The Royal Stones of Eden (Royal Secrecies Book 1)
Page 1
THE ROYAL STONES OF EDEN
RAE T. ALEXANDER
Copyright Beary and Blevins Publishing, 2015
All Rights Reserved.
To
Thomas Childs
TABLE OF CONTENTS
A PROLOGUE BY MATTIE
SAN FRANCISCO, 1906
CHAPTER 1
AN OLD FRIEND
OVER ONE HUNDRED YEARS LATER
SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH
CHAPTER 2
YOUNG DAVID’S VISION
IN THE WORDS OF DAVID
CHAPTER 3
HOW MATTIE AND DAVID FIRST MET
CHAPTER 4
THE MEETING
CHAPTER 5
PETER BEFORE EGYPT
IN THE WORDS OF PETER
CHAPTER 6
DAVID’S RETREAT
CHAPTER 7
PETER’S TRIP TO WALES
BEFORE EGYPT
CHAPTER 8
MATTIE REMEMBERS
CHAPTER 9
PETER AND DRED
JUST BEFORE EGYPT
CHAPTER 10
MALKUTH STONES OF GAN EDEN
PART ONE
CHAPTER 11
THE REVELATION OF JOHN
CHAPTER 12
MALKUTH STONES OF GAN EDEN
PART TWO
CHAPTER 13
THE SHORT TALE OF SYLVIA AND PETER
FIVE YEARS AFTER EGYPT
CHAPTER 14
MALKUTH STONES OF GAN EDEN
PART THREE
IN THE WORDS OF ROBIN
CHAPTER 15
JAIL BAIT
PART ONE
CHAPTER 16
MALKUTH STONES OF GAN EDEN
PART FOUR
IN THE WORDS OF MERLIN
CHAPTER 17
THE WITCH, THE SWORD, AND SAMUEL
IN THE WORDS OF SAM
CHAPTER 18
JAIL BAIT
PART TWO
CHAPTER 19
GOLD RUSH FEVER
PART ONE
IN THE WORDS OF HAJ
CHAPTER 20
GOLD RUSH FEVER
PART TWO
CHAPTER 21
TUNNELS IN KANAB
PART ONE
CHAPTER 22
GOLD RUSH FEVER
PART THREE
IN THE WORDS OF HAJ
CHAPTER 23
THE CONFESSION OF JESSE
IN HER OWN WORDS
CHAPTER 24
THE WORDS OF ANI NVYA
CHAPTER 25
TUNNELS IN KANAB
PART TWO
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgments
A book can seldom by accomplished without the patient assistance and encouragement of friends.
Thank you to all of the “gang” at the “morning show.”
Introduction
This book pays tribute to several broad and historical writing styles. The first is a modified style of repetition, often found in poetic or ancient writings. In a pompous and grandiose style, words and phrases are frequently repeated to show emphasis and clarity throughout a paragraph. This is not meant to demean the reader. There was a time that we did not have the advantage of bold print or italics. This book also pays tribute to the art of storytelling and the imperfections that come along with it. The story will have passive voice, repetitious phrases, and redundancy like most storytellers tend to have. Several characters lead an entire chapter by telling their version of the story. The additional element of repetition may be seen as it is from the point of view of different people.
This is a huge story to tell. And while the book is not always linear, eventually all of the stories come together toward the end.
Enjoy the ride, and remember this: Time waits for no one!
-Rae
rtalexander.com
A Prologue by Mattie
San Francisco, 1906
As God is my witness, the words I write to you are indeed truthful. I believe that I know the truth very well, but I know of no one who truly knows what the composition of it is. Who knows what is imagined and what is real? Our memories, with their limitations, contain all we are and all we know. We remember, and we know. We know, and we remember. And I remember so many things and forget so many others.
Mine is the story of the transformation of a country girl into a modern woman, the recollection, and retrospection of painful and forgotten memories, and the assimilation of the knowledge and the wisdom of the past. A new memory becomes alive within my brain with each passing second, and every day I remember and understand even more.
I remember the day when the blood on my hands, face, and chest mixed with my sweat, which caused a nauseating smell to perfume my once unstained dress. Jagged rocks tore the once elegant lace of my mid-Victorian blouse, and soot blackened my once beautiful red hair. I stood on Market Street, and I cried and felt so dreadfully alone while I heard the sounds of thousands of women and children as they screamed and shed their loud tears of distress.
The vociferous sounds of the city permeated the air, and disaster was everywhere. People were trying to run away from the stench of the ash and smoke, fearful of yet another building falling, as hundreds, perhaps thousands, had fallen that day. One of those buildings nearly fell on me as it crumbled, but I narrowly escaped death and successfully evaded the numerous bricks that rained down that day. My hands bled as I pushed away the sharp debris that tumbled over my head. If it did not fall, then it burned, it seemed. Old San Francisco died that April day in 1906.
I felt more alone than the time my husband left me two years earlier.
Where are you now John? I thought. You left me two years ago. Why did you leave our two sons and me alone back in Sacramento? Did you leave our home only to go out on another binge of drinking and gambling?
