He took a deep breath, straightened his clothes and rubbed his aching jaw. He had not been hurt for a long time. The worst pain he had felt was from the headaches he had been getting since rescuing people from their own minds.
The white glow was descending over the organic landscape, soon it would be the dark time, where tiny luminous slits would open in the skeletal cliffs and casting eerie lights over the seething soft landscape.
Brad, Athan thought clearly.
He needed a door.
An awareness of Belinda’s mind grew in his senses.
Her exit was not a far walk, just further along the ridge.
Good, he needed company, which was a new sensation for him.
Chapter 10
ATHAN STUMBLED THROUGH Belinda’s subconscious and out into the room where she had been working on the computer.
He looked up at the ceiling and cringed as the throb of pain in his face began to flare.
Belinda glared down at him.
He pulled himself up off the floor, panting.
“What the hell, Athan? What did I say about…”
Athan held up a hand apologetically. “I’m sorry, I didn’t have a choice. I need to see Brad.”
Belinda shook her head and turned back to her computer gesturing toward the other room.
When Brad saw Athan enter the room he told him to sit down while he hurried to the kitchen. When he returned he held out two pain killers for him, then handed him a warm mug of chai.
Athan raised a brow at the strong spicy scent of the drink, but gratefully took the two pills.
“She is going through an ‘experimental hot drink’ fad,” Brad said apologetically.
“And what’s that exactly?” Athan muttered as he took a sip of the fragrant tea.
“It involves buying a whole collection of different teas and coffees and forcing them on me, like I’m a guinea pig,” Brad said with a smile. “I don’t really mind. Trying new things is good. It keeps things interesting while we are locked in this dungeon so much of the time. Plus it takes her mind off her Uni work.”
“This chai stuff is pretty damn good.”
“Glad you like it. Personally I find the scent more attractive than the taste,” Brad sipped.
Athan sat back into the lounge and rubbed his temples and closed his eyes. “Despite all this craziness,” Athan said after a couple of sips, “I’ve really enjoyed hanging out with you again. I think I became accustomed to being lonely,” he said as he watched Brad collect a few papers before taking a seat on the lounge opposite.
“Like when we found you?” Brad said fondly. “Ian and I were so proud of what we were building. And the work it took to track you down was tedious.”
Athan chuckled. “Yeah, I knew how to hide in a hurry. Thankfully, I still do.” Athan became grave. “I had to do it again.”
“PHC got wind of you?” Brad said straightening himself with interest.
Belinda stepped out of the bedroom with her empty mug and looked at the serious expressions on the faces of the two men.
“Well you boys look glum. Do you need toasties to cheer you up?” The two men stared up at her like starving puppies. “Seriously, you guys are making them on your own though. I’m out of depressionville.” She gathered a few notebooks from near one of the televisions and slid them into her backpack.
Athan stifled a laugh, and Brad smiled broadly.
“I think we can handle it.” Brad nodded.
“Doubt it, babe.” Belinda chuckled. “This guy knows everything except what we have in the fridge.” She gestured at Athan grinning on the lounge. “Ham and cheese. Middle shelf. See you later.”
“Perfect. Thank you,” Athan said.
Belinda collected her Uni books and her backpack and left the two men to talk.
Athan took a deep breath. “It wasn’t PHC. It was that black figure in the other plane.”
“It’s real then?”
“He’s real, and I’m fairly sure it was a person. He was wearing a mask and he was dressed like a monk.” Athan reached for a pencil and the note pad that was on the desk beside the lounge. He sketched the character as best as he could remember, then handed the pad to Brad who looked at it with curiosity.
“You haven’t forgotten how to draw Athan, it’s very good. This is your mystery figure? He looks like one of those faceless creatures from the deeper realm you described, but this is not the first time I’ve seen this.”
“You recognise him?” Athan was shocked.
“I recognize this.” Brad drew an invisible circle around the sketch. “This symbol, this character. It is old, very old.”
Brad turned to one of his monitors and lowered it and began to type into a search bar.
A collection of images loaded.
Brad clicked on one.
It was a stone frieze from a Mayan temple.
He clicked on another image and dragged it next to the first. It was another stone frieze from a Hindu temple.
Lastly he opened a third image. It was a Byzantine mosaic.
A figure appeared robed in two of the images and dressed in bone in the Mayan frieze. Its face was blank.
“That’s him, Brad, that’s the guy. Why is he depicted here?” Athan’s eyes were wide as he examined the detail.
“In the religions of nearly all societies there are two polar opposites. Light and dark. Good and bad.”
Athan nodded.
Brad continued. “This guy is in nearly every religious text or narrative on the planet. He is not the embodiment of evil; he’s not one of the four horsemen. He’s the initiator.”
“Initiator?”
“Well, that’s not what he is called, that was his job description. He or it has been labeled many things by many different cultures, but his job was always the same. He would appear and bring the dark with him. He was the herald of the end times. Bringer of the Dark. The Preist of Pestilence. This character represents the beginning of great change and upheaval in human society.” Brad examined the sketch Athan had made again. “This is not good.”
