“Dred said that he was my brother,” Peter said.
I corrected him. I told him that Dred was not his brother, but the father of many lies. I had him sit down on a bench in the basement, while I told him some further truth. I revealed what happened during his mother’s transference, an event that was nearly a thousand years old. I told him what my father had told me about the incident.
“You were in your mother’s womb when she went through a time portal, similar to the one that I showed you. I learned these stories from my father. He said that you traveled with her. She was pregnant with you, and you remained in her body during the trip. You were both transported into a future far beyond what she once knew,” I told him.
It was still difficult for him to grasp everything, but I took the time to explain everything that I knew about the incident of his mother’s transference. I told him everything that was relative to his understanding of his origins. It was a difficult afternoon, and one that exhausted us both.
A week later, and after much tutoring and knowledge sharing, I was finally able bring up a most controversial subject to Peter Jenkins. I planned on asking for his help with something that I had been involved with before his arrival.
I remember the day that I brought up the subject. It was the day that I picked up David and Mattie and met them for the first time. We were in the laboratory. I had finished another tale concerning one of the treasures below. That was when I brought up the subject. For a week, Peter had been filled with tales of magic and legends, and he was becoming hungry and anxious for more information.
“I have to go pick up some people in my taxi at their hotel,” I told him. “If you would like for me to show you a demonstration of time travel, to convince you of the power that we are guarding, then wait. I will show you in a few weeks! You are not quite ready now. I want to talk to you about what is beyond those tunnels.”—I opened the steel door of the basement, and I pointed to one of the cave tunnels in the dark distance. The tunnels were illuminated with special wired lighting, but the lights were off at that time. Darkness screamed at us beyond the steel door. Peter took a few steps into the darkness to take it in while I stayed on the other side of the door.
“One fatal night, my parents and the Priests walked down that cave entrance and never returned again! Beyond that entrance, about one and a half kilometers away, is a blockage, a dead end, the result of a cave in. I want to find out what happened to them. They may still be alive and trapped in another world. I have to know the truth. I have been digging through, as I have had the time, and I could use your help.”—as I spoke, Peter showed a look of terror and distrust.
“Are you out of your bloody mind!” he bellowed. “You have tried to convince me that I am the son of King Arthur, and then add to that some bloody story of creatures from below. You tell me that these creatures seek out our blood or enslavement?
“And now you want to dig up these people? And for what? For what insane purpose?—our detriment? I think that you’re all loony? Even Uncle Willie must have been a loony! Robbie tried to tell me some bloody weird stories too!”—Peter came back into the laboratory and started to pace. He stared intensely at the distant and mysterious tunnel beyond the basement room.
“Wait here, I won’t be too long,” I promised. “Don’t worry. I will soon show you more.”—I left the steel door to the cave open and left him to ponder my words as I walked up the narrow and dark stairs to the cafe. I then locked the door at the top of the stairs, but I did not tell him that I was sealing him in. I did not want to risk him leaving.
First, I wanted to pick up Mattie and David. I needed some witnesses. I wanted to make sure that someone from the outside world knew about Peter and me. What if Peter failed to believe my story—what if he turned on me in anger—I thought. Murder needed witnesses. It had only been a week, and Peter was still not quite prepared for the sights that he would see.
I left him for several hours but returned later with Mattie and David by my side. I took them into the basement and even into the area beyond the steel door. I explained to them, with a made-up tale, that I was doing an archaeological exploration of a tunnel created by the pharaohs and needed the assistance of a student archaeologist. David and Mattie bought it.
Peter refrained from a display of anger, even though he had been locked in a cave for several hours. He gave me a look that said retaliation and then greeted his new friends openly.
“Nice to meet you!” he cordially but artificially greeted.
“Oh, you are English?”—Mattie’s ability to state the obvious made Peter’s eyes shift instantly upward, but he acknowledged her anyway.
For whatever reason, they immediately took to each other—David, Mattie, and Peter. David and Peter became friends as they worked several weeks together in the caves. David labored with his genuineness. He was excited about seeing the ancient relics, although he did not know the full truth about them.
Peter operated with different motives and with a great reluctance. The real reason that Peter played along as the archaeologist was his eagerness to see the promised demonstration of magic and mysticism. He truly wanted to believe, but he needed more proof. He was the typical unbeliever, the man without faith.
Mattie brought us lunches from the cafe on occasion while my wife remained in her seclusion. However, my wife did make one exception to her rule of privacy. My wife, by her own free will and insistence, met with Peter, and they talked briefly. But she remained adamant and still refused to see David or Mattie.
While the men dug below in the caves, Mattie spent most of her time shopping in and exploring Cairo. That was her story. In fact, after pressing her, she said that she had met an Egyptian lady, whom she had befriended at a local market. She called her Nora. She said that Nora had shown her the sights of the city, but she had never taken her to see her family. I suggested that it might be because of her husband’s objections, and I apologized for any prejudice that she might have interpreted from the action.
