“Wisdom,” Josh said. “I think that’s my father.”
Chapter Thirty
Wisdom stopped mid-step and followed Josh’s eyes down to the floor.
“Well, well, well, this certainly is interesting.”
“Do you know him?”
“We’re acquainted,” Wisdom said with a grimace. “Let’s get out of here before he sees us.”
Josh followed Wisdom’s lead away from the edge of the valley and back into the cave. He waited to speak until the entrance to the factory was far behind them.
“Who is Propates? And what did you mean by ‘the real one’?”
Wisdom shook his head and placed a finger to his lips with a soft shushing sound. He stopped at a flat part of the cave wall and laid the palm of his hand against the black stone. At his touch, stone faded away and another red door appeared. He turned the handle and pushed the door inwards. It opened to a bright sun-filled field filled with white and purple wildflowers and knee-high grass. Josh followed Wisdom out of the Axeinus. When he looked behind him, the door was nowhere to be seen. They were in a valley surrounded by tall white-capped mountains. There was no sign of humanity anywhere.
“That’s better.” Wisdom snapped his fingers and two plush red loveseats appeared. He sat on one and took a deep breath. “To make a very long and complex story short and simple, the Council of Peacocks is an organization started in Greece over two thousand years ago. They worshipped an all-seeing God with 100 eyes. They called him Argus Propates. They believed in the pursuit of knowledge without being bound by the restrictions of morality and social convention. Some people believe there are things humans have no business learning. I have to say I fall into that crowd. I can think of at least fifteen things I know myself that I don’t think your average person should know.”
“Isn’t that kind of, I don’t know, arrogant?” Josh looked down at his body and saw he was now dressed in a black trench coat. His mind must have created it to combat the slight chill he felt on the wind, even though he knew there really was no wind. “If you’re capable of dealing with these things, what makes you think other people don’t have the intellectual capacity to deal with them?”
“Well, you’re right. It probably is arrogant, but you missed my point. I’m not saying humans don’t have the intellectual capacity to deal with these little facts. Not everyone is a moron, after all. It’s just, knowing certain things makes it difficult for the average human to go about and do the average human things he or she needs to do. Take those demons, for example. Just imagine Mrs. Peggy-Joe Housewife. She has a husband and two little children. How does she put her children to bed at night and tell them there are no monsters in the world, if she finds out that there really are monsters? How does she sleep at night knowing that any moment something could creep out of the shadows and take her children away? Should she really have that kind of knowledge? Or would it be better for her to really believe there are no monsters?”
“I don’t see how it’s any better for her not to know. Maybe if she knew, she could protect herself. Set up defenses against the demons.”
“That’s just it, Josh,” Wisdom leaned forward. “There are no defenses against them. They come and go as they please. They choose their victims at random. Nobody out there can stop them. Peggy-Joe can’t send the police after the demons, can she? You can’t shoot things that aren’t physical. It’s like fighting fear with a shotgun. Knowledge may be a weapon but it has no power over the dark things that crawl out of the night.”
“So what are you, Wisdom? Are you one of those dark things?”
Wisdom leaned back and looked at Josh for a long time. Then he lowered his eyes and chewed on his lips for a moment. “I might be. I can usually convince myself that I’m something more evolved than the Orpheans, but we’re more alike than I care to admit. Once I was a boy, innocent and stupid. Then the creature I call father turned me into something else. I spent years doing very bad things. I have a set of standards I live by. I try to do as much good as I can in the world. Maybe that’s enough.” He nodded his head a few times. “I have to believe it’s enough.
“Anyway, as I was saying, the Argusites were pursuers of knowledge. There were religious wars in those days just like there are today. They fell out of favor, went underground and stayed there. But their desire for learning wasn’t stopped by dwindling membership and state sanctions against them. If anything, oppression fed their desire. They saw the roadblocks as a sign that the Powers-That-Be were trying to oppress them, prevent them from true knowledge. They hid out with the Yezidi, another spurned religious group. The surviving members of the Council met a former student of mine, a man called Propates. Not the one we saw back in those caves, mind you, just a man with enough power to be dangerous. He offered them knowledge, lots of it, and the things they learned changed them. You know how it is. Once you know certain things about the world, you can’t look at anything the same way again.
“When you’re a kid, you learn about pain by burning your hand on the stove. And you change. You learn to be cautious. You learn that the world can hurt you. Up to that point you have absolute faith in the world. It’s not even that you feel invulnerable. You are innocent and pure because you have no concept of vulnerability. When you get older you find out that there are deviants in the world who steal children. You change again and learn not to talk to strangers. You start to realize your life could be destroyed in a single moment of someone else’s psychosis. When you get even older you realize that it is not the strangers you have to be afraid of. It’s your friends and relatives that can hurt you the most. You learn not to trust other people. Finally, you get to a stage in your life when you realize the biggest threat to your well-being is yourself. Now you can forget about trust altogether. Most people, if they’re lucky, go through this stage and learn to believe in something else, something outside their Selves. Something bigger. Karma, destiny, God. They start to see the patterns in life. If they are not lucky, well, life starts to look an awful lot like Hell.