My husband, so-called, was not only an alcoholic and womanizer, but he was also a dreamer as well. He always looked for the big strike. After all, his daddy had lived near Sutter's Mill during the Gold Rush of '49. He got his dreamer quality from his daddy, but I loved him. It was on that tragic day, the day of the earthquake, that I missed him the most. I missed him terribly. It was not something a modern woman was supposed to do.
In 1906, San Francisco was a different world. It was a world of both freedom and oppression, of great opportunity, and great poverty. Music was gay. African-Americans were the colored race. Morphine and cocaine were available as pain remedies by the droplet, for infants that suffered from teething pain or in greater quantities as a suicide method for the adults.
Our newspaper reported on several suicides by both men and women who overdosed on morphine. Once, I read about two middle-aged women who committed suicide while they held hands on a warm summer day. They collapsed after they sipped their tainted tea, deadly laced with morphine. Another morphine death that I heard about involved a man overcome with guilt. He could not reveal to his wife that their love was dead. He had found another woman to love and killed himself because he could not live with his choices and the consequences. It was an era of shame and ignorance.
It was on the day of the Great 1906 Earthquake that I pulled out the two stones that I had in my pocket, and I pondered an illusory escape. It was a great day of personal tragedy. I wondered—was this the day that I would use the two gifts from my mysterious visitor who recently came into my life for a second time? My visiting friend advised me that I could use these stones in my greatest moment of tragedy. He said that I could avoid any harm, including death. The stones radiated a glorious blue and white and seemed to be magnetized as they clung to each other in my palm.
I
found comfort from a friend that day in one called Aysha, and her brother Nikola Vranich. Their parents had migrated to Sacramento from Alabama in search of gold in the 1850's. They stayed in that golden California city until a mining accident killed their father. Then they traveled with their mother to San Francisco via the Overland. They used their entire savings to start a new life in San Francisco, in 1905.
Unlike the Vranich family, I could not afford a train when I left Sacramento. I traveled, along with another family, by wagon, with my two children, Tommy, and Timothy. I had heard there were opportunities in Vaudeville on the coast. I dreamed of being a performer. I wanted to be a singer.
My husband had left our children and me after a presumed night of gambling in Sacramento. I assumed that he no longer wanted the responsibility of a family. I waited for months until I realized that he was never coming back. San Francisco represented a chance to start a new life.
It was on that fatal day in April, the day of the earthquake, that a comforting Aysha Vranich came up from behind me and put her arm around me. She led me away from the piles of rubble and fire. She told me, “Everything will be better tomorrow. Everything is always better tomorrow.” And I believed her. Somehow, I connected with her, on some undetectable level. I did not resist her strong young arm because I instinctively felt that it guided me to a safer place. I trusted her. Aysha displayed a genuine kindness, or at least it seemed like it. I did not question her sincerity.
I followed her away from the rubble of the building that was once a rented room. The room and its occupants were buried somewhere underneath the mounds of dirt and debris. Part of that fallen building had caught fire due to broken gas mains, and there was no water to fight the fire because the water pipes had broken as well. My two children had burned to death while I was going to the market for a loaf of bread.
I wanted to escape the tragedy of that day. I wanted to run far away, but Aysha held onto me. She walked beside me and called for her brother Nikola to help her. She had him walk on my other side. As we walked further away, we tried not to breathe in too much smoke, and I started to cry heavily and shivered from the shock of it all.
I tightened my grip on the stones and placed them back in my pocket. The stones, reportedly, had the magic and the power to take anyone away to another place, or to another time, although I did not believe in any magic of any kind. Instead, I yearned for an achievable and realistic escape from the harrowing pain and sorrow, not the imagined and better tomorrow created and spun from the wells of hope.
The mysterious and dark-skinned man that visited me a week or two before the earthquake told me to keep the stones in my possession. He said that they would protect me in the future if I came to harm. I first saw him about a year before I arrived in San Francisco. He saved me from a man in Sacramento who tried to rob me at gunpoint. So I trusted his unusual request, even though I did not believe in their magic. Those two stones jostled in my pocket as they led me down the street, away from the burning buildings, the debris, and the charred remains of my two children.
Aysha and Nikola eventually escorted me to a camp that had white tents set up in orderly rows. The encampment was on a hill that overlooked the smoke that rose from the city. Cots with the wounded marched out in a steady and morbid stream.
Once at an available spot in the camp, Nikola secured a blanket from a pack that he carried, and he laid it out on the slightly damp ground, between two white tents. He asked me to lie down.
"Calm her down while I search again for mama!" Nikola insisted to his sister as he turned to walk back toward the city. Nikola, for just a brief moment, looked back at Aysha—as if he did not know her—then he dismissed the thought.
"She is not alive, Nikola!"—Aysha angrily stared at her brother. She was upset that Nikola left to look for their mother. Aysha believed her to be dead, under piles of wreckage.
She succumbed to his stubbornness. Her eyes seemed to twirl as if she had made a connection to memories that were locked up in her brain. Something seemed odd to me.
