Irrefutable Proof: Mars Origin I Series Book II

by Abby L. Vandiver

  “Would you like a glass?” he asked me, as he lifted his to drink.

  “No, thank you. I don’t drink.”

  He nodded, and wiped the corners of his mouth with the cloth napkin. Then he told me about Göbekli, the Library at Alexandria, and about Mithraism and their secret underground caves. How these places housed the information for thousands of years, in their attempt to keep it safe until someone discovered it.

  “I saw a Mithraeum at Yale’s Art Gallery. No one knows anything about the Mithra,” I said.

  “The Mithra were keepers of the knowledge that had been passed down,” he said, fork midway to his mouth. “They were not a group of religious zealots. The caves, I’m told, were reminiscent of the underground tunnels of their homeland. That’s why no one knew what went on inside of them, or what the Mithra did. It was not yet time for the knowledge, held since the migration, to be revealed so they kept it secret.”

  “Were they the descendants of the Ancients?” I asked.

  “Ancients? If I understand what you mean, then yes, they were.”

  And over dolce of tiramisu, I found how Nikhil had dedicated his life to reading and researching to find all the clues to read the Book of Knowledge. How he looked for information, or a person that knew of our ancient past. But never, he said, did he find a story that came close to the truth, until he had read my book.

  “So, then you know people who can read the Voynich Manuscript?” Then I thought about what I had just heard. “Wait, you know people that know about the migration, don’t you?”

  “The answer is no and yes. No, I don’t know anyone who can read the Voynich Manuscript. If I did I wouldn’t have had to, as you say, ‘stalk you’. And yes, I know people that know about the migration. I know about it, yes?”

  “Then, these people can help me.”

  “No. We cannot.”

  “What! Why?”

  “Because they won’t say what they know until proof has been provided. They will not reveal themselves, because then their secret would be out and nothing can back up their claims. They will be like the Erich von Dänikens of the world. So we are counting on you.”

  “Don’t count on me.”

  He smiled and poured himself another glass of wine.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Cleveland Heights, Ohio

  I didn’t really trust that Father . . . uhm, that Nikhil Chandra. He wasn’t a priest, I didn’t think. How do you lie about that? But he sure knew a lot of stuff about all the things I had discovered. Still he had said that he would be of no help to me unless I provided proof.

  Well, wasn’t that what I had been trying to do for the past nine months? Get proof?

  Practically getting killed in the process.

  We all were all in my living room. Claire, Mase, Greg, and me. Addie was on Skype, something I made Claire learn to use. Although I was trying desperately to find advanced technology used by people thousands of years ago, I wasn’t all that keen on using it myself. I was happy with an electric typewriter, a rotary phone and a transistor radio.

  “Now you can decipher the book,” Mase said. The three of them were standing over me where I sat on the couch, flipping through the pages of the copy of the Voynich Manuscript I had received in Italy.

  “No,” I said, hesitantly. “I can’t decipher the book.” I may have had a copy of it, but Mase was terribly confused if he thought that meant I was going to one day be able to read it.

  Everyone looked at me with disbelief and questions etched into their faces. I glanced down at the screen on the laptop – yep, so was Addie.

  When I got back home from Italy with my copy of the book, no one cared to hear about my experiences. They couldn’t have cared less about Nikhil Chandra’s story. All they wanted to know was how fast I could decipher the Voynich Manuscript so I could tell them what our ancestors knew.

  “There is no way to decipher the book,” I said. “At least for me to decipher it.”

  “Then why did you go get it? Why did we go back to Jerusalem, almost get killed, for the other stuff. Why did we need Dr. Sabir’s research notes and Hannah Abelson’s interpretations? I don’t understand.” Greg was sounding pretty upset.

  This is one of those times that I really believed that Greg was going to choke me. He had threatened to do it all my life, but now I could almost feel his grip . . .

  “Yeah, I don’t understand this at all,” Addie chimed in.

