Piercing the Void

By Soren Knox

Ghosts walk among us. Living, breathing men and women who have given up their names to become shadows in the darkness. These ghosts hunt the dark things that possess and corrupt the souls of the living. Legally dead and newly named, these warriors stand at the threshold between the seen and the unseen worlds.

During the Baltic wars, a legendary Marine vanished on the wind of war as a mist sun-struck. Now, thirty years later, Greg Hoyt is drawn out of the shadows of anonymity by his own legend.

As an ancient evil struggles to reemerge on the southern shore of Lake Superior, a retired Navy Chaplain hunts for the best retired degausser money can hire to help him dissolve the nightmare. When he finally tracks down a picture of the reclusive Greg Hoyt, he is surprised to find his old seminary classmate staring back at him.

Together, they will examine and rebuke the trespasses committed half a millennium ago in order to starve the preternatural beast of its power. But first, they must examine their own souls and heal the rift that grew between them three decades earlier.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781468510690

Soren Knox

Soren Knox divides his time between the North Woods and libraries along the eastern seaboard. While he cannot say that he’s taken on fallen dominions, he does enjoy free-diving and the occasional 24-hour vigil. After a tour of duty in the parish, he now dedicates his time to building worlds.

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Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

ILLUSTRATIONS

GLOSSARY

De familia:

Non est disputatio

Sine caritate non cor

Sine amicitia non labor

Sine concordia non auctor

Gratia ad omnem qui plenus fidei

Delectatio in omnes qui surgenti cum lumina

Tranquillitas pro omni qui in communio diei illius

Ab gaudis claraque iungens aureus

Christ the King Sunday 2011

Tota fere sapientiae nostra summa, quae vera demum ac solida sapientia censeri debeat duabus partibus constat: Dei cognitione et nostri…

The summit and breadth of the wisdom we must seek—our only sure and solid wisdom—consists of two facets: understanding God; understanding ourselves.

We cannot have one without the other…

Jean Cauvin,

Institutiones Christianae Religionis (1559)

Selig sind die Toten, die in dem Herren sterben, von nun an. Ja, der Geist spricht; sie ruhen von ihrer Arbeit und ihre Werke folgen ihnen nach.

«Blessed are the Dead who now hold fast with the Lord forever!»

«True» the Spirit spoke, «They rest from labor and their works follow in triumph!»

Heinrich Schütz,

Selig sind die Toten,

lyrics from Rev 14:13b

Translations taken from Breakwater Fail: Underground Histories of Reformation, Capt. A.B. McCormack, USN (ret).

01PTVImage.tif

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1)   Site Kappa Topographic Map: 1:24000; Initial Manifold Compiled from ERINYES Remote Geophysical Swarm; Fine Detail Checked by On-site Cartographers.

2)   Site Kappa Megalithic Artifact Detail: Dolmen (confirmed) Theta-level Vital Capacitance Node; Last Discharge ~1600 C.E. ± 0.7 yrs.; Pre-recon Charge Level Sub-DELTA and rising.

3)   Site Kappa: Dolmen Engraving; Reproduction and Interpretive Transliteration Hypothetical Text (Seph. Yetz. Mid1.6).

4)   Site Kappa Megalithics: Dolmen; Chapel of Binding; Turret Stair to Test Complex.

5)   Site Kappa: Subterranean 1; Rough Site Plan; Drone (unconfirmed); Cartographic Reproducibility (unconfirmed).

Chapter One

I N THE ROOM, DARKNESS LIFTED. NO ONE LOOKING IN WOULD KNOW when light became visible to the man seated in the center of the room. He knew, though. He recognized the first light as a man dying of thirst recognizes the slightest humidity on a stray breeze. He perceived the first light because he had been in complete darkness for ten days. This first light would be missed by his eyes (its intensity below the receptor threshold of his purple rods).

His body, however, sensed the burst of electricity, some hint of a twist in the Image22223.PNG field. Have a friend turn on a fan while you are on the other side of a large room, and you will know the first reaction of his nerves to the first impulse of light. This man’s friend was an expert system governing the climate control of his home. He had programmed it thus, because had the lights flashed on—as normal lighting tends to do—he would have been blinded.

Since it will be many hours before light reaches the limit of visibility, we should attempt to see what he saw. What he risked blindness to see, why he submerged himself in a darkness that would have been considered torture if forced upon him. It should be noted beforehand that he loved light, and not the darkness. He had banished himself from natural light so that he could dwell in preternatural light.

