“We all want to be who we truly are,” he said as he positioned candles in a circle around them. Some of the candles gave off a harsher smell than the first batch he’d lit, and he explained that perfumes were used for commercial candles, but for doing difficult psychic work, other elements had to be added to the experience. He lit several sticks of incense, and again the scent was complicated, almost challenging, because it wasn’t actually pleasant, though not offensive, either.
When she asked if the incense was for sale in the store, he made a face. “Corinda, bless her well-intentioned heart, sells a lot of what can best be described as ‘tourist incense.’ Same for most of the candles she sells. They’re very popular with the crowd that orbits the real world of the expanding mind, but they aren’t much different from the dream catchers and kachina dolls people buy for their homes. The unenlightened think that just by having those items it means they are doing the actual work necessary to move from the still-point of spiritual inaction to the place where the soul runs free. Do you understand that, Dana?”
“I think so.”
“No. Do you understand it or not?”
She smiled and nodded. “Yes,” she said firmly. “I do.”
“And there we go. Baby steps become steadier, and then you’ll leap into the air and dance.”
Dana wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or not, but she chose to take it as one.
“As for this incense,” added Sunlight, “it’s not for sale, but I’ll give you some.”
Once the room was set the way Sunlight wanted it, they spent ten minutes together just breathing in the incense, sipping the herbal tea, and relaxing. After long minutes of agreeable quiet, he began speaking, guiding her deeper into the meditation.
“Your body is a vehicle for great power,” he said. “As you relax, as you breathe, you will feel your body change. The density that confines you into your physical shape will become less and less and less … until it no longer has the power to trap your spirit. And then, with a breath, you will rise up and out.”
She inhaled and exhaled, soft and long and easy, feeling the strange smoke soothe her and sand the edges off her anxiety.
“Nothing can hurt you here,” Sunlight told her. “You are safe. You are powerful. You are in your power and of your power. You are powerful in so many wonderful ways. Say it, Dana, decree it. You are powerful.”
“I am powerful,” she murmured.
“You are safe.”
“I am … safe.” There was the slightest stumble over that, but she repeated it. “I am safe.”
“You are safe,” echoed Sunlight. “You are like a caterpillar in a chrysalis. The form and nature that defined your life until now disguises the form that you will become.”
The room seemed to swirl with the incense smoke, tilting and turning in ways that she found relaxing rather than unsettling.
“Let your spirit rise and expand, Dana,” said Sunlight.
When she’d started coming to Beyond Beyond with Melissa, this sort of thing would have made her laugh, or at the very least feel incredibly self-conscious. But the visions and the deaths, and the horrors in Frank Hale’s sheriff’s department files, changed something in her. The new age stuff no longer felt like some kind of benign pretend magic. This wasn’t healing crystals, faerie pocket charms, or chant music. This felt real.
As Sunlight spoke, Dana could actually feel herself changing in some deep and fundamental way. It was as if her body was a box wrapped with chains and locks and metal bands, and with every moment those locks were clicking open, the chains breaking and falling away, the bands snapping. She took a deeper breath, and there was a snap, as if a tether holding her inside her body broke, and then Dana moved upward, drifting like a helium balloon. It was soft, without pain. Without hesitation, either. It felt right. It felt more right than anything else she had ever done.
She could feel her body as two separate things. There was the physical form sitting there, slightly slumped as if muscle and bone, blood and skin slumbered. It was her shell, her cocoon, but it was not who she was. Dana understood that now. Her true self emerged like a butterfly from that shell, rose above it as intangible as smoke but with definite form. She could still feel her arms and hands, legs and feet, heart and breath and everything, except it all felt light, ghostlike, charged with a strange energy that hummed like electricity.
“Open the eyes of your soul,” said Sunlight, and now his voice sounded like it came from the heavens above, deep and soft as thunder from a distant storm. Powerful but in no way threatening. “Open your third eye and allow it to see the truth about what is and what will be.”
As impossible as that seemed as a concept, Dana felt as if suddenly something did happen, that her mind and perception opened in a way she had never before experienced. The room became very bright, but not in a glaring way. No, this was like she could simply see everything with ten thousand times more clarity, and with great insight into what she saw. The closest candles were no longer merely wax and flame. They had each become so much more, because she could see their components and differences. There was a swirl of things making up the wax of each one. She could see and identify every element, every component, no matter how subtle. Beeswax and tallow from animal fat, chemicals from the Coccus pella insect, boiled fruit from a cinnamon tree, extracts of tree nuts. Blended together to exacting specifications. She suddenly knew that the candles were insoluble in water, had low reactivity, low toxicity, and changed from solid to liquid because of thermoplasticity. She knew this, but Dana was positive she had never been told that nor had she read about it. However, those facts, and so much more, were there in her head. As if they were obvious, as if she should know such things. She went a level deeper, and when she turned to look at a paraffin wax candle closer to where Sunlight sat, she abruptly knew that it contained the hydrocarbon signature, CnH2n+2.
