Progeny

by Shawn Hopkins

  Over the past few days, Pastor Brian and some of the other men from the church had contacted Bermudian officials, talked to airport personnel in Bermuda, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, the police, FBI, customs, the American embassy, and Interpol. But no one had any answers, just offhanded promises that they’d look into it. But then yesterday, a police officer from Bermuda actually called and informed her that he’d met John about a week ago. He related to her their conversation, about his interest in Christopher Carter (of whom he had to give a brief history), and also what he’d discovered about Henry’s boat. And, because John and the other Americans were now missing along with the boat, he was hoping she might have some information that could assist him in finding them. But all Kristen could offer was a few insignificant details concerning Henry’s background and SEAL Team One. However, in the course of her talking, the police officer seemed rather surprised when she said that Henry had initially gone to Bermuda to talk with some local author, and that John and the other Americans planned on meeting him, too. He asked her if she knew the name of the author, if it happened to be Ronald Carter. She told him she had no idea, and he suddenly wanted to get off the phone. He promised he would call with anything new and asked her to call him if she remembered anything else or if John happened to call her — which, of course, he told her was his hope.

  Kristen escaped the clutches of the bed and walked to the bathroom, understanding that, with the growing difficulty of getting out of bed, she was waking up later and later each day. It was already early afternoon. She turned on the faucet and stared at the mirror. Still barely visible were the faint remains of yet another message that had mysteriously appeared across it. But she didn’t bother telling Brian about this one, didn’t even care what it said. She knew Brian had some idea of what was going on but that he was trying to protect her by keeping it to himself. He told her about the “silly woman” passage and its connection with angels — which she was able to relate to the VHS tape herself — but he didn’t seem willing to expound any further. She didn’t see what good it would do to keep calling whenever a new message appeared. Besides, if the Devil wanted to scare her, he could do it in English. She was too emotionally drained to be scared, and any reaction to such things now came filtered through a bored sense of contempt.

  While she was drying her hands, she heard the mailman pull away from the curb outside. Grabbing a robe, and not caring in the least about her appearance, she pulled it on and tied it at the waist while already on her way to the mailbox.

  Among some white envelopes there were two packages wedged tightly into the confines of the old, rusted box. Curiosity flared as she took them into the house. Setting them on the table, she went to work tearing them open.

  She froze.

  It was postmarked from Bermuda. And the handwriting…

  They were from John.

  She tore the first one open in a frenzy, extracting its contents. And stood confused.

  A book.

  No note, no postcard, no explanation whatsoever. Just a book.

  The Bermuda Triangle and the Doorway to Hell.

  Without taking the time to contemplate the title and whether it could be relevant at all to John’s whereabouts, she ripped open the other one. But she was rewarded with only the same sense of confusion… of false hope. It was another book, this one titled, Lost Bloodlines: The Gods Among Us. She set both books down on the table and sat. Resting her head in her hands, she began to sob.

  Finally, she lifted her puffy eyes and stared at the books, finally noticing the author’s name on their spines. Ronald Douglas Carter — the man the police officer had asked about. It was the same author Henry had gone to see. She flipped the book over in her hands.

  She shot to her feet.

  Gasping, she knocked over the chair and dropped the book. Her heart was beating ferociously, trying to escape her chest. She couldn’t catch her breath, her hands shaking violently at her sides. “Oh, Jesus…” she whispered.

  The back of the book was comprised entirely of the author’s picture. And the man staring up at her was someone that she knew, though not as Ronald Douglas Carter.

  But as Doctor Grigori.

  And, though she hadn’t realized it at the time, she now knew why the doctor seemed so familiar to her. There were subtle differences, such as hair style and the presence of a tan, but she had no doubt that this man, whatever his name really was, was in fact the same man she had seen on the VHS tape — the one that had made her feel so peculiarly violated. Only the tape was old, at least from the early 80s, and the Lost Bloodlines book, as she forced herself to touch it again, was copyrighted 1976. How then was it possible that this man looked exactly the same in all three instances?

  She placed a hand on her stomach, over the spot his touch had landed, and was overcome by a sudden, immense fear sweeping through her.

  She ran for the phone.

  EIGHTEEN

  Midday. 29th day of May. Bermuda, Northeast end

  Despite a week having passed, acclimation had still not set into place yet. They all assumed there had to be some level of transition experienced, if even to some miniscule degree, but so far things just seemed to be getting stranger. In fact, with every new day that passed, John, Hunter, Paul, and Chadwick only grew more certain that they were dreaming. At least until Henry, who had improved greatly from his wounds, would lecture on the likelihood of everyone having the same dream at the same time. He kept reassuring them that adjustment would indeed run its course, and that soon mystery would be drowned by normalcy — as bizarre as that normalcy might be. But they weren’t so sure.

