Psychic Warrior

by David Morehouse

  “You’d die?”

  “No, I don’t think ‘die’ is the word. I’m thinking more along the lines of being vaporized. But I seem to feel that that would mean another movement to another place, only I wouldn’t have any control over it. What I’m trying to say is, nobody’s supposed to be here. Even we aren’t supposed to be here; it’s an invasion, an intrusion into something very powerful and sacred.”

  “Ah, that word ‘sacred.’ Explore that a bit—took into the essence of the box. What’s there that’s sacred?”

  I moved around the box carefully, never taking my eyes off it and never letting the doorway out of my sight. “Well, I sense that this symbol is, or has been used as, a tool.”

  “What sort of tool?”

  “I don’t know exactly. It had some very lofty purpose, and it served a great number of people for a long time. Then it was placed here until it was needed again. Many people lost their lives to be able to use it; even more died in order to get it here.”

  “Why is it in that lonely place, do you think?”

  “It’s been hidden until called out again. Its purpose has been served for now, but not forever. It’s being protected. If you try to unravel its secret you are dumbfounded and confused—that’s one of its defenses. If you stumble upon it, you are destroyed or taken away to another place for fear you might reveal the secret.” -

  “All right; you’ve been there an hour and forty minutes now. Let’s break it off and come home.”

  Those were the words I wanted to hear. I felt very uncomfortable and vulnerable in the cavern. “I’m on my way.”

  An hour later I sat in the garden room with Levy and Mel and discussed my session with them. They began with the usual questions: “What did you think it was? What is this sketch of? How did you feel?” And so on. They marveled at my sketches of the box and the winged creatures that adorned it. They discussed the powerful unseen presence and the indications of a protective force. We talked for more than an hour without them revealing anything concrete about the target, but finally Mel suggested that I be given my feedback. Like a dog waiting for a bone, I waited for the envelope. Levy opened it first and looked inside, smiling. Of course, he already knew what the target was; he just wanted to amuse himself with another look at the feedback. Shaking his head, he tossed the artist’s sketch from the envelope on the desk in front of me and walked out of the room.

  “Well, aren’t you going to look at it?” Riley asked.

  I turned the paper over to see a painting and description of the Ark of the Covenant. “Oh, my God,” I said slowly.

  “‘Oh, my God’ are the exact words I was looking for.” Riley laughed. “I was sure you were gonna say ’em any time. But the damned thing is just too powerful. I had the same problem. The only person to ever call it in the air, so to speak, was Posner. I think it’s because he’s such a hard-head he didn’t hear the thing warning him not to come any closer, or maybe he knew what it looked like before he got started—he’s kind of religious, you know. Have you ever seen a picture before?”

  “Nope! I’ve heard of it—I mean, who hasn’t? But I never knew what it looked like. Or felt like.”

  “Some very important religious articles were carried around the desert in that thing. It went along with Moses in the wilderness.”

  “Yeah, I’m sort of familiar with the story. I had to take religion every semester at BYU.”

  “Did you know the Ark was part of a dimensional opening?”

  “What do you mean, ‘dimensional opening’?”

  “I mean a portal that lets you move from one dimension to another. I think God dwells in a four-dimensional world; that’s why He’s omnipresent and omniscient. When the high priests went into the inner sanctum of the Temple in the wilderness, they tied ropes to their ankles so their buddies could pull them back. These guys were traveling somewhere, and I believe it was to another dimension, where they would commune with the Creator. The ropes on their ankles were their way of making sure they had a round-trip ticket. Cool, huh?”

  I stared at him. “You never cease to amaze me, my friend.”

  Kathleen was responsible for my next mission. She had selected the target in accordance with Levy’s wishes and was waiting in the monitor room when I arrived.

  “Go ahead and get hooked up; here are your tasking sheet and coordinates. It’s pretty simple today, no tricks or heavy stuff. Okay?”

  “You bet. I should be ready to go in about five or ten minutes. I’ll give you a holler over the intercom.”

