Progeny

by Shawn Hopkins

  “That’s why you left?”

  “You wouldn’t believe the things I did in those years, Henry. And then to have an Arab convert me to Christianity in Iraq… Everything changed.” The nightmares stopped. “I promised God I would never raise my hand against another human being again.”

  There was silence in the small room for a long moment, and John thought Henry had finally fallen back asleep.

  But then his voice broke the stillness. “Well, then I guess it’s a good thing they’re not human.”

  “Who?”

  “Are you familiar with the Book of Enoch?” He coughed.

  “Not really, no.”

  “Well, it seems to imply that both the giants and their offspring are beyond redemption.” He turned his head toward John. “What do you think, Johnny?”

  “It’s not an authorized book.”

  “The early church considered it inspired, and Jesus, Peter, and Jude all referenced it. The book wasn’t banned by the establishment church until it decided that belief in the physicality of angels should be a heresy.”

  “What do you want to know, Henry?”

  “I had to come here, to this place. I had to know if it was real, what my heritage is. At first, I rather liked the idea of being a descendant of the Titans, from the ‘heroes of old.’ But after what I’ve seen here, what he showed me… John, I need to know if it’s possible for the offspring of angels to find salvation.”

  “All things are possible with God, Henry,” John responded out of habit. But something was nagging at the back of his head, tickling his subconscious. Ignoring it, he asked his brother if he wanted to be saved.

  But he was already asleep.

  SIXTEEN

  Nightfall. 23rd day of May. Bermuda, Crystal Caves

  By the time John joined the others in the aforementioned room, he found them sitting amidst a circle of fifteen other men, some of whom he recognized from the forest. He could tell immediately that whatever the topic of conversation was, it had Paul, Hunter, and Chris wearing expressions of bewilderment. Then he noticed Chadwick sitting a slight distance away from the circle, staring blankly into empty space. Jackson, however, seemed slightly removed from the discussion; perhaps it was Nick’s death weighing on his conscious that was distracting him. John could only guess as to what revelations had been shared with them and how much of their conceived notion of reality had survived the experience.

  “What’d I miss?” John asked, taking in all the new and unshaven faces.

  “These people think that God sent us to save them,” Paul sneered.

  “Save them from what?”

  The oldest man present stood slowly to his feet.

  Hunter quickly leaned over and whispered into John’s ear, “His name’s Samuel.”

  “We will show you.” Samuel’s voice was as uneven as his shaking hands, but there was a passionate purpose still projecting it. And though a fragile man now, many hard years were etched into his sun-darkened features.

  But John was still trying to equate what Henry just told him with what he was seeing in front of him now. “Are all of you from the bloodline…”

  The man shook his head. “No. We are simply the ones who were unfortunate enough to be in their company.”

  “Henry said they’d be looking for him,” John pointed at Chadwick who was still sitting motionless, trapped somewhere inside his own tortured mind and combating his newly discovered lineage.

  “Yes. If he has his blood. But we’ll protect him… or kill him before he can be captured.”

  Chadwick’s eyes flicked up in surprise.

  “Believe me,” Samuel said, “you’d want to die before being turned into one of his slaves.”

  “Slaves?” John maneuvered his backpack, suddenly realizing its presence.

  “His bloodline opens the gateway. The more of them,” he tilted his head toward Chadwick, “he can get here, the more powerful he becomes. But it’s what they come with that he really wants. Men that he can use as slaves, women that he can use to breed giants, and the cargo that he can use to construct his network of sites. Of course, most of us resist… despite what he promises. The women, however, seem incapable of resistance. So we hide them away.” He walked closely by a hanging torch, and John could see even more clearly the effects of his unfortunate lifestyle. “Most of us are hunted down and killed, though more for their amusement than for any threat we might pose to them. For some reason, they leave us alone in the caves. Miraculously, we have been able to exist apart from his experiments for almost four hundred years.”

  “Four hundred years?”

  He nodded, his weary eyes half closing. “After the settlement of Bermuda, when he first began bringing his offspring. But we are not all descendants of those old ships. There are only a few relatives left from those who came before the 19th century.” He reached out and placed a hand against the wall to steady himself. “We don’t feel the need to bring life into this horrible place, to watch it squashed under their feet and eaten over their fires. However, we get lonely and occasionally seek companionship which sometimes results in added life. Those that are then born here are brought up as survivor warriors in the only reality they’ll ever know.

  “Whenever another ship or plane appears, we try to get to the passengers before they do, hide them in the caves before he can get to them. Sometimes we’re successful,” he nodded again at his new guests. “And sometimes we are not. But the pace in which he brings his offspring has lessened greatly. Which tells us that he’s close to completing what he has been constructing for the last four hundred years.”

  “Which is what?”

  “It is difficult to explain, and truthfully, we have no idea how it might work, but think of it as a kind of escape mechanism.”