  Jackson was another matter. Whereas he had once taken every opportunity to communicate some factually-based diatribe about whatever was crossing his mind, he had recently grown silent, communicating in short sentences and only whenever it was absolutely necessary to speak at all. He was growing further and further away from the group, and Henry’s advice not to trust him was now being instinctively adhered to by everyone.

  The deaths of Nick and Chris proved to be somewhat blunted in the face of a world full of megalithic architecture, giants, flying scorpion-men, and a ruler that the “natives” called, Osiris. Though they were certainly sad, the impact of its finality, of its true appreciation, was kept at a distance. Whether it was a psychological mechanism enacted to avoid the reality, or whether they were simply too distracted to dwell on it, no one bothered to figure out. Only when a night afforded some time to relax, did John notice tears sparkling in the eyes of his brother and Hunter, even Paul. But never Jackson.

  Chadwick, on the other hand (and rather surprisingly), was probably adapting the quickest. After being so close to a breakdown, he had rebounded swiftly, regaining his composure and entering into an ongoing discussion with Henry about their shared heritage and what the peculiar ramifications of such a lineage might entail.

  The “pureblooded” people, as they referred to themselves — like Noah’s family in the biblical Flood account — were grieving the loss of Stephen, who killed himself the day after the “mission” had claimed his daughter’s life. As the story went, after giving birth to their daughter, his wife was taken by the giants and seduced by Osiris. She subsequently gave birth to four giants that ended up slaughtering a dozen of the pureblooded. Stephen, on a mission similar to the one that killed his daughter, had executed her before she could bear more. His daughter then became the only thing capable of holding back the tsunamis of shame and despair that threatened to sweep him away every day since. Once she was removed, and not just removed but also reincarnated as another world of guilt leaning against his soul, the tidal waves finally came down unimpeded.

  It was related to the new arrivals that on such missions the relative was given the chance to perform the act if they so desired, but that there was always backup in case they couldn’t follow through with it when the time came.

  Stephen couldn’t.

  But even in light of the sorrow that accompanied the
recent deaths, a sparkle of hope continued to shine in the eyes of their hosts. They still believed that John and company had been sent by God to stop Osiris from putting to use what he’d spent four hundred years constructing — something they believed was going to be “activated” in just three weeks’ time on the summer solstice.

  When John asked Chadwick why the summer solstice was so important, he’d simply responded by stating that there were four high points in the year on which ancient and sacred ceremonies were conducted all over the world: the solstices and the equinoxes. But that was the extent of his explanation.

  In the meantime, their hosts had done their best to acclimate them with the island, taking them to some of the other caves and introducing them to more of their pureblooded comrades. They had even shown them the secret chambers used to hide their women. Such was the extent of the trust John and the others earned by simply appearing a month before the solstice.

  When asked about the women, the old man, Samuel, explained why their women were the most unfortunate components within the whole demonic scheme. Once captured, females were unable to resist the seduction of Osiris and were then destined to become part of his harem, producing as many children for him as possible. Half of these children grew to be giants and preformed most of the labor in constructing his sites. The others were used as foot soldiers and servants, any females used for breeding more children. Both the men and the giants had their own harems and both were known to produce giants of their own, the genetic anomalies apparently able to skip around from generation to generation. That is why, explained the man, they had to either keep the women hidden from them… or kill them. Their very survival depended on it.

  ****

  Even now, as they followed their guides through the forest — they’d taken a boat across to St. George’s Island and had been trekking northeast for over an hour — John thought back to what Chadwick said about the Book of Enoch. According to Chadwick’s interpretation of the pseudepigraphal work, certain of the fallen angels had developed a lust for women, desiring to have children by them. Two hundred angels then irreversibly changed their form in a way that somehow allowed them the ability to participate on the physical plane, and thus realize their outlawed desires. The book said they descended together upon a mountain in the times of Jared. They took women, any of whom they chose, to be their wives. They taught them sorcery, incantation, and divination; taught them the practice of applying makeup in order to enhance their sexual attractiveness. They taught men how to make weapons and armor, mirrors, and jewelry. They introduced astronomy, signs in the heavens and the motion of the moon; they caused men to sacrifice to devils as to gods, taught men to read and write, and even how to terminate a fetus in the womb. Indeed, Chadwick said they taught every species of iniquity upon the earth and disclosed to man all the secret things of heaven. So much so, that the world itself became “altered” with impiety and fornication as mankind corrupted all of his ways. And, of course, giants were born to the wives of these rebel angels. The stature of these giants was three hundred cubits, and they devoured all that man had produced until they even began eating man, drinking his blood. At which point God sent Gabriel to turn the offspring of the angels against each other, that they might destroy one another. But the teachings of the angels had already infected humankind, making all their secrets and every power of the Devil common knowledge among them. So God judged both the angels and the world, intent on restoring and reviving the earth through a single righteous family. And so a flood was sent over the whole earth to destroy all that was in it, causing sinners to disappear from off its face and erase all of the forbidden wisdom that had corrupted man. The angels were imprisoned and cast into darkness, where they await the Great Day of Judgment and the fire intended for them…

  It was a story that Henry, of all people, believed to compliment Scripture. Much to John’s surprise, Henry told him that in the book of Jude, when it spoke of the angels leaving their first estate, the Greek word oiketerion was used — a word seen only in Second Corinthians 5:2 as referring to the “spiritual body.” He believed it was describing the change the fallen angels had undergone in order to marry women and produce offspring, exchanging a spiritual body for a physical one, or, as the Book of Enoch described it, “laying aside their class” or “deserting the lofty sky and their holy everlasting station.” For this act, God had “reserved these angels in everlasting chains under darkness until the judgment of the great day.”

