What Is Growing Inside Maria

by Heidi King

Revelations

  By Patrick McGreer

  The following has been written by the editor. It is his best speculation as to the events that transpired based on emails from Matt B. Hope, the crime scene, police reports, court transcripts and third person interviews.

  After reading Patrick’s email, Matt was out of his mind. He got into his car and drove straight back to The Lost and Found. When he got there, Gabriel and Nico told him that everyone had gone to Dr. Mike’s house in Boquete for dream analysis and rituals. Matt raced back to down the hill to the car. He tried to stay calm down and focus on controlling his breathing. Be cool, stay on the road. Right around the town of La Mina, a strange hunch began to solidify in his mind. He still had missing pieces of the puzzle to put together. He swerved off the road and took the sharp dip down to the town. He drove as far as the road would take him and then walked to the house where he first met Tuna.

  He knocked on the door, but no one responded. Finally, he just pushed the door open. A putrid smell suddenly rushed out at him, and he wretched. There she was, sitting in the same spot on her chair. There were old flowers and fresh flowers at her feet. But she was dead – she had been decomposing for some time. Whoever it was that was telling María about a Holy Grail cup, about finding salvation in the resurrection and saving some child, was not Tuna.

  He drove fast to Dr. Mike’s house. He had no plan but to confront him and expose him to the others. When he arrived, the front door was locked, so he decided to sneak around the back. The sliding pool door was open, and the house was silent. He wanted to find the incriminating vial of the essence of brugmansia before he confronted Dr. Mike. Carefully, he crept up the stairs to his bedroom. The door was slightly ajar.

  What he saw was like being smoked in the chest. He couldn’t breathe.

  Maria and Usnavy were laying face down and naked on two double beds. Their limbs were bound and stretched with nylon cord to the bed posts, spread out like as if they were being subjected to some kind of medieval torture. They both had large new tattoos on their backs of the Masonic compass and the square. They were blindfolded. As far as Matt knew, they didn’t know he was there.

  He stepped out of the room and found Dr. Mike in his study. He was leaning back in his armchair behind his desk, naked, his glasses resting on his fat hairy stomach.

  “Am I the only one that won’t fuck in front of you like some sort of horny circus monkey?” Matt shouted.

  Dr. Mike looked at Matt with a sated, lazy expression. “One day Mathew, you will erase the scars that inhibit you from seeing and realizing your dreams.”

  “You’re fucking them both aren’t you? You are playing them like cheap sex toys.”

  “Matt, these girls are acting of their own free will. Just as you were given the opportunity to quit, so are the girls, at any point they feel uncomfortable.”

  Matt leaned on Dr. Mike’s desk with both hands. “It started with Usnavy didn’t it?” Matt pushed. “Somehow a beautiful girl half your age finds a fat old man strangely attractive because she had a wet dream about him. Only you put the dream there.”

  Dr. Mike sighed and leaned back in his chair, adjusting his glasses back on the bridge of his nose. “Matt, you don’t truly understand the unconscious. You’re very clever but don’t have the vision to see the whole picture. This grand experiment is a new theology. A religion that you wouldn’t understand because you don’t listen to yourself. Your inner self.”

  “Fuck you,” Matt shouted. His face twisted crimson with rage. “You planted the dreams, didn’t you?”

  Dr. Mike sat up and raised his voice to meet Matt’s. “Be careful Matt. Your anger is the projection of your own shadow, hidden in your unconscious. A duality you can’t bridge. A part repressed in your dreams. You hide in you, your desire to succeed. But you’re too afraid to let yourself succeed.”

  “And what is success, Doctor? Money? Power? Your fucking cigars?”

  Dr. Mike settled back into his chair. “Go ahead Matt, let your anger out. It must be quite painful to lose your friends. Your best friend. Your girlfriend. Your job. Let your shadow roam. All repression is unhealthy. But remember that you envy what you hate. You’re too awash in right and wrong to follow your will. To follow your destiny.” Dr. Mike stood to face Matt. “But you still have an opportunity to be a part of it, Matt.”

  Matt walked around the desk to Dr. Mike. “A part of your lies and manipulation,” he snapped. “Follow your destiny?” he continued bitterly. “Follow your dreams? The dreams are yours, not theirs. Planted to get your way. To act out your sex fantasies. A sick joke. Whose fetish was rape, Dr. Mike? Was that yours? Turning rape dreams into ritual? Is that what you told them, that this was their destiny? This was their true will that they repress?”