  John paused in thought, wondering again why everything had to be so illusively vague. “So this ‘he’ that you keep talking about has been trapped here for four hundred years?”

  “No,” he answered. “Much longer than that.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Samuel walked over to John and handed him a small leather-bound book. “The Book of Enoch. One of his offspring had it on him. He passed it into our care before he was taken. It has shed much light on our otherwise uncertain and mysterious existence. It is a tragedy that so many of us have lived and died here with no clue as to why. But I’m sure your friend, Chadwick, can fill you in on what mysteries the ancient book contains.” He looked at the troubled man. “Can’t you?”

  “Sure,” he whispered.

  “We’re not sure how or why, but most of his seed arrives with some prior knowledge of these things. Some kind of genetic bend toward them.” He sighed while taking the book back from him and looking around the room. “I know this is a lot to take in all at once and that you, no doubt, believe it all to be some strange dream that you can simply wake up from. I assure you that this place is real.” He shuffled back to his seat at the circle. “We usually take more time to acclimate our new arrivals, but in your case, we simply do not have the time. God has finally sent salvation to us.” And then he paused. Folding his hands behind his back like he had been a general in some other lifetime, he issued out some feeble orders. “You will accompany some of our men on a mission tonight. It won’t be an easy thing to witness, what they have to do, but it’ll give you an idea of just what this place is.”

  Though Jackson, Paul, Hunter, and Chris were not prone to taking orders from anyone, they realized just how fragile their situation was, that their own salvation might just depend on these people who were actually acclimated to life within this inexplicable world.

  John held up his hand, wondering if the question had already been posed before his arrival. “Who is this man that you keep referring to?”

  The old man’s lips twitched at the corners of his mouth, and he pulled some of his white hair behind an ear as he sat heavily into his chair. “Our predecessors called him… Osiris.”

  ****

/>   The twelve of them were divided evenly between the two boats. John, Chadwick, and Paul were in the lead boat and sharing the company of three islanders, while Hunter, Jackson, and Chris were with three others trailing behind. They were paddling ferociously through the pouring rain, flashes of lightning exposing the reef and open ocean to their right and the coast lingering at a distance on their left. Following the coast into the sound, they would take refuge on a small island lying just off what should be the city of Hamilton.

  If they made it there alive.

  The rowboats salvaged from the graveyard were being lifted fifteen feet into the air, the waves threatening to flip them upside-down and thrust them into oblivion.

  The sky lit up with four branches of lightning, and John was able to make out Paul pointing to something back on the island. But another huge wave was coming, forcing them to position the boat’s bow into the wave. Once the wave passed by beneath them, and after a few more moments of its rolling form blocking the entire island from sight, John was finally able to get a glimpse of what had captured Paul’s attention. “What is that?” he screamed over the weather.

  Another streak of lightning lingered in the sky and turned night into day for a few seconds.

  There was no mistaking what it was.

  It glowed like a diamond in the midst of the storm, an ancient lighthouse from another world.

  Once the sky returned to blackness, and the image faded from the moving horizon, Chadwick’s voice tried breaking through the storm’s wrath. But the wind stole his words before they could be heard, casting them furiously into the rocks that guarded the island.

  ****

  Defying the odds, they actually made it to the tiny island unscathed — an island that, just the other day, resided within Hamilton Harbor. Now they were huddled together in a small cave that flooded every time a huge wave was hurled high enough to reach its entranceway. It was going to be a long, miserable night.

  Chadwick was shaking from the cold, cursing this field trip and the old man who had sent them on it. He thought he should be back in the Crystal Caves, hiding from the creatures that were supposedly looking for him. He was twirling his beard with bone-white, shaking fingers, mumbling about the thing they’d seen from the boat.

  Knowing that Chadwick was on the verge of slipping into despair, John tried distracting him from their situation by asking how the megalithic sites might be used as an escape mechanism and what the summer solstice could have to do with it.

  It seemed to be working so far in stimulating Chadwick’s mind with things not directly connected to their physical condition. “The Egyptian’s entire sky religion was a manifestation of the Hermetic axiom, ‘As above, so below; as below, so above,’” he orated through chattering teeth. “The entire Giza necropolis is a reflection of the sky where Osiris is said to dwell. Even Arab chroniclers in the Middle Ages described the Great Pyramid as being a temple to the stars… Their religion was very dualistic, what happened on earth mirrored by what happened in the heavens and vice-versa.”

  Only half interested in what he was saying, because his own mind was approaching sanity’s drop off, John nodded just to keep Chadwick talking.

  “Sumerian texts tell of an everlasting ground plan that post-flood kings followed in reestablishing the cities of Sumer. In the original Akkadian, Bab-Ili — or Babel — meant ‘gateway of the gods’ and was supposed to be a ziggurat through which the gods were able to enter and leave Sumer. There’s a lot of talk about Ekur — a pointed-peaked house of the gods that was used to bring the Anunnaki to earth — in old Sumerian poems.”

