The Return of the Shadow Whistler

By Royce Walker

In a faraway village, a boy intently watches as his grandmother reads his cards. After she tells him his destiny will be forever tied to the failings of taught lessons and that he must overcome corruption and power with a pure heart, Michael suddenly realizes there is a world before him that harbors secrets and that nothing is as it seems. Meanwhile, moments after a young priest finds something in the sky he was never meant to see, he lies dead on the floor of a computer room as hard drives melt and a lone man ensures this is not the time for discovery.

Years later, Father Michael Vaetas is vacillating between his identity as priest and well-heeled academician as he learns the Papal Council for Scientific Investigations has appointed him to the section for astronomical studies. While Vaetas hopes he will finally be freed from the iron grip of the church, he instead is told the Council wants him to find a way to end time. As Vaetas travels through time on a dangerous journey to the truth, age-old religious institutions and faith collide as a negative power seeks to destroy the heritage of man.

In this exciting science fiction tale, loyalties are tested and a power is forced to prove its merit as a priest attempts to fulfill his destiny and all wonder whether the answer is shining among the stars.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491736517

Royce Walker

Royce Walker grew up in San Francisco during the city’s great cultural renaissance. He counts his travels through India and Nepal as a young man as the inspiration for his perspective on life, religion, and the fusion of esoteric knowledge with faith. Royce lives with his wife and a small tribe of cats near Washington, DC.

Book preview

THE STROKE

ONE OF THE YOUNG priests ran back into the observatory control room from the outside, where he had been concentrating on the sky. The night was chilly, and the stars were so bright that he had cast a shadow on the ground. He studied the computer screen with wide eyes. He looked around the computer room, as if to affirm that he wasn’t dreaming.

There it was. Right there.

He was so excited that he hadn’t realized there was someone else in the room with him.

So, is this it? The voice was steady but with an escalated pitch of interest. The young priest was focused on the screen and didn’t bother to look up. Yes, this is it. There it is. I can’t believe we found it!

But you should believe. That’s what faith is. Believing. With that, the voice came closer to him, right up behind him. Do you still have any faith?

The young priest turned toward the voice and was met with a face—a face so close to him that it took his breath away.

You were never meant to find this. It was a fool’s errand.

There was a rush of sound. A burst of noise surrounded them, and the lights in the room, even the screens of the computer monitors, seemed to dim, just a bit.

With that, the young priest fell to the floor, his skin looking like glacial ice, and his eyes transfixed on something beyond the room. He was dead.

The man stood over the body, admiring the countenance on the corpse’s face. Rest, if you can. It will be a long time until Man returns to this moment. With that, the man stepped beyond the body and went toward a dark hallway.

The computer screens went blank. The room soon filled with a whirring sound as the computer hard drives began spinning up so fast that they eventually melted, and the room filled with smoke. The paper printouts and other documents scattered about the room and suddenly turned to ash.

The man turned back toward the computer room and spoke quietly. This is not the time for discovery—not for Man. It’s not your time. It will never be your time.

THE PRIEST

THE PRIEST WALKED FROM his lodging to the Vatican complex, taking time to consider his predicament. After years of subtle pleading with the Papal Council for Scientific Investigations to assign him to its personnel roster in the section for astronomical studies, the academic area that encompassed the breadth of his two doctorates, he had finally been given an invitation to present himself to the order of scientists responsible for this activity. He had contemplated as many angles as his mind could possibly accommodate, across the span of years, as to why he had been ignored and denied acceptance, as well as why he now was being admitted.

The idea of pleading had diminished his desire and certainly his enthusiasm for service to the church, but he had persisted. He could have abandoned the world of the church for academia and left the constant drone of disappointment and life beneath a weight of disadvantage behind, but he couldn’t. Not yet.

He had gone about contemplating this with the typical patience of a priest over the years, concealing his sheer sense of uneasiness. While at the same time, he tolerated the nagging and annoyingly persistent suspicion that the Vatican, with all of its secret enclaves and miles of archives, was harboring something beyond the reaches of its own faith. What was being concealed was unknown, but his academic training didn’t constrain his imagination. Everything was cloaked in deception, reaching, perhaps, into that realm habitually refuted—that the church itself was aligned with, well, unnatural forces.

He thought as he walked.

