Friday, September 4, 2009

Chapter 14 History Repeats

Copyright David A. Kearns


“…Now in those days there was an apprentice to Backtun, a younger man named Belem who thought that to better escape the feathered lizard kind, it was best to sail west to the lands of Mayapaztan and Olmeca. But others argued they would be pursued by feathered lizard sons, or perhaps they were already corrupting those cultures with their poisonous deeds.
A council of the builders was held in secret to decide what to do. It was agreed then, that in order to spread the chances of wisdom being saved, two groups would be sent, one to each place, to Yucateka and Kembe, after the calamity that was coming.
And so the great war that had been brewing through smaller wars and battles, and the strife that had erupted and so distracted free-thinking people as to prevent them from seeing their own end, came to pass.
Posaztlan was struck with the weapon that can cause the rocks to hum and shift in the earth, which caused a slide of land in the mountains of Lucayonekay, which caused a volcano to explode. But those of Posaztlan had been provided with a terrible weapon as well, by feathered lizard kind; a ray of light from the power crystals that was turned for a bad use, and would burn hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest in only one day. The smoke and flames became so thick, many were forced into the sea, and the land burned both with the soot from the volcano, and the burning forests of Aztlan. The sun was blotted out from the sky for months. When the smoke cleared, there were corpses everywhere, and the diseases swept in, and the insects, until the lands stunk with the smell of rotting flesh.
But by that time, those followers of Backtun and Belem, had made their arrangements and had fled.
Then came the rising waters from the ice shelf which had fallen into the sea covering Aztlan and Posaztlan forever and all but erasing those places, histories and wisdom from this earth.
Our people arrived here, in Kembe, and founded an earthly paradise that lasted for three hundred years of Ra. Every one hundred years we meet with our cousin peoples who live among the Mayatl and Olmecatl and Nahuatl, and share our histories with them, as they do with us.
But now, we have noticed things that our far-seers have said will precipitate the return of feathered lizard sons who mean to wipe out our history.
Every thirty years of Ra, they quietly return from the seas and take our sacred Gembe for their experiments and their breeding. With the sinking of Aztlan, and Posaztlan, the noble Gembe has sought our beaches and coasts to lay their eggs.
Likewise, feathered lizard has secretly taken the rose of our youth for their breeding experiments in their night-ships.
Since we know they have the power to hear us when we think of them, we have limited the knowledge of their existence to but a few keepers of the records, so that not so many of us will know of them, and fear them, thus calling them to us with our very fears.
But the waters of the ocean Aztlan have now reached our beloved ball courts, eighteen stones to new Ra from this wall; alerting us to the fact that every year the storms bring more water, that takes more forests with it, water that will soon take all of this community.
Thus, it seems clear to us, although we have not the (technology) to see it as Backtun did, another ice shelf has fallen into the sea.
The feathered lizard kind have also obviously approached members of our society and given them wisdom and knowledge they did not previously possess, and they have created factions among our peoples, promoted fear and distrust, and even set them to war, both with themselves and the tribes of this land.
They, the feathered lizard sons, have again sponsored the old argument between those who saw the wise man Guhengetus as son of Ra and those who saw him as son of woman: a useless argument that for some reason breeds violence, always, though the man’s words were always those of peace.
Thus, by the wisdom of our mother seer, who finally made us understand the wisdom of stone over paper, we have written our history on this wall, and on the day when the ocean seas cover our beloved ball courts, forever, we will remove the covering stones and the chamber and reveal this text for all of our nation to see.
It will cause strife because many will be exposed for having kept a secret, a piece of wisdom away from the young. But we only did this to prevent strife, and prevent the return of the feathered lizard sons who will surely hear us lamenting and dreading them. For they hear out thoughts so well, as was a gift from their survival of the ice time, but now this is a means by which they follow us for their purposes.
And we will pass this knowledge on to those who move northward, and those who move inland so that the feathered lizard kind does not remove all knowledge of them, and other wondrous things from this earth, and so they do not finally commit humankind to the slavery feathered lizard kind has in mind for us.
Our far seers have warned us of a time in the future when feathered lizard kind will arm all of the nations of the earth with terrible weapons, and just as waves of energy come from Ra, these weapons will be unleashed to destroy all of mankind, but for the slaves chosen by those of the feathered lizard. And all human kind’s knowledge reason and wisdom will be undone forever.
This must not be allowed to pass.
We call out to you who read these words, from a time when humankind had a chance. We pray that chance still lives for anyone who reads these words after we are gone. Remember, do not hate your fellow human for any reason, not for land, not for religion, not for beliefs in how humans should be governed, not for the way your neighbor spends his shells. Those reasons to hate and make war are as foreign to us as the ice which created them.
If you find yourself hating for these foolish reasons, you must surely ask yourself if there is someone, somewhere making you do so with means you do not understand. Is there someone somewhere placing the weapons of all our demise in your hands?
You read the words from a dead people who have lost their homeland, their lives, their everything. It happened to us because we had forgotten how to love. You of living flesh and blood human being reading these words, you, have the choice not to put the weapon in your own hands.
Use it and keep our memories alive.”


