"I still don't believe Henry was involved in something so foul. He was one of the most religious men I knew - an outstanding member of the community."
"A perfect cover. No one would ever suspect him."
"But, why?"
"Because religion did not satisfy his needs...did not give him what he needed, so he turned to the only alternative that seemed logical. I think the church let him down at some point and he lost faith. It could also be that he was after power," Carson explained.
"I don't know. I just don't know. I knew him my whole life," Stokes said. "What should we do?"
"I'm calling Detective Vancuso," Carson said.
"Who's that?"
"He's investigating the break-in at my house and he thinks a cult may be involved."
The Garden - Chapter 32
In her garden, Mary's mind drifted with the wind - a funnel of memories that streamed into her consciousness one after another at lightning speed. The funnel of memories was endless and she thought it was a bit strange that almost all of her most pleasant memories were recalled with such vivid detail at this time. Her thoughts scared her as she pulled up willowy green weeds and trimmed her overly healthy rose bushes.
She loved the garden - it gave her a sense of accomplishment and purpose. Like her cooking, it gave meaning to her life as she gave life to the plants and flowers that struggled to make their way out of the dark, cold earth. She worked slowly feeling her energy run down as the day grew older. She wore a large floppy straw hat to keep the sun off her face and out of her eyes because her skin had become extremely sensitive to the sun in her later years. She wore a light cotton, long-sleeved shirt and baggy blue jeans. The only part of her body exposed to the sun was the back of her neck. A light breeze kept her neck cool so she didn't notice the intensity of the sun's rays and the sunburn she was receiving at the nape of her neck.
The kaleidoscope of memories continued as if she were in a dream state. The first date with Matthew suddenly streamed into her consciousness. They had grown up on the same street only several houses apart on Acorn Drive in the nearby coastal town of Atlantic Highlands. They said the street got its name from the rows of large oak trees that lined the street and eventually dropped hundreds of acorns each spring covering the sidewalks. They had occasionally played together as children in the early and mid 1950s, but never took notice of each other until high school. He was on the football team and she was in the Literary Club.
Mary felt very tired and walked to the far corner of the yard and sat down in the teak settee under the giant maple tree - her favorite place. A cool, gentle breeze whipped her face as she settled down on the settee. The tree made her feel safe - the large stately branches protected her against the evils of the world. She loved the old shade tree. It was one of her few cherished things. Like she had done always, she leaned her head against tree on this day and closed her eyes. Its 85-year-old bark served as an anchor in the world. She dozed into a peaceful sleep, and dreamt she was back at her high school football stadium. The smells and sounds of the nearby locker room drifted towards the bleachers, where Mary and her friend, Dolores, sat waiting for the team to come out after their showers. The locker room smelled of stale sweat, worn leather, disinfectant and soap. The players dripped out sporadically and Mary kept a keen eye for Matthew. When he emerged - his black hair shiny and clean and slicked to his powerful head - Mary always stood up and waved. Matthew would approach and when he was close enough, he would always ask the same question.
"Hi, Mary," he said. "What are you doing here?"
"Just thought I'd say hello," Mary said twitching with embarrassment.
"Well. Hello," Matthew replied with a large smile.
"Hello."
"There's a dance Friday night," Matthew said hesitating.
Several moments passed, and then he spoke again.
"Would you like to go?"
"I'd love to!" Mary said jumping up from the bench.
"Great! I'll pick you..." Matthew said, but his voice suddenly lost its volume and faded away. Suddenly, she began to float upward away from Matthew like a wisp of smoke. She reached out towards him, but she could not reach him. He stared up at her in disbelief and sadness. She began to cry for only a moment and then felt a tremendous peace flow through her consciousness - a peace without conditions, a peace she knew was not fleeting.
