The Ghost Reapers

by Jackie Ferris

  They hurried into the adjacent sitting room, then took their places in front of the TV, which was blazing with denials.

  “Did you sleep okay?”

  She rubbed her eyes. “Like a baby; I was exhausted.”

  “Me too.” He adjusted his seat. The leather was comfortable but his back was still painful.

  “Do you really think Abdul will reveal everything?”

  “He will tell the truth about the Nommo organisation, Hawwa, and what he knows about the Reformers. He wants revenge for his son. This is payback day. It also ensures that he stays alive.” There was a pause in the conversation as room service entered with a trolley laden with fruit and enough different breads and pastries to grace a Parisian patisserie.

  Jazz waited until the waiters had left. “The new cloth suggests it’s linked to the Turin Shroud.” She shook her head. “I still don’t get the tie-up. This thing about echoes and ghosts makes no sense to me. I get the dimensional warp, but not Nommo and Kasha. I thought they were made up to help people understand what had happened.”

  “We weren’t far off the truth; they are a human manifestation of something we cannot understand. I spoke to Idris; he filled in a few gaps.”

  Jazz pulled a face. “Couldn’t you have waited for me?”

  “Sorry; I did not want you to be disappointed.”

  Jazz smiled, oddly pleased. “What did he say?”

  “None of the public data relating to the Turin Shroud made sense to him. Pathologists concluded the image was consistent with a man who was crucified, yet no one knew how Romans crucified people in the fourteenth century, when the Shroud first came to light. There is also the clarity issue. The image is much clearer in the black and white negative. I don’t have to tell you that the photographic image was not invented then.

  After digging in the Vatican records, Idris discovered that the Knights Templar had uncovered the Turin Shroud in Jerusalem. They also turned up other artefacts, which the Essenes had hidden at the fall of the Second Temple. Their findings resulted in the Knights paying reverence to Nefertiti, under the guise of the Egyptian goddess Isis, the Black Madonna. What has come down to us is a black African story reinterpreted by white people. It began with the Egyptians inventing stories about the Pyramid and the Sphinx. It was exacerbated by the Moses story, and ended with Christ. Or perhaps I should say the Roman Emperor Constantine.

  Christ was resurrected in spirit, not body, a concept the ancients were very familiar with because of Homer’s epics. But this was lost in Constantine’s translation. He rewrote the Christian faith three hundred years after Christ’s death. In reality Christ’s body was wrapped in the Shroud and hidden by the Essenes for centuries. When the Holy Wars began, there were only a few skeletal bones left. The Essenes tried to protect them, but they were holy men and no match for the Templar, who seized the Shroud. The image on it transfixed them. It wasn’t painted on to the cloth, which is one reason why the Church never allowed it to be displayed when they got hold of it.

  When Idris was initiated into Nommo, he joined up a lot of the missing pieces of the puzzle. I added my bit, with my idea about the dimensional warp and its echoes. The image on the Turin Shroud has to be a dimensional echo.

  The images on the shrouds are a physical reminder of Nommo’s goodness, rippling through time. The shrouds are a physical manifestation of the dimensional warp.

  The Church didn’t want the Turin Shroud to be recognised because the blood stains on the cloth show Jesus as a man, not a god. It proves his death, not his resurrection. They had no idea that, in the future, photography would prove it was a dimensional warp. The Essenes who protected his body knew it was a dimensional echo, because they knew about the Great Pyramid. They never revealed the truth, because persecution by the Egyptians had scared them. They protected Christ’s body just as they had Nefertiti’s, because they knew he was special.

  The bodily resurrection gathered momentum with the Roman Emperor Constantine. Until then, it had been hotly disputed and not generally believed. Constantine destroyed every gospel that espoused the spiritual resurrection, because they conflicted with his version. He had no idea that the Essenes still had the body and the Shroud it was wrapped in.

  Ironically, until now, the only evidence of the truth was the Shroud and the Nag Hammadi scrolls. The twelve leather-bound papyri discovered in 1945 in Egypt support the view of the spiritual resurrection.”

  “The rest is lies, woven through history,” Jazz sank back into her chair and sighed.

  “Lies which we are about to confront. There are still so many questions. Even with the evidence, we will stir up incalculable hatred. People will blame us for trying to change their beliefs. They will struggle to come to terms with the dimensional warp. They will want answers. There are so many we don’t have. The Great Pyramid is a blueprint or key to something we don’t understand.”

  She looked into his cornflower blue eyes. “I couldn’t face this on my own. There were a few points in the last few days when I doubted you, but I doubted myself more. I couldn’t do this without you. We’re in this together – aren’t we?”

  Her afterthought rippled between them as he coughed hesitantly. Suddenly, she reminded him of that frightened fawn again. He resisted the urge to put his arms around her and protect her. “There is one more lie.”

  “What else can there be? We’ve bulldozed our way through history.”

  “It’s something more personal.”

  “Like?”

  “I’m not sure how to tell you this, Jazz.”

