Council of Peacocks (40 page)

“Wisdom,” Josh said. “I think that’s my
father.”

Chapter Thirty

Wisdom stopped mid-step and followed Josh’s
eyes down to the floor.

“Well, well, well, this certainly is
interesting.”

“Do you know him?”

“We’re acquainted,” Wisdom said with a
grimace. “Let’s get out of here before he sees us.”

Josh followed Wisdom’s lead away from the
edge of the valley and back into the cave. He waited to speak until
the entrance to the factory was far behind them.

“Who is Propates? And what did you mean by
‘the real one’?”

Wisdom shook his head and placed a finger to
his lips with a soft shushing sound. He stopped at a flat part of
the cave wall and laid the palm of his hand against the black
stone. At his touch, stone faded away and another red door
appeared. He turned the handle and pushed the door inwards. It
opened to a bright sun-filled field filled with white and purple
wildflowers and knee-high grass. Josh followed Wisdom out of the
Axeinus. When he looked behind him, the door was nowhere to be
seen. They were in a valley surrounded by tall white-capped
mountains. There was no sign of humanity anywhere.

“That’s better.” Wisdom snapped his fingers
and two plush red loveseats appeared. He sat on one and took a deep
breath. “To make a very long and complex story short and simple,
the Council of Peacocks is an organization started in Greece over
two thousand years ago. They worshipped an all-seeing God with 100
eyes. They called him Argus Propates. They believed in the pursuit
of knowledge without being bound by the restrictions of morality
and social convention. Some people believe there are things humans
have no business learning. I have to say I fall into that crowd. I
can think of at least fifteen things I know myself that I don’t
think your average person should know.”

“Isn’t that kind of, I don’t know, arrogant?”
Josh looked down at his body and saw he was now dressed in a black
trench coat. His mind must have created it to combat the slight
chill he felt on the wind, even though he knew there really was no
wind. “If you’re capable of dealing with these things, what makes
you think other people don’t have the intellectual capacity to deal
with them?”

“Well, you’re right. It probably is arrogant,
but you missed my point. I’m not saying humans don’t have the
intellectual capacity to deal with these little facts. Not everyone
is a moron, after all. It’s just, knowing certain things makes it
difficult for the average human to go about and do the average
human things he or she needs to do. Take those demons, for example.
Just imagine Mrs. Peggy-Joe Housewife. She has a husband and two
little children. How does she put her children to bed at night and
tell them there are no monsters in the world, if she finds out that
there really are monsters? How does she sleep at night knowing that
any moment something could creep out of the shadows and take her
children away? Should she really have that kind of knowledge? Or
would it be better for her to really believe there are no
monsters?”

“I don’t see how it’s any better for her not
to know. Maybe if she knew, she could protect herself. Set up
defenses against the demons.”

“That’s just it, Josh,” Wisdom leaned
forward. “There are no defenses against them. They come and go as
they please. They choose their victims at random. Nobody out there
can stop them. Peggy-Joe can’t send the police after the demons,
can she? You can’t shoot things that aren’t physical. It’s like
fighting fear with a shotgun. Knowledge may be a weapon but it has
no power over the dark things that crawl out of the night.”

“So what are you, Wisdom? Are you one of
those dark things?”

Wisdom leaned back and looked at Josh for a
long time. Then he lowered his eyes and chewed on his lips for a
moment. “I might be. I can usually convince myself that I’m
something more evolved than the Orpheans, but we’re more alike than
I care to admit. Once I was a boy, innocent and stupid. Then the
creature I call father turned me into something else. I spent years
doing very bad things. I have a set of standards I live by. I try
to do as much good as I can in the world. Maybe that’s enough.” He
nodded his head a few times. “I have to believe it’s enough.