Matthew and the football field vanished into a darkness that swallowed her completely. She found herself rocketing through space, traveling at what she thought was immense distances in only seconds. Then a light began to appear below her. A strange green pattern formed that moved back and forth, horizontally. The pattern appeared out of focus, and then slowly became recognizable - it was the top of the old maple tree swaying back and forth from a slight breeze. A figure appeared under the tree - it was her, asleep, curled up on the settee and looking content. She wondered how she could be floating above her own body. She no longer felt part of it. It was someone else's body now, she thought. She floated for several moments until a gust of wind seemed to swirl off the top of the tree and move towards her. She could feel a tiny wisp of a breeze move over her and flow harder past her. Then it turned into a great wind and suddenly there was an explosion of sound. She could hear again! She could hear the wind rushing past, the sweet deep melody of her backyard wind chime and the chirps of several birds. An inner peace and great wisdom overwhelmed her and she tried to reach out toward the old maple tree and the singing birds, but her arms would not respond. Suddenly, the wind increased again and pulled her away from the old maple tree, and she tried to resist, but the wind was stronger. It pulled and crushed her at the same time. The maple tree vanished and she sensed being pulled downward at tremendous speed. A tiny flickering orange light appeared below her and slowly became larger and brighter. The light reflected off the walls of a dark tunnel covered in stringy, translucent arms that whipped out towards her as she descended. She lunged toward the wall and stretched her arms out as far as she could to stop her falling, but she couldn’t reach the wall. As she moved closer to the glowing orange light, she could feel the heat and her skin beginning to burn. At first, the pain was like severe sunburn, but as she was thrust closer, the burning increased. The pain became unbearable and there was no escape. Then she stopped moving and found herself standing on a rim of a pool of red-hot molten liquid. Several beings oozed out of the hot liquid - they were black and resembled human forms, but changed shape constantly as their skin blistered and oozed, reformed, and deformed. Their large bulbous eyes were filled with pain and horror. The figures floated out of the red-hot pool and landed next to her. They stood on each side of her on the narrow rim that resembled a slate walk. She was trapped, she thought. If she stepped forward or back, she would fall into the molten liquid. One figure reached out and touched her arm. Mary jumped back and screamed. Her arm began to blister and burn. The being on the other side touched her shoulder, and it turned black, collapsed and reformed again disfigured. Suddenly, the pain stopped and her arm and shoulder went back into its original shape. The beings vanished and a bright, brilliant light shown overhead. The light was the size of a man and its shape changed constantly. The light communicated to her, not with words or sounds, but with thoughts.
"Come," it said.
Mary reached up toward the light and was lifted upward. The pain and heat vanished and she felt a tremendous amount of love coming from the light - an unconditional love without judgment, without boundaries; a love that transcended space and time and clearly extended into infinity. A profound peace seeped into her and she felt that she had arrived "home." The light brought her to a plush, pastoral field with rolling hills of green grass and endless white roses spreading out into the horizon. Mary breathed in the sweet scent of the roses and the hearty smell of the fresh grass. She could hear birds singing in the distance, and the rustling of tree leaves. She spotted a tiny valley shaded by two large maple trees. Three small children played in the fresh grass with a smal
l rubber ball. The little girl looked up at Mary.
"Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!" the tiny girl shouted.
The two little boys looked up and shouted the same words. They all began running towards Mary. Mary ran to them with outstretched arms. She hugged them all. She had never felt such an intense love - the emotion seemed to stream through her like water rushing over a waterfall. She knew instantly that these were the children she had lost to miscarriages over the years. If only Matthew hadn't been so stubborn about that operation, she thought. He was sure it would have killed her, but at least one of her children would have lived.
Mary looked up and saw Matthew stooping in front of one of the trees. A woman dressed in a light cotton long-sleeved shirt and blue jeans was curled up on a wooden bench. He was crying; she had never seen him so sad, so emotional. His pain stabbed her like a knife. She wanted to run to him, to hug him, to sooth his pain away. Instead, she hugged the children again and experienced the profound love and wisdom that she had sought all her life. She was finally at peace. A being of light appeared from behind one of the trees and approached Mary. The being was translucent and the light moved like smoke in windless air. Mary jumped back remembering the clear arms in the tunnel that burned her skin.
"Will you come now or later?" said a melodic voice from the light.
Mary looked at the beautiful faces of her children and then at Matthew's face covered with tears. Her house suddenly appeared in front of her - movers were bringing in more antique pieces; then she was hosting a dinner party with doctors from the hospital; she was gardening; her and Matthew were on a trip to Italy - Matthew was the key speaker at a convention in Naples; more dinner parties; a luncheon with other doctor's wives - all in lonely, isolated silence. The scenes rushed past her like a kaleidoscope of memories. Mary looked at the children again - their wide, beautiful eyes beckoning her, their tiny smiles giving her unimaginable joy.
"Now," she thought.
The light being became more brilliant and everything vanished except the three children. They held each other's hands and walked into the glorious light. Mary suddenly realized where she was. The part of the world she had just left and the world she was in now were one. She had an increased appreciation of life and death and a renewed purpose of existence. She was more loving, more caring, and more compassionate than she had ever been in life, and she had her three lost children to share her feelings with for all eternity. All the pain and discomforts from her life on the earth melted away into a peace she had never experienced before. She came upon a profound wisdom that all of the Earth and the universe were one; that time with its past, present and future were merely an illusion because all events just exist - nothing happens or occurs; that good and evil are also one because without evil there is no good, and without good there is no evil, and that all forces in space and time are in harmony with each other. She followed the light being into eternity, her children beside her, her life fulfilled with the new world ahead of her.