“The Argusites learned a whole set of thought patterns not conducive to daily life. They changed their name to the Council of Peacocks and they made themselves a plan. They decided to recreate the hundred eyes of Argus in the bodies of one hundred fully-realized humans, each with the power and knowledge these thought patterns bestow. They believe if they do this they can resurrect their dead god and start a new age on Earth. Blah blah blah – your typical religious zealot crap. The problem for them is that most human beings really can’t handle the things they learn. Physically. No, I’m definitely not going to tell you what the patterns are. You’re not like other humans, but I still don’t think you could handle the crap they deal with. You see, the knowledge that Propates gives them sort of works in levels. You see one weave of the pattern and you have this eureka moment. Your mind, your body and your sense of your spirit go through this transformation. Then you’re able to see another thread in the tapestry, you follow it until you can see the whole pattern and – voila! another eureka moment. On and on until you reach the point they call ‘Eyeness’, where you see and appreciate all the patterns of Creation. Seems like a waste of time to me. They spend their whole lives learning what they’ll know instantly upon dying. So instead of enjoying the world around them, they waste their days in an impossible search. Well, whatever. To each his own.”
“None of this explains why you’re out to get them.” Josh sat down, finally, on the other loveseat. Even though he was just dreaming, his feet were starting to hurt from being on them for so long. “What’s so bad about resurrecting their god or the pursuit of higher knowledge? It just sounds like a New Age cult.”
Wisdom nodded. “Yeah, except for the whole stealing babies and human experimentation thing.”
“The what?”
“Oh, I skipped that part, didn’t I? I always do that. There’s a lot more to the Council than just expanding their consciousness. They want to create a super-race, people that could survive th
e process of achieving Eyeness. Only problem, being a secret society, they don’t exactly create a Facebook page and hand out flyers to attract new members. They prefer the Nazi approach. They steal children and teenagers and conduct genetic experiments on them. Sometimes it is surgery. Other times it’s radiation. Either way, they always mix in their magic and certain brainwashing methods. Sometimes their experiments actually survive. I’ve seen far too many examples of their failures.
“So what does that make you? Are you some sort of, I don’t know, police force or vigilante out there to stop threats to world peace?”
“Yeah, I know. Kind of hard to swallow, isn’t it? Well, since we’re being honest and all, I’ll tell the real reason I started curtailing the actions of the Council. Boredom. Not very heroic, I know, but when you’ve been alive as long as I have, you need a reason to keep going. A raison d’être, as the French would say. It was either this or the aliens.”
“The aliens? You mean those UFO things are real?!”
“Let’s not get into that. Loooooong story. Whatever my reasons are, I’ve made it my personal mission for the last few centuries to be a thorn in the side of the Council. For a very long time I was able to do it in anonymity. I’d prevent a kidnapping here, reverse the damage done to the gene structure of a kid there. Then they found me out. That’s when the Council started using the Edimmu. They’d come into contact with the Edimmu during their time with the Yezidi. You see, as far as the Yezidi are concerned, the Edimmu are angelic heralds from God. The Council just sees them as hired muscle. Whatever the truth is, I don’t know. Maybe they are angels of a sort. All I know is that they’ve been on this planet at least as long as humans and they are very, very different from the Orpheans. I just find it hard to believe an angel would hire himself out to the highest bidder.”
“Wisdom….” Josh hesitated. “That creature down there, that thing, it was my father, wasn’t it? The demon one. How do you know him?”
“A tedious story, really, but it all boils down to a poker game.”
“A poker game?”
“That’s what I said, isn’t it? He’s got this sort of vendetta against me because he lost his wife in a poker game.”
“You won my mother in a poker game!”
“Well I doubt very much she’s your mother. This was several thousand years ago and Ehpslab – that’s his name, by the way – he’s not exactly the most monogamous of demons. I’m sure your demon mother was someone else altogether.”
“I think I’m going to be sick.”
The air above grew darker, as if something had drifted in front of the sun. Josh looked up, but there were no clouds, nor any sun for that matter. “Did you do that?”
Wisdom shook his head and slowly rose to his feet. “I only have a little control of things here. This is your dream, after all. Shall we make one more stop before I let you get some sleep?”
Josh stood as well. He walked as Wisdom created another red door out of thin air.
“Back in the Axeinus,” Josh began, “you said you thought you knew what was going on. Why do you think the Edimmu and the Orpheans are working together?”
Wisdom took several deep breaths and stared off into the distance. “That factory we saw is new. As long as I’ve known them, the Orpheans have been unorganized. Somehow they’ve managed to capture a powerful god and build an advanced manufacturing plant in a plane of existence without physicality. Maybe I’m getting too old for this. How could I not have seen this coming? No matter. The crux of it is, they are preparing for war. That factory was constructing an armory – body armor and weapons infused with the blood of a deity. The Edimmu, being solid as they are, must have helped them construct the factory. Something much bigger than I suspected is going on here. For that, I think we need to ask your father. The human one.”
The door swung open even as Josh’s jaw dropped. On the other side of the door was the kitchen back in his home in Ottawa. The walls and cupboards were painted a light yellow with a trim of white daisies. An apple pie sat on the counter and Josh knew instantly what he was seeing. As he followed Wisdom through the door, the kitchen began to fill with people.
