Solstice
Of The Heart
A Novel
by
John J Blenkush
All Rights Reserved © 2011 by John J Blenkush
Copyright by John J Blenkush
Smashwords Edition
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John J Blenkush
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PO Box 531
Forest Ranch, CA 95942
Legend has it the ancient Lemurian city of Telos lies beneath the great northern Californian volcano of Mount Shasta. Lemurians live on, so the storytellers say. We’ve seen them, they say, tall, handsome, beautiful, gentle giants with blue eyes and flowing manes of blonde hair. Small people too, miniature, darting from here to there, so fast the eye can’t follow. Living in hollow earth, where light ends darkness, where walls are made of gold, the ceilings cast in jewel, the floors copper laid. Animals abound, the fish and the fowl too, living in harmony, nary a bone left to the rot. And here you will find the flower, foliage, and fruit, sweet nectar, all, next to none, snatched away only to reappear.
And what shall we say of the mountain dwellers? Those who reap the life-force energy of the mountain, who practice the ancient art of vampirism, transferring and manipulating life-force energy, for neither is it created or lost, only transferred from crucible to crucible. Should we say they are good? Should we say they are evil?
Surface dwellers bite their tongues, fearful their whispers of tittle-tattle will be heard, their destinies forever lay to waste by the masters of vampirism. Only the story-tellers, old men and women, a foot set in the grave, dare discharge the secrets they hold, for death is the enemy of misery, and a fond friend to them.
Learned men will tell you; the life-force energy knows no evil, knows no good. And so too, the vessel which holds the life-force, it must be chosen, with care and due diligence, for what good is it to cast a net only to catch a tailless fish, a wingless bird, a bull without heart, or one who casts aside The Law of One.
Herein lays the crux.
The storytellers say, foretelling is written in the Record of Ancient Matters. The Lemurians will a day ascend, lift their superlatives to the surface, and pledge them to wage war, not with blunt force, but with imprint. The chosen few will learn the ways of surface dwellers, liberate their hearts and minds, turn them from destruction to salvation.
One, they say, will lead the coming, going forth to choose a surface equal, to unite with her as one, as is inscribed by The Laws of One, to procreate a newborn, so all will come to see the infant as, he IS. For the time will come, when all things old must end, when the world will replicate the obliteration of Mu and, for those who survive, only one choice will remain; he IS.
To this end, a bride, pure in heart, unblemished in body, soul of perfect love, must be mated. And on the day of her bequest, the sun will stop, reverse, and start again. Solstice will pass. A new world will seek birth through rebirth. New will replace old. Scraping clean what is, so what must come will be, good triumphing over evil.
And so...the Solstice Saga begins, a story to be told, and handed down through the ages, so that all will know; a new world is yet to come, for it has been written in the Record of Ancient Matters.
To learn more about the Lemurians and the back story to the SOLSTICE SAGA go to www.jblenkush.com
I felt my heart stand still, as if in waiting to reverse direction.
Julissa Grant
CONTENTS
1 – BOY HUNTING
2 – DETENTION
3 – LEMURIANS
4 – CLOSE CALL
5 – FIRST CONTACT
6 – KNOWING
7 – GIRL TALK
8 – LIVE PIG
9 – SECOND GUESSING
10 – DREAMS
11 – SNOW AND CRYSTALS
12 – DEATH
13 – DEAL
14 – MINNESOTA BECKONING
15 – LAW OF ONE
16 – WINDOW TO THE SOUL
17 – HISTORY LESSON
1 BOY HUNTING
In the overall events of the world, skipping a class on history to lark around on such a grand autumn day wasn’t such a big deal. Or at least it shouldn’t have been. Turns out it would be a life changer for me.
My first week as a sophomore in a new high school and here I was ditching my last period class. Why do I need to know what happened four-hundred years ago? What sixteen year old girl is going to care who fought who in what war and for what reason? Was there ever a good enough reason to cause harm?
I didn’t think so.
Mr. Mattingly, my history teacher, said, “If you don’t like my class, the door swings both ways. Don’t let it hit you on the way out.”
I took him up on his offer.
I looked across at Cherrie who had her left leg tucked up under her on the driver’s seat of her grandfather’s Lincoln Continental. I suppose I could blame her for my infraction. After all, she’s two years older than me. She started school a year late—something about Attention Disorder—and managed to flunk a class in grade school. But I know she’s not dumb. In my book she’s the smartest student at Shasta High School (SHS), clever enough to find a shortcut around six hours of classes a day.
It’s a given, if you are a student at Jefferson High, SHS’s continuation school, you have issues. Cherrie’s issue was boredom. She made the choice to attend the alternative school. Decisions of that sort made her the adult of our pair in my eyes and a leader. It didn’t hurt she owned a driver’s license and, just as important, had access to a car.
