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 (4 page)

BOOK: House of Cabal Volume One: Eden
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“You miss them. Is that why you’re keeping us
here? You want another Adam and Eve?”

I crouched down to her height. Her attempt to
understand impressed me. Most humans would slip into denial. She
had the audacity to challenge my authority. “Despite what you’ve
heard, God never forbade the two humans anything. They tired of
paradise and wanted to leave. The only way for them to leave was
for them to not be here, for them to never have existed. Their
departure caused what your scientists call the Big Bang. It birthed
your timeline. Your Holy Bible is divinely inspired, but it tells a
story of two people that never existed in your reality. You are no
more Adam and Eve’s descendant than is a pebble or a gas
giant.”

“But you remember them. If they never
existed…?”

“The Garden of Eden isn’t like Earth or your
universe. Time and space function differently here. Eve and Adam…
Their afterimage still persists. Their story inspired your creation
myths. Maybe because the idea of them lives on, they live on in
spirit here in the garden. Who can say? The complexity is beyond
me. There should be nothing left of them, but traces are
everywhere. The garden often functions as a maddening paradox. The
universe you come from has its own timestream, or timeline, you
could say. The garden is independent from all that.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The garden is its own dimension. A person
can be in the garden eternally, while still living their lives on
Earth, because the two aren’t connected, not in a way you could
understand. Now that you are here, you will always be here, you
have always been here. From this point on, you and your husband
can’t ever truly leave.”

“But I haven’t always been here! I’ve only
been here a few minutes.”

“It’s only your limited perception that makes
you blind to the other moments. I can only speculate, but your
perception will expand. Time as you know it will lose its hold.

“You find all this scary because it’s still
so alien to you. No death lives here, or sickness. Nothing grows
old. Time is irrelevant. Once I return, you might not remember I
was gone. I’ve already left a few times since you’ve arrived to
explore the timeline in order to witness how you sneaked your way
in. I’m still missing elements of the story, but I’ll fill in the
gaps soon enough.”

She nodded, pretending to understand.

I considered morphing into my human form but
decided it could make matters worse. I needed to stay consistent.
How else would she ever grow to trust me?

“It doesn’t seem like it now, but you found
what you were looking for. You found paradise.”

A worm rose up. Dana reached out to touch it.
It purred and nuzzled her hand with its eyeless face. Its pink skin
was like that of a pot-bellied pig.

“We really found the Garden of Eden?”

“That’s right.”

“Why are you helping us?”

“I’m an angel.” I laughed at her skepticism.
“You believe in Eden’s Garden, but not that I’m an angel. Have a
little faith.”

“Didn’t you say angels would cast us
out?”

“I like to think of myself as an independent
thinker. Enough questions. I need to go, and you need to rest.”

“What happened to our expedition? There was
something in the sandstorm. I heard screaming and gunfire.”

“I’ll be back. We’ll talk then.”

The worms lowered her back down. I tucked her
under the moss as a parent might do a child at bedtime. The
caterpillars cooed a lullaby and spun silk.

“Do you have a name?” she said.

“My name is Pinsleep.” She started to say
something, but I shushed her. “Your name is Dana Parr. I already
know. I’ve looked at your destiny thread. I’m your angel. Don’t
worry. Just rest.”

Kissing her forehead in my current form would
give her nightmares, so I pulled away.

She curled into a ball next to her husband
and fell into a dreamless sleep. She was enchanting.

 

V

The caterpillars finished spinning cocoons.
The white silk caught light from the glowing sap and sparkled like
crystal. Dana and her husband lying there in stark solidity, under
the now-lustrous blanket, made me doubt my memories of Adam and
Eve.

I had mistaken shadows for substance. I had
hoarded scarce scraps of memory snatched from the wind.

Witness angels before the Big Bang sang
divine operas about Adam and Eve. That I was sure of, that memory
was beyond reproach. But the first man and woman were long gone. My
memories of them were suspect, some surely invented whole cloth
while I meditated in my hollow.