“Anyway, as I was saying, the Argusites were
pursuers of knowledge. There were religious wars in those days just
like there are today. They fell out of favor, went underground and
stayed there. But their desire for learning wasn’t stopped by
dwindling membership and state sanctions against them. If anything,
oppression fed their desire. They saw the roadblocks as a sign that
the Powers-That-Be were trying to oppress them, prevent them from
true knowledge. They hid out with the Yezidi, another spurned
religious group. The surviving members of the Council met a former
student of mine, a man called Propates. Not the one we saw back in
those caves, mind you, just a man with enough power to be
dangerous. He offered them knowledge, lots of it, and the things
they learned changed them. You know how it is. Once you know
certain things about the world, you can’t look at anything the same
way again.

“When you’re a kid, you learn about pain by
burning your hand on the stove. And you change. You learn to be
cautious. You learn that the world can hurt you. Up to that point
you have absolute faith in the world. It’s not even that you feel
invulnerable. You are innocent and pure because you have no concept
of vulnerability. When you get older you find out that there are
deviants in the world who steal children. You change again and
learn not to talk to strangers. You start to realize your life
could be destroyed in a single moment of someone else’s psychosis.
When you get even older you realize that it is not the strangers
you have to be afraid of. It’s your friends and relatives that can
hurt you the most. You learn not to trust other people. Finally,
you get to a stage in your life when you realize the biggest threat
to your well-being is yourself. Now you can forget about trust
altogether. Most people, if they’re lucky, go through this stage
and learn to believe in something else, something outside their
Selves. Something bigger. Karma, destiny, God. They start to see
the patterns in life. If they are not lucky, well, life starts to
look an awful lot like Hell.

“The Argusites learned a whole set of thought
patterns not conducive to daily life. They changed their name to
the Council of Peacocks and they made themselves a plan. They
decided to recreate the hundred eyes of Argus in the bodies of one
hundred fully-realized humans, each with the power and knowledge
these thought patterns bestow. They believe if they do this they
can resurrect their dead god and start a new age on Earth. Blah
blah blah – your typical religious zealot crap. The problem for
them is that most human beings really can’t handle the things they
learn. Physically. No, I’m definitely not going to tell you what
the patterns are. You’re not like other humans, but I still don’t
think you could handle the crap they deal with. You see, the
knowledge that Propates gives them sort of works in levels. You see
one weave of the pattern and you have this eureka moment. Your
mind, your body and your sense of your spirit go through this
transformation. Then you’re able to see another thread in the
tapestry, you follow it until you can see the whole pattern and –
voila! another eureka moment. On and on until you reach the point
they call ‘Eyeness’, where you see and appreciate all the patterns
of Creation. Seems like a waste of time to me. They spend their
whole lives learning what they’ll know instantly upon dying. So
instead of enjoying the world around them, they waste their days in
an impossible search. Well, whatever. To each his own.”

“None of this explains why you’re out to get
them.” Josh sat down, finally, on the other loveseat. Even though
he was just dreaming, his feet were starting to hurt from being on
them for so long. “What’s so bad about resurrecting their god or
the pursuit of higher knowledge? It just sounds like a New Age
cult.”

Wisdom nodded. “Yeah, except for the whole
stealing babies and human experimentation thing.”

“The what?”

“Oh, I skipped that part, didn’t I? I always
do that. There’s a lot more to the Council than just expanding
their consciousness. They want to create a super-race, people that
could survive the process of achieving Eyeness. Only problem, being
a secret society, they don’t exactly create a Facebook page and
hand out flyers to attract new members. They prefer the Nazi
approach. They steal children and teenagers and conduct genetic
experiments on them. Sometimes it is surgery. Other times it’s
radiation. Either way, they always mix in their magic and certain
brainwashing methods. Sometimes their experiments actually survive.
I’ve seen far too many examples of their failures.

“So what does that make you? Are you some
sort of, I don’t know, police force or vigilante out there to stop
threats to world peace?”

“Yeah, I know. Kind of hard to swallow, isn’t
it? Well, since we’re being honest and all, I’ll tell the real
reason I started curtailing the actions of the Council. Boredom.
Not very heroic, I know, but when you’ve been alive as long as I
have, you need a reason to keep going. A
raison
d’être
,
as the French would say. It was either this or
the aliens.”

