Star Woman in Love (18 page)

“Let’s see...,” Harker said turning to the mummy. “Who are you?”

Silence was unbearable and still unbridgeable for the mummy-like girl: it sucked her in like water down the drain, vacuumed into a void. She lied still. Far too much space was in her head. A big blank descended when the question was asked. She didn’t have a clue as to who she was. She understood sound and nothing else. The voice that was talking to her was soothing. It could take her home. She was pure matter ready to be forged by the whims of her onlookers, by the sound of that voice. All she could understand were the sensations she was experiencing. She enjoyed breathing, shallowly at first, and then more deeply. Yes was yes and no was no. They had told her so repeatedly when all she could see was that big bright light. Now she wanted to sleep again. Rest. Forget even more. No need to hold on to any memory. She was new, she was the Chosen One. Her body hurt. Her limbs were heavy. Her eyes couldn’t focus on any shape in particular. She had only definitions but nothing to attach them to yet. She wondered if she was a larva, a parasite. No: she was a girl, almost a woman, the Chosen One. Their voices had told her, their words had programmed her. All was dark now and she needed to rest.

Marion Le Blanc started fiddling with the machinery. A red button came on. All faces turned to look at what she was doing. She addressed the man wearing glasses.

“We’re losing her, Francois. Brain activity is deteriorating. She has a regular pulse though. No panic, the situation is under control. Pump more morphine and give her more anaesthetic. That’s it. There should be no major brain damage and she’s likely to have retained all of her organ functions perfectly. Let’s wait and see... my God... I can’t believe we’ve made it... I’ll believe it when she’ll be walking and talking... my God, my good God... we’ve made it, it’s a miracle!”

This was the most secretive and confidential clinical trial that Three-D Pharmaceuticals had ever run. Indeed, it wasn’t really a clinical trial although that was how they had labelled it from the beginning, in case any information leaked. So far so good; twenty years of ground breaking research and preparation had gone into perfecting the study. Many ‘guinea pigs’ had succumbed to the perils of this adventurous experiment. The world needed it now more than ever. Cassandra Morgante had to be stopped before she could develop her self-healing powers and grow ever-lasting cells in her body. No pharmaceutical company could survive if the element of immortality and viral invulnerability were introduced into the minds and bodies of the human species. Everything would blend into oneness. The very foundation upon which the industry was based would be shaken irrevocably. The course of history would be changed forever. Fear and death would disappear over time, and Time itself would eventually come to an end. No one, but a fool, would want this.

Duality was much better than oneness, and Harker knew this. Human evolution was based upon struggle and making the right self-preserving choices. Some may maintain that love is nature’s preference. In the third dimension, however, a species’ endurance doesn’t result from love. It depends on fear, which had so far driven the Survival of the Fittest of the Earth. Cassandra had to be wiped out, or at least counteracted. That’s why Harker had devised an antidote to her: her own personal, custom-build nemesis.

He turned pensive for a second as he remembered the place of his origin. He could never go back there, to that plane where love rules. Wasn’t love the force that had begun to erode his entire angel race after all? Too much love can wipe matter away, and sweep life into nothingness. It was starting to happen on Venus when he took his bet. He wouldn’t let this happen on Earth, his adoptive planet for the past number of millennia. The last two thousand years had been a greater challenge, as more and more Beings of Light had started to incarnate as Earthlings. This was raising the Planet’s frequency, and humans were starting to live longer and better lives. But it was Cassandra’s birth that was the real problem. She was equipped to succeed: she was designed to be the first immortal human.

Something needed to be done before that could happen. Harker had sided with the most money-driven, mercenary pharmaceutical giant in order to counteract the Masters’ Plan. Humans had to continue to suffer and die. Their collective fear had kept him in vogue for so long, and it had given him the strength to last for all these centuries. The Lord of the Ego, the Angel of Pain, the Most Beautiful in the Legion of Angels, or Monsieur Harker as they called him now. He had invented the Game and didn’t want any new rule to be introduced.

