Bless the Child (30 page)

“On your moment in time, Maggie, depends your destiny,” he answered. “The Pope summoned me to Rome.

“He was kinder, and more fair-minded, then I had any right to expect, after the debacle of the Sacred Congregation. We had met before, when I was still a student—my favorite moralist, Guiseppi Pontinelli—a brilliant Roman of patrician lineage—was a close friend of the then-Cardinal, so when my first book had gained fame, the Cardinal who was destined for the papacy had read it and remembered me.

“I found he had read my newest work, too. And had discussed it with Pontinelli, in great depth. The Pope questioned me on every nuance of my theory, traced every footstep that had led me to it . . . probed not my theology, as I expected, but my sincerity and my love of God. It was, without question, the most extraordinary inquiry I was ever party to.

“He made no pronouncement to me, of his findings, but later Pontinelli told me the Pope’s appraisal of me, in precise terms. ‘This man is not a heretic,’ the Holy Father had told him. ‘He is merely a mystic, who has followed God around a corner and has not yet been shown the way home. The path will be made clear to him, I believe, in the Father’s own time. We must shelter him, Guiseppi, until God see fit to relieve us of that responsibility.’” Peter smiled sadly, and Maggie saw the tears in his eyes.

“I was not excommunicated. Instead, I was sent to the place where you found me, hidden away among the dust of the forbidden thinkers. A wonderfully cruel jest, on the part of the Sacred Congregation, I suspect. When they could not excommunicate me, perhaps they determined to show me the musty obscurity into which such thought as mine inevitably declines. Better than being broken on the wheel of course—I was fortunate to be a heretic in such a benevolent age.”

Maggie realized she’d been holding her breath through the last part of the soliloquy. “And was such exile as you describe better than simply leaving the Church entirely, Peter? Surely you could have pursued your quest, and your writing, on the outside? You had an international reputation for both brilliance and integrity.”

“I considered doing just that, Maggie,” he said honestly. “And then I remembered how I had railed at my first exile to parish work—and how very wrong I had been in my judgment. My superiors had prescribed precisely the right medicine for my troubled soul, however much I, in my ignorance, had rebelled at the bitter taste of it.

“I began to see my newest exile—and my silence—as an appropriate penance to be exacted for my sins . . . those the Sacred Congregation knew of, those they did not.

“I settled into this new purgatory, Maggie, to wait for illumination about why God had place me in this particular quagmire. How would He work
through me,
and
in me?
My librarianship became a time of sorting the wheat from the chaff of myself . . . of my theories, of my priesthood, of my humanity. In truth, it was both humbling and enlightening to see how many had faltered before me . . . it helped keep me honest in my self appraisal. I have continued to write, of course, and to explore my hypothesis. Worst case, they shall have to deal with my theories when I die.”

“Or consign them to a vault under the Vatican, never to be heard from again!” she said, angry at the unfairness.

“Whether or not any of my further work sees the light of day is entirely in God’s hands, now, Maggie. Just as it should be, I suspect.”

Neither of them spoke for a time.

“I have a friend,” Peter said suddenly, brightening a little. “His name is Father James Kebede . . . He has a subtle mind and great love of God . . . I’d like to add his perspective to your dilemma. Would you consider meeting him? It would mean a great deal to me.”

He was changing the subject, and who could blame him. “I have a few friends I’d like you to meet too, Peter,” she answered slowly. “Maybe it would be a good idea if we all put our heads together.”

Peter walked to the desk and picked up a thick sheaf of notes; he seemed to be saying they should get back to work.

He handed her the folio and Maggie groaned inwardly; they were in Latin. She’d taken five years of it in school, but that had been long ago. “Second nature to you, maybe,” she said with a grimace, as she took the papers.

Peter smiled and said, “Don’t worry, I’ll translate. There’s something here I want you to see.”

After Peter left, Maggie stood at the parlor window watching the empty street where he’d been. He was such a complex combination of evolved intellect and old-fashioned piety. What was it she felt for him, she wondered. Could it be called love? She always felt curiously
complete
with him; as if some unspecified missing molecule had been infused into her structure. Not like a missing piece added to a jigsaw puzzle, but rather like a chemical added to a beaker, that transmutes the original substance from within.

It didn’t feel
new,
as falling in love does. It felt old, like some long forgotten strain of music that surfaces in your mind and then cannot be banished.

She couldn’t even decide if it felt good. That was the weirdest part of all. Their relationship felt necessary, inevitable. Unavoidable.

It unnerved her to realize that she
wanted
him, so she pushed the thought from her head and went to bed.

