The Sick Horror at The Lost and Found

by Heidi King

  But there she was, sitting on a rock inside the cave, naked, legs spread open.

  “You have got to be fucked!” I shouted. Then I looked at each one of them in the eyes and repeated myself. “You have all got to be fucked!”

  Maria stood up off the rock and walked toward me. “The Grail, the Sang Real, Royal Blood, is in the ocean of the unconscious. We seek it with the symbols we have chosen. You have the crown. In the beginning was the word. Creation begins. The ultimate secret of the Holy Grail -- the blood and the bloodline. First Communion, then salvation, and then we can save the child.”

  She reached down and undid the zipper of my pants and slipped her hand in. I let her do it. Nothing was moving. At that moment all my desire for her withered and died. But then I felt a horrible, sharp pain. I keeled over and almost threw up. She didn’t hit me there… it was like something inside me.

  “Pour the sun into the moon. Lead me into the house of Osiris and let me give in to his hand what is in my hand, to his mouth what is in my mouth, to his body what is in my body, to his wand what is in my womb.”

  “I’m done.” I said, struggling to my feet. “Something is completely fucked here.” And I turned and walked away, thinking that I would never again return to The Lost and Found.

  Patrick’s Letter to Matt

  By Patrick McGreer

  Dear Matt,

  Sorry things are not going well at The Lost and Found. Where is Steve in all this? I thought you guys are all best friends.

  Listen, I made some calls to some friends of mine who are very knowledgeable about the area. I also did a little research on the internet. It is not all good news. First of all, however, you are not losing your mind when it comes to the blue rock phenomenon at the petroglyphs in Caldera. All over the area the stones serve as a kind of treasure map to the locations of buried Indian gold in the area.

  When Christopher Columbus visited Bocas del Toro in 1502 during his fourth and final New World voyage, he was so taken by the beauty of the area that he affixed his name to many sites, including Isla Colón (Columbus Island), Isla San Cristóbal (Saint Christopher Island) and Bahía de Almirante (Admiral’s Bay). He found the Ngäbe Indians with large gold disks around their necks, and, eager not to return to Spain empty-handed, asked about the gold. But the Indians pointed towards the high mountains. They pointed to the rugged highland cloud forests, where The Lost and Found is currently located. The Indians did not use the gold as currency, but it was very valuable for ceremonial purposes.

  Later, when the forces of the Spanish conquest arrived, they did everything they could to get their hands on gold, and Indians did everything to hide it. Their chiefs would burn themselves alive rather than surrender. There is an ancient lake about seven miles from The Lost and Found where it is rumored that the Ngäbe lord Urracá, the bravest and most cunning of their chieftains, flooded his own stronghold rather than give up its treasures to the invaders. An entire clan of hundreds of individuals voluntarily drowned in underground chambers they collapsed around themselves, dedicating their spirits to protect the sacred gold artifacts, made holy by their most powerful shamans and gods. Dozens of years later, the waters receded. The blue light you saw is produced by a reaction from the methane gas that still is being released, little by little, from the mass grave. It is a little known secret that grave robbers sometimes camp out in remote area and just wait for a glimpse of the phantasmal blue lights that give away the location of a secret graveyard. The blue light you saw at the petroglyphs was methane gas from graves dug during the time of the Spanish genocide, and it may have caused you to pass out.

  Now a little about brugmansia, the essence of which you saw in bottled form in a vial in Dr. Mike’s house. I got most of this from Wikipedia, so you can google it yourself. Brugmansia is a genus of seven species of flowering plants in the family solanaceae, native to subtropical and tropical regions of South America, along the Andes from Colombia to northern Chile and also in southeastern Brazil. They are known as Angel's Trumpets for the eye-catching large white bell-shaped flowers that hang from their branches.

  All parts of brugmansia are toxic – ingestion of the roots in particular is fatally poisonous. But a tea made from the flowers is sometimes ingested for recreational or shamanic intoxication, as the plant contains the tropane alkaloids scopolamine and atropine. However, because the potency of the toxic compounds in the plant is variable, the degree of intoxication is unpredictable and can lead to psychosis and even death.

