Unbeknown to Matt, I longed for the fancy-free days when I fell in love with you. I lied to myself that I was happy without you. But I was a prisoner: a slave to the loneliness of the forsaken lover. I was not going to spend another day trapped in the wound. It was like being hypnotised, like a ghost in a dream. My walks had become a reflection of my own inner meanderings. I had to change that. I was going to follow the frequency of our Union, our alchemy. My heart would be my guide.
I headed north and found myself in the city centre. My wandering took me to the crossroads between Dame Street and George’s Street, the site of the lovers’ goodbye. It was the X in my heart, the mark that you had left, mapped out on every cell of my body. I was standing at the very spot on the pavement where we had last kissed. I’d been walking that crossroad forever, with our goodbye kiss still fresh on my lips, burning like a fire in the desert. Where were you now? Did you ever think about me? Our joint frequency came back to my mind and my heart expanded as if a shower of Light had sprung from it. An ocean of golden Divinity erupted through my chest and I became springtime itself. The Life Force returned in me, with leaves and flowers a-blooming, breeze a-blowing, couples a-falling and all. I was in love again: I was that love again. In that moment without boundaries I forgot that I did actually hate you.
I kept measuring my steps, down the street, focusing my mind on the frequency. I didn’t want to lose it again. I looked at the shop windows without seeing them. I saw people flitting by but they were like ghosts. Nothing seemed physical. I was in the world of spectres, moving through Dreamtime Ireland. I turned the corner from George’s Street into the lane that stretches through to the entrance to Dublin Castle. My heart was racing.
And there you were, in front of me, after all this time. You were the picture of demure elegance in a trilby hat and silk scarf. What should I do now? It was too late to turn around and hide. You were talking to a street artist who was painting that back alley where the fire exits of a French café, a gay pub and a Chinese restaurant converge. Engrossed in your conversation, you had not seen me. For a split second I was overjoyed. Nothing but romance flew between us. I wanted to run into your arms and kiss your beautiful face. But before I could bat an eyelid, my heart turned to stone and my blood froze. Fear paralysed me: now there was another woman in your life. Someone else had taken the place that once was mine. I realised I wasn’t welcome anymore. Splinters of ice ran through my legs as I walked by you while you stood next to the bearded man and his canvas. You didn’t notice me at all. Could you feel something? How could you ever detect me when I walked by shrouded in despair?
“Only in the Light of my true self will you recognise me”. Those were the words I left behind for you, whispering in the air, at the gate of our house. They had cast a spell on us. You were still the one but I was hidden by fear, by the darkness of the wound that had driven us apart. So you didn’t see me as I walked by you like a ghost. Your physical senses were now incapable of recognising me because we had lost the frequency of our love. It couldn’t be maintained by one person alone. Would we ever retrieve it? Will we ever retrieve us?
I was caught up in the depths of my psyche. Ah the pangs of love: how they hurt. Ah the lump in my throat: how it silenced the words I wanted to tell you. And that relentless longing that turned me to stone: how cold it made me inside out. I became stone when I realised you had banished me from your heart and from your memory. I had to go back on my steps and take a good look at you. My heart oscillated between a feeling of terror and one of invincibility. You hadn’t seen me, so I would try again. I gathered all the courage I could find and approached you. You looked stoned and smelled of alcohol. Your energy was frazzled and chaotic. That was why our connection was no longer in place, I thought. The words you uttered made no sound to my ears. Your lips moved but I only heard silence.
“Oscar?”
You turned to face me with a puzzled expression.
“Hi Oscar...”
Now you looked downright scared. You could hear my voice. But you didn’t see anyone else in that dark alley apart from Ronnie Jennings who was bent on his canvas, unfazed by our interaction. Tears streamed down my cheeks as I realised I had become invisible to you. Perhaps you were never going to see me again. We lived in two separate realities now. I could see you but couldn’t hear you. You could hear me but couldn’t see me. What had we done? What had happened to us?
I looked at the sky searching for answers. The sun was flaring and spinning apocalyptically. I turned away and fixed my eyes on the pavement. I cast no shadow. I had too much Light in me. That dark alleyway was a dangerous place. As terror seized my limbs, a blue and red butterfly appeared out of thin air. Her arrival reassured me. It was the help I needed. Her crystalline voice spurred me to move away:
“If you stay here just a second longer, my dear one, something horrible will happen. Run away now, as fast as you can!”
Sparkles from her wings danced around my body. My energy rose again. My legs moved without my command. I darted out of the alleyway with a lump in my throat. Perhaps our goodbye was forever. Perhaps we were meant to be apart, or else the Plan would die. Perhaps I wasn’t ready to share my powers with the world. I was dashing in my high heels. It was a miracle I didn’t break a leg. I arrived at the Transformation Centre in Temple Bar, just a short distance away, in a matter of minutes. Conor, your brother, was there. He opened the door and it took him one glance to realise that I was terrified.
