Fallen Masters Read online

  “In truth, sir, you can’t even find your body.”

  “What? That’s a strange thing to say.”

  “Think about it.”

  The person speaking to him was standing right over him, looking down at him.

  “Damn. Martin Sheen!”

  “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  “You look exactly like Martin Sheen. He’s one of my all-time favorite actors. He played the President on TV.”

  “I look exactly like you want me to look.”

  “Really? That’s a strange comment. And this is one strange debrief. What am I doing here? And where is here?”

  * * *

  Whoever it was that had been talking to him disappeared as memories of the event began coming back. He remembered now, exiting the car and starting through the corridor provided by the honor guard, returning their salutes. He could see the men, from eighty-six-year-old Clyde Barnes, the World War II vet (how did he know Clyde Barnes’s name—and how did he know that Sergeant Barnes had landed on D-Day?), to twenty-one-year-old Logan McMurtry, who had been to Afghanistan twice (and how did he know that?). He couldn’t remember meeting either of them.

  Then he remembered seeing Lee Timothy, who was second from the far end on the left side. He brought his M1 rifle from the present arms position to a firing position. He fired twice, and POTUS could clearly remember the .30-caliber bullets going into his chest. He had not worn his bulletproof vest. He hated the damn things.

  Wait a minute. If the bullets hit me in the chest, why am I not wounded?

  Again he ran his hands over his chest, but this time, he wasn’t sure he felt anything at all, including his chest. What was it the man who sounded like a movie star—he couldn’t place exactly which one—had said to him? That he couldn’t even find his body?

  Wait a minute. If I am the casualty, then that clearly means that I am—what? Injured? Dead? Is that possible? Am I dead!

  Wow! I thought you didn’t feel anything when you were dead. But that’s not true. Dead feels like a headache. And a powerful one, at that. Have I been shot in the head? I will need some heavenly Advil ASAP!

  POTUS sat up and started to look around, but everywhere he looked, all he saw were rays and shafts of light around him like swords from the sky.

  Hmmmm. Sky? Does here—Heaven—the hereafter—even have a sky? Am I in the sky? I have a lot of questions for a dead guy. As soon as my adviser returns, I am going—

  “Yes?” Without even a millisecond passing after he had this thought his guide was standing there again.

  “You don’t look like Martin Sheen anymore.”

  “Who do I look like now?”

  “You don’t look like anything. At least, nothing that I can describe. Are you an angel? Are you a ghost? What do I call you?”

  “Call me IRA.”

  “IRA?”

  “Yes. I-R-A. Intellectual Research Adviser. I appeared to you in the form that you would find acceptable. You would expect a senior member of the Secret Service detail to be with you, so I assumed the role. You are the one who projected the Martin Sheen image on me. You have many questions, I know—and I will answer some of them immediately, and others not quite yet. But there is much work to do.”

  “Work? I have work to do here?”

  “Absolutely. What do you think happens when you die? You think it’s all milk and honey from now on? Well, that, goddamn it, isn’t going to happen.” IRA winced. “Oops, sorry, sir! Not you, sir,” he said to POTUS. “The Big Boss, sir. I mean the Creator. He asks that the name not be used in vain.”

  “So I’ve always heard,” POTUS said.

  “Right. All right, let me try this again. When you die, you don’t get a harp, you don’t get a halo, and you don’t get the universal book of knowledge. You’ve always heard that dying is a natural part of life, haven’t you?”

  “I’ve heard that, yes.”

  “It’s true. And that means that, even after you die, you still have to work at being you.”

  “IRA, are you telling me that I am going to run the United States of America from the afterlife?”

  “Not exactly. You will have a little bit of help. In fact, you will have quite a bit of help. Come with me to the Hall of Governing Wisdom.”

  There was a flash of light. Or was there really a flash of light? Did POTUS just imagine it? For that matter, was he imagining all of this?

  He found himself walking—yes, walking, not gliding—down a great, wide hall with floors of glistening marble, flanked on either side by beautiful Corinthian columns. POTUS had never seen anything close to this; even Saddam Hussein’s most elaborate palaces seemed like chicken coops compared to this. He wished he could call Steven Spielberg or George Lucas to make a special effects film of the place, but even that would not be able to capture the beauty all around him.…

  Without consciously walking toward them, POTUS found himself standing beside one of the columns. Was he standing? When he reached out to touch one of the columns, he perceived no physical denseness to it. Yet this column, and all the other columns, had shape and structure. And something else. They seemed to vibrate, and to give off a beautiful musical chord, like a bridge written by Bach, or Beethoven, or Vivaldi.

  “These columns aren’t really here, are they?” POTUS asked.

  “They are here because you put them here. Everything here is thought and energy.”

  “Wait a minute. Are you telling me I know enough about architectural design to imagine something like this?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “IRA, I haven’t been this confused by something someone is supposed to be teaching me since my first week of calculus in the Academy. You aren’t making, if you will excuse the language, a hell of a lot of sense.”

  “I’ll try to do better,” IRA said. “Everything here has shape and design, and there is a grand architecture for all the archetypes.”

