The Royal Stones of Eden (Royal Secrecies Book 1) (32 page)

I decided that I would be brief but firm, but she uttered some Arabic words and pushed me aside once I unlocked the door. She said that her name was Nora, which struck a familiar chord to both of us. She asked me to lock the door. She had something important to say to us, she insisted. To amuse her, I locked the door, and I prepared myself for what I thought would be a brief request for coffee.

After the door was locked, however, she pulled off her robes, removed her veil, and then took off a wig of full hair. She revealed herself. Nora was, in fact, Dred in disguise, and he started in straight away, as Peter would say.

“Hello, Peter! You forgot about me, didn’t you?”—Dred’s eyes glowed red, and I started to step away and seek a weapon of some kind.

“I don’t think so, Haj!”—he turned to me and twirled me around, with a motion of his right index finger. He stopped me before I could run away. I was briefly frozen and under the control of his powerful telekinetic grip.

“Peter, you were supposed to avenge the death of our Uncle Willie.”—Peter had just begun to see the power of an Anakite, and Dred continued.

“But no matter. I shall tell you the reason for my delay. I had every intention of following you and then killing Haj and getting the stones, but then I saw your friends, David and Mattie. I knew that by waiting I would find out more information about the stones, but I never bargained for meeting dear, sweet, and wonderful Mattie.”—Dred grabbed a spotted cloth on the cafe counter and began to wipe off his feminine make-up.

“Oh the stories she could tell! She knows so much about the past! She knows all about precious stones. I can sense it. Oh, yes! I read her mind! It was difficult, but I read it all the same. Mattie knows the location of many stones. The locations are locked up inside her head,” he said. I was just as surprised as Peter was to hear about the possible secrets that were inside of Mattie’s brain.

What was her connection to all of this?

“Haj! You will take me to your cave, deep below, and then open the portal. You will retrieve a green stone, and the blue and the white one also. I am going to get Mattie’s gold stones of wealth and power. And once I have all of your royal stones, then I will have the power to destroy all of those that were once chosen as favorites by the Living Spirit. I will have my vengeance on mankind. I will repay them for what they did to my people.

“But first, I must go back and get those stones. I know where they are! I saw them in her mind!”

Dred said something about the stones being in a place called Sacramento and in a time of long ago, where there was much gold. That was the moment that I realized what Mattie truly was. Mattie was what the Priests used to refer to as the unknowing traveler. Inside Mattie’s mind was the past of another life. Mattie was from another time or era.

I also connected to what Dred said about Sacramento. I was an avid student of history as well as an archaeologist. Merlin, or Peter’s Uncle Willie, had often told of treasures in the American West. He had used such knowledge to fund the Guardians on more than one occasion. Could it be that Mattie had similar knowledge in her mind, I thought. If Mattie was from the Old West, perhaps she was thinking of simple gold stones and not of ancient relics. Dred must be mistaken. Dred thought that he was going to get the precious royal stones of Gan Eden.

On the other hand, Dred was possibly going down an old but disastrous path, I thought. Just like the miners of 1849, Dred was possibly getting the “fever.” I had to go along with it, and not just because I was forced into doing so. I knew that this quest could have no end but failure for Dred. This was going to be easy, I thought. I had a plan.

“I will show you where the stones are!” I offered, and I led both Dred and a trembling Peter down to the basement, down to the vise and the salmon stone, down to Dred’s most assured demise.

The vise and stone were set up as before, just as I had shown Peter several weeks earlier. I had the blue, white, and green stone that was needed for such a travel to a time past. In addition, in my right pocket, I had a stone of black royal onyx. That stone would be the flaw in Dred’s plans.

The cloud formed again, just as it had done when I first showed the process to Peter. Dred placed his own hand on top of the stones. His deformed fingernails of vertical shapes pushed through his stretched black gloves. He spoke the words as if it meant something important.

“Sacramento! 1905!” he cried out. Dred focused on an image from Mattie’s mind.