  “C’mon, you guys. I went to Jerusalem because I thought Dr. Sabir had figured out the clues. Maybe the Voynich Manuscripts has something to do with this, I’m not sure. But you really didn’t expect that I would be able to decipher an unknown language that no one, and I mean no one, has been able to decipher in hundreds of years.”

  “Uhm, we kind of did,” Greg said.

  “Thanks, Greg.” The one time he has any confidence in my abilities, it really was something that I couldn’t do.

  “How do you propose, Justin, to find out what the book says?” Greg asked.

  “I’m going to find someone who can read it.”

  “You mean a Martian?” This time it was my own husband turning against me.

  “Yes,” I said quietly, almost in a whisper. “A Martian.”

  Greg and Mase turned, almost in step with one another, walked over to the couch and sat down. Addie glared at me, her face the size of the 19” monitor. Claire came and sat next to me, as if she thought she might have to help defend me from an attack.

  “So, who’s going to go and help me find a Martian?” I said, and grinned.

  “Justin.” Greg, staring at me, said my name and nothing else, then he looked over at Mase, shook his head, and noisily sucked in a breath. I could see the veins near his temple pulsating.

  “Justin.” This time it was Mase that said my name. “How are you supposed to find a Martian? It just isn’t possible.”

  “Do you actually think that you know where a Martian lives?” Greg’s look of disgust had morphed into something that was beginning to resemble amusement. “Do you actually think, and I’m feeling really frustrated about this because you had me, after all of this, starting to believe your theory about man’s origins. But do you actually think that what you’re saying is sane? That you think that you know where to find a Martian?”

  “No. She doesn’t know where a Martian is,” Addie’s voice blared through the speakers. “Because there aren’t any Martians.”

  “Yeah there are,” I said, looking around at everyone. “And I know where to look for one, too.”

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Of course there was no such thing as Martians. I only said it like that because that’s the way the conversation was going.

  Man. Human beings. Homo sapiens. That’s who lived on Mars. Us. They all knew that, too.

  So it wasn’t as if I were looking for a “Martian.” I didn’t have to go out and find an alien. I just had to find people who hadn’t forgotten the knowledge man came to this planet with. The ones Nikhil Chandra talked about.

  That shouldn’t be so hard.

  Right?

  Nikhil said they existed. I knew what to look for. Easy. I figured out who I thought they were, and then found there were plenty of them around.

  Uncontacted people.

  Uncontacted people were part of Dr. Sabir’s research. Finding a remnant of the people who had come to this planet from Mars was something he had written in his notebook.

  I sat alone in my study. I looked out of my French doors, my mind wandering.

  Dr. Sabir had written that in order to find people who could read the manuscripts, we need only to look for groups of isolated people. Lost tribes. Communities of people who had not taken part in global civilization.

  Few people had remained totally uncontacted by the world, but there were more people than anyone would imagine that had not been tainted by outside influences. And they lived all over the globe.

  I narrowed it down to two that I thought could actually
be “the Martians.”

  The Sentinelese people were my first guess. They had been isolated for more than sixty thousand years. Sixty thousand.

  Hard to imagine.

  They were believed to be the last pre-Neolithic tribe in the world to remain isolated. They had lived among themselves for fifty-eight thousand years before Christ was born. Millennia before the oldest stories of the Bible. They may have witnessed the whole thing. Maybe even been a part of it. Maybe, I thought, their ancestors were the ones brought down on spaceships.

  The Sentinelese lived near India. I believed the Indian race was the one that was originally meant for this planet. So it made sense that they could be the people I was looking for.

  They lived on North Sentinel Island.

  I glanced over at my bookshelf at my big, awkward-to-get-down atlas, and wished for a smaller version. Instead, I turned to my computer and Googled a map of Asia.

  Andaman Islands. Located right there, in the Indian Ocean. I touched it with my finger. In the eastern part of the Bay of Bengal. It was just a dot in a sea of blue. A teeny-weenie speck.

