Emily's House (The Akasha Chronicles) (29 page)

The realization of what she was saying took root in my brain. She just said many earth months.

But then that second part. If I had been in the Netherworld, then I wasn’t really in the human world. Would the mind trip of this place never cease!

“So you’re saying that I can just slip into whatever time I want since I left and voila! Problem solved?"

“Yes. You know this to be true.”

It was like a large weight lifted off my shoulders. I didn’t have to hurry. I could take my time here. There was no time here. All the time and yet no time.

“Okay, so now what? What else must I know before I can take care of our Dughall problem?”

“Now fair Emily, you must rest. It has been a long time since you allowed your body to sleep. Rest and when you wake, we will complete the training you need for your task.”

The Goddess pointed to a door that appeared out of the mist. I opened it and went inside to a cozy room with a large bed covered in pillows and a plush duvet cover. I crawled in, covered up and drifted off instantly to a deep sleep.

I needed that rest. It was the last time I slept for a very long time.

52. Dughall at the LHC

“Sir, I think there’s a bit of any error in your instructions for the experiment.”

“There are no errors,” Dughall coolly replied.

“But Sir, if we enter the codes you wrote, it will pulse the particle streams at a very high frequency.”

“Yes.”

“But Sir, we don’t know what will happen to the machinery at such a high frequency pulse.”

“I do.”

The young man stood there with his mouth hanging slightly open. Was his boss a mad man? Or was he as in command as he seemed?

“Are you going to input the program or shall I find someone more. . . capable?” Dughall asked.

“I. . . I can do it. I will do it. It’s just. . . well I have to tell you my concern here. No one has tested this. We don’t know what will happen down there.”

“Mr. . . .what’s your name?”

“Schaeffer, Sir, Ted Schaeffer.”

“Mr. Ted Schaeffer, I am well aware of the capabilities of this machine. I would not order this program if I was not sure of the outcome. Now, you have exactly one minute to get to your station and start clicking at the keys or I will find someone to replace Mr. Ted Schaeffer.”

Ted Schaeffer practically ran from the room. He was uneasy going about this day’s work, but he was even more uneasy staying in the room with his project supervisor. He knew it was crazy, but he had a strange feeling that his boss wouldn’t just fire him from the project, but meant to harm him if he didn’t comply.

“Dughall, you’re enjoying every minute of this, aren’t you?” Macha teased when Ted Schaeffer had left the room – escaped it more like.

“Why, whatever do you mean dear little Macha?” Dughall replied as he batted his eyes coyly at her.

“You know what I mean. Playing at – toying with the humans.”

“Toying with Mr. Ted Schaeffer? Why ever would you say that?” Dughall said with the hint of a smirky smile on his face. When Dughall smiled it looked like a cross between a snake and hyena.

“You enjoy sitting back, like the cat with a mouse, stringing them along – luring them step by step to your trap.”

“Ah, I’m not setting a trap for them Macha. They are of no consequence to me one-way or the other. But if they get caught in a trap, well so be it.”

With that Dughall sat back and monitored the progress of Mr. Ted Schaeffer. He had never seen a human move his fingers so fast on the keys of a computer machine. The man typed as if his life depended on it. Dughall smiled to himself at this thought because, of course, Mr. Ted Schaeffer’s life did depend on it.

53. Hospitality, CERN Style

The three made it no farther than the first security gate.

Fanny had suggested that they arrange for a tour and get inside that way. But Jake said that plan was too ‘Scooby Doo’ and Liam agreed with him.

Instead, they went with Liam’s straightforward plan. Since Liam was a theoretical physicist after all, he suggested that he just ask to speak to someone inside. He thought they would listen to him.

But Liam was wrong. Apparently CERN thinks anyone who shows up at their gate claiming there’s a terrorist inside their compound is either a loon or a terrorist themselves.

Why that guard gate went for option #2 when approached by a middle-aged guy and two teenagers from Chicago, one can never know. They weren’t sent away, but they weren’t allowed in either. Instead, they were escorted to a separate building by military-type security guards.

Liam felt like he was being hauled to Guantanamo Bay. Branded a potential terrorist meant CERN could throw them in a room without windows, no one phone call, and pretty much hold them there was long as they pleased.