Despite the endless generations of inquisitional conduct with savage militaristic purges, torture, rape, historical pillaging, cultural routs, and torching of entire civilizations in the name of protecting a religious conglomerate that was itself an eternal institution beyond the laws of nature, the priest now suspected that the heretics and the blasphemers did, in fact, know something of the truth. In fact, he believed they were more aware than the Vatican itself was willing to acknowledge.

Instead of the abrupt and indignant denials, the tone and tenor of inner academic conversations within tightly controlled proceedings had begun to evolve, migrate really, toward that which seemed almost unthinkable. Admissions to all these transgressions seemed to be teetering on the brink of seeing the light of day.

That being said, he still wanted to stay and learn the depths of this deception—or learn, perhaps, that the deception was in itself a deception—to conceal the real work of the church, which he hoped would be to find faith in its most tangible form and steward it for the welfare of Mankind. But he knew better. It wasn’t about service to itself; it was about ambition.

He vacillated between his identity as priest and well-heeled academician, and he had become uneasy about the very basis of the indisputability of the entire history of the church. Its stern denials and blatant adversarial reactions to anything testing the bounds of centuries of power had started, ever so subtly, to crack and remanifest with the patina of a reliquary.

There were lies afoot, and they were becoming harder and harder to deny and conceal.

There really was an evil force in this existence—one that had casually stepped forward amid all of the fearmongering and intimidation the church had used all those centuries to instill the sense that it was the church, and only the church, that was keeping this force at bay. And as it stepped forth into the light of day, the force of evil had propelled the church into a complete state of astonishment, embodied in the realization that the war on evil they had been waging all these centuries, a theatrically contrived war, was now for real. All the dogmatic pageantry and pomp and circumstance used to hold on to power and seize wealth now really had to work—not just for the benefit of social control, but to preserve reality. Now, in his mind, the priest had to surrender his training to his sense of academic intuition. The church was the evil force. It had been all along. But, he accepted, such declarations were counterproductive.

That image was nagging at him—a reliquary. In his mind’s eye, he could almost see something. An object. But it wasn’t clear. And he could almost see a place, a garden perhaps, and a man. He had seen this image during his long stay in Kashmir. The Sufi scholars he had studied with had merely smiled and told him that this was the face of time. And the Nyingma shamans he had stayed with in Tibet had only turned their eyes downward and spit on the ground, warning him that this was a face he did not want to meet. They called it the Dark Hand of Time.

Time … to represent it in these terms and to characterize it as a thing of physical presence challenged his sense of academic proportion. This was the stuff of philosophical seminars, of study sessions and coffee breaks. It spoke of a falling off of discipline, he thought.

He walked on.

THE BICYCLIST

THE PRIEST WAS LOST in his thoughts and accidentally stepped off the curb directly in front of a bicyclist, who swerved and swore loudly until the rider realized that the errant pedestrian was a priest. The man raised his hat and apologized as he pedaled away.

As the bicyclist sped off, the priest noticed a keen, almost sharp look in the man’s eye as he the man looked back over his shoulder. He actually smiled, but not in a friendly way.

The image of that smile, a smirk really, hung with the priest and made him feel unsettled, so he returned to his thoughts and tried to dismiss the encounter. Of course, he recalled what the Sufis had told him—contemplative thoughts will invoke encounters of all types, even those contemplations that one intended to avoid.

Again, it was a nagging in him, much like that which had subtly driven him to the ends of the earth seeking answers and knowledge, all amid a drive toward discovery. This drive had never ended and had gone unsatisfied, unreconciled, much like the drive to seek faith over science. This same drive now pushed him to walk to the final meeting of his career, either as a priest or as a scientist. Which it would be was yet to be determined.

That very same nagging earlier in his life had turned into academic motivation, which had seen him nearly leave the church to invest his entire being in the study of Gnostic intellectualism. It was this effort, in fact, that he was immersed in, originally in Japan but more recently in Vancouver, in the Punjab, in the northern reaches of Scandinavia, in St. Petersburg, in Thailand, in New Mexico, and in Santiago, where the letter finally came via papal messenger. He saw the arrival of the letter itself as a harbinger of emerging fortune. He was still trying to decide what fortune might be coming with it.

