by John Shirley
“Uh—yes, gentlemen?”
Mendel said, “When you spoke of the origin of that image—the one that collated so interestingly with the appearances of the demons in that area—you said you had a sort of vision of it?”
“Yes.”
“When you say ‘vision,’ Ira,” Nyerza said, “do you mean, exactly, a— How do you describe . . . ?”
I thought about it. “No, not like Ezekiel. I mean, I envisioned it as an artist, that’s all. But it was a very strong visual, um, inspiration, so . . . I almost think of it as a vision. But it’s not like I heard a voice from heaven saying, ‘Why do you persecute me?’ ”
“Quite,” Mendel said, nodding. He looked at Nyerza. “Even so. And the synchronicities.”
“We must make the leap,” Nyerza said. “What he and the girl bring us cannot be brought by accident. Their higher selves collaborate with the higher design.”
“I . . . wish to make a leap, too,” I said. They looked at me, both with eyebrows raised. Nyerza’s eyebrows a couple of feet higher than Mendel’s. “Israel—Professor Paymenz—spoke of an organization. I take it you both belong to it. I took it to be a political organization. Progressive organization of some kind, but— You both seem to be involved in something, um . . . esoteric? I mean in the sense of the three circles—exoteric, mesoteric, esoteric.” I thought I saw Mendel suppress a smile and I added hastily, “I don’t mean that I know these things deeply. But I have some sense of them. I helped the professor edit his book at one point, and I worked at, well, it’s just a magazine, but—”—
“No, the magazine Visions was sometimes on the right track,” Mendel said. “I occasionally contributed to it under a pen name.”
“Which name?” I asked in surprise.
He shook his head, smiling. “Some things you know . . . I will tell you this much more, which will be some things you have guessed and heard and maybe a little more, but, if you trust me, this will serve as a confirmation: In ancient times, well before the birth of Christ, certain people struggled to became conscious—conscious, and not identified with what the Buddhists call samsara, with the false self, the shadows on the wall of the cave . . . and a few became truly conscious, more or less at the same time. Some were in what we now call Egypt, some in India, some in China, some in what is now Nepal, some in Africa, one in North America—a few others. You’ve studied enough to know there are degrees of consciousness, of being awake and mindful, of being aware of oneself and the subtler aspects of one’s surroundings and of being aware of the cosmos itself. You have felt a little of this awareness yourself—almost anyone has had the feeling of being much more awake at some times than at others: things being more vivid, life lived more in the moment, some greater sense of connectedness. It passes quickly for most people, and they forget it. But there are those who know it can be cultivated and sustained and refined and taken to a very high level. When a certain degree of competence is achieved in this practice, one passes a threshold and becomes truly conscious—as much as one can be as a mortal person, embodied—and when that happens one becomes psychically aware of other truly conscious people, though they may be thousands of miles away. Aware of one another, they came together and formed a . . . what people call a secret society or secret lodge. One name for it is the Conscious Circle of Humanity.”
“Mendel,” Nyerza interrupted. “Are you sure? He has earned no such initiation.”
“True, but it is only words, dear colleague, and in these extreme circumstances, perhaps everyone with a fertile soul must be initiated to the degree they can be. We need all the help we can get. And there are indications, do not forget, about these two young people . . . and he is a friend to the Urn . . .”
“Yes, true, true, go on then, please.”
“So, the Conscious Circle continued in various forms. Sometimes its members were murdered by enemies, diabolic forces in various guises. But we continued as best we could. And we evolved a—a sort of plan, an overall scheme. We formed sublodges, lesser lodges, which not every member of the sublodge understood. For example, we created the original Masonic lodge and the Knights Templar and the original Rosicrucians and certain circles in the East . . . but few of the members of those lodges—even their highest initiates—were aware of the Conscious Circle or the real reason for the formation of those lodges. The real secret lodge was a circle that kept the other, better-known lodges as satellites of a sort. And these lodges were used to promote, for example, the Magna Carta, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the development of the idea of the republic. The work of Lao-tzu. The Buddha was one of ours. Christ was, yes, the incarnation of God. But his teaching was of course co-opted and muddied. Thomas Jefferson was one of us. A few others you would know. But most kept to the shadows. There have been experiments, failed experiments. For example, we introduced LSD . . . and LSD was not supposed to become a street drug and what it led to—ah, we have our failures, you see. We yet hope to guide humanity to a global unity, a democratic unity, a United States of Earth.”
“But not a unity controlled by the USA,” Nyerza hastened to add. “Controlled by representatives of all the nations. Yet far more powerful than the United Nations.”
Mendel nodded and continued, “In our awkward way, and with many false starts, we slowly guide humanity to, we hope, an attitude of tolerance, of social justice, of respect for human rights, and, yes, to the end of war. Ultimately, to a condition that makes for a greater probability of Becoming Conscious on the part of more people. And, therefore, a condition of service to the Higher, which men often call God. . . . Now, have a glass of this regrettable chablis, and chew that over. You have answered our questions, and we have some work to do. God bless you, young man. Pray for us all.”