  And there were only about two hundred and fifty or so of them.

  Was that all that was left of the Ancients?

  Another fact that had made them my number one choice was their language. Their language was considered unclassified. And, those few from the outside that had had contact with them had come back to say that they spoke a language that is markedly different from any other language on Earth. It was uniquely their own. It was even completely different from other languages in the Andamans.

  The Sentinelese were hunter-gatherers. No one had found any evidence of them having either agricultural practices or methods of producing fire.

  They didn’t use fire.

  It was what the Ancients had wanted. For us to be devoid of advanced knowledge. Only, if it had not been for the Saboteurs, we would all be like the Sentinelese. We might never have had the knowledge that sets us apart from all other species of animals.

  But what made me leery of them as the contacted people were their features. They were closer to being classified as negrito peoples than mongoloid. They were, in comparison to other Indians, short, most less than 5’5”, they had dark skin and “peppercorn” hair, characteristics that were more common to the continent of Africa than the country of India. Didn’t quite go with what the AHM manuscripts said, but still a very good choice.

  My second choice of uncontacted people were the Apurinã. They lived in Amazonas, a state of Brazil, located in the northwestern corner of the country. Close to the Peru border. Peru was the home of the Nazca Plains, and I knew that had something to do with the Ancients.

  I felt the area was right. It was in the New World, where lots of Indians were found. They were definitely the right race. They were Awarak, some of the ones I pegged when I first translated the manuscripts as being the “one race.” And the Jesuits, in the mad dash to evangelize the Indians, had founded several Spanish missions in the Amazon territory. The Jesuits were the ones that had the Voynich Manuscript right before ole’ Wilfrid got his hands on it. Indians. Voynich Manuscript. Jesuits. It all made sense. It gave the Apurinã tribe another check in their box.

  The problem with them was that the Apurinã language (also called Apurinã), was not an unknown language. If someone could speak their language, and they spoke the language written in the Voynich Manuscript, then someone would have deciphered it by now.

  I Googled Expedia to price tickets from Cleveland to India to Brazil and back. Then I dialed Simon’s number. He said if I needed him, all I had to do was call.

  Chapter Fifty

  Simon Melas couldn’t finish his western style omelet and hash browns he had ordered. He wet his lips, turned up the glass of orange juice to drink, and spilled it down the front of his brown plaid shirt.

  “Shit.” He turned his head around to see if anyone heard him, and grabbed a napkin and brushed it down his shirt.

  Finding out what Justin was working on was one thing, but then Hannah Abelson had wanted too much. All over some stupid notebook sixty years old that Justin had found.

  All those years she had helped him get grant money for his research, all he had to do was keep an eye on Justin. Well, he had. How was he supposed to know she’d written that book? She hadn’t told anyone. Heck, he didn’t even meet her until after she had published it.

  Sure, he knew, he messed up on his own. He had taken the money. Over the years he had taken a lot of money from the grants he received. And when it had been found out that he had taken it, Hannah had promised she’d help clear his name. Until she found out Justin had written that book. Then she’d had no time for him. She had a whole different agenda.

  Hannah wanted Justin dead.

  Being a spy, a liar and thief may be no lesser a sin to murder in God’s eyes, but it was in his.

  Until now.

  Hannah had had a one-track mind. Brushing him off every time he’d tried to call. She had listened when he called and told her Justin had asked about the Book of Enoch. But then no time to talk to him about what he needed.

  Then she just flipped out on him.

  She’d make sure he never got another dime of research money, she’d said. Simon thought back, reflecting on that last conversation he’d had with Hannah. Her last conversation.

  And, she said, he could forget about being the big man at MIT any longer.

  That was just too much.

  He had gone to her house. He just wanted his life back. That’s all.