  I hooked myself up in ERV Room Number Two and took my position on the platform.

  “Okay, I’m ready to start the countdown.”

  “Fine,” said Kathleen. “Start talking to me as soon as your eyes clear and you’re in the target area.”

  I said nothing as her voice faded and I began my separation. The fall through the tunnel seemed longer this time and I never hit the membrane at all. It seemed to me that I’d traveled a great distance, or perhaps had missed the coordinates.

  “My throat seems constricted, and there’s a harsh chemical smell, like some caustic solvent.”

  Kathleen watched my respirations on the monitor. “Concentrate on your breathing, David; keep track of it, and remember, nothing can hurt you there.”

  “I’m having trouble breathing; my throat’s sore. It feels like it’s being burned inside. All I see is a desolate-looking landscape, very lunar. The soil is amber and there is no atmosphere—should say, no oxygen. Where is this place?”

  “You tell me. Take a look at the horizon—do you see anything familiar? Look at the sun or whatever the light source is; does it look familiar? Do you see anything out of the ordinary that might help you determine where you are? Come on, now … you need to learn to look for these clues on your own.”

  I looked to the horizon, a staggering landscape of jagged mountains and rock outcroppings. The sky was black, not blue, and I saw no moon. The stars had an odd shimmer, not like what I remembered looking into the night sky in New Mexico or Wyoming. And the sun was very different, smaller and colder.

  “This isn’t Earth, I know that much. I can see distant ranges of mountains, an open landscape littered with rock of all sizes and shapes. There’s a fine dust covering everything, and a harsh wind seems to be kicking up in the distance, spreading the dust. A giant red cloud is climbing upward from the effect of the wind.”

  “Are you alone there?”

  That stopped me in my tracks. “I certainly fucking hope I’m alone here. Why? Am I not supposed to be?”

  “I’m asking for your impressions of the target. Try not to second-guess me even if the question seems a little leading. I merely want to suggest that you look for something that might not be obvious.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t see any structures or anything that remotely looks like a structure, not even any caves. I’ll try to search backward in time.”

  I let the signal line drag me into the past; present time gave me little information. I closed my eyes to ride the movement out, and I opened them to a landscape that hadn’t changed a bit.

  “I don’t understand it. I just executed a fairly large movement in time and I still don’t see anything. Nothing on the horizon has changed, nor in the atmosphere. I’m going to walk around for a while. I think I’m okay with the breathing now.”

  “You appear to be; I’m not seeing any adverse reactions on the monitors. Don’t wander too far, though. I don’t want to leave you here too long.”

  “I’m walking toward a large outcrop of rocks maybe five hundred yards away. The atmosphere is very strong and caustic; it makes my skin tingle. I’m dropping down into a small depression in the surface. It’s maybe five feet deep and thirty feet across. I’m on the far rim now and still moving toward the rocks. I see nothing of interest here, and I find no indication of life, not even me. I’ll keep on in this direction a little longer—” I stopped, noticing something in the soil. “That’s odd.”


  “What?”

  “There are two identical linear depressions running in front of me. They are parallel, maybe ten feet apart, and they run along the ground about sixty feet with a few short breaks. The depressions are about three quarters of an inch deep and about twenty inches wide. I can’t see any reason why they start where they do or where they’re headed. They aren’t headed toward the mountains, but rather more or less parallel to them.”

  “Touch one and see what you get.”

  “I’m touching it now, and I … these are not natural. I mean, nothing fell out of the sky and skidded here; these were made by something or someone.”

  “Did the makers live there?”

  “Yes, I think so. I think this was home to them, but they weren’t there in present time. What happened to them?”

  “Do you think you can answer that question?”

  I kept touching the depression. “No, I doubt I can. It seems that whatever happened here took place over many thousands of years. What happened, and how, is a mystery to me. Perhaps with some other sessions and viewers we could figure it out, but I definitely don’t have it in me to do it alone, now.”