When she inhaled the incense, she could actually see the sage and cedar plants from which that stick of incense got its form. She could see components of makko from the Persea thunbergii tree, and Xiangnan pi, made from the bark of the Phoebe nanmu tree, and jigit, a resin-based binder used in India. And more. Microscopic components, molecular structures, chemical signatures. All of it. The information flooded into her mind and was recorded there. She knew—absolutely knew—that she would retain that information forever. Somehow. Impossibly, but definitely.
“Accept the truths your mind’s eye perceives,” said Sunlight. “Absorb it and be it. The organic brain has limits, but the soul-mind is capable of infinite awareness and infinite retention. Be the infinite, Dana. Allow no limitations. In the world of spiritual source energy, there are no restrictions, no boundaries. We all want to eclipse the limited view of what the world thinks we are and reveal who we truly are. Understand that and be that truth, Dana. All truth is yours to own, to share. Swim in it, Dana.”
And so she swam.
Soon the room itself fell away, and Dana felt her spirit body rise through the ceiling and into the air above Beyond Beyond. Even though she could still feel her limbs, she somehow knew that this was only a lingering illusion, because her true self was a luminous ball that glowed with bright golden light. She looked into the sky and saw that it was crisscrossed by a network of crystalline rods, as if reality itself was but a dream within a lattice of silica and diamond. It was beautiful and she wanted to weep, but when a sob broke from her, it came out as a shout of pure and unfiltered joy.
She could hear Sunlight speaking, but she was no longer in the same room with him. Dana wasn’t even sure she was on the same planet. His words were soothing, guiding, but the language was now meaningless. Not actual words but more like a breeze that stirs a tide. She rode along on that tide, going farther up and out until Craiger was a patchwork of tiny houses and farmed fields. And then higher. Maryland blended into a landscape smear of green and brown and blue. Higher still until the earth, the whole world, spun below her, a smoky blue gem laid on a vast piece of black
velvet on which ten billion diamonds were scattered. Crystal dust was cast across the fabric, and Dana realized that it was the Milky Way.
There was no pain, no doubt, no fear, no worry, no anxiety, no trepidation, no concern, no trace of negativity.
There was nothing but peace.
Nothing but an ever-expanding awareness that brought with it the understanding that she—Dana Scully—was as important a part of the universal All as everything else. As important as the warming sun. As important as the dark matter that held the universe together. As important as love. As important as life.
She floated there, high above the earth, and became aware of something behind her. She turned, expecting it to be the moon.
And it was.
Not some dead, pitted chunk of debris caught in synchronous orbit with the earth. It was somehow alive.
Alive.
She flew toward it, laughing aloud despite the airless vacuum of space. The mountains of the moon, crenellated edges of vast impact craters, looked lovely as she flew across them. Sunlight’s voice was fading, fading as she flew beyond his control, beyond his reach, making this journey her own.
Far below she saw something gleaming like metal, and she realized that it was something left behind by one of the Apollo missions. She saw Surveyor 1 and 2. She saw the lunar rover from Apollo 15 and the Apollo 11 LM-5 Eagle descent stage. She saw the flag that had been planted by the first human beings to step onto the surface of another world. She looked for the footprints, but they had become obscured. There was debris, though. Proof that humans had been here. And that made her laugh, because she was a fifteen-year-old girl, and it had taken her moments to soar through space to reach this point. No rockets, no space suit. Nothing but her will and her mind.
And then something moved on the dusty surface of the moon.
Dana turned her awareness to see what it was.
There was something on the edge of a large crater, poised on the rim, touched by the sun and gleaming with silver fire.
It was triangular and huge. Hundreds of times bigger than any of the debris left behind by NASA. It did not sit cold and inert, as the other machines did. Instead there were lights blazing on each of the three points. Bright white, and these were the first lights she had seen that hurt her to look at. They were too bright, or … maybe bright in the wrong way. In a way that was not harmonious with her spirit-sight.
The lights seemed to throb, to pulse. A slow, heavy rhythm. Flaring and dimming, flaring and dimming, and flaring again. She understood that this was a machine, a ship of some kind, but the rhythm was like a slumbering heart. Then the throbbing changed, quickened, became more urgent.
All of a sudden Dana realized that this thing, this ship, had indeed been sleeping and now that she had flown so close to it, it had begun to awaken.
With a cry of alarm, she turned and ran, racing on solar winds back toward the earth. Back toward her body. She flew faster and faster while behind her the lights throbbed and flared and came closer to being awake.
“No!” cried Dana, because every instinct, every part of her expanded awareness, knew that this was wrong, that she had made a terrible mistake.
A dangerous and deadly mistake.
She flew downward, downward, needing to escape back into the mundane and ordinary world. She thought she heard Sunlight’s voice calling out to her, but she flew past it as she plunged into the atmosphere, down toward Maryland, toward the small town of Craiger, toward the center of town and the rooftop of Beyond Beyond. She smashed through it, actually feeling the tar of the roof, the wood and plaster, metal and brick, electrical wires, and everything of which the building was made.
Then she was in the room and her body was there. So was Sunlight’s. Both bodies looked empty, vulnerable. Dead.
But there was something very wrong here, too.
A figure stood between the two vacant bodies.
