Jacob's Trouble 666

by Terry James

  The black, bottomless eyes held his in their grip while he tried to scream the words which would not come, as if they, too, were held captive in that unspeakable ambience.

  "Do not believe his lies!" he tried to scream but could not. "He is not your savior! INterface is not Utopia! It is Hell on Earth!... It is all lies!... All lies!"

  Chapter 19

  Hugo Marchek's sister in the crumpled heap. Fiery trial through which passing was impossible. Clothing catching fire, burning. Saryeva Marchek's dress, taken from the chair and placed on top of her brother's desk, the material then smoothed in order to get a better look. Scorched by the flames engulfing the room. Gradations of browns permeating the light-colored print material, the burned areas outlining the form of a young woman. The image of a crucified man burned into the long, ancient linen shroud, which became harder and harder to see because it fled quickly, a white, shrinking rectangle against a black void.

  Why was movement so inhibited? Why were his shoulders, arms, legs and head so terribly heavy? Herrlich Krimhler, here, now! To save the lost who were vanquished to this cold, inescapable blackness. Why the piles of empty, scorched clothing strewn along this path of saving grace — this shaft of light? Light and life again achieved!

  Black eyes from the pyramid's top. Restraining him to the point of paralysis. Leaden legs. His body transformed into one of the huge, hewn blocks of stone, of which the pyramid should be constructed but was not. Rather was made of crystalline substance, unknown, filled with power emanating from somewhere within.

  Darkness, and a single white cube shrinking while tumbling silently to nothingness, before returning to illuminate and make visible and audible the world.

  "But if this is him, why is he here? They forgave him. Took him into the fold."

  "He's Jacob Zen. Thinner and older than in those pictures of him. But it's him, all right."

  Throbbing temples -- Must have Trachetrol. Each pump a burst of pain in the chest, the head. Hazy forms, checkered, crisscrossed, human forms, edged with spreading, velvet fringe that made them appear at first glance to be corpulent old men in silhouette against the squares of brightness behind and above them.

  "He's almost awake," one of the two guards said. Both men left, then, through a doorway, whose door sounded of metal and great weight when it slammed behind them.

  Focusing... not easy. He caught a glimpse of other human forms, like the previous ones, blurred at first, but, with effort, becoming somewhat clearer. They stood behind a barrier of checkerboard design, wearing gray, robe-like clothing. "Welcome, Jacob Zen," one of the men said.

  The checkerboard. Mesh bars. A cage of some kind.

  "Where am I?" Pain surged in his head when he spoke, forcing him to lie flat on his back again. "A compound near the city, Washington."

  "D.C.? How did I get here?"

  "Three men brought you here."

  "You have been sleeping for quite some time," the other man said in an accent he could not place.

  "What day is it?"

  "Tuesday. The seventh of the month."

  "Did they say anything when they brought me?"

  "Nothing of importance," the older man said.

  "Why are you in here?"

  "We are of the house of Israel. That is crime enough for them."

  Jacob smiled bitterly through his pain. These were extremely orthodox Jews, who would not change to placate INterface. Amazing they had survived this long, while preserving their honor; he had arrived at exactly the same place and time, having more than once soiled his.

  "You were pardoned by them. We witnessed it from Jerusalem. Do you understand why you are now here, in this place?"

  "Haven't you learned yet that they say and do whatever suits their purposes? Surely you know their ways by now," Jacob said with mild irritation.

  "We know their ways," the younger man said. "Our brothers and sisters continue the fight against the evil now upon the world. But now, it must be waged with very different methods because of the most recent edict. Those who accept their mark can be monitored constantly."

  Jacob leaned on one elbow and looked at the man. "What mark?"

  "That which Herrlich Krimhler demanded three nights ago in the Temple at Jerusalem. The mark he ordered all peoples to accept in order to prove their loyalty to him."

  "I didn't know. I passed out, I guess, or was drugged, or something. I don't remember anything after I tried to get to the top of the..."

  "What did you hope to accomplish?"

