The Emissary

by Patricia Cori

  “Hey, man, you know the invite’s always open, if you change your mind. After a good night’s sleep, I bet you’ll be knocking on my door!”

  Just as Nathan waved goodbye, his foot about to step back on the gas, two small blackbirds dropped, simultaneously, out of the sky—right in the middle of the street, between the two men. Before either even had a chance to react, hell unleashed its fury. In one terrifying moment, hundreds of red-winged blackbirds plummeted to the ground, all at once, blanketing the pavement, as if something had zapped them right out of the sky. Not one of them moved. No flutter of wings. It appeared they had been hit by a force so fierce it had killed them instantaneously—in flight.

  “Damn!” Will shouted, having been pummeled on the head and shoulders several times, as the tiny corpses hailed down from the sky and crashed down around him. He stared out at Nathan, dumbfounded. “What the hell?”

  “You get yourself into the house and stay there, until we find out what just happened!”

  Will dropped the hose and walked hurriedly back towards the porch, stepping over dead birds everywhere around him. He felt a strange, gripping fear—a sense of foreboding—rising in the back of his throat. As he turned off the faucet, he looked back over his shoulder at Nathan, mystified, before going inside, and then he slammed the door closed and locked it with the dead bolt. Both of them were incredulous, sensing that something sinister—something ominous and unprecedented—was literally coming down all around them.

  As in a scene reminiscent of Hitchcock’s film The Birds, Nathan drove in a slow crawl to the driveway, trying to avoid the fragile little bodies, but there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of dead birds strewn in every direction. They lined the pavement for as far as he could see down the road ahead of him. Their bodies were smashed against the windshield and the hood of the car and, looking through the rearview mirror, he saw the same black blanket of death, covering the street behind him. He cringed as his wheels crunched over each little bump, praying that the little creatures had died instantly, knowing no pain.

  As he guided the car slowly onto his driveway, he asked himself if Judgment Day had finally arrived, just like the Reverend had warned them—only days before, in congregation. When the automatic door of his garage opened, he pulled the car in, closed the door back down, and went straight inside, through the kitchen. Once in the house, he threw the dead bolt—knowing that whatever had killed those birds wasn’t going to be deterred by locks or closed doors if it wanted in, but somehow it felt like the right thing to do.

  In a quiet little resort town in Maine that same day, Judy Levine prepared a nutritious picnic basket for her and the children, after home-teaching them all morning. Outdoors, the whipping wind snapped with the chilling sting of winter, but she had them bundled up in their down jackets and, besides, the rugged beach and the fresh air beckoned. It was a welcome break having lunch outside, at the water’s edge—no matter how challenging Maine’s winter weather proved to be. Judy always marveled at how invigorating it was to breathe in the crisp sea air and to listen to the roar of waves breaking, mighty and commanding, over the jutting cliffs nearby.

  Situated directly in front of their beachfront property was a rocky cove, which served as a natural barrier to the winter winds that rolled over the coast. She and the children called it their “secret fort.” There, the kids would entertain themselves for hours, making sculptures in the moist sand, and Judy would kick back and relax, watching the blue water crabs climbing sideways, up and around in rocks of the tide pools: one of Mother Nature’s oddities that so enriched the palette of her artistic creation.

  Spending time together out by the water was always a great way to break up the tedium of the day’s lessons, and it was a vital part of her work with the children, teaching them to honor and always celebrate the wonders of Earth’s own garden, while enjoying the magic of play. That day, however, when they stepped out through the backyard gate and approached the shore, she was horrified to discover a strange, silvery patina covering the sand that, on closer inspection, turned out to be an enormous mass of dead fish. Their suffocating bodies littered the entire beachfront, all the way down the coast. She stared in disbelief, gazing as far down the shore as she could, estimating that there were tens of thousands of them, heaped up over each other, their gills expanding and contracting, as they lay dying in the open air.

