Knowing (33 page)

“Wait for them to kill you?” Jane asked. “Why would you do that?”

“It’s my destiny. I knew I wouldn’t make it to thirty. Most of us never make it to thirty. They embed a suicide switch in our programming. It usually clicks on around age twenty-seven and goes into full gear before thirty. I think Gabe felt it coming on right before he hit thirty, but he was smart enough to not flip the switch. It’s a real strong trigger for self-destruction. It’s hard to override their system. Your desire to implode is greater than your desire to live. And when it gets too much,
you
take care of business. One less problem they have to deal with. It’s quite efficient programming, huh? The computer destroys itself and everything in it.
They
don’t have to lift a finger.”

“But you cut out your chip,” Jane offered. “So, you’re not hooked in to their end game.”

“If I kill myself now,” Monroe said with authority, “it’s on
my
terms, not theirs.” He wiped his brow. “Damn, seriously, you don’t think it’s hot in here?”

“No, it isn’t,” Harlan said.

“Shit, I feel like I have flames dancing on my bare flesh.” He got up again and stared out the side window.

“What is it?” Jane asked.

“They’re out there.”

Jane got up and moved to Monroe’s side. She peered out the window but all she saw was acres of farm and ranch land with not a soul in sight. “Is this your paranoia talking?”

“No, ma’am. This is experience talking.” He scanned the area one more time. “Nobody’s ever met the guy at the top of the pyramid. Nobody knows the names of the few who protect him. But all I know in my heart is that he’s indestructible.”

Jane shook her head. “I don’t understand how any person or small group got this kind of supreme power that overrides everything rational.”

“It’s a good question. It didn’t happen overnight. I heard that Romulus has been hiding in plain sight for centuries. Pulling the strings and making us think we are in charge of our own future.”

“We
are
in charge of our own future.”

“You sure about that?” Monroe asked, with a crooked grin. “How can you be so sure that what you believe and what you desire has not been programmed into you by everything you encounter on a daily basis? If every choice you are given is not a choice at all and really just a pre-digested preference that was created for you, how would you feel? We have the
illusion
of choice because no matter what we choose, the game never changes. The wheels always keep moving in the direction that suits the ones who are designing the wheels. If they don’t want that wheel to travel somewhere, they make damn sure it’s designed so that it doesn’t roll there.” He cocked his head to the side. “If they want you to be afraid of something that’s not even a real threat, they can do that too. Oh yeah, there’s
nothin’
more compelling than a
perceived
threat, especially when you’re the one in control of creating that perception!” He turned to the side in contemplation. “You know, Romulus does have one downfall. They can’t generate anything on their own because they lack sanity and humanity. They don’t create anything except chaos. Everything they own, they’ve stolen. Essentially, they exist by sucking on the souls of others.”

Jane nodded, recollecting her dream. “The word ‘soul’ exists within the word ‘Romulus.’”

“You saw that too, huh?” Monroe replied with a sly grin.

“It was pointed out to me,” Jane stated.

Monroe meandered back toward them. “It ain’t a coincidence. But the joke’s on them because they have no soul. They have the heart of a lizard and the breath of a devil.”

“Fuck ‘em,” Jane stated.

Monroe glanced at her. “It’s easy to say that when you haven’t dealt with them directly.”

“I have! I’m deep in their muck right now, Monroe. They want to kill Harlan because they think he knows something.”

Monroe looked at Harlan. “He doesn’t know anything. But his heart does.”

Jane had to wrap her mind around the fact that the only person who finally understood what was going on just happened to be mentally unfit. “You said Gabe wanted to leave a legacy?” She pointed to Harlan. “
That
is his legacy, right there!”

Monroe moved away from Jane and plopped his skinny ass on his chair. “What are you going to do if you find out what that heart of his is trying to tell you? You going to expose it?”

“That’s what Gabe wants, isn’t it?” Jane replied.

“Why?” Monroe asked gently. “Why put your ass on the line for a dead man?”

She glanced nervously toward Harlan. “Harlan isn’t dead yet.”

“I was talking about Gabe.”

Jane considered the question. “Well, Gabe is inside of Harlan. So, I guess it’s one in the same. I save one, I save the other.”

“Why don’t you just go back to your life and forget about all this?”

“Because I don’t have a life!” Jane stated, shocked somewhat that she was admitting that to a stranger. “The only life I have is in saving other people.”

Monroe looked at her perplexed. “
Really
? You’re all alone?”

“No, she ain’t,” Harlan suddenly interjected.

