When Armando woke up the next morning, he didn’t remember going to the chapel in his dream, but he sensed something. I wonder if that priest my mother got rid of when I was small did something to me? Does my mother know something? Will she tell me?
Armando searched his brain, struggling to remember something as he drove up the castle driveway. He’d phoned ahead to tell Matilda he needed to talk to her, so she was waiting for him in the breakfast room. The room was sunny and very private in the mornings when the staff took a break. He observed her from the hall while she sat drinking tea, staring out the window. Her blue eyes were as clear as the sky in his dream. Pietro had once told him that some people from Lucca have light blue eyes like hers because the invading Celts raped the women after the collapse of the Roman Empire.
She saw him and leaped up, the joy on her face replaced by concern as she took a closer look at him. “Armando, you look terrible! You’d think it was the end of the world, like all the silly fanatics have been screaming about!” She noted his rumpled clothes and haggard face. “What on earth is the matter? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost!”
“Well, maybe I have. Maybe I have seen my own ghost, the shroud Signorelli painted of me. We have been estranged for so long, Mother, as if I could not be your flesh and blood. As if I am a pariah. I had a chance to win you back when I was dating Sarah, but I could not keep it going.” He paused to plead with her, “You are going to have to be honest with me because I’m trying to change myself. Can you believe that? I want to be different. Do not make too much fun of the end-of-time thing! I feel desperate. I will be condemned to be one of the damned if I don’t find out what is wrong with me!”
Matilda’s eyes filled with worry and fear. “What are you asking about, Armando? I want to tell you what you want to know, but I don’t know what you are asking? Is it something in your past? When?”
She searched his agonized deep brown eyes. He looked like he was going to explode. Wondering what he’d done, she was almost afraid of him. It could be almost anything; that she knew. She had thought of meeting him in his studio for privacy. Thank goodness I didn’t go into his lair with him. God, what has he done?
“Mother, something is wrong with me; I am really sick. Lorenzo almost terminated me because he can’t stand me. I could get anti-psychotic drugs, but I am afraid of them. I think they unleash demons in people, the forces I’ve spent my adult life trying to contain. The only thing that will help me is to get the truth.” He lowered his eyes and demanded, “Did something happen to me around the time of my First Communion?”
Matilda slumped on the bench as air expelled from her lungs. Oh, God, no. Do not ask me to remember this. I cannot stand the pain. She raised an elbow to the table and looked off to the distant wintry fields, her eyebrows knit tightly together. Lines appeared above her upper lip and between her eyebrows; Armando thought she suddenly looked twenty years older. Her voice strained and breaking, she said, “Something did happen around that time. You were an absolutely cherubic little boy; everybody adored you. You used to sing all the time in the morning right in this room. Then you changed. It’s hard to explain, but it was as if you had the evil eye.”
She sighed deeply, her gaze still off in the fields. “People became afraid of you when you crushed the skull of your little butterscotch puppy with a rock. Pietro was very angry with you and hit you for the first time, but I had a bad feeling about that priest, Father Cesare. At your First Communion, I went out of my way to catch his eye, and he would not look at me. You have to understand that nobody in those days imagined priests harmed little children, but I put things together. One day I came into your room unexpectedly, and you were sitting on your bed crying. I tried to get you to talk to me but you wouldn’t; I suppose you couldn’t. One of the servant girls didn’t like to be around you and I wondered about that. She told me I should watch you but she wouldn’t tell me why, so I fired her. I don’t know what it was, but I just sensed I could not trust Father Cesare. I asked the Archbishop to replace him and a new priest came. They sent Father Cesare to care for deaf children in a facility in Verona. You, you weren’t a child any more; you acted like a knowing adult.”
There was a hideous crawling feeling inside his intestines as if a lamprey eel had detached. He was feeling such dread and foreboding that he didn’t know how to press Matilda. But I have to know. He said in a quiet and detached voice, “I think I wasn’t a child anymore; I think that priest took my innocence from me. All I know is that once the world was white, and then it turned black. I felt like something awful was caged inside me, something he, he put inside me. But I was too small to comprehend it. Mother, I think that priest abused me. I think that priest raped me when I was only seven!”