“This is crazy!” Fanny yelled when they were finally alone in their ‘hospitality suite’.

“Shh! You want them to hear?” Jake scolded.

“I don’t care if they hear! They’ve got their heads up their asses so far they’re probably hearing bowel sounds. Oh, sorry Mr. Adams.”

“It’s okay Fanny. I have to say I agree with you.”

“I don’t care where their heads are, we gotta’ get out of here,” Jake whispered.

“Way to state the obvious, Jake,” Fanny replied. “And why are you whispering?”

“’Cause, Einstein, this place is probably bugged like crazy.”

The three just looked at each other silently.

“Jake’s probably right,” Liam whispered. “If you think you have terrorists in your custody, you’d want to spy on them while you’re giving them your ‘hospitality.’”

That’s what the guards called it. They said, “Please enjoy our hospitality while we check out your credentials,” then they locked the door of the small tin can of a building with one room filled with four bunk beds and one small bathroom.

Their situation seemed so improbable to Liam. What kind of credentials are two fourteen-year-old kids supposed to have anyway? Then their reality hit Liam like a ton of bricks. He was harboring two runaways – one of who faked a passport (federal felony!) and both of who recently robbed an ancient grave of a protected antiquity (an international crime!).

“What was I thinking, bringing you two here with me? I was trying to keep you kids out of trouble – I may have just gotten you into even bigger trouble,” he said.

“It’s not your fault, Mr. Adams,” Jake offered.

“Yeah, we came ‘cause we wanted to,” said Fanny. “We’d have followed you here even if you said we couldn’t come.”

“But this isn’t your fight. It’s mine now.”

“Wrong – it’s our fight. We promised Em. We’re not going to abandon her now,” said Jake.

“Yeah, we’ve come too far to be dealt out,” said Fanny.

“Well, now I don’t think you could be ‘dealt out’ even if you wanted to be.”

“If only they believed us,” Jake said.

“Yeah, ‘cause if they don’t, then they’re going to get an unwelcome surprise,” Fanny said as she made a slashing motion across her throat.

“Gee, Fan, no wonder we were thrown into this tin can! You’re going around making threatening statements and talking smack!”

“I’m not threatening. I’m just saying, we told them the truth. If they’d bother to remove their head from the dark place it’s in, they might investigate and find out there’s a guy in their facility – a guy that wasn’t there a few weeks ago – and if they’d only check they’d see he doesn’t quite add up,” Fanny said raising her voice to make sure any listening ears would be sure to hear her.

“You’re probably right Fanny,” Liam said.

“But what’s he going to do here, Mr. Adams? And if he’s here, how’d he get in. As we’ve seen, security is high.”

“My guess is he faked credentials to get inside.”

“Prolly killed someone,” Fanny offered.

“Now why would you say that? You’re so melodramatic.”

“You heard Hindergog’s story! This guy’s like evil incarnate. He’s killed plenty of people before – back then. You think he wouldn’t kill some wimpy scientists dude and steal his cred to get in here?”

“You’ve got a point,” Jake conceded. “Okay, so maybe he could find a way in. But then what? I mean, how could he open a portal? For Em to cross over, she needed to be at the portal at the Sacred Grove and be wearing the torc
and
say a magic spell.”

Liam had pondered Jake’s question nonstop since they’d left Dublin. He felt close to an answer, but it was still hovering just outside his reach.

The three sat in the bunkhouse for several hours before Liam gave in to exhaustion and stretched out on one of the bunks and dozed off.

Liam slept fitfully and found himself dreaming. Suddenly he was jolted awake – wide-awake – by the words ‘pulsed resonant frequencies’ repeating in his mind. It was as if someone had shouted the words into his ear and woke him up.

Fanny and Jake were asleep. Liam bolted up and shook them both awake.

“I’ve got it. I know how he’s going to do it,” he nearly shouted.

“What? How?” Jake asked sleepily as he yawned.

“By pulsing resonant frequencies,” he stated matter-of-factly.

They both looked at Liam as if he had suddenly sprouted a second head.

“Huh,” asked Fanny?