  “Right,” POTUS said, the expression in his voice clearly showing that he still had no idea what IRA was talking about. It would take him a while to absorb all that was happening. He felt rushed, pushed, propelled—but to what end? He could not even guess.

  “Come, they are gathering now.”

  “They? Who are they?”

  “To put it in a form you can understand, I’ll say that they are the Council of Elders. Think Parliament, or your Congress.”

  “Ahh, so there is some structure to this place.”

  “Yes. But you cannot contribute just yet. They will be expecting you when you are ready—but for now, all you can do—all you will do, is observe.”

  The members of the Council, men and women, were sitting at a great round table. They were meeting in a room that had textured white wainscoting halfway up the walls, then marble above. An unbelievably large chandelier hung over the table. All the men had silver hair and were dignified looking, the women had brindled hair and possessed an aura of beauty. There was an appropriate racial mixture to the group, and even as POTUS looked at them, he realized that he wasn’t “seeing” them at all.

  This room, the chandelier, the table, and the members of the council had all been created in his own mind. Somehow, he understood that, that didn’t mean they weren’t there. They were there; he just needed a frame of reference for them, and his mind had created that frame of reference.

  Slowly—all too slowly from POTUS’s perspective—he was learning and experiencing some amazing things. How had all this come into existence? It wasn’t all just in his mind, though his mind—his soul, really—was forming “sights” and “sounds” to fill his consciousness with images and ideas. It was all still very foreign to him, yet somehow familiar … he wondered whether this was what eternity meant: Experiences and images that were always and everywhere present, the same yet constantly changing, always had been and always would be. And he had been invited to step into the stream of eternal consciousness at this time—as measured in earthly time, that is—and for all time. This was his new home, he real
ized, and he was being called upon to make new choices, each and every moment of his new existence. When would it end? Probably never, he thought. Nor did he want it to.

  CHAPTER

  47

  There was a barely perceptible and unintelligible murmur among the Council members; then Mr. Pennington held up his finger to call for attention.

  Mr. Pennington?

  Suddenly he was no longer POTUS; he was six-year-old Marcus Jackson on the way home from school on Chicago’s South Side when three older and much larger white boys stepped out in front of him.

  “Where are you going, colored boy?” one of them taunted.

  “I’m going home.”

  “Not before you shine my shoes—boy.” He stuck his foot out and the other two boys laughed.

  Young Marcus did nothing.

  “Shine my shoes, or we’re goin’ hurt you, bad.”

  Marcus got down on one knee, and with a broad smile, the bully lifted his foot. He took the bully’s foot, then jerked it up quickly, throwing the bully on his back. The other two boys attacked him then, but like an avenging angel, a gray-haired white man who lived on the corner was on them. He pulled the two bullies off the Marcus, then helped him back to his feet. The three bullies ran off.

  “That’s right, run!” Mr. Pennington said. “Every time you little punks come by my house, you had better run!”

  Marcus Jackson was wearing shorts, and Pennington brushed the dirt away from Marcus’s knees. “That was a brave thing you did, son,” he said. He invited the child in for milk and cookies, and he visited him often after that.

  Pennington was a retired army master sergeant who had won the Silver Star in Korea. It was Pennington who persuaded the young man to go to West Point, and ultimately came to stand proudly in the audience with his mother to watch his graduation and commissioning. Captain Jackson was in Germany when Pennington died, but as soon as he returned to the States, he visited Pennington’s grave.

  But even as POTUS stood there remembering Pennington, he realized that the Governor of the Council was not Pennington, and now he no longer even looked like him.

  He looked around and recognized no one. What he did not yet realize was that these Council elders had not been incarnate for centuries … so he would have no way of knowing them.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the Council,” the Governor said. “We are gathered here today to discuss the territories for which we are responsible. The Dark Forces are gathering in their uniformity, and they are orchestrating the masses to bond and unite against the Light.”

  Echoes of frustration were heard from the other members of the assembly.

  “That’s not good.”

  “We need to do something.”

  “What can we do? Our options are very limited.”

  “We have to do something.”

  “There is very little we can do,” the Governor said. “We are bound by the rules of our Divine Creator and Source, and we cannot interfere and actually do things for mankind. We can only interface with them, and inspire them to make more positive choices. How many times do we need to go over this?”

  POTUS chuckled. Had the Governor actually said interface?

  “You do understand, don’t you, that this is cognition only, that nobody is actually speaking?” IRA said. “You are creating the language you think you hear, and thus you are responsible for the vocabulary.”

  “OMG! That’s like Doctor Who’s Tardis. It translates the alien languages so it all sounds like English. Oh, and how does the Big Guy feel about the OMG reference?” POTUS asked.

  “Touché. Well, I didn’t vocalize my thought just now, but your interpretation of it was accurate.”

  The Council had interrupted its conversation during the exchange between POTUS and IRA, and for the moment there was not only no sound, but no motion either. It was as if a hold button had been pushed.

  “Do they know we are here?” POTUS asked, nodding toward the Council in freeze-frame.