Cody
stood in the white tile bathroom sobbing piteously. The floor all around her feet was covered in vomit. Ghania had held her nose until she couldn’t breathe, and then her mouth had opened all by itself, even though she didn’t want it to, and Ghania poured the horrible cocktail down her throat until it choked her, and spilled all over her face, into her nose and eyes, and down her dress. Even her socks were full of it. And the she had started throwing up, and Ghania had slapped her so hard her head hit the bathtub, and everything turned dark, and Ghania was cursing as she ran down the hall, shouting for a servant to clean up the mess, leaving the dripping and terrified child.

Cody’s sobs were convulsive now, gulping in air and trying to breathe. She stood in the midst of the horrid puddle, not knowing what to do, or where to turn.

Ghania had stopped for now, but she wouldn’t stop forever.

Cody O’Connor crept to the window and stared at the sea through the blur of her tears. Now there was no place left in her world that was safe. Only Mim. And she was gone. She could see the place on the beach where Mim had stood when she said she would save her. The ache of it squeezed her heart because Mim never came back for her. Maybe she never would. Maybe she got hurt in a car crash, or maybe she got sick, or maybe she died. Or maybe she loved some other little girl . . .

Maybe Cody would be alone, in this terrible place, forever.

“I love you, Mim,” she whispered to the phantom on the sand.

There was sand in her dreams, sometimes. Not like on the beach. Some other kind of sand. So hot it hurt your feet and your eyes. So hot it burned you, when you breathed. And Mim was in that other sandy place, holding Cody’s hand.

And they were running.

And they were very, very afraid.

The
dream crashed in on Maggie as soon as sleep came. She was poised at the edge of a vast desert landscape. A sea of endless shifting sand stretched perilously before her and the little girl who clutched her hand in fear.

They were being pursued.

Somewhere, not far behind, assassins trailed them. Now, the endless desert was their only hope of escape. The two frightened figures hurried forward into the burning vastness . . . and shimmered out of sight, like a mirage.

Maggie thrashed her way toward wakefulness, and sat up, uncertainly. She still carried with her the longings and the terrors of the woman and child . . . or maybe the child was Cody, and this was just another manifestation of the terrible anxiety that surrounded her.

She turned in the bed and forced her eyes to focus on the room around her.

And then she knew the unthinkable truth.

It was she and Cody who were running, and they were
somewhere else in time.

M
aggie looked around the room at the small assemblage of friends, hoping Amanda had been right when she’d insisted all the allies meet.
What a zany little army for such a big battle,
she thought.
I feel like Frodo.
Peter stood by the fireplace, Amanda sat decorous as ever, in an armchair, Devlin lounged near Maggie on the couch, his jacket hanging over a nearby chair, his tie loosened. He looked as if he’d been up all night.

“Quite a potent gathering, I’d say,” Ellie remarked as she passed out a tray of drinks.

“Of which, I expect, I am the least qualified,” offered Amanda, rising and taking the tray from Ellie’s hands. “So I shall have the least to say and will therefore make myself useful in more mundane ways.” She smiled warmly at Ellie, who relinquished the chore, and sat down on the floor. “I will interject a question here or there, though, if that won’t be a bother,” Amanda finished and everyone murmured assent.

“We all have parts to play here, Amanda,” Ellie assured her. “Your qualifications will do just fine.”

“Ellie and I are of the opinion,” Peter began, “that Maa Kheru will use the night of April 30th for the Amulets’ Materialization.” Maggie’s heart thudded in her chest. Three and a half weeks, it pounded . . .
three and a half weeks.

“On what do you base such an assumption,” Devlin interjected. Maggie and Ellie exchanged glances; it was easy to see the men’s wariness of each other was just this side of antagonism.
Damn,
Maggie thought, feeling the tension,
I should have gotten them together in some other way.
How foolish it had been to imagine they would get along.

Peter turned to Devlin. “As best I can piece the ancient writings together—and let me assure you, this is said with very little certitude, because everything in the papyri is couched in riddles. But it appears two things are necessary in order to Materialize the Amulet . . . the Messenger, born under the correct planetary aspects must be present, of course. And conjunction of Saturn and Neptune, trining Pluto and Uranus, must take place, in order to produce the electromagnetic frequencies that will favor materialization. Such will be the case on April 30th of this year.”

Ellie chimed in. “When you add in that April 30th is Walpurgisnacht, when malevolent energies are at their most powerful, it seems a good bet that’s the target date.”

