Chronicles of Ara: Perdition

by Joel Eisenberg

  She reflects on her visitor from a few days ago—Freak. “But, sir, there’s only one muse, and—”

  He looks up, and without pause, “You know that, how?”

  “Know what?” she bluffs. It’s a test, and I almost blew it.

  “This is what I miss when I wax nostalgic about having you as my student. I really wanted to graduate you. You’re the most unpredictable student I’ve ever had.” He draws a breath and widens his grin. “No matter. Congratulations again, Ms. Ghioto.”

  “Thank you, sir.” She bites and tears the inside of her lower lip and tongues away the blood, suddenly praying to that very singular goddess that she really did not expose herself. In any way. Because she does indeed believe the words she heard from the strange woman who lied on her couch. She just does. If she drank, maybe she wouldn’t. But she does, and to deflect her slip, she coughs and laughs in mock embarrassment and emotion.

  SING SING CORRECTIONAL FACILITY,

  OSSINING, NEW YORK

  Warden’s office. Only Charlie and the warden are present. Charlie sits and is again shackled.

  “I do appreciate you coming to your senses,” the warden says.

  “Really, do you think I give a damn?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Regardless, I appreciate the magazine interview.”

  “Okay. I’m glad you appreciate it.”

  “Whoever has read it believes X was interviewed from prison, and frankly, to a person, your words are indistinguishable from the real thing.”

  “I’m thrilled.”

  “I want to know how.”

  “How what?” Charlie asks.

  “How are you able to so closely mimic X?”

  Charlie considers the question, then, “Respectfully, send me back.”

  “Send you back? Am I missing something?”

  “We’re both wasting time here, and I will not answer any more questions to—”

  The warden strikes him with a billy club to the side of his head, just below the base of his skull.

  Charlie instantly loses consciousness.

  ASCENSION

  AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION (B OF C)

  “And . . . Social Archeologist Selu Hobbin, Segment One. Ladies and gentle-men, good evening. My name is Empyrean, and I am your host for Hotseat, the locus of science and spirituality and cable television’s only live under-ground gab fest for freethinkers, by freethinkers. Empyrean, from the ancient medieval Latin empyreus as adapted from the ancient Greek empyrus, meaning in or of fire and the location of the highest heaven. You may know the name from Dante’s Divine Comedy as God’s domicile and the source of all creation and light.”

  “Are you familiar with the boy they call X?”

  “I am most familiar,” Selu states.

  “Have you read him?”

  “I have. This is why I say I am most familiar.”

  “And you say discounting him would be a grave mistake. Why?”

  Selu clasps his hands as he answers. “Are you familiar with the concept of the Abeyance, as the boy explains in his writings?”

  “I am.”

  “Are you also familiar with the concept of the earth’s five mass extinctions?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Please explain.”

  “I consider myself a social archaeologist.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning I look at the larger picture. Finders like myself, we’re not your garden-variety Indiana Jones type. As social archaeologists, we attempt to define societies based on the work we discover as opposed to exclusively studying the artifact as a curio. Does that make sense?”

  “In other words, you wouldn’t be the one looking for the Lost Ark unless there was a bigger concept you were identifying.”

  “A model for a society, or a culture,” explains Selu, “may be partially identified, maybe as yet identified, within which that Ark is but a piece. That object would be our nucleus from which we build outwards. Correct?”

  “Go on.”

  “So, the Abeyance X speaks of is equivalent to a mass extinction event. Equivalent, not equal. Not the same. Similar. In his description, the world pauses and corrects itself. In extinction, the world sheds its excess skin, so to speak, and corrects itself from there. Goes back to Darwin and Survival of the Fittest. Again, a similar concept. We learn as a society, as a world, to do without, and yet the planet continues to spin as if nothing happened. And so we exist in a world without dinosaurs, wooly mammoths, prehistoric man, etcetera.”

  “Caused by . . .”

  “Nature as a cause and effect? I don’t subscribe to anything super-natural, just me, so I need to ascribe some of my blame to man. There are always natural occurrences and systems—asteroids, meteors, and other destructive or potentially destructive cosmic events—and some that we have yet to identify, but for the sake of argument let’s also say global warming, hunting, pollution, the clearing away of rain forests . . . you get my drift. Man is not innocent, and there is so much more we could be doing to sway these results.”

  “But the Abeyance as X describes it can take place over shorter periods of time, isn’t that what he says? How many abeyant events have there been, according to him, do you recall?”

  “I do not. As I said, the events may be similar, but they are not the same, so I don’t spend too much time thinking about it, to be frank. I’m also not convinced that his work is not metaphoric—he does fancy himself a writer—but that may be an idea for another day.”

  “May I ask you this question—”

  Selu laughs. “It’s your show.”

  “What have we lost so far?”

  “That’s a big question.”

  “That’s why they pay me the big dollars.”

  “Should I say I’ll answer only if you make a donation to—”

  “See me after the show.”

