The Sick Horror at The Lost and Found (17 page)

Later, when the forces of the Spanish
conquest arrived, they did everything they could to get their hands
on gold, and Indians did everything to hide it. Their chiefs would
burn themselves alive rather than surrender. There is an ancient
lake about seven miles from The Lost and Found where it is rumored
that the Ngäbe lord Urracá, the bravest and most cunning of their
chieftains, flooded his own stronghold rather than give up its
treasures to the invaders. An entire clan of hundreds of
individuals voluntarily drowned in underground chambers they
collapsed around themselves, dedicating their spirits to protect
the sacred gold artifacts, made holy by their most powerful shamans
and gods. Dozens of years later, the waters receded. The blue light
you saw is produced by a reaction from the methane gas that still
is being released, little by little, from the mass grave. It is a
little known secret that grave robbers sometimes camp out in remote
area and just wait for a glimpse of the phantasmal blue lights that
give away the location of a secret graveyard. The blue light you
saw at the petroglyphs was methane gas from graves dug during the
time of the Spanish genocide, and it may have caused you to pass
out.

Now a little about brugmansia, the
essence of which you saw in bottled form in a vial in Dr. Mike’s
house. I got most of this from Wikipedia, so you can google it
yourself. Brugmansia is a genus of seven species of flowering
plants in the family solanaceae, native to subtropical and tropical
regions of South America, along the Andes from Colombia to northern
Chile and also in southeastern Brazil. They are known as Angel's
Trumpets for the eye-catching large white bell-shaped flowers that
hang from their branches.

All parts of brugmansia are toxic –
ingestion of the roots in particular is fatally poisonous. But a
tea made from the flowers is sometimes ingested for recreational or
shamanic intoxication, as the plant contains the tropane alkaloids
scopolamine and atropine. However, because the potency of the toxic
compounds in the plant is variable, the degree of intoxication is
unpredictable and can lead to psychosis and even death.

Ritualized brugmansia consumption is
an important aspect of the shamanic complexes noted among many
indigenous peoples of western Amazonia. Likewise, it is a central
component in the cosmology and shamanic practices of the Urarina
peoples of Loreto, Peru.

Matt, I am glad you contacted me. It
seems as if Dr. Mike may have drugged all of you with brugmansia –
this would account for Maria’s irrational behavior, your passing
out and even the shared dream the four of you believe you
experienced. I suggest you confront no one until I am there. Lay
low in Boquete and I will meet you in a day or two.

Patrick McGreer

Revelations

By Patrick
McGreer

The following has been written by the
editor. It is his best speculation as to the events that transpired
based on emails from Matt B. Hope, the crime scene, police reports,
court transcripts and third person interviews.

After reading Patrick’s email, Matt
was out of his mind. He got into his car and drove straight back to
The Lost and Found. When he got there, Gabriel and Nico told him
that everyone had gone to Dr. Mike’s house in Boquete for dream
analysis and rituals. Matt raced back to down the hill to the car.
He tried to stay calm down and focus on controlling his breathing.
Be cool, stay on the road. Right around the town of La Mina, a
strange hunch began to solidify in his mind. He still had missing
pieces of the puzzle to put together. He swerved off the road and
took the sharp dip down to the town. He drove as far as the road
would take him and then walked to the house where he first met
Tuna.

He knocked on the door, but no one
responded. Finally, he just pushed the door open. A putrid smell
suddenly rushed out at him, and he wretched. There she was, sitting
in the same spot on her chair. There were old flowers and fresh
flowers at her feet. But she was dead – she had been decomposing
for some time. Whoever it was that was telling María about a Holy
Grail cup, about finding salvation in the resurrection and saving
some child, was not Tuna.

He drove fast to Dr. Mike’s house. He
had no plan but to confront him and expose him to the others. When
he arrived, the front door was locked, so he decided to sneak
around the back. The sliding pool door was open, and the house was
silent. He wanted to find the incriminating vial of the essence of
brugmansia before he confronted Dr. Mike. Carefully, he crept up
the stairs to his bedroom. The door was slightly ajar.

What he saw was like being smoked in
the chest. He couldn’t breathe.