Devlin frowned at all the mystic jargon, and Ellie picked up on his distaste.

“When in Rome, Dev . . .” she said pointedly, and he chuckled good naturedly at the chiding.

“Okay. Okay. I stand reproved. Circumstantial evidence is sometimes all you get. Cops just hate approximation.”

Ellie smiled mischievously; he was so like Maggie’s detailed description.

“It’s because you’re a
poet
that you hate the approximate, Dev, not because you’re a cop. At least that’s what Rilke would have said.”

Devlin had to laugh; Ellie was more than she appeared. “Okay,” he allowed, “for the moment, let’s focus on April 30th. That gives us less than a month to pull the rabbit out of the hat.”

Ellie saw that Devlin seldom took his eyes off Peter. “Just for the record, Father, what exactly will this Materialization consist of?” he asked.

“Everyone here calls me Peter,” the priest responded quietly. “I wish, you’d do the same.”

Devlin shook his head, with a short laugh. “No way, Father, I’m a BIC.”

“A BIC?”

“Bronx Irish Catholic,” Devlin replied. “We have our own ways where priests are concerned.”

Deftly sidestepped, Maggie thought, glancing at Ellie to see if she’d caught the nuance.
You are Maggie’s friend, not mine,
it said clearly.
The jury’s still out on you.

“As you wish,” Peter replied. “I’ll tell you what I’ve been able to glean so far. But, I caution you to remember, this is speculation based on encoded arcane data, that has suffered many mistranslations, over a nearly five-thousand-year period.

“Even the Bible differs to a marked degree when read in the original Hebrew or Greek, or the Aramaic of Christ’s time, or the King James rendition . . .”

Devlin waved his hand in acceptance of the disclaimer. “I’m used to screwed-up evidence, Father. Just give me your best guess.”

Peter took a deep breath, considering how to encapsulate what he knew.

“Let us look at this process as a physicist might,” he said. “We must remember, that what we think of as our
physical self—
and our entire world, for that matter—is not solid matter at all, but rather a collection of billions of molecules, in constant motion. If Cody
is
the Isis Messenger, she is a kind of cosmic tuning fork. We must hypothesize that her unique vibratory rate can—under certain auspicious circumstances—resonate with a preconceived pattern of Universal energies, to cause things to happen. In this case, to bring into material existence another molecular structure, the Isis Amulet. Just as our galaxy was called into being from
non-being,
or at least from the primordial melting pot of molecules, so, too, will the Amulet be called into being.

“Once that Materialization is complete, another electromagnetic resonance will be set up by the newly Materialized Amulet. The second resonance will manifest into matter, the Sekhmet Stone.

“At the moment, you might say these two Amulets exist only in a
potentiality of being,
as Saint Augustine called the first creation, that predated the Creation set forth in Genesis. After the thirtieth, we must hypothesize that the Amulet and the Stone could actually exist on our material plane.”

He looked around to see if everyone was following, so far.

“It would help us, perhaps, to remember that from a physicist’s point of view, light is a form of energy that has no electrical charge or mass, yet it can create protons and electrons that are the components of the atom, and thus the building blocks of matter. According to Planck’s quantum theory, light is transmitted in ‘pockets,’ or quanta, of action, which are called photons. And photons tend to behave like intelligent human beings . . . for example, the photons that from a ray of light always select a path through the atmosphere that will take them most expeditiously to their destination.”

“Come again?” Devlin interjected.

“I merely suggest that as farfetched as creation of matter out of nonmatter appears to us . . . it may not be totally implausible from a physicist’s point of view.”

“Peter’s just telling you we may not know everything the ancients knew,” Ellie said placatingly.

“So how would they use Cody? What happens to her?” Devlin persisted.

Peter shook his head, a deep frown on his face. “The texts say only that her Ka must leave her body and journey to the place in time/space where the Amulets are safe kept. She must then successfully journey back with them . . .” He gestured toward Ellie.

“Our resident metaphysician, Ellie, tells me, that according to oral tradition, the Messenger will be gravely endangered while making this journey out of the body. Perhaps she would care to explain . . .”

Ellie took up the thread. “When a human being’s spirit—let’s call it the Ka for the moment—leaves the body to wander the Astral, or the Angelic, or Buddhic, or any other plane of existence, it remains attached to the physical body by what is called the Silver Cord, an etheric umbilicus that seems capable of limitless extension.”

“I’ve heard of that!” Amanda offered enthusiastically. “Shirley MacLaine goes flitting around the world at night, and finds her way back by way of this silver string. Yes?”

