OkayK, Finn what the fuck? That voice
sounds just like me,” said Rebecca.

He did not have the opportunity to respond
before a massive boom rocked the entire building. Leader was knocking on his
front door.

Finn’s
stay in the hospital was a long, monotonous horror show, featuring special
guest stars — anger, pain and the ever-popular humiliation.

The left side of his face had been replaced
with a mass of puckered red tissue that would eventually transform into a mass
of white scar tissue. His left eye was gone. His right leg had been broken in
two places, the left had been shattered so badly that the doctors had not been
able to save it and it had been removed from the mid-thigh. His left arm was
gone from just below his elbow. His testicles had been torn from his body, but his
penis remained. The damage meant he was confined to a bed for twenty-four hours
a day.

He pissed into a catheter.

He shat in a bed pan.

The doctors told him he was lucky to
survive.

Lucky.

Right.

One of the few things he looked forward to
was the weekly visit by Mara Novak.

Apparently, she was the one who found him
after the attack. He probably owed his life to her. Not a huge debt as far as
he was concerned, considering the quality of life he was looking forward to.

A few weeks ago she had left a book on his
bedside table about the
Akashic Chronicle
, and when she had come back to
pick it up a day later she found that Finn was reading it. In fact he had
almost finished reading it. He had been fascinated. Although his field of study
was psi, he, like most of his colleagues, studiously avoided the appearance of
being too interested in the occult. They had enough difficulty being taken
seriously by the scientific community without appearing to believe in anything
more bizarre than acupuncture. Even acupuncture was a little iffy.

The concept of the
Akashic Chronicle
in general had struck a chord with Finn. According to the book, there existed
some sort of eternal collective unconsciousness that stored every piece of
knowledge accumulated by humanity since they had climbed down from the trees,
made their way to the coast and started living a primitive beach life. Every
memory and experience was out there, one just needed to know how to access it.
To Mara and Finn, who each had a passion for knowledge, this was the ultimate
honey pot. They had spent hours talking about the possibility of the existence
of an
Akashic Chronicle
and the implications of being able to access it.
Mara had even admitted that she had attempted some of the exercises in the
book, to no avail.

She also let ship that she and Proctor used
to have an ongoing dialogue on the occult.

“So how is Professor Proctor? Have they let
him out of the hospital yet?” Finn asked when she mentioned Proctor.

“Oh, Finn, of course you wouldn’t know. On
the night of your accident, dear Proctor passed away.”

“He’s dead?” Finn chuckled bitterly. “Lucky
bastard.”

“Finn, don’t say that. Proctor was a mentor
and friend to you. You should grieve for his loss, not look for an opportunity
for self-pity. Pity will poison your life.”

“Life, what life? If I ever get out of here
I will be a freak, a travesty, a parody of a man, half a man.”

Mara shook her head slightly.

“What? No more sage advice, Mara?”

She would not rise to the bait so they had
sat in silence awkwardly for a few minutes before she recalled a prior
engagement and left.

He had not really expected her to come
back, but a day later the nurse had brought in a book called,
Theory of
Possession in the Caribbean
.

On the cover was a yellow Post-It note.
There was a message written in neat, spiky letters. “Let’s discuss next week.”

She came back every week after that to
discuss a different topic.

A month into his recovery, Bex’s brother
David came by to visit. He had flown in from America when he had heard of Bex’s
disappearance. He looked like Bex, with the same dark hair, same pale blue eyes,
but he had a little more intensity to his gaze than Bex did, more focused. Finn
remembered Bex saying that he was a lawyer or something in America, something
to do with the movie industry.

David averted his eyes when he was talking
to Finn, but Finn was getting used to that. Most people would look out the
window when they spoke to him. If they turned to him they usually focused on
his blanket or looked over his head. Very few people would look into his
ravaged face or gaze into his remaining angry eye.

David got to the point, “I know this is
difficult to talk about, but I need to know anything you can remember about the
night Bex disappeared. Anything that might give us a clue about where she is,
or if she’s …” He took a breath, “No longer with us. Is there anything else you
may not have told someone?”

Finn did not answer right away, pretending to
consider the request. Over the past few weeks Finn had come to the conclusion
that the more he told people about what he remembered, the worse things would
be for him. When he was first able to talk he described in great detail
everything that he remembered. When he stuck to his story, they started to
bring psychologists and psychiatrists to the sessions. They were considering
adding exotic cocktails of psychotropic drugs to his IV when he realized that
the truth would probably land him in some mental institution swaddled in a
cotton wool drug fugue. He recanted his story and agreed that it was plausible
that his original story was constructed by his subconscious to fill in a void
in his memory, or some such nonsense. He decided that lying was better than a
stay in a hospital of indeterminate length.

“I’m sorry, David. The whole night is a
blank. I don’t remember anything at all. I don’t even remember being on the
beach.”

“Please, I am begging you. Is there
anything you can remember, anything at all?” David got up and closed the door
to the room and sat down. He actually made eye contact and held Finn’s right
hand. “I know I am not supposed to mention it, but they said when you first
came around you had a story about what happened, a story about monsters or
beasts. Is there any truth to it?” Finn did not answer. “Look, I know they
wouldn’t believe you, but I have seen things, scary, unexplainable things. Bex
and I both did, when we were kids. I’ve seen things in Hollywood too and not
just your regular Hollywood freak show shit. If she really was taken by someone
or something, I need to know. It may be the only thing that can save her.”

He clenched his fist and a tear of
frustration rolled down David’s face. His eyes flicked back and forth between
Finn’s eye and his patch.