As I write this now, it occurs to me that had anyone else told me the things that Mendel told me, any other time, the skeptic in me—the skeptic shielding the man who deeply yearns to believe—would have nodded politely but inwardly doubted every word. Despite my association with Visions magazine and my inner certainty that some kind of spiritual world is real, I have always been skeptical of most of what people claimed to be the manifestations of that world in our own. The Conscious Circle of Humanity? Another supposedly ancient, supposedly secret society? With anyone else, I’d have thought the man was trying to set me up for induction into a cult, or that he’d become delusional and sucked others, like Nyerza, into his delusions, as can happen with the charismatically mad.
But there was a recognition in me, when he told me of the Conscious Circle—and implied his own part in it. There was a certitude in the very air, an understanding in me, a resonance with what he’d said that somehow transcended all doubts—though others had made similar, rather convincing claims in my presence about their own esoteric connections, and those others I had not believed. Here was the real thing, and it was the force of his being, the presence of the very consciousness that he described, that confirmed it to me. I felt it in the air as a man feels a powerful electric field around a hydroelectric generator. I felt it only when he chose to show it to me. But it was quite real.
Later, I drew Paymenz aside. “You know what Mendel told me—about the Conscious Circle?”
“I heard.”
“Do they . . . take students?”
“You would not have been told were you not a serious candidate.”
“And—and you, Dr. Paymenz?”
He heaved a great sigh. “Once, Nyerza was my student. Now, I am his student. I was truly conscious, or nearly, for a time. But I—I fell. I re-experienced the Fall of Man. I—do not wish to discuss how it came about. My own frailty. Complete consciousness is a burden as well as a kind of enthronement. I now . . . struggle to return to the kind of consciousness they have—Nyerza and Mendel. And I warn you, to waken, to really waken, is as painful as a birth. And some die in childbirth.”
He would say nothing more.
That night, I woke from a nightmare of a Sharkadian raging through an elementary sch
ool, and found Melissa gone from her cot. I got up and went down a hallway where only every second light was lit and even these flickered fitfully. I heard a cry from a room to the side and thought a demon had dragged her away to torture her to death there. I looked in, opening my mouth to shout, and saw Nyerza rearing naked over her on his cot, and it was he who cried out, and her face, turned to him, was like the Madonna. I hastened away, feeling shattered but hoping they hadn’t seen me. No one should transgress on rapture.
6
I’d have laid odds that Mendel—who had, at Nyerza’s side, been involved in saving tens of thousands of African refugees from tribal genocide a few years before, who had seemed unafraid, centered in the face of a relentless and immeasurable invasion of apparently indestructible supernatural predators—
That this man could not be shaken, could not be cowed. But he seemed pale, unnerved, the next morning, as he brought us a report from the translator programs and the industrial-accident investigation.
Before he came . . . waiting for Mendel, we sat around the cafeteria tables, drinking acrid coffee.
I was heartily sick of this place but afraid to go anywhere else, for we had news from the outside world sometimes: The demons seemed to move in fronts across the land, and whoever survived to remain behind the wave was safe for a time, until another demonic sweep through that area. People had begun to adapt already, adopting strategies for going on with some semblance of their lives around the demons, behind them, and during the Lulls, taking comfort in government announcements of research, of experimental relocations of population to less infested areas—that soon became diabolically infested.
Confrontations and sometimes gun battles came about between streams of refugees and people housed in the areas used, willy-nilly, as refuge—until refugee camps were established.
There were accusations in the fragmentary media, where the cables and fiber optic lines still remained, that attempts had been made by experimental governmental teams to sacrifice to the demons, as Shephard had suggested, offering up lifers from prison, volunteers, people whose status was murkily defined—even, according to some stories, homeless children. The demons, it was rumored, took the sacrifices but gave nothing in return. There were official denials that any of this had taken place. Meantime, the slaughter continued; cults formed and were dissolved; militias formed and were dissolved; National Guardsmen roamed in both fanatical order and anarchic melees.
In our underground lair, I sipped my vile coffee; I looked at Nyerza sidelong, now and then, and at Melissa. Though they weren’t holding hands, I thought, with a stabbing pang: They are lovers. She is his.
And I told myself: He’s a great man, he deserves her. I don’t.
It didn’t help.
That’s when Mendel came in carrying a sheaf of printouts. He laid them with trembling hands in front of Paymenz, who seemed surprised himself at Mendel’s state.
“Are you quite all right, Monsignor Mendel?” Paymenz asked. This was the first and only time I heard him called monsignor, and it was news to me.
