by Jill Gregory
It was as if the UN was meeting in Sicily, in his home.
From the time he first saw the paneled double doors close, shutting him out in the marble tiled foyer, he’d longed to be a part of it, to sit by his father’s side and listen, to soak up the power that was in that room.
But not until he was eighteen did he receive his own talisman—the gold ring he never took off—and his own invitation to the ceremonies.
He’d been revolted by what he’d seen.
Odd how he’d come to relish this ritual that crowned the evening. Fortunately, his father had been an intuitive and patient man, who had explained the necessity of what they did, and its grander purpose. The women they initiated would play a key role once the world was theirs. Hand-selected, isolated—the unwilling vessels would be needed. And used.
Now when he couldn’t sleep the night before the ritual, it had nothing to do with anxiety.
He reached out a well-tanned hand, and with the press of a button the paneled wall behind him slid away.
She was waiting there in the shadows, raven-haired, blindfolded, naked.
Some of the men began to shift in their seats, thinking of the divine ecstasy to follow. Others remained perfectly still, their gazes hawk-like on the girl.
They were all intelligent men, dedicated and powerful. Like those who’d come before them, each had been handpicked at an early age for this honor, for this challenge, for this most bold and dangerous quest.
And no one outside the Circle was the wiser, he thought with satisfaction. Not a one of those fools mired in the physical earth knew a single thing about the Gnoseos.
The girl was brought forward.
Alberto Ortega went to the cabinet where the two ancient gemstones gleamed, like dark stars, in a lighted glass case. The amethyst and emerald dated back thousands of years. They were two of the twelve ageless gems upon which the birthstones of the zodiac were later modeled. Ortega was careful not to jostle their case as he reached to retrieve the ritual goblet and the small silver vial. Carefully, he shook the blue powder into the goblet until the granules covered the etching of a serpent biting its own tail at the vessel’s bottom. As the blindfolded girl whimpered, DiStefano stepped forward to pour wine from a cut crystal decanter. He watched the ruby liquid rise to meet the embrace of a second serpent etched halfway up the bowl, then stirred it with his finger.
Eyes gleaming, he signaled for the blindfold to be removed. Ignoring the girl’s terrified expression, he lifted the goblet and tipped it to the girl’s trembling lips.
“No, please,” she begged, frantically trying to twist her head aside.
“Stop whimpering,” DiStefano murmured, fingering the curl that fell across her cheek before grabbing the hair at her nape, tilting her head back. “You should be thankful. You have been chosen for greatness.”
As he dribbled nearly all of the bitter liquid down her throat, her eyes locked on his—seconds before she began to quiver. He passed off the goblet, first to Ortega, who tasted a droplet and then passed the ceremonial cup to Odiambo Mofulatsi, third in command. Quickly, it made its way around the table as each member of the Circle took a small symbolic sip.
And then the girl’s shoulders began to shudder uncontrollably.
The world spun as wild colors leaped behind Irina’s eyes. Her heart began to race, hurting inside her chest. She felt serpents, slithering, twining, around her shoulders, and then smelled the musk of men.
Her screams surfaced and swam through the room as the colors and the men and the terror pulled her under.
MARYLEBONE, LONDON
His eyes were so dry they ached. The lines of the graph on the twenty-four-inch flat-screen monitor blurred one onto the next. Three days in this chair, he thought wearily, three days of superimposing one graph upon another. Three days of searching the overlapping transcriptions, trying to identify the final three names. With a groan he flicked off the computer. Enough.
He’d be no good to anyone if he persisted at this point. He knew his limits and he’d already crossed them. There weren’t enough Optrex Refreshing Drops in London to keep him going another hour.
Spinning his chair around, he blinked at the magnificently erotic Gustav Klimt canvas that filled one entire wall of his second-floor office. While he was working he was totally unaware of the luxury of his surroundings, of the polished ebony floors hewn from African woods that were echoed in the crown moldings, of the exquisite zebra-skin rugs, the Aubusson tapestries and the sculptures purchased from Christie’s auction house. In his Oxford years, many of his acquaintances had thought him decadent—how right they were. He, like his father and a majority of the Circle, made hedonism an art.