  "To call them liars. To destroy Krimhler's credibility by showing the world the hypocrisy of his claims. But that's not important now. Tell me about this mark."

  "Herrlich Krimhler declared himself to be God. He commanded everyone to receive the mark acknowledging their acceptance that he is the one and only Deity. Refusal means death by decapitation without benefit of trial, if INterface wishes to execute those refusing. An even worse fate awaits those who are not executed. Those without the mark cannot interact within INterface Response Unity. Either their code is taken out of the system or their electronic funds are deleted. Their logic, to justify this punishment, is: if one does not receive the Allegiant mark, he chooses not to be a part of the system. To live without the mark, one must steal. Therefore he is not only disloyal to Krimhler, but a thief, deserving of death. The Six Ways to Peace is violated by those who break laws."

  Jacob, through his headache, felt a jab of guilt, remembering his part in cutting innocents out of the world-saving system before worshiping the resurrected messiah was required.

  The younger man spoke. "At the time the mark is given, a transponder is implanted, either in the top of the right hand, or in the forehead. This assures that the person can be constantly monitored, the transponder being linked by a series of satellites circling the earth, to surveillance stations many times more sophisticated than were the Sector Coordinator monitoring posts."

  Unusual men! Unlikely to know such things. Almost like they were divulging their knowledge to forge an understanding of some sort with him. "How do you know all of this?"

  "The 666 mark worn visibly on the forehead brings special recognition and services to those displaying it," the older man said, ignoring Jacob's question.

  "666?"

  "In honor of Herrlich Krimhler and his Six Ways to Peace. The Roman Numeral for the number 666, within the pyramid design."

  Jacob lay back and tried to rub the pain from his eyes. His mind researching for the single neurological impulse that would trigger the recollection process and summon the words he had heard before, or read, or both. Something about a mark. A prophetical mark.

  Of course! It replayed within his brain. Hugo Marchek's unforgettable voice quoting the Scripture. "And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and enslaved, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads. And that no man might buy or sell, except he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast; for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred three-score and six."

  Without conscious prompting, his memory, or flashback delusion caused by the Trachetrol, brought remembered things to the surface. INterface doctrines his unconscious mind stored that night at Jerusalem. He heard, in his mind's ear, Krimhler's pronouncements. His lies, about what he called the Cosmic Evolutionary Purge that occurred every eon or so. That was what accounted for the sudden elimination of the dinosaurs, and of Atlantis. It affected humankind differently than other forms because the human was the highest plane before reaching the metaphysical levels of soul-mindedness, at which point one became god-like. Jews remained Jews because they were not the sons of the Great Cosmic Mind, merely a by-product of its creation. Jews, as a race, turned to the side of evil. Lucifer had been on the side of what was good and right since the beginning. Jews were the offspring of Michael, while all others were the children of Lucifer. Herrlich Krimhler gave that night
, Jacob somehow knew through the subconscious remembrance, his version of the creation and all that had happened since.

  Lucifer had not been chased from Heaven for leading a rebellion against God. There was no such entity as the biblical Jehovah. The war that raged was between Lucifer and Michael, the angel created by Lucifer, the true Mind-Father of the Cosmos. Michael was the one in rebellion, having persuaded most of humanity to believe that Lucifer was responsible for the world's problems. Michael, the true Satan, introduced his false messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, into the world through the Jewish seed. He, Herrlich Krimhler, was the true Messiah, the son of Lucifer, and at the same time, he was Lucifer.

  Even with the great evils the Jewish race had perpetrated, if the Jews would accept the mark, symbolic of Herrlich Krimhler, in what Krimhler called the Luciferian Initiation, the Jews could receive forgiveness and obtain salvation. It was possible to offer this grace to the Jew because, as a religion, Judaism traditionally rejected Michael's false Christ, Jesus of Nazareth.

  "Are Jews taking this mark?" Jacob said from the hard cot, while he continued to massage his temples.

