The Daykeeper's Grimoire (17 page)

“It’s a possibility,” Uncle Li says. “He does seem like a man who is hiding something.”

“Obviously
someone
other than the three of us knows about the tower,” he says.

Uncle Li nods in agreement. “It couldn’t be any of the guests; they were all gone by the time we went down there. And Mrs. Findlay wouldn’t know anything about that—your parents hired her, right? She wasn’t a fixture at the castle?”

“No, she wouldn’t have anything to do with this,” I say. Now that Tenzo is no longer a suspect, I think it has to be either Barend Schlacter or Thomas.

“And her grandson, that fellow you’re so fond of … what’s his name?” Uncle Li asks.

I instantly turn red. “What? Alex? I’m not …” I stammer for the words. “He doesn’t know anything either. They’re all totally
not
involved.”

I cradle my forehead in my hand. “If my parents knew what was going on, they’d freak out.” I’ve never been a part of something big before. I mean, a
prophecy
, for God’s sake! Do I bag it because I’m scared, or do I trust Uncle Li and Tenzo to keep me safe?

Uncle Li closes his eyes for a moment and pinches the bridge of his nose with his fingers. “Buddha help me when your parents find out I kept any of this from them—”

“I’ll take all the blame,” I say. “Really. All of it.”

Uncle Li shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter. I’m the responsible adult in this situation. But I do agree that our efforts to get to the bottom of this would be thwarted if we told them.”

“They already want to send me to boarding school. If they found out any of this they’d send me to a locked-down military school.” If I’m going to trust Tenzo to keep me safe, I might as well tell him what we know. Looking Tenzo in the eyes I say, “So, you want the full scoop?”

“Absolutely,” he says, eyes wide with surprise.

Uncle Li gives me an approving nod so I take a deep breath and dive in. I tell him about the grimoire I found in the secret room, the rubbings I took of the square spirals on the wall, about how I conned Dad into decoding the symbols in the spirals and then copied his program, how I found the way to the tower and the stuff we discovered there, like the fountain and the glowing rocks and the cogs and wheels down below. “Am I forgetting anything?” I ask.

Uncle Li raises his hands up to the air and makes that floating gesture. “Oh my God, that’s right,” I say. “There’s a huge magnetic field or something that makes you float!”

Tenzo looks at me and then at Uncle Li and says, “Okay” in that long drawn-out way that really means
I’m not sure I believe you
.

“Really! Mr. Papers showed us. You stand inside the circle of rocks and you start floating.”

Tenzo leans forward in his seat. Then he asks, “Have either of you ever been to the United Nations Headquarters in New York?”

We both shake our heads.

“There’s a very interesting room there, the Meditation Room,” Tenzo says. “In the center of the space is a six-ton block of solid iron ore—said to be the largest natural piece ever mined.”

“So you think they’re trying to
create
a place of power there?” I ask.

“Well, you have to wonder why the architects of the U.N. Meditation Room would import and install such an expensive material if it didn’t do anything.”

“Can you float above the United Nations one?” I ask, more interested in the amusement-park aspect of it than the weird theories.

Tenzo chuckles. “No, there are different types of magnets and magnetic fields. I don’t think this one is like the one in the tower.”

My legs are falling asleep under me, so I shift. Mr. Papers lifts his head and screeches with irritation because I wake him up. When I settle, he curls back up like a cinnamon roll. “You know,” Tenzo says, “my father was responsible for bringing Mr. Papers here.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes, he’s from a rare pygmy lineage of white-throated capuchin monkeys, brought to Dunhuang from the Mayalands by the first Daykeepers. There was an extensive breeding and training program in the caves to produce helper monkeys with special skills. Basically they were using the same type of electromagnetic energy from the Galactic Center on monkeys and they found a leap of evolution happened. Mr. Papers is from this lineage.”

“But that would make him really old, wouldn’t it? How long do they live?”

Uncle Li says, “Capuchin monkeys can live fifty years or more in captivity, and the pygmy variation lives even longer. Based on what I know, I’d guess he was about sixty-five.”

“So did you know Mr. Papers when you were a kid?” I ask, petting the fur on his head until it’s slicked back, soft and shiny. He looks too young to be sixty-five.

“No, but he knew my father. He’d send me letters with stories of Mr. Papers. It’s delightful to finally meet him.” He takes a deep breath through his nose and exhales quietly.

The fact that Tenzo doesn’t seem to be the bad guy any more doesn’t change the fact that he still looks creepy. I want to get over it because I know he can’t help it, but it might take more than a day.

I try for a kind gesture. “Would you like to spend some time with Mr. Papers?” I ask. He seems touched. I put Mr. Papers in his lap and he jumps up to his shoulder and puts one hand on Tenzo’s head. His eyes say
thank you
.

Looking weary, Uncle Li suggests that we rest and reconvene for dinner. I agree, wanting to go back to my room to see what the newly decoded spiral says.