It was ironic, in fact, that after he had left the Dharamsala region of India, after spending months with the Tibetan Buddhist librarians who stewarded the Gelug tradition’s archives, and after making a nearly overlooked factual connection between the birth of Buddhism in India and the ascension of shamanic movements in South America, a link that might eventually throw the entire theory of Man’s land bridge migration across the Bering Strait into turmoil, he had received a phone message. All the caller had said was that a papal invitation was being delivered. He, Vaetas, had spent many brief moments since then considering what the caller had not said.

The cobblestone paths from his stone apartment building to the academic council chambers were almost rough, uneven under foot. The walk made him wonder just for a moment how many souls, whether loyal and pure or otherwise, had trod the same path to a fate completely unpredicted.

He remembered his time in Rome as a young man. As an exchange student, he had walked everywhere and read everything. The seduction of the architecture and a fixation on the mysteries of rogue Byzantine design elements had forged a curiosity in him to seek out the influences of art and design on religious doctrine, and vice versa. It was this—this honey pot of curiosity—that had eventually snagged him. Science had come later, but the intellectual fire to connect the different spheres of knowledge had burned its way onto his soul. This was perhaps both his greatest asset and his greatest vulnerability.

The effects of the priestly faith had really been secondary to his curiosity, or perhaps, more suitably, overwhelmed by the sheer girth of scripts, books, and records long stolen from the world and hidden in vaults that only a trusted few were ever allowed to see. Vaetas had felt like an explorer, braving a precarious deal with the rigid perils of authority to broker a chance to find a wellspring of truth. The vaults were there, both intellectually and physically. The denials of such things, however, were persistently vigorous. It wasn’t until a massive land fraud prosecution in Rome exposed some of the Vatican’s secret holdings that the mere physical existence of those vaults was even admitted to. The intellectual vaults, however, remained closed, hidden, and denied.

Of course, for centuries, the Vatican’s artifcatual vaults had been steadily filled with relics, art, wealth, and national treasures, all procured by the Vatican. Even some of civilization’s most potent talismans had been taken there. Whether they had ever truly been understood or used was a mystery to most people and unknown to those outside the church, but Vaetas, a scholar who recognized remnants of history-enabling research when he saw them, knew what had really gone on. He knew this, as he had stumbled across victims of theft who recounted their trauma to him with the hope that he could intercede.

A conclusion was looming for him. The church was much more adept in the black arts than anyone would ever believe. In fact, some said that the church was the black arts. He didn’t believe that, as he had seen them in real life, but the comparison wasn’t entirely dismissible. The robes of power were concealing in all ways, even to him.

THE WALK

ALL OF THIS WAS now amassing in Vaetas’s mind as he contemplated the next two hours—his presentation of his qualifications, the council’s initial rejection of him, a plea for reconsideration, a reluctant concession, and then a convincing argument for his acceptance. And then he would spend a long afternoon in solitude in one of the complex’s stone gardens where he would experience the subtle recollection of long hours spent contemplating eternity. The time would conclude with their decision—a decision, he hoped, that would free him from the iron grip of the church, one way or another.

The sun was just creeping up above the rooflines of the city, and he looked at his watch. Seven. He would have a few minutes to organize his thoughts before the council was scheduled to convene at 7:35.

7:35—long past the Sikhs’ morning bells and long past sunrise in the southern continent. But as is the power of institutions that defy nature, even the sun had made concessions. Vaetas reflected on his long study of the sun—gravity, fusion, theories of the construction of the galaxy and the universe. He had been especially inspired by the idea that looking through a telescope was, in fact, looking into the past. This excited him, as it had all through his studies, during the long years in doctoral effort when on cold nights he’d stare through antiquated yet fully functional telescopes at spots in the sky.

Seeing across time seemed like an impossibility. Yet, there it was—light from another time.

Light could survive the ages. Light that had been borne out of chemical reactions billions of years ago was still as potent and as active as it had been the moment it had been generated. Light was truly eternal. Such a thing, if harnessed, would encompass the entire breadth of all of existence.

Prometheus had been right to steal fire.

Vaetas smiled.

The idea made him walk more self-assuredly, and he found himself relaxing.

THE INNER SANCTUM

VAETAS PASSED THROUGH SEVERAL gates, a number of armed checkpoints, and the grand foyer of one of the library buildings. He knew the way, but he was still cautious as he walked. The officer from the Vatican security office who had been assigned to assist him followed at a discreet distance, radio in hand and submachine gun concealed under his coat.