I watched Nikola through still teary eyes as he walked back to the city. We never saw him again. He died later that day from a dynamite explosion, one that the city had used to control and contain the fire. His body was never recovered because it was likely blown apart and scattered throughout a city block.
Aysha attempted to comfort me, and again she told me that all things would be better in time. That was her repetitive motto on that day. She also kept singing a rhyme in her Romanian language. I was sure that she meant to calm me, but I did not understand the words. I asked her to translate it for me and sing it in English. She sang it again, although it was out of rhythm.
All things done have not been done. All things not done have been done already.
There are no other things, so do not worry my child!
As she sang, she moved her arm rhythmically over me, and we both heard a distinct clicking sound. The sound seemed to come from my pocket. Aysha moved her hand over my pocket. She waved it back and forth. She tried to confirm the origin of the sound. Upon each wave, the clicking sound was heard.
I removed the two stones from my pocket. I held them in my open hand and showed them to her. Aysha again waved her hand over them. They moved toward each other, in rhythm to Aysha’s waving hand, clicked together, and then they retreated.
Some called Aysha a gypsy, and others called her a witch because she told fortunes for money, although it was against her brother's wishes. I was mesmerized, and I thought that she must have had some mystic power in her hand. Maybe there is magic in the world after all, I thought.
However, the power was not in her hand. It was in her ring. It was in her red stone on her ring, on her right hand, a red jewel mounted on a solid gold band. I had never seen her wear it before. I assumed it was new. Again, she slowly moved her hand closer to the stones in my hand, and we both heard the magnetic reaction.
"Where did you get these?" she asked intently. She had a new and bewildered look and tone as if she was a different person entirely. That was the second time that she seemed odd to me. I told her that a man that I once knew in Sacramento gave them to me, and then she told me a most frightful thing that I would never forget.
"Be careful using the power in these stones, my dear! For in the day that you do, you will surely die!”
Chapter 1
An Old Friend
Over One Hundred Years Later
Salt Lake City, Utah
The compact Chevy Cavalier jolted and sped over the speed bumps faster than it should. David was in a hurry. He was late for the fourth time for one of Mattie’s symphony concerts. David rapidly switched his view from the road to the rear-view mirror, back and forth. His coffee spilled sporadically in his coffee holder, between the two front leather seats.
While David juggled his views, an older Volkswagen Beetle suddenly cut him off, and it stole his planned parking space. David rattled off several expletives. He was skilled. He said those words rapidly and aggressively, at any given stressful moment. It was a habit he got from his father.
David was the result of a managed childhood. He was spoiled. He had it all at an early age. His grandmother, a wealthy widow of a Bay Area business owner, practically raised him. He inherited her entire estate of two older houses, both of them built in 1910, one in Alameda, California, and another house south of San Francisco. Unfortunately, she left him major amounts of debt. It was a debt that accrued, but it served a greater purpose. It financed his education at a private high school and a college education in liberal arts. He also had earned several computer certifications, most of which he did not take advantage of or use.
He rushed through the final parking lot traffic. He was in a hotel parking lot, near the concert venue, Abravenal Hall, in Salt Lake City, Utah. He knew that his close friend, Peter Jenkins, had reserved an extra box seat for him, but he still felt rushed, for Mattie’s sake. David's car slightly bumped into a cement column, and he finally came to a stop.
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He opened his car door quickly. He grabbed the lint brush at the edge of the seat and rolled gobs of cat hair off his tuxedo jacket. He slid his dirty comb through his dark brown hair several times and hurried to the lobby. He wondered if Peter would smell the alcohol he was sweating out and exhaling.
Once he was finally in the concert hall and seated, Peter whispered, "About bloody time, old boy!"
"Yeah, I had a meeting," claimed David.
"With the bottle?" Peter chided.
"You know, if you weren't my 'dearest and best' friend," David said sarcastically. David gave him a stare that cut.
"Relax, old bean! I settled it with Mattie during the intermission. You should be glad that you have me as your 'dearest' friend. She was absolutely furious. She didn't study classical violin, move to Utah, and give you free passes to the symphony for you to break her little heart in exchange for some bourbon. Anyway, the concert is just finishing up. So, relax!" Peter Jenkins was sometimes like that to David. He would scold and then quickly cover his scolding with reassurance. It was almost as if he had a split personality.
Peter was a graduate of Oxford. He first met Mattie and David in the summer, five years prior to the concert. At that time, all of them were sure of themselves, very confident of their career paths and dreams. They were in Cairo, Egypt that summer. Peter studied archaeology and medicine. It was, according to David, an odd combination of interests. Mattie was there on David's invitation and traveled with him as a companion and girlfriend. David was working on his master's degree thesis in history, with no truly planned end for his education.
In the eyes of Mattie, David was a professional student who could not hold on to money. At least, this was her first impression of his status. Mattie and David had technically lived together ever since they had met at a school music concert at the University of San Francisco. She studied music in San Francisco, with the help of a grant. Prior to that, Mattie had graduated from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Mattie felt that she was the real student and David was just a romantic dreamer, with no real plans at all.