  “Okay, then let’s call the mission complete. Break it off and come home.”

  I was back in the office preparing my summary when Mel approached me.

  “How’d it go this morning?”

  I showed him my sketches. “This is all I saw except for these two lines in the ground. I don’t know; sometimes I think I’m getting worse at this stuff, not better. I can’t seem to lock onto what I’m supposed to be looking at. I just wander around until I stumble on something, and even then I can’t tell what it is.”

  “You’re doing fine—hell, better than fine. Look, you’re not being targeted against fixed installations like museums and churches anymore. You’re moving up in the world to difficult targets with extreme emotional and intellectual impact. This is the stuff that separates talented psychics from remote viewers. You’re learning to be a workhorse, not a sideshow. Nobody has the key to success here, and we all have good and bad sessions. You will, but from what I can see, this was not one of them. You get on target faster than anyone I’ve seen; you may not have the skills to pick things apart yet, but you don’t fuck around when it comes to getting there. So stop pissing and moaning and finish this summary. I want to see the target folder.”

  Kathleen came around the corner and glanced at my sketches briefly. She looked at Mel and tossed the folder to me before I’d finished the summary.

  “But—” I said.

  “Just look at it, and don’t tell Levy I gave it to you this soon. If I didn’t think you were right on, I’d make you wait.”

  The target folder contained a series of shots taken from Mars orbit and from a lander on the planet’s surface. There was a chemical analysis of the atmosphere, and some high-altitude photographs of the surface with captions indicating which spots had led several scientists to believe Mars was once inhabited.

  “Interesting!” I said.

  “Mel, I believe our boy is growing bored with his travels. ‘Interesting,’ he says about the surface of the planet Mars.” Kathleen was a bit indignant.

  “Ah, he just wants to branch out a little more, that’s all.”

  “Branch out? Branch out from Mars? Well, I’ll work on it.” She snatched up the folder and headed for the door. “I expect the rest of your summary in ten minutes.”

  “I do believe you’ve pissed her off,” Mel said. He took out a cigarette. “I’ll leave you to your misery while I go smoke this thing.”

  I plodded my way through the rest of the summary and turned it in to Kathleen. “Hey, I’m sorry if I came across as an ass,” I apologized. “I guess I’m looking for answers out there, and all I ever run into are more questions.”

  “I know how you feel, and I apologize for losing my cool. I have an agenda in mind for you, and it’s frustrating when you don’t realize the significance of what you’re doing. Going to the surface of Mars and back in a matter of minutes is significant stuff; you can’t just blow it off because it doesn’t answer all your questions. One big question it should have answered for you was whether you can journey off-planet and survive. Another thing: we are not alone in this universe. That’s the kind of lesson I want you to learn here. Everything else will come in time. Okay?”

  I smiled at her. “You know, if you’d been my freshman math teacher in high school, I most certainly wouldn’t be so bad at math now.” I patted her on the shoulder. “Thanks for your patience. I know I’m a terrible student.”

  “You’re an infantryman; I don’t expect anything more. What’s that saying? Arguing with an infantryman is like wrestling with a pig: everybody gets dirty, but the pig loves it.”

  One hot summer day Debbie managed to convince me to have a picnic with her and the children. Burba Lake, just across the road from the unit, was ideal. We enjoyed lunch and had a game of kickball in the grassy fields surrounding the lake. While the children played only feet from us, Debbie and I lay in the sun and spoke of happier times and better places.

  “Sometimes I wish we were back at BYU just being students. We only had two hundred and fifty dollars a month to live on, but we were-happy, weren’t we?” Debbie asked.

  “Yeah, honey. We were really happy. I remember what a night out consisted of after Michael was born. Remember that?”

  “You mean the trips to the Snow White Drive-In for five-for-a-dollar hamburgers?”

  “Exactly—and we could doctor those things until they put Burger King to shame, couldn’t we?”