“The magnets – the giant magnets. If he pulses the frequencies at an extremely high rate of speed – really high – well, it might work.”

“I don’t get it,” said Jake. “What would that do?”

“Well, it has been largely theoretical you see. But the Philadelphia experiment and other more fringe stuff – well, it’s theorized by some that if you rapidly pulse electromagnetic frequencies – really large magnetic frequencies – and focus it – well, theoretically you could transport an object. . .”

“Or people?”

“Yes, or people, to other places – instantaneously. At least that’s what some have theorized, but it has been fringe science, not something that anyone with credentials has worked on.”

“Okay, you lost me at the word pulse,” said Fanny sleepily.

“Shut up Fan, this is serious!”

“Don’t get your tiny pants in a twist Jake! I don’t follow all you’re saying Mr. Adams, but if you think you’ve got it, I believe you.”

“Thanks Fanny, but I don’t know what good any of it does us when we’re stuck in here.”

54. Dughall at CERN

As Liam, Fanny and Jake tried to find a way out of their situation, in a room littered with dirty coffee cups and half-empty Coke cans, a bored young security officer listened to the idle chatter of his American ‘guests’. He spoke very little English so he didn’t see the point in him being the one assigned to this task. These people must not be much of a threat or else they would have assigned someone else. He was low man on the totem pole so he always got stuck with the cession de merde!

Little did the three American ‘guests’ know that they needn’t hush their voices or whisper to keep secrets. They also didn’t know that loudly emphasizing a point wouldn’t help either. For all intents and purposes, their communication was completely unmonitored which proved to be a helpful turn of events for Dughall.

Mr. Ted Schaeffer’s hands worked feverishly as he typed the coded instructions to make the machine a mile underground perform as commanded. These instructions were highly unusual and Ted Schaeffer knew it.

Most of the experiments at CERN were straightforward enough. Power it up, cool it down (way down), and when everything was a go, accelerate particles, collect the bits of stuff created by the collisions, then send all the data to a huge conglomeration of computers around the world to crunch numbers.

An immense and complex machine but a relatively straightforward idea. Spin, collide and collect.

But this experiment – the one his strange new supervisor handed down – was unlike anything else. He would have gone over Mr. Dughall’s head too – should have probably – if it weren’t for the nagging feeling that his life depended on his fingers quickly and accurately entering the codes commanded by his boss.

He wasn’t a physicist so it wasn’t his job to know all the intricacies of the reason for such an experiment. But he was an engineer, and he knew this machine. And because he knew this machine, he knew that oscillating the frequencies of the magnetic energy created underground in the collider as rapidly as requested by Mr. Dughall could have disastrous effects.

But the guy seemed like he knew what he was doing. He was so sure of himself. Maybe Mr. Ted Schaeffer wasn’t as bright as he had thought he was.

So he cast his doubt aside and typed like a madman.

Even at the feverish pace that Mr. Ted Schaeffer typed, it took days for him to enter the complex instructions required to order the machine to perform as Dughall required. His impatience almost got the better of him. It took extraordinary self-control – not to mention a swift kick from Macha – to keep Dughall from strangling Ted Schaeffer a few times.

“Remember your prize,” Macha had said as her tiny body delivered an amazingly strong kick to his behind, just in time to stop him from putting his hands around Ted Schaeffer’s neck and squeezing the life from him.

It took weeks of work at CERN, not to mention over a millennium in the Umbra Nihili, but finally the day was at hand. Finally, all was aligned. Finally, Dughall would triumph.

“Macha, repeat to me the instructions one more time so that I’m sure your tiny faerie brain gets it right,” hissed Dughall.

“After more than a thousand years putting up with you, I still don’t know why I do, you awful piece of rotted human flesh,” Macha retorted. “I’ll repeat your instructions though even a faerie with half its wits would find it no harder than beating their own wings.”

“Just tell me woman! We have only one shot.”

“All right, all right. It’s simple. In one hour, you will make your way down to the accelerator and drink the potion I brewed for you. Remember, the protective effect will last only five minutes at most, so you must be right on the mark. If you are there any longer, you will freeze instantly.”

“I know that Macha! You’re telling me my part. What I’m concerned about my little gnat is that you remember your part.”