  Ritualized brugmansia consumption is an important aspect of the shamanic complexes noted among many indigenous peoples of western Amazonia. Likewise, it is a central component in the cosmology and shamanic practices of the Urarina peoples of Loreto, Peru.

  Matt, I am glad you contacted me. It seems as if Dr. Mike may have drugged all of you with brugmansia – this would account for Maria’s irrational behavior, your passing out and even the shared dream the four of you believe you experienced. I suggest you confront no one until I am there. Lay low in Boquete and I will meet you in a day or two.

  Patrick McGreer

  Revelations

  By Patrick McGreer

  The following has been written by the editor. It is his best speculation as to the events that transpired based on emails from Matt B. Hope, the crime scene, police reports, court transcripts and third person interviews.

  After reading Patrick’s email, Matt was out of his mind. He got into his car and drove straight back to The Lost and Found. When he got there, Gabriel and Nico told him that everyone had gone to Dr. Mike’s house in Boquete for dream analysis and rituals. Matt raced back to down the hill to the car. He tried to stay calm down and focus on controlling his breathing. Be cool, stay on the road. Right around the town of La Mina, a strange hunch began to solidify in his mind. He still had missing pieces of the puzzle to put together. He swerved off the road and took the sharp dip down to the town. He drove as far as the road would take him and then walked to the house where he first met Tuna.

  He knocked on the door, but no one responded. Finally, he just pushed the door open. A putrid smell suddenly rushed out at him, and he wretched. There she was, sitting in the same spot on her chair. There were old flowers and fresh flowers at her feet. But she was dead – she had been decomposing for some time. Whoever it was that was telling María about a Holy Grail cup, about finding salvation in the resurrection and saving some child, was not Tuna.

  He drove fast to Dr. Mike’s house. He had no plan but to confront him and expose him to the others. When he arrived, the front door was locked, so he decided to sneak around the back. The sliding pool door was open, and the house was silent. He wanted to find the incriminating vial of the essence of brugmansia before he confronted Dr. Mike. Carefully, he crept up the stairs to his bedroom. The door was slightly ajar.

  What he saw was like being smoked in the chest. He couldn’t breathe.

  Maria and Usnavy were laying face down and naked on two double beds. Their limbs were bound and stretched with nylon cord to the bed posts, spread out like as if they were being subjected to some kind of medieval torture. They both had large new tattoos on their backs of the Masonic compass and the square. They were blindfolded. As far as Matt knew, they didn’t know he was there.

  He stepped out of the room and found Dr. Mike in his study. He was leaning back in his armchair behind his desk, naked, his glasses resting on his fat hairy stomach.

  “Am I the only one that won’t fuck in front of you like some sort of horny circus monkey?” Matt shouted.

  Dr. Mike looked at Matt with a sated, lazy expression. “One day Mathew, you will erase the scars that inhibit you from seeing and realizing your dreams.”

  “You’re fucking them both aren’t you? You are playing them like cheap sex toys.”

  “Matt, these girls are acting of their own free will. Just as you were given the opportunity to quit, so are the girls, at any point they feel uncomfortable.”

  Matt leaned on Dr. Mike�
�s desk with both hands. “It started with Usnavy didn’t it?” Matt pushed. “Somehow a beautiful girl half your age finds a fat old man strangely attractive because she had a wet dream about him. Only you put the dream there.”

  Dr. Mike sighed and leaned back in his chair, adjusting his glasses back on the bridge of his nose. “Matt, you don’t truly understand the unconscious. You’re very clever but don’t have the vision to see the whole picture. This grand experiment is a new theology. A religion that you wouldn’t understand because you don’t listen to yourself. Your inner self.”

  “Fuck you,” Matt shouted. His face twisted crimson with rage. “You planted the dreams, didn’t you?”

  Dr. Mike sat up and raised his voice to meet Matt’s. “Be careful Matt. Your anger is the projection of your own shadow, hidden in your unconscious. A duality you can’t bridge. A part repressed in your dreams. You hide in you, your desire to succeed. But you’re too afraid to let yourself succeed.”

  “And what is success, Doctor? Money? Power? Your fucking cigars?”

