Chapter 1

Detective Arturo Grondona lit a thin cigarillo in his lips, inhaling deeply. At his feet sobbed a missionary, his gasping pleas coming in broken Spanish. At the other end of the church, near the door, stood two dark figures. In the shadows their features were obscured from the missionaries view. Outside of the door burned the bright Arizona sun in a cloudless sky.
'I'll ask you again, where is the book?'� Arturo spoke in heavily accented English. The missionary, surprised by his until now silent tormentors command of the common tongue, ceased his crying.
'It was purchased, I told you. The mission is poor; I had to sell off some non-essential items. That book, being non-religious, was of no use to us here.'� The missionary stated, aware of his interrogators enforcers at the door.
'It wasn't yours to dispose of.'� Stated Arturo in a monotone voice. It was something he had said before. 'You great-grandfather swore an oath to me that it would remain here until I was able to come collect it.'�
Detective Arturo appeared to the missionary to be not yet fifty. Other than his enormous bulk, clearly 300 pounds in his trench coat and fedora hat, he showed no signs of being old enough to have known the missionaries ancestors.
'Finiche,'� spoke the detective 'you were there, you heard him swear an oath to me.'�
'Indeed, I would not have left him with as many fingers as he had if he hadn't.'� spoke the figure by the door in a deep Irish accent. The missionary's eyes grew wide with terror. How did these people know that his great-grandfather, a man he had only known for the first 6 years of his life, had been missing fingers on his left hand? An affliction he refused to tell anyone about.
'You seem to still have all of your digits, priest.'� Spoke the detective. The missionary could hear footsteps behind him.
'I told you, it was an Internet sale, and I don't know the buyer. You would have to talk to the company I went through to sell it to get his identity.'� The priest scrambled for answers, as the footsteps behind him got closer. Turning away from the smoking detective he now saw the two behind him more clearly. Both had pitch hair, one in dreadlocks, the other's naturally curly. They were young looking, in their twenties, and dressed in the manner which befit the age that they appeared.
'I don't believe he knows exactly who he sent it to.'� Said the figure that had up until now remained silent. The dread-locked thug looked down on the groveling man at their feet. 'He does, however, know where it was sent.'�
'Does he now, why wouldn't he tell us that, what has he got to lose?'� the detective wondered aloud.
'Nothing he can't live without.'� Spoke the Irishman, reaching down quickly and grabbing the missionary's left hand ripping the two hands that had been clasped in pleading prayer apart, pulling his arm behind his back. The priest let out a wailing cry and was gifted a swift boot to the mouth by the detective, stopping the cry in mid-breath. Pulling his fingers apart with both hands, the Irishman smiled.
'I wonder if I can still do this with my bare hands, it has been awhile since we have had to deal with someone unwilling to give us answers.'�
'Give it a go Finiche.'� Answered the detective.
'WAIT, WAIT, I sent it to an address in Milwaukee, Wisconsin!'� the tortured man at their feet divulged finally. 'I have it on record on my laptop, in my office upstairs.'�
'Take him Finiche, retrieve the address.'� The detective ordered.
The missionary and the Irishman retired upstairs, the priest rubbing his hands together, enjoying all ten fingers still.
'Wisconsin?'� questioned the Dread. 'Who do we know in Wisconsin?'� The detective extinguishes his cigarillo on the floor of the church and promptly lights another.
'I don't think we know the man personally Asema. We know of him though, or his sect rather.'�
'A Volvan?'�
'Indeed.'�
'Incarnate, here on earth?'�
'Its possible, but typically they do not know who they are when they are here, lost to the Bardo. It is common for them to walk among us as if we were their long dream. A nightmare really, stripped of all of their miracles, forced to live a waking life as a mere Todlich, a human.'�
'Then why acquire the book? Could it be a coincidence?'� the Dread questions the Detective further.
'No, no, this world does not work in such a way. There is no secret force of intent that aligns the universe to a Toad-lickers will. The universe bats these creatures back and forth as if they were so many billiard balls.'�
'Many years ago Arturo, you were one of these creatures, and you still aspire to be one again.'�
'That's true, there is a strange lure to their existence, once tasted it is difficult to cleanse one's palate.'�
` 'I am certainly glad I shall never have to experience that affliction.'� Stated the Dread, matter-of-factly.
Above them on the second floor of the mission, Finiche could be heard shouting in an unintelligible accent at the priest whose crying had begun again.
'Quite the act the Druid puts on.'� The Dread observes.
'Yes,'� the Detective returns, laughing 'he has little patience for mortals, especially when they cling to life so.'�
'Where did you find him?'�
'I can't honestly remember.'� States the Detective. 'I can remember his not being there and I can remember him there, the transition is shadowed from my memory.'�
'It must have been long ago then.'�
'Yes, I think that much is true.'�
'Here they come again.'� Speaks the Dread as the commotion upstairs makes it way back down to ground level. The missionary, his face now bloodied, is relatively silent.
'I have it, no name, but an address.'� Speaks the Druid.
'That is enough to get us started. Asema, you should return to whence you came and inform our Employer of our progress.'�
'Fair enough.'�
'Finiche and I will make our way to the great wild north.'� Concludes the Detective, snorting. 'I do prefer our present climate, but you should have some nostalgia for our destination Druid.'�
'More than I like to make claim to Arturo.'� The Irishman replies cryptically.
'Leave the priest with his fingers, he has served us.'�
'But he broke his family's oath and disposed of the Quixote!'�
'Finiche, mortal hearts and fickle and easily swayed, especially with abstract values.'� Asema states hoping to salve the Druid's indignation, grunting with discontent, the Irishman looses his grip on the priest's arm allowing his exhausted form to collapse to the floor.
'There is a bus stop in downtown Tucson, you know the one?'� Asema questions.
'Yes, I have heard some stories about that bus stop, some strange Todlich going's on there.'� Replies the Detective.
'Sure,'� answers the Dread. 'But that is another story entirely. There is a café next to the bus station that will serve my needs, shall we retire to the city?'�
'Come Finiche, leave him.'�
'He could call the police.'� The Druid states emphatically. The priest, looking up from his silent hyperventilation, has clearly thought of this as well. The Dread, sighing audibly, walks over to the frightened crumpled many on the ground at the foot of the stairs, crouches down close to his face, and speaks a soft word. The word, having been spoken, exits his mouth in the form of a soft blue sphere. Transfixed, the priest watches as the sphere slowly traces a vector from Asema's mouth to the center or his forehead at which point he looses sight of it along with his consciousness. Standing, the Dread straightens his modern clothes.
'He should sleep for awhile now, and when he does wake, he will only remember falling down the stairs after his morning's bout with a whiskey bottle.'�
'Excellent,'� returns the Detective, 'shall we retire gentlemen?'�
'Who you calling a gentleman?'� returns the Druid with a smile.