“Cassandra, come on in. What’s going on? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”
I sat down with a glass of water he brought over and I tried to catch my breath. What could I tell him now? I was still trying to figure out what had happened. There was a tear in the Earth grid coinciding with the deviation in the Plan caused by our separation. Two parallel realities were emerging. They were really the same one from two different perspectives. These two worlds were still joined though they were beginning to come apart at the seams. I had an appalling premonition that once they separated for good, they would be irreconcilable. The same could be true of you and me.
“I had a vision, an omen...”
Your brother’s presence was as comforting that day as it had been in Paris nine years earlier, when my bag got stolen and I had to come face to face with my vulnerability. I couldn’t tell him that I had just discovered that you and I existed in two separate worlds. Did that mean he was never going to see you again either? He had grown weary of your ways and disapproved of your choice of a partner. Gallantly, he had never mentioned Charlotte and her condition to me for all those months. But he still loved you and admired you as his big brother.
The butterfly was with me when I arrived. As I was talking to Conor, she transformed into the two-foot hologram of a beautiful woman. To my surprise, Conor could see her too. The atmosphere around us turned to perfect peace and joy. I heard her speak to me. Conor could hear her words as well.
“Greetings, my friends. My name is Lady Myriam. I am the Lady of Alchemy. I am appearing to you from Shambhala, the Land of Heaven on Earth, to help you find your way. I was once human. The world knew me as the Queen of Sheba. I had a few other important incarnations before I achieved my present state as Shambhala citizen and Earth angel.”
I found my smile again in the magic of that encounter. Conor reached out and held my hand, enthralled by our visitor.
“I was assigned to act as your guide during the Shift the Earth is bracing itself to undergo. Cassandra, your life might seem almost unbearable at present. Let me reassure you that the Ascended Masters are behind you. We have been supporting you along the way. We have met many times. You can see and hear us, but your memory of our encounters disappears immediately upon our departure. It’s due to the fact that your body is no longer capable of vibrating at our frequency constantly. The day will come when seeing us will be like second nature again. You mustn’t give into the lies that the Dark Side has crafted to tempt you. Remember who you are, Cassandra. The future
of the Earth rests on your ability to retrieve your True Identity...”
The air frizzled and Lady Myriam disappeared. Conor and I were jolted out of the peacefulness of this wondrous vision. We stared at each other blankly. What had happened? The last thing we remembered was my sudden, desperate appearance at the Centre with tears pouring from my eyes. So how come did I feel elated now? And why was Conor quite happy too? He hugged me like the true brother he had always been since you and I got together. As a joke, he hummed the song he sang under my hostel window in Paris, all those years ago:
“Gonna get your girl, gonna take her down...”
Unbeknown to him, that was the signal Mr Harker would want me to hear again a decade later, and for a very specific purpose.
* * * *
New York, March 1999
Robert Harker, his wife and a number of dark-suited men and women sat in a sound-proofed boardroom in New York’s World Trade Center. The group in attendance were Harker’s closest advisers. They were sworn to secrecy. Or else they would lose their lives. The meeting was highly confidential: the results of the long-running experiment in Paris were being disclosed. They could now be considered final and reproducible. Vanessa 279, the first human to have been successfully cloned from an adult cell, was created in the Vaults where she remained from her birth in 1995 until all tests gave the all-clear. She ‘emerged’ to life on the surface in 1996. She had since been living healthily as the adoptive child of an anonymous couple. The little girl was now four and physiologically perfect. Her intelligence was above the norm and she had already taught herself to read and write.
“The experiment,” Harker was saying, “has been immeasurably important. For the first time in human history, our team’s efforts have shown that the genetic material from a specific adult cell, theoretically programmed to express only a specific subset of its genes, can in actual fact be reprogrammed to grow a completely new organism. Whilst this concept has already been demonstrated in other mammalian systems, it is entirely innovative in its courage to handle human cloning.”
Finding guinea pigs had not been difficult. The devil makes work for idle hands. A few unfortunate casualties had to be suppressed to avoid leaks of information. And of course, five baby clones and over one hundred embryos ended up being immolated on the altar of research too. But all in all, the project did not prove too expensive in terms of human lives sacrificed. Everything had to be put into the context of the incredible scope of this experiment and its impact on the course of history. Unbeknown to the scientists and businessmen and women in that Boardroom, Harker’s intentions had other even more sinister ramifications and his thoughts were far away from that Boardroom. His Counterplan was well and truly underway. He was delighted.
“Ah, those foolish Shambhalians don’t have the vaguest clue!”
Cassandra had become too widely known for his liking. Although she had been weakened by Oscar’s betrayal, people could still tune into her healing frequency by listening to old recordings of her voice and watching her image broadcast in better times, or through the many CDs and videos s by the Transformation Centre. The sound and pictures from when was she was still powerful were still effective. It was time to stop her, or at least lower her vibration even further.