“Oh my God, Armando. How could such a thing be?” she said in a barely audible, horrified voice. “How could such a terrible thing happen? How could a man do that to a little boy? I can’t imagine that. I cannot understand that, but I know something happened to you. You trusted him; we trusted him.” She paused, then continued, her voice now pleading. “Maybe it wasn’t that bad? Maybe he did things to you that made you feel guilty, but he didn’t do that?”
Armando met her eyes. “No, Mother, I think he raped me. I dimly remember terrible pain and I remember hiding in my room feeling sick. I can’t remember it happening, but I was not myself after that. I had a foulness inside that made me want to crawl out of my own body! So I started hurting everybody. First I was just mean and bad-tempered, couldn’t sleep at night, and it felt good to hurt others. My puppy annoyed me by licking me and wagging his tail, so I crushed him. I raped one of the young maids when I was twelve. I didn’t care about the sex, but I enjoyed hurting her. I know this is horrible for you, Mother, but you have to hear it. Since that priest abused me, I have felt like I had to hurt women to escape my damnation. I like it when they are weak and helpless. Thank god I didn’t kill anybody.” Each confession seemed to hit his mother like a blow, but Armando had to keep going. His words now came out in a rush. “When I was eighteen I almost strangled Magdalena Pisano in the ravine below the lower vineyard after I tied her up and raped her. I will stab myself in my heart with a cross unless I can change. I can’t go to a priest for Confession because I am afraid of all of them. The people I have hurt must forgive me. You are the first one, Mother. I have not made you happy, and I am sorry, deeply sorry.”
Matilda tried to keep her composure as tears welled up. Her throat burned, her muscles ached, and her heart was expanding as if it would break. The numbness that had been her constant companion was leaving her, and it hurt. She had never thought she could ever feel anything for Armando, her only son, again. He’d hurt her so much by becoming a monster that a huge part of her happiness had just shut down. She squeaked out, “Oh, Armando, I don’t know if I can take this. It’s so overwhelming. I’m so sad this happened to you and to hear what you have done.”
Armando sat with his mother for a long time with his arm around her thin shoulders while he quieted his body. Then he breathed with her as if they were again one body. A deep emotion emerged in his heart that he could not identify. As he stayed with her and allowed himself to feel her pain, his true masculinity came forth, his essence that had stopped growing when he was seven years old. I am a man; I never knew it. She is my mother, the woman I lost. I love her and I regret all the time we will never get back. “Mother, this is going to take time, I know it is going to take me a lot of time. I had to know; I have to face it. Suddenly yesterday I felt evil being unchained in the heavens. I can liberate myself by asking forgiveness from the ones I have harmed, all of them! Claudia will be the first because she is the one I have harmed the most.”
“Oh, Armando, I know you always thought I didn’t like her. But I did like her! I was afraid of what you were doing to her. You were so sophisticated at a young age that I hated to think about what you did to her behind closed doors. I was afraid for her and I was afraid for Sarah since you were so much older; I was v
ery worried when she was alone with you. I never could get to know Claudia and now I’ve lost my friendship with Sarah, which makes me so unhappy.”
Armando felt shame flood him again at the thought of how he had hurt Claudia again and again, and how he had tried to hurt Sarah. “You were right to be afraid of what was going on behind closed doors. But that is over and it is never going to happen again. I actually think I can redeem myself! Forget about Confession and the so-called sacraments! I have to redeem myself! Nobody else is going to, not even Jesus.”
Matilda shared the story with Pietro before dinner and when the three of them gathered in the library, Pietro was a different father. He put his arm around Armando and said, “My son, you never have to share any of this with me unless you want to. Your mother has told me about your conversation. I think that priest harmed you, but there is no going back on the past. Of course, I will report him immediately and demand an investigation if he’s alive. All I care about is I love you. Your sharing with your mother has made her happy again because for her, you had died. If you ever have children, you will be amazed by how long you will wait until your child opens his or her heart to you. Welcome home, Armando.”
