House of Cabal Volume One: Eden Read online

  “It’s the Antichrist.”

  One of his brothers tried to comfort him. “It’s just Boris.”

  “It’s not him. It’s not him anymore.”

  A sandstorm crested over the dunes like a flood. It consumed Boris first and then the rest of the expedition, dropping visibility to no more than a few feet.

  Boris called for help. The rush of the sand was too loud for anyone to hear him. He groped forward, shielding his face with his arm as he watched the ground. The marker flags formed a grid. Maybe he could use them to navigate back to shelter.

  All he wanted was the satellite phone, so he could call his wife one last time.

  In only a few minutes, night fell and visibility dropped even further. From the darkness he heard his wife's labor grunts and outcries, as if she was in the sandstorm with him, giving birth.

  “Hold on!”

  Panicked, he ran toward the cries with his infected hand reaching out, stumbled into what he thought was a Humvee grill, and he braced himself on the smooth vertical bars. His hand now felt like a marionette, like it was missing the joint cartilage and could only be manipulated indirectly. He wrapped his fingers around the bars to make his hand feel more solid. The “grill” swung open, letting out a fuzzy, white light. Though dim, the light pierced his retina. It bored into his brain. He tried to keep his eyes open, despite the pain, to understand what he was seeing.

  The swirling sand around him suspended in midair like time had stopped. The knuckles in his right hand became universes. He could almost see something through the light, something vaster than the desert, something more glorious than the surface of the sun. He closed his eyes to the sting.

  It was too late.

  His eyes ignited.

  He screamed in agony and pulled back.

  His hand came off at the wrist. Arm skin bunched up like plastic wrap, and the exposed veins and tendons wriggled away from the bone, reaching for the light the way plants grow in time-lapse.

  If you're not familiar with the Bible’s creation myth, near the dawn of time, Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit born of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. For violating God’s trust, they were cast out, and Uriel, with a sword of God’s fire, guarded the garden’s entrance and made sure Adam and Eve never returned.

  In reality, the garden had no forbidden tree or fruit. Uriel wasn’t keeping Adam and Eve out, but the whole human race. And his weapon wasn't literally a fire sword. But the metaphor was apt.

  Trespass resulted in incineration.

  Boris, with burnt-out eyes, saw his wife. She was in a hospital gown, exhausted. Sweat clung to her brow as she gazed at their swaddled newborn. Was it a boy or girl? Before he thought to ask, Boris, his wife, and his child were consumed by the holy flame.

  The tedium of guarding a gate that existed outside of time and space made Uriel a bit overzealous. Finally, here was the reason behind all the waiting. He wanted to get his wrath’s worth.

  The blinding sand provided the cherub cover. Those not killed by the "sword of fire" were killed by friendly fire as the Blackwater officers shot at any perceived threat. Joey passed out, missing most of the action, and was incinerated all the same.

  While Uriel slaughtered those with guns, those with scientific knowledge, and those native to the land, Dana ran toward the light, only glancing back once to make sure her husband followed.

  The gate, the portal to paradise, closed just as she and her husband crossed the threshold.

  Uriel took his time, relishing his grim work. He found an Iraqi guide cowering, praying to Allah. There was an atheist scientist hiding in the latrine. A Christian clung to the stone tablet and begged for forgiveness. The sandstorm swept up the ashes and flowed south, leaving only the charred, twisted husks of the Humvees and mobile laboratory behind.

  Chapter 2

  I

  Dana and her husband had entered paradise while Uriel was distracted. Impossible. Yet there the two humans were, inside the gates.

  To find out how, I entered the timestream and witnessed the expedition, the Eden mite, and the tragedy that befell Boris’s family in Tbilisi, Georgia.

  At the David Tatishvili Medical Center, the mother and child’s death was classified as a rare case of spontaneous combustion caused by childbirth. Their ashes were kept in a large ceramic tub for scientific study in a private room only accessible by keycard.