Maria and Usnavy were laying face down
and naked on two double beds. Their limbs were bound and stretched
with nylon cord to the bed posts, spread out like as if they were
being subjected to some kind of medieval torture. They both had
large new tattoos on their backs of the Masonic compass and the
square. They were blindfolded. As far as Matt knew, they didn’t
know he was there.

He stepped out of the room and found
Dr. Mike in his study. He was leaning back in his armchair behind
his desk, naked, his glasses resting on his fat hairy
stomach.

“
Am I the only one that
won’t fuck in front of you like some sort of horny circus monkey?”
Matt shouted.

Dr. Mike looked at Matt with a sated,
lazy expression. “One day Mathew, you will erase the scars that
inhibit you from seeing and realizing your dreams.”

“
You’re fucking them both
aren’t you? You are playing them like cheap sex toys.”

“
Matt, these girls are
acting of their own free will. Just as you were given the
opportunity to quit, so are the girls, at any point they feel
uncomfortable.”

Matt leaned on Dr. Mike’s desk with
both hands. “It started with Usnavy didn’t it?” Matt pushed.
“Somehow a beautiful girl half your age finds a fat old man
strangely attractive because she had a wet dream about him. Only
you put the dream there.”

Dr. Mike sighed and leaned back in his
chair, adjusting his glasses back on the bridge of his nose. “Matt,
you don’t truly understand the unconscious. You’re very clever but
don’t have the vision to see the whole picture. This grand
experiment is a new theology. A religion that you wouldn’t
understand because you don’t listen to yourself. Your inner
self.”

“
Fuck you,” Matt shouted.
His face twisted crimson with rage. “You planted the dreams, didn’t
you?”

Dr. Mike sat up and raised his voice
to meet Matt’s. “Be careful Matt. Your anger is the projection of
your own shadow, hidden in your unconscious. A duality you can’t
bridge. A part repressed in your dreams. You hide in you, your
desire to succeed. But you’re too afraid to let yourself
succeed.”

“
And what is success,
Doctor? Money? Power? Your fucking cigars?”

Dr. Mike settled back into his chair.
“Go ahead Matt, let your anger out. It must be quite painful to
lose your friends. Your best friend. Your girlfriend. Your job. Let
your shadow roam. All repression is unhealthy. But remember that
you envy what you hate. You’re too awash in right and wrong to
follow your will. To follow your destiny.” Dr. Mike stood to face
Matt. “But you still have an opportunity to be a part of it,
Matt.”

Matt walked around the desk to Dr.
Mike. “A part of your lies and manipulation,” he snapped. “Follow
your destiny?” he continued bitterly. “Follow your dreams? The
dreams are yours, not theirs. Planted to get your way. To act out
your sex fantasies. A sick joke. Whose fetish was rape, Dr. Mike?
Was that yours? Turning rape dreams into ritual? Is that what you
told them, that this was their destiny? This was their true will
that they repress?”

“
Matt, there is a greater
truth than that. Faith must come before truth.”

“
Faith in you? What did you
use, Doctor? Hypnosis? Brugmansia? The lucid dream symbols
triggered the dreams you planted. We never had a group dream. You
hypnotized us. You told us the dreams we would have. One by one you
hypnotized us and planted in our minds the dreams that you told us
originated in our unconscious!”

“
But look at María now. She
is healing. She is overcome her fears and is flying.”

“
A blind whore manipulated
by a sick old man playing God,” Matt shouted into his
face.

“
Playing God?” Dr. Mike
raised his voice to stop Matt from interrupting. “No Matt, it is
God. Faith is all God is. What good is truth? It’s as fleeting as a
distant subjective memory. I mobilize faith like the mythmakers
that wrote the Bible. But faith, Matt, I can use faith to heal. I
heal -- God is just untrendy fiction.”

“
You sick twisted fuck,”
Matt said as he pushed Dr. Mike toppling over his chair.

“
Why me!” Matt shouted. He
held a tuft of Dr. Mike’s beard, pulling his head from side to
side. “Why did you come after me? Was it Steve? Why me?”

“
No,” said a voice from
behind us. “I wanted you here.”