34
Two Fathers
On December 21, 2012, for David and Rose “ordinary life” was gone. She retired early after a simple supper to go upstairs with The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope, hoping English high society trivia might help her forget about the children who died in Newtown.
The winds diminished enough for David to set a fire in his study. Sometimes the old chimney down-drafted, so he nursed the flames until they were burning brightly. He read an archaeology book for a few hours and then tiptoed upstairs to make sure Rose was asleep. It was almost midnight and her light was out, so he went back down to his study, shut the door, and contemplated the crackling fire. It would be astonishing if the Maya actually knew the European invaders would begin their decline now. But then again, the Maya were the sacred high culture of this continent; maybe they did know. The night deepened around him, and once he was sure the world wasn’t going to end, he retrieved the crystal skull of Dzibichaltun. The mysterious skull intrigued him in a new way because the book he’d just read suggested the ancient Maya used crystal skulls for divination. Maybe that’s how they discovered the end time? Is this one of the skulls that can predict the future?
He held the skull in his left hand, warming it with his body heat. He wished he still had the whale’s ear. Maybe the whale’s ear could hear this skull speak? He closed his eyes and felt a fluttering sensation in the lower cup of his ear canal. I’ll be damned. I do feel a vibration there.
He knew what to do because he was adept at detecting the subtle energy of electromagnetic fields. He rubbed the skull’s cerebellum with his fingers. The buzzing in his ears joined with a watery sensation in his temporal bones, and he felt the back of his skull expand relative to the size of the skull’s large cerebellum. With such a huge cerebellum, this skull must be Neanderthal. But how in hell would the Maya know anything about the Neanderthals? Being of pure Near-Eastern Jewish lineage, David knew he carried many Neanderthal genes based on recent DNA studies. From just a light touch on the skull, his cerebellum filled with energy. I wonder what Neanderthals were really like; maybe they were psychic?
His sphenoid bone, the bird-shaped delicate bone over his eyebrows that balanced his body when he walked, clicked. He surrendered, knowing the click meant he could travel out of his body. I am flying! I am flying way above the world over the jungle treetops to the land of the Maya. I see a very small pyramid glowing in a clearing, must be the Pyramid of Dzibichaltun. I fly home with the skull to deliver the records of time!
David was sitting quietly by the firelight, deeply immersed in the most profound state of consciousness of his entire life. Outside the quarter moon in Aries rose in the night sky leaving a pathway of light on the surface of the calming sea. He cupped the skull’s cerebellum to draw life out of it; his sphenoid bone began vibrating faster. He pressed the front face of the skull onto his thymus gland, and his chest and neck bones rattled slightly. The crystal skull spoke: I am the Time Hologram, a superwave from the center of the galaxy. I travel through cosmic space to penetrate your solar system. The extinction of Neanderthal, the psychic human, holds you back. Their imprint is in everything, and you are lost unless you awaken their spirit. Remember us! The war in heaven of the past five thousand years ended tonight, and Neanderthal codes are to open again. Soon you will see people in power acting very differently; they will make new choices without knowing why. Many leaders will flounder. The ancient ones dream with you again. So open the doorway of your cerebellum, the world of archaic memory, your planet’s ancient dream. You have brought me back to my temple so that I can awaken you. I am holographic. I can exist anywhere, anytime, to communicate with you; I am the essence of your thoughts. I am reborn in reality when you consider me. I have returned at the Calendar’s end.
