Read House of Cabal Volume One: Eden Online

Authors: Wesley McCraw

Tags: #angels, #gay, #bisexual, #conspiracy, #time travel, #immortal, #insects, #aphrodisiac, #masculinity

House of Cabal Volume One: Eden (16 page)

BOOK: House of Cabal Volume One: Eden
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“Or a cult.” She laughs. “You go to this
remote estate and it’s a doomsday cult, chanting and all that. They
said it would change your life forever. Isn’t that what cults
promise, human sacrifice and a life changed forever?”

I cross my arms, holding my cut finger out.
“You joke, but you might not be far off. It has that religious
symbol. The eternal flame.”

“I’m sure it’s not a cult, Everett. She’s
joking.”

“We don’t have enough clues. It could be
anything. Do you know anything else about the symbol?”

He shrugs. “It mostly relates to everlasting
life and God’s power. I’m no expert in cuneiform, but it’s not
related to Sumerian as far as I can tell. The symbol could be
Zoroastrian. That tradition has the six divine sparks. Each one is
an everlasting flame.”

Dana protests. “That doesn’t make sense. How
does that connect with what the gnostics were saying?”

“The symbol on the box might not have
anything to do with the tablet inside. It could just be a box.”

“Zoroastrian though?”

“It’s a guess. The infinity symbol has its
roots in the roman numeral CIC, so the symbol probably originated
after the Sumerians.”

“Then it’s more likely it has roots in
Judaism. That would make more sense.”

“I wish we could give you a clear answer,
Everett. Long story short, the Muslim gnostic said it meant eternal
flame.”

“When you saw it, how did you know you needed
to put the note over a fire?”

“Lucky guess? In most ancient languages fire
and burning are the same symbol. It’s not just an eternal flame,
it’s an eternal burning, or even eternally burnt. It got me
thinking. There was all that blank space between the stanzas, and a
holy flame is supposed to light the way to salvation, and so I put
two and two together and thought maybe there was invisible ink. I
didn’t mean to just take it from you like that.”

“No. You were right. I should have thought of
invisible ink from the beginning.”

“The return address!” I yell out of the
blue.

They both look at me like I’m a weirdo.

“The box has a return address. All I have to
do is track down the location of the address and use the key. It’s
so obvious. Why didn’t I think of that before?”

“Riddle solved.” Dana stands. “You finished
with your plate?”

They should be more excited about this. I
guess it’s not their puzzle. I suppress my stupid grin so I don’t
look as ridiculous.

Dana takes the dishes into the kitchen.

Thomas backs up from the table. “Before you
go, you should look up the address online.”

“You have a computer?”

With the return address in hand, I follow
Thomas to a room down the hall.

You look around with fresh eyes. If I lied
about cutting myself—maybe just a slight of hand, but still a
deception—what else am I lying about?

 

 

Cassette Tape Eight:

Urban Legends

 

The room is empty except for a desk, a
printer, and a laptop computer. A sliding glass door leads out to
the backyard, and you stand behind me, reflected in the glass. You
don’t look happy. You thought I was open about everything. You were
being naïve. Of course there is a layer I’m hiding. Everyone you’ve
ever interviewed tried to hide something. Why would I be
different?

The modem sounds as Thomas logs onto the
Internet. It’s paranoia again, but I want to make sure no one is
watching from outside. I find the light switch. The well maintained
backyard has an empty doghouse and yellow tulips lining a tall
white fence.

“You have a dog?”

“What? Oh, the dog house. No. No, it came
with the house.”

You ask me what happened to my brother.

I remain silent as Thomas goes through some
websites. You aren’t actually here. I don’t have to answer your
questions.

Unlike me, Thomas knows what he’s doing when
it comes to the Internet and arrives at a complicated, at least to
me, address directory.

I give him the address. He types it in.
Nothing comes up.

“That’s strange,” he says. “Maybe it’s not a
real address.” He goes to a general search engine. After a few
websites, he comes to the Creative Employment Center (CEC)
homepage.