  "Some," the younger man said from the cell across the concrete corridor from Jacob's cell. "Most Jews in Palestine are well-versed in the prophecies and have taken shelter. The controllers are trying to learn where they have hidden, because Herrlich Krimhler is in an insane rage, wanting to find them and destroy them."

  "Where could that many people go? Do you know?"

  "We are here to be executed, because we will not tell them where Israel hides."

  "Executed?"

  "We have learned from our guards that the executions, yours and ours, are to be shown throughout INterface. They are to be by decapitation. Krimhler, himself, ordered it."

  Decapitation! Krimhler, he remembered, informed the world that night from Jerusalem that the severing of the head from the body symbolized the cutting off of any hope for redemption. The sentence to Hell. Which Hell, depended on the sin-condition. For some, it was simply ceasing to be. For others, it meant being reborn, reincarnated in a life form lower than before, and with each subsequent death, being reborn to ever descending levels, de-evolving to the most basic elements of matter. Reincarnation in reverse. Backward, ever backward in time and space.

  Karen rubbed the back of his neck and kissed his eyes, her soft hair brushing his face. She sat, then lay beside him and their lips met. Spring lay just outside the windows, bright morning light full of pollens rising and swirling and making the colors beyond the neatly groomed garden appear to co-mingle into a pleasant mist.

  One does not dream in color, it was said or written somewhere. But this was vividly colorful, looking out the window between the time of parting and fusing again with her velvet lips. More so than reality. But this was reality. She was loving him, while the unfamiliar but unforgettable fragrances came in through the open windows, her fingers long and cool and gentle, soothing the taut muscles, forcing the aching from his skull. More real than any reality. Real. Reality like he had not known. Not a dream... Not a dream. Real!

  She was his, not some glazed-eyed addict. His to love, to hold, to share his passions with, to give to and take pleasure from.

  He sat up, his vision at first dark, slowly gathering in his surroundings and making his other senses aware, a dream! She was not really here; they were not in each others' arms, together in an indescribably beautiful garden-place, loving, being human again.

  Still night, the light outside the small, square windows causing shadows where it hit against and curved around the metal bars, creating crisscrossed patterns on the gray floor beyond the bunk.

  The pain was gone from his neck and the back of his head. The dream, a God-sent physical relief, though while consciousness became more focused, the remembered beauty of the dream caused greater pain of the soul. The two men slept in their respective cells across the small corridor, the bars in their windows making similarly checkered patterns on their bunks and floors. Somewhere in the smog-filled early morning, far distant, a large dog barked, causing others to sound. Soon all was quiet again.

  What would it be like to have one's head cleaved from the body? A moment of pain? An eternity? Instant unconsciousness? Or a second of flip-flopping, through dying eyes, seeing the last of the world in a violently twirling moment before thudding against the bottom of the container?

  Could the brain, did the brain, stay alive for the minute or two or however many it took for the oxygen to deplete? Most likely, there was instant unconsciousness. Most likely, but who could testify to it?

  To die in such a way, helplessly, unheroically. Just on one's knees, then a plop, one's blood squirting shamefully, like that of a slaughtered animal. Better to go out gloriously — An explosion or gunned down while yourself killing the enemy. But to just kneel and die, your head tumbling into a metal box before the entertained, wicked world. Better to die proudly, like a man. An explosion, gunfire. But death was death. Cessation of breathing, of blood flow, of conscious thought. A long, meaningless sleep, where dreams have no place.

  Karen. Lovely, soft, yet firm to the touch, Karen. She comes again and caresses and strokes and kisses. Her skin cool in the rainbow mist surrounding them both while they love.

  Her touch is different, somehow, as it changes. Hard and cold and she pulls away, or is pulled away. Her face an emotionless mask while she backs away into the mist, which itself has transformed into gray, murky haze. In slow motion, he pursues her fading form through the smog, unable to match her speed. She is not moving under her own power, but is dragged, still without expression or protest, and she disappears into the dark cloud.