While in the pyramid, David was simultaneously aware of himself in his study. Grounded by the magical night with his senses on high alert, this was a culminating moment. The idea popped into his mind that he could travel to the Pleiades from this pyramid. Why the Pleiades? Why do I always find myself in that star cluster when I seek the time library? Maybe I can see them if I go to the window. He went over to the moonlight-bathed window and could see the beautiful little jewel-like cluster shining way high above the moon. The bright twinkling beacon in the center was Alcyone, the central star. Still holding the skull in his left hand, he stood staring at Alcyone as his vision blurred and swirled into a cone.
Ah, excellent, David. Now you have the direct line. My crystalline matrix reduces to a line through Alcyone, which briefly draws me out of my spherical holographic presence in the universe, the ninth dimension. My dimensional reduction will enable you to see what I see. Now, what would you like to know?
As he continued holding the crystal skull, David’s cerebellum was like an electrical circuit struck by lightning. Undaunted, he asked the skull, “You have a very large cerebellum, as if you are a Neanderthal. Is that important? Are you?”
David, notice your cerebellum connects with the whole universe, not just to your planet. But your culture denigrates universal wisdom. Now that we have made this connection, Neanderthal intelligence is going to reawaken in all human brains. This breakthrough will be intense and subliminal. People will start acting as if they are following a distant beacon. Watch current events carefully, and you will see this is true. When you see evil actions stifled and stomped on, evil men removed from power left and right, it will be quite a show!
David traveled around in his own cerebellum while the skull answered him. He saw incredible apocalyptical scenes—people drowning in rushing water; fire burning homes, forests, and cities; refugees moving along roads beyond the horizon; and everywhere frightened animals trying to escape. Once again, he asked the skull. “This is all well and good, but what I see in my cerebellum is terrible scenes of the maelstrom, the whirlwind, the complete unraveling of reality—Earth’s nightmare. I can’t see how that’s going to do anybody any good. Why do I see this?”
This is where it gets complicated, because everything that you experience functions as particles and waves in the fourth dimension, the quantum world. So as you observe your reality from your perspective in third-dimensional space and time, when I add my greater view from the fifth dimension, my holographic sight lifts you out of your dimension. I pull you through particle-wave duality, the location of the nightmare you see. You are in particle land amid the disasters yet when you expand to traverse higher in the waves, you see good things happening. Let me put it this way to you: if you were caught in a flood, fire, or a mass murder, wouldn’t you like to know a great elemental cleansing is going on that is dissipating evil? Answer me truthfully, David.
David thought carefully before answering. “I suppose having a higher perspective while in a world going to hell would make it easier
to get along.”
My last advice to you is to not miss the magic in your world at every turn. I will not abandon you while I move to the tenth dimension to become a rhapsodic sphere. By trusting your inner mind, you have given me this choice. When others on Earth trust their inner minds, I will link them to Alcyone. Whenever you see good things happening that you thought were impossible based on the previous events of your life, celebrate these breakthroughs! When you consciously acknowledge these new miracles, they pop into waves. You must herald each shift that penetrates the human heart because they come from very high worlds. Your world is transmuting to beauty and hope, love and compassion.
David felt a sudden withdrawal of energy from the skull, and he was left alone, feeling very tired. He wondered if the horrible scenes in his mind had caused his exhaustion. He walked over to the little cabinet in the corner, opened it, and put the skull back inside. I wonder if the skull exists in the fifth dimension yet physically in my cabinet? He closed the door and locked it, knowing he’d never see the skull again. He went over to the fire to spread the last of the coals and put the metal screen firmly in front of the fireplace. As he slowly climbed the stairs in the cooling house, the moon was setting below the horizon; a warm body awaited him in bed.
On the same night, William sat at his desk in his library drinking twelve-year-old Scotch while contemplating the apocalypse, which for him would be the fall of the Church. Wind and rain pummeled the old glass in his window seat. What in hell is wrong with Benedict, or I should say Ratzinger? Why is he so stubborn while everything falls apart? “Between the Sheets in Roma” indeed! How could the pope invite my damned Jewish son-in-law to write gossipy trash about him? Does Sarah think this crap is funny?
Revelations of the Ruby Crystal Page 36