  He picked out several diced tomatoes on his plate and pushed them around with his fork. His reputation was shot to hell. And not being able to get government grants for his projects meant he was out of work. No funding, no excavations, no traveling. No nothing. He had needed Hannah.

  Surely anyone would understand how a man could crack under that kind of pressure.

  His hair in a ponytail and wearing tight jeans, he felt everything was tightening around him. He sighed heavily, and jerked off the rubber band that held his hair. He pushed back the plate and buried his head in his hands, his hair cascading down, covering both. His body was suffused with tension. He wobbled his leg back and forth underneath the table, and fought to breathe through the all-consuming knot in his chest. He sat, frustrated at his weakness, a peculiar feeling rising from the pit of his stomach.

  He had been at that table in IHOP for more than an hour, going over what he’d done. He hadn’t meant to do it. She had let him in the side door and from the moment he stepped into her house she had lit into him like a wild woman.

  She had starting marching around her little house in a tirade, acting like Rumplestiltskin. It seemed like she was already upset when he got there. She started shouting that she would kill Justin, and she would kill him, too. Then she turned and glared at him, calling him a little chicken-shit.

  She was crazy, he’d thought. Who did she think she was?

  She sat down in that big chair of hers, she was such a tiny woman, and it looked like it could swallow her up. She’d been furious, her face beet red, and she was out of breath from her rant. She was taking in deep breaths through her nose. He could see her chest rising and falling, trying to suck in enough air.

  What if she couldn’t get any air?

  A pillow was right there. All he had to do was put it over her face . . .

  “Can I get you anything else, sir?” The waitress stood over him.

  “No.” He snapped at her without lifting up his head.

  Now what to do about Justin?

  He lifted up his head. Reaching over, he picked up the pepper shaker and screwed off the top. He poured half of it onto the table in a little pile. Then he turned and called the waitress, telling her to bring him a pot of coffee.

  He leaned down close to the pile of pepper. Holding his hair back, he blew it, the granules scattering across the table.

  It was Justin’s fault that he wouldn’t get his reputation back, or his ability t
o get more money restored.

  I’ve already killed once . . .

  He’d arranged the trip to North Sentinel Island for Justin. And then it was off to Brazil. She had called him. All was well between them, Justin had said. And she needed his help.

  That created two opportunities to get her back for what she had done to him.

  The only problem was that she was dragging along one of her siblings. That brother of hers, Greg, he had met him in Israel, and he had seemed to be very protective of her. Brazil would be the best place. Simon knew the terrain there better. He thought he could make a more realistic “accident” of it there. But he’d try when they got to India, too.

  He had tried to talk to Justin before she went to Israel, to get her to stop whatever she was doing that was consuming Hannah. Instead of listening to him, she had accused him of trying to shoot her. It hadn’t been him, at least not that time.

  Maybe, he considered, he should’ve pushed Justin a little harder to get her to stop. Maybe he wouldn’t be sitting at IHOP a murderer if he had. But that probably wouldn’t have helped, Hannah had seemed so determined.

  And Justin was just as determined. Even after he’d sent her that warning written in Sanskrit, telling her if she wanted to live she needed to give up whatever she was trying to do. But she just wouldn’t listen. She just wouldn’t stop.

  What could be so important?

  It didn’t matter anymore. Hannah hadn’t helped him because of Justin, and Hannah got what she deserved. Now, so would Justin. And then he would just disappear.

  He pulled a napkin out of the holder, wiped his hands, and threw it on top of the half-eaten omelet. He pulled a twenty out his pocket and threw it on the table just as the waitress came back with his carafe of coffee.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  We set off for India.

  It was just me and Greg. Simon was going to meet us there.

  Claire had a 3-day conference at the Cleveland Medical Mart downtown. Addie couldn’t come with us, either. But with her ready reference to a book, whose premise she believed appropriate for the situation, she had told me to look for our Kipling’s Mowgli. Someone raised by the Sentinelese but who remembered the ways of “contacted” people.