Fallen Masters (59 page)

The director of the show now embraced the meaning of this historical broadcast. He immediately projected an image of the late President of the United States onto the enormous screen behind young Marcus. Seeing the larger-than-life image of his dad, he could not help being overcome with emotion. Knowing he would never feel him again, never get to hug him one last time, only fueled the deep feelings stirring inside him.

After several minutes of the standing ovation, Marcus took the microphone from one of the technicians who had been quickly dispatched to mic him up. There was a pause in the pandemonium as the oxygen in the theater became rarified and everyone held his or her breath.

Onstage and in the theater there was absolute, dead silence as Marcus Jackson stood center stage, his hands folded in front of him, wearing a black suit, white shirt, and no tie.

*   *   *

He looks like he belongs there, in front of the world,
Rae Loona thought. She, like everyone else in the audience, was totally absorbed in the scene, focused on the young man who looked eerily like his father, the slain President of the United States.

Some members of the audience later said they could also see the late President himself standing there behind his son, smiling and encouraging him as he spoke.

What Marcus and Rae and all the others could not know was that across the globe, billions of people were also silent, as if a curtain had descended over the Earth and absorbed every wave of sound and blanketed the planet in utter silence.

Dawson Rask, Bobby Anderson, Tyler Michaels, and John Travolta—who stood arm-in-arm with Rae, wrapping her arm through his—watched from backstage. Anderson scoped out the crowd with a practiced eye, looking for signs of threat. He felt, oddly, that the danger had passed.

Charlene glanced back to blow a kiss to Dawson. Was this really happening? What in heaven’s name did it mean? Everyone present knew that something bordering on the supernatural had occurred—was occurring. But
what
?

*   *   *

Mama G stepped toward the small group backstage. She thought she heard the voice of the Governor of the Council of Elders whispering in her ear. “Do you see now what your purpose has been? You have been a part of bringing all these people together. You and the Fallen Masters who have guided them. Just as I have guided you.”

There stood Asima, visible only to Patricia Rose Greenidge—just as Mama G was visible only to those in this immediate circle of living human beings and Fallen Masters.

She silently thanked the Governor. The visions she had been privileged to see all came flooding back to her, jolting her with the force of a positive, powerful electricity, then gave way to a glimpse of the future … almost too bright to behold. Would it come true?

The words of the Governor now filled her consciousness: “Behold, as the stars and the planets align in their courses and the people of Earth choose the Light over the Darkness, this shall come to pass. The shadow
will
be lifted, if the people heed the words they will hear this night.”

Dear Lord
, Mama G prayed,
thank You for Your gifts to me. Please help me be worthy and to be grateful for all You have done. And let me know what else is left for me to do for You, as long as I am on this Earth.

“Come, dear Mama,” Asima said. “Your time on this plane has ended. I am here to escort you to the Other Side. You are one of us now—one with us in the realm of the spirit.”

“But how—why?” She was confused, but she did not resist the gentle voice and the unworldly “touch” of the spirit guide, the lovely young woman who had given her life to save her boy’s life—to give him life a second time, at the cost of her own.

“Come. You shall see. All shall be revealed to you, as it is written.”

“In the stars?”

Asima smiled. “Yes, in the stars that represent the souls of all who have come before us.”

*   *   *

What is happening?
This thought was the one thing that all those in the Hollywood Grand Theatre and billions around the globe were wondering. The moment unfolded before their eyes as if in a dream.

Marcus finally spoke.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I am sorry to interrupt tonight’s broadcast. As you can see, I survived and am grateful to those who found me and rescued me today. People who were entrusted with my well-being kidnapped me and caused a great deal of suffering to my family. Although I am looking forward to going home and being with my mom and family, I won’t be reunited with my dad—my best friend and the best dad in the world—who was taken from this world … our world—” He paused, swallowing hard. “
—my
world. Tonight I stand before you and ask you in his honor to make a choice. He inspired me to look for the goodness or
God
ness in every person. When 9/11 happened over ten years ago, he told me even then, that those men were good at their core but just chose evil instead.

“My father is alive, though he is not with us in body,” Marcus said. The hush became even deeper, as if everyone had stopped breathing.

“My father is dead. You all know that, and you know that I was kidnapped. I still don’t know why this has all happened, just that it has. And it is over now. But my father is still with us. He has spoken to me, and he wants me to share what he said with everyone who can hear me—with everyone who will listen.

“There are bad people and bad spirits threatening us. Just like those who kidnapped me. I guess they thought they could make some kind of big deal about having the son of the President in their power. I don’t know. But I do know that my dad was able to break through the wall that separates us from souls who are dead. If he has the power to do that, then he has the power to fight evil.

“He told me that I have the ability to make the right choice—that all of us have the same power, to choose right over wrong, love over evil, light over darkness. I believe him.

“The words I am speaking are not my own. As you can see, I’m just a kid, really, with a pretty good education—at least my parents have sent me to good schools, even if I haven’t studied all that hard all the time. But I did not know anything about the world and the truth of the world, until I was taken from my family, until I lost my father and my best friend. What do any of us really know about life until we experience pain and loss and disappointment? What can we know about happiness unless we have known about sadness and experienced it in ourselves? Like I said, I didn’t
know
anything, and I can’t claim to even now—but I am here to share with all of you what has been shared with me.

“The message is this: Together we can turn back the forces that want to destroy our world. We have seen this with my kidnappers and the one who shot my dad. There is evil all around us. Look at your own lives. You will see it. To resist such evil is simple but not easy. And we can do it right now—together.”

As one, the Hollywood Grand Theatre audience took in a deep, gasping breath.