“Shut up,” Jane whispered toward Harlan.

“Don’t tell me to shut up,” Harlan retorted. “She’s got a real nice boyfriend. She just doesn’t want to believe it.”

Jane spun toward Harlan. “That boyfriend had a 9mm pointed at your head.”

“Yeah, well, I already forgave him for that.” Harlan stated in a stern tenor. “You should too.”

Monroe popped out of his chair again. He began tapping his head with the tips of his fingers. “I’ve got places to go and people to be.”

Jane stood up. “Hey, come on! I thought you were going to help me out.” She observed him and realized he’d split and another personality took over.

“I need to do my rounds.” He picked up two rifles and shoved his .45 pistol down the front of his sagging trousers. “
By myself
.” His voice was strict. “You can look at or read anything you want. You can eat whatever you find. You can even play games on my computers. You’ll never get past my firewall so I’m not worried.”

“When are you coming back?” Jane asked.

“Couple hours. Maybe more.” He grabbed a clip and shoved it into his pocket.

“What if you don’t come back? We’ll be sitting ducks.”

“Gabe has watched over you two so far. Hopefully, he’s still up to the job.”

For the first hour of Monroe’s absence, Jane sat on the screened porch and waited. Harlan, on the contrary, built himself a thick sandwich, knocked back half a dozen raw eggs, two bottles of pine needle beer and settled his ass in front of Monroe’s giant computer. He was still sitting there playing Tetris when Jane finally walked back into the house. She heated up a can of clam chowder she found on a shelf in Monroe’s sparse kitchen. Returning to the living room with the saucepan of chowder and a large spoon, she ate a few spoonfuls before setting it down and collecting the remaining four postcards Monroe retrieved from the hidden wall safe.

She cleared a space on Monroe’s cluttered desk and laid them out. Checking the back of each card, the only handwriting was Monroe’s address and a circled number in the space where the message would normally be written. The numbers began with “2” and ended with “6.” The card with “2” on the back featured what looked like a city park, with beautifully manicured lawns, playground equipment and a baseball field. Turning the card over, the imprint on the back read: “O’Rian Park in the small town of Helios, Colorado, is a popular center for family gatherings and sports activities.” Jane remembered seeing a map amidst the clutter and once she found it, she opened it up and laid it on the floor. From what she could tell, Helios was in spitting distance of Monroe’s dwelling.

Looking at the card with “3” on the back, the photograph was a family farm with rows and rows of verdant produce ready to be harvested. She turned the card over. “
The Green Goodness
CSA is located in the San Luis Valley, resting in the Sangre de Cristo mountains.” This was the same CSA mentioned in the Eco-Goddesses newsletter Harlan kept in his mysterious burlap bag. Jane ran out to the van and brought back the burlap bag, Harlan’s notebook and her leather satchel. Fishing out the newsletter from the bag, Jane turned the pages until she found the large black and white photo of the fifty people standing in front of a field of vegetables. The caption beneath had crammed the names of the CSA members so tightly that it was nearly impossible to discern any of them.

“You see a magnifying glass anywhere around here?” she asked Harlan.

He was deeply involved in his computer game. “Hang on. I finally got to level twenty five.”

Jane waved him off and started hunting through drawers until she uncovered a photographer’s loop. Running the loop across the caption, she read each name until she came to one that was all too familiar: Werner Haas. “Shit,” she said standing up and staring at the photo. Counting the people in the photo from left to right in that line, she held her index finger on the face. Pressing the loop against the photograph, there was Gabe. It was exactly what John Burroughs told her. He could blend in and play any part he wanted—a priest, executive…or CSA farm worker.

She snapped up the third card that had “4” circled on the back. But Jane noticed right away that there was no title or explanation of the photo as the other postcards. The scene was strange, depicting a rugged view of a mountain top meadow. To the left, was an old, rusty windmill and to the left of that was an “X” written in black permanent ink. Above the “X” were the words, “You are here.” Jane flipped the card over again, thinking maybe she missed some minute description of where this was located but there was nothing there.

Jane retrieved the fourth and last card. The number “6” was circled on the back. Where was the card with number five, she wondered? Everything she had in her hand was what Monroe removed from the hole in the wall. Figuring she’d go with what she had, Jane looked at the front photo. It was an adobe shrine in northern New Mexico called El Santuario de Chimayo. The sloping adobe wall at the front of the sacred church opened to a modest entrance that led visitors down a weather beaten pathway and toward the shrine. On the back, it read: “The Santuario de Chimayo is a historic shrine of New Mexico that draws hundreds of pilgrims annually. It is considered a consecrated location for healing the spirit, the body and the mind.”