Matt spun around. María was standing
at the door, her hands clasped behind her back. Matt froze -- his
hand still holding Dr. Mike’s beard tightly.

“
You?” Matt asked. He was
utterly confused. “You know what’s happening?”

“
Of course I know what’s
happening here,” María said. She walked around the desk and stood
behind Dr. Mike’s chair to face Matt. “Estrella, Usnavy and me, we
all know what’s happening. I can’t believe you guys think we’re so
naive. It’s the lot of you that is confused.”

“
María knows what the...”
But Dr. Mike couldn’t finish his sentence. Matt watched in horror
as María, with swift and decisive motion, hit Dr. Mike hard at the
base of the skull with the clock that had been sitting on his desk.
His body went limp in Matt’s hand. Matt let go of his beard and Dr.
Mike slumped off his chair and onto the floor.

“
Help me move him to the
couch,” Maria commanded. Unthinkingly, Matt bent down to grab Dr.
Mike’s arms. But he didn’t finish the job. He heard a thud and felt
a sharp pain at the back of his neck as the world around him
darkened.

Holy Blood

By Patrick
McGreer

Matt’s head snapped back. He was
naked, bound and gagged, shivering in a damp chill. His head
throbbed and his broken nose stung. His arms were numb, tied to a
long two by four nailed to a tree at The Lost and Found. His body
slumped under its own weight.

Through a blur of tears he saw María
holding the smelling salts that had been used to revive him. She
was dressed in only knee-high black leather boots – the rest of her
naked body was covered in bright swirls of paint. Only a small
circle of skin surrounding the tattooed sphere above her navel was
unpainted. An Egyptian ankh, the symbol of Isis, was painted in
black and white on her face. Her long dark hair was slick with
sweat. She pressed her nose against Matt’s ear and released a high
pitched, shrill, “Happy Easter!”

On either side of him the shadows of
twin crucifixes crept slowly along the ground -- growing longer
with the dying sun. Tied to them were Dr. Mike and Steve,
unconscious and also naked. Matt was surrounded by circles of
sticks and logs, the innermost of which was still a certain
distance from his feet. María picked up a gas canister and began
sloshing it over the firewood. She lit a match and held it up to
Matt’s face, her visage terrible and unforgiving. The black paint
drying around her mouth was like the stitching on the mouth of a
corpse. She dropped the match into the circle of sticks. It
flickered for a moment and then surged, like a burst of wind into a
ring of fire. She stood back and the ring of fire shot around and
enclosed Matt in a circle of waist-high flames.

“
Tiferet,” María explained,
pointing to the circle of fire. “The male part of God separated at
the breaking of the vessels. And this is Shekinah,” she yelled. She
dropped another match, igniting the second ring of fire. “The
female part of God.”

“
But the word is lost!” she
cried. “It is the hour when the temple lay in ruin. Destroyed by
the Romans. The Roman Church. The sacred Shekinah defiled in blood.
The Grail is lost! The word is lost! Therefore in the name of
Baphomet,” she cried into the darkening sky, “I declare this
chapter of the Knights Templar open!”

Matt was pushing with his toes to
release the pressure of the rope on his shoulders. A small trickle
of mucus and blood ran from his nose.

“
Did you know that you are
Baphomet?” she asked cheerfully. “Mat, Bernard, the middle initial
B. And your last name, Hope -- an anagram like Mr. MoJo Risen.
Scramble the letters and you have Baphomet, the Templar idol
beneath the ruins of the Temple of Solomon. The idol that helped
Jesus to remember his past lives, and that he was the bearer of the
rituals of Isis.”

María looked ready to erupt into
violence. “But there are those who have darkened their own eyes,”
she turned and yelled to Usnavy and Estrella. They were also naked
and covered in body paint.

“
Christians have been
fooled by lies so light seems like darkness. The Roman Church
claims the grail is the physical cup of the Last Supper, not the
secret ritual of rebirth. The Papacy of the Roman Church fears
Jesus, and they grasp at a false mandate of authority, preaching
that Jesus made Peter the first of the popes. But we are his
rightful heirs. We uncovered the rites in our dreams.”