His amber eyes were fixed on Charlotte Mechant’s body: it was half the size it had been a year before, on the night he had enticed her to the lab. She was an easy prey. A spotty seventeen year-old girl, a problem teenager who’d run away from her family in the countryside of Bourgogne to the French capital in search of work, love and a new body. She was overweight then, verging on obese. Depression and an extreme need for attention were her constant companions. She thought she had found the help she badly needed at Monsieur Harker’s Hypnosis Centre on the Boulevard du Mont Parnasse. The clinic was expensive and lavishly decorated, with marble floors and antique tapestries on the walls. Charlotte fell in love with Bob Harker the second she saw him. All women did; and he knew that she would also follow suit.

Now she was lying on the table, covered in bandages and shaved head to toe, having undergone ninety seven different surgeries and hours of electroshock at various degree of intensity. She definitely had the body she had always wanted at last. It would be revealed once she had healed. He knew that she would succeed: he had created his own personal ‘anti-Cassandra’. From this point onwards, the efforts of the Luciferian Tribe he led could concentrate on making Charlotte believe she was like Cassandra so they could swap places, and Cassandra would forget who she was. The former would be difficult. The latter would be borderline impossible.

There was a lot of cunning in Harker’s plan, but they had to entrap Cassandra before her powers could grow any stronger. It would take some hard work to defy her mighty helpers. The Tribe had always enjoyed a challenge anyway. Harker wanted Cassandra for himself. He could seduce her. He needed to de-activate her to fulfil his own personal prophecy and create the world he wanted.

She was becoming a real problem. Her energy was rising and reaching towards the Core Signature, the harmonious frequency of creation. She could raise the consciousness of those she interacted with by her mere presence. This kind of shift in perception could bring about a change in the cellular make-up of those who experienced it. In due course she would end up tuning into her Core Signature, bringing her chakras into alignment and prompting to the kundalini to rise and dance. When the 12-strand DNA replaced her normal 2-strand one, she would become an angel. This could be contagious, too. That’s why the Tribe was keeping close watch. So far, her escapades into her angelic essence had been short-lived and inadvertent. She didn’t realise they were coming from her and thought of them as external experiences generated by the environment, or as messages from the natural world. Harker didn’t want this to happen, and certainly not while she was in Paris.

* * * *

When Cassandra, who was then still an undergraduate at Edinburgh University, arrived in Paris, the atmosphere changed. She brought Light and good energy, and the city hated this. As usual, we followed her to shelter her from the snares of the Dark Forces. After all, the place she was visiting was the hub of all Luciferian activities, the capital of the Dark Angel, the environment in which the deepest wound of the Earth was kept permanently bleeding. Evil lurked freely everywhere, in the lushest of disguises. However, Cassandra hadn’t noticed. Her focus, as usual, was on love, which she was seeking actively once again. This time she was hoping to find it in the romantic surroundings of the French capital, sitting in a café or strolling along the Seine. Letizia was her travelling companion. They had grown up together in Northern Italy.

The official excuse for the girls’ visit to Paris was that Cassandra wanted to look at some early Merovingian manuscripts in the Bibliothèque Nationale. She was in her third year as a Medieval History undergraduate and had managed to get a travel bursary for this purpose. She and Letizia had been through a number of adventures together, and they were adamant that this was going to be their latest one. They wanted to explore new grounds. April was a good month to do just that. So they boarded a train in Venice one evening and found themselves in Paris on the following day. They were twenty-two then. They took a twin room in a hostel in Saint Michel. Breakfast was included. The expanse of the city stretched out ahead for them to explore. Everything was possible.

The first few days were spent admiring the artistic treasures of the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume, and the quirky beauty of the Pompidou Centre. Cassandra wanted to leave the manuscripts until later in their two-week stay. On the third morning the two friends decided to have an early breakfast and hit the town without any further ado.

