House of Cabal Volume One: Eden (5 page)

II

Lane and Kyle rose early when the waves were
right, drank OJ, smoked weed, and tried to live conflict-free
lives. They didn’t have any current connections for me to follow
besides Lane’s mom, who seemed obviously unrelated to the House of
Cabal construction.

Three bottles of freshly squeezed OJ were
delivered every morning to the bungalow’s front door. People, all
very attractive and dressed in white, harvested Valencia sweet
oranges from an orchard that separated the beach from the highway.
Kyle joked that they were a cult. A red brick road ran north along
the beach, parallel to the orchard, and up along a cliff face
around a bluff. Trucks, day after day, carried construction
materials up the road. Their destination remained in my blind
spot.

It was impossible. The drivers’ destiny
threads should have led me straight to the House of Cabal. The eyes
of God didn’t have a blind spot.

Lane and Kyle’s destiny threads were as
strong as ever. I was confident answers would be forthcoming, and
while curious about the two men’s pasts, I remained on the beach,
thinking continual close proximity to the construction site would
eventually clarify my vision.

In front of a newly erected tent that
billowed like a sail, a group of models laughed, horsed around, and
drank from glass bottles of OJ. Lane and Kyle had been talked into
a fashion shoot that was a fiction just for show. Of course, the
two friends didn’t suspect a thing.

“Actually, lose the tank top,” the wardrobe
director told Lane. “It works better without it.”

Lane reluctantly pulled off his shirt,
feeling exposed in the designer swim jammers they had given him to
wear. They left little to the imagination. He crossed his arms.

Kyle tilted his head to the side and looked
past the wardrobe director to the rolling waves. “Dude, we could
totally be surfing right now.”

A pair of breasts caught Lane’s attention.
Areolas the size of sand dollars were exposed to the warm sun and
coming closer. The rest of the Brazilian blossomed in Lane’s
vision. The only garment she wore was her bikini bottoms. Her name
was Juliana, and she was there to seduce Lane and Kyle, though her
motives were unknown to me, her thoughts muddled and vague to my
perception.

She said, with a Portuguese accent, as she
passed by, “Hey boys.”

Lane and Kyle made a timid wave.

Kyle loved ogling women with Lane, even
though it made his friend uncomfortable. Kyle put an arm around
Lane’s shoulder. “Nice wood.”

Lane blushed and refrained from covering
himself. “Dude, I’m not cut out for this.”

“Come on, man. If we don’t join in, we don’t
get to go to the after party, and dude, it’s like our best chance
to get laid. With models. You know how horny I’ve been.”

Their one-room bungalow afforded them very
little privacy.

Lane lowered his voice. “I don’t fit in with
these people. I’m not a model.”

These people weren’t actually models either.
They were human, and very beautiful, with perfect skin, athletic
bodies, and striking features, but something had changed them, I
just didn’t know what. Revelation was so close, and something
unknown, and powerful, was blocking me. It was maddening.

“We are going for candid,” Calvin, the
photographer, reminded everyone. “When you touch, I want you to
really feel it.”

His assistant stood ready with a second
camera.

Calvin divided the models into two co-ed
football teams.

Lane clutched the ball and bent over. His
teammates formed the front line. Juliana pressed the back of her
hands between his legs.

“Hike!”

She threw a perfect spiral way off target,
and the ball landed in the surf. The models ran for it. Throughout
the rest of the game, wet cloth, some see-through, clung as a
second skin.

After an hour of spirited play, with only
some of the interaction being photographed, Lane caught an
impossible long ball, ran it in for the winning touchdown, and
performed a celebration dance that included throwing his swim
jammers into the surf. The girls swarmed him and cheered, their
breasts bouncing in the sun.

“Lucky bastard,” Kyle said.

The rest of the men weren’t about to let Lane
get all the attention, and they stripped too. The group, now less
inhibited than ever, ran and jumped and played water tag naked, the
air filled with ecstatic laughter.