  Dr. Mike settled back into his chair. “Go ahead Matt, let your anger out. It must be quite painful to lose your friends. Your best friend. Your girlfriend. Your job. Let your shadow roam. All repression is unhealthy. But remember that you envy what you hate. You’re too awash in right and wrong to follow your will. To follow your destiny.” Dr. Mike stood to face Matt. “But you still have an opportunity to be a part of it, Matt.”

  Matt walked around the desk to Dr. Mike. “A part of your lies and manipulation,” he snapped. “Follow your destiny?” he continued bitterly. “Follow your dreams? The dreams are yours, not theirs. Planted to get your way. To act out your sex fantasies. A sick joke. Whose fetish was rape, Dr. Mike? Was that yours? Turning rape dreams into ritual? Is that what you told them, that this was their destiny? This was their true will that they repress?”

  “Matt, there is a greater truth than that. Faith must come before truth.”

  “Faith in you? What did you use, Doctor? Hypnosis? Brugmansia? The lucid dream symbols triggered the dreams you planted. We never had a group dream. You hypnotized us. You told us the dreams we would have. One by one you hypnotized us and planted in our minds the dreams that you told us originated in our unconscious!”

  “But look at María now. She is healing. She is overcome her fears and is flying.”

  “A blind whore manipulated by a sick old man playing God,” Matt shouted into his face.

  “Playing God?” Dr. Mike raised his voice to stop Matt from interrupting. “No Matt, it is God. Faith is all God is. What good is truth? It’s as fleeting as a distant subjective memory. I mobilize faith like the mythmakers that wrote the Bible. But faith, Matt, I can use faith to heal. I heal -- God is just untrendy fiction.”

  “You sick twisted fuck,” Matt said as he pushed Dr. Mike toppling over his chair.

  “Why me!” Matt shouted. He held a tuft of Dr. Mike’s beard, pulling his head from side to side. “Why did you come after me? Was it Steve? Why me?”

  “No,” said a voice from behind us. “I wanted you here.”

  Matt spun around. María was standing at the door, her hands clasped behind her back. Matt froze -- his hand still holding Dr. Mike’s beard tightly.

  “You?” Matt asked. He was utterly confused. “You know what’s happening?”

  “Of course I know what’s happening here,” María said. She walked around the desk and stood behind Dr. Mike’s chair to face Matt. “Estrella, Usnavy and me, we all know what’s happening. I can’t believe you guys think we’re so naive. It’s the lot of you that is confused.”

  “María knows what the...” But Dr. Mike couldn’t finish his sentence. Matt watched in horror as María, with swift and decisive motion, hit Dr. Mike hard at the base of the skull with the clock that had been sitting on his desk. His body went limp in Matt’s hand. Matt let go of his beard and Dr. Mike slumped off his chair and onto the floor.

  “Help me move him to the couch,” Maria commanded. Unthinkingly, Matt bent down to grab Dr. Mike’s arms. But he didn’t finish the job. He heard a thud and felt a sharp pain at the back of his neck as the world around him darkened.

  Holy Blood

  By Patrick McGreer

  Matt’s head snapped back. He was naked, bound and gagged, shivering in a damp chill. His head throbbed and his broken nose stung. His arms were numb, tied to a long two by four nailed to a tree at The Lost and Found. His body slumped under its own weight.

  Through a blur of tears he saw María holding the smelling salts that had been used to revive him. She was dressed in only knee-high black leather boots – the rest of her naked body was covered in bright swirls of paint. Only a small circle of skin surrounding the tattooed sphere above her navel was unpainted. An Egyptian ankh, the symbol of Isis, was painted in black and white on her face. Her long dark hair was slick with sweat. She pressed her nose against Matt’s ear and released a high pitched, shrill, “Happy Easter!”

  On either side of him the shadows of twin crucifixes crept slowly along the ground -- growing longer with the dying sun. Tied to them were Dr. Mike and Steve, unconscious and also naked. Matt was surrounded by circles of sticks and logs, the innermost of which was still a certain distance from his feet. María picked up a gas canister and began sloshing it over the firewood. She lit a match and held it up to Matt’s face, her visage terrible and unforgiving. The black paint drying around her mouth was like the stitching on the mouth of a corpse. She dropped the match into the circle of sticks. It flickered for a moment and then surged, like a burst of wind into a ring of fire. She stood back and the ring of fire shot around and enclosed Matt in a circle of waist-high flames.