  Whatever had caused this horrific catastrophe had to have struck so suddenly that it still had not been picked up by the local media. No mention was made of it on the morning news that she and her husband had watched at breakfast, only a few hours earlier. There was no stench of death, that putrid odor of rotting fish, in the wind. No, this was fresh—many of them were still alive, so it had to have only just happened. She was quite possibly the first person to discover the disaster: massive and instantaneous—and probably highly toxic.

  Panicked, she dropped the basket and grabbed her children, almost dragging them back to the house. Pouting and carrying on, they wanted to stay outside, and they couldn’t understand why their mother had done an immediate turnaround. Trying not to frighten them, she rushed the children through the gate and back into the house, closing all the windows and doors, and locking them all inside—until she could find out what dangers lurked outdoors. Who knew what new environmental catastrophe had taken place out off the coast, enough to cause such a massive fish kill? With the way things were going in the world—the poisoning of the skies, the earth, and the sea—she knew anything was possible. She most certainly wasn’t going to let the children or herself get any more exposure to whatever had killed those fish than they had already. God only knew what toxin was being released into the air, or what chemical was laced within the ocean’s spray, seeping deep into the sand.

  Just hours later, halfway around the globe, on the South Island of New Zealand, locals woke up to the horrifying news that fifty humpback whales and more than a hundred bottlenose dolphins had beached themselves during the night. According to the first morning news reports, it was a scene of “devastating proportions.” Almost all were dead when the first observers discovered their lifeless bodies, lined up along the beach, like ships thrown out of the sea, in a hurricane. A gruesome, heartbreaking scene, it made no sense at all. Why were such unfathomable numbers of whales and dolphins washing up along the beaches of the world in such catastrophic scenes as these? What was driving them from the deep waters to meet their death on Earth’s shores?

  Hundreds of animal conservationists and volunteers poured onto the beach to help, but with low tide sucking the waves back out to sea, there was no way to save the immobilized prisoners from their fate. To the despair of those who worked tirelessly throughout the day, the few remaining mammals still alive were dying now, and it was clear that not even a shift in the tide could save them. It was too late. Captives of the scorching summer sands, they struggled to breathe their last breaths, their eyes fixed on the humans who were there for them, in their final hours.

  Desperate people worked unrelentingly to free them, but it was all for naught. Slowly, torturously, the mighty whales and their cousins, the dolphin beings, succumbed, leaving an immense void in their passing.

  All anyone could do was to try to comfort them.

  To be utterly impotent before the mass death of such magnificent beings was to lose a piece of oneself forever. No one present that day would ever be free of that memory. The heartache would linger forever in the deep, deep waters of the subconscious, from where such sadness would ripple and wave, always asking, “What could have been done differently?” Who amongst them could not be struggling to accept the inevitability of such a cruel, tragic death? Such painful memories would never be erased from the hearts and souls of the people who had watched, helpless to alter the course of the events that day, and it was only right that they not be forgotten.

  While the determined still scrambled to haul buckets of seawater from the receding tide, a few stopped dead in their tracks, looking up … beco
ming aware that they were now almost shrouded in an eerie, fog-like haze. It was oddly unnatural, as if low clouds had been scooped up in a gigantic atmospheric vacuum cleaner and then released, adhering to what appeared to be some sort of man-made, perfectly perpendicular matrix. There was a palpable electrical charge to the air so intense that many of the volunteers could feel their hair literally standing on end, and, after a short time, they began suffering from debilitating headaches, nausea, and difficulty breathing. Most of them were well aware that whatever was causing the acute physical symptoms and the stranding and deaths of the whales and dolphins was sourced in that strange electrical grid that hovered, low and menacing, overhead.

  No one knew what in the world could be causing it, but they did know, without question, that something highly abnormal had most definitely taken place on that isolated beach off the Southern Coast.