Lane, surging with confidence, chased down
the Brazilian and slung her over his shoulder while she giggled and
yelled in Portuguese. Calvin took a barrage of pictures to capture
the moment. Kyle stood back, watching, just thankful to see his
friend finally come out of his shell.

It was an erotic fantasy of community and
belonging that was too good to be true. The two surfers were being
played. As the day proceeded, I still couldn’t figure out why. The
models’ destiny threads, no matter which direction in time I
searched, quickly became obscured. For the first time in my life, I
started to doubt myself.

At the after-party on the beach, with the
sunset matching the coals in the fire, people shared bottles of
expensive liquor and weed. Kyle’s arm was around Lane’s shoulder,
his hand comfortable on Lane’s chest. Juliana rested her head on
Lane’s stomach, bodies on all sides needing no space of their
own.

“Dude,” Kyle said to the embers that swirled
like fireflies above the entangled mass. “How lucky are we?”

The party, fueled by more than weed and
alcohol, escalated into a hedonistic fever dream. I knew now that
the orange juice was some kind of aphrodisiac.

No. Not the juice. The bugs
in
the
juice. Lane had wiped the head of one onto his board shorts the day
before. The bugs had affected everyone at the party. Before a full
on orgy started, Lane and Kyle led Juliana back to their bungalow
for a night’s worth of debauched lovemaking.

The models dispersed and traveled back to the
construction site. Any thread that went up the red road got
confused with everyone else's, just like with the drivers and the
construction crew. A thread would look like two, or fade out, or
double back on itself.

In the morning, Lane and Kyle had figured out
that the modeling agency was a sham, but by then, they had already
been seduced by the potential community and the effects of the
bugs.

Lane didn’t reconcile with his mother. Kyle’s
only connection was Lane. They had little to leave behind. When
they joined the House of Cabal, I was cut off from their destiny
threads, just like with everyone who had joined before them.

Lane and Kyle were a dead end. Angels were
made to witness God’s creation, to see past free will to the true
nature of reality. The destiny threads should have made everything
simple, the way they did for every other witness angel that
explored the timestream. Something was wrong with me.

I followed other recruits, spanning over a
decade. Each time a person joined the House of Cabal, my sight was
blocked. It never failed. And it wasn’t just their destiny threads
either. The parts of their minds that had answers were invisible to
me as well. This wasn’t just me, I realized. No other angel had
seen this story either. Otherwise, the story of the House of Cabal
would have already been told by another angel.

What if the place the House of Cabal was
constructing wasn’t part of God’s design? Sacrilegious, I knew, but
maybe also an answer to my prayers. If I could find a way to see
what other angels couldn’t, maybe I could compose an opera worthy
of the Alpha and Omega. I could bring God revelation.

My most telling clue, after all my searching,
was still that the House of Cabal had funded Dana’s expedition.
Money had been deposited into a Swiss bank account years before
Dana and Thomas had even heard of the cuneiform tablet. Was there a
link between the bugs in the juice and the Eden mites in the
desert? They felt connected, and normally that was all a witness
angel needed to travel the timeline and find answers, but in this
case it wasn’t working. I had a blind spot, and there was no way to
know how much was hidden. The possibilities were endless. I needed
a strategy no witness angel had used before.

Sick of my impotence, I went back to the
Garden of Eden for answers.

In Earth’s timestream, observation was the
only wise move. Interrogating Juliana or the truck drivers or
anyone else keeping secrets could have unintended consequences.
Dana Parr, on the other hand, was in the garden in a separate
dimension outside the timeflow. It seemed horribly primitive, but I
could politely ask Dana questions to find a new lead. And if that
didn’t work, I could ask less politely.

Torture figured prominently in the destiny
threads of many martyrs. In war stories it was everywhere. I saw
Omar al-Jamadi interrogated in Abu Ghraib. He confessed everything.
The guards didn’t care about the tablet. When confessing didn’t
stop the pain, Omar tried to invent what they wanted to hear.

Uriel, like a statue, stood guard at his post
inside the garden gate. If I hadn’t witnessed him massacre the
expedition, I would think he’d never moved from his post.