*
Beyond faith collapsing, the tenure of cumulus clouds searches science for the unanswerable. A sky azure, ripe with shadows, spilling above the earth in a riot of chaos. Below, sprawled across the confines of matter within the habitable atmosphere, breeds the human. Faith collapses upon examination beneath the glass of reason. Reason dissolves once applied to the geometry of faith.
The North American continent holds many secrets. Questions, myths, theories gone unanswered since their inception. Cities of gold, fountains of eternity, giant albino serpents digging canyons as they skulk through endless deciduous forests; now myth dries on the brush before being applied to the canvas. Reason dictates the course of man who in turn affects the rest of the world around him. Within reason lies inherently, its adverse. For reason to remain sound there must also exist its proof.
Is not the opposite of chaos the perfection of order? The theory of chaos suggests an order hidden within. To validate chaos, would it require a reverse of this hidden order or rather an impossible true chaos completely void of sense?
Arms exploding fire incinerating scale-dug canyons, faith collapses revealing a passionate vane; behind the gossamer of Maya lies its own proof, the negation of suffering. Behind what we see as we walk through this life there must exist another.
The discovery and application of mathematics has made man great. Obstinately we seek the end, the final theorem. As we look forward the answers lie at our heels safe from investigation. It is our divine and simian nature to not discuss the probability of truth residing so close, when we have expended so much of our energy looking in the opposite direction.
A man will sit and drink coffee with no remorse in achieving just that. New minds untaught find answers over and over again, thinking them novel. A young boy perfects the act of wandering. A woman vomits into her toilet. Clouds form perpetually malleable patterns beneath an unchanged, all-seeing star. Asteroids fall to earth, a toaster is sold at a rummage sale, a tanned and servile youth drinks dirty water from a handcrafted bladder; they define themselves as a microcosm. Dreams haunt some while insomnia plagues others. Steps fall upon the corporeal pavement while others tread upon the ghost of synaptic reaction.
Behind all of us stalks our reflection hidden beneath the surface of a placid freshwater lake. Hashish burns the minds of assassins as housecats roam the wilderness of empty apartments.