Frank Tessler - Chapter 33
Frank didn't notice the weather as he walked through the narrow canopy to the departure gate - the rain pounded on the thin metal roof like thousands of tiny drums beating together. He wore a loose fitting striped green shirt, tight blue jeans and black, richly ornate cowboy boots. Like his personality, the clothes suggested that he moved fast and in no way hinted that he was an investigative pathologist employed by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia. The flight was uneventful from Atlanta to Newark, and he was looking forward to seeing Carson again. He and Carson had been friends since childhood. They lived on the same block and played together as kids. They went to the same high school, the prom, studied together and attended Rutgers Medical School at Cook College. They loved each other like brothers and would do anything for each other.
He grabbed the side of the buttery soft leather valise that hung off his right shoulder and brought it forward. The worn, cedar brown leather reminded him of his grandfather, whom he had never met and had only seen in cracked and faded tiny black and white photos with bent corners.
"You're grandfather loved to travel. He always said that travel was educational and he always carried his leather valise wherever he went," his mother told him one day holding it lovingly seeing the memories of her father in the worn leather.
"Where did he go?"
"All over. He was a businessman."
His mother had given Frank the valise when he graduated medical school. She had kept it hidden away all those years planning to give it to Frank when it was old enough to appreciate it. At first, Frank wasn't impressed - the leather bag was worn and looked ancient. He placed it in a closet and forgot about it for several months until he saw one of the older, established doctors carrying a similar case. He began using it the next day and soon grew to love it. It was large enough to carry all his paperwork, a laptop, lunch, and anything else, he needed. The front had two small pouches with large flaps that tied shut with leather ties. The more Frank carried the bag, the more he realized its importance - its link with the past, his link with his lineage. He often wondered where the case had been, what cities, what countries and who of importance had been in the same room with the valise during a time that was long gone. As he ran his fingers across the smooth leather, it was if he could touch the past and transcend the barriers of the present. When he touched a computer keyboard or drove his car, he knew those things were made only a short time ago by people who were still alive, but the case was made more than three generations ago and its artisans no longer existed, but their work lived on through the valise.
He deplaned into the waiting area and scanned the crowd for Carson. After several minutes, he grew tired of looking for his friend and went to the coffee shop. He ordered a coffee and drank it black so that he could experience the total taste of the beverage. He had just started drinking his coffee black and discovered it was a whole new beverage. The tiny airport shop was warm and steamy, but the atmosphere was electrified with the bustle of people coming and going. Frank did not notice the flurry as he stared into his cup at the black shiny surface. He thought about an investigative strategy he would use in search of the virus that he thought was causing the Hellfire Syndrome. He never let distractions cloud his thought processes or his goals in life. He believed that most people never achieved what they really wanted in life because of too many distractions. Ever since he realized that he wanted to study disease and find its cause and hopefully a cure, he focused his energies on doing just that. Like most people, a chain of circumstances kept getting in his way, but he did not allow them to stop him. He did not let people persuade him to do something different like Aunt Sophie, his mother's sister, who kept telling his mother that pathology was a waste of time.
"He should be a surgeon or a gynecologist, open an office on Park Avenue, make lots of money. Saul has friends; Saul can call Jerry. Jerry can set him up," she would tell his mother in a sharp telltale accent that revealed her Long Island roots.
"No. The boy does what he wants, Sophie. I can't control him," his mother would reply.
"He's gonna be a pauper. What nice Jewish girl is gonna marry him? You tell me?"
"Maybe, he won't marry a nice Jewish girl?"
"Marry a gentile! Oy vay, I don't know what these kids are coming to these days," Aunt Sophie would say.
"They don't think like we did. They think for themselves."
"Drink your tea. Drink your tea. I don't want to hear this anymore! Saul, call Jerry! Jerry's a good friend."
Saul was in the other room talking with Frank's father and watching a football game. He never responded.
Frank turned and searched the crowds again.
"Carson! Carson! Over here!" he yelled waving his hand high over his head.
Carson worked his way through the moving crowd zigzagging like a pinball until he reached Frank and his smiling face.
"Good to see you, old buddy!" Frank said.
The two friends hugged.
"What's the matter? You look terrible!" Frank said.
Carson's face drooped as if it were made of melting wax and the dark circles under his eyes revealed his deep pain.
"Has it gotten that bad?"
"Yes and no. Maybe you can help me end this craziness. Come on. Your baggage is downstairs. I'll fill you in on the way home."
"Well, I'm glad I got your message and I was able to convince my boss that we may have a level 2 emergency."
Carson was silent as they loaded Frank’s luggage into the trunk of Carson’s car. They drove out of the underground parking deck into the black, wet night.
"So what's going on?" Frank asked as they sped onto the New Jersey Turnpike heading south.
"You remember talking with Doctor Stokes?"
"Oh, yeah. I spoke with him a few days ago," Frank said. "Oh no! Don't tell me he died, too?"
"No. His wife did."
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