The survival of this child, Vanessa, had confused Oscar’s ability to tune into Cassandra’s frequency even more. The little girl had the same physiological make up as the Star Woman’s: she was her clone, just like Charlotte’s baby, in actual fact. She also emitted the same frequency as the original. Oscar’s mind would be pulled in too many directions, emphasizing his schizophrenia. Without Oscar’s love as a mirror to amplify Cassandra’s frequency, the Plan wouldn’t have the same effect. Moreover, this way Cassandra’s imaginal cells would also lose some of their power to transform the rest of her body. Without her evolution, the human race wouldn’t upgrade. Harker liked the status quo. He was prepared to go to any length to maintain it. The meeting was momentous. His mind, however, was preoccupied with other important matters.
“I have to recruit Cassandra now that she is regaining some of her strength... I’ll use the excuse that I need her help in expanding the potential of my staff... I must have access to her and her two clones simultaneously, at all times...”
The Dark Forces were celebrating yet another victory. Their Prince was spinning his web around their prey with consummate skill and charm, closer and closer. Both Cassandra and Oscar were now treading Shadowland. The Counterplan had emerged from the Earth Grid where the ex-lovers’ paths crossed in that dark alleyway in Dublin. Their connection was broken. Harker was waiting for Oscar’s fears to be projected onto the world on a large scale now. He could control the confused artist’s mind at will, through the power of the secret wound. His plan was perfect in its simplicity. The tie between the ex-lovers was truly severed. Two different energetic realities could now be created. With Oscar’s focus fixed on preparing for family life, he couldn’t have been further removed from his shamanic work. He had now become the core of an in-between dimension which was designed to usher the worst human nightmares into manifestation. At the same time, Cassandra was now the fulcrum of another liminal dimension which pulled away from and repelled the one which was being spun around Oscar. Their worlds were mutually nullifying. Unlike the Masters’ Plan, which was based on the Law of Attraction, Harker’s Counterplan was based on the Law of Rejection. In Lucifer’s vision, duality was the only rule.
He was adamant that the Masters had no clue as what he was up to. He was always a few steps ahead of them anyway. Everything was working to perfection. Sitting in the oak and teak boardroom, Harker looked at his diamond cufflinks and then over to the Manhattan skyline. The implications on the Earth’s energy field of the pull of such powerful centres in two different directions would be apparent very soon.
“During all the time I have spent observing Cassandra, I must admit I have grown fond of her, much to my surprise. She’s fabulously cynical. Now that she cannot really outdo me, she might provide me with some sophisticated company. She is immortal, just like me, and we share the Star-bond. We both have the kind of intelligence which goes to the root of everything, and projects the future from there. Perhaps she can be turned into an ally. That would really upset the Masters and their altruistic efforts...”
He turned to matters at hands again, and spoke to the audience to conclude his speech.
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the future.”
When the roaring applause stopped, Professor Marion Le Blanc was invited to take the floor. She launched into a presentation of the various developmental phases in the experiment. The hard science behind the research was revealed in great detail. Cloning Vanessa had a low success rate per fertilised egg. The miracle baby was born after using over two hundred eggs to create thirty-seven embryos. These produced only five babies at birth. Vanessa was the only one who had survived.
Those in attendance were only given a watered down version of events. They didn’t know that the nuclear donor was the renowned magic woman Cassandra Morgante, and that she didn’t know that her biological samples were being used to clone her. Another secret was that another egg had been fertilised, and a freshly cloned embryo had been implanted in another surrogate a few months previously.
Finally, videos were shown of the girl Marion called the “Child of Science.” The little one was fluent in French, Italian and English. She knew how to read and write in the three languages. She was learning to play the violin, and had already started ballet classes and pony-riding. In a surprising finale, Marion revealed that she was Vanessa’s surrogate mother and was now raising her like her own. After all, she had created her. The donor of the biological material, who was anonymous, would have never had a baby anyway. This girl owed her life to her. And to Mr Harker, whose surname the child had taken for legal reasons. The bond between Marion and the cloned girl, she added, was one of mother and daughter, and of the holiest kind.
“Ladies and ge
ntlemen, let me introduce you to the future. Please welcome Vanessa Harker.”
The room went silent when the little girl tip-toed in, holding her minder’s hand. She greeted the audience with a cute curtsy and proceeded to sit on her mother’s knees. The dark-suited crowd erupted into applause again. Harker was grinning from ear to ear. He was invincible. There was nothing he couldn’t do in the world of matter.
* * * *
Shambhala, watching Dublin, spring 1999
All the big screens in the Crystal City were switched on. As usual, events from the three-dimensional Earth were being broadcast in its major squares. Fairies, devas, angels, spirit guides and totems followed the developments in Cassandra’s life with bathed breath. The policy in Shambhala was that all higher beings would help our heroine by simply focusing their minds on her, lifting her energy through the Light of their awareness. That day had something unusual in store. The atmosphere was momentous. New developments on Earth were about to unfold as the city shone like a diamond. The hologram-transmitter in the White Lodge was positioned to send its projection on the round table around which the Masters were sitting. The flames that danced over their heads were bright and riveting. Something was going to crop up in Cassandra’s life, the outcome of which had them split into two factions. Some thought that she was going to succumb to the lure of matter and was never going to become an Earth angel. Others believed that she was simply biding time, and creating time for that matter, before her final victory. If she won, humanity would evolve. If she didn’t, humanity would be doomed.
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