  “Okay, I’ll do that. Easiest let-down I ever had.” The host smiles. “Some estimates,” Selu continues, “have the extinction event of 250 million years ago—the Permian-Triassic event—at a loss of 96 percent of marine species, followed by the loss of 70 percent of land species.”

  “Nintey-six percent.”

  “That was our worst in terms of loss. Now many say our sixth mass extinction is beckoning, which they are calling the Holocene Extinction, due to some recent anomalies that X in part has brought to our attention. He says our present issues are due to human activity—and then he gets into his fantasy stories about the influence of the muse, and then we have the other gods and dragons and so forth—but he’s not wrong in his thinking. Shift is happening. The extent of that shift may well be man’s responsibility, but the breadth of this event is in question.”

  “But, as a social archeologist you still dig up bones and such.”

  “Yes, I still dig up bones.”

  “Any clues?” asks Empyrean.

  “Working on it.”

  “Do you agree with X?”

  “Working on it.”

  “Is there anything at all you could tell us now about Holocene—”

  “You have to understand, I’m not being facetious when I say I’m working on it. I don’t know yet, and the difference between the boy and myself is I’m not an alarmist. I take another view entirely, and I’m still working on my conclusion. For example, we knew nothing of extinction as a concept until the early nineteenth century, when we realized the bones we discovered couldn’t be explained. The consensus was if the creatures, such as the wooly mammoth, still existed, they would be found. This is how simple this concept was once.”

  “Surely.”

  “What’s worrisome is this: The Permian-Triassic event is considered by many respected scientists to have been caused by a substantive volcanic eruption that released unparalleled levels of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We’re doing exactly the same thing now, which is what has many of us so worried.”

  “When was the first such mass extinction?”

  “
The End-Ordovician Extinction some 450 million years ago, which appears to have been caused by a new polar age. The last ended the reign of the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago. The End-Cretaceous Extinction. Asteroids are still blamed for that one, but remember one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m not a scientist,” Selu says.

  “Which makes these proceedings refreshing. I can barely understand you.”

  “Thank you. I think.”

  “Last question, circling back. You may not be an evolutionary scientist by formal definition.”

  “I think that’s been established.”

  “The Abeyance.”

  “Yes?”

  “Purpose?”

  Selu sits back, relaxing for the first time in the interview. That’s the question of the day.”

  “Any thoughts?”

  “Assuming X is right in his theory, and he’s less of a scientist than I—”

  “But brilliant.”

  “But clearly brilliant. It appears that he’s in accord with prevailing scientific thought that something is happening out there now, that appears to be enabled by man himself. Even in his fantasy stories, the corrupted muse can influence but she cannot directly interfere. So while in his version of events man creates art that in turn influences further invention, ultimately leading to the means to destroy ourselves—man is still the culprit.”

  “We need to wrap—”

  “Then man would also be responsible for the Abeyance events he describes as we blame man for our present extinction event. The only apparent difference between his work and my own is how we got here.”

  “So you believe in the Holocene extinction then?”

  “I do.”

  “Let’s talk alchemy, shall we?” Empyrean requests.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Take a look.”

  The following image appears onscreen:

  “Heinrich Khunrath was the artist there; 1606.” Selu says.

  “Can you tell the audience what they and you are looking at?”

  “That would be Khunrath’s rendering of the Emerald Tablet.”

  “Khunrath was an alchemist, correct?”

  “Correct. And a physician.”

  “Alchemy. We’ve heard so much about alchemy over the years,” Empyrean explains. “Author Paulo Coelho wrote one of the world’s bestselling books with the title, The Alchemist. Carl Jung said, quote, ‘Alchemy, as a nature philosophy of great consideration in the Middle Ages, throws a bridge to the past, the gnosis, and also to the future, the modern psychology of the unconscious.’ The English title of J.K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, referring to an alchemical substance capable of turning base metals into silver or gold. Johann Conrad Dippel—”

  “Another alchemist and physician, also a theologian.”

  “Who is said to have inspired, in part, what novel?”

  “Frankenstein.”

  “Exactly. We could do this all day. You as a social archaeologist should agree the answers to the world are found in its connections?”

  “I accept that,” Selu says.

  “As our boy X reiterates over and over in his own long-winded way?”

  “Is that a question?”

  “Answer this instead. Mr. Hobbins, what is alchemy?”

  “Alchemy . . . is the philosophy, a Hermetic philosophy of attaining perfection. Creating the Philosopher’s Stone to transform metals into gold, to use your example with Rowling, the Elixer of Life to attain immortality from mortality—”

  “The opposite consequence of Ara, the muse.”

  “Right. And alchemy incorporates religious and spiritual practice as well as myth and magic, but alchemy also contributed a great deal to the development of much of today’s Western science, such as chemistry, so discounting it entirely as a pseudo-science pays the philosophy a disservice, I think.”

  “Talk to me about the Emerald Tablet,” Empyrean says.

  “A primary alchemic text, appeared first in a book written in Arabic between the sixth and eighth centuries.”

  “And?”

  “And?”

  “Is alchemy a dead philosophy?”