  And then there was Second Peter 2:4 and 5, which is the only place in the entire Bible that the Greek word Tarturus is used. It was a place that Homer described as being a subterranean prison inhabited by the Titans who rebelled against Zeus. John recalled the verse from memory.

  For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to Tarturus, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved for judgment; and spared not the old world, but saved Noah…

  In First Peter 3:18 and 19, Henry had explained, it says that Christ, after dying on the cross, went and “preached” to the spirits in prison that disobeyed while Noah was building the ark. The Greek word for “preached” means “to herald,” thus signifying Christ’s announcement of victory over the angels who had committed such an atrocious sin (some theologians believed that Satan’s plan in sending the angels to marry women was actually to contaminate the human gene pool and prevent the birth of the Messiah, of whom it had already been prophesied would crush Satan’s head).

  There was, of course, the most obvious correlation in Genesis six, a section of the Bible that had recently become unavoidable to John. In fact, the more he pondered the revelation of his adoption, that he wasn’t actually part of the Carter bloodline, the more difficult it was for him to accept his freedom from such an association. The VHS tape, his childhood dreams, the giant in Afghanistan, the Poseidon-like figure that only he and Chadwick had seen…

  “The heroes of old,” both Chadwick and Henry said (as did the man on the VHS tape) “are none other than the mythological gods and their offspring, most of which were produced from their mating with human women. The gods were these two hundred fallen angels, their offspring the demigods. All the different stories all come from the same source; only the names are changed depending on which cultures are telling it.” They told him about Japanese, Korean, Sumerian, and Persian traditions that contained the idea of godlike figures descending to earth and producing supermen via human women.

  But as John thought about all this, he found himself still strangely bothered by Henry’s question: John, I want to know if it’s possible for the offspring of angels to find salvation. The fact of the matter was, he didn’t know. According to Enoch, the angels who sinned in this manner, and the giants born to them, were never to obtain peace or remission of sins. The question then became: was it possible to be far enough removed from the purity of the cursed seed to be free from its damnation?

  “Where we going?” Hunter asked, bringing John out of his thoughts. Hunter had his eyes fixed intensively on the canopy above them, ready for more flying creatures to sweep down at them — something they’d seen more of since Chris’ death.

  John recognized the area, too. They were heading back toward the giant wall they saw their first day here.

  “There’s something else we want you to see,” a middle-aged black man named Charles answered. In addition to Charles, there was a balding Irishman named Patrick and a scrawny teenager named George traveling with them.

  “Are you taking us to that wall?” Chadwick was still a little weary of their hosts, wondering if they would just turn and shoot him the second he became a conflict of interest. Though they seemed to be viewing him as a savior rather than as a threat so far, believing he shared the same divine protection as his friends, it was a view that could change in a moment — which was why he’d rather be in the caves with the women.

  “Past the wall.”

  “To the unfinished temple?”

  Charles looked back and n
odded. “We want you to see it for yourselves.”

  “We’ve already seen it. It’s almost identical to the Osireion at Abydos.”

  “I don’t know what that is. But it’s the altar we want you to see.”

  “We saw that, too. And the body parts buried around it.” Chadwick was growing weary of following after these people. Walking for hours without knowing why or to where was a method that hadn’t ended well before.

  Patrick began speaking, taking over the conversation with his thick Irish accent. “The Book of Enoch says that the giants shall be called evil spirits and that evil spirits shall proceed from their flesh. It says that the habitation of terrestrial spirits born on earth shall be earth and that the spirits of the giants shall be like clouds, which oppress and corrupt upon the earth.”

  “Meaning?” Paul asked, his eyes with Hunter’s still up in the trees. Images of Chris falling back to the earth were playing on a continuous loop in both their minds.

  “It means,” Henry said, limping alongside them and armed with an MP5, “that when the Nephilim died in the Flood, the angelic part of them became disembodied spirits.”

  John thought immediately back to what Ronald said about the destruction of the Golden Age and the souls of its inhabitants becoming demons.

  Patrick nodded.

  Chadwick contemplated this. “But according to Genesis, there were giants after the flood, too. What happened to them?”

  Paul held up a hand. “What do you mean there were giants after the flood? I thought the whole point was to destroy the giants once and for all. You telling me that it didn’t work? That God destroyed the world for nothing?”