The antechamber was just as all the others he had seen before—a statement of authority and power as old as time and memory would allow. The church persisted in its illusion of resiliency. The huge room housed a broad, imposing long table covered in scarlet red sashes and blustering coats of arms with massive thrones behind them. Vaetas had wondered if the style of intimidation had changed at all since the Cathars were put on trial for heresy and finally to death. He didn’t have an answer. But the room sparked memories in him, perhaps dormant impressions from others who had visited the chamber under less-than-cordial circumstances, where precise vengeance and the agenda of a religion so vast in its reach and yet so constrained in its humanity, had exacted its toll on new ideas.

Time was accompanied by blood.

A young priest, one of the new generation of loyal servants, clean cut, polite, and attentive, showed Vaetas to his chair, which was planted firmly against the wall to the left of the council table. Vaetas took a moment to check the order of his notes. After a few moments, a nun, an elderly woman from an Order Vaetas didn’t recognize, came to him. She was slightly hunched over with her hands clasped together in front of her. She looked old and frail, but his sense of her also harbored a suspicion that she was fully alert and observant.

Father Vaetas? Her voice was warm, firm, and yet it held a note of authority, almost power, in its tone.

Yes? Sister …? He rose out of habit and bowed slightly, as had been his practice in India.

I’m Mother Superior Rose Margaret of the Order of the Chalice and the Blade. Would you accompany me?

Yes, certainly. Vaetas rose and then hesitated. The Order of the Chalice and the Blade? I … I thought—

Oh, we’re quite alive, as you see. We even have a Mother Superior, which means I’m at least as old as any of the other papal officers here and at least as dangerous, I suppose. And you, you’re from the Order of the Carolingians. We thought you were all dead too.

Vaetas shrugged his shoulders.

The Mother directed him, and they walked.

I actually saw a Carolingian burned alive by the secular arm of the church in India in 1926 for heresy, she said. Jesuits. Ghastly business. I don’t know if the priest had actually done what he had been accused of—witchcraft or some such hogwash—but he was dead nonetheless. It’s all a matter of perception leading to a common end. I suppose we can consider the eternal flames of the nether regions together. Shall we? She smiled and gestured to a door near the rear of the chamber behind the council table.

Vaetas nodded and stepped along with her. He thought about telling her that he recognized her but refrained and held his tongue. They walked through the rear door into a long hallway and passed several impressive paintings. Vaetas’s attention went to an incredible contemporary painting, which he recognized. He started to say the name out loud, not intending to, but the Mother Superior interrupted him.

Yes, that’s Cole, a founder of the Hudson River school of art—the moral landscape. It’s the true manifestation of objective art in the Western tradition. Something I think we can relate to here, in our, ah, current situation. She smiled. I know … contemporary art seems to be so radical a departure from institutional norms here, but we are the Vatican after all, the Council for Scientific Investigations. There’s no investigating anything if all we do is suppress ideas. Fortunately, our new philosophy includes collecting and showing precious art, not burning it. Appreciation is part of the process of acceptance … or absorption—something like that.

I would have thought you’d be too preoccupied with your duties to notice what’s on the walls. Vaetas jested with her innocently. Head in the books and all that.

The Mother Superior raised her head just a bit and looked at Vaetas as they walked. Here, in this place, within this religion, the walls tell the most informative stories. The art hangs on them, as does the faith, but the walls tell more. The art is a nice distraction from what can be the harshness of our own world.

Vaetas thought this an odd comment, but then again, the entire discussion was a breach of protocol. I’m sure Giordano Bruno thought the very same thing.

True. Well, I spent thirty-five years in Calcutta, and much longer in other places in East India, feeding the poor, if that’s what you can call people starving to death from the time they’re born. You either learn all kinds of ways to distract yourself in a place like that, or you embrace it. The distractions don’t last.

They walked alongside one another and continued down the corridor. Vaetas fought down the impulse to like this woman. He knew that today, this day, was the one day he had to maintain a sense of objective logic. But she gently persisted.

She continued. I remember you from your earliest graduate studies. That work on the secret language of geometric design in Pre-Raphaelite art still raises eyebrows here. I suspect the Freemasons were royally perturbed as well, especially within these walls—hidden communications and history revealed, and all that. What bravery you had back then, to expose something that just one hundred years earlier would have seen you relegated to the Zoroastrian catacombs on some barren seafaring island. That was, what, how many years ago?