  “We aren’t here,” IRA said.

  “What? Well, if we aren’t here, where are we?”

  “We are nowhere and everywhere,” IRA said. “Think of it as electricity. The electricity is everywhere in the grid, but not until you close a switch is it ‘there.’ We will be here when we need to be here.”

  “Fascinating,” POTUS said in his best Spock imitation. Now, with his attention returning to the assembly, they resumed their discussion.

  One of the other members spoke. “Brothers and sisters, I know that we are all terribly concerned with the planetary shifts that are coming and what will befall humankind. But I agree with the Governor of our Council as he states the rules that we cannot interfere with their destinies.”

  “The Dark Forces can,” another entity said.

  “That is because they are fallen energies from the Light and are no longer bound to our treaties and covenants,” the Governor said. “They can create chaos and prey on the fears of man, enable their jealousies and torment them to react. They seek out the meek and vulnerable, the emotionally and spiritually void persons, and strike like a rattlesnake.”

  The next voice was that of one of the female members of the Council. Her voice was soothing and well modulated. “And all of this while we and our forces of Light watch, with only the hope that our inspirational energies will assist mankind in making more positive choices. But obviously, that isn’t enough. Something, I don’t know what, but something has to be done.”

  “Something must be done, yes,” the Governor said. “Where is IRA? Is he here?”

  “I am here, Excellencies of the Council,” IRA said. “And I have with me our newest arrival. He is not ready yet, as he just woke up from his second sleep and learned of his humanity.”

  The Governor of the Council looked over toward POTUS and welcomed him with a nod and warm, energetic gesture. Then the Governor turned his attention back to the council.

  “I would like to take a vote of all Council members and suggest that the time has come for us to fall back to the earthly plane to assist our children. We need them to express more strongly our energetic principles so that man may be able to make the right choices. We can provide reminders and gentle nods that they are not alone.”

  POTUS realized now that the Hall of Governing Wisdom was considerably larger than he had at first perceived, and many more people were present than he had previously thought. The round table of the Council sat on a raised floor in the middle of the great hall, while around the Council all the others sat in concentric circles.

  The presence of the others, not as mere spectators, but as participants in the deliberations, reminded POTUS in form, if not in appearance, of the joint sessions of congress when such were assembled. Except this was a room he didn’t mind being in—even under the circumstances of death.

  The Governor continued:

  “We will have but a small window of opportunity to do this, because the veil between their world and ours is diminishing and we will not be able to lower our vibrations. I suggest that dynamic teams be put together. These masters of love and insight will ‘fall’ down, and their lower vibration waves must work strategically with other human beings in making great changes.”

  “Do we have a list of the people who will be our voices?”

  “All this ‘Dark Forces’ talk is rather disconcerting,” POTUS said. “Tell me, can the Council actually do something to help combat the spiritual terrorism we see today?”

  As before, the Council and indeed every representative in the chamber, for POTUS thought of the others as representatives—went into freeze-frame as he and IRA carried on their discussion.

  “The Governor and the Council of Elders are attempting to make things better,” IRA said.

  “But I just heard them say that they can’t interfere.”

  “They can’t interfere directly, that is true,” IRA said. “But what they can do, and what it is their job to do, is to inspire people who are living on the planet now to ma
ke a difference and to consciously abandon evil and darkness. The Council will encourage people to use their free will to choose the Light.”

  “Can they do it?” POTUS asked.

  “I don’t know,” IRA replied.

  “What do you mean you don’t know? Aren’t you my Intellectual Research Adviser? I thought you knew everything.”

  “What the Governor and the Council of Elders have set out for themselves is no easy task,” IRA said. “Sadly, Heaven will more than likely not succeed because, I regret to tell you, the Dark Forces are flowing in abundance.”

  “How much power do these Dark Forces have?”

  “Their power is considerable.”

  “But good will always overcome evil, will it not?” POTUS asked.

  A sad smile spread across IRA’s non-corporeal face, that is, across the face that POTUS was perceiving. He wondered now, why he had ever thought it might be Martin Sheen. IRA didn’t look anything at all like Martin Sheen.

  “Yes, good triumphs over evil,” IRA said. “That was one of the earliest precepts we were able to inculcate in the human experience. An oldie but goodie to be sure. Unfortunately, it is not necessarily true. You heard what the Governor said. They are fallen energies from the Light, which means they have as much power as any angel of good. More, when you consider that they are no longer bound to any code of ethics.”

  “I spent my entire life believing in the concept of good over evil,” POTUS said.

  “Ah, yes, your Mr. Pennington.”

  “You know about Mr. Pennington?”

  “I know all there is to know about you. What about your own situation in Iraq? You were certainly representing good when you ordered a counterstrike on those insurgents in the mosque who launched bombs at Charley’s Humvee. You saved lives. Yet you were punished for that. Did evil not overturn good?”

  “Aha!” POTUS said as if scoring a point in a debate. “But the charges were dismissed. And didn’t the American people respond to that—and elect me president?”

  “And were you not assassinated?” IRA replied.