Since the body was evil, why attempt to tame it? Why struggle against nature’s impulses? The evil in the body was inherent—only the soul, like the Source with which it yearned to reunite, was pure. So when he worked, it was all work, intense, focused, and driven. When he played, he gave it everything he had—he denied himself nothing.
And now it was time to play.
He squinted at his watch, a Vacheron Constantin, and realized that the ancient ceremony in Sicily had begun.
He’d have a ceremony of his own tonight. It would rejuvenate him.
He reached for his cane and pushed himself to his feet. As he limped through the marble-floored corridors of his three-story home on Blandford Street, he realized he hadn’t eaten solid food in over twenty-four hours. That would soon be remedied. He wanted to wrap his tongue around something spicy and hot.
He buzzed Gilbert from his bedroom. Indian cuisine would be perfect.
“Get me a reservation at Tamarind for tonight—the usual time, the usual table. I want a redhead. A Cate Blanchett type. Make sure she’s there one half hour before I arrive.”
He shuffled through his cavernous closet, the cane thumping with each step. He paused to finger the sleeve of his newest Ermenegildo Zegna tuxedo. He’d set it off with the sapphire cufflinks he’d picked up in Florence last month.
Tossing his clothes across the bed, he removed the gold medallion that hung around his neck—a double ouroboros—two serpents, coiled into a figure eight, biting each other’s tails. Their diamond eyes flashed against the lustrous gold.
His ouroboros talisman was grander than his father’s, he thought with satisfaction. As was befitting the Serpent.
Icy water attacked his body from the multiple jets studding the granite walls of his shower. As always, the freezing water pleased and revived him. He lathered his shoulder-length dirty-blond hair and scrubbed at the tired muscles in his powerful sloped shoulders.
The end of the world must wait a few more days, he decided as he lathered his buttocks, where tattooed black snakes intertwined.
A burst of food, sex, pleasure would sharpen his brain for the finale. Soon enough, this mockery of an earth with its pathetic skyscrapers, droning factories, laughable churches, and deluded governments would dissipate into the ether. All of it was evil, only the soul and the Source was pure.
And for tonight he would put aside the quest for the ultimate purity—the truth of existence. He’d put out of his head the search for the last of those bloody names, and indulge the flesh.
His flesh.
All for the good of his soul.
CHAPTER THREE
Shen Jianchao
Glenda McPharon
Hassan Habari
Lubomir Zalewski
Donald Walston
Rufus Johnson
Noelania Trias
Henrik Kolenko
Sandra Hudson
Mzobanzi Nxele
Furiously, David flipped through his journal, typing names from random pages, Googling them one after another.
By midnight, he’d done a search of more than fifty of the names. A number of them came up “not found.” Others landed numerous hits, but scant information.
Then he typed in Marika Dubrovska. A series of links to news headlines from Krakow popped up on the
screen. A Marika Dubrovska had been shot in her sleep at the Wysotsky Hotel two years ago. Though David searched for updated material there was none, and it appeared that her murder was unsolved.
One Simon Rosenblatt turned out to be a Holocaust victim, gassed at Treblinka in 1942. Another was an American sailor killed in the bombing of Pearl Harbor. There were three other Simon Rosenblatts—all of whom died between 1940 and 1945.
LaToya Lincoln, a Detroit social worker, washed ashore on the Canadian side of the Detroit River in 1999.
David’s fingers flew across the keys. He typed in another name, and another.
Donald Walston. A blizzard of hits filled the computer screen. He sorted through information on four Donald Walstons—an electrician in New Brunswick; a great-grandfather on a genealogical tree in South Africa; an author in Birmingham, England; and a dentist in Santa Barbara.
His hands began to tremble. All four were dead. Different times, different countries. With the exception of the great-grandfather in South Africa, who died of typhoid in 1918, the others had all died within months of each other—and all within the last year.