“Pinsleep!” His weaponized holy fire
illuminated his pleased expression. “You were exploring the
timeline!”

He sounded as if greeting a long lost friend,
though he still focused his attention on the entrance. I didn’t
understand his excitement.

“You haven’t been in your tree,” he
added.

“I’m not always in my tree.”

“You found your muse, didn’t you? I told
them. I told the other witness angels you weren’t lazy. You were
just waiting for the right moment.”

Ignoring him, I continued on to my banjo
tree.

“Dana?” I called into the dark hollow. “I’m
home.”

Dana and her husband were gone.

III

“The two humans were under my care! You had
no right!”

“What are you talking about?” Uriel was
curves, his figure swollen muscles with little bone.

In contrast, I was all hard angles, probably
why Dana thought I might be a machine. “What did you do to
them?”

“Them? Oh, you must have heard. An army with
twenty-first-century weapons tried to enter the garden, but I took
care of them. I thought maybe bullets would hurt me.” He beamed
with pride. “They poke tiny holes, nothing more. Swords are more
dangerous.” The fire in his palm flared. “I’ve waited for that day
for far too long, the reason I was created. I did it! I killed them
all.”

“I saw.”

“Ha ha! You saw me?! I inspired the great
Pinsleep to get off his ass!” His deep rumble of laughter scared
away many of the gathered insects.

I glared, not thinking him funny.

“You think you’ll never find an opera worthy
of God. But you will. My day came and so will yours.”

“They were under my care.”

“You mean the humans in your hollow? They
asked about you. They wanted to know when you would return. I
didn’t know what to say.”

“You mean you didn’t incinerate them?”

Uriel clenched his fist so that no flames
could escape. “I would never kill in the garden! What kind of
cherubim do you take me for?”

“It’s just… You massacred those people.”

“Those people were warned! Those people knew
not to seek out the garden. They did it anyway. Typical.”

“Typical? It has never happened before.”

“You know what I mean. Humans! No offense.
Your humans seem pleasant enough. Very polite. But they act newly
born. They’ve been changing things too. I told them they were
always here, but they didn’t understand. I’m not even sure they
believe in God.”

“Do you know where they went? I’d rather not
search the whole garden. I need to ask the female some
questions.”

“Is your opera about Dana?”

“Just tell me.”

“I don’t follow the humans around all day. I
have better things to do.”

“Uriel. Out with it.”

“I’ve heard talk. You witness angels are a
chatty bunch. The humans spend time down by the river. Apparently
Dana and Thomas prefer the company of mammals. God only knows
why.”

I started to go, but Uriel spoke up. I was
shocked to see that he faced me and not the gate.

“Make sure these two humans don’t get into
trouble like the last ones. What were their names?”

“Adam and Eve.”

“That’s right. I remember their faces. But
you! You remember their names!”

Uriel had never asked about Adam and Eve
before. He always humored me, but I had assumed he thought I was
delusional.

“Thank you, Uriel.” I touched his shoulder.
“You are a good friend. I didn’t mean to doubt you. Your wrath was
impressive. I’m honored to be your witness.”

“The honor is mine.”

“There is not a more honorable cherub in all
God’s army.”

“Pinsleep?” Uriel’s good humor fell a bit and
he sounded lost. “Do you know why God brought them here?”

“The two humans? I’m not sure He did.”

Uriel laughed again and turned back to the
gate. “If he didn’t want them here, he would just banish them and
be done with it.”

“I don’t think it’s as simple as that.”

“Everything is simple for God.”

“But what God wants is never simple.”

IV

At an especially beautiful bend in the river
of the lower valley, Dana and her husband passed the time, having
never looked so good.

A plethora of mammals congregated, including
freshwater dolphins and countless feline and canine breeds that
only previously existed on Earth. While the mammals weren’t as
fascinating as the ectothemic creatures of the underground and
northern woods, it figured that these commonplace animals were more
comforting to humans accustomed to Earth.

Dana lounged among leopards.

Primates swung in the canopy above and fed on
fruits and berries.