  While all three of these bizarre, seemingly unconnected events were unfolding, only a few hours apart at different locations across the planet, from the icy fields of a remote top-security military station in Alaska, a covert network of complex antennae, covering ten city blocks, emitted destructive, extremely low frequency (ELF) energy waves around the Earth, across the oceans, and out into the atmosphere. Free from any kind of scrutiny, the facility buzzed with the sizzling sounds of high-voltage bolts of electrical lightning that shot like crackling whips from tower to tower, surging with enough electrical energy to light up the entire West Coast of the North American continent.

  What no one was ready to hear, much less talk about, was that these same ELF energy waves were also being beamed into the cloud layers, and then bounced back down at the secret government’s military targets of choice—all around the globe: anywhere and everywhere their evil little hearts desired. Anyone paying the least bit of attention would have recognized that these events—the blackbirds in Los Angeles, the fish carnage in Maine, and the whale and dolphin beaching in New Zealand—were indeed connected, and that the emergency on Planet Earth was about to explode in an all-out and, perhaps, irreversible global disaster.

  Unbeknownst to most of its dormant and otherwise distracted inhabitants, one beautiful tiny blue sphere, spinning through the dark cloak of galactic space, was clearly under siege.

  2

  Jamie Hastings

  Among the rescue workers on the beach that terrifying day in New Zealand was a woman whose life was dramatically affected by the unfathomable death of the whales and dolphins. For Jamie Hastings, it was a mystery that would chart the course of the rest of her days, seeking an answer she might never find. Those long hours of their struggle would forever be inscribed on her heart and soul, like a nightmare that haunts from the deep and murky waters of the subconscious—repeating and repeating—until finally it leaves its imprint on the conscious mind with a fierceness so great it can never again be released back into the shadows … nor forgotten.

  Immortalized in her memory forever would remain the moment she sat eye to eye with a dying giant and, there, up so close, she was able to gaze into the whale’s very soul. What an ironic twist of fate that such an extraordinary opportunity—coming face to face with a great whale—should manifest in so cruel a circumstance.

  So immense was the love and compassion pouring out of her, she felt as if she had completely merged with the being, and she knew the whale felt it. It was love that flowed from a place so deep within, in one sense, and from so far beyond in another that, for that moment, she was ready to leave with her, to swim alongside the pod as one of them, and journey with her ancient family—through the veils—to another world.

  Experiencing the immensity of that love and the longing to leave with them was the most transcendental experience of her entire life. She and the great whale were in the flow of infinite love, from Source: a love like nothing she had ever known before; a love she doubted she could ever know again. In that moment of blissful union, soul-to-soul, she no longer knew where the whale ended and she began—where that point of separation could be defined, on any level.

  The swollen female Humpback was so pregnant—she seemed just hours away from delivering her calf. Sadly, this helpless mother would never live to know that ecstatic moment of birthing her infant, or teaching her baby the joy of swimming in the open sea with her: weaving the music of the waters, nestled in the safety of their pod. There would be no song, no light from the sun for these transiting souls as they passed from life, entwined and connected forever … at least not until they reached the other side. Here, in this massive grave with their kin, shrouded in this strange electric cloud, there was only sadness and suffering: a time of farewells; a time of silenced songs that might have been.

  Jamie peered deeply into the mother’s eyes, asking permission to connect with her baby: to touch her soul. With that, the whale let fall a tear. It dropped to the sand and dissolved into fading traces of ocean foam, while for Jamie, that one tear was so deep she felt she could drown within it—immense as the greatest ocean, and timeless as the waves.

  The mighty whale looked back into Jamie’s eyes with that same sense of knowing, and a light sparked between them—a flicker of recognition between two ancient souls—and then, the gentle giant, a mother-to-be who never would, blew the last precious bit of air out her blowhole.

  She and her unborn baby died in that instant—within that last breath, with Jamie’s love around them.

  As unbearable as it was to cope with the immensity of emotions surging within her, Jamie saw the others through their pain and the dying, until the suffering ended, at last, and every soul had made its passage. They deserved at least that. She knew how to hold the light for the dying, assisting in their transition to another plane, where they would be free to swim in clear, sacred waters once again. It was the pure essence of her shamanic work, conducting souls through the transition from physical reality back to spirit, and she considered herself blessed to have been of service to such noble beings in their hour of going.

