Disciples of the Serpent: A Novel of the O.C.L.T.

by Williams, Sidney

  Now she showed her badge. “Could you find Mr. Redmond? It’s very important.”

  In a few moments, they were seated around an antique table in a tight little room. They faced a small, round and silver-bearded gentleman wearing equally round spectacles. Nervous eyes were magnified by the lenses and looked mistrustful.

  “He was just in briefly,” Redmond said. “Hello, goodbye.”

  “Have you heard of his death?”

  She watched for a reaction. She didn’t get shock, but she detected a flash of sadness.

  “Yes. I read of it.”

  “Did it occur to you to make contact with the police, since he was probably by here hours before his murder?”

  “It occurred. It also occurred to flee to South America, but nowhere is really safe.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He rose, moved to a cabinet and pulled out a packet of information.

  “The professor brought word that something he–I guess we, since I was filled in on it–were a part of had gotten out of hand again.”

  “He expressed concern of something like that to me a few years ago,” Bullfinch said. “But we never re-connected about it. Until I got a text. From what we can tell it was around the time he visited you.”

  The old man nodded.

  “He brought a packet, a collection of a few signs he’d received that a circle of believers had become active again.”

  “What do you mean, circle of believers?” O’Donnell asked.

  “Professor Burke had a few students who decided to conduct an experiment a few years ago. A theoretical experiment, sociological, anthropological, choose your label.”

  “What were they trying to do?”

  “Exactly what they seem to have accomplished. They gave birth to a new strand of mythology, or a fresh adherence to old ideas.”

  “What, they created their own Scientology?” O’Donnell asked.

  “Not quite a religion,” Redmond said. “They wanted to see, in an enlightened age, if they could spark belief if they dropped some old ideas into the stream with just a few revisions and new ideas to accommodate modernity.”

  “Did you memorize that from their brochure?” Bullfinch asked.

  “I heard it stated quite a bit, when things were being discussed a while back, once Inerney figured out what the students had done.”

  “What exactly did they do?” Bullfinch asked.

  “It started when they were on an archaeological dig. Just a cataloging effort really. Then they stumbled on a fragment of information. They started to report it apparently, then decided it might be more interesting to try a different approach.”

  “This was a piece of a lost alphabet?”

  Redmond’s eyebrows wrinkled, but he nodded. “One night, when all this was just conversation among young intellectuals in training, the talk of ubiquitous themes emerged.”

  “The rabbit in the moon,” Bullfinch said.

  “What does that mean?” O’Donnell said.

  “I’ve mentioned it though not by that name. It’s a reference in folklore,” Bullfinch said. “It’s called a pareidolia. Think of it as a shared interpretation or misinterpretation of a natural phenomenon. There are patterns on the moon that many have seen as shaped like a rabbit. Particularly in Asian cultures there are stories of a rabbit that lives in the moon. They say he’s preparing rice since that’s an action that was part of their world. There are similar themes about the rabbit in Aztec myth. The specifics of the rabbit’s task vary by country based on acts the cultures recognize, but it’s widespread, all because of a vague natural formation.”

  “Dragons are even more common,” Redmond said. “And more exciting. You can find a lot of world-origin theories rooted in dragons and serpents and giant things. That’s what the young scholars decided to root their myth around.”

  “So they wanted to see if something deep in one of the old mythologies would resonate today with a little prompting?” O’Donnell asked. “Like the finding of a lost alphabet character.”

  Redmond nodded. “Some in academic circles might call it seeding.”

  “Putting rocks in obscure fields just as long as they’re on a perceived ley line? I’d say ‘seeding’ was a good term.” Bullfinch asked.

  “They thought it out well. A few clues, a few symbols, a few planted whispers and voila, a new belief, a new story, a new myth of a doorway to old things like Crom Cruach.” He pronounced it “crook”.

  “So, what happened?” O’Donnell asked. “Am I correct in suspecting nothing good?”

  “The Circle of Ning was born.”

  “Ning?” O’Donnell asked.

  Bullfinch seemed nonplused. “From Ningizzidda, I presume.”

  Redmond nodded again. “Son of Enki and Ereshkigal. They were behind the creation of the world in some stories. In Sumerian legend, he’s a snake-like guardian of a deity’s palace. There are suggestions in the information they put out that Ning and Crom Cruac are cousins.”

  “This crap I can’t even pronounce is tied to a string of murders today?” O’Donnell asked.

  “Calm, dear lady,” Bullfinch said.

  “You could see where it might fit with the murders including Inny’s,” Redmond said.

  “Go on. What did they do?” Bullfinch asked.

  “How does any good con game work?” Redmond asked. “With a story. As I said, they’d been working as volunteers with the Kilduff-Power Archaeological Trust. They found a character that didn’t fit with known alphabets. It looked like Ogham, but it wasn’t a standard character or part of the later forfeda, and being young and imaginative, they decided to use it as a way to drop bits of a story into the world’s information stream. Not to spill a whole tale out in one place, but to make it a mystery that would pique the curiosity of people who ran across it. They were clever in where they buried it. Where gophers wouldn’t go, they said.”

