The Sword of Michael - eARC (7 page)

“There’s a gateway there, Dillon. A portal. A portal for the Dark Forces. In a place on the edge of town, where the old town cemetery adjoins what used to be the Native American burial ground. It’s called Hell Hollow. What’s going on
here
started over
there
. Who came here is from there. Came through there.”

“Dude, that’s not a place we want to knock around,” Dillon said. “It’s just a bad and ugly place. I don’t want to be running afoul of what passes for law over there.”

“I hope we don’t have to. They’re moving over here…there’s something here they want.”

“You?”

“Not just me. There’s something else going on here…something they want to quash.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know.” I thought for a moment, and then the images from my journey reappeared…
a dark form pressing against the dark fabric of space-time, like a face beneath a taut sheet of black latex, pressing, straining…

“I think they’re trying to open a portal here,” I said.

“Why?”

“Confluence. If you weaken the very material of the barrier between the worlds…think of Decanter as a big gaping hole into the Dark Side—and they can come through there. Think of Minneapolis as a place of the Light…and the fabric between the worlds is bulging here. Get it to tear between here and Decanter, that makes the portal way bigger…big enough for something else to come through.”

“What’s so big it needs forty miles of room to come through?” Dillon said.

“The Fallen,” I said. “The heavy hitters of the Dark Forces. The Fallen Angels.”

“Oh, sweet suffering Jesus,” Dillon said.

“Yes,” I said. “We’ll need His help. We’ll be doing His work.”

“What are
we
going to do?” Dillon said. “A small time gunfighter and the local shaman? We should be calling every shaman in the country here. The Pope! The Vatican! Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership! Gurkhas! Whoever will come!”

“We’ve got help coming, Dillon,” I said. “I’ve been shown this. But right now, it’s you and me, buddy. You and me and the Legions of Light, the Mighty Warriors of Light on Earth. They work through us. All of us who carry the Light. You, me, all those who choose the Light…”

Dillon shook his head in exasperation. “You take care of the shaman stuff, Marius. I’ll take care of the shooting part.”

I nodded. It was clear we were going to need both.

Chapter 11

I’m sometimes asked about the difference between a shaman and a sorcerer. Without getting into semantics, the short answer is intention. A shaman travels to the Other Realms to gather information and to commune with the spirits and deities on the behalf of others; a shaman travels with the intention to facilitate healing, to learn, to find things, to help others. A sorcerer does the same thing, but with the intention to hurt, to harm, to act out of self-aggrandizement or ego.

Intention is everything.

It’s a fine line. The razor’s edge.

My friend Marcus once pointed out to me that it’s like
Star Wars
and The Force. George Lucas got it right. The path to the Dark Side is paved with good intentions…but it’s the path of impatience, of anger, of rage, of hurt, of sorrow—all the part and parcel of human existence. We need to find our way past all that. That’s why the shaman’s path is so perilous. Because in the search of power to help others, we can be seduced along the way to take the easy path, the expedient path, to give into anger and reaction.

Anger can be useful. It’s the Creator’s Gift to us to call us into action when it’s appropriate. But acting while in anger is a dangerous place to be when you’re working with the spirits. Everything we do is vibration and energy—and while anger and rage can surely get things done, the long term repercussions of that will just as surely come back to bite you in the ass.

Or kick your door down and shoot you in your bed.

Or snatch your soul essence while you’re in the Other Realms.

I got up off my couch and went into the kitchen to fetch myself another Negra Modelo beer, went back and stared out the window at the park. The beer was good, actually great. It cut through the dryness in my mouth that had afflicted me since my last journey.

It helped wash away the dry ashy taste of fear.

A big part of the shaman’s work has to do with fear. His own and the management of it in others. Many New Age shamanic practitioners tend towards a Pollyanna view of reality, clung to the belief that every thing in the Other Realms and this one was fuzzy and warm and nice and safe. The practitioners who were Called and honored their Path, went forward and did their own work—as hard as it might be—found themselves somewhere along the Path where they had to deal with their own dark fears, because Spirit has a way of manifesting in a very real way those dark things within us we don’t want to acknowledge. Demons, dragons, evil…inside every human there’s a piece that resonates with that, and the harder you repress and deny it, the more it persists—“What you resist, persists…”—and the Dark Forces sniff for that and go for it, because that’s how they make entry.