  After all the teams of exhausted volunteers packed up and went home, and the sunless sky turned cold and gloomier still in the blackness of that senseless night, Jamie stayed, a grieving guardian in the darkness, alone but for the graveyard of dead corpses lined up on the shore. Morning would bring crews of cleanup teams, with all the necessary equipment. Theirs would be the horrific, utterly unthinkable job of disposing of the bodies, to protect against the obvious threat to public health, and to assure that the beach could be reopened for their summer tourist season—in full swing. But, for that sacred moment, hers was the only human presence there, and she stayed through until dawn, knowing how very profound it was to her and to the transitioning souls of one hundred fifty whales and dolphins, who, for some mysterious reason, had chosen to die.

  Hopefully, thought Jamie, as the great beings crossed over to the other side, they would remember that someone—some human being—had known and cared enough to stay through the night, to see them across the rainbow bridge.

  In that difficult time of great sadness and loss, Jamie felt each laborious breath of every whale and dolphin strip her of her own life force—a psychic pain so intense she could barely breathe. For a fleeting moment, she was able to escape the sadness, focusing her eye within the spirit realm, where she could see them swimming out of the tunnel of darkness and into the brilliance of illuminated waters. They were on their way, back out to the cosmic sea, where they would be free again. That was her consolation.

  She knew her lifework had changed forever that day. She was being called to use her gift to help prevent a tragedy such as this from ever happening again. And she knew, without question, that the whales and dolphins would reach out to her again, from the other side of night … and she would be there.

  By the love of god, she would be there … forever.

  According to her mother’s many stories, Jamie Hastings was born with her eyes wide open—right through the sacred birth canal and into the world. Herself a psychic of noteworthy ability, Amanda Hastings often
talked about how Jamie spoke to her before she was conceived, announcing, in a dream, that she was coming, and to “get ready” for a remarkable reunion. Amanda loved to tell the story of how her daughter came through her, in a nearly painless birth process, with the amniotic sac still fully intact.

  When the midwife cut her out of the caul, her very first sound was not the usual cry of a newborn at the slap of the doctor but, rather, baby laughter. That was why her mother used to call Jamie her “Buddha baby,” and it was a name that stuck throughout her life. And that is how she knew Jamie would always be protected, surrounded in her love, no matter what life would throw at her—from either side of the veil.

  Suffice to say that any kid with an entry into the world like that was born to be an interesting soul, at the very least, from the onset.

  From the early days of her childhood, Jamie exhibited exceptional abilities that her mother noted and encouraged, without reservation. There were none of the distractions of the day back then: no computers, electronic games, cell phones, and other gadgets that have hijacked the minds of computer-age children, and programmed them not to see beyond the illusions of their electronic devices. Children of her time were creators … freethinkers … and the pictures they drew came from their vivid imaginations, not copied and pasted from computer screens.

  Jamie had real vision. She was connected from birth with the spirit world, and she spent time with beings and teachers from other realms: light beings from other dimensions. She would spend hours on end alone, in her room, rather than playing with the other children in the neighborhood, as she never exhibited an affinity for playing make-believe, when her own experience was so real.

  Occasionally, she would burst out of her bedroom to report some extraordinary new revelation that spoke with such intricacy and knowledge that Amanda knew it could be only of worlds other than theirs, even if she herself could not conceptualize what her little daughter could see so clearly. Sometimes, she grew concerned that the child was becoming too attached to the spirit world, and that she was disconnecting from the earthly realm altogether. Jamie always knew when her mother was becoming worried about those times. She would sit Amanda down and explain, patiently, that she had to spend time with the faeries, and the spirits, or they would disappear. It made sense to both of them, and only them, so they managed to keep it their carefully guarded secret, and no one, not even her father, was in on it.