“Cassie, wake up! It’s sunny outside! Let’s get moving now.”

“Letizia... what time is it?”

“7 on the dot. I woke up over an hour ago... can’t you hear that?”

“What? I’m too groggy... ah, yeah... someone’s singing... underneath our window... down in the alleyway... beautiful voice...”

“Beautiful my arse! It woke me up when I really needed a rest. We have a full day ahead of us and I wanted to feel recharged this morning... not serenaded!”

The sun was shining through the curtains. Cassandra got out of bed, put on a sweater and went to open the window.

“Bonjour! Hey there! Good morning to you and thanks for the music!”

A young man in a cowboy hat and a long suede coat was leaning on the brick wall of the back street, strumming his guitar and humming a bluesy tune. He sounded American, at least when he sang. It was hard to make out much of what he was singing though, as his words were mumbled. The song was about getting a girl, taking her away from Boulevard du Montparnasse and to the man who loved her. A strange blues with a Parisian twist, probably his own composition. He stopped for a short second to greet Cassandra with the flash of a perfect smile. There was something familiar about him, she thought, though she was sure they had never met.

“Hello...,” he said looking up absent-mindedly. His blond hair fell on his shoulders in sun-kissed waves.

“Definitely Californian, definitely a surfer,” Cassandra told Letizia as her eyes absorbed the vision of this suntanned troubadour who looked more like an athlete than a travelling musician. “I have found what I’d come looking for in Paris!”

His chiselled face was unique: he had blue eyes and slightly Asian features. He continued to play his music, keeping his eyes on the girl who was leaning out of the window in a vest and shorts. She was even more attractive than he’d guessed at first glance. He had seen her the day before in the breakfast room. Stunning. He had felt a drive, almost a compulsion, to get to know her. Conor, that was his name, was always on the lookout for the chance of a romantic liaison. She fit the part: exotic, innocent and young as she was. How old could she be? Eighteen perhaps? He was a man of experience at twenty-three, and well travelled. Was she Spanish? A tourist in the city of love. He had tricks up his sleeves and he wanted to show her. His fingers could touch a young woman in the most exquisite way. He could feel her trembling under his hands already. She had to fall for him: she had to be enthralled by his charms.

“Gonna get your girl, gonna take her down...,” he was singing.

“Are you staying in this hostel?,” Cassandra asked him. He nodded in reply.

“Well, see you downstairs at breakfast then!”

He smiled and continued with his song. Letizia appeared at the window and slammed it closed. She raised her middle finger to him as she pulled the curtains. Conor remained as if transfixed in the alleyway, playing his guitar for a few more minutes. Then he woke up from his trance and couldn’t quite understand what he was doing in the backstreet so early in the morning. He felt very sleepy and tired all of a sudden. All he could do was go back to the dorm and hope for a bit of sleep despite the fact that everybody else would be waking up.

“What did I smoke last night? What did I drink? Where did I go,” he wondered.

A sensation of panic and fear started spreading from his head to his heart, finally reaching his guts. Or was it hunger?  Perhaps he should go and get a bite. Breakfast would be served in half an hour in the hostel. Food or no food, the fact remained that he had no recollection of what he’d done the night before and how he ended up playing underneath a window at dawn. Whose window was it?

“Mad trip, man! I’m running on empty here... gotta ground myself again, gonna get some sleep, man!”

The two girls emerged from the luxury of their twin room into the hostel’s cafeteria where many of the guests were already busy with breakfast. Cassandra’s hair was in a ponytail. She wore a miniskirt and a sweatshirt that she had selected carefully in the hope of getting the attention of the weird but gorgeous serenading dude. Heads turned as she walked in. She took a look around the room: he wasn’t there. Her heart sank. She put some food and a coffee on her tray and went to sit with her friend at the end of one of the long tables, wanting to avoid having to chat with other guests.

“Where is he?”

She was sure she would find him there waiting for her. She always got what she wanted after all, especially with men.