Once back in my room I rush over to my computer and read:

When the masses, by bondage and slavery are torn

Eight Batz, the Last Daykeeper, will then be born

This beginning of the end before the new beginning will arrive

The twelfth of November, nineteen hundred ninety-five

I gasp. November 12, 1995? That was the day I was born.

I feel dizzy and taste metal in my mouth.

I’m overwhelmed so I do what any overwhelmed girl would do: I lay face down on my bed and crash. When I wake up a little later feeling chilled, I’m too tired to get up and crawl under the covers so I reach over to grab the comforter and fold myself up like a burrito.

That’s when I see the man standing at the foot of my bed.

You know in dreams when you’re too scared to run or scream? That’s how I feel: paralyzed.

The man walks to the side of my bed. “Do not be afraid,” he says.

I assume I must be dreaming because all of a sudden I’m not scared.

He sits on the edge of my bed. His poncho looks like a rug, woven with really bright colors. His skin is dark and weathered and he has very high cheekbones and small square teeth; I get a feeling he’s Mexican, although he almost looks Asian. He’s wearing old black sandals and thick pants made out of some kind of heavy linen cloth.

“It’s good to see you,” he says with an accent I can’t place. “My name is Bolon. It has been a long day, yes?”

“You have no idea,” I reply.

He is silent for a long time, but it doesn’t seem weird. We just look at each other.

Then he says, “You are doing well. You are on the path and we are very proud of you.”

“Wow … thanks, I guess. But who do you mean by ‘we’?”

“The Elders on The Council who help guide the prophecy.”

I prop up on one elbow and wonder if I could be aware of myself like this if I were actually dreaming. “Is this a dream?” I ask.

He smiles, “Isn’t it all? What is the difference between a dream and waking life—both are created by you, so which is real? Or are they both?”

I lay back down on the pillow with a thud. He shifts a little and I get a whiff of a complex smell—wood fire, spices, tree sap. I don’t remember ever smelling anything in a dream, but if this is real, why aren’t I scared?

He seems to know what I’m thinking. “I am not here to frighten you, or to make you uncomfortable. I am here to answer any questions you have.”

I sit up again. He has this incredibly kind face with the type of small, squinty eyes that make a person look like he’s always smiling.

“I just don’t understand any of this.”

He puts his old hand over mine and I feel the same jolt of energy I did when I touched the names on the tower, which seems like forever ago. He looks me straight in the eyes and starts to speak, although I feel like he could tell me everything I need to know without saying it out loud.

“The world is changing very fast right now, and will only get faster as we head toward 2012. The Shadow Forces are gaining momentum. From an evolutionary perspective, things have not moved this fast in the billions of years that the Earth has existed. Imagine how lucky you are to be living here, now, at this moment.”

“But how am
I
involved in any of this?” I ask.

“You will help overcome the Shadow Forces.”

I can’t help but laugh.

“Caity, you and the hundreds of millions of other young people on the planet are the midwives of a new world.”

“We can’t do
anything
! We don’t run the world. Old white men run the world.”

Bolon smiles. “Oh, so you’ve met the
Fraternitas
?”

“What do you know about the
Fraternitas
?” I ask.

He shrugs. “The
Fraternitas
has been around for ages. It’s an elite group of people who rule together. They control banking, commerce, and military organizations at the highest level; together they run the invisible world government—the Shadow Government.”

“Oh come on! Some of my dad’s geek friends are deep into conspiracies, so I’ve overheard conversations like this before. Mom says you can make anything look like a conspiracy if you want to.”

“This is truly the most powerful and dangerous group in the world,” he says.

When I see that Bolon is serious, my heart rate bumps up and my fingertips go cold. “Oh my God. I sent Justine to their office in San Francisco! And that’s who that freak Barend Schlacter works for—”

“I heard he had been here to visit. I hope he didn’t scare you too badly.”

“Are you kidding me? He scared the crap out of me! He said he was going to make me an orphan! This is who doesn’t want me to do what you’re telling me I’ll do?”

Bolon takes a deep breath and simply says, “Yes.”

“And you don’t feel bad putting a girl my age in huge danger?”

“It is not up to me. This is your path. But if there is no risk, there is no reward.”

What kind of comeback can you use on that?

“So why do they want to hurt me and my family?” I ask.

“Because you can impede their progress. You can stop them from controlling the masses. You see our consciousness has been declining so we have been easy to control. Now, because of changes in electromagnetic energy coming at us, our consciousness is elevating and it will be more difficult to be controlled by them. They know this and are getting desperate.”

“So it goes back to the Galactic Center thing? That’s where this energy is coming from?”

Bolon nods. “Our relationship to the Galactic Center affects us deeply. We are on the verge of a leap in evolution, but this time it’s an evolution of
consciousness
.”

When it comes right down to it, I think to myself, I’m not even sure I could define what consciousness is. Awakeness? Awareness? Brain power?

“How does that happen?” I ask. “I mean, how does consciousness
evolve
?”