“Is this the same guy? The Bringer of the Endtimes?” Athan nodded to the screen.
Brad shrugged. “The character has been written about since the beginning, but it may not be an actual person. As far as I’ve seen it is simply a symbol of change.” Brad rubbed at his short beard. “Unless someone is using this symbol as their identity.”
“He spoke to me too, Brad. He knew me, by name, and he knew about The League. He said he had been hunting us.” Athan sat back and sipped again. “He said I’ve been Undoing all of our hard work.”
Brad raised his brows. “Our, there is more than one, or an organization. Do you think he could be part of the kidnapping?”
“I’m fairly sure of it.”
Brad nodded. “Well, it looks like we are dealing with a harsh chap. He’s obviously a human if he is coordinating this with other people. And they are operating in our world, not your metaphysical one. He is human or Post-Human. Most likely the latter.”
Athan nodded.
“He attacked me, and he threw one hell of a punch. Said he was going to kill me, so I bolted.” Athan prodded at his face where it still stung. “I didn’t want to battle to the death or anything. I wasn’t entirely sure who or what he was.”
“Sound move,” Brad said. “Using repressed memories to entomb someone in an infinite loop of their own self-loathing, that’s evil genius stuff. And how did he and his friends get these particular people to start with, given their social roles?”
“Social roles?”
“Yes. International corporate representation, social psychology, Fair Trade… I bet the guys in the first list you were given are just as big. Do you have it?” Brad cleared the screen and brought up a search menu.
“Umm…no, but I remember the names,” Athan said, searching his brain.
“They were at two different Melbourne hospitals,” Athan muttered as he tried to remember.
“Wha
t were the others doing in a Ballarat hospital? They clearly didn’t have business here, they were city big shots.”
“Andrew Campbell, Mary Killroy, Donald Stakes and Anton Netsche. They were all different scenarios except for Campbell. His was the one with the dad’s guitar and killing the cat, which I saw twice. And Li and Kallet both shared the one with the dog.”
“Right,” Brad said as he typed and scanned text. “Killroy is in marketing, high up, British. Mr Stakes is…advanced IT, communications and so on. So is Campbell. And Netsche is radiology, robotics, experimental science…quite a veteran in technology pushes.”
“This seems a bit coincidental,” Athan said shaking his head.
“It is also too much of a coincidence that this has happened,” Brad pointed to a section in the text.
After returning from a three month business trip Mr Donald Stakes, IT developer in Melbourne, New York and Beijing, was brutally stabbed by youths at the airport carpark…
Brad nodded to another section. “And this…”
Ms Kendra Thompson found dead today from suspected drug overdose, in a dilapidated house that police raided today…
Brad typed more names into his search, and they both looked in shock as they noticed people that Athan had been freeing were simply disappearing. Mary Killroy got as far as Heathrow in London before dying in a taxi accident.
“It looks as if someone is cleaning up their mess. This is some kind of big time criminal activity, and you have got yourself caught up in it, Athan.”
“Cleaning up a mess. That’s what the Bringer of the End Times said. Shit. It’s like The League all over again. The drama the intrigue, the high stakes… I forgot how fun the crime fighting business was,” Athan said rubbing his temples.
Brad sat back and nodded.
Silent, with glazed eyes.
He was thinking again.
“I wonder how high it goes?” Brad said finally.
Athan grunted, a response which got Brad’s attention. He watched the way Athan rubbed at the sides of his head.
“You never used to be affected by your mind hopping, Sleepwalker. How long have been suffering from those headaches?”
Athan shrugged. “About as long as I’ve been messing around in the minds of these coma patients, I guess.”
“These may be linked. Maybe extracting people from comas is affecting you.”
“There’s something else Brad.” Athan sat forward. “James Kallett. I questioned him after I got him out. He had a subconscious scenario the same as David Li and he told me wasn’t trapped in a memory. He remembered being at work before he woke up in hospital.”
Brad rubbed at his short beard while looking thoughtful. “So you think that these scenarios are synthetic?” He began to enter new words into the search bar on his computer.
“Well, yeah, I guess so, but is that even possible? To craft a subconscious entrapment that masquerades as a repressed memory?” Athan drained his mug and set it back on the coffee table. “Hard core.”
“I’m searching now. I haven’t heard of it before, but you never know. The Internet is very big,” Brad said as he frantically typed away.
“Do you expect to find something helpful on the Internet?”
Brad shrugged. “This isn’t just the Internet. This is a search engine that can bypass any firewall and can explore any hard drive that is in a device with Internet access. It is called Shadownet. The people I got it from made me jump through hoops, but it’s worth it.”
“Who gave it to you?”
“A man named Caesar, at Ledbrook Tech.” Brad typed and scanned text again.
“Not familiar to me,” Athan said taking off his shoes and getting comfortable.
Brad shrugged. “Nor to anyone really. That’s why I had to earn his trust first.”
The search loaded and Brad scrolled down the column of text.