“There’s the address.” He points to the
bottom of the screen. The web page is plain blue with only one
paragraph and no pictures, altogether unremarkable.

“The Creative Employment Center sounds
straightforward enough. I can’t believe they would have you go
through this whole riddle thing. Are you an artist?”

“I took classes in college.”

“It says here that you don’t contact them,
they contact you.” He grins and says, “This has to be it.”

For the first time, I realize the hokey
aspect of all this.

I lean over his shoulder. He has on a cologne
that I think I’ve tried before.

“It says it’s near Carmel-by-the-Sea,
California. The directory would’ve given you a map, but I guess
you’ll have to go to Carmel and ask around.” He scrolls up and down
the simple homepage. “Why do they have a website just to say we’ll
contact you?”

“Because, how else would I find this place if
there is no record of the address anywhere? One more clue to the
riddle. At least now I know what area to look in.”

I read it for myself. It doesn’t say much
more than what he told me, just that it gives opportunities to
those who deserve it. I check the usual systems for encoding
messages but can’t make anything out. The copyright at the bottom
of the page is in a different color than the rest of the text, and
I click on it.

A new page comes up.

It reads:

Twenty-four thousand, five hundred eight
people went missing from the streets of Los Angeles in 1984,
according to a yearly report from the California Department of
Justice. Some estimate the actual number is higher due to the large
number of disappearances that go unreported.

Last year Tom Granger, a local talent agent,
reported to the LAPD that he was mysteriously losing a number of
his most promising clients. He told police, “One day they were
pestering me to get them auditions, the next, it was like they
didn’t exist.” Every two weeks he would lose another client. A
number of other talent agents across the city were reporting
similar occurrences.

As the police looked into the
disappearances, a pattern started to form. The missing persons were
between the ages of 16 and 21 and homeless. None of them had family
in L.A. and many of them were runaways. The police connected more
than 100 disappearances to the case.

The similarities gave authorities little to
go on. No significant clues surfaced until one police officer
started to interview the local teenage homeless population.

In his interviews, the police officer
discovered reports of young men and women, many who turned to
prostitution, disappearing after getting into a black 1939
Rolls-Royce Wraith. Though no one could give a description of the
driver, almost everyone knew of the car. According to the reports,
the car would pull up to a person on the street and the person
would get in voluntarily, never to be seen from again.


It was eerie,” the police officer
confessed later, when asked about the interviews. “All these kids
all over L.A. had seen the same car, abducting huge amounts of
kids, yet no one was reporting it. I asked them how they knew it
was the same car, and that’s when they told me the license plate
read ‘ENIGMA.’ It was the first real lead in the case.”

Strangely, many didn’t see the car as a
threat.


He took my best friend,” said a
15-year-old boy who lived in a homeless shelter at the end of
13
th
street. “Shawn wouldn’t leave
me. It must’ve been his big break. I know I’ll see him in a movie
and I won’t even recognize him because he’s that good. At
auditions, they don’t care if you have talent. They just care if
you’re famous. The man in the Wraith is different. He cares about
talent. That’s why he took Shawn.”

The man in the Rolls-Royce Wraith was said
to be a top casting director from Hollywood who took pity on the
homeless of L.A. He came from the streets, so he casts people from
the streets.

Blacks, Hispanics, and Whites all told the
story of the same driver, in elaborate detail. He was said to have
come to L.A. on his 16
th
birthday,
back in the times of old Hollywood, of Marilyn Monroe and James
Dean. According to reports, he was running away from a mentally
unstable mother and an abusive father in Texas. Having mastered all
of Shakespeare’s plays, all of Fred Astaire’s moves, and every
accent from Irish to Swahili, he was a young acting genius.

However, like many actors who came to L.A.,
he struck out in the harsh game of showbiz, despite his talent.
After two years of auditions and odd jobs, someone introduced him
to cocaine. Cocaine was his undoing. He was soon out of money, out
of a job, and forced into prostitution to feed his growing drug
addiction.