  “Matt, there is a greater truth than that. Faith must come before truth.”

  “Faith in you? What did you use, Doctor? Hypnosis? Brugmansia? The lucid dream symbols triggered the dreams you planted. We never had a group dream. You hypnotized us. You told us the dreams we would have. One by one you hypnotized us and planted in our minds the dreams that you told us originated in our unconscious!”

  “But look at María now. She is healing. She is overcome her fears and is flying.”

  “A blind whore manipulated by a sick old man playing God,” Matt shouted into his face.

  “Playing God?” Dr. Mike raised his voice to stop Matt from interrupting. “No Matt, it is God. Faith is all God is. What good is truth? It’s as fleeting as a distant subjective memory. I mobilize faith like the mythmakers that wrote the Bible. But faith, Matt, I can use faith to heal. I heal -- God is just untrendy fiction.”

  “You sick twisted fuck,” Matt said as he pushed Dr. Mike toppling over his chair.

  “Why me!” Matt shouted. He held a tuft of Dr. Mike’s beard, pulling his head from side to side. “Why did you come after me? Was it Steve? Why me?”

  “No,” said a voice from behind us. “I wanted you here.”

  Matt spun around. María was standing at the door, her hands clasped behind her back. Matt froze -- his hand still holding Dr. Mike’s beard tightly.

  “You?” Matt asked. He was utterly confused. “You know what’s happening?”

  “Of course I know what’s happening here,” María said. She walked around the desk and stood behind Dr. Mike’s chair to face Matt. “Estrella, Usnavy and me, we all know what’s happening. I can’t believe you guys think we’re so naive. It’s the lot of you that is confused.”

  “María knows what the...” But Dr. Mike couldn’t finish his sentence. Matt watched in horror as María, with swift and decisive motion, hit Dr. Mike hard at the base of the skull with the clock that had been sitting on his desk. His body went limp in Matt’s hand. Matt let go of his beard and Dr. Mike slumped off his chair and onto the floor.

  “Help me move him to the couch,” Maria commanded. Unthinkingly, Matt bent down to grab Dr. Mike’s arms. But he didn’t finish the job. He heard a thud and felt a sharp pain at the back of his neck as the world around him darkened.

 

  Holy Blood

  By Patrick McGreer

  Matt’s head snapped back. He was naked, bound and gagged, shivering in a damp chill. His head throbbed and his broken nose stung. His arms were numb, tied to a long two by four nailed to a tree at The Lost and Found. His body slumped under its own weight.

  Through a blur of tears he saw María holding the smelling salts that had been used to revive him. She was dressed in only knee-high black leather boots – the rest of her naked body was covered in bright swirls of paint. Only a small circle of skin surrounding the tattooed sphere above her navel was unpainted. An Egyptian ankh, the symbol of Isis, was painted in black and white on her face. Her long dark hair was slick with sweat. She pressed her nose against Matt’s ear and released a high pitched, shrill, “Happy Easter!”
>
  On either side of him the shadows of twin crucifixes crept slowly along the ground -- growing longer with the dying sun. Tied to them were Dr. Mike and Steve, unconscious and also naked. Matt was surrounded by circles of sticks and logs, the innermost of which was still a certain distance from his feet. María picked up a gas canister and began sloshing it over the firewood. She lit a match and held it up to Matt’s face, her visage terrible and unforgiving. The black paint drying around her mouth was like the stitching on the mouth of a corpse. She dropped the match into the circle of sticks. It flickered for a moment and then surged, like a burst of wind into a ring of fire. She stood back and the ring of fire shot around and enclosed Matt in a circle of waist-high flames.

  “Tiferet,” María explained, pointing to the circle of fire. “The male part of God separated at the breaking of the vessels. And this is Shekinah,” she yelled. She dropped another match, igniting the second ring of fire. “The female part of God.”

  “But the word is lost!” she cried. “It is the hour when the temple lay in ruin. Destroyed by the Romans. The Roman Church. The sacred Shekinah defiled in blood. The Grail is lost! The word is lost! Therefore in the name of Baphomet,” she cried into the darkening sky, “I declare this chapter of the Knights Templar open!”

  Matt was pushing with his toes to release the pressure of the rope on his shoulders. A small trickle of mucus and blood ran from his nose.