He did not mistake that preternatural light for supernatural light. He did not confuse the medium of transmission for the message, anymore than a physicist would mistake optical material for the light it carries. The man loved the Word who made the natural light, so he sought Him behind the natural light. He loved that One so well that he was not misled by the preternatural light. He desired to follow the Light who made the lights as far as he could.

Bardic Duty of Warning Follows (if Ye need it not, proceed to end of boxed text to continue with your tale):

If our tale be heard by nominalists (who might argue against the lexical substance of light), by postmodernists (who might argue ironically that the multiplicities of light indicated an absence of Light), by moralists or pietists (who might argue that because they cannot follow his path, he must be deluded), or any other strange denizens of intellectual bestiaries not foreseen, they are urged to set aside their calcified ears in favor of new ones and listen with wonder, awe, and fear.

If they cannot manage this feat of normalcy, they would be better off spending their time recording the frequency tables of kai and its cognates in Koine Greek shopping lists of the first century, C.E. Conjunctions join words, and words shape logoi, and logoi are the tracks of the Logos. A specialist in nails might be admired for the practical benefit he provides the contractor, but he should not have precedence over the architect in matters of design.

The duty of warning has been fulfilled.

This quester after Light had spent the past ten days following the ripples and currents of refracted luminosity. Every half-year for the past five years he had been called upon in like manner. He was happy to do this, not least because it steadied him for his work.

He was a degausser, our man was, and after he gave up his name, he was known as Greg Hoyt. Our tale will refer to him by this name, even when recalling his actions before he relinquished his birth name.

Hoyt first noticed the tracks he sought a year and a half ago. He had been led to see his life as a thread in this tapestry of radiance. He had seen that his strand was about to twist alongside two others, with whom he had been braided long before. More clearly, he noted that the braid passed through shadow, and that emergence caused strange refractions for a decade or three, until the act hidden behind the shadow was absorbed into forms pleasing to the eye once again.

But the act, the source of new light, never reached the surface of the tapestry. It remained hidden in the tangled warp on the backside of the weave, imbedded in the core of the larger thread his was imbedded within.

So he wondered, a year and a half ago, and swam around that thread, its threads, and their constituent strands. He could see the fond braid emerge from the shadow; he could see how that braid re-twined after a long unraveling; he could sense his fault in the early fraying long before. However, he was not given to look into the approaching shadow, nor the fine details of the braid on the far side. He saw that the new plaiting began very near in time. He saw the brightening of the braid as it left the shadow, as if a fuller were at work to bleach the threads once dimmed.

It was then that he felt the early touch of the room’s light and sensed what he had sensed so many times before—the call to return from the preternatural world. The preternatural light began to shimmer as the recessionary forms of memory and imagination began to solidify again. Much as a mirage vanishes the closer you get to its place, his vision dissipated.

So he was clothed once again in remembrance and anointed with feeling. His mind delighted in a long past October dusk in Eastern Pennsylvania—a treasure house of reds and yellows and oranges veiling the soon-to-be unclad trees, their reflection dancing in the rippled mirror of a dam pond; the stored warmth of the day’s heat radiated from the dam’s now-shadowed bulk; the chill of the oncoming night air; the damp musk of river-soaked concrete; the rare peace of hard labor shared with like minds.

Silence.

Greg opened his eyes to the comforting darkness of the room, a mental warmth and solace that wrapped his mind. He waited as his eyes picked up the glow that became a shine that returned him to the Delaware coast, on a midnight at the end of September.

When objects became clear, not intrusive, he got up and walked through the darkroom door into his entrance hall. Out the plate glass window of the living room, far against the horizon, the lights of a freighter sank from view. He drank some diluted juice and packed a worn, black leather knapsack with his breakfast reading, then lay down to sleep with this prayer on his lips: et lux perpetua, luceat eis.

It was a restful, though short night. When Greg awoke, he was met by the first sliver of the rising sun as it ran from horizon to sand along a rippled bronze path. He shouldered his bag and headed for the beach to walk into town.