As we drove out of Shasta City, California and entered I-5 heading south, I couldn’t help but feel like Louise of the notorious film Thelma and Louise. Only I hadn’t been nearly raped and Cherrie hadn’t killed anyone, or at least she hadn’t in the two short months I had come to know her.
Thinking back over the last several months, I expected the worse when Dierdra, my mother, informed me we were moving from White Bear Lake, Minnesota to a small town in northern California called Shasta City. I had been to Shasta once when I was five. I didn’t remember much about the town. I did remember Uncle Mickey and his overgrown mustache and the way he liked to grab me, lie down on the floor, and while hoisting me up in the air, recite the I’ll give you a pickle for a nickel rhyme.
I also had vivid memories of Uncle Mickey’s small log cabin, mostly because of the enormous amount of snow blanketing the house, the Christmas lights, and sledding down the snow caked driveway. For a while, those cherished memories were tarnished by the hate I felt for Uncle Mickey’s role in the death of my father, Simon Grant.
Uncle Mickey and my father perished in a white out—as the newspaper headlines described it—on Mount Hood. Their bodies were never found. It took me a few years to accept the fact father died doing something he loved to do and it wasn’t Uncle Mickey’s fault, even if he was the one who enticed his brother to go mountaineering.
I found peace with Dad’s passing.
Mom didn’t.
Uncle Mickey, in his will, left his log cabin to Simon. Naturally, Dierdra inherited it upon Simon’s death.
I suppose it was because of me it took three years before mother closed on the idea of relocating to California. I just didn’t exp
ect it to happen after I had already completed my freshman year at White Bear Lake High School and made new friends, not to mention being forced to give up my childhood friends.
I felt for Dierdra, so I didn’t complain much about the move. She’s a psychotherapist. She’s good at helping others with their anxieties, depression, and phobias, but it was becoming increasing apparent she wasn’t good at helping herself. I could feel her slipping away; the mood shifts, the staring out the window at nothing, weight loss, that sort of thing.
Moving to the town of Shasta City, which rests on the flank of the mountain, Mount Shasta, would bring her closer to father. Or at least that was what she said. It didn’t seem to matter to her Mount Shasta wasn’t where father had died and now laid entombed in ice. He and Uncle Mickey had summited Shasta a half dozen times, two of those from the north side. This is where Simon had chosen to set his spirit free. It is where, I imagined, Dierdra believed his spirit lived on.
And maybe I didn’t complain, because I knew I could use a change in scenery too. After having lost a friend and my father to death within a year’s time, I felt my life had forever lost its purpose. At one point I found myself asking the question: What’s the point of struggling on if sorrow scrapes away everything worth living for? As Cherrie’s life did for her, the cruelty of my life ate away at my soul and carved inroads into my will to live.
So why should I care?
I lost my passion. I grew apathetic. Joy eluded me. It was time for a change. Some would say a drastic change. So I didn’t complain, not too loudly anyway, when Dierdra approached me and asked if I wouldn’t mind moving to California.
I met Cherrie, who lives across the street from Uncle Mickey’s cabin with her grandfather, Garl, the same day we moved in. She wore blue jeans and a flannel shirt. With her short cropped hair and the ever present unlit cigarette hanging from her mouth, I—at first and from a distance—mistook her for a boy. Within days we were inseparable. She seemed to need a friend. More so, I understood, she needed someone to follow her on her adventures. I needed a lifeline and a bridge to my new life, so I unwittingly became her accomplice. Or at least that’s what I like to tell myself. Fact was I knew exactly what I was doing.
Skipping a class from school would come at a price, but at the moment I didn’t care, as long as my punishment didn’t mean the loss of life or limb.
As far as I knew, Cherrie and I, unlike Thelma and Louise, weren’t planning on driving over a cliff. I gave Cherrie the once over in attempt to gauge her mood. She did say we were going rock climbing in the Castle Crag State Forest. She wasn’t planning on jumping off a cliff, I could only hope. With Cherrie, you never knew.
I heard Cherrie once punched a guy who outweighed her by two-hundred pounds in the gut for insisting the pronunciation of her name was Cherry (emphasis on the Ch) and not Cherrie. She could be unpredictable and, of course, temperamental.
“What’re you thinking?” Cherrie asked, as her lips held dearly to the unlit cigarette.
“Why are we going rock climbing? You know us Minnesotans have flat feet.”
“Julis” (my name is Julissa Grant but I’m not about to punch Cherrie in the gut for not pronouncing it correct) “take a look out there.” Cherrie pointed, her finger stretching in a south west direction. “What do you see?”
I looked beyond the road and the pine studded forest.
Castle Crags State Park is well known throughout Northern California for its towering crags and spires and convex slabs of granite, one of which makes up Castle Dome.
“Rock,” I said.
“And lots of it.”
“And we have to climb it, why?”
Cherrie smiled. I thought I knew what she was going to say. I rushed to beat her to the answer.
“Because it’s there? Right?”