The electrician had been a murder victim, the author died in a hit and run, the dentist was killed in a fire.
By 7 A.M. he had gone through one hundred eighty of the names in his journal. He found hits on sixty—of those, forty-eight were dead. Like the three Donald Walstons, twenty-seven had been murdered, the other twenty-one died in accidents. Not one of them had died of natural causes.
Dazed, David read over the names. Their hometowns spanned the globe. Their dates of death spanned several centuries. They came from every walk of life, every ethnicity, every religion.
They came from his journal.
They came from his head.
CHAPTER FOUR
“There you have it, Dillon. Am I nuts?”
Father Dillon McGrath studied David through searing blue eyes that had seen and pondered much in forty-five years. “Hearing Beverly Panagoupolos’s name in your head the same day she died and then finding it in your journal doesn’t make you nuts. Psychic, perhaps, but not nuts.”
“If I had one psychic bone in my body, I’d have won the lottery by now.”
Dillon’s face crinkled into the crooked smile that had made countless women curse his Roman collar. David had always thought that with his black curly hair and ruddy complexion, Dillon McGrath looked more like a pirate than a priest, but in the eight years they’d been friends, the only vices the burly chair of the Theology Department had ever displayed were a penchant for Glenmorangie and contraband Cuban cigars.
They’d both started on the tenure track at Georgetown University in the same autumn. They’d had practically nothing in common, but their friendship had formed at faculty functions and spilled over to their weekly Saturday morning search for the best lox and bagels breakfast in D.C.
Glancing at the wall of Dillon’s office, with its bookshelves packed with volumes on philosophy, comparative religion, supernaturalism, and metaphysics, David had few illusions that any of them held the answer to what was happening to him.
“How long have you been writing down these names?” Dillon asked, taking a sip of coffee from the Orioles mug on his desk. “Can you recall?”
“Since my sophomore year in high school.”
“So what happened that year that might have triggered it?”
“Nothing.” David got to his feet and began to pace around the room. He wasn’t sure he was ready to actually give voice to what had happened to him, even though that was why he’d come here.
“Spit it out, David. I know you too well. Whenever you start pacing, I know there’s a thousand thoughts going on in that brilliant brain of yours. Don’t make me drag them out one by one.”
“Now you sound just like the psychiatrist my parents dragged me to right after the accident.”
Dillon leaned forward. “Accident?”
With a sigh, David turned back and threw himself down in the chair. “I nearly killed myself and a couple of friends when I was thirteen. Two years before the names started. We fell off a roof. I smashed in my rib cage, and for a few minutes, they lost me.”
He looked straight into Dillon’s probing eyes. “And, yes,” he said, preempting the question, “I went down the tunnel and saw the proverbial light.”
Dillon stared at him in amazement. “And you never told me?” He gestured toward the bookshelves. “You know I wrote two books about metaphysics and the afterlife and you’ve never let me pick your brain?”
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.” David grinned, holding up both hands, palms up.
Dillon shook his head. “That near death experience must be connected to the names.” His voice held an edge of excitement. “Two years is merely a blink to the subconscious.”
“If you say so. . ..” David took a long breath. “I’m short on answers right now. That’s why I’m here.”
Dillon leaned back in his chair. “Why don’t you start at the beginning,” he suggested. “Don’t hold back or edit your thoughts. Just tell me everything you remember about that experience.”
So David told him. Told him about his father’s important guests that snowy afternoon at their home in Connecticut. The Swiss ambassador, Erik Mueller; his wife and their son, Crispin, two years older than David, and as full of himself as anyone David had ever met. It had been David’s job to entertain him.
Crispin was broad-shouldered, blond, and athletic, a skier who boasted that he’d scaled a section of the Matterhorn when he was seven. Crispin was restless that afternoon, and clearly showing off for David’s best friend, Abby Lewis, who’d stared at the older boy like he was David Bowie.