August’s haze-veiled colors had begun to harden as October drew back humidity’s cloak. The coast along South Marysville wasn’t buttressed by jetties this far from town, so Greg could walk the surf zone uninterrupted. The wave remnants and pebbled, coarse sand shook him awake. It wouldn’t be until later that the shore breeze would stiffen into an onshore wind. For now, it meandered, warm then cold, onshore then offshore, overwhelmed by the prevailing winds then rising again. The thunder and hiss of the surf beat called a good cadence, and he settled in for the mile-long walk.

This early, coming out of a ten-day recon, Hoyt still got lost in light and shadow. He would know he’d settled back into time when textures caught his attention. As it was, long shadows called attention to the serpent’s trail of last night’s high tide mark. The dark cast of wet sand gave way to the mirrored white and gray-green tones of the surf’s glittering horse’s mane falling up from the dropping lip of a wave. The veil of spray vanished; the brief tunnel-grey crouched in the shadow under the curl was crushed into an eruption of foam and matte-brown turbulence.

In time, that refrain of the elemental chorus was punctuated by the compressed hiss of surf swept against creosote-soaked wood and spotted kelp-washed stone. He had to work now, to step onto a jetty and not get twisted up on the way back down. The effort woke more of his body, though, while the seagull cries joined the jetties’ kinesthetic rhythm.

By the time he reached town, touch had returned and the cold cast of wave wash and damp sand became a press of loose, dry beach. He welcomed the hard jolt of the boardwalk wood composite, shook out his hands, and walked past the waterfront grandstand. On the town side of the lifeguard station, he noticed a black Maserati sedan in the public lot.

Must be a high-flyer road-tripping down from Rehoboth, he thought.

Greg climbed the stairs to Sunny Side Up, a diner on the second floor of a boardwalk arcade. He knew he would get good coffee, good hash browns, and a bagel with egg, cheese, and pork roll. A real breakfast.

A real leftover from my past life, he corrected himself.

However he thought it, the heavy breakfast always tasted right and grounded him out from his empyrean travels. He laughed as he remembered his relief when he had realized that the vision just past would roll over him in time for one last meal before the diner closed this season.

Tomorrow, he noted with satisfaction, as he went through the door. One more good meal he wouldn’t have to cook for himself.

The Ukrainian college girl behind the counter who took orders was headed back to Berkeley by Saturday, he found out. She liked talking with him because his so-so Ukrainian made her feel less than half a world away from home. She also liked that he knew enough to speak Ukrainian, not Russian or Polish. He wished her blessings and grace for the school year, then headed back out to eat on the deck overlooking the Atlantic. The sun was fully above the horizon now and he set to work on breakfast. After a bit, he went in for a refill. When he came back out, he noticed that someone had replaced his bookmark with a business card. It was ebony, with gold lettering:

ALL THINGS HIDDEN WILL BE REVEALED.

Greg fought down a burst of annoyance at spooks and their unsettling games as he finished his meal.

He sat back with his coffee to think through the message. Greg had retired five years ago; he had stayed out of the game so it would stay out of him. Other than the few, rare favors someone called in, that is. He was pretty sure no one in his part of the arena was trying to call him back.

Especially since the visions had started in.

Even degaussers had a pragmatic limit, and compulsory, ten-day total darkness visions of sempiternal light did not lend the kind of consistency in an operator that the community preferred.

Had he been passed off to the shadier corners, then?

There had been community rumors of operations so necessary that a few peccadillos wouldn’t be considered a liability. After twenty years in the degaussing game, Greg knew rumors were like the novels he and his teammates passed around on long deployments. They relieved the stress of boredom but had as much to do with reality on the shield wall as daisies had to do with elves.

He waved goodbye to the waitress, packed his book, and said, Send me an emote of New York in the fall.

She nodded, waved, and Greg headed back home through town. As he walked, he pulled up an n-space link and analyzed the card in 2-phase flow. At least that way he could analyze while he walked and not get run over by a bicyclist. The card was standard, a boardroom grade vanity meld-crafted from sheet-layered onyx; the lettering was true-gold ink.

He cleared his head and his analysis cache. Both were getting too full too fast these days. He’d make sure to get an upgrade on the analysis system’s memory.

There wasn’t much he could do about his head, he thought with a chuckle.

He went over the data with a deep level scan. Sure enough, the spin states in the ink’s gold had been ordered into a pattern. If he marked spin-up as a one, spin-down as a zero, and spin neutral as a space, his mind focused on the first letter of the third word. He mapped the resulting arrays, extruded them, and pocketed the card. He dialed down the overlay so he could get back to enjoying the late September day.