  “Did you know that you are Baphomet?” she asked cheerfully. “Mat, Bernard, the middle initial B. And your last name, Hope -- an anagram like Mr. MoJo Risen. Scramble the letters and you have Baphomet, the Templar idol beneath the ruins of the Temple of Solomon. The idol that helped Jesus to remember his past lives, and that he was the bearer of the rituals of Isis.”

  María looked ready to erupt into violence. “But there are those who have darkened their own eyes,” she turned and yelled to Usnavy and Estrella. They were also naked and covered in body paint.

  “Christians have been fooled by lies so light seems like darkness. The Roman Church claims the grail is the physical cup of the Last Supper, not the secret ritual of rebirth. The Papacy of the Roman Church fears Jesus, and they grasp at a false mandate of authority, preaching that Jesus made Peter the first of the popes. But we are his rightful heirs. We uncovered the rites in our dreams.”

  She picked up a small wooden crucifix and threw it on the ground before Matt’s feet. Estrella stepped through the fire and smoke into the ring. She had a loose smile and staggered as though drunk. A moment later, Usnavy jumped through the flames. In turn they spat on the cross with convincing contempt. María leapt into the air and landed on the crucifix, splitting it in two with the heel of her boot. She spoke like she was spitting venom. Her temples were tight, and her jaw was sharp when she bit down on her words. “We are the Templars, through DeMolay. We preserve the secret of the Grail, though slaughtered by the Church. We discovered it in the ruined temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. Thus we must walk in a cloak of darkness and preserve our knowledge under a secret society. With the ritual lost we walk in a barren land with a wounded king. Only the Holy Grail will heal him.”

  María motioned to Estrella, and like a faithful apprentice, she presented a black felt marker. With it she drew the symbol of the Grail in the form of a cup on one of Matt’s hands and the symbol of a crown on the other.

  “These symbols of ours,” María said, “will guide you to the word. I am your Grail, Mat. Shekinah is there waiting. You’ll recognize her. She is the child of me. You were her father twice, once when we met, and once after the Rosicrucian Temple.”

  María’s face softened. The intense anger left her and she smiled warmly. She held her hand up to Matt’s face and tenderly wiped away his tears. “I had given up on getting pregnant, Matt. I gave up until I saw you in a dream. Dr. Mike led me to you. I gave up on getting pregnant until that night, the night I became pregnant with my twin. My twin Shekinah. My twin that died before I knew her in this world. She was growing again in me. I spoke to her in my dreams. She was going to be reborn. We conceived through the ritual in the Rosicrucian Temple in David. We miscarried, Mat.”

  Matt hadn’t known until that moment that he had gotten María pregnant. What could have changed had he known? He silently studied her face. She stared down at him in silence. A shudder and then black and white streaks -- the ankh she had painted on her face was now awash in tears. It was the first time Matt had seen her cry. A mad clown distraught with grief.

  She dropped to her knees and screamed into the sky. Her biting rage returned and her screams echoed through the trees. “You will understand when you see that what happened to us is no coincidence. You will forgive me. In the exile of death, Shekinah will lead you to the receptacle of the soul, my womb, the Holy Grail. You... you will be reborn through me. Resurrection! And as Isis, your mother, I will help you remember this life. Think of the power when you keep all that you have learned into your next life. You will gain the power of generations. Knowledge will grow tenfold in you upon the body of the Great Goddess. You are the first in the creation of a new order of beings in a new world order that will be able to remember past lives. Novus Ordo Seclorum.”

  “Novus Ordo Seclorum,” Estrella and Usnavy chanted. Estrella dutifully picked up a machete and handed it to María. María rested the blade on Matt’s shoulder and spoke above the heads of the captives around her, as though she were addressing masses from the center of an immense coliseum.

  “I hereby invoke upon this candidate the powers of death,” she yelled. “Endow him with such fortitude that at the hour of trial he falls not.”

  Then she leaned in close to Matt and whispered, “I’m going to put your penis in my mouth. It’s not hard now, but it will be. Your instinct will kick in. Don’t worry. We can heal that wound one more time.”

  She got down onto her knees and lapped at his penis with the tip of her tongue. She looked into Matt’s eyes as they stretched in horror. His penis became erect in spite of all of his efforts to control it. His face grew flushed with rage. He bit hard into the bandanna tied around his mouth. He wanted one kick. Just to feel the sensation of his foot slamming into her face.