“This is Thanksgiving,” he said.
The people moved slightly faster than they should have. They were also incredibly silent, but they were clearly his family. There was Uncle Perry sipping his third martini, flirting with Cousin Rob’s girlfriend. Josh’s grandparents were helping his mother set the table while Jan did her best to look interested in whatever Uncle Kyle was saying. Seeing Jan, even if it was only a dream, brought a tear to his eye.
“Do you think you could have picked a busier memory to pop into?” Wisdom stepped out of the way of Aunt Janet, who was carrying a tray of crystal glasses out to the dining room.
“Don’t look at me.” Josh waved back at Jan, who had motioned for him to save her. “I don’t know how this thing works. You’re the one with the magic doors and everything.”
“Well, can you make them go away now?”
Jan started walking over to Josh, her face brightly lit with an eager smile.
“How do I do that, Wisdom?”
Wisdom reluctantly accepted a glass of wine from a man Josh couldn’t place. “Christ. Just remember what your kitchen was like after all these people went home.”
Jan was inches away from him when she faded away. Her absence hit him like a stone. Like fog dissipating, all the people disappeared. It was dark in the kitchen now, and the apple pie was gone.
Wisdom walked over to the table and set the wine glass down. He snapped his fingers and the lights came on.
“That’s better. Now, let’s go find your father.” Wisdom walked up the stairs to the second floor.
“Wait a minute.” Josh tried to run after him, but he could not make his legs work properly. He moved very slowly, followed by a sudden burst of movement up the steps that almost sent him flying into Wisdom. “What does my father have to do with this? You can’t think he knows anything about those demons, can you?”
Wisdom turned around as soon as he got to the top of the stairs. “Of course he knows about the demons, Josh. That’s his job. The group he works with, Candleworks, their sole function is the study of nonhumans, like the Orpheans, and the search for ways to fight them.”
“I thought you said there was no way to fight them.”
“Are you going to hold me accountable for everything I say? Well, in that case I’ll have to make sure I say less. There are ways to fight them, if you can find the right energy fields through magic or advanced science – half a dozen of one, six of the other – but it’s not what your father knows about the Orpheans I’m most interested in. It’s what he knows about the Council. Which door is their bedroom?”
Josh pointed at the first door on the right. “But, that’s… I mean, it’s just not possible.”
Wisdom stopped, his hand on the doorknob, and spoke over his shoulder. “You say that a lot, you know. After the things you’ve seen recently I would think you would have a better appreciation of exactly what is possible.”
“Point taken. It’s just, my father couldn’t keep that kind of stuff from me. From us. Hey, I have an idea. You said I have another father, right? A demon. He has to be the father those Edimmu knew. That makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“Yesterday I’d have agreed one hundred percent. Ten minutes into your head and I knew differently. Those Edimmu knew you. They have interacted with you in the presence of your father. It’s highly improbable they were talking about a non-material creature like Ehpslab. Like I said, things are getting very clear to me. I have a few questions for old Richard Wilkinson.”
With that, he pushed the door open.
Josh looked in on his parents in bed. His mother was fast asleep, dressed in a flannel nightdress. Josh wanted to rush over and cover her so that Wisdom could not see the way her breasts rose and fell with each breath, but he fought the urge. It was not real, after all. This was just a dream. His father sat prop
ped up in bed reading a thick white book by the small pool of light coming from the lamp on the night table. He wore the wire-framed glasses he had needed for reading since his last birthday. Richard Wilkinson did not look up as they walked into the room.
“Go ahead, Josh.” Wisdom waved his hand forward.
“What?”
“You’ll have to say something to your father or he’s not going to see us. Once you get it going, I can take over.”
“You’re not going to hurt him, are you?”
Wisdom rolled his eyes. “Again, not real, remember? That is not really your father, just your memory of your father.”
“Then how can he…?”
“Smart question. How can he provide information that you don’t know if he’s just a figment of your imagination? Don’t know. Maybe he won’t. Who can say what information you have tucked away in your head? Let’s just think of him as a focal point to get the information we need and take it from there. Come on, ask away. I don’t have all night, you know.”
Josh looked back and forth from Wisdom to his father several times. Then, with a shrug, he took two steps toward the bed. “Dad? Hey Dad, can you see me?”
Richard Wilkinson looked up from his book. “Of course I can see you, son. What’s the matter? Can’t sleep? I told you not to have that last piece of pie. You just can’t handle the sweets.” When he started speaking, his voice was very faint, but as the words continued, they grew steadily louder until they reached a normal volume. There was still a strange quality to them, though, an echo as if his voice was reverberating around a very large room.
“It’s not that, Dad.” Josh looked back at Wisdom. “It’s kind of serious. I need to know about the Council, Dad. The Council of Peacocks.”
Richard put the book down and took off his reading glasses. “Maybe I should be the one asking what you know about the Council of Peacocks, Josh. Who have you been talking to?”
The Shadow Box: Paranormal Suspense and Dark Fantasy Thriller Novels Page 110