For several weeks, after the arrival of Mattie and David, Nora showed Mattie around Cairo, while the men acted like professional archaeologists far below the cafe near two cave entrances. There were two major tunnel openings, and they were close together, at the far end of the cave. The cave deepened in depth as it sloped downward, between the steel door and the tunnels. The area in front of the tunnels had a cave ceiling that was about fifteen meters in height, and against both sides of the cave’s walls in this open area were the ancient treasures and artifacts, heaped in huge and unorganized piles on each side.
We dug with great consistency and effort through the blocked tunnels, although we eventually focused on the left one. We used mechanical drills, as well as hand picks, and we proceeded with extreme caution. The further and deeper into the tunnels we went, the more we had to brace and support the tunnel walls and ceiling with wooden beams. We used a method of bracing that Merlin had shared with my father. Merlin had told my father that he had learned the art of cave bracing while he was in the Old West, in America.
I purchased the wood that we used from an international company that discretely brought the wood into a private courtyard beside the cafe and then stacked it in several piles. The courtyard was secluded, surrounded by high walls of thick and decorated stone. In the yard, there were several concealed but accessible holes that led directly to the caves, one of which we used to lower wood or other supplies down to the open area just outside the tunnels. The holes also served as ventilation.
A steel cable lowered the wood down into the cave. It was attached to an electric winch and was set up near the holes. It made little noise but was always explained as “making renovations” if heard by the patrons of the cafe.
High above the tunnels, between the ceiling and the tunnel entrances, there were several smaller holes in the cave wall. I believed that those upper holes led to an area behind the blocked cave entrances, behind the collapsed tunnels. I thought it might serve as a shortcut. In order t
o investigate this theory, we built several levels of scaffolding that reached the upper holes, and I even provided individual climbing kits, composed of gear that was often mixed-up as we tossed our equipment into big bags at the end of the day.
Every day ended with David walking through the laboratory and staring at the tubes of colorful liquid that I did not conceal. I did not feel the need of doing so. Powerful things without the knowledge of their use were powerless.
As to the vials of liquid, I explained to David that they contained various metal ore. It was ore that I had found and melted, using a unique and highly secretive process. I did not tell him of the ancient secrets. I kept him in the dark about all things magic.
As for Peter, I told him to wait a little longer. I gave him the excuse of waiting for some kind of magical or astrological phase—which was a lie. I waited for seven weeks because my wife, the prophetess, had asked me to do so. As I often had found, she was extremely accurate in all of her predictions.
It was on the morning of the seventh day, of the seventh week, that my wife spoke to me her very prophetic words.
“You will show him today,” she advised me. “Today the evil will come, as a disguise. Then the evil will leave, and you must follow it—and take Peter with you,” she advised.
My wife spoke abruptly, similar to how she spoke to Peter when she first met him. Peter had been the exception to her rule of silence. She spoke about two sentences to Peter, but they were words I did not hear. I was in another room for just a moment when they talked. Later, when I asked Peter about his brief meeting with my wife, he simply said that he thought she was potty or barmy. Peter said that she had told him to listen to whatever I said. She said to do it without questioning, or he would fall into some kind of great peril. Peter insisted to me that she was talking bollocks, and he dismissed her admonition.
The evil day that was prophesied started out innocently enough as Peter came to the cafe from his hotel, on his own, in a rented car. I told Peter that it was the day that I would finally show him the mystical power of time displacement. I used the excuse of inappropriate moon phases as the reason for the delay. That was another falsehood of course, but Peter was the sort of man that needed an explanation for everything.
It was about seven when Peter showed up at my door, with his usual and annoying promptness. He immediately invoked a concern about David. I knew that David was always a late sleeper because I usually picked him up with my taxi after ten in the morning. David would not miss us during the experiment, I concluded. We would be gone for a matter of seconds, I thought.
“Don’t worry!” I told Peter. “What I will show you will be for a matter of seconds to them. We will be back in a flash of an eye, a speck in time itself.”—I couldn’t believe I was evoking such a cliché, but I could not resist fanning the flame inside my eager student.
Before we left the cafe for the stairs of the basement, the sight of an apparent and early female customer delayed us. She rapidly approached the front door and was dressed in a black veil and robes. It was two hours before we officially opened the cafe, and the morning light had just started to dispel the darkness in the city. I knew that I would have to explain that we were not open and refuse her service.
I decided that I would be brief but firm, but she uttered some Arabic words and pushed me aside once I unlocked the door. She said that her name was Nora, which struck a familiar chord to both of us. She asked me to lock the door. She had something important to say to us, she insisted. To amuse her, I locked the door, and I prepared myself for what I thought would be a brief request for coffee.
After the door was locked, however, she pulled off her robes, removed her veil, and then took off a wig of full hair. She revealed herself. Nora was, in fact, Dred in disguise, and he started in straight away, as Peter would say.
“Hello, Peter! You forgot about me, didn’t you?”—Dred’s eyes glowed red, and I started to step away and seek a weapon of some kind.
“I don’t think so, Haj!”—he turned to me and twirled me around, with a motion of his right index finger. He stopped me before I could run away. I was briefly frozen and under the control of his powerful telekinetic grip.
“Peter, you were supposed to avenge the death of our Uncle Willie.”—Peter had just begun to see the power of an Anakite, and Dred continued.