  “Rather astute thinking,” Bullfinch said. “You have to dig for something versus. being handed a dry thesis, you get excited.”

  “We like questions, we humans. Since we were all in Ireland, it made sense to tie the story around our legends and things like Crom Cruach and the Voyage of St. Brendan with hints that it went beyond, connected to other cultures like the rabbit. This is what Inny indicated later anyway.”

  “It sounds like an interesting discussion for a dorm room,” Bullfinch said. “Even for an expansion of a role-playing game, but it seems to have really gotten out of hand.”

  “These were very bright students with possibly a couple of geniuses in the mix. Young, intuitive and unfortunately unseasoned. That can be a dangerous combination. They didn’t really understand what can happen in the world. What people can want.”

  “Druids, Ogham, ancient history.” Bullfinch said.

  “Druids are mysterious, and real. A good hook.”

  “What did they promise?” Bullfinch asked.

  “What any good legend promises. Power for those who find favor with the mythical beings.”

  “So it, uh, went viral?” O’Donnell asked.

  “Before we knew what viral was.”

  Twenty-One

  “Once they’d sunk a few clues in remote places, they started dropping hints on the computer bulletin boards that were still around and on the various websites that allowed postings, and they made contributions to Usenet and the systems that were still vibrant,” Redmond said. “Scanned documents and text files were easy enough to fabricate. This was the days before Twitter and Reddit. Dial-up days, so they used what they had. Sprinkling pieces onto the burgeoning Internet, seeding information as they had in the ground, leaking out mostly electronic documents or rumors of documents that had the appearance of scholarly works. Or pieces of scholarly works. Again, they tried to cloak it in a bit of mystery, like they were details that had slipped out from some secret network.”

  “They convinced the casual that there was something there.”

  “And tied it to rocks in
the ground with their markings for anyone who got that far. Geocaching, if you will, before people were doing GPS searches for hidden trinkets with their mobis.”

  “How do we go from fake research papers to real venom and dead people?” O’Donnell asked.

  “Bear in mind, I came to know of this once it was starting to spiral out of control as Professor Burke and a few others were trying to figure out how to deal with it. They wanted to contain it without destroying the future of the students. They’d done stupid things in a brilliant way. Inerney realized they’d be ruined as scholars and possibly in the job market as a whole if their actions were revealed.”

  O’Donnell cocked an eyebrow upward and gave a tilt of her head. “Wouldn’t have helped his reputation either, right? Or the trust’s?”

  Redmond lifted his shoulders. “What’s the American businessman, Professor? Morgan? Went by initials.”

  “J.P. Morgan,” Bullfinch said. “The quote is: ‘A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason.’”

  “Does anyone work without some self-interest?” Redmond asked.

  “Just go on,” Bullfinch said. “How did this shape up?”

  “Before Professor Burke knew what was going on, the students began to notice activity–not long after the seeds were planted and a few nudges given,” Redmond said. “People sharing messages, chatting about ideas even looking for stones and trying to assemble text from the markings. Burke and his friends would drop into chat room sessions and see conspiracy theories being discussed and expanding. They grew excited that things were taking hold.”

  He drew a breath.

  “Some of them were so excited they decided to add fuel to the phenomenon, for the purpose of continuing their study. They dropped letters to individuals they identified as meeting a few criteria.”

  “Those who were expressing interest?” Bullfinch asked.

  Redmond nodded. “They pinpointed individuals who seemed to exhibit a high degree of intelligence coupled with a predisposition to an interest in the strange and unusual and a degree of paranoia.”

  “Someone bright who’d buy into snake-oil stories and propagate them?” O’Donnell asked.

  “That’s precise, actually. One of those was a young man pursuing a PhD. Shawn Drury was his name. He read about Ogham and reptiles, and his paranoia percolated until he began to take his suspicions and fears to others. He became an evangelist for the message, and started to assemble the research papers and bits of data the scholars had sprinkled out there, joined some Internet theorists and crackpots as well.”

  “Really fulfilling their purpose,” Bullfinch said.

  “He collected the narrative, found a unified thread and began to talk to a few people around a table in a bar. Then a few more and a few more until Olina Lerma Quiñones heard his story.”

  “She doesn’t sound like an Irish Catholic,” O’Donnell said.

  “She was from Spain, living in Dublin in poor quarters. She was the daughter of miners in the Asturias actually who came here looking for something better. Unfortunately, she wound up homeless. The stories Drury was telling seemed to resonate with her. She took up the cause of spreading the word, drawing in a few more adherents and a few more, operating underground for a while to gather knowledge, though the scholars detected her movements and made note.”

  “I take it this all went somewhere bad?”

  “They gathered enough believers to become concerning, especially because they started to drag in homeless people to increase their ranks.”

  “Press gang proselytizing?” O’Donnell asked.

  “Something like that. The scholars feared some who failed to become true believers might have been killed. When they attempted investigation, threats were made.”

  “That would have been around the time Professor Burke contacted me,” Bullfinch said.

  “He’d become fully aware at that time, I suspect. They were clutching at ways to deal with what looked like a growing problem. As they tried to investigate, Madam Quiñones started having people follow them.”

  “Were there threats?”