So why was I spending a sunny day inside drinking beer and dwelling on this?

Because I’d come to the realization that the real danger in all of this was the focus on me and my weaknesses.

And that scared me. Badly.

If you’re Called to be a Light Worker, or you self-identify as a Warrior of the Light, then you’re taking a stance. A position in the Great Conflict. The War Between The Light And The Dark. The more you do your Work, the more your Light will shine. And the more you will be Seen. And once you’ve been Seen doing the Work, sooner or later, the Dark Forces will turn to shut down your light, slow you, take you off the board, knock you out of the game.

How do you shut down a Warrior of the Light?

Not easily, but the basic strategy is find his or her weaknesses and exploit them, work your way through the list of the deadly sins (one thing the Catholics surely got right) and see what resonates within the targeted shaman. But if the shaman finds the courage, he can work through his stuff and eventually, ideally, move to the evolution where there is no more resonance for the Dark Forces to get a grip on.

Ideally.

One thing I was taught early on, and I’ve embodied the truth of, in this work, you want to be pure, but not
too
pure. I welcomed the liberation from the need to be perfect, but more than once I’ve caught myself relying on that adage to justify my avoiding my own self-work.

That’s the danger for me. That’s why this was coming to me now. In the guidance that came through my recent journeys. In the thousands of past lives I’ve lived, somewhere back there was a powerful sorcerer, one who’d gone as far down the Dark Road as one can. I’d come back from that, worked through it, but the Laws of Karma and Balance are inescapable and everything that happens we are responsible for. How we relate to events, how we choose to act, that’s what provides us with the opportunity to relieve ourselves of the old burdens. To choose to do things differently.

That’s what was in all of this unfolding around me.

The chance to do things differently.

That’s what this was all about for me. While there was a call to action, wrapped up in that call was the clear message to heed
how
I went about it, because this was the opportunity to do things differently than I had before.

Or get sucked into the same old way of doing it.

I felt that draw.

A sense of righteous anger…righteousness…that’s the draw. To be and act angry, to justify it through righteousness, because you’re doing it—at least in your mind—on the behalf of others. Anger is seductive. It gives the sense of immediate and palpable power, even though it’s an illusion, a semblance of power. Real power is settled and grounded. A filling in. Power-Full.

A knock on the door shook me out of my navel-gazing.

I peeked out the window. It was Maryka Owen, the woman I’d done a depossession with. That seemed a very long time ago.

I went to the door and opened it.

“Hi,” I said.

She tugged at her hair with one hand, wrapped a strand of hair around her finger. “I’m sorry for not calling. I needed to see you, and I came right by…”

“Sure,” I said. “It happens like that sometimes. C’mon in.”

I waved her into the front room and settled back into the couch. She sat in my armchair, leaned forward, knees pressed together, long fingers intertwined in a tight knot on her thighs.

“What is it?” I said.

“I’ve been feeling much better…”

“That’s good.”

“But this friend came to see me, from over in Decanter…”

…and I felt the knowing and the soft voice of my guides…“This is how it opens…”

I repressed my sigh. “Yes?”

“…and since then I’ve had this feeling that there’s some entity hanging around since he came over.”

“Your friend, is he staying with you?”

“Yes. He had some problems in Decanter. He’s going to stay with me till he figures out what to do.”

“How long have you known him?”

She thought on it. “Two years. We met at a meditation workshop in Indianapolis.”

I closed my eyes. As it often does, information came to me in a big packet, a ball of energy…

Tigre and Burt…Tigre curled beside a huge tree, Burt perched on a long-hanging branch, First In Front seated cross-legged with his back propped against the tree.