“I . . . have seen something . . . a bit of personal precognition . . . how things will end with me, at least, with my embodiment, and it is—it is not something I wish to discuss. But we have much else to discuss: The demonic declamation that you recorded from the television appears to be in a language related both to proto-Sumerian and the most ancient language associated with Egypt.” He turned to his notes and went on, “It translates, to the extent it is translatable, as follows: ‘Now at last is the long-delayed feast commenced; the sheep have been driven to the”—possible translation—‘temple, and the slaughter is’—unintelligible. ‘How richly run the”—possible translation—‘gutters, of jade and adamantine. The circle closes; the circlefor which this world was created . . .”—untranslatable— ‘cleave to my”—untranslatable—‘Our fast is at an end . . . What astounding pretensions are theirs; how the”—unintelligible—‘roll their eyes, how they”—possible translation—‘bleat and try to rise on hind legs like men . . . How few the men”—or: ‘true humanity”—‘and how”—possible translation—‘transient . . . Come now, attendants and brethren and”—untranslatable.”
Mendel laid the text aside, took a long, slow breath, and looked at the others. “This business about the circle closing, the apparently foreordained foreplanning of it . . .”
Nyerza shivered visibly. “Perhaps it is . . . demonic hubris.”
“It could be that they knew someone would translate and they sought to demoralize us,” Paymenz said.
“It could be,” Mendel said. “But deep in my soul there is a dread as never before. . . .”
“What was that line from Dickens,” Melissa said. “Something about, are these the shadows of what will be, or what may be, if the way to the future is unaltered . . .”
Mendel smiled fondly at her. “Do you know, I believe that something speaks through you, my dear, something precious.”
She looked at him in openmouthed surprise. Then managed, “Sure—Dickens.”
Mendel chuckled.
Paymenz shook his head at Mendel. “Do not speak of it yet. Now, as to the industrial accidents?”
Mendel nodded. “It seems that recently two to three thousand men and women associated with manufacturing, especially in the chemicals and petroleum fields, have just . . . disappeared. Indeed: They vanished the night before the demonic attack. And, my friends, each one of them was an executive or key person associated with a company that had either had a major industrial accident or was responsible for a long-lasting cancer corridor, a record of much death and sickness around their factories, invariably covered up or, I think the expression is, glossed over, by . . . spinning doctors?”
“Spin doctors,” I muttered. “The Conscious Circle— Are there those who are . . . conscious or—or powerful, esoterically powerful . . . who are opposed to—to the Conscious Circle?”
“Yes. It is possible to be conscious but to be sick—to be conscious does not mean to be good,” Mendel said. “There are very few such people—only a handful. But there are only 23 conscious people in the circle—only 23 good conscious people in the whole world.”
“Only 23!”
“Your mouth is hanging open, Ira,” Paymenz said. “It is a grotesque effect.”
“But—how can you know there’re only 23?”
“We know,” Mendel said dismissively. “As for the sick ones, the dark magicians, they may manipulate hundreds of others, using certain abilities that come to such people when they become partially conscious—telepathy, psychic control, and so forth. They have their own agenda, you see, but it is not that they are opposed to us particularly. They are indifferent to us as long as we do not get in their way. They wish to make themselves gods. They believe that each can rule his own universe, his own cosmos, and exploit it for his pleasure, if they become powerful enough.”
Paymenz said sadly, “Some people become the apotheosis of selfishness and call it exalted.”
Mendel nodded. “Now as to—” He broke off, looked at the ceiling, and frowned. He shivered and buttoned the top buttons of his shirt, though it was quite warm.
Melissa said suddenly, “I’m worried about my cats, Dad.”
Kind of a non sequitur, I thought, but typical of Melissa. The remark was something that I loved her for, though I don’t know why.
Nyerza looked at her with lifted eyebrows. “Cats?”
She scowled at him, knowing what he was thinking. “Yes. Cats. I know—the world is being eaten alive. All those people. And I’m worried about my cats. That’s just how I am. I need to know they’re okay.”
“They have water and dry food, my dear,” Paymenz said, patting her hand.
Brows knit, Mendel glanced again at the ceiling—then in the direction of the conference room where we’d met the demons.
Nyerza snorted softly, was saying, “Well, this is so American—to be concerned about cats at such a time.”
I looked at
Nyerza and thought, with a little flush of mean-spirited triumph: Being “awakened” apparently doesn’t necessarily make you always compassionate, always empathetic. It doesn’t make you perfect. And it doesn’t take away lust.
Nyerza looked at me. I had the uncanny sense that he’d read my mind. I looked away.
“You’re quite right,” Mendel said, smiling gently at me. Mendel! Not Nyerza. “We are imperfect, even—even then.”
Melissa looked at Mendel, then at me. “Ira didn’t say anything . . . did he?”
Suddenly Mendel lifted his head and seemed to sniff the air. He looked at Nyerza, and both looked at the ceiling. Then at the hallway.