  Experts flew in from Germany and hastily concluded that the remains were similar to a 1980 case. Old Man Henry combusted in his home in South Wales. His greasy clothing caught fire in his sleep and acted like a candle wick. He died from smoke inhalation, and his fat burned over the course of the night, leaving an ash pile and his legs below the knee eerily untouched. The “wick effect” didn’t explain the mother and child’s combustion. Among other things, their incineration was too instantaneous and complete. The experts ignored the contradictions and flew back to Germany.

  The hospital disregarded the extended family’s wishes (most of the family were still in Russia), and unceremoniously threw the remains in a reusable plastic bin for biomedical waste, burying used syringes, bloody gauze, and a swollen foot amputated from a diabetic in the coarse, gray ash of the mother and child. An outside company later that day removed the waste and in strict accordance to procedure disposed of it off site.

  II

  The ravenous bugs of Eden left Dana and her husband naked and trembling. The humans were frightened, but unharmed. I re-entered the timestream, this time back before the expedition, still thirsting for a fuller picture.

  Omar al-Jamadi strode down the deserted main hall of the Iraqi National Museum and scanned the darkness with a flashlight, making sure no one lay in wait. He had worked here as a security guard. His boss had let him go (really, he had fired him) for his own safety, saying it was too dangerous for anyone to remain behind during the invasion.

  Outside the quiet museum, looters ravaged Baghdad. Bombing had knocked out most of the city’s power, and men with guns and makeshift weapons now prowled the darkened streets. Many scrounged for necessities, while others, some in large groups, looked to cause trouble.

  The museum stood out in the open and begged to be plundered. Its front facade resembled a castle, but its back half, with its large glass windows, resembled an office building, and it would be easy to infiltrate.

  The galleries appeared scavenged already. Whole display cases were empty. Mannequins overturned. Banners strewn across the marble floor.

  The museum staff, hearing the US’s drumbeat for war, had hastily moved much of the collection to an undisclosed location outside the city, leaving the place in disarray. Before that, the Iraqi government had confiscated a significant portion of the more valuable exhibits without explanation. There wasn’t much left to loot.

  Omar quickly descended the back stairs. He scanned the underground storage rooms and searched for a distinctive symbol that was supposedly carved into the lid of a wooden box. The symbol looked like a figure eight with an arrow on both sides pointing to the center. He didn’t see it anywhere.

  In and out as fast as possible. That was his plan. Back home, he had left his old Glock 22 with his eldest son to protect the rest of the family. In the eerie silence of the underground, he tried not to regret that decision.

  More than a hundred cuneiform tablets were in storage, with thousands of similar tablets on display across the world. These kind of tablets weren’t a rare artifact by any means. No one would notice if this one in particular went missing. He deserved some kind of severance package for his many years at the museum.

  His religious faith told him these excuses were half-hearted justifications for immorality. But he was out of options.

  He passed over the correct box more than once, thinking, “That can’t be it.” The box was big, far too big to fit in his satchel. He moved a stack of newspapers off the top. He ran his hand over the carved infinity symbol and got a chill. Carrying the box in his arms would draw unwanted attent
ion out on the streets.

  He trudged up the stairs. He had a loving wife and three children to consider. He left the box behind. It was the heavy cuneiform tablet inside that mattered. Thankfully, the tablet fit snugly in his satchel without issue.

  Looters smashed in the museum’s front door, and almost simultaneously, windows shattered in the back. He turned off his flashlight and silently prayed to Allah for protection. He heard men coming from both north and south. They rummaged through the back offices. Glass shattered in the front hall, probably a display case getting smashed in.

  He needed an alternate escape route.

  The west hall led to the closest exit. It opened to the main street. But there was a vast room between him and the exit where he could be spotted. If they discovered him trying to sneak the cuneiform out, the looters would assume it was valuable and take it from him, and maybe cave his skull in in the process.

  Down the hall, light reflected off marble. He heard the men joking amongst themselves as they approached.