  “Go on.” Her heart sank. She was expecting him to say he was going back to New York.

  “Marc was not your father.”

  She did a double take. “What are you talking about?”

  “Dad isn’t your father, at least not in blood.”

  “Dad’s in jail,

  Jazz will fail.” The old taunt whistled through her brain like a freight train. She stood up. “This is ridiculous. If you knew he wasn’t my father why involve me?”

  “He was your father in everything but blood. You don’t share his genes, that is the only difference. When we were in London at the Tower, he took a DNA sample. It turns out you are no relation, even though he always thought of you as his child. He believed in you. The blood thing made no difference to him. Akhoum told me love is thicker than blood; he was right.”

  “We are not brother and sister?”

  He shook his head. “It kind of comes as a relief.”

  “Wait, look at that.” Jazz pointed to the screen

  The news was streaming a news bulletin: “Egyptologists have declared that they want to open the wall behind Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus. It is believed that Nefertiti’s mummy is there. If it is, it means that she never left Egypt.

  “The Shroud of Nommo is an elaborate hoax by Isis designed to destabilise the West…”

  Jazz looked at Francisco. “What happens now?”

  Footnotes

  Fact Finder for The Ghost Reapers

  Having written The Ghost Reapers, it occurred to me how difficult it is to separate fact from fiction.

  For those of you who are interested, I have compiled a list of facts I believe to be true.

  Nefertiti An Egyptian queen, born circa 1,370 BC. She lived until around 1,330 BC. She was married to the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten; they became the most infamous couple to rule Egypt, changing it from a polytheist society to a monotheist one. Once the most famous woman in the world, she mysteriously disappeared from public view. Her mummy has never been found, although many now suspect it is in a hidden chamber in Tutankhamun’s tomb.

  Muna A soft plaster used to cover walls in Egyptian tombs. It is made from quartz, clay, limestone and crushed straw.

  Aegyptos The name given by Greeks to Egypt. It is a contraction of the Greek words Hi Gu Ptos. The place where the creator gods manifested .The ancients referred to the land as KMT: “black land”.

  Demotic Script Derived from the
ancient Greek demotikos, meaning “popular”, it was first used by Herodotus the Greek historian to describe the script used for Egyptian documents around 650 BC.

  Tutankhamun (Tutankhamon) was an Egyptian pharaoh, 1,332-1,323 BC (eighteenth Dynasty). His tomb was broken into and resealed, not once but probably twice.

  Six chariots were placed in the tomb, which was surprising given Tut’s disabilities. The antechamber was ransacked: people were looking for something specific.

  His funeral mask carries different qualities of gold, and part of it seems to have been made for a woman, not a man.

  There are many references in the tomb to Nefertiti.

  New research has also indicated that there are other tombs and rooms hidden within the burial site, still to be explored.

  Carter and Carnarvon Carter’s canary was found dead in the mouth of a cobra shortly after the tomb was opened. The cobra was the symbol of the Egyptian monarchy.

  Carnarvon died from blood poisoning, after accidentally slashing a mosquito bite while shaving. When Tut’s first autopsy was carried out he had a lesion on his left cheek.

  Carnarvon’s dog, Susie, died four hours after her master on his English estate.

  The Daily Express reported that the lights went out in Cairo Hospital at the moment Carnarvon died.

  Solomon’s ring was attributed to Solomon in medieval Jewish tradition, with the power to command demons. This came from Arabic writers writing in the Middle Ages.

  The Star of David later became a symbol of Judaism in the fourteenth century, following these depictions of the Seal of Solomon. It was adopted for the flag of Israel in 1948.

  The Bible lists Solomon as having lived circa 970 – 931 BC. He may have built a temple now known as the First Temple, but turned away from Yahweh, worshipping pagan gods.

  Hieroglyphics The first known hieroglyphics date from the middle part of the fourth millennium BC. They relate to taxes and economics. The word hieroglyphics is a Greek translation from Egyptian. The Egyptian term was medu netjer, meaning “divine words”.

  St Peter There is no evidence that Peter ever visited Rome. A tomb has recently been discovered in Jerusalem; the name Simon Bar Jona is inscribed above it. Many experts believe this to be Peter’s tomb.

  The Rosetta Stone and other findings from Napoleon”s troop of one hundred and fifty scientists, along with the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, Marx’s Das Kapital and Twain’s Innocents Abroad, caused quite a stir in the nineteenth century.

  Ethiopia was deemed to be a civilised country by the Ancient Egyptians. Perhaps it was the land where the gods came from?

  Atun was a very important god in the Old Kingdom. The Ancient Egyptians believed in the “primeval soup” version of creation.

  The Palermo Stone lists kings before and after Menes. The list shows kings going back thousands of years before Menes. Scholars are divided on how to interpret this, as they insist that Egypt began with Menes in 3,100.

  Dogon The Dogon people are a group of people living in Mali in west Africa. They believe in Nummo or Nommo, water spirits associated with Sirius. The Babylonians, Sumerians and Philistines also believed in fish-like men who were divine.