After an uncomfortable silence, Finn
relented. “Okay, I’ll tell you, but do not repeat this to anyone else. And
don’t let them know that I told you. I have no desire to see the inside of a
mental institution. Agreed?” David nodded. Finn started to speak.

On her way into the hospital for her weekly
visit with Finn, an attractive man with dark hair and blue eyes bumped into
Mara. He absently apologized and continued on his way; he seemed troubled.

When she reached Finn’s room, she could see
he was troubled.

“Why so down, Finn?” She was not what you
would consider subtle.

“You are kidding. Have you seen my
copulating face?”

“Finn, you can’t put me off like that. We
know each other too well now. It isn’t your face or injuries. It’s something
else. What is it?”

“Bex’s brother was just here. He wanted to
know what happened that night. I told him.”

“What? The truth? Are you sure that was
wise?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure that I care
anymore. I just wish I knew something, anything, about Bex. He’s the same. The
uncertainty is killing him. I had to tell him, whether he believed me or not.”

“Did he? Believe you, that is?”

“That’s the troubling part. He did believe,
right away, without hesitation. You know, I could almost convince myself that
it didn’t happen the way I remember. I could almost believe that my mind made
it up. Then along comes someone who believes me. First you, now him, even
Jonni. I think Jonni believes me. I don’t think he’s just trying to spare my
feelings. I don’t think he’s just avoiding calling me crazy. He doesn’t operate
that way.”

Mara thought before she spoke. “There is
more in existence than we can possibly imagine. The universe is complex and
diverse. You know that; you’re the one with the physics Ph.D. I look at your
injuries and your story makes sense. Blaming this on some group of local thugs
with knives and bats and acid just does not add up. I was on the beach, and I
heard nothing before I found you. You would have been screaming, Bex too.
You’re not the type to be deluded by your unconsciousness.”

“Thank you, Mara. That means a lot. Anyway,
astral projection?”

“Yes, what did you think of the book?”

“Actually, I already knew quite a lot about
this subject from the psi side. Remote viewing, out of body experiences, that
sort of thing. We usually focus on detecting the effects with unprepared
people. The Russians and Americans tried to militarize the effect with
specialists, of course. They admitted to some limited success. Of course, even
if they had been wildly successful they wouldn’t have reported it, nor would
they have admitted absolute failure and the waste of budget.”

“What did you think of the occultist angle
on the subject?” Mara asked.

“It was interesting; we’ve found the effect
can be magnified in the lab setting when we block out external sensory
information.”

“Really, did you have a sensory deprivation
tank available in the Parapsychology department?”

“No, nothing so exotic or expensive. We cut
ping pong balls in half and taped them over the subject’s eyes and then shined
a red light on their face, nice and relaxing. We also played white noise
through headphones, that sort of thing. So I can see that on the occult side of
things that meditation could potentially increase the likelihood of astral projection.
I could also see how the rituals suggested could help. If you are focused on a
complex series of steps, you can lose awareness of your surroundings.”

“You know many of the ancient esoteric
groups had initiation rites that involved meditation, fasting, pain, drugs. All
of which could induce hallucinations. What do you think? Could the reports of astral
projection really just be hallucinations?” Mara was playing the skeptic. They
often took opposing positions for their conversations. Not that they
necessarily held the position, but logical argument helped them both to
crystalize their thoughts and ideas.

“Prior to my incident on the beach, I would
agree. Now I am much more likely to accept things like astral projection as
being more than just artifacts of a distressed brain. I actually had some very
odd experiences when I was first gaining consciousness after the accident.”

“Odd? What do you mean by odd?”

“It seemed like I could hear your thoughts
when I was lying there.”

Mara tilted her head in thought. “Are you
thinking true telepathy, mind reading?”

“I don’t know. It could have been a drug-induced
hallucination.”

“But you don’t think it was. You wouldn’t
have mentioned it otherwise.”

Finn paused and gathered his thoughts. “I
don’t think it was a hallucination. It made sense what I heard. I suppose
heard
is not the right way to describe it. Maybe
detected
is the right word.”

“Okay, let’s assume that it was real. Can
you read my mind now?”

“Nope. I think it had something to do with
my state of mind at the time. The pain, both physical and emotional, seemed to
overcome some sort of block, allowing me to pick up on your thoughts.”

“Interesting, maybe you should torture your
subjects in an experiment sometime.”

The right side of his face twitched
briefly, a partial smile, quickly gone. “That’s an experiment that would get
some press. Seriously, the more I read and learn about the esoteric arts of the
ancients, the more it seems like the rituals and initiations were used to
overcome mental blocks. To free the mind, open the third eye, et cetera.”

She was often delighted by his ability to
grasp the concepts and to rapidly evaluate the different aspects of each
subject. If only he had been one of her students, she might have had more
interest in teaching.

Mara leaned forward. “Yes, yes, I agree.
The experiences you had when first gaining consciousness may indicate that your
ordeal, however tragic, may have opened some previously closed doors. Have
there been any other odd occurrences?”

“Not that I’ve noticed, except for some
vivid dreams, nightmares, really. But, I hear nightmares are pretty common in
my situation. I don’t remember them particularly well. I just know I wake up
feeling terrified and a little sad.”

“Have you tried a dream diary?”

“Oh, you mean writing down the dreams as
soon as I wake up?”

“Yes, I have been doing it for years. It is
amazing how much you can recall when you train yourself to record your dreams.
It is like telling your brain not to purge the memories.”