“Here’s the connection,” First In Front said. He held up his old scalping knife and gestured. “This is where it starts…”

Burt flapped his wings and rose into the air, gripped with his talons the fabric of the sky like a sheet on the wall and pulled it back…into the black…black, black, black. Far off in the black, two glowing spots of red that rushed forward and became enraged eyes in a sea of black…a flurry of images, one after another rolling into a steady stream…images from Atlantics, medieval images, figures twisting in flames, rolling forward.…long black ships hanging in the air, long threads running down from them to humans far below…the main streets of downtown Decanter as seen through a sepia filter…and below the streets, tormented souls pressing up against the concrete and the buildings…the disincarnate, human and otherwise, walking the streets, sitting in waiting rooms, in courthouses, in offices…and near the graveyard on Long Street, on the edge of Decanter, a pulsing invisible to the everyday eye, a pulsing against the fabric of reality, like the image of a sheet…the dark portal. And all around it the cast of characters…the possessed…lawyers, bankers, cops, deputies, school teachers, the everyday people of a seemingly everyday town…all of them looking down at the pulsing blackness beneath their feet and far above their head, a similar pulsing, a pulsing from the Light they ignored…and then the image of an old man, running, out of breath, and behind him, laughing, some of those same faces…

I opened my eyes and murmured “Thank you” to my guides.

Maryka cocked her head, puzzled.

“I think I should meet your friend, Maryka.”

“Now?”

“Yes,” I said, heavily. “Now.”

Chapter 12

Anthony Boardman was older than me, probably in his early fifties. He was big-framed but shrunken, as though he’d been ill and hadn’t filled out. His face was pained and I saw the energy around him that told me he dealt with some chronic illness…

Cancer…

Yes. He had that look.

“I used to be a reiki practitioner,” he said. He dipped his head to his coffee cup when he sipped, like a bird pecking into a tall glass of water. He looked around at the other tables. “I stopped when I got sick. I want to go back to it, but I feel as though there’s a part of me that’s gone away…”

“Soul loss is common when you go through major illness,” I said. “Did you do chemo?”

“Yes,” he said. He nodded. “I’ve heard of you. Shamanic work interests me. I have friends who’ve done it. Some of them combine reiki and shamanic. Seems like it blends well.”

“It can,” I said. I looked at Maryka and then back at him. “Maryka tells me you had some trouble in Decanter?”

“Yes,” he said. “Some trouble with a neighbor that turned into something else. Do you know Decanter?”

“I’ve been over there quite a bit,” I said. “Done clearings. Lots of bad energy in that place…lots of things going on beneath the surface. Literally.”

“You know the history there?” he said.

“Some of it,” I said. “Burial and holy land to the Sioux…white settlers built right on top of it. Long history of strange disappearances, massacres, madness, crime…just plain ugly.”

“Just plain ugly,” he repeated thoughtfully. “Yes. It’s a corrupt place, energetically and everywhere else.”

“Tell me your story, Tony,” I said.

He twisted his lips sourly. “It was one of those things you don’t think anything about, at first. I had this apartment in Decanter, nice neighborhood, on the South Side, not far from Holy Cross Church and School. Quiet building, just six units. I lived there by myself while I was recovering, just out of the hospital. Mostly older people in the building. Working folks. The apartment above me, this young guy moved. I spoke to him a few times. He seemed like a nice enough guy, he was a school teacher.

“But he was strange. Always staring at me, talking to himself. I heard him complaining a couple of times, to someone else, about me. From his apartment. He didn’t like the smell of my cooking or I played my music too loud. It was strange…he never said anything to my face, but he’d say things loud enough for me to hear. I didn’t give it much mind at first, but after awhile it began to wear on me. It was his energy…”

“It was dark?” I said.

“Yes,” Tony said. “Very. I didn’t catch it at first. Then I noticed how he looked when he watched me. If he knew you were looking at him, he’d smile, look like an All American boy. But if you caught him, he was different…his eyes were dark, he had this hate-filled look, that sideways sneaky thing you see in kids that have gone their whole lives lying and never been caught.”

“Father of Lies,” I said.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” he said.

“Felt it though, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

He sighed and went on. “I noticed some other people his age hanging around, and then this older man started coming by. His father, by the look of him. I heard the kid complaining to his father about me.”

“You never did anything? Never spoke to him?”

“Nothing. I left him alone, I was polite when I passed him in the hall…nothing that a normal person would find offensive.”

“Normal being the key word.”

He laughed. “That’s right.” His face darkened suddenly. “One day I was sitting in my front room. I spent a lot of time sitting and meditating and working on my healing visualizations. In my recliner. I heard someone screaming outside and when I looked it was this kid…”

“What’s his name?” I said.

“Bryant. Bryant Eichmann.”

“Eichmann? Like the Nazi?”

“In more ways than one.”

“Go on.”