Jane looked at the photo again. She’d heard about Chimayo many times from her brother who was fascinated by all things “woo-woo.” He called it the “Lourdes of the Southwest” and he had good reason for it. People made pilgrimages from all over the world to walk the short distance into the chapel and then into the modest side room where a small pit in the floor, known as
el pocito
, holds the “holy dirt” which many believe has remarkable curative powers. Visitors return to their homes with a bag of this holy dirt and report that miracles occurred in their lives shortly thereafter. Terminal illnesses went into remission, marriages were saved, couples were able to conceive, and, yes, people could walk again. The chapel at Chimayo is filled floor to ceiling with crutches brought there by believers as evidence that a miraculous healing occurred for them.

Jane laid out the four cards and looked at them again. But the fact that the order started with “2” and not “1” bothered Jane. Spying the lone card of the farmer in overalls that resembled Harlan, she picked it up and turned it over. There was “1” on the back. Setting it down in the first position, it felt to Jane as if the cards represented a collective pathway. Why else would Gabe number them? The first card established Harlan’s arrival. To Jane, it made peculiar sense that Gabe somehow knew all of this would occur and wanted to give Harlan and her the guidance they would need to complete their journey. Accepting that theory, Jane deduced that their next stop would be locating O’Rian Park the next day. But in the meantime, she would continue to take Monroe up on his offer to read and look at anything she desired.

She roamed the periphery of the living room, reading and looking at the various postcards that were tacked onto the boards in thick layers. She’d pull one off a board and Jane would find three more hidden underneath it. One card had a single quote across the front: “We don’t have hoaxes anymore. We have engineered misunderstandings.” Jane smiled and continued to remove one card after another until she found one that made her take a break. It was a vintage reissue of a card that sported a 1966 ice blue Mustang on the front. Pulling it off the board, she turned it over and saw that it was unused. How odd, she thought. Staring at the depiction of her cherished ride, her heart sunk. She wasn’t sure if it was the damn car she missed or the guy who drove it away from her.

Tucking the card into her jacket pocket, she perused a few more pegboards of cards before noticing that one board stood out from the wall more than the others. Jane lifted it off the two screws and set it down, exposing another secret compartment. She tapped the door of the compartment lightly several times, testing its security. Either it wasn’t locked correctly or the lock had been compromised because the door opened. Jane turned to alert Harlan but stopped before uttering a word. He was onto level thirty-three and there was no way he could be ripped away from that achievement. Reaching into the twelve-inch square hole, Jane removed a single, plain, 8 ½ x 14 inch envelope that felt somewhat weighty. She turned back to Harlan who was still engrossed in his game and then quietly walked into the kitchen with the envelope.

Jane unhooked the envelope flap and lifted the contents onto Monroe’s cluttered kitchen table. It was a stack of 8 x 10 inch color photos. The first photo showed what appeared to be an African tribal village from the air. The photography was well done with vivid colors and crisp images. The second shot was taken closer to the ground but still in the aircraft. Jane turned over the shots to see if there was anything written or stamped on the backs but they were blank. Each subsequent shot seemed to tell a chronological story of walking into the village, showing lattice-roofed mud huts and young children. Jane stopped and pulled up the two shots of the lattice-roofed huts. They were identical to what she saw in her strange and disturbing vision. Remembering how that vision ended with a horrific scream from a child, Jane steadied herself. She snuck a peek outside the kitchen door to make sure Harlan was still occupied before returning to the photographs. There were several shots of children that appeared to be between the ages of two and six, dressed in their native garb. One child, a boy, wore a unique horn necklace around his neck. He smiled at the camera, holding out his hand.

Jane felt her mouth go dry as she turned to the next photo in the stack. There was a close-up of the same young boy with the necklace around his neck. But in this photo, his skull was split in two down the middle and pulled apart. It was clear that the brain had been removed from his cranium. Jane took several steps backward, pressing her back against the wall. She’d seen thousands of gruesome, murderous crime scene photos that involved children and infants but somehow, this felt different.
This
shot seemed to have surgical precision. She felt sick to her stomach as she moved back to the table. The next twelve shots would have challenged hardcore detectives who’d “seen it all.” Each one was worse than the one before. Every photo featured a close-up of another child under the age of six with his or her head split open in the exact manner as the one before, and each child had their brain removed.