“Here! There was some experimentation in this area, not entirely the same, from the sixties and seventies. It looks as if it was linked to the influence of hallucinogens and psychedelics. Then it appears again after the Vietnam War with experimentation with antipsychotics, trauma and some hallucinogens. After that it was reduced to whispers of government experimentation on controlled populations in Third World countries. The last ten years it has been totally under the radar, but suspected. This is interesting…” Brad trailed off.
“What?” Athan asked.
“Three names are mentioned at various times; names you are acquainted with. Anton Netsche, David Li and Mary Killroy. They are fairly spread out over a period of about forty years, but this fits. The puzzle is beginning to come together.” Brad smiled widely.
Athan strained to read the text on the screen from the lounge. “Wow, okay this is getting crazy. Mind control and stuff, creepy.”
“There could be a chance then, that there is a link between your headaches and these patients,” Brad said smiling and nodding toward the screen.
“Yeah?”
Why is he so excited when he reads bad news?
“These people are tied to this experimental research. Synthetic memory is not listed, but would not have been overlooked during their testing.”
“Why are they the ones winding up in hospitals unconscious with mind tampering?” Athan sat back into the lounge and rubbed at the sides of his head again.
“My friend, maybe these headaches of yours are a side effect or residue from the tampering?” Brad suggested. “It is a possibility Athan, and the only one I can think of, besides a run of the mill headache.”
Athan shrugged and looked at the columns of text on the screen again.
“Wait! Look here!” he pointed it out.
…and was attended by a number of different experts and analysts in the field of psychology and psychiatry as well as recognized psychics and mediums for different perspectives and some additional tests. These experts were drawn from a worldwide pool that spanned as far as Denmark, Turkey and Australia.
“Could they have consulted our old mate Dan in this? This is nineteen seventy eight, he would have had a career working with the police by then, he would have been ‘recognised’.” Athan looked to Brad for confirmation.
Bradly nodded slowly and stared at the text on the screen. “Dan Dangerous has more to do with this mess than he let on. He’d seen the deeper realm and ‘The Blind’ at some stage during his career, and that’s the reason why he didn’t want to search for guilt in the minds of the murder suspects. Maybe that wasn’t all; maybe this is when he saw the things that frightened him out of working for the police. He was involved in some seriously messy mind penetrating experimentation, and I don’t think these psychics were brought in just for perspectives or expert opinions. People don’t believe in this stuff, or they don’t want to. The only reason they would have been gathering people like this is if they were working on something new, or something they didn’t understand. Science doesn’t acknowledge psychics as professionals.” Brad took a deep breath. “These people were meddling with human minds in a very dangerous way. I’m guessing that they were experimenting on Post-Human minds as well. And I bet Daniel Carl knows a lot more about what’s going on than he told you.”
“I think you might be right,” Athan agreed.
“I think Mr Carl deserves a second visit. I’m coming with you this time,” Brad said as he got up from the computer.
Athan was surprised that Brad wanted leave his little hideaway, but he nodded his head in agreement.
Brad didn’t want feel like he was on the outside of something this big.
Chapter 11
FOR THE SECOND time Athan pushed his way through an unkempt garden to get to the old wooden front door of Daniel Carl, AKA Dan Dangerous.
He knocked loudly, to make sure the old man had heard. “Hello? Dan?”
There was no answer.
“Maybe he has run away after all,” Brad said as he tried to peer into a window. Athan stood on the step with his head tilted, breathing deeply.
“Or he is refusing to answer. He’s been here today, I can tell that much,” Athan said closing his eyes.
“How?”
“I can sort of feel him,” Athan said turning around and concentrating. “He has a mental discharge, like he’s been leaking water.”
Brad raised his brow. “I didn’t know your abilities gave you that kind of insight.”
“Well, mostly they don’t, but this guy, he’s leaving a trail like a snail. I don’t know why, I didn’t see it earlier. Maybe that’s why he tries not to move far from the house. He can probably see it himself.” Athan looked about the garden. “So if he left the house…”
“He would have left a trail.” Brad finished. They both walked around the house getting wet feet as they trudged through grass.
The back door gave them a clue; it was the same kind of residue that Athan had picked up on at the front door.
“He went down here, to the creek,” Athan said as they picked their way down an old track.
And there he was.
Daniel Carl sat on an old tree stump beside the creek with a little fishing rod in his hand. He nearly fell off when he saw the two men marching down the dirt path.
“Mr Harper? You’re back. You scared the crap out of me!” Dan said.
“I doubt that,” Athan said smiling. “You left some very interesting parts out of your story, Mr Carl, parts we need to hear. I brought a friend. This is Brad Lewis.”
“Like us, I noticed. Another guy from The League, eh?” Dan smiled and nodded, impressed. “How have I earned the pleasure of your company?”
“We have got ourselves mixed up in something big old man, and you are either part of it, or you know about it. We noticed that you took a little international trip in ‘78. What were you doing in Utah?” Brad asked, not wasting any time.
“Straight ta the point. I respect that. But ya talk funny. You English or somethin?”
Brad ran his hand back through his shoulder length hair. “Call it a disability, Mr Carl.”
The Post-Humans (Book 1): The League Page 11