*

The man just sat and watched his coffee cup dwindle in contents. The waitress would fill his cup without him asking and without stopping to speak with him about anything.
Another woman came in and smiled at him as he looked away from his coffee.
"Hi Carl," she began but ceased as other women howled at the end of the counter for more of their brood to join them. Carl did not particularly like women. He was old, 56 years old and alone, sipping coffee in the local family restaurant. He came here every night and every night for the last year and a half this conglomeration of gossipers had grown becoming a bane to his important rituals and structured behavior. Patiently he waited and recalled finer days of the restaurant.
Approximately 34 years ago it had opened across the street from his parents home. He lived there now, his mother and father dead and in matching urns on the mantle. He clamored around the empty house and enjoyed meager meals gleaned from disability checks. So many years ago, this restaurant had opened and he had begun coming across the street and drinking their coffee and sometimes ordering their apple pie. When the restaurant first opened a couple from the inner city owned it. Carl had begun to frequent the restaurant because of the convenience of the location. Later he came for her, for the owner's daughter, the only waitress back then. He came and sat and drank his coffee and she would serve him with a smile and speak with him at length about his day and her day and sometimes her father had to tell her to get to work because she was as ravished with Carl as he with her.
She had moved away to New York and went to college and forgot Carl and her parent's family restaurant. He tried to follow up after her, get her phone number, an address, a time when she would visit for the summer. Her parents stopped coming into the restaurant after opening another downtown. Carl was left to sit and wait and watch the world go by from his corner letting his coffee grow cold, listening to the voices of young women at the other end of the counter, speaking of nonsensical adventures in urban drama.