“But no matter. I shall tell you the reason for my delay. I had every intention of following you and then killing Haj and getting the stones, but then I saw your friends, David and Mattie. I knew that by waiting I would find out more information about the stones, but I never bargained for meeting dear, sweet, and wonderful Mattie.”—Dred grabbed a spotted cloth on the cafe counter and began to wipe off his feminine make-up.
“Oh the stories she could tell! She knows so much about the past! She knows all about precious stones. I can sense it. Oh, yes! I read her mind! It was difficult, but I read it all the same. Mattie knows the location of many stones. The locations are locked up inside her head,” he said. I was just as surprised as Peter was to hear about the possible secrets that were inside of Mattie’s brain.
What was her connection to all of this?
“Haj! You will take me to your cave, deep below, and then open the portal. You will retrieve a green stone, and the blue and the white one also. I am going to get Mattie’s gold stones of wealth and power. And once I have all of your royal stones, then I will have the power to destroy all of those that were once chosen as favorites by the Living Spirit. I will have my vengeance on mankind. I will repay them for what they did to my people.
“But first, I must go back and get those stones. I know where they are! I saw them in her mind!”
Dred said something about the stones being in a place called Sacramento and in a time of long ago, where there was much gold. That was the moment that I realized what Mattie truly was. Mattie was what the Priests used to refer to as the unknowing traveler. Inside Mattie’s mind was the past of another life. Mattie was from another time or era.
I also connected to what Dred said about Sacramento. I was an avid student of history as well as an archaeologist. Merlin, or Peter’s Uncle Willie, had often told of treasures in the American West. He had used such knowledge to fund the Guardians on more than one occasion. Could it be that Mattie had similar knowledge in her mind, I thought. If Mattie was from the Old West, perhaps she was thinking of simple gold stones and not of ancient relics. Dred must be mistaken. Dred thought that he was going to get the precious royal stones of Gan Eden.
On the other hand, Dred was possibly going down an old but disastrous path, I thought. Just like the miners of 1849, Dred was possibly getting the “fever.” I had to go along with it, and not just because I was forced into doing so. I knew that this quest could have no end but failure for Dred. This was going to be easy, I thought. I had a plan.
“I will show you where the stones are!” I offered, and I led both Dred and a trembling Peter down to the basement, down to the vise and the salmon stone, down to Dred’s most assured demise.
The vise and stone were set up as before, just as I had shown Peter several weeks earlier. I had the blue, white, and green stone that was needed for such a travel to a time past. In addition, in my right pocket, I had a stone of black royal onyx. That stone would be the flaw in Dred’s plans.
The cloud formed again, just as it had done when I first showed the process to Peter. Dred placed his own hand on top of the stones. His deformed fingernails of vertical shapes pushed through his stretched black gloves. He spoke the words as if it meant something important.
“Sacramento! 1905!” he cried out. Dred focused on an image from Mattie’s mind.
The date seemed off to me and not correct, but then again, I had not read Mattie’s mind. Mattie must have stored the location of a gold mine somewhere in her brain. Was it truly in the past? Or, did Mattie simply read a story, or watch a movie. Was that the information that was locked inside her? I dared not take any chance of being wrong. I
stuck my hands in my pockets and backed away from Dred—as if I was giving up.
The image of a brown hill appeared in the cloud and the smell of cattle and their manure filled the basement. The sound of horses could be heard close by and inside the cloud.
“You! Test it first!”—Dred pointed to Peter, who did not quite know what he meant by that. A perturbed Dred waved his fingers, and instantly Peter’s watch came off his hand and flew into Dred’s hand. He tossed it into the cloud, and we all saw the watch sitting on the dirt, just inside the cloud. Dred again spoke to the frightened Peter.
“Pick it up!” Dred barked his orders. “Now, man, now!”
Peter feared a finger of doom. Nervously he reached into the cloud and picked up the watch.
“Excellent! It works!”—a satisfied Dred, who held a rested left hand on the stones in the vice, then placed one leg into the cloud. He stepped on the grass on the other side of the cloud. He then picked up the blue, white, and green stones. He left the salmon stone in the vice. The cloud kept its shape, and it did not disappear.
“I bid you goodbye!” he exclaimed. “And when I return, in a matter of seconds, I will let you both watch as I destroy all of mankind and take my vengeance out on this second and most evil creation! Then I will kill you—or perhaps make you slaves—if you beg me nicely!” The evil in his laugh was interrupted only by my next comment. As Dred moved his other leg into the cloud, I removed the black stone from my pocket and tossed it at Dred, who caught it out of instinct.
“You forgot this stone, old boy!”—I smiled as the cloud quickly dissipated without a trace. All of the stones—the ones the Dred had, and the onyx—fell to the basement’s floor. Dred and the cloud disappeared from our site.
“What just happened?”—Peter went to the vise and waved his hands over it—as if something was there, but nothing was there. The cloud and the evil one were gone, and Peter could not believe all that he had witnessed.
The Royal Stones of Eden (Royal Secrecies Book 1) Page 23