Vaetas smiled, pleasantly surprised she had remembered him. I’ve lost count. Or burned at the stake, as you say. I’d prefer that over being picked apart by birds. I assume University of Chicago is missing you?

The nun paused at a large, formidable door and smiled, returning the appreciation of recognition. Missing is not something academia ever experiences. Rather, they enshrine your memory onto the trash heap of obsolescence. But now, as we shall see, Dr. Vaetas, Father, you are stepping into a new world. She gestured toward the door.

Vaetas hesitated for a split second and then reached for the handle and pushed the door open. The first step— Vaetas began.

Yes, I know it. Padmasambhava. ‘Once you step through, there’s nowhere left for you but the memory of future lives.’ Her tone had returned to its mercurial pitch. Perhaps today?

THE MEETING

THE VAULTED CEILING OF the vast room gave it a sense of scope that reminded Vaetas of the galactic view. And the room itself seemed to go on forever behind a small cluster of people standing casually before him. One of them stepped away, and Vaetas recognized him immediately. It was the Cardinal who headed the entire council. Vaetas bowed deeply and extended his hand to show his reverence to the man who many considered the most brilliant mind in the church, but the man himself waved Vaetas up.

Father Vaetas, please. This is an informal affair. May I introduce to you some of the others?

The group assembled rather fluidly, and Vaetas found himself shaking hands with men whose names he knew from the thousands of scientific papers he’d read over the span of years too numerous to count. One man, a graduate advisor of his from long ago, hadn’t aged a day.

Michael! Welcome and congratulations. Your recent work on dark matter has really gotten us thinking in new terms. It’s really quite spectacular and has set the public world alight with all kinds of ideas. They shook hands vigorously. And your application of theories about acceleration of light are, well, nearly otherworldly. Still, most impressive.

The Cardinal spoke pleasantly and gestured toward a small arrangement of couches and chairs. Gentlemen, please.

They all sat. The Mother Superior joined them.

The Cardinal nodded to her. Thank you, Dr. Ferenborne. Gladys. Ah, Mother. Rose Margaret.

The Mother cast a stern glance at the Cardinal and then broke into a smile as they all laughed. Certainly, Your Eminence.

Vaetas noticed a sense of fear among the others present as she settled into her seat.

One of the others in the group began. Dr. Vaetas, we’ve been following your work for quite some time. We hope you haven’t misinterpreted our lack of pace in considering you to this appointment as a reflection on your most impressive achievements. Your work has been exemplary.

The Mother continued. Your work, all of it, in support of the church or in academia, is all equally valued here. Your interpretations of some of the more ancient Vedic texts dealing with astronomical theories of the origins of matter have been key to our current efforts.

Vaetas’s eyebrows rose slightly.

Yes, someone else added, your insight into those theories as noted in the Upanishads, particularly on the very beginning of existence, has been most helpful. And the most recent work on Sufi astronomical observations during the cusp of the ninth century historical rift is, well, startling. Your research abilities are simply superior. Your detection of cryptologic cascades within the Pali Canon was a superb achievement. It still has some of our academic peers wincing.

Vaetas smiled and nodded his acceptance, but he also paused in his thinking for a moment. His findings hadn’t yet been summarized.

How did they know about that?

Vaetas straightened and then said something that normal protocol would have prohibited him from saying, but he went ahead. Even our grand institution is elevated by the affirmation of findings sought out of the rest of the world. The effort for me is as much a test of concentration as it is—

Faith? The Cardinal finished the sentence for him. They all smiled.

Certainly, Your Eminence. I would have said endurance. But concentration is as much a part of the exploration for knowledge as is the faith. Vaetas nodded.

The Cardinal shifted in his chair just a bit. I’ve been instructed by the Holy Father to offer you an appointment to the astronomical section. Will you consider this?

Vaetas studied the group, every face. There was something hovering there, within them—a secret. He was pensive, nearly uncomfortable. But his curiosity rose. The appointment is for … what, exactly, Your Eminence?

Does it matter? The Pope demands your allegiance. The Cardinal seemed to be testing him.

I serve best in those areas that I am most qualified to address, Eminence; otherwise, it would strain our already taxed expectations. Vaetas’s response came out of him almost before he could stop it.