  Suddenly Dr. Mike began twisting and writhing in a savage spasm of anger and fear, like a caterpillar caught on the edge of a toying child’s shoe. He managed to free his mouth to shout, “You fucking psychopathic whore! This is all a fucking lie, María, can’t you see? Matt was right. All of them lies.”

  “The Bible is a lie,” Maria retorted calmly. “But from great fiction comes great faith, and through great faith, truth. Only you, the male myth makers of the world, the Church, the Freemasons, fail to see truth through all the pollution you ejaculate into the world.”

  “Usnavy!” Dr. Mike pleaded. “Help me, please.”

  Usnavy walked up to Dr. Mike. “I know now,” she said. “I know how you moved us. You control. I know you make the sex dreams with you. I’m not a whore. I know more than you now -- the love I have is not controlled by you. Now I am the boss.”

  “You’re quoting fucking María, Usnavy,” Dr. Mike shouted back. “She told you to say that. Look at yourself, painted up like some child at a birthday party. She’s desperately trying to escape who she is, her past. Usnavy, María was my patient, a prostitute racked with guilt and depression, traumatized by -”

  Usnavy kneed him swiftly in the testicles, causing his rant to end in a gurgling shriek. “You’re no fucking different!” she screamed. “No different from other gringos. No different from my father! Run away and throw me like trash!” She burst into tears and collapsed on the ground. “I’m thinking I was happy,” she sobbed. “So happy. It was you... I saw it in my dreams.”

  María walked over to Estrella, who had lied down on the grass, staring at the sky with her eyes glassed over. She lifted her hand to her face to study her lucid dream symbol. María
squatted down at her side, resting a hand on her shoulder. “It will all be over soon. They will soon wake up. Why don’t you sleep? Everything will be fine.”

  Estrella lifted her arms and Maria held her. “I am asleep,” she said, “I love you so much. I want this over,” she cried. “I want you, I want us.”

  María untied the two by four pinning Matt to the tree. His knees buckled under his weight and he fell to the ground. Usnavy and Estrella stretched him out on the moist, dark soil.

  “I can conceive you,” María said, towering over him. “I wouldn’t do this if I thought you couldn’t return. Follow your symbol, and you will be reborn in me. Death is like the sleep we have learned to control in our dreams. Shekinah is your sprig of acacia. Your soul will acquire coats of skin, in my womb, the Holy Grail. I’ll be a good mother. I’ll teach you to remember. This is the secret of the Grail -- the secret of eternal life.”

  She stared down at him, a boot on either side of his stomach. Her face was a blur through tears and smoke. The black and white ankh was now a mess of drying caked paint, peeling away to show her skin. Her face, with her mouth a portrait of twisted evil and her eyes like pearls of confused compassion, was suddenly beautiful again,

  “Hiram was -- like you will be -- murdered. Sacrificed in the temple. Your ritual at the Blue Rock was your training for rebirth -- the ritual that Dr. Mike stole from the Freemasons.”

  María rested on top of him now, straddling him, leaning back to flex her abs. She ran circles with her index finger in the bright paint around her tattoo. Then she took his erection to make small circles around the opening of her vagina and lowered herself onto him, letting her well trained muscles do the work. He lay there, unable to speak.

  Leaning forward, she purred quietly into his ear. “I like to look into guys’ eyes when they cum. I can always tell by the strange contortions in their face and the slight flushing of the skin when they’re about to cum. You can see the pupils dilate. If a guy’s penis was severed just at the moment of orgasm, would cum still spurt from the hole where his cock was attached?” Then she stopped “You feel like you’re gonna cum don’t you?” she taunted. “This is the moment, Mat. Isn’t it strange to know that when you cum, you’re going to enter my womb and pass through this life? Still your cock is hard. Tough, no? ”

  She grinded her clitoris hard into his pelvic bone and reveled in the ultimate rush of sexual control. She squealed when she saw the fear in Matt’s eyes -- his fear of climaxing-- mesmerized by the complete power she held over him. She felt his hatred and desire. She was sliding in excitement, close to orgasm herself.

  She brought them both near a rushing climax. His hips rose up to meet hers. The pain and pleasure dissolved into a numbing need for rapture. María’s eyes rolled back -- she was lost in trance. Matt’s body suddenly went rigid... And it was done. Maria opened her eyes. She could feel his warm semen spill into her.

