by Brandt Legg
The helicopter flew in restricted airspace over the Taos Pueblo, but any other route would have alerted Omnia and brought choppers, now stationed at Taos Airport. I should have been thinking about the drop I’d be making into the portal. Instead, I tried to script the conversation Linh and I would have when we next met.
Then I saw the portal, which was nearly impossible to see from either above or below. Only a slight ripple could be seen from the side. When we’d stayed in Taos, I’d often seen strange clouds over the mountain. There were rumors of UFOs concealing themselves, which might have been, or maybe it had something to do with the portal.
I contemplated just what I would do to Dunaway. I knew he needed to be found and stopped, but the method eluded me. Clastier’s words had finally gotten through: Dunaway could not be converted, he needed to be surpassed, and only I could do it.
The pilot circled. Greater World came into view. Omnia was crushing all resistance. The Movement’s infrastructure had been completely gutted. We clung to the hope of our revolution on the outer fringes of time and dimension. Spencer would never agree, but I now saw the Jadeo as not just something to protect, but something to use. For too long it had been out of the hands of the nine entrusted. It had been a distraction . . . find it, hide it. No, it was time for an Outmove. I was one of the nine, and one of the seven, and darkness was on the verge of overtaking the light. The future was up to me; the Outmove was to use the Jadeo. The pilot gave me a hand signal and hovered as close as safety allowed.
I jumped from the helicopter, unable to see the portal. The mountain rose fast. Could I have missed it? Maybe it was a false portal. My rapid descent sent me into a dizzying spin. The rocks on the peak were less than fifty feet below. The portal was gone! Forty feet, my skin burned, thirty, twenty. In a split second I would explode onto the rocks, ten, five, two, one . . . suddenly, less than an inch from impact, like a bungee jumper, my body recoiled and snapped back toward the sky. Like a rocket, I soared into the portal from beneath.
Perhaps that is why Taos Mountain is sacred. The Native American tribe which controls the mountain allows no one on the peak. The portal stretched beyond my vision in all directions. Turquoise became deep blue and finally indigo until bright sunlight burned through and all was white. The promise of this portal to take me to anyone might be a myth. I wondered how Lee Duncan and his fellow portalogists could ever learn anything within a portal. They were mostly disorientating places and capturing data seemed as unlikely as remembering the details of a dream.
Floating in the midst of light, looking for any direction, I began to feel sick. Was there a way out? A way anywhere? It could be just over my shoulder, just out of reach; it could require a run or a dive, something I didn’t know. All I wanted was to reach Dunaway. Everything went black.
My eyes began to adjust. At my back, a massive window, maybe eighty feet by thirty feet, afforded a near-Hubble view of the stars. Inside the warm room, I was cold. A gigantic round fireplace, crafted from black and gray marble, burning trunk-sized logs, warmed me. More of the room came into view – smooth stone floors, two tables of irregular shape, one ten feet long, the other twice that, several comfortable looking chairs. I saw no doors and the ceiling, incredibly high, seemed to be the sky, with a number of skylights revealing more stars.
“Nate, for a very long time, I’ve been certain we would meet tonight.” I did not recognize the voice. It was not Dunaway, but even before I turned to see who owned such a deep and ancient voice, I knew I’d somehow found the Dark Mystic.
70
He sat in an overstuffed, black leather chair, drink in hand, smiling. The dark brown skin on his smooth-shaved head seemed to glow, gold-mirrored sunglasses matched a shiny shirt, and smoky ebony pants moved as if in a breeze when he stood. “Nathan Ryder,” he said, towering over me by at least six inches. “I am your final mystic.”
“You’re the Dark Mystic.”
“People call me that. I’ve never liked that name, but, in this confusion, it will suffice.”
“What confusion?” I looked around the large and nearly empty space, which had the feel of a meeting room at an upscale mountain lodge somewhere in Europe, or perhaps, a spaceship floating in the Milky Way.
“The times we find ourselves in, many find confusing, confounding, counter and complicated.”
“Where are we?”
“I call it Slice. It’s a dimension of my own making. I’ve sliced it off of 92426.”
“You created a new dimension?” The stories of his powers were understated rather than exaggerated. “How do you do that?”
“Ha, you are young . . .” He laughed a rich laugh. “That you think a question like that could be answered in anything less than a hundred years . . . that you think you deserve to know the answer . . . that you asked it of me, all these things would astonish me if I were capable of being astonished.”
“I’m sorry if I offended you.” His reputation for being as much good as bad suddenly worried me.
“Yes. They say many things about me, don’t they? Some think I am a myth, and I suppose parts of each of us are myths. I can teach you a great number of things, Nathan Ryder, but some lessons will be painful. Death is a teacher like no other in life.” He stood close. I saw my reflection, framed by stars, in his gold glasses.
“Are you going to kill me?”
“Do you fear death?”
“No.”
“No?”
“I’ve died too many times, lost too many loved ones . . . seen dimensions, past and future times, and beyond . . . No, I don’t fear death.”
“Brilliant. How do you feel about it then?”