Vaetas could see some of the others in the room hold their breath. His words could be seen as a political barb or as a contentious declaration of defiance. The exchange could well lead to his undoing, but he held firm.

The Cardinal smiled. Truly. The Cardinal looked innocently at him and said flatly, We want you to look for a way to end time.

THE TRAP

VAETAS HAD TO DIG deep into himself to keep from doing anything, a change of expression, a flinch, or even a reaction in the look of his eyes. Even though he had heard what had been said, it was a statement of massive implications. Was this a rhetorical exercise, as had been the test at the beginning of his trial as an adherent to the orders of the church, or was this metaphorical, or even interpretive?

He had seen the end of time during long retreats in Japan studying calligraphy in winter. It was so cold the ink slabs had to rest on small burners to keep the ink liquid. It had been like a trip to witness absolute zero. Everything ceased to move; everything had become part of the whole through the sheer absence of temperature. Vaetas reflected on this as he surveyed the faces of the people huddled around him. Had he the power to do so, he would have preferred to be back at the Zen monastery, shivering with his calligraphy brush.

Time … this is a difficult concept, Eminence. The intellectual context of this is not consistent across even our own world. Vaetas was careful and measured in his words but felt confident in them. To assign a mechanical disposition to it, inorganic or otherwise, I should say, is, well, challenging.

The Cardinal smiled imperceptibly and gestured for Vaetas to proceed.

As the great Zen philosophers say, with fair respect to our church, to look for a thing is to never find it. It is there but never here. There is no ‘there’ here. There is only ‘here’ here. We are as trapped in time as the sundial, which sees time pass along its face without ever knowing what time is or realizing that it’s part of a much grander design. The sundial doesn’t know time, only the sun. The words seemed to just tumble out of him, not really coming from anywhere except the sheer pain of years studying the vastness of knowledge, much of it in direct opposition to the church’s prohibitions of such efforts.

The Mother Superior spoke up. What a spectacle of depth you are, Father Vaetas. Be careful; there’s a stake and a woodpile outside. She smiled, and the whole room erupted in soft laughter and gentle applause. I knew Ernst Hoffman. And Krishnamurti. And Watts. You do them a great honor.

Yes, such are the musings of minds that are free to wander. The Cardinal smiled. We had something, well, a bit more mechanical, as you said, in mind. He nodded, and the rest of the room departed, even the Mother Superior, gently bowing toward them as she pulled a side vault door closed behind her.

They were suddenly alone. The Cardinal’s face grew stern. "We have a difficult situation. I laugh using that word, situation—it seems to imply a state of temporary concern, which belies our great history and our endurance, as you said yourself. And to say that it is difficult is to call upon the enormous resiliency of the church across its entire history to resist failure. But this is what it is, and this is where we are."

The Cardinal rested his finger on a small light switch on the table alongside him and then gently pushed.

The entire room came to life. It was grander than Vaetas had even suspected such a place should be, having only been invited into the inner enclaves of power when the light was absent. Vaetas recognized many of the vintage telescopes scattered around the room and saw cases of books, fine, old books, some of which he instantly suspected were the original notes of Galileo Galilei. Across the room was the entire set of Isaac Newton’s Royal Society reports; Vaetas recognized them as the missing volumes long sought by the Queen’s royal astronomer. He knew of them through the translations he had undertaken of French academic papers published in the nineteenth century, in which their unique bindings were described.

The room was filled with other rare items too—ancient astronomical charts, globes, massive collections of astronomical observational tables, and drafting instruments. There were even some Sumerian clay tablets with missing portions fully restored, a highly improbable likelihood if one believed the mainstream academic circles. And there were clocks, including what appeared to be one of Benjamin Franklin’s marine-worthy timekeeping systems, and a primitive hourglass made of gourds from north-central Africa, a place in the Sudan forbidden to outsiders.

On measure, it was an extraordinary collection. But there was more.

Off alongside the wall, sitting in a place of prominence under the lighting, was a large granite vault with leaded glass doors. Inside, on the shelves he could see, were carvings of frightening masks and whole heads of what Vaetas recognized as dark deities from the Nyingma tradition in Tibet. There were stirrup jugs from South America painted with grotesque and violent faces.