“It was like he was having a schizophrenic episode…he was ranting and raving about me outside my window…like he wanted me to come outside. Then some young woman came by and made him go up into his apartment. About an hour later someone knocked on my door. It was his father.”

Tony paused to sip his coffee. His mouth twisted as though it had suddenly gone sour.

“He was just like the son?” I said.

“Worse,” Tony said. “Everything about him…eyes, even how he smelt…something was just wrong about him. What made it so uncomfortable, though that word doesn’t do it justice, was how arrogant he was, like everything he wanted was already decided in advance.”

“Decided about what?”

“He wanted me to move out. He said I was disturbing his son, his son was special, his son was sensitive. He was important, he knew people, he was a banker…Nothing about me being an invalid, nothing about me minding my own business…it was all about him and what he wanted…”

I nodded. I got that. The self-centeredness, the whole Service-to-Self orientation before anything or anyone else, is the single most significant indicator of deep-seated possession and allegiance to the Dark Forces.

Evil.

The second most significant is the adherence to the Lie. Satan got his handle as The Father of Lies for a reason. A brilliant Catholic writer named M. Scott Peck wrote a book called
People Of The Lie
which was his take on that indicator of evil, how to define it and how to identify it in others early on.

“What else did he say?” I said.

“I told him the truth. I wasn’t bothering anyone. He was the one with the problem.”

“I take it he didn’t like that answer.”

Tony laughed. “No. He didn’t.”

“And then…other things started to happen?” I prompted.

Tony stared at me. His eyes were sunken and surrounded by bruised flesh. Deep in there I saw a flash of something staring back at me, something quickly hidden, and I felt my guides gather round me…

…Possession, cording, curse, thought form…tended. Definitely tended…

That meant that somewhere a demon or a sorcerer—or both—were watching through Tony’s eyes, tending the possession through an energetic cord.

I drew a deep breath and silently called on the angelic realm, The Mighty Warriors of Light on Earth, and Michael and Uriel, the two mighty archangels who honored me with their assistance. I felt the energy shift, a brightening, and saw through my half-closed eyes the darkness above and behind Tony ease as the angelic realm arrived, and awaited the Work that was yet to be done…

“Yes,” Tony said. “I saw his father hanging around with someone else. They were searching outside the apartment building. Like they were looking for something or someone.”

“This was while you were at home?”

“Yes. I was always at home. Then I started hearing them outside my door. They’d stand out there and talk about things that could happen, how people could fall down stairs and get hurt. Then someone went through my laundry and some of my clothing disappeared.”

“Do you remember what disappeared?”

“Some underwear, boxer shorts, and an old T-shirt.”

“Did you ever find them?”

“No.”

This was shaping up to be something more than run-of-the-mill possession. Clothing, especially natural fibers worn next to the skin, build up an energetic charge. After so much immersion in a human energy field, they become infused with the energy. So if you have a piece of clothing that someone has worn for a long time, you have a piece of that person’s energy. A sorcerer can work with that energy, treat the clothing as though it’s part of you, since for energetic purposes it is part of you until it’s cleared by time or sunlight or direct focused intention.

Tony wasn’t just the victim of an active possession; he was the victim of a curse, a focused one deliberately made with skill and knowledge and technique; a curse tended now by the maker of it, and somewhere, that maker was becoming agitated. I saw with the shamanic vision that is part of my Gift a ripple in the energy field of the suffering man seated across from me, a ripple reflected in the muscles of his face, a ripple like the subsurface passage of a great white shark might make on a moonlit ocean, late in the night…

“How long ago was this, Tony?” I said.

“About a year.”

“What happened to prompt you coming over here?”

Tony looked at Maryka. She nodded in support.

“It stepped up,” he said. “It got worse. They were coming by all the time, especially at night. They’d stand outside my window, outside my door, talk about killing me…”

“Are you sure it was them? Were you hearing it or did you see them too?”

“It was them. I took their pictures. I recorded them with a digital video camera.”

“Who was it?”

“The kid upstairs, Bryant and someone named Christian. I think it’s his brother.” He paused. “You know what’s strange? I think they were twins…”

I cringed inside. The Cabal…the place were weird science and the paranormal intersected with conspiracy theory and the bloody back corridors of Realpolitik.

Clones. Like the ones I’d run through the chipper.

“So they were twins?” I said.