“Like I do about a door.”
“Really? So you’re interested in the other side? Please, follow me.” He walked to the glass wall. We looked out. The “building” sat on top of an impossibly high cliff. A dark ocean with gigantic waves wrestled a rocky coast a thousand feet below. Stars, close enough to touch, burned through the fabric of sky in such numbers they rendered it translucent.
“It’s like the edge of the world,” I said.
“Yes, I carved it out of just that. It’s the work of a millennium, still incomplete, of course.”
“I’ve never seen a more beautiful view.”
“Certainly you have, everyone has, you just forget . . . like everyone.”
“That’s part of the problem.”
“It is the problem. This lack of memory has created the fear which has formed the faults which have made the mistakes which . . . well, you get the idea, disaster ensues.”
I nodded.
“Now back to our little discussion of death, you called it a door. That’s correct, isn’t it, Nathan Ryder? A door?”
“Yes.” I didn’t like his tone.
He opened a door in the glass wall where none had been before, then motioned to me to step through.
“After you,” I said.
His baritone laugh rolled into one long tone before abruptly stopping. “I insist.” His voice firm and clipped.
I jerked back, but instantly my heels were teetering on the edge. The wind unsteadied me, my palms turned clammy, I couldn’t get any footing.
“There is much to learn from walking through this death you call a door,” he whispered. Using the same power that put me there, he spun me around so that my back was to the opening and only my toes remained on the black marble floor. “Are you afraid of death?”
“No. But I’m not ready to die.”
“Why is that, Nathan Ryder?”
“I have things to do.”
“Thank you for that very specific answer. Enjoy the view.” He spun me around again.
“You know why I’m here,” I yelled.
“Yet we’ve just met.”
“I’m one of the seven, I have an open channel to the universe, to my soul, in order to help everyone find their own soul, so that the awakening can happen. I am trying to do that,” I rambled, unsure if he’d let me fall at any moment.
&n
bsp; “Seems you’re a rather important fellow, then. Maybe you should live?”
“I think that’s the plan.”
“Really, who makes the plan?”
“I made it.”
“Have you seen it?”
“No.”
“Sounds rather unreliable. Why didn’t you decide to live forever, then?”
“I wouldn’t want to.”
“Hmm, but you want to live now? A little longer? Perhaps an hour? Four months? Fifty-eight years?”
“Just longer.”
“But there is that plan. May I see a copy . . . what does it say?”
“I just know that my work is not done.”
“Well, Nathan Ryder, that seems rather obvious, doesn’t it? I mean, take a look around. Not here, speaking figuratively. The world is a mess. One could argue it’s in much worse shape than when you came on the scene. So, I’d say your work appears to have hardly begun, much less being done. It seems unlikely you’d be missed at all.”
“Why did I make it to the fifteenth mystic if I’m doing everything wrong?”
“Was that the game? You’re on some kind of spiritual scavenger hunt?”
“No.”
“What you don’t realize is that the next generation’s seven are already on earth. The little toddlers are all in good shape and they’ve got a shot at making a difference. If they don’t, nothing to worry about, another crop will come behind them. You’re in a long line of sevens, and do you know what? They have all failed . . . even the famous ones. Do you know why? Because any time mankind hears a message of love and peace, anything that comes close to the spiritual truth, do you know what they do? They kill the messenger. Your death then is a tradition.”
71
He left me on that ledge for a day. I watched as the sun crept around the horizon. The coast faced due north because the sun rose and set on the water. The spectacle might have explained the Dark Mystic’s choice of locations for his dimension, but it wasn’t clear if any of what I saw was real. He returned the following night.
“Are you ready to die?”
“No. My life is not complete yet.”
“Who says?”
“I do. The life of Nathan Ryder is not complete because I still can make a difference.”
“Omnia appears unstoppable.”
“They will collapse once I open the Jadeo and show the world –”
“Open the Jadeo? Is that your role? Do you even have the Jadeo?”
“Let me off this ledge and tell me where to find Dunaway.”
“Are you telling me what to do?”
My feet slipped and I fell at a forty-five degree angle. The waves, foamy in the starlight, loud in the stillness, pulled me toward them. “No,” I yelled.
“My questions have not been answered.”
“No, I –”
“I do not require you to tell me what I already know. You are trying to see even a glimpse of what I know. Everything you know or ever will know was known to me prior to your birth a thousand lifetimes ago,” the Dark Mystic said.
He left again, and I hung there, fighting fear, on the verge of falling, for another day. The following night he returned.
“Are you ready to die?”
“Yes.”
“Really? Why?”
“I have lived so that I am always ready to die.”
Suddenly I was sitting across from the Dark Mystic, in a comfortable chair by the fireplace.
“Perhaps your life has not been wasted.”
I sighed. The warmth of the fire slipped into my skin and brought my bones back to an acceptable feeling of living. “I want to know all you will teach me.”
“All I will teach you is more than all you have learned.”
“It’ll take forever,” I said.
“Remember, forever has already happened; it took an instant.”