  “Tiferet,” María explained, pointing to the circle of fire. “The male part of God separated at the breaking of the vessels. And this is Shekinah,” she yelled. She dropped another match, igniting the second ring of fire. “The female part of God.”

  “But the word is lost!” she cried. “It is the hour when the temple lay in ruin. Destroyed by the Romans. The Roman Church. The sacred Shekinah defiled in blood. The Grail is lost! The word is lost! Therefore in the name of Baphomet,” she cried into the darkening sky, “I declare this chapter of the Knights Templar open!”

  Matt was pushing with his toes to release the pressure of the rope on his shoulders. A small trickle of mucus and blood ran from his nose.

  “Did you know that you are Baphomet?” she asked cheerfully. “Mat, Bernard, the middle initial B. And your last name, Hope -- an anagram like Mr. MoJo Risen. Scramble the letters and you have Baphomet, the Templar idol beneath the ruins of the Temple of Solomon. The idol that helped Jesus to remember his past lives, and that he was the bearer of the rituals of Isis.”

  María looked ready to erupt into violence. “But there are those who have darkened their own eyes,” she turned and yelled to Usnavy and Estrella. They were also naked and covered in body paint.

  “Christians have been fooled by lies so light seems like darkness. The Roman Church claims the grail is the physical cup of the Last Supper, not the secret ritual of rebirth. The Papacy of the Roman Church fears Jesus, and they grasp at a false mandate of authority, preaching that Jesus made Peter the first of the popes. But we are his rightful heirs. We uncovered the rites in our dreams.”

  She picked up a small wooden crucifix and threw it on the ground before Matt’s feet. Estrella stepped through the fire and smoke into the ring. She had a loose smile and staggered as though drunk. A moment later, Usnavy jumped through the flames. In turn they spat on the cross with convincing contempt. María leapt into the air and landed on the crucifix, splitting it in two with the heel of her boot. She spoke like she was spitting venom. Her temples were tight, and her jaw was sharp when she bit down on her words. “We are the Templars, through DeMolay. We preserve the secret of the Grail, though slaughtered by the Church. We discovered it in the ruined temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. Thus we must walk in a cloak of darkness and preserve our kno
wledge under a secret society. With the ritual lost we walk in a barren land with a wounded king. Only the Holy Grail will heal him.”

  María motioned to Estrella, and like a faithful apprentice, she presented a black felt marker. With it she drew the symbol of the Grail in the form of a cup on one of Matt’s hands and the symbol of a crown on the other.

  “These symbols of ours,” María said, “will guide you to the word. I am your Grail, Mat. Shekinah is there waiting. You’ll recognize her. She is the child of me. You were her father twice, once when we met, and once after the Rosicrucian Temple.”

  María’s face softened. The intense anger left her and she smiled warmly. She held her hand up to Matt’s face and tenderly wiped away his tears. “I had given up on getting pregnant, Matt. I gave up until I saw you in a dream. Dr. Mike led me to you. I gave up on getting pregnant until that night, the night I became pregnant with my twin. My twin Shekinah. My twin that died before I knew her in this world. She was growing again in me. I spoke to her in my dreams. She was going to be reborn. We conceived through the ritual in the Rosicrucian Temple in David. We miscarried, Mat.”

  Matt hadn’t known until that moment that he had gotten María pregnant. What could have changed had he known? He silently studied her face. She stared down at him in silence. A shudder and then black and white streaks -- the ankh she had painted on her face was now awash in tears. It was the first time Matt had seen her cry. A mad clown distraught with grief.

  She dropped to her knees and screamed into the sky. Her biting rage returned and her screams echoed through the trees. “You will understand when you see that what happened to us is no coincidence. You will forgive me. In the exile of death, Shekinah will lead you to the receptacle of the soul, my womb, the Holy Grail. You... you will be reborn through me. Resurrection! And as Isis, your mother, I will help you remember this life. Think of the power when you keep all that you have learned into your next life. You will gain the power of generations. Knowledge will grow tenfold in you upon the body of the Great Goddess. You are the first in the creation of a new order of beings in a new world order that will be able to remember past lives. Novus Ordo Seclorum.”