“Course not, dweeb. Not taking you to climb rock.”
“Then what?”
“Because that’s where the boys are.”
“You’re kidding me! I just left a school full of boys, over two-hundred of them by my count.”
“None like these.”
“And these are?”
“Spidermen.”
“Cough. Sputter. For real? I’m risking detention at school and grounding at home to see Toby Maguire in tights?”
“You haven’t seen these hunks climb the wall. Pretty impressive stuff. Muscle against mass. Sweat against stone.”
“Only walls we have in Minnesota are mounds of snow. No one climbs them but little kids.”
“Reason enough to take you along. To broaden your horizons.”
Cherrie was right. My horizons could use some broadening, and I don’t mean through schooling. Sure, I agree. To make it in this world an education helps. But so do life skills—in the real world. If broadening my horizons meant climbing rock in the Castle Crags’ State Park, while taking in some of the sweat soaked, half-clad male sights, who was I to argue with her?
“I’m in.”
Cherrie gave a look up and down the freeway. “Like you have a choice.”
I chalked up a point for her. Once I had walked off campus, I was committed.
If the vehicles—or the lack of them—in the parking lot at the trailhead gave any indication, we were in for disappointment. By my count there were exactly two; a Ford Ranger and a BMW, of all things.
Cherrie shrugged off my look of displeasure. “Most climbers,” she said, “hitchhike their way down I-5 using the train of semis as their transport. Truckers and climbers are born with kinship blood.”
“How’s that?”
I really didn’t expect an answer and I didn’t get one from Cherrie. Best reason I could up with, as we stepped onto the rocky trail head, a symbiotic relationship (my biology teacher would be proud) existed between the two breeds; the climbers required a ride, the truck drivers a welcomed break from the monotony of the road. I imagined rock climbers could weave some harrowing tales from their experiences. And the truck drivers had listening ears or, at least the look they gave you as you talked gave you the impression they heard you. I knew this last part because my father had been a truck driver.
It wasn’t long before we stepped onto the plateau beneath the rock spires of Castle Crags. The Crags are made of mammoth towers of rock rising six-thousand feet.
Cherrie sat down. I followed suit.
“See there,” Cherrie said.
My gaze followed her finger. Before us, but some distance, stood a sheer rock wall. I didn’t realize just how large it was until Cherrie had me focus on the climbers crawling on its face.
“Good,” I told her. “This is what you brought me here for? To watch ants climb rock? Not quite what I had hoped for.”
“Keep your pants on. Wait until they come down. Then you’ll see.”
“When? Tomorrow morning? Tomorrow’s Saturday. I hope to be in bed. Sleeping.”
“There will be more coming up the trail,” Cherrie said, as she took an imaginary drag on her cigarette. She looked down the trail we had just hiked up. “Just you wait. They pass right on by here.”
I played along. “And then what? Make conversation? Hope they will stop and take notice?”
“No.” Cherrie lay back. She rested her head on a rock. She looked to the darkening sky. “Not much daylight left. They’ll be in a hurry to climb, so there’s no stopping them, but it’s the ice breaker. You see them. They see you. Maybe say hi. Next time, who knows? They see you down town, remember you, and ask you your name. Next thing you know he’s climbing all over you instead of rock.”
I lay alongside Cherrie. “Got to tell you, Cherrie, I think there are easier ways to grab a boy’s attention.”
“Not these hunks. Fish in the shallows, shallow fish you catch.”
“What? Folk wisdom?”
“No. Grandpa wisdom. He says it every time he sees someone standing on the shore fishing. Says it pertains to people as well. Want to know someone with depth you’ve got to troll deep.”
“Well, they look like they have depth,” I said.
“Who?”
I pointed down the trail.
“The Delmons.”
“Delmons?”
Not that I really felt I needed to know. But it made good conversation and, besides, the way Cherrie had said their name she might as well have said, The Devils. Naturally, my curiosity was aroused.
“You don’t want to know.”
“Why not?”
“They’re not your kind. They’re nobody’s kind, actually.”
“What makes them so special?”
“For one, they’re from the other side of the tracks.”
“Literally?”
“Literally.”
“Aren’t we being prissy today.”
“You got it wrong. They live on the upper side of the tracks, the mountain side. We live below, valley side.”
I studied the threesome as they walked single file, hiking their way up the trail. The boy in the lead held his head high, his eyes fixed on Castle Dome. The two following seemed intent at looking at the heels of the hiker in front. All three of them wore city clothes and slacks. Two wore white collared shirts, the other a blue collared shirt. All of them wore shoes one might wear to church, not for hiking. Out on the street, one might mistake them for church-goers on a mission, except these guys didn’t carry any books. And they wore their hair long, shoulder length.
A stiff breeze blew. I turned my face into it to sweep the hair out of my eyes and to grab Cherrie’s attention. “You mean they look down on us?”
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