“Did you know that more than ninety percent of your brain is not being used? And more than ninety percent of DNA is classified as ‘junk’ because scientists cannot figure out what it does. And more than ninety percent of space is considered ‘empty’ even though it’s teeming with energy? It’s as if we are wearing blinders. We understand almost nothing! This change in electromagnetic energy will allow us to access parts of ourselves we didn’t even know we had, to understand things that seem inexplicable.”

“So pretty soon these vibrations from the center of the galaxy will make us … what … smarter?”

“If the
Fraternitas
doesn’t destroy us before then, yes. Our minds expand as we get higher-dimensional energy from the Galactic Center.”

“See, this is exactly why you got the wrong person—space is really not my thing. To tell you the truth,” I admit, “I didn’t even know there
was
a center to the galaxy.”

“Scientists have only recently discovered exactly where the center of our galaxy is, and only a few years ago discovered that it is a massive black hole. But the Maya knew where the center of the galaxy was thousands of years ago—
and
they knew it was a black hole.”

“Wow, that’s amazing,” I say. I sit up and draw my knees to my chest. “But how does a black hole out in the galaxy have any effect on us here on Earth?” I ask.

“Doesn’t the moon affect us?” he replies. “The moon moves oceans and it’s billions of times less powerful than the Galactic Center! We’ve begun moving into a special and rare alignment of the Earth, the sun, and the Great Mother that will do more than just move tides—”

“The Great Mother?”

“The center of our galaxy—where new stars are born and where everything, including us, comes from.”

“Us too? People?”

Bolon bursts out laughing. “You are very funny,” he says, reaching over and gently patting my hand. “Do you realize that you are in the ultimate recycling center? Every atom in your body has been processed in at least one star and has gone on to be a part of various other things—you have atoms that may have been part of dinosaurs, fireflies, flowers, lava—even other humans.
Every
part of you came from the Galactic Center, and every part of you has been, and always will be, connected to everything else. You will see this more clearly as your dormant DNA wakes up.”

“But how?”

“Picture only being able to see this one room. You live in this one room for hundreds of thousands of years because it’s all you know, it’s all you can see. Then all of a sudden a door opens and you find out that there has always been an enormous building attached to the one room you have been living in.”

“I have that dream all the time! I’ll be in a house that I believe I live in, although I just made it up in the dream, and then I’ll open a door that I’d thought was a closet or something and it turns out to be a whole part of the house I never knew was there. And it’s always something amazing like an indoor garden or a ballroom.”

“That is a perfect metaphor for what is happening. You are living in five percent of a mansion. And you will not believe what’s behind the door you’re about to open …”

This thought gives me chills.

“Can you lay out the nuts and bolts here, like exactly how does this brain evolution, or whatever you called it, work?”

“You know a lot about computers, yes? The ones and zeros that tell your computer what to do are just a series of magnetic charges. There are many things that can make these magnetic charges go haywire and make the computer slow and prone to crashing—things like air pressure and electrical surges. Just like a hard drive, we are magnetic beings and we are fundamentally changed by the electromagnetic energy that surrounds us. Think of it as if we’re about to get a major hardware upgrade.”

“And the
Fraternitas
doesn’t want us to upgrade?”

“The
Fraternitas
will do everything in their power—and that power is considerable—to
stop
this upgrade. Only weak, fearful, indebted people can be controlled. If your goal is to control the masses, having people wake up and open their eyes is the worst thing that could happen.”

“But you said this upgrade is related to where we are in the universe. The
Fraternitas
can’t do anything about that, can they?”

Bolon shakes his head. “They cannot change where we are relative to the Galactic Center, but they’re trying other extreme methods; they’ve been spraying metals and compounds in the air to block the magnetic energy coming to our planet and they’ve built a network of arrays in Alaska that can change the nature of our ionosphere, greatly affecting what comes through.”

“That’s HAARP and Project Khymatos! Justine heard them talking about that!”

Bolon doesn’t look a bit surprised. “They think this, in combination with physically weakening us by putting chemicals in the water and genetically modifying the food we eat, emotionally weakening us by keeping us in a state of fear about our safety, and financially weakening us by keeping us in a state of perpetual debt, will help stop the upgrade and keep us easy to control.”

“But you’re talking about big-time world-wide conspiracy …”

“You need only to look at the two things that the
Fraternitas
care most about: war and money. There are eight to ten wars happening on the planet right now. Follow the money funding these wars and you will find the
Fraternitas
on both sides.”

This makes no sense. “Why would they pay for
both sides
of a war?”

“Wars make people fearful and easier to manipulate. They control population. They take the focus off other sinister things that are happening. They put countries in debt while making the FRO billions of dollars each year. Wars will continue to escalate until 2012 while
Fraternitas
members from various industries can put things in place to exert their control.”

“Then what?”

Bolon shakes his head. “We do not have to worry about that because we have
you
.”

“Why can’t you Elders stop them?” I ask. “You’re these all-powerful shamans and I’m a totally inexperienced kid who doesn’t know much about anything at all.”

“It is your path. Did you know there are more people on the planet under the age of twenty than there ever have been before? It will be the young who will see that we can manifest great things and create a different world. And it will be you who shows them.”