David’s stomach churned as he recounted the details: Crispin daring him to climb the roof of the neighbor’s three-story gabled home, his own voice rising in false bravado as he accepted the challenge. Then there was Abby clambering up behind them, snow melting on her eyelashes. His feet slipping as he followed Crispin’s tracks across the roof, trying to act as if he wasn’t scared, as if the dizzying distance to the ground didn’t matter.
Then Abby’s feet flew out from under her, and her laughter turned to screams. David tried to grab her, his arms flailing, knocking Crispin off balance. They all fell together, in what seemed like slow-motion as the ice-packed ground rose up to slam them into silent blackness.
“And then . . .”
David’s voice trailed off. Dillon cocked an eyebrow.
“And then . . . what?”
David felt sick and shaky. He hated talking about this, he hated the guilt it dredged up. He heard his father’s voice again, thin and biting.
How could you do something so asinine? Crispin dared you, so you had to do it? Do you realize you nearly killed yourself? That boy could be in a coma for the rest of his life. Why the hell didn’t you think, David? You’re supposed to be so smart, why didn’t you think?
His head pounded, remembering how his mother had shushed his father, drawn him away from the hospital bed, but it was too late. Those words had hung between them like the dingy gray curtains the nurses pulled around his bed to keep out the press.
“And then the next thing I knew I was in the hospital, hurting like hell and hooked up to wires and tubes—and the doctors were telling me they’d brought me back.”
Dillon nodded. “And where did you go?”
“I’m not sure.” David raked a hand through his hair, his eyes narrowed in concentration. “I only remember a tunnel, a bright light. The same thing everybody who experiences this remembers. Nothing more. I’ve read every book Elisabeth Kübler-Ross has written on the subject. And as far as I can tell, there was nothing unique about what happened to me.”
Dillon spoke quietly. “It’s less than what most people who’ve gone to the light have reported experiencing, David. There is definitely more to your experience. There has to be. You’re blocking it.” Dillon’s voice was matter-of-fact.
“I’m betting that wh
atever you experienced in that tunnel has some bearing on these names. You’ve been writing them in your journal obsessively year after year for nearly a quarter of a century. Something like that doesn’t just happen randomly. Not to someone who’s as sane, functional, and practical as you are.”
“But I’m not functioning so well, that’s just it. I feel like I’m losing my mind. Lately, the names are with me more and more. How do I stop it?”
“You’ve got to get to the source.” Dillon’s eyebrows knitted in concern. “If you’re that blocked, you need to see a hypnotherapist.”
Alarm surged through David. He couldn’t have been more startled if his best friend had just suggested electroshock therapy.
“Take it easy. This isn’t hocus-pocus,” Dillon assured him. “Alex Dorset works with crime victims and the D.C. police. He’s a highly regarded hypnotherapist—and a friend.”
He flipped through his Rolodex. “Here you go.” Grabbing a pen, he scribbled on a sheet of lined paper. “I can’t put you in better hands.”
David stared at the paper the priest held out, but he didn’t take it. “I’m not comfortable with touchy-feely stuff, Dillon—”
“Are you comfortable with the names taking over your life? I thought you were looking for answers.”
David didn’t reply. He rubbed his temples. He’d written a new name in his journal last night. He’d been trying not to think about it.
Dillon pressed the paper into his hand. “This is as good a place as any to start. Call Alex.”
David folded the paper and shoved it into his wallet. “I’ll let you know what happens.”
“By the way,” Dillon said, as David started toward the door. “You never mentioned what happened to your friends.”
“Abby was okay.” David’s mouth twisted. “She only had a broken arm. But Crispin . . .”
His voice trailed off. Dillon waited, saying nothing.
“Crispin ended up in a coma. They said he’d probably never wake up. My father checked on him for a year or so, after they flew him back to Switzerland, but he hadn’t improved.” David shook his head. “Actually, I still have something that belonged to him. Though I never figured out why he’d have a rock with Hebrew lettering on it.”