Jane collected all the photos and shoved them into the large envelope. She sat down and tried to catch her breath and steady her nerves. One of the postcards Gabe sent Nanette Larson featured children in the Congo dressed in their native garb. Jane easily recalled Nanette’s comment about how, less than a week after receiving the card, she saw a story on the Internet about a coup in the Congo where tribal leaders were slaughtered, along with many children. But if this was connected to that massacre, where were the shots of the tribal leaders? Wouldn’t a tribal leader, Jane reasoned, be more valuable as some sort of photographic “kill prize” rather than a child?

Then her mind drifted to another disturbing yet probable connection. Suddenly, Patsy Cline’s “Through the Eyes of a Child” took on a sinister twist. Jane wracked her brain trying to come up with a suitable explanation for Harlan being compelled to include that song in his burlap bag. The only thing she could come up with was the abject terror in their young eyes right before they were killed. But that ran counter to the lines in the song that spoke more positively about “what a wonderful world it would be” to “see the world through the eyes of a child.” Jane scooped up the envelope and walked back into the living room. She started to put the envelope back into the hiding place but pulled it back out, closed the steel door and replaced the peg board on the wall.

After finishing her soup and grabbing a few stale chips, she walked out onto the screened in porch, sat in a comfortable recliner and waited. Occasionally, she dozed but quickly stirred at the softest sound. Harlan eventually joined her, bringing her a sandwich and then a bowl of ice cream from a carton in the freezer. And together, they waited. As night confiscated the daylight, Jane and Harlan pulled a couple blankets closer to their bodies. Two more sandwiches later with a pine needle beer for Harlan and a soda for Jane, they were still waiting. Jane had already chewed the skin nearly off one thumb and was working on the other one when she heard footsteps disturb the gravel pathway that lay cloaked in darkness in front of them. She slid off the recliner and stood up as Harlan followed suit. Out of the April shadows, Monroe appeared, looking tired and troubled. Harlan relaxed but Jane stood as if a steel rod replaced her spine.

“Where in the hell have you been all day?” Jane exclaimed.

Monroe opened the front door and rested his two rifles and .45 on a small table. “You know, I don’t even know your name,” he said with an eerie calm. “Should I just call you ‘mom?’”

Jane wasn’t sure what new personality had taken him over but it seemed to be a laid back one. “My name’s Jane and I’m nobody’s mother.”

“Could’ve fooled me,” Monroe mumbled under his breath.

Harlan shot Jane a half-smile of agreement. “I need to talk to Monroe. Alone.”

Harlan worked his way around chairs and back into the house. “Damn, brother. I’ll say a prayer for you.”

Jane waited until Harlan was in the house and out of earshot. “Sit down.”

Monroe held firm. “You know, this is
my
house, right?”

“
Sit down
,” she firmly repeated.

He ran his fingers through his tangled hair. “Oh, man. Shit just got real.” He planted his ass onto the recliner across from Jane.

She grabbed the envelope and threw it at him. “Yeah, shit just got
way
real!”

Monroe didn’t touch the envelope. “This was hidden in my wall.”

“You said I could read or look at
anything
. And I didn’t have to pick a lock to get it. Don’t act so shocked, Monroe. You expected me to find it. That’s why you were gone so long. You wanted to give me lots of time. I’ve been waiting for you for almost nine fucking hours. I’m not sure who you are used to dealing with but—”

“Gabe didn’t do it,” Monroe suddenly interrupted in a low, modulated voice. He looked Jane straight in the eye. “You thought he did this?”

“I don’t know what to think anymore.”

“Wow. Even after everything I told you about him and what you probably already knew, you still thought he was capable of this,” he flicked his middle finger against the envelope. “Is that what your mind told you or is that what your heart told you? The heart and the mind are two separate elements that can often work against each other.”

Jane regarded Monroe with a puzzled expression. The syncs between the worlds were beginning to collide.

Monroe flung the envelope on the floor. “Jesus, how could you believe Gabe had a hand in that? I think the trickster got hold of you.”

“What’s that?” Jane asked, sitting down.

“He’s within your head and outside of it. He enjoys making you suffer and his only goal is to destroy you. He hates those who love you so he feeds you lies and dismisses those who tell you the truth. He makes you doubt what your heart tells you and then whispers what you want to hear. His biggest fear is that you will wake up, so he waits for you in the darkened shadows and demands that you sleep. He needs to keep you enslaved. He’s gotta keep you afraid, addicted and unsure of yourself so you are paralyzed to act. He gains his strength by making sure you are weak.” He looked at her. “Weak enough to believe that the heart of the man inside your friend’s chest could even conceive of this, let alone do it.”