*

The dawning of a notebook dawn does prescribe to one a certain animosity of the page. What arcane limericks shall be transcribed? To what personage shall the plain be dedicated? The first, foremost, then doubly, the third, a pampas, a field, a foreboding salt flat, and the drained swamps of my father's birth shall become the slate. The medium is the ineffable speech of a theistic patriarchy. Sitting below rafters of gold and light a simple man takes pleasure in a simple thing. A petite cup of espresso graces his tongue; delicate tiger mottle sits atop three fourths of an inch of crema. What secrets hide beneath in the prophetic dregs? Prophetic only in the hands of a professional thief; sitting blithely beneath a veiling of autumn leaves; one's thoughts turn to James Joyce and are at once, off again; electrochemical impulses disappearing in early morning fog loitering above the damp earth of a hidden pasture.
There are some places here in America that pavement does not reach. This secret pasture exists in that space today as it also exists in my insomniac dreamless memory. The existing pasture litters its mornings with mist. The variety of deciduous trees is phenomenal. Oak, maple, cottonwood, lilac, plum, crabapple, and birch sing whispers unto the wind. Beneath the rafters of refraction and cumulus clouds begs softly a hat filled with ideas and quotes from Lewis Carroll. A Jabberwocky watches the pasture and waits for the sun to evaporate the frightened mist.
For some, dawn brings the sadness of a repetition, for others, the quality of the morning light illuminates the secret glyph of the natural world. The word of God doth spake these glyphs into being. What devilish suffering pulls our minds from the Lord's Work, it is pavement laid down in steaming heaps breaking the backs of young Christian men. I come forth to detract in plain style the Romanesque wonder of concrete. The aforementioned mist still hangs close to the dampened ground. A Holstein stands with dew on his back.
In this place pavement runs short its endless and convoluted course. Perhaps the concept of a piece of America that cannot be reached on a paved road is strange to some, perhaps not to others of a more rural ilk. Invariably the rural routes lead to cultivated land. The agrarians are humbly the beginning and end of civilization as we have come to enjoy it. From what was the first proper city exhumed? The timbers and ashes of cultivated land are the cause of the stony artificial blights upon the face of the nation.
It is the heartland this agrarian paradise of glacial hills, solitary hardwoods, tornadoes, squalls, barking dogs, and other creatures lurking just out of sight; it is the heartland criss-crossed by fresh gravel paths that lends its broad and struggling shoulders for the expanding cancers of cities to rest upon. When you are in your local market thumping melons or purchasing corn chips and fresh salsa, ponder their origins.
The Romans invented concrete; they lay upon the earth enormous avenues, stretched pillars and dome to their physical limits, and pummeled the untamed surf with the functionality of their piers. We owe much to the Romans and Greeks but we will limit these paragraphs to the advent of liquid stone and its applications.
From the cinders of the Roman Empire was born to the world a gentleman by the name of Auguste Perret. Born to a builder's family in 1874 Belgium he attended a renowned university but neglected to graduate for it would have negated his eligibility as a contractor. Auguste began experimentation and subsequently created the world's first multi-story reinforced concrete building. He was swiftly recognized as a specialist in concrete design. For almost four centuries the genesis of Perret's work has blossomed into what is now known as the modern city. When the microclimate of the city was firmly established the closest approximation in nature was that of a desert. We have created cancers upon our mother's flesh and it is here the majority of the populous chooses to reside. Not only have we chosen to live among the parched mutated stone, we stretch tendrils of this satanic advent through the healthy ecology to connect with similar cancers. We travel these tendrils like a parasite or an unquenchable virus.
As morning progresses the mist dissipates. The pasture lies in a small valley between low hills. I recall mournfully looking out of the half window of the school bus as we rambled down the rough surface of the gravel road. I remember the mist in this valley on a humid morning. School had begun and the leaves were only tinted with their true colors. I believe I am a bit of a sensitive when homes gather around me in hostile blocks and semi-circles, when I have to walk a lonely avenue a quarter of a mile to find a decent tree. The land I was born too possessed cement foundations for the utilitarian buildings and homes warmed by fuel oil but this was the limit. All avenues for five miles in any direction were laid with gravel. This gravel came from the few limestone quarries in the area. Everything is localized. The sweet corn and tomatoes were within walking distance. The water, of such an astounding clarity, then as it is now. The quality of life in this place unreachable by paved roads would bring even the most dedicated city dweller to his knees amongst sobs of repentance. The sun shines differently there.
I have lived half of my life in deserts. The first of which was a desert within a desert. Tucson, Arizona was my home during some very formative years in the very late twentieth century. It is through this experience that I came to understand the allure of the desert.
My ancestral home, while possessing enormous beauty, also posed as a formidable place to weather those dark months at the end and beginning of the Christian calendar.
There I was, 19, a Flock of Seagull's haircut, a green twill trench coat, and khaki pants with elastic cuffs at the ankles. I was standing in approximately three feet of snow next to a dilapidated house my mother had rented in a town some ten minutes from the family farm and the pastures of the mist. Everything was blanketed in a crystalline white envelope. I stood in the snowdrift and was hit from behind by an icy gust of wind. This polar blast had an unusual effect on me. I was awakened to the futility and oppression a Midwestern winter possesses and I was driven to tears. A year and six months later I moved to Tucson with my good friend Bela on two black-market plane tickets, one-way.