My memories after the Big Bang were clear.
Once Adam and Eve were removed form existence, the other witness
angels, like ants fleeing from a destroyed colony, ventured out
into the freshly born timeline. The lingering loss I couldn’t
explain wasn’t enough to convince my brothers and sisters that we
had a disappeared past. They were too distracted by the drama of
these new Earthlings and their destiny threads to pay me much
heed.

Maybe that lingering pain I felt, that I
couldn’t adequately express, was guilt. Adam and Eve, as eternity
wore on, would have confided in me about their growing boredom and
unrest. I was their angel. I would have helped them any way I
could. Maybe I helped them escape into nothingness, the ultimate
assisted suicide.

My brothers and sisters told me about Earth,
how I should join them on their expeditions into the timestream.
“You don’t know what you’re missing,” they would say. But I heard
their operas and saw how easy it was for them. Each Earthling’s
destiny thread started at birth and ended at death. It made telling
their stories second nature. Simplicity seduced everyone except
me.

God made me different.

I couldn’t burn off the old memory to let the
new reality take root. I ached to tell an opera of my own, but I
hid my pain, thinking I was above simple stories and simple truths,
and remained in the garden, where everything wasn’t so neatly laid
out. Unlike Earth’s linear timeline, the garden was an anarchy.
Glimpses and echoes of the old reality hid amongst the undergrowth
of the garden’s eternal present.

The garden was a ruin, and I was its ghost,
and from the remnants, I reconstructed the reality of Adam and Eve
that once existed. No angel knew the two humans like I had. Eve and
Adam’s destinies were obscured because of the incomprehensible
nature of their greatness. This is what I told myself. It was more
likely their destiny threads were nonexistent because the first
couple were destined to be erased.

In love and in glory, I reveled in a previous
reality that would never come again. I could play it all out in my
mind. In the gaps I now realized I constructed what I wanted. I
confused memory and fantasy. Of course I was the true king of the
angels. My pride was unequaled. Eve and Adam trusted only me, loved
only me. God made me special. Was it any surprise I couldn’t move
on from such a narcissistic reimagining? I made a hermitage of my
own lost history and secretly thought it would always be enough. I
never needed to sing an opera again. I hadn’t really been waiting
for a new muse. My epoch was Adam and Eve.

Now that I had two new humans hidden in my
sanctuary, I could relive my glory days and be a guide again and
compose operas recounting new adventures in Eden’s Garden. Things
would be just as they were before Adam and Eve were erased.

But that wasn’t what I wanted. Eden and its
delights were old news, and the story of two humans wasn’t enough.
The gnostic female elder in Cairo, a true prophet of the second
sight, saw a coming advent. She saw what angels had missed.

This new age was my chance at restoring my
glory.

The cocoons broke open as Dana and her
husband slept. The resulting moths rose in profusion, coated the
root-covered ceiling, and blocked out the light from the protective
script.

Like the fuzzy caterpillars, I had changed.
Even if Adam and Eve were returned to me (something I had longed
for ever since the Big Bang), they would no longer be enough.

 

 

 

Chapter 3

 

I

I entered the timestream, confident that Dana
and her husband would be fine if they stayed put. The protective
script would hide them from prying eyes.

I still had questions about the funding of
such a massive expedition. It couldn’t have been solely funded by
the couple in my hollow. There were bank loans, money from
relatives and friends, a grant from a prestigious archaeological
society, and one anonymous donor. Nothing remained anonymous to an
angel. We were the eyes of God.

I followed the money not to a single person
but to a secret organization, called the House of Cabal.

Organizations, companies, churches, secret
societies, and the like didn’t have destiny threads like people,
and the House of Cabal’s influences were so numerous I couldn’t
immediately comprehend its reach, or even its basic nature. Who ran
it? Who founded it? It had to be constructed from a multitude of
people and intentions, changing over time, for it to be so
obscured. What was the purpose for its founding? The House of
Cabal’s largest project was a massive compound in California, built
eighteen years before Dana’s expedition. It seemed like the most
obvious place to start my investigation.

On June 7th, 1985, a pair of star-crossed
destiny threads headed straight for the compound’s heart during the
height of its construction.