  Comet: it is now believed that around twelve thousand, nine hundred years ago, a comet hit the earth, causing massive cooling and climate change.

  Manetho A Greek writer who, in 300 BC, compiled the list of Egyptian kings we accept today.

  Groves A British pilot who took the first photograph showing the eight-sided curvature of the Great Pyramid.

  Akkadian is an extinct language spoken and written in Mesopotamia. It is thought to have begun around the mid-third millennium BC.

  Giza was once a verdant plateau. It is reasonable to suppose that at one time the area was subject to heavy rains, as well as the Nile flooding and geological evidence supports this.

  Israelites The statues of pagan gods found in Israeli camps in the twelfth century BC confirm that many relate to Baal, who looked like Akhenaten.

  Pharaoh Merneptah His stele, dated to 1,209 BC, claims to lay Israelis to waste.

  Knights Templar On Friday 13th, 1307, King Philip IV of France, together with Pope Clement V, ordered all the Templars to be rounded up and killed or thrown in prison.

  The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was first published in 1776. Napoleon entered Egypt in 1798.

  The Gospels were written at any time after 70 AD, by unknown Greek scribes.

  Homer Greek poet born between the twelfth and eighth centuries BC. He wrote poems about the spirits of gods entering people.

  The Mark of Cain was first used in Genesis, describing darkness and bad things. Black then became synonymous with bad. The Church of Latter Day Saints used it to stop Africans becoming priests two hundred years ago.

  Al Manun broke into the Great Pyramid in 820 AD to crack the limestone. The workers had to use fire and vinegar to create a shock to break the limestone.

  Arab texts support the idea that the Great Pyramid was built before the Great Deluge. One text claims it was built in the Falling Vulture of Cancer, which ran from approximately 8,810 – 6,650 BC. Arab historians also talk of a period when the earth turned on its axis. On an inventory stele near the pyramids erected around 1,500 BC – a copy of a much older one – Khefu claims to have done repair work on the Great Pyramid. His name on the pyramid is believed to be vandalism, or the work of the forger Howard Vyse. The funerary complex near the Great Pyramid bears inscriptions relating to Khufu.

  The Great Pyramid is built of 2,300,000 limestone and granite blocks weighing between twenty-five and fifty tons. The saws in the Cairo museum are too soft to cut the limestone and granite. Even today the best steel saws only have a hardness of 5.5.

  The “ramp theory” purported to explain how the Pyramid was built, lacks any archaeological evidence. It would have been enormous and taken three hundred thousand labourers eight years to dismantle.

  The stones were placed together so tightly that even a razor blade could not pass between them.

  In the fifth century BC, Herodotus reported inscriptions of strange characters on the outer casing. In 1179 the Arab historian, Abd el Latif, reports inscriptions so numerous that they could fill 10,000 written pages. In 1356, after an earthquake that levelled Cairo, many stones were displaced; the others were used to build mosques and fortresses.

  Silt sediment rising fourteen feet around the base of the Great Pyramid contain seashells and fossils which have been radio carbon dated to twelve thousand years ago.

  The sides of the Great Pyramid are lined up almost exactly with the cardinal point of the compass.

  Measurements show the precise spherical shape and size of the earth.

  The pyramid incorporates latitude and longitude lines that intersect at the Great Pyramid and locate it at the centre of the earth’s land mass.

  Measurements show that its constructors knew the proportions of pi and the Golden Mean thousands of years before Pythagorean triangles.

  The Pyramid is built on a mound of granite to support its weight.

  Constantine In 325 the Roman Emperor Constantine presided over the Council of Nicaea which declared Jesus to be the same substance as God. This had been disputed until then. The contention was that he had risen in body as well as in spirit. Constantine unified the various offshoots of Christianity, including the Arian, which believed that Jesus was inferior to God. Constantine changed the headquarters of Christianity, from Jerusalem to Rome. He also changed the location of the tomb, which was outside the city walls, to inside the walls. He proclaimed the birth date – then unknown – to be 25th December, to coincide with the winter celebrations of the god Soñ Invictus – the God Constantine continued to worship privately.

  Dark Matter makes up around twenty-seven per cent of the universe; sixty-eight per cent is dark energy.

  M-theory is a theory in physics unifying all consistent superstring theories. It was first conjectured by Edward Witte
n in 1995.

  Turin Shroud The image was first observed in great detail in 1898 by Secondo Pia, on the reverse photographic plate. The image is consistent with crucifixion methods at around the time of Christ’s death.

  The blood type is AB. The blood flows are consistent with those of a crucified man.

  The Queen’s Chamber So named by the Arabs because of its shape. The King’s Chamber was named for the same reason.

  The Copper Scroll is different to the other scrolls found in the caves purporting to be Hebrew. Its composition suggests that it is of Egyptian origin and probably a copy.

  The Jewish Bible The oldest manuscripts discovered date back to the second century BC.

  The Jerusalem Talmud was compiled in the fourth century CE, in Galilee.