  María raised herself slightly, keeping about three quarters of Matt’s penis inside her. She took the blade of the machete and slowly dragged it across the shaft of his penis. Muffled screams came from beneath the bandanna. He struggled in vain to lift his head and pull loose his hands. Despite having honed the blade sharp enough to shave with, María had difficulty cutting the penis off in one go and had to slide it back and forth several times.

  Matt sank back into the caverns of his mind. His life was not nostalgically passing by. He wasn’t in a warm place.

  María’s nose was inches from his gaping, flowing wound. “No,” she said quietly to herself. “It doesn’t still come out.” But blood did, splattering her cheek and forehead. It ran down Matt’s thighs and onto the grass. Bright red lined the inside of Maria’s thighs. She rubbed some of the blood up her abdomen, mixing it with the bright body paint up to her navel and around her tattooed sphere.

  Matt remembered the pain he felt in his groin at the pilgrimage of the Black Christ and in his dreams. They were prophecies. He didn’t know at the time, but his unconscious knew. It told him about this moment – it warned him.

  María rolled off Matt and stood up. His penis stuck inside her for brief moment and then slid out like a large, dead worm – the broken obelisk -- and hit the ground silently.

  “The killer awoke before dawn,” she said with a deep penetrating voice. “He put his boots on. He took a face from the ancient gallery and walked on down the hall. He went into the room where his brother lived and he...”

  She stopped in front of Dr. Mike. The blood stained blade gleamed darkly and menacingly in the firelight. His frantic, darting eyes followed the shimmering streak as María drove the blade deep into his abdomen in one strong, brutal thrust. She swiftly pushed the blade up into his chest cavity and it became stuck. There was an audible crack as she snapped the blade from his chest. Dr. Mike’s eyes remained open. But they stopped darting and fixed on nothing now but darkness. María untied his arms and he fell over. His intestines spilled out onto the dirt and weeds.

  Estrella walked over to Steve and rested her hand on his chest. She fell to her knees, resting her head against his feet kissing them. She looked at the palm of her hand for her dream symbol. Nothing was there. She began crying.

  “He’s not dying,” Maria said softly to Estrella. “You know that don’t you? He’s afraid, but he’s never been more alive. Consciousness cleaves to form. He thinks he is leaving this, and he is afraid.”

  Matt wished he could speak to Steve; tell him that it was okay, and that he was his best friend and that they would get out of this.

  María stood directly between Matt and Steve’s motionless body. “The body was concealed in a grave marked with a sprig of acacia -- a shrubbery,” she yelled with a fake English accent. She spun around and took huge steps toward Matt. “Then he walked on down the hall,” she yelled. “And he came to a door and he looked inside. Father?” she glared. “Yes son? I want to kill you.”

  The white of Matt’s eyes glowed in the dying red sun. He breathed furiously through his nose. Maria swung the blade through the specters inhabiting the rising smoke. The fire had died. She suddenly stopped behind Matt. The blade rested against her long painted legs. She slowly lifted her chin.

  “Father... I want to... fuuuuuck you!” she screamed.

  She swung the blade in front of Matt’s face, cutting his chin and nicking his neck. She danced in a frenzy, a mad shaman in a frantic dance of death. She jumped into the air, digging her boots into the grass and earth when she landed. Abruptly she fell onto her knees before Matt and dropped the machete. She put her hands over her eyes, smiling to herself. She bit her bottom lip hard enough to draw blood. She swallowed. Her painted breasts heaved up and down.

  Small bursts of blood shot out of Matt’s neck. The blade had nicked his jugular. He bit down hard on the saliva soaked bandanna covering his mouth. The blood hit María’s face and she began laughing loudly. Then the blood poured out in a steady stream down the center of his collarbone and onto his chest.

  María held her hand over Matt’s spurting wound, stalling death as if she was holding her finger over a tear in a leaking life raft.

  She whispered to Matt. “You will be conceived in me. You will be your own father. Father and son. Just as Osiris was conceived in Isis. I’ll be the widow. Just like Jesus at the Last Supper with Mary Magdalene. You have great company. Mr. MoJo Risen. Kill the father, fuck the mother, and be born again in the Holy Goddess. Enjoy your Oedipus complex. After all, I’m gonna be your momma soon.”

  Matt’s eyelids began to flicker.