“I think so,” Tony said. “They weren’t alone…there were police men sometimes.”

“Local?”

“Yes. I think the father…”

“Do you remember his name?”

“Wilhelm,” Tony said. “His friends called him Will.”

“That’s a good German mouthful,” I said.

Tony didn’t think that was funny. “I had dreams about that, too. I dreamt I saw them in a concentration camp, dressed up in Nazi uniforms, laughing, standing on a platform looking down on people, sorting out the weak from the strong, the men from the women, the women from the children…”

He blinked back sudden tears.

“Horrible dreams,” he went on. “I saw them tossing children into the flames. Laughing while they did it.”

I paused. “And the police?”

“The father, he had something to do with them.”

“I thought you said he was a banker?”

“Yes. But he also had something to do with the police.”

“Okay. What else?”

He went on. “I just had this feeling something bad was going to happen if I didn’t move. They kept coming around. They didn’t care who saw them. The other neighbors were afraid to say anything. It got to the point I couldn’t sleep at all. I went for days without sleeping. So finally I left. I came over here and stayed with Maryka. I had the first good sleep I’ve had in I can’t remember how long. She told me about you and what you’d done for her, and I just knew I had to talk to you.”

My coffee had grown cold and my stomach sour. Not a good combination. Nor were the signs before me. Creator had sent this to me, as Creator does. A true practitioner doesn’t advertise or solicit, he trusts that the Creator will send him those who need the special kind of help we provide and that what we do will be in accordance with the Divine Plan.

What I felt right now reminded me of an interview with Mother Theresa, the Catholic nun-saint who worked with the poor and with lepers. The interviewer—well meaning but insipid—had asked Mother Teresa how she was able to summon the strength to deal with what she saw everyday. But before the elderly nun could answer, the interviewer answered herself and said, “I suppose God never send you anything you can’t bear, right?”

Mother Theresa’s acerbic reply was this: “Yes, I suppose that is true. That’s why I pray every single day that God not have so much faith in me.”

I identify with that. Especially right now.

I hid my apprehension. I do that well. “What can I do to help you, Tony?”

“Can you work on me?” he said. “I could really use your help.”

I closed my eyes. “Yes. I can help you.”

When I opened my eyes, Tony’s relief was visible in every line of his face.

“What do I have to do?” he said.

I looked at the window at the sky, then at my watch. “What’s your schedule like today?”

“Wide open all day,” he said.

“Maryka? You?” I said.

“I’m free…” she said, puzzled.

“The reason I’m asking is that if Tony wants you to be available, could you be? To stand in support of him and tend to him after we get done?”

“Of course,” she said. “I can do that.”

“Okay,” I said. “I need some time to pull things together. Maryka, bring Tony to my place around seven-thirty tonight.”

“We’ll be there,” she said.

“Good,” I said. “I need to talk to some friends of mine. I’ll see you then…around dusk.”

I sat there, lingering, while the two of them left. I swirled the dregs of my coffee in the cup and watched my clients leave.

…you know you can talk to us any time…
came the soft and familiar and loving voices that were with me always.

“I know that,” I said out loud. There was no one sitting near me to be disturbed by the sight of a disheveled shaman talking to himself. “But I want to give you the attention you deserve.”

Soft laughter.
oh no, I think he wants something…you think?…oh, absolutely.

I walked out the door and First In Front appeared beside me. I was struck, as always, how other people on the sidewalk seemed to sense his presence and move out of his way; sometimes they’d stand aside with a puzzled expression as though they could almost see my invisible but ever present companion.

I’m thinking ceremony, First In Front said. You thinking ceremony?

A big crow circled overhead, cawed once, flew away into the west. I stopped to stare up at it.

Yes, Burt said. Absolutely. Time to gather power and allies. This is much darker than it appears.

A deep sibilant purr, like a powerful engine idling, heard through layer upon layer of velvet. Oh, Marius, the soft feminine voice said. Always your best work when it’s another calling upon you for help…

That’s his risk, Burt said. He’ll start thinking he’s special or something…

…more laughter, loving laughter…

Oh, he thinks that, Tigre said. But I’ll give him this—he does the best he can.

“Gee thanks,” I said. “Glad you see that.”

“Excuse me?

I started. The woman next to me held her daughter by the hand and waited for the light to change.