“The aliens? You mean those UFO things are
real?!”

“Let’s not get into that. Loooooong story.
Whatever my reasons are, I’ve made it my personal mission for the
last few centuries to be a thorn in the side of the Council. For a
very long time I was able to do it in anonymity. I’d prevent a
kidnapping here, reverse the damage done to the gene structure of a
kid there. Then they found me out. That’s when the Council started
using the Edimmu. They’d come into contact with the Edimmu during
their time with the Yezidi. You see, as far as the Yezidi are
concerned, the Edimmu are angelic heralds from God. The Council
just sees them as hired muscle. Whatever the truth is, I don’t
know. Maybe they are angels of a sort. All I know is that they’ve
been on this planet at least as long as humans and they are very,
very different from the Orpheans. I just find it hard to believe an
angel would hire himself out to the highest bidder.”

“Wisdom….” Josh hesitated. “That creature
down there, that thing, it was my father, wasn’t it? The demon one.
How do you know him?”

“A tedious story, really, but it all boils
down to a poker game.”

“A poker game?”

“That’s what I said, isn’t it? He’s got this
sort of vendetta against me because he lost his wife in a poker
game.”

“You won my mother in a poker game!”

“Well I doubt very much she’s your mother.
This was several thousand years ago and Ehpslab – that’s his name,
by the way – he’s not exactly the most monogamous of demons. I’m
sure your demon mother was someone else altogether.”

“I think I’m going to be sick.”

The air above grew darker, as if something
had drifted in front of the sun. Josh looked up, but there were no
clouds, nor any sun for that matter. “Did you do that?”

Wisdom shook his head and slowly rose to his
feet. “I only have a little control of things here. This is your
dream, after all. Shall we make one more stop before I let you get
some sleep?”

Josh stood as well. He walked as Wisdom
created another red door out of thin air.

“Back in the Axeinus,” Josh began, “you said
you thought you knew what was going on. Why do you think the Edimmu
and the Orpheans are working together?”

Wisdom took several deep breaths and stared
off into the distance. “That factory we saw is new. As long as I’ve
known them, the Orpheans have been unorganized. Somehow they’ve
managed to capture a powerful god and build an advanced
manufacturing plant in a plane of existence without physicality.
Maybe I’m getting too old for this. How could I not have seen this
coming? No matter. The crux of it is, they are preparing for war.
That factory was constructing an armory – body armor and weapons
infused with the blood of a deity. The Edimmu, being solid as they
are, must have helped them construct the factory. Something much
bigger than I suspected is going on here. For that, I think we need
to ask your father. The human one.”

The door swung open even as Josh’s jaw
dropped. On the other side of the door was the kitchen back in his
home in Ottawa. The walls and cupboards were painted a light yellow
with a trim of white daisies. An apple pie sat on the counter and
Josh knew instantly what he was seeing. As he followed Wisdom
through the door, the kitchen began to fill with people.

“This is Thanksgiving,” he said.

The people moved slightly faster than they
should have. They were also incredibly silent, but they were
clearly his family. There was Uncle Perry sipping his third
martini, flirting with Cousin Rob’s girlfriend. Josh’s grandparents
were helping his mother set the table while Jan did her best to
look interested in whatever Uncle Kyle was saying. Seeing Jan, even
if it was only a dream, brought a tear to his eye.

“Do you think you could have picked a busier
memory to pop into?” Wisdom stepped out of the way of Aunt Janet,
who was carrying a tray of crystal glasses out to the dining
room.

“Don’t look at me.” Josh waved back at Jan,
who had motioned for him to save her. “I don’t know how this thing
works. You’re the one with the magic doors and everything.”

“Well, can you make them go away now?”

Jan started walking over to Josh, her face
brightly lit with an eager smile.

“How do I do that, Wisdom?”

Wisdom reluctantly accepted a glass of wine
from a man Josh couldn’t place. “Christ. Just remember what your
kitchen was like after all these people went home.”