The date seemed off to me and not correct, but then again, I had not read Mattie’s mind. Mattie must have stored the location of a gold mine somewhere in her brain. Was it truly in the past? Or, did Mattie simply read a story, or watch a movie. Was that the information that was locked inside her? I dared not take any chance of being wrong. I stuck my hands in my pockets and backed away from Dred—as if I was giving up.

The image of a brown hill appeared in the cloud and the smell of cattle and their manure filled the basement. The sound of horses could be heard close by and inside the cloud.

“You! Test it first!”—Dred pointed to Peter, who did not quite know what he meant by that. A perturbed Dred waved his fingers, and instantly Peter’s watch came off his hand and flew into Dred’s hand. He tossed it into the cloud, and we all saw the watch sitting on the dirt, just inside the cloud. Dred again spoke to the frightened Peter.

“Pick it up!” Dred barked his orders. “Now, man, now!”

Peter feared a finger of doom. Nervously he reached into the cloud and picked up the watch.

“Excellent! It works!”—a satisfied Dred, who held a rested left hand on the stones in the vice, then placed one leg into the cloud. He stepped on the grass on the other side of the cloud. He then picked up the blue, white, and green stones. He left the salmon stone in the vice. The cloud kept its shape, and it did not disappear.

“I bid you goodbye!” he exclaimed. “And when I return, in a matter of seconds, I will let you both watch as I destroy all of mankind and take my vengeance out on this second and most evil creation! Then I will kill you—or perhaps make you slaves—if you beg me nicely!” The evil in his laugh was interrupted only by my next comment. As Dred moved his other leg into the cloud, I removed the black stone from my pocket and tossed it at Dred, who caught it out of instinct.

“You forgot this stone, old boy!”—I smiled as the cloud quickly dissipated without a trace. All of the stones—the ones the Dred had, and the onyx—fell to the basement’s floor. Dred and the cloud disappeared from our site.

“What just happened?”—Peter went to the vise and waved his hands over it—as if something was there, but nothing was there. The cloud and the evil one were gone, and Peter could not believe all that he had witnessed.

“No Anakite may travel or port with a stone of onyx,” I told Peter. “It is an old rule of the Priests, one which I will be forever grateful for! This is why the stones remained and did not travel with him. Dred is somewhere in the Old American West!—and you and I are going after him!”—it was official. As I spoke, I could see that Peter was now a believer in the power of the ancient stones of Eden.

Peter looked at the watch he had picked up just inside of the cloud. It was corroded and rusted. His new friend David had, just the night before, transformed the watch into a digital recording unit, showing off his technical skills. His watch was now ruined. As Peter made sure his hand had no damage, he wondered what would happen to a physical body that would go through and stay in such a mystical portal. He wondered what magic was ahead of him.

Chapter 20

Gold Rush Fever

Part Two

It was just before Haj left for Sacramento and the world of 1905. He was compelled to answer a question from David, during a break from the diggings. It had been two days since Dred had departed. Haj planned to leave with Peter on the following day. The extra time was needed to gather appropriate clothing and supplies. First, Haj had to answer a persistent question that David had repeated again to him.

“Come on, Haj! What does it mean? You keep avoiding my question.”—David referred to an inscription on a clay tablet from Mesopotamia. The carving in the tablet was a mixture of symbols, some of which repeated. David had found the tablet in one of the storage cabinets, wrapped in protective cloth, on a day that Haj had forgotten to lock it up.

“That has nothing to do with your stone, David. Your stone has Egyptian writing on it, the symbol of water,” Haj told him.