  We both laughed, relaxing in the Maryland sunshine. A flock of geese paddled by our picnic site. Michael and Mariah tossed pine cones at them, producing a clatter of wings and water.

  “We used to go to the BYU Film Society showings for a trip to the movies,” Debbie reminisced. “Only cost us twenty-five cents apiece to see a movie.”

  “You mean try to see a movie, between taking our screaming kid outside or getting up so someone else could take out theirs. Remember we couldn’t even afford a bag of popcorn? We had to bring our own from home and sneak it inside. I wonder what would have happened if they’d caught us.”

  She chuckled. “At BYU? Are you kidding? We’d have made campus headlines: ‘Popcorn Smugglers Nabbed in the Act.’ I can just see it, you and I expelled for violating the popcorn law: no education, no job, no future.” She hesitated for a moment. “No army, no bullet, no nightmares.”

  “Come on, honey, things haven’t been all that bad, have they? I mean, we have the house in Bowie, our kids get to stay in one place, I’m home most every night. It’s not like it was in the Rangers.”

  “I enjoyed the Ranger battalion. I liked helping the troops and their families. It made me feel needed, which I don’t feel now. I was a part of a team there, our team. I loved Colonel Taylor and Keith Nightingale and their wives and kids. It was just a better time, that’s all. And I miss it.”

  “I know you do. Deep inside me, I miss it, too; I just can’t afford the luxury of thinking about it any longer. Here is where I am now, and I’m changing because of it. I know you don’t like it, and I’m causing you a lot of problems, but I think it will work out in the long run. Everything in life happens for a reason. You and I always felt that way about the army, we always felt that we would be put where we could do the most good, influence things for the better. I have to keep on believing that. I have to believe that everything in my life has led me to this point.” I snuggled into her shoulder. “Now just hold me and tell me you love me while I catch a nap.”

  “I do love you, husband. I always have, and I always will.” She sighed a troubled woman’s sigh. “You go to sleep.” She stroked my hair until I fell asleep.

  I opened my eyes to the bright sunshine. “Damn, Debbie, how long did you let me sleep?” I reached for my watch and shoes but they were gone. I was alone. Panicking, I jumped up and ran this way and that, trying to find Debbie and the children. “
Dammit, I can’t believe she’d just get up and leave me lying here. Dammit! Dammit! Where the hell are my shoes?”

  I turned toward the unit and my eyes met those of a familiar figure. It was the angel from my visions in Jordan. He stood looking at me, saying nothing.

  “You again! Listen, I don’t know who you are or what you’re doing here, but you’re not leaving until I get some answers out of you. First off, where the hell are my wife and kids?”

  He spoke to me in a tone so loving and gentle that my entire body filled with warmth and light. “They’re still here, right where you left them.”

  I risked another look around me, but they weren’t there.

  Before I could speak, the angel said: “You can’t see them because you are in another dimension, parallel to theirs. They can’t see or hear you. I assure you they are perfectly safe, and unaware of your absence.”

  I nodded briefly, not losing eye contact with him. “Okay. But why are you here? Why am I here? What’s happening to me?”

  The angel smiled knowingly. “You are here to speak to me; I am here to speak to you. What is happening to you is entirely up to you.”

  “Why me? Why not Mel, or Paul or Kathleen?”

  “Because you were chosen. Your father knew it long ago. He will tell you the story one day in the near future, when it is appropriate, and when he finds the courage to tell it to you. He was given information in a vision much like yours.”

  “What information?”

  “That will be for him to share with you, in his time. I want you to know that troubled times await you. Everything you hold dear will hang by a thread, and you will feel alone and hopeless. You will be broken down and cast out. I tell you this so that you can prepare yourself spiritually for the encounter. I’ll say no more except that I’ve been given to you by a very special person who loves you dearly. I will always be with you, even through your darkest hours. Remember that. I will always be with you, even through your darkest hours.”

  His image faded in the sunlight until nothing remained. I awoke softly, still in Debbie’s arms. I kissed her on the cheek and held her tight for a moment longer.