  “Not outright, but there was what might be called a campaign of intimidation. That was tied to a belief that seemed to be accepted among the believers that the scholars had held things back, and that there was more information, and that…mentioned gateways were being concealed. Madam Quiñones had blended aspects from other sources, fomenting her ranks with promises that might be obtained.”

  “Had the scholars, as we’re calling them, really stumbled on something?” Bullfinch asked.

  “They’d mixed and matched pieces with real finds and scholarship. There was disagreement in the circle about how far they should let things go, especially with someone like Madam Quiñones, who may have been delusional but was also charismatic. Also they argued about what might be real. Some felt there should always be gaps in the narrative. Others felt the social experiment they were conducting superseded other scholarly considerations and if they’d stumbled onto something real, so be it.”

  “Not so much into things like peer review?”

  “Among other protocols. Some of them began to sprinkle more details here or there to be found.” Redmond said. “It wasn’t hard to blend in their new pieces of data and extrapolations. Some of the scholars felt as long as they kept an accurate record, what laymen discovered and even what got reported in the press didn’t matter. Especially if it furthered the experiment. Professor Burke, you should know, never approved of seeding.”

  “You’ve said they put more things out there that came from other archaeological excavations for believers to find?” Bullfinch asked.

  “We’re reaching the extent of my knowledge. I’m not sure what all went into the mix because I heard all this second hand from Inny. I think it included the Ogham-like symbols and other details.”

  “No one was harmed back in the day?” O’Donnell asked. “Among the scholars, I mean?”

  “No. Followed. Telephoned. Watched. Not harmed. It appeared to come to an end when Madam Quiñones died. Six, seven years ago. We thought she was the glue and that when she was no longer around, the followers had drifted apart just as the scholars had.”

  “But we flash forward,” Bullfinch said.

  Redmond nodded. “To a few months ago. When the first of the now-former scholars died and hints that what Madam Quiñones started was still alive. That was a man named Thomas Kelly in Galway.”

  “If we check into that, will we learn it’s an unexplained poisoning?”

  Twenty-Two

  “How many names can he give us?” Rees asked once they’d return to Aisteach headquarters and briefed him in a small conference room. “These people need to be protected.”

  Redmond had agreed to come with them for further interview and was nervous enough to let Rees put him in a bunker. He’d been taken to an Aisteach safe house, though Nelda, his assistant, had refused, saying she was outside the scope of the situation having only worked for the shop the past year. She had a test coming up and needed to study.

  “He’ll give us a list,” O’Donnell said. “We’ll need to find them before the snake handlers do. I think we need to try and look up Burke’s niece also. We saw her picture in his office. Vita Burke.”

  “We’ll look for her,” Rees said.

  “When we find any of these people, we need to see what more they can tell us about what they’ve done,” Bullfinch said. “And what the disciples might be planning. If we can understand the story the scholars—as Redmond and apparently Burke called them—set up for people to find, that may help us anticipate moves, and in pinning down the killers’ ambitions.”

  “Redmond doesn’t know the whole created myth?” Rees asked.

  “Something about unleashing great power tied to mythology,” O’Donnell said. “Not the specifics.”

  “Will the people we track down talk? This an egregious maneuver for academics isn’t it? If they’ve established careers…�
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  “They definitely abandoned the usual protocols in favor of a thought experiment,” Bullfinch said. “I can’t imagine Burke or serious colleagues were really happy with what they’d done, though they may have become intrigued by the repercussions. To a point. We’ll have to hope their fear of death will overcome other concerns.”

  “Pressure can be applied,” Rees said. “So where are we? “We’ve uncovered a secret history that was under all our noses. What’s made these believers or whoever they are suddenly more dangerous? What’s the trigger? Why are they killing?”

  “It would appear they want to accomplish something, and at the same time they want to eliminate the information trail,” O’Donnell said. “It’s preparation for what we need to treat as a terrorist act. You silence anyone who might give you away or help your enemy. We’ve seen it time and again, and I think Professor Bullfinch’s earlier assessment is true. We need to put our ear to the ground just like we would for bomb-making or…”

  “There’s something in secret history they don’t want others to have,” Bullfinch said. “Something they think is to their benefit, and they’re killing anyone who can’t help them.”

  “From what Redmond could tell us, these people have always been on the sketchy side,” O’Donnell said.

  “They’ve been so sketchy and insignificant over the years that even organizations like mine, that monitor these things, haven’t given them much of a sniff,” Bullfinch said. “Something’s delivered them a bit of a push, perhaps even gotten them better organized.”

  “To what purpose?” Rees asked.

  “We can’t see that yet. We haven’t turned that card over yet, but we’d better,” Bullfinch said.

  “You’re harboring a deeper worry,” O’Donnell said. “What is it?”

  “I’ve seen things in the world you wouldn’t accept from just my word, and the O.C.L.T. records are classified even to the Aisteach. There’s enough out there to be worrisome. These people think there’s something catastrophic they can lay their hands on in what they’re trying to assemble. My deeper worry, as you put it, is that there’s something to their twisted ideas and that they might be able to tap into it. They may be killing to keep anyone from being able to undo what they want to attempt.”