Then his luck seemed to change. James, a
casting director, saw the actor at a homeless shelter and instantly
saw his talent. The two became lovers, and James gave the actor
money so he wouldn’t have to sell himself on the street. James then
took the boy, who by this time had just turned 19, to rehab.

Despite his newfound connection, years went
by and the actor had yet to play even the smallest part in a movie
or television show. The actor never gave up, and worked each day to
become better at his craft.

Decades later, the desperate actor, still
without a single part, took a walk down Sunset Boulevard with his
lover James. The actor asked if he should give up on his dream of
becoming a star. The casting director said that the actor had more
talent than anyone he had ever met. He said that the actor could
have played a hundred different parts in a hundred different
movies, but if the casting director cast the actor in something,
people would find out they were lovers. James said he would rather
die than have people know he was in love with a man. As he said
this, a car swerved and hit James from behind, killing him
instantly.

The actor wept for James, holding him in his
arms, and waited for the driver to step out of the black
Rolls-Royce Wraith.

No one emerged from the car.

The actor laid the casting director down,
opened the driver side door, and looked inside. The driver was
gone.

He stuffed James into the trunk. The part of
a casting director was not a challenging one, not for an actor who
had studied his craft so vigilantly for so many years. No one
noticed James was missing; rather, everyone just thought he became
much better at finding talent and maybe had done something with his
hair.

Though the actor’s dream of fame never came
true, by taking his dead lover’s identity, he was able to help
others find success.

It was understood that the actor used that
same black Wraith that killed his lover to scout the streets of
L.A., endlessly looking for the same raw talent he had boasted so
many years ago when he first came to L.A.

When the homeless were asked where they
heard this story, they said from a friend of a friend or from
somebody who knew somebody, always giving police an ambiguous
answer.

The police knew the story was an urban myth,
but what, if any of it, was factual? The key was in the “ENIGMA”
license plate. The police ran it through the database and found
that the car actually belonged to a company called House of
Cabal.

 

“Interesting story,” Thomas says, “but what
does the Creative Employment Center have to do with it?”

“Could you print me a copy? And the page
before that too.”

You tap me on the shoulder and point to the
sliding glass window. The yard has become a dull blur. The tulips
blend with the fence the way watercolor bleeds. It’s odd that it
doesn’t feel odd, only like the natural feeling of waking.

“What are you going to do about being locked
out of your apartment?” Thomas clicks the print icon. The room
around us loses color, the outside already faded to
nothingness.

“Dana can drive me to my friend Rod’s house;
he has a spare key to my apartment. Tomorrow will suck. I need to
talk to Carrie. We had a fight. And I need to ask for time off
work.”

It’s just the three of us now, the room has
swirled away into the gray. Thomas of course doesn’t notice.

I almost wake from the regression, but you
don’t let me. You think I’m hiding something and ask why Rod has a
key to my apartment.

I’m half-awake and start to remember the
future again. You’re writing my autobiography. We are in some kind
of interview. We need to wake up. We have been under too long
already.

You tell me that I’m right, this is an
interview, so I should answer your questions. You have been an
observer long enough, obediently watching whatever I show you. Your
job is to investigate.

You change the cassette.

 

 

Cassette Tape Nine:

Investigation

 

Trust me, Chuck. You don’t need to see what
happens next. That’s why the world has turned to gray. We should
skip this next part. Nothing happens. It’s not part of the plan. If
I show you everything in my life, it will take forever.

The more I protest, the less you’re
convinced.

All that happens is that Thomas drives and we
talk, make small talk, and then I crash on Rod’s couch.

Really, Chuck, there is nothing to see.

You were so discombobulated at the gym you
never got a good look at Rod’s face. He has my spare key. I act
like he is barely part of my life. You think I’m not telling the
whole story.

Chuck, I’ve been more honest with you than
anyone ever. My homophobic panic. My doubts about my fiancé. I’ve
confessed my sexual hangups. You’ve seen a man in a wheelchair put
a condom on my dick. You’ve heard my every impure thought. We need
to wake up is all.

BOOK: House of Cabal Volume One: Eden
8.89Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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