I did not speak. Instead I thought about everything he’d said since we met. When the sun rose, he offered me a drink. I hadn’t eaten since my arrival, but until he offered, the thought of food or water never occurred to me. The velvety black potion tasted like the smell of flowers in the mountains. A single round ice cube floated in my glass in spite of the warm liquid. As much as I drank, the glass remained half full and the ice never melted.
“There are all kinds of powers. They are positive, yet each power has a block which is neutral and, equally important, every power also has an opposite which is negative.”
I nodded, afraid to say the wrong thing. The statement was new to me, and the simple symmetry of it brought a clarity that had been lacking in my understanding of the five great soul powers. Yet, if I admitted that, he might push me back onto the ledge, might drop me this time, or subject me to some new torture.
He swirled his own glass. “You must know, Nathan Ryder, I can read your every thought, even the ones you don’t know about. So, please do not insult me with fear. If you are not beyond that, then we will have to begin another time.”
“These samurai teaching techniques are a bit unnerving. If you want to kill me, then do it.”
“In the end it isn’t death that kills us; something killed us long ago.”
The sun suddenly dimmed, the room falling into complete darkness. I cannot recall how long we sat there unable to see anything but my thoughts; certainly days passed. When the light returned, the Dark Mystic removed his sunglasses and stared into my eyes.
A week before, what I saw would have left me unhinged, maybe even terrified. Now, something had changed. I continued looking past his multicolored irises and pondered whether or not what I was seeing was real or another test. It was not surprising that the Dark Mystic would also be another person I knew, but then I saw many others I had known. I stopped at the slave.
“Your eyes were brown then,” I said.
“Yes, the color changes come as one gets closer to their soul.”
“Surely you’ve died since then; it’s been almost four hundred years.”
He stood and turned away from me, unbuttoned his shirt, then lowered it. I gasped. His back was crisscrossed with long horrible scars from whippings. “Some of those are from me?”
He turned back to face me. “Only the first few.”
“But they are all because of me.”
He didn’t say anything.
“I’m sorry.”
“I know.”
This time I was quiet.
“The karma from brutality such as slavery, the holocaust, betrayals of the Native Americans, and other acts of genocide, is very strong. It takes a hundred lifetimes or more to clear such things.”
“I am still paying,” I said.
“We are all still paying.”
“Why have you remained in that incarnation? How have you remained?”
“I have been a mystic for a very long time.”
“We’ve known each other many times, haven’t we?”
“One is not born accidentally as one of his generation’s seven. Countless lifetimes are required to prepare to be one of the seven. I have been your mystic dozens of times. During your time as a slave trader, you were also a slave, you were married to Gibi. I was her brother. It was a complex time that ended tragically. I hid in the mountains and became a breatharian. I learned things. Nature and solitude are life’s greatest teachers. Stars, Outviews and signs will show a person almost anything. But I encountered mystics, too. Wandus and Spencer have helped me grow; the Old Man of the Lake and Yangchen have given me much.”
“If you know all of them, why didn’t they just tell me where you were?”
“Do you really have to ask?”
I stopped long enough to think, still distracted by who I’d seen in his eyes, my adrenaline running wild. “Because . . . I was not ready. Because I needed to find you myself.”
“Your question should have been, why am I the last mystic. And that is because I am no longer a mystic of the earth. Few mystics have ever created their own dimension. In those mountains, s
oon I knew how not to die.”
I knew better than to ask how. “But you have other incarnations that live and die.”
“Yes.” He smiled. “Once you connect to your soul, not just for soul powers and Outviews, not just seeing it but to unify with it, you can live all your lives from any one of them.”
“I don’t really understand that.”
“I know you don’t; one day you will.”
While trying to figure out how to ask him about the other incarnation I’d seen in him, the total blackness returned.
“Is this why they call you the Dark Mystic?” I asked, but no answer came. More days in the abyss.
When he returned we talked again but I did not ask him what I most wanted to know. The cycle continued for a very, very long time – questions, answers, and great periods of solitude. He showed me things but mostly made me find them.
“Today, you should return to 92426.”
“Am I ready?”
“I cannot answer that, Nathan Ryder. Only you can if you are ready, and you will only know once you are ready, or . . . once it’s too late.”
“How long have I been here?”
“Eleven years.”
No answer would have shocked me. Still, I wondered what had happened in my world during my absence. Would I recognize it? Who would still be alive?
“Don’t worry about such things. My dimension is a friend of time. Only eleven minutes will have passed in 92426.”
“That’s a relief.”
“Maybe.”
“Can I ask one last question?”
He studied me.
“I believe the information will be helpful to my purpose,” I added.
“Very well.”
“During those first few days, I saw something in your eyes and need to know if it’s true. Do you share a soul with Dunaway?”
72
The Dark Mystic looked at me, smiling. “Don’t worry, Nate. Dunaway doesn’t know yet. I have been alive for a very long time. He is still young. Many mystics prepared my soul to be one of the seven. Most of the mystics you know were once one of their generation’s seven. It was not meant to be this way with Dunaway and you. Or with Dunaway and me, for that matter.”