  “Once you asked if I ever cry,” she said. Her hand was still on Matt’s neck -- his blood was seeping through her fingers. “I cry through Shekinah. She cries for me. She is my double. I love her. My only friend dropped down the stairs.” Maria put her lips to Matt’s ear and whispered. “My dad used to fuck me. My real dad. Fucked me without a condom.
Fucked me hard and smiled with these ugly yellow teeth. Fucked me with nothing but an ugly gray fedora that smelled like cigars. Fucked me and told me that if I had the baby, my twin Shekinah would be reborn in me and Mom would be happy again.”

  Matt thought about what he had seen at Dr. Mike’s house. Whatever happened there had awoken the powerful and terrifying nightmares buried in her unconscious. Even now, Matt felt bad for her. He accepted death peacefully. But María, unable to confront life and unable to confront death, was striving for immortality. Reliving those nightmares tied to a bed was what allowed her to kill. She was killing to achieve immortality.

  She took her bloodied hand from his neck. A pulsating stream of blood resumed its flow. She lay on top of him. The blood from Matt’s neck covered Maria’s thrusting, sliding body. Her voice rose again.

  “My dad fucked me,” she screamed, “and I’d see the orgasm in his eyes. Fucked me and I’d see his pupils dilate. I’d know the exact second when it would all be over... And then we got on our hands and knees and prayed. Prayed to God that I would be pregnant and Shekinah would come back to us.”

  María stopped. She sat up, straddling Matt, covered in his blood.

  “You want to speak, don’t you?” she whispered. “You want last words. What would your last words be while your soul slowly leaves your body and enters mine?”

  Matt slowly lifted his head. María untied his gag. He coughed a few times, trying to suck in air. He stared deep into pools of black.

  “Baphomet doesn’t work,” Matt gurgled as blood spilled out.

  “What?”

  “Your anagram doesn’t work,” he tried to whisper. “Matt is spelled with two T’s.” His chest rose once more and then went still.

  María turned to Estrella and Usnavy. “I have drunk from the cup. We will find salvation and save Shekinah. And he’s here too. I can feel him. This way to the ancient gallery, Matt. We did good.”

  Return to The Lost and Found

  By Patrick McGreer

  According to the official recorded doctrine of the Church of Christ Templar, the secret Grail rituals were first recorded with the Osiris and Isis archetypes. The Isis cult then migrated and preserved their secrets at the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. The Romans feared the power of the cult and persecuted its members, a persecution the culminated with King Herod’s execution of the babies of Nazareth and the beheading of John the Baptist. Forced underground, the Egyptian priest, later known as Jesus the Christ, divulged the secret rituals at the Last Supper to his disciples and directed them to be passed down secretly through each generation.

  After Jesus’ death, the Romans once more recoiled in fear before the new faith, which spread like wildfire all the way to Rome. So they crucified its priests, destroyed the second temple, dispersed the twelve tribes of Israel and gained doctrinal control over Christianity. The true ritual of resurrection was again lost. Through the idol, Baphomet, the rites were rediscovered in catacombs beneath the ruined temple by the Knights Templar, who were in their turn eliminated by the Roman Church. The last grand master of the Templar, DeMolay, was burned at the stake in 1307. The Templar attempted to preserve their rituals in the secret society called the Freemasons, but the rituals were again lost in a misogynistic patriarchy. The modern history of Christ Templar, they claim, began in 2008 when Mat B. Hope, through divine intervention, recovered the lost Grail rituals.

  Estrella González and Usnavy Márquez became the key chroniclers of this recent history of the modern Templar and their savior, Mat B. Hope. She finished the Templar Gospels in 2008.

  Mathew B. Hope, Steven Banks and Dr. Mike Anderson are lost and remain on Interpol’s missing persons list. The whereabouts of María Concepción are unknown, but a series of clues in the form a treasure hunt game have been left behind that may lead to whereabouts of the missing persons. Their disappearances are regarded as highly suspicious. The church claims that they ascended into heaven. The file remains open to this day.

  María Concepción gave birth to fraternal twins, one male and one female. She named her son Mat and her daughter Shekinah. The church has officially applied to the Panamanian government as a nonprofit religious group and claims dozens of new members each month.

  This is Not The End !!!

  The plot only thickens and the story continues but we need you. Imagine hunting for clues down cobblestone streets, chasing down leads – in Panama! An app developed by the editor and authors puts you directly hot on the trail of Maria. Visit backpackingandhackingpanama.com and check out the apps video for a live action experience that takes this story to whole new level… if you thought this story was interesting, the experience will blow your mind.