“I have been given the Key of Understanding by my father. My message is,
Do not give up your freedom. Make a different choice—the right choice.
As hard as it is at a time like this when so much seems to be going wrong and the Earth itself is threatened by physical and spiritual forces beyond our understanding…” The young man paused and unfolded his hands, raising them to shoulder level and looking directly into the primary television camera.

“My message is not really my message at all, but comes from a Source of all that is good, a creative, loving Source that wants all human beings to be happy and fulfilled in their lives. Whatever your religious faith, or whether you do not have any faith in your heart—that is not the point.”

*   *   *

Rae Loona and Tyler Michaels were transfixed. Neither said a word, but they looked at each other for a second in total understanding. Never had Tyler felt moved in this way, and he could feel the presence of Karen and his unborn child. He also felt another unseen presence, one that had been “dispatched” by Karen and had watched over him for a long time, ever since her death.

Charlene had walked backstage and now stood next to Dawson. Neither said a word but drew closer together.

Marcus was speaking, teaching this unbelievably enormous audience, leading them to a new understanding of their shared purpose—of what was possible through individual choice to do good and to be good.

“Religion and God are like a pyramid: What you see depends upon what angle and what time of day you look at it. From my perspective I see it as red, with deep green shadows. From your view, it may appear bright gold with no distinct edges against a bright sky. If you don’t get up out of your chair and look at the pyramid from many angles, get up and walk around the pyramid and really look at it, you will never know the many colors of God.

“You will never see what you are supposed to see—which is everything and every color and every aspect of creation. It is all visible to us, if we will just open our eyes and look at what is before us.”

He paused for several seconds and looked around him.

“I have said that these words are not my own, yet I am saying them. If you think that is weird, how do you think I feel?”

The people in the theater, most of them hard-bitten, no-nonsense show business professionals, released some of their tension with a ripple of laughter. Elsewhere around the world, when Marcus’s words were translated, the same effect was felt, and people of every imaginable color and culture smiled.

Marcus spoke slowly and deliberately. Instinctively, he knew that his words were being translated into various languages and that he was being dubbed, or subtitles were being streamed across TV screens in many places.

He looked over at Tyler, remembering what Tyler had said about his boy—wishing Jeremy could have grown up to be like him, to be
with
him—and remembering the story of the butterflies. Marcus continued, enunciating each word carefully, “In honor of my dad, I just want to say a proper good-bye. He loved blue butterflies. Can you find a blue butterfly on your iPhones or BlackBerries or whatever phone you use—and hold it up to show that we are choosing goodness or
God
ness over darkness? Every person who hears my voice in this broadcast: Take your cell phones, wherever you are. Place a call to someone you love or just turn on the phone and hold it up to the sky so that the light can be seen from above.”

Some people at the back of the theater and in the upper tiers moved toward the exits to make their calls and hold up their phones to the sky. The majority of the crowd on the orchestra level stayed in place, awaiting what Marcus Jackson would say next with rapt attention.

*   *   *

As Marcus delivered his appeal for peace and love, the Council of Elders and the Tribunal both looked down at the Earth and were able to see blue lights blinking across the planet. An inspirational message of love and hope from Heaven was delivered, and the response from the people of Earth came shining back to the Other Side.

It was visible to all who had the ability to see, whatever side they had chosen.

The members of the Council of Elders and souls on the Other Side who had chosen rightly—whether in their earthly existence or after—rejoiced.

Amid these shifts of planetary and celestial consciousness toward the light and away from the darkness, IRA realized there would be casualties for his side—new arrivals whom he would be meeting to recruit, to claim as he had tried to claim POTUS, to feed on the energy of the world they were leaving. The Tribunal would need many victories, even minor victories, in the face of losing this battle for power.

Have we lost?
IRA asked himself in desperation, fighting to hang onto the denial that fed his own sense of power and worth in the face of disaster and destruction. It was unthinkable. Yet neither he nor his brother spirits of the Tribunal could deny what was happening before their eyes.

IRA rejoined the Tribunal, who had gathered around the pools of passion, now clouded with warring energies, no longer showing a clear path to victory for them. It was dawning on the leaders that their campaign of manipulation, playing off the powerful fears and uncertainties of human beings, was disintegrating before their eyes. Just as they had enlisted more and more new souls, seemingly every day, they were now losing control of those same souls in the blink of an eye—in the flutter of a butterfly’s wings.…

Legions of souls who had embraced their message would be betrayed, lost to them forever. The choice of Darkness over Light, of mayhem over peace, had seemed so simple and attractive to so many within the sway of the Tribunal’s forces, but what now? Panic spread rapidly through those gathered in the realm of the dark energies like a cancer. Black holes bloomed in the space that surrounded their stronghold.

Shrieking and gnashing of teeth erupted among them. It was horrible to hear.

This was the beginning of the end for their drive for total domination.

“We shall fight on! O Masters of the dark design and hellfire, we shall rise once more to battle the puny powers that have thwarted us this day!” The hapless guttural oration of the chief general, standing over a bloodred pool of consciousness and desire, filled the mind of every soldier, spy, and ambassador of evil within his range. A black miasma seeped from the dark matter moving through the universe, which had been diverted, by pure energy, from its destructive path.

IRA joined the others in issuing an ugly, bowel-wrenching scream that shook the foundations of the universe.

CHAPTER

106

Vatican City

The pope had walked across the beautiful Vatican gardens after nightfall to spend some time with his science team at the space observatory located within the tiny city-state. The structure had been built in the time of Galileo to study and chart the movement of the stars and planets. The popes then had felt they needed to get a handle on the cosmos and not leave it completely to the secular scientists who were busy upending the traditional understanding of the Earth and the solar system in the post-Renaissance era.