  “Dead? No. Alchemy will never die.”

  “Is the practice anti-religious?”

  “Some may think so.”

  “Of those who do, is alchemy the work of the devil?”

  “Could be.”

  “Could be?”

  “You’d have to ask them.”

  “Do you believe in the devil, Mr. Hobbins?”

  “No.”

  “Demons?”

  “Demons? I’m curious as to the intent of your question.”

  “Every culture has their demons,” Empyrean explains. “The Sumerians had Asag, who sired rock demon spawn from mountains and whose very presence made fish boil alive in the rivers. Do you believe in demons?”

  “We all have our demons.”

  “Are you familiar with the demon named Beleth?”

  “Beleth, no . . . I don’t think so. Should I be?”

  “We’ll be right back.”

  ~~~

  “What was that all about? Were you antagonizing me?”

  “Keeping you on your toes is all. Tension is always a positive on live television. No worries.”

  Selu doesn’t believe a word of it. He refrains from speaking until they’re back on air.

  ~~~

  On air.

  “So you’re heading back to Alexandria, Egypt, on a quest for lost treasures.”

  “I am.”

  “Any parting words on the matter?”

  “Yes. Keep your eyes open, and always speak your truth.”

  “I’m sure there’s more than one meaning there, but, for now, thank you Selu Hobbins.”

  “Thank you.”

  An Open Letter to the Media

  It’s like this. Listen to me. Selu Hobbins is a troll.

  The Library of Alexandria suffered a series of fires for reason, thereby depriving us of unaccountable years’ worth of losses. Losses of literature, thought, math, and who knows what else.

  Pompeii. Ditto, but for our purposes one of the two most significant of the earth’s volcanic eruptions, not necessarily the most important. The other will be disclosed shortly.

  Back to our history . . .

  The world’s five great mass extinctions. Guess what? We had made it to a certain point in our knowledge and then again, and again, lost.

  Lost. Forever. What do we have that made up for what was lost? The Internet?

  The Oracle of Delphi was there before. Pythia. The Greeks, again.

  The great pyramids of Egypt? Created by humans and lost. Writing on cave walls. With apologies to Erich Von Danikan and his ilk? Humans. Lost. Not space aliens. Stonehenge, crop circles . . . etcetera and so forth.

  Why is it that we appear to get to a certain point in our knowledge, and then we suddenly need to scale back and begin again? What is the cause? With all of our modern technology, where will we go from here? What is the danger?

  It has been said forever that man should attempt to “reach for the stars.” However, when that promise appears within reach, we lose it.

  Anyone remember Aryabhata? Doubtful, unless you’re a scholar or in a related business, but in the fifth and sixth centuries, Aryabhata was the first of the great Indian mathematician-astronomers who took religion out of the equation and yet ascribed a theoretical motion of the heavens to the earth’s rotation. Why is he important? Among other reasons, much of his pioneering work has been lost.

  And I ask again, “Why?”

  And before him, even, Noah’s son Ham. Said to have written a book of mathematics with the demon Beleth, a king of hell who ruled over eighty-five legions of demons. Check your grimoires.

  If you believe that sort of thing.

  “Why?”

  I know the answer, and it’s the most deceptively and d
evastatingly simple part of my equation: There is indeed an “Infinity Pass.” It was so-named for reason, and it is about to be compromised. By one of us.

  More accurately, an entity who is about to become “one of us” so that part of your answer is near.

  I know the rest of the answer too. What will happen then? Well, in response, maybe it’s due time that you all listen to me, to take me seriously. Maybe if you show me some respect, I’ll allow you one final chance.

  Maybe.

  Oh, and before I go? Remember this: As the chestnut has that “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” neither was the first realm of the gods.

  Mirkwood.

  The “first realm” being abject truth and not a misprint. Be on the lookout for “Goddess Ode” if you have not seen it already, or otherwise glossed over it earlier within the First Measure of Creation.

  I’ll explain more about this relevance later, but you must understand one more thing. I will not patronize you any further. Make no mistake, what I write and submit from here will be based on your attitude towards this overly respectful entry. Scorn me again, you only have yourselves to blame for what happens next.

  Unheeded warnings remain a fool’s gospel.

  What am I referring to this time, you may ask? Fools, all of you.

  You are where you are today as your imagination has never been policed. Nor should it have been and nor should it be. Ever. The muse’s influence, though, was never challenged. Every creative impulse and every second-guess or censor in the history of man has been at her directive.

  That paradox we’ll also deal with. Later.

  Why?

  As ever . . .

  P.S. Allow me to correct a misleading statement. The muse’s influence indeed has been challenged, but only by a lowly dragon, and he is returning. If you need reminding then I remind you that Taebal was not affected by the first Abeyance. That says something right there.

  That says his appearance in these proceedings is no mere coincidence.

  Guide to light, remember . . .

  You’ve heard it a hundred times, and you’ll hear it a hundred more: There is reason for everything.

  Yep.

  MIRKWOOD

  Nothing has changed.