  “Anunnaki?” Hunter asked from somewhere in the darkness.

  “Aliens. Or gods or angels… they’re all probably the same. Anyway,” his teeth clattered, “some think the Great Pyramid was built in place of Ekur, after Ekur was destroyed by the Flood.”

  John rubbed his freezing hands together, blowing warm breath into them. “And how is it supposed to be used as a gateway?”

  “Mentioned in the Coffin Texts is a formula that was used to access the heavens, somehow enabling the initiate the ability to work out or visualize the correct position of the stars from any epoch. There are other texts that describe the Pyramid as being a gateway to another world, too.” His words were growing slower, beginning to slur from the cold. “The whole system was designed as a transporter used to send the Pharaohs back in time to Osiris’ reign. Or, as in the case of the Edfu Texts, the development of the sites was supposed to resurrect the former world of the gods.” He paused. “—religious texts regard the area as a sacred landscape inherited from the gods — Osiris’ cosmic kingdom during First Time was passed down to his son Horus and on to an era of demigods that maintained the sacred body of knowledge — even the Greeks and Romans believed the Pharaohs were guardians of earth’s past ages—”

  And then Chadwick fell silent, presumably falling asleep. No one asked. They just sat staring into the void around them, listening to the crashing waves outside while trying to let Chadwick’s words define what they had just seen.

  ****

  The storm finally seemed to exhaust itself, leaving only the choppy waves beyond the row of small islands to greet the faint glow now rising against the horizon. Though thankful the storm was over, the sun’s soon arrival presented its own challenge — the need to get to the mainland before the morning light could betray their presence.

  “—small pyramid in Brewsterville, Indiana was found in 1879… skeletal remains of person nine and a half feet tall…” Chadwick was mumbling, his eyes staring into nothingness. It didn’t look like he got any sleep, the deep mysteries of this place running like a hamster to nowhere on the wheel that was his brain.

  “You think he’s gonna be alright?” Chris asked Hunter as he prepared to slip off the rocks and enter the dark waters.

  “—in 1925, in Walkerton, Indiana, archeologists dug up eight people that were between eight and ten feet tall, all dressed in copper armor…”

  A big man with an Australian accent grabbed Jackson by the shoulder. “He stays here,” he stated while manipulating a rifle across his back. “He’ll be safe in the cave.”

  Jackson nodded to the man and then looked over to John. “Tell him he’s staying here.”

  “—the Aztec’s capital was built to replicate the island their ancestors came from, and yet only Plato’s Atlantis can offer us such an island…”

  “Chad,” John said, resting a hand on his shoulder. There was no way the archeologist could make the long swim to shore, angel blood in his veins or not.

  Chadwick looked at John as lingering moonlight slipped through the clouds and reflected off the water facing them. “Did you know that the Great Pyramid was made with two and a half million stone blocks, each weighing an average of two point six tons — some even fifty tons?”

  “I didn’t know that,” John answered shortly, turning him by the shoulder so that he was facing the cave’s entrance again.

  “Its total mass is six point three million tons… Its base is a perfect square to within one-twentieth of a single degree, despite the fact that it sits on a raised mound thirty feet high… The sides are equilateral triangles that are locked into the cardinal axes of the planet. Its meridian axis aligns within 1/20th of a single degree to true north and south—”

  “Chad, we need you to stay here.”

  “—the blocks are cut to a point zero one tolerance, and the length of each side is the length of a solar year in cubits. The exact distance, John, from the earth to the sun is geometrically programmed into its architecture, and when adding up the diagonals of the pyramid’s base in inches, you get the number of years in the precessional cycle.”

  John started pushing him toward the cave, hearing the others start to swim away behind him. “Stay here in the cave, Chad.”

  Chadwick grabbed John’s shoulder and squeezed it tight. “Do you understand what I’m saying, John? It’s a model of the northern hemisphere built with a relati
vely new and intricate knowledge of our solar system. Its measurements represent the circumference of the entire earth and stands at exactly one-third of the way between the equator and the North Pole — or at least where the North Pole is now — sitting on latitude thirty. John, the value of pi, phi, and Pythagoras’ theorem was known and used by its builders—”

  “Come on, John!” Paul snapped from the rocky shore.

  “Chad, please, look at me. Stay inside the cave until we come back, okay?” He handed him one of the MP5s.

  “Okay, John,” he said, taking the weapon. “But before you go, did you know that the Great Pyramid was originally covered with a polished limestone face that reflected the sun? It was mostly destroyed by an earthquake in 1301 AD. The benben stone, which is still missing — the reason it’s detached on the dollar bill — was supposedly gold.” And then he turned away from John and climbed up into the cave, again muttering something about the Atlantean wisdom-religion and its great pyramid temple that the initiated priests of the Sacred Feather went out from, building pyramids and temples wherever they went.