Haj recalled a conversation that he had with David a few days earlier, a conversation that began with David’s explanation of that traumatizing day in his childhood when he first learned of his parent’s death. David also told Haj about the cloud, the man, and the stone, but Haj tried to explain away the stone and David’s experience. Haj was suspicious of David, and he was not quite ready to reveal any sacred secrets to an unknown. Haj suggested to David that he had hallucinated the image of the man and the cloud. Moreover, Haj had insisted, the stone was most likely a stone that David’s dad had kept in his room, found the day that he died. Haj said that David had formed an attachment to it because of his dad’s suicide and the trauma of that day. After recalling that past conversation, Haj focused on his present conversation with David and made an assessment.

“David, you don’t even like archaeology. You are more interested in science. Why didn’t you study physics or engineering?” the perceptive Haj asked. Haj remembered the conversation with him a few days earlier and was beginning to figure David out.

“I just wanted to graduate. Courses in history and archaeology seemed easier to me. I wanted to study physics, and I was always interested in how things worked.”—David had been pulled apart by Haj. He had been quicker than Mattie at figuring David out.

“So you thought that since you could not figure out what science to concentrate in, liking them all, that you would major in something that was beneath you, something not related to what you truly wanted. It was merely achievable. You chose a path that did not truly satisfy you.”—the look on David’s face said that Haj was correct, and then Haj decided to satisfy David’s questions.

“David, these stones have a repeating phrase in them,” Haj said. He read the inscription and translated it for David.

All things done have not been done. All things not done have been done already.

“This phrase is repeated five times on this stone.”—Haj saw that David was confused, so he attempted an explanation.

“There is an ancient belief. It says that time, as it was then understood, is not a changeable event. In fact, time is a repeating event. Instead of a linear line, time is viewed as more of a circle.”

“Like a yin and yang?”—David asked.

“Not exactly. What it means is this. What one is going to do, they have done already, even though they have not done it yet. There is no future action that has not been completed already, or any past action that can be undone.”

“I don’t buy that at all,” David said. “If time is not linear, then you should be able to change history. You should be able to go back in time and make a change in the past. That action would then change the future.”

“I don’t think so, my friend. Would you go back in time and kill your father before you were born? Or, could you kill him if you did not first exist?”—Haj secured the stone tablet back into the cabinet as he glanced at the wrinkled brow of David.

“You cannot change what has happened, but you and I will disagree on this, ok?”—Haj smiled and tapped David on the shoulder. “By the way, you said you lost the white stone?”

David explained that either he had lost it or it had been stolen. The stone had disappeared a few days after it had been shown to Haj. The real truth was dramatically different. After Haj had seen the stone, he called his colleague Thomas Childers to secure the stone immediately. Haj had been the one who had taken it from David’s bag one day in order to give it to Tom.

When Tom came to pick up the white stone, Haj had another very similar stone on a table beside it. Tom thought he was seeing double. David’s stone looked identical to a stone that Haj had removed from his safe. The day that Tom came for David’s stone was the day that Haj truly knew that danger was extremely close at hand. Death was near the door, and tragedy was begging to open it.

“That looks like the other one. They look like the same stone, almost.”—Tom uttered while touching both stones, examining them closely.

“They
are
the same stone!”—Haj saw the spacious eyes of Tom grow, and then he asked him for some much-needed help.

“I want you to watch David and Mattie for me. I am going on a little trip soon, with Peter. I might be gone for a few seconds, or I may never return.”—he asked Tom to look after David, or maybe enlist him in some made-up civil service position. “I have to stop an old enemy of ours.”

“Dred?” Tom asked.

“Dred!” Haj confirmed. Haj explained that Dred was still alive, and he recounted all that he knew and all that had happened. “And, if I fail…” Haj barely could speak the words.

Tom assured Haj that he would not fail, took the stone, and kept the matter hidden from David. Tom had served as a butler to David’s family for about five years, and, at that time at least, he had not revealed his role as a Guardian to David. Like Mrs. Habib, Tom kept his secrets well also. Tom had even come to Egypt without David knowing it. And it was in Egypt on that same day that Tom discreetly visited a hospital, upon the instructions of a glowing stone of prophecy. He greeted a man named Sam, who had returned from a long journey from an ancient past.