Tall, immensely powerful, his body rippling with muscles and crackling with living fire. He was beautiful, too. A face more perfect than any man or woman Dana had ever seen. A thousand times more beautiful than a statue from ancient Egypt or Greece or China. Haughty, imperious, sensual, amused. And yet there was something familiar about him. Almost as if that face was superimposed over another one. Dana tried to see through the beauty to the face beneath, and she caught a glimpse.
Just a glimpse.
And then it was gone. The angel stood there, dressed in rags of light, looking up at her. Through the open V of his white shirt, Dana could see a large tattoo inked directly over his heart. A disk of deep black surrounded by a corona of fire. The sign of the eclipse.
His sign, of that she was certain.
Behind his broad back a pair of magnificent wings unfolded and spread so wide the tips of each wing brushed the walls.
The wings were not set with white feathers.
They were huge and leathery and black.
The angel Lucifer looked up at her and said a single word. It was the most terrifying thing he could say.
He said, “Dana…”
CHAPTER 48
The Chrysalis Room
6:48 P.M.
Dana screamed herself awake.
She fell over, smashing her shoulder against the floor, hitting her head, biting her tongue, flooding herself with pain.
The carpet beneath her was cold and coarse.
But it was only carpet.
She could not see the fibers; it did not whisper its chemical formula to her. The molecules of which it was composed did not reveal themselves. It was a rug and she lay on it. Ordinary candles surrounded her, and the air was filled with smoke from incense of no particular magnificence.
She was back in the world. In the real world.
It was smaller, uglier, less magnificent.
Safer.
A groan drew her focus, and she turned to see Sunlight sitting with his face in his hands, shoulders slumped. He seemed to be as dazed as she was.
“What…?” she began, and failed to construct any question beyond that.
It made Sunlight look up. His face was drawn and haggard, and it took a moment for his eyes to focus on her.
“Dana?”
“What happened?”
He rubbed his eyes and sat up, but it looked painful. “That was … something.”
“Did you see what I saw?”
Sunlight nodded. “I think so.” He paused, considering. “On the moon? A ship?”
“Yes. But that wasn’t what I meant.” She climbed to her feet and stood, swaying. It was as if her body did not quite fit right, like she’d gotten dressed in her skin in the dark and had buttoned it up wrong. “I saw him.”
“Him?”
“I saw the angel,” she said.
Sunlight stiffened. “What?”
“Didn’t you see him? He was right here,” she said, pointing to the area between where they had been sitting.
He got to his feet as well and looked as wobbly as she was. “It was an angel?”
“Not just any angel,” she said. “I think I saw his true face. It was like he was wearing a mask.”
That made Sunlight gasp, and he stepped over and took her by the shoulders and stared hard into her eyes. “You saw him?” he demanded. “You really saw him?”
“I—I think so.”
“Tell me. Every detail,” he cried. “It’s important.”
Dana tried to remember every detail, but the more she was in her body, the further memory drifted from her. She could remember the mask best and she described that, and described the garments of light and the leathery wings. Sunlight released her and walked thoughtfully across the room. He stopped by a small table on which was a bowl of fruit and a knife. He picked up the knife, selected a ripe pear, and peeled it without comment. Then he cut it in half and brought it over to her.
“Here, eat this.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Psychic experiences take a toll on the physical body. Pears have water, vi
tamins C and K, copper, and fiber. It’ll help you settle back in.” He smiled. “It’s a very old trick.”
Dana took the fruit and ate it. The pear was delicious, and it erased a metallic taste in her mouth that she had only been mildly aware of. Sunlight also ate his piece.
“Do you know who Lucifer is?” he asked.
“He was the Morning Star,” she said, chewing. “He was an important angel who rebelled against God.”
He nodded. “He was the shining one, the light-bearer. It is a mistake to confuse Lucifer with Satan, Dana, for they are not the same being. Satan is the soul of evil, the infinite exemplar of corruption and sin. Lucifer is an angel, and an angel has perfect knowledge of God, of the universal All. A being with such an awareness could not, by definition, be evil. That is an impossibility, because perfect knowledge and perfect love are two sides of the same coin.”
“But in church they told us that Satan was Lucifer.”
“Of course they did,” said Sunlight, “because they don’t understand. Lucifer was the bringer of light—he was a liberator, a guardian of the enlightened and a guiding light that brings people to true understanding. The misinformed connection of Lucifer to Satan is mostly the work of poets and writers. Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, Joost van den Vondel’s Lucifer, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost collectively polluted the name of the angel whose gift is knowledge and understanding.”
She took a step back from him. “What are you saying? That it’s okay that this angel is killing people at my school?”
Sunlight looked genuinely surprised. “What? No, of course not. I’m sorry, Dana. I’m still a little rattled, too. What I meant is that if you truly saw Lucifer, then you were not seeing the creature responsible for these tragic murders.”
“Then…?”
“That’s why I want you to try to remember the face you saw behind the mask of the angel. I suspect that someone is projecting the image of Lucifer in order to both confuse you and disguise his true face.”
The X-Files Origins--Devil's Advocate Page 16