  The cloud dissipates and he sees her on her hands and knees, naked and white against the backdrop of absolute black, her long hair falling toward the floor, touching the floor and hiding her face from him. But it is Karen.

  He tries to run to her but cannot move. He looks at his feet; they are affixed to the black marble floor by something unseen and he looks to Karen again, who seems glued on hands and knees.

  From somewhere behind her, he cannot determine from where, a large, dark form emerges. A satyr-being, whose features are obscured by facial hair and hideous bumps, and whose two cloven hooves clop sharply upon the marble floor as the man-goat approaches her.

  Jacob screams as Karen screams. He can move now, and will grab the thing and choke the life from it! But doors of iron bars slam between him and them, and he cannot move the crisscrossed metal, but can only grip the bars tightly and stand, helpless.

  She raises her face while the thing ravages her. He shrieks obscenities but to no effect. Karen's face is turning toward him now, sweat beaded on her forehead and around her mouth.

  Her eyes open, showing pain at first, but changes, while she looks into his, to an expression of sensual ecstasy. Her face is alive with passion. Not pain, not fear, but is lost in the throes of heightening pleasure. She looks at Jacob and laughs, a hideous cackle that distorts her pretty face into a face of changing features. It is first Fredria VanHorne's face, then Melissa Jantzen's. His own mother's face. Each face in its turn has "666" imprinted upon the forehead. The satyr, too, changes, to the form of a man. His face is the grinning, mocking face of Herrlich Krimhler, upon whose forehead is stamped "DCLXVI!"

  "On your feet!"

  Loud banging on metal brought him from the nightmare, jarring him. He stood unsteadily on the concrete floor, trying to regain full awareness, to make sense of the barking commands shouted by the man in the black uniform, who glared at him and at the other prisoners.

  Time for execution! He had slept away his last minutes of life. He had been prepared for death before. Why did he inwardly now fight against resignation to the inevitable?

  "Kneel before the Son," one of the controllers ordered when the steel door opened, issuing in three men, who were not recognizable because they were silhouetted blackly against the bright light just outside the cellblock. The man in the center was tall and walked with uncom
mon grace. His heavier, thicker companions carried Uzi-type weapons at the ready. "Kneel!" one of the controllers said angrily.

  "Leave us," the tall man said in a voice unmistakably that of Herrlich Krimhler. The guards left the cellblock and Krimhler turned his eyes upon Jacob, who stood by the bunk, struck momentarily mute by the fact that he stood face to face with the man the world had seen Jacob Zen murder. Herrlich Krimhler, the master of the New Age, the resurrected Savior.

  "Why do you stare, Jacob? Do you yet not believe I am who I say I am?"

  The other prisoners, Jacob noticed, moved to their bars, where they listened.

  "So that you might believe..." Krimhler stepped to the bars of Jacob's cell and in the same instant stood within the cell, his dark features half-obscured in the sparse light. He had passed through the metal! Walked through it! The other men, like Jacob, gawked in astonishment while Krimhler continued to speak.

  "Why do you deny me? I am the Christ, the Messiah yearned for by humanity. Why do you persecute me, Jacob Zen? Why do you refuse the Lord and Savior of mankind his rightful worship? Why do you refuse the mark of adoration and salvation?"

  Jacob backed away from Krimhler, who put the questions softly. He bumped against the bunk and nearly fell backward, but caught himself.

  "No! You are not the Messiah. He came over 2,000 years ago." He felt his voice tremble while speaking the words weakly.

  "False Christs have come and gone. I am the true Christ, the Son of God. I am God."

  "No! God is everything good. You are all that is evil!"

  "You are deceived, Jacob. I am come because of the evils in the world. Look at the scars of crucifixion, Jacob." Krimhler stepped into the light that streamed in the window over Jacob's shoulder. A faint, circular spot of light rested upon the bronzed forehead. Krimhler held his hand out, palms up.

  "See the nailprints, symbolic of the crucifixion I suffered for mankind." The shadows seemed to again engulf the face, putting Krimhler in obscuring darkness.