Outside a small mom-and-pop convenience store
located just off Highway 1, not far from San Luis Obispo, Lane
Harris, a devoted surfer, drank orange juice from an old-fashioned
glass milk bottle labeled “H of C.” He didn’t know that “H of C”
stood for House of Cabal. He thought the bottle came from a
modeling agency.

Using his tongue, he rolled what had to be a
piece of pulp against the back of his upper teeth and palate,
though it felt unusually complex.

A Rottweiler in the back of an Isuzu pickup
truck, close to a phone booth, barked at passing cars. A driver in
a parked white van read a magazine.

Lane fished quarters from his board shorts
and slid them into the slot of the payphone. He dialed his mother’s
number. The last time he talked to her was more than a year ago.
His chest tightened with each ring. He hoped and feared she would
answer.

Lane stuck his tongue out and wiped the pulp
onto his index finger to give it a look. A squishy, white insect
head clung to his fingertip.

His mother picked up. He wiped the head onto
his shorts.

“Mom?”

She was inebriated even though it was only
midmorning.

“Mom. Mom, it’s Lane. … No, that’s why I’m
calling. Me and Kyle, we’re back in Cali.”

The Rottweiler continued her mindless
barking.

He told his mom about a bungalow on the
beach. “We’re renting it from this modeling agency, Cabal Modeling.
You heard of them?” He rambled about the orange juice—“They’re
giving us this free OJ. It’s so fresh!”—and the fashion shoots that
often took place on the beach.

He strained to hear. “What? This dog won’t
shut up.” He forced a laugh.

She thought the call was about money.

“I take care of myself just fine, Mom. I just
want you to see the new place.”

He finished the juice and wiped his mouth
with his bare arm. He was addicted to the stuff.

He talked about how good Kyle and him were
doing and gave her directions on how to come to see their new
place, ignoring her obvious reluctance.

The dog had calmed down and now just paced
and panted.

“I want to see you. It’s been too long. Kyle
and me were talking, and he thinks I should give you another
chance.” His mother took offense, and they fought, even though that
was the last thing Lane wanted.

The Rottweiler watched him as they bickered,
her sad eyes seeking his approval.

He turned his back.

“That’s not what happened. …Mom—” She
wouldn’t let him speak. “… Kyle’s not a hoodlum.… What was I
supposed to do? … You’re my mother!”

A silence extended between them, and a
strange static rattled the line.

“What was I supposed to do, mom? You were
drunk. You’re drunk right now. What was I supposed to do, watch you
drink yourself to death? … I was drowning. I had to leave. I had to
save myself.”

She hung up.

He slammed the phone into the cradle. “Damn
it!”

He threw down the bottle, shattering it
against the pavement outside the phone booth. The dog joined in by
snarling and barking.

Lane, embarrassed, glanced around. The driver
of the van quickly looked back to his magazine and pretended to
mind his own business.

Lane’s best friend, Kyle Donavan, emerged
from the store, his arms full of groceries.

“How did it go?” Kyle said over the
barking.

“Wipeout.”

The two friends appeared identical, with dark
hair and boy-next-door good looks, even though they weren’t twins
or even brothers. Only recently had Lane started to pack on more
muscle, seemingly without trying, making them look even more alike.
Their one conflict was that Lane was an introvert, wanting it to
just be the two of them, while Kyle was an extrovert, needing a
larger community of surfers and partyers to feel satisfied.

“Bogus.” Kyle handed Lane the bags and went
over to the dog, his flip-flops crunching shattered glass. “You can
try next food run. The bitch’ll come around.” The dog sniffed his
hand. “Good girl.”

“Why? I fuckin’ hate her.”

“And you fuckin’ love her. And so it
goes.”

The driver, who often gave them a ride as a
favor and who also sold them weed, drove them up Highway 1 toward
their bungalow. Kyle read his worn copy of
Slaughterhouse-Five.
Lane wondered if his mother would ever
forgive him for leaving home after his brother’s death. Sometimes
relationships never mended, even when both parties tried their
best. Maybe it was no one’s fault.

BOOK: House of Cabal Volume One: Eden
13.43Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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