  He sprinted east, trying not to trip over anything in the dark. He had patrolled these halls a million times. He pictured the floorplan in his mind and ran his hand along a wall, past the restrooms and the entrance to the east exhibit. He was careful not to knock down any picture frames as he made his way forward. He turned a corner and rushed down another hall. He groped for the emergency fire exit. It wasn’t where he thought it would be. He refused to use his flashlight. If he turned it on, the looters might see the light and chase him down.

  There! He felt it!

  The door was further to the right than he remembered. He pushed the bar. Compared to the darkness inside the museum, outside was relatively bright.

  He traversed the back streets, sticking to the shadows, all the while second guessing his hasty decision to leave the box behind. What if it ruined the deal? How would his family survive?

  Smoke from the ravaged city shrouded the half-moon like a veil.

  The next day, he handed the tablet across a counter to the owner of a small cafe near Zawara Park. The tablet, wrapped in a white cloth, now resembled a loaf of bread. Men were sipping Turkish coffee at various mismatched tables around the open space. It felt like all the men were watching, but he didn’t look to see if it was true. The cafe owner gave Omar an envelope in exchange, smiled and nodded, and didn’t ask questions.

  Even though his instincts told him to bolt, Omar walked as casually as possible out of the cafe, through the park, down the sidewalk, and over the Sinak Bridge, crossing Tigris River. His heart pounded the whole way.

  A week later, Dana and her husband picked up the tablet a safe distance outside the city. They heard gunfire as they made the pickup and sped away soon after. It would be a month before they had the whole thing translated and another two weeks before their expedition took them out into the middle of the desert.

  The money in the envelope provided Omar’s family with necessities for over two years. Omar personally only used the money the first year. In 2004, in a night raid, shortly after Isha prayer, the Americans arrested him and imprisoned him without charge in Abu Ghraib. “Omar al-Jamadi” was on a list. His wife petitioned for his release, alongside all the other petitioning wives and mothers, but she never saw him again.

  A group of prison guards tortured Omar. He died from infection while repeatedly mumbling his wife’s name.

  Years later, US law enforcement tracked down, seized, and returned many of the artifacts that were taken and sold off by the Iraqi government before the war.

  Omar’s eldest son became a security guard at the museum once it reopened in 2009. Omar’s only daughter founded a school for girls in Syria and never married. His youngest son was killed in a drone strike.

  When a destiny thread ended, it only signaled for me to find another beginning.

  III

  A fringe group of Egyptian gnostics discovered the cuneiform tablet in 1898 in a cave near the Valley of the Kings. Napoleon Bonaparte’s men, during his Egyptian Campaign, and Egyptologist Henry Salt, during his 1815 expedition, excavated the cave, but somehow each time the tablet had been overlooked. The gnostics kept their find to themselves, slowly translating the pictographs and hiding the stone from the British, until after the Egyptian parliamentary election in 1924, when the gnostics handed it over to the state.

  Over the course of the 19th century, the gnostics had adopted many traditional Muslim practices and divided themselves by gender, yet they still maintained their evolving mysticism. The men focused on Jewish occult practices and God’s darker qualities, while the women translated Sumerian texts and practiced nature worship. Separately they both tracked the cuneiform tablet as it changed hands over the decades.

  The women lost track of it in 1999 and reached out to the American Sumerian Society for help, of which Dana and her husband were members.

  In early 2001 in Cairo, after two years of handwritten correspondence, Dana Parr met with the gnostic women in a makeshift structure on top of an apartment building, while her husband met with the gnostic men on a rooftop across the street.

  The women gave Dana mint tea and were very welcoming. They explained that the tablet was in the Middle East, most likely in the Iraqi capital. The exact location was unknown, despite the considerable effort the women had put into locating it remotely. They hoped Dana could go to Baghdad on their behalf and continue the search.