Vaetas felt the air leave his body for a moment when he saw a lone sculpture—a head that he recognized. He had seen the head before in photographs from the early twentieth century. It was the rendering of Ahriman, created by Rudolf Steiner.

Of all things to bring into the church … this is dangerous.

THE DUST

BUT HOW DID THE church get it?

It shouldn’t be here, Vaetas thought. He didn’t realize that he had spoken out loud.

So, you are familiar with that? The Cardinal’s voice was steady. I am, as well. Steiner was a brilliant man and a formidable scholar of esoteric knowledge. He was such a disciplined and spiritually powerful man that he could actually search for knowledge and find it. He used it and learned from it. That was a novel concept. Churchill thought so as well, Walter Stein had tutored him. It’s been said that seeing this sculpture convinced Churchill of the urgency of winning the war in Europe. The dark forces not only loomed on the horizon of Existence, but they had manifested in real time and were marching on the world of Man. Steiner knew it. Churchill knew it. Stein knew it. Patton, certainly. It brought a sense of urgency to a confrontation that may well have been won ultimately, but the meaning of which would have been entirely missed.

The Cardinal resettled into his chair. And Steiner dared to bring forth the image of a thing, an adversary, a nemesis, that we have spent thousands of years, and slaughtered millions of lives, to combat. An image that, in and of itself, is as dark and contentious as the being is. Anywhere its image is, or its rendering, so is its awareness. And as for being dangerous, I certainly agree. But this is only one of many such artifacts we have here like this.

Vaetas listened. His heart was beating normally, but he felt his palms growing damp. "You said is, Eminence, and not may be. Have we encountered this thing?"

"That word I use purposefully as well … combat. But in truth, it has been as much a friendly fencing match as it is combat. The Cardinal stood and wandered over to the vault. We had reached a kind of amicable tolerance, maybe even a collegial sporting rivalry. There are other things here, things long lost to the practice of history that are equally as ominous, from other corridors of dim light that we simply can’t look down and comprehend. But, ultimately, these things rely on the power of Man to be used. We are, after all, instruments for the conduit of existence. The Cardinal paused. Without Man, there is no reason for such implements. Time is a river that flows around us regardless of whether we choose to swim."

Vaetas took his cue. Truly, Eminence. Without the vehicle of Man, Evil finds only inorganic space and no ambition. It stays in its realm between consciousness and the mind.

The Cardinal was briefly silent, considering Vaetas’s perspective, and nodded. It is the vehicle of Man that poses the greatest challenge and is our greatest weakness.

Vaetas held himself for a moment. So are we looking for the end of time or its benefactor? he asked, nodding toward the vault.

The Cardinal raised his eyebrows slightly and shrugged ever so discreetly but didn’t answer.

THE EXPRESSION

VAETAS THOUGHT FOR A moment. There are ample rituals still in practice, many of which I have seen. The black hat ceremony of Karma Kagyu comes to mind. If we—

The Cardinal interrupted. "We had grown to believe that they are each separate unto themselves, and in the same instant, they are the same—Time and this being. But things have changed. Time is the being. Time is its rhythm. It’s part of its own existence, if that makes any sense—an inorganic being that can manifest in time through the laws of physics. Or outside of them. The Cardinal refrained. He is, by all sorts, a traveler."

Vaetas felt the foundation of his conditioned perspective on the church slipping into a cold realization that what he had long suspected, and suppressed in himself, was coming forth to fruition. The sensation of admission slid up his back to his neck, and he felt the pinch of fear there, as if something had him by the neck with a cold, sharp claw.

So our Universe is, in fact, a much larger place than we dared admit. Vaetas’s words were soft, but the Cardinal heard them.

Admitting the truth is now moot. The Cardinal countered. When Man first started looking into the heavens with mechanical devices, he slowly stepped over the line between humanity and divinity. Divinity was our birthright; humanity was our death sentence. Even the laws of nature have seams where their basic design flaws can be observed, even manipulated. Our greatest obstacle to enlightenment has been that we—I mean, Man—never comprehended the implications of making such simple observations.

Vaetas listened closely. The conversation was turning toward something that intrigued him—something not typical of Cardinal-like discussion.

"The mere act of looking, and then finally seeing, changed everything. We tried very hard to suppress Einstein’s work, particularly his correct theory about the instantaneous nature of the interruption of natural processes. We did, in fact, manage to thwart the exposure of