Ellie chuckled. “That’s exactly right, Amanda. So, you probably also know that the Astral traveler must take great care not to sever the cord, and not to let anything jarring happen to the body back home, because the physical body is terribly vulnerable while the genie is out of the bottle, so to speak.”

Amanda nodded, obviously intrigued. “So assuming any of this astonishing tale is true, we must worry about Cody not just in this world, but in four or five others, as well? God Almighty, we do seem to have our work cut out for us.”

“The dangers are sevenfold, actually,” Ellie continued. “The Black Magicians could destroy Cody’s physical body, so she couldn’t get back in . . . her Ka could be attacked or imprisoned by demons, while on the Astral . . . or maybe something even worse could happen . . .” Ellie looked worriedly at Peter, who picked up the explanation.

“There’s a very obscure papyrus—part of the Mari Recension—it’s so abstruse no one has ever paid it much mind. But if you read it in the context of this Isis-Sekhmet legend—it might be construed to mean that Sekhmet could choose to follow her Stone into the Material world, by means of taking over Cody’s body. To do that, the child’s Ka would have to be kidnapped on the Astral, and held prisoner by some kind of demonic guardians.” He put up his hands in a noncommittal gesture, in response to a derisive snort from Devlin.

“I merely
report
what the Recension suggests, Lieutenant, he said, trying not to be angry. “I can offer no scientific verification for such a happenstance.” The priest paused, then spoke again. “I have had, however, empirical experience of demonic intelligences . . . as, indeed, did Maggie, the night of the Sending. So I cannot summarily dismiss the possibility either.”

Put that in your pipe and smoke it,
Ellie thought with a suppressed grin. It was obvious Devlin intuited Maggie’s connection to Peter and resented it. She made a mental note to try to smooth things over—dissension among allies was not in anyone’s best interest.

“Could you tell us a little about Isis and Sekhmet, Peter or Ellie?” Amanda put in quickly, to quell the tension in the room. “I expect Dev and I are not up to speed on our Goddesses.” She smiled disarmingly at Devlin, as she said it, and saw him decide to opt for civility.

“Amanda’s right,” he agreed. “We were fresh out of Goddesses in the Bronx.”

Peter looked to Ellie, but she deferred to him with a wave of the hand, so he cleared his throat and began. “‘In the beginning was Isis,’” he said. “’Oldest of the Old, She was the Goddess from whom all Becoming Arose. She was the Great Lady, Mistress of the House of Life. Mistress of the Word of God. She was unique. In all her great and wondrous works, She was a wiser magician and more excellent than any other God.’” He smiled and added, “All that is taken from a Theban manuscript written in the fourteenth century before Christ.

“All the old Gods, you find, have some sort of allegorical legend attached to the time when they walked the earth and had exchanges with humans.

“Probably the best account of the Isis legend is the one provided by Plutarch, in his treatise
De Iside et Ostride,”
he said. “It was written in Greek about the middle of the first century of our era, and later substantiated by certain Egyptian hieroglyphic texts. Whether you accept it as history or allegory, the tale is an extraordinary one, in its complex understanding of human nature. I won’t burden you with all of it, just the salient points.

“Osiris was an Egyptian king of breathtaking wisdom who set himself the task of civilizing the people, and redeeming them from their former states of barbarism. He and his remarkable queen, Isis, taught them the cultivation of the earth, gave them a body of laws, and instructed them in the worship of the Gods.

“Having made his own land prosperous, Osiris set out to teach the other nations of the world, leaving Isis to rule in his stead. She ruled so brilliantly, in fact, that Osiris’s nasty brother Set was thwarted in his evil designs on the kingdom. This enraged Set so, that when his brother returned, he persuaded seventy-two malcontents to join him in a conspiracy to kill Osiris. After they’d killed him by treachery, they cut his body into fourteen pieces and scattered them all over Egypt, or Khemu-Amenti, as it was then called.”

Khemu- Amenti!
The name jolted Maggie. That was the name from her dream; the name that eluded her. And there was that
sound
again . . . that elusive tinkling, like a bell carried away on the wind.
Temple bells . . .
they had something to do with being in a temple . . . She forced her mind to return to what Peter was saying:

“Osiris became the king of the Underworld, while Isis took her rightful place as Queen of Heaven. She was the archetype, of course, of all female attributes, love, duty, fortitude, courage, and devotion to justice.”

“I’d like to add something, here, Peter,” Ellie interjected. “In Mystery School teachings, Isis is credited with some unique attributes that we might like to keep in mind when we contemplate the importance of her Amulet.