*

Vladimir toiled with tools of gold and silver. The rest of humanity bustling around him, he did not notice. Brick upon brick through snow and sweat, bleeding numbers and names known only to his work; this work, divine, creased with sweat, spoken of in whispers. The steeple rose above the Teuton as he took his measurements to see that they were correct. How many years had he spent on this continent? One of the first Europeans to arrive, Lost in the frozen wastes of the Great Lakes with that pernicious Finiche, the undying druid who cursed Vladimir with a life that contained no hope of achieving Heaven. Vladimir scratched his great beard that hid his face and barrel chest, took more calculations and ciphered their meaning in a notebook bound in Birchwood and scribed in ink tainted with the blood of roosters. The small room and hearth he had created earlier in his career both paled in direct comparison to this steeple. The Caritas Church, a church of heathen protestants, was to hide the key to the other two. The only correlations to be drawn through painstaking reverse engineering of his journal. Wrapping his text in the skin of a faun, he directed the laborers assigned to him in placing the last stones and set off towards the courtyard where he would hide his secrets.

*

The Empress Amarn walked along the promenade of her castle deep in the Agulian wilderness. Her minions, the Volva, deep in the Dream Bardo making their way to earth; her robes were of flowing satin and cassowary feathers were woven into the seams. The promenade of her castle faced a great wasting vista of hills and forests of stunted trees no more than three feet high. The stones of her walk were entirely encased in a green moss, spiraling up ruined pillars that used to support the roof. There were many small wooden doors in the walls, many of the doors led to places in her palace she no longer visited or had never visited before. One of these rotting doors stood at her feet. To enter she would have had to stoop, almost crawl through it. She pictured in her mind's eye where this door led, a room of white marble with a long table where the old government; before her imperial rule; would hold meeting, a table and chairs of white marble. The marble was also here on the promenade but used for circular portals in the mossy stone floor, portals that eventually led to the underground city beneath the palace. Once a place of worship and study, this subterranean metropolis now seethed with the victims of her reign, prisoners and their torturers. Both havinge lived down there for so long that they were breeding and creating burgeoning castes of those that were persecuted and their superiors. As she walked sentient shadows swirled lightly around her robes.
The Other Ones, those dark formless witches, special minions of the Empress Amarn. Their origins shrouded in mystery to most. The entire ambira of Agulhas and its protectorates know of the Other Ones and fear them, which is their role. They are the Gestapo of the Empress Amarn enforcing her rule where her troops and her engineered steam spewing war machines cannot.
The Other Ones were once mortal females, born in the subterranean passages of the Imperial Palace. There are no women allowed in the general quarters of the Dungeon City. Those women that are incarcerated in the city are kept separate in the upper echelons of the city performing labor in the millineries. Sewing and cleaning the uniforms for the militia, if they are fortunate, if their crimes are grievous however, they are ferried to a different fate.

*

'They will nehver take me ahlive.'� spoke Charolette Downe to no one as she viewed her crumbling plantation from a porch of rotting boards. The swamp had claimed this place, as its own for it never really belonged to any entity besides the swamp. A constant battle was required during the finer days of the plantation to keep the land at bay and to keep the buildings from decaying into the mud. Charolette stood and waited for the coming army, a pistol in her hand. The south had fallen; she had heard at long last the outcome of the war. Her people and her way of life were now at an end.
She would not let the Yankees take her. They could do what they would with her proud corpse but as they brought their boots down on the land of her family she would fire every bullet in her pistol with the aim of killing those she could. She knew her own death would be terrible, perhaps they would only wound her and drag her inside her house to torture her until she met her God but at least she would have never given up. There were at least portions of the South that would win this war, at least in death.

* *

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