Let the AI work on the problem, he muttered to the building breeze.

He stopped by a drainage canal in front of the Corals, his condo complex. The wind blew up capillary waves, a turtle breast stroked upstream, and the AI returned with its modal suggestions.

His personal favorite was a Gaussian mask seeded with the cardinal primes for each of the first seventeen digits of e as a randomizer. The encoded package was the Hunting of the Snark. Unless one of his cryptographer friends was playing a bad pre-Halloween joke, the message was too 20th century cute for anything but a prank.

Greg settled on the third option: a likelihood with a probability between one-sixth and one-sixteenth. A series of elliptical partial differential equations mapped in a hyperhexoidal space generated interfering waveforms with a hexadecimal frequency. The power filter of said frequencies described the letter spectrum of Augustan Latin. After a bit of fudging, he got the message:

THE ELDER PLINY RECKONED HIMSELF SAFE

IN THE SHADE OF VESUVIUS. THE YOUNGER

PLINY, SAFE IN THE HARBOR, SAW IN HORROR AS THE SHADE AWOKE. DESCENDING THE

SLOPES IT MADE HIS UNCLE A SHADE INSTEAD.

His laugh was cut short though, as he put the trajectories together and came up with a near-certain answer.

A not good answer.

Because it meant that an old friend was calling. An old friend who was two decades behind in Hoyt’s memory. Not to mention a mutual friend hurt, and oh yeah, the little prerequisite for first-gen degaussers: a contrived combat death disappearance.

All in all, he was glad he’d had a good breakfast.

Because the least worrisome outcome was a visit with an old friend. The worst-case was that someone had breached the shadows of his identity. And the old friend was likely to become an old, dead friend if the sweepers got wind someone was sniffing around a degausser’s bulkhead.

Greg asked himself, Why couldn’t you let curiosity die a prudent death, Alex?

He tasked the AI with another search. This result was fast, and notched down his fear, but just a touch.

Alexander Brock McCormack.

Captain (ret.) USN

Born 12 July 2031.

B.S. Mathematics, B.A. Classics (Harvard University);

M. Div., M.A. Theology (Princeton Theological Seminary);

Ordained Minister of Word and Sacrament Presbyterian Church in North America 11 July 2055.

Ph.D. Fundamental Theology (Fordham University).

US Naval Chaplaincy Corps (Captain): USMC FEU (Baltic Campaign), seconded JMIC (classified); Commission Retired (O-6), 10 Sept 2078.

Currently President, Transfinite Mapping, LLC.

A short spin through Transfinite Mapping’s webpage plus that classified detail eased his fears. A regional-scale thoughtform cartographer with an intelligence background could have found him.

Which meant—most likely—that no sweepers would be taking care of loose ends.

But why Alex, and why now? If he knew enough to find Greg, he knew enough to know Greg had retired.

Was it a catch-up-for-old-times’-sake? That could have—would have—been taken care of years ago. Quietly, because JMIC wasn’t fond of anyone knowing who their degaussers were in the early days.

Greg settled on a preliminary conclusion: the contact was, for whatever reason, other than simple grad-school bonhomie.

You always lusted for your questions, Alex, he thought. Too bad the answers tended to bite people we loved.

The who having been answered, the why still lingered, but the where was clear.

Greg walked through the parking lot, crossed under the fourth of eight buildings—the Delaware. He was startled to see, parked by one of the pylons, the Maserati from the public lot in town. The condo complex was a nice one (the parking was reserved for guests under the buildings), so the driver wasn’t from Rehoboth after all.

He realized something a quick check verified: it was Alex again. Greg shook his head as he walked up to the cement deck that connected the buildings at dune level. A few minutes later, he sat on the beach access stairs in front of the Halifax building.

A storm must be spinning off North Carolina way, he thought, since the shorebreak doesn’t crunch when it breaks unless a big blow is in the Mid-Atlantic.

He listened again.

The sound of impact receded the longer it took for the wave to die. That meant the wave started its collapse closer to him than farther up coast toward town.

He nodded in conclusion: the shorebreak was nearing five feet; it was breaking south to north; its impact sounded sharp and crisp, so the wave wasn’t spilling, it was crashing. He stood up to see over the dunes and saw that he was right on. He smiled.

It was the little things that made