  Finding it was obviously very important to the women. Dana prodded for further explanation. They poured her more tea and brought out pita bread and a fava bean dip. Dana took some to be polite.

  The matriarch believed only Eve ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and only a woman should know the secret location of Eden’s Garden. The tablet revealed the garden’s location for those worthy. The female elder prophesied that knowledge from Eden would once again remake the world. The gnostic men feared this feminine knowledge, thinking it would incur God’s wrath. If Dana found the tablet first, maybe she could thwart the men’s plan to destroy it.

  Across the street, Dana’s husband was treated just as warmly and served a licorice root tea. The men knew the tablet was in the Iraqi National Museum, but without translating every cuneiform tablet the museum had in storage, the correct tablet would be impossible to distinguish from the rest. The patriarch believed that the cuneiform contained forbidden knowledge no human should see, man or woman, and that the tablet must be destroyed for the good of humanity.

  “You must use your wealth and your influence,” the gnostic male elder told Dana’s husband in Sa'idi Arabic. “You must destroy every cuneiform tablet in the museum. It is the only way. Even gazing upon the tablet may endanger your soul.”

  Meanwhile, the gnostic female elder told Dana in Egyptian Arabic, “God is knowledge. Knowledge is trapped in Mother Earth. We only need to help her open up so that she can let that knowledge free. The cuneiform tablet is kept in a wooden box. The box is carved with a symbol of the Eternal Flame of the Godhood. Find that box and you will know Mother Earth. You will know God.”

  Dana and her husband reunited after their clandestine meetings with the gnostic men and women.

  “Did your rooftop have chickens?”

  “No, but I saw some in the hallways of the building. It was a nightmare for my wheelchair.”

  “I’m sorry. You okay?”

  “And I think someone was using one of the rooms to raise livestock.”

  She laughed. “The smell of this place takes some getting used to.”

  “A man was kind enough to carry me. He practically ran up the stairs. I guess there are a lot of people in the building that are old or don’t have legs, and he often carries them around.” He held up his mini tape recorder. “Come on. Let’s get this translated. I’m curious what the old guy said.”

  Dana and her husband crossed the great gender divide and compared recordings.

  America was gearing up for war with Iraq. It was too dangerous to go into Baghdad. Their contact at the Ir
aqi National Museum wasn’t willing to smuggle out the tablet, but she knew someone else who needed the cash.

  Their intermediary convinced Omar al-Jamadi to smuggle out the tablet for them.

  These destiny threads, converging from all over the world, led to a single moment when Dana and her husband could slip through the garden gate undetected, after Boris, with his infected hand, temporarily anchored the nebulous Garden of Eden to a specific time and place, dooming his family.

  It seemed straightforward enough, just another human story, this one exceptional only because it led to me. Yet, nothing felt resolved, like a melody with a discordant last note.

  IV

  I snatched Dana’s husband from the remnants of his wheelchair, shooed away the millipede, and encompassed the husband and wife with my arms and cloak.

  Uriel’s shadow remained at his post. He would return.

  “You can’t be seen here,” I said in English.

  The couple was in too much shock to understand. Dana whimpered and clutched the straps around my midsection. Her silent husband leaned his head against the side of my chest.

  “I’ll protect you.” I swept them up.

  I darted across the grass, between the marble columns that gave the garden’s entrance its order and majesty, and plunged into my hiding place: an octagonal chamber under the banjo tree. The walls were dirt and stone and borrowed bricks from the catacombs of the northern glen. Above us, protective symbols, carved into the banjo tree’s exposed roots, glowed from swelling indigo-colored sap. Worms, each a foot in diameter, emerged from the rocky floor and formed a soft place for the humans to rest.

  Dana tried to scramble off the wriggling annelids, thinking them dangerous. Her husband passed out. I held her down, my hand the width of her upper torso.

  “No creature in the garden will harm you, but the angels will cast you out.” With my three free hands, I gathered moss that grew near the hollow’s entrance. “You need to stay here. Calm yourself.”