July 2, 2011 Melbourne Beach
“Look, Tim,” said Jay. “Now it’s my turn to apologize. I don’t know what got into me.”
“Whatever man, it’s cool,” I allowed as I leaned on the railing looking out at the moon rising off the water.
After an uncomfortable silence Jay turned and walked back into the house.
He had become such a political animal. His needs met – the stability of the household before Ryan’s little brother, Sean, arrived – Jay drifted off to straighten his place up a bit.
Smokey and Dave came out on the deck.
“We re-reading the last of the translation,” Dave said.
“Find anything new?” I asked.
“No, but I think Russ has something to tell you,” Dave said.
“Sure, what is it?” I asked.
“Ryan had a lot of help doing the translations, Tim. A lot of help. He used some of my friends to do it,” Dave said.
“Oh really?”
“Some of the folks I had run into during my travels in Central America,” he said.
“And what Smoke? Tell me what’s on your mind,” I said.
“A lot of the documents passed through my hands over the years,” Smokey said.
“And while Jay was burning down Ryan’s memory, you were quietly listening and saying nothing about what you knew,” I said.
“I don’t feel good about that. I spoke to Jay. If you poke him with a stick he’ll even admit there’s a lot more to this whole thing that meets the eye,” Smokey said.
“Yeah, well, lemme hold my breath on that one, why don’t I. Again, your point Smokey?”
“If you dig a bit more in the documents you’re going to run into references to a guy named George Wendell; a hard-hat diver from Wabasso Beach. He was one of the first people around here, who knew about the wrecks of the Spanish fleet of 1715,” he said.
“C’mon, Smokey. Spill all of it. That stuff you told me when Tim here was on the beach thinking he was losing his mind,” Dave prodded.
“Jesus, Dave. I’m getting to it,” Smokey said.
I reached a hand over and touched Smokey on the shoulder and a visual image came through, it was sometime in the early 1940s. A man stood alone on a beach watching an airplane dance in the sky about two miles off-shore to the south. It flipped on its back, arched over into a dive…
“TBF Avenger. That’s what I’m seeing,” I said. “I’m seeing a World War II, single engine bomber on a training flight off Sebastian Inlet.”
“Jesus, how did you do that Tim?” Smokey said.
“One of the new powers I’ve picked up recently. Just continue with the story, Smokey,” I said.



July 3, 1941 Monster Hole, south side of Sebastian Inlet Florida
The plane rushed toward the aquamarine surface of the ocean as the sunlight glinted off the water and the shiny royal blue skin of the aircraft. The men in their seats were young, in their twenties, just kids having fun, dressed in kaki; juiced on adrenaline in their prime of life and youth.
The radio and rear machine gunner had his head craned around, looking back toward the pilot screaming with joy; his career at this point just one long rollercoaster ride at Coney Island.
The pilot in front had a grin that stretched his face nearly to the cracking point. He lined the target buoys up in his sights and waited until the beach rushed down into his view and steadied itself horizontally across his windscreen.
By the time the TBF leveled out of the dive the water was rushing merely thirty feet or so below the belly of the aircraft. Scrub and palmetto stood above the white strand.
A man on a long stone pier on the south side of the inlet watched the men make the practice run, or what should have been a practice run.
The over-eager young pilot reached down to the red safety switch, flipped it up exposing the bomb toggle. The motion was automatic, born of a thousand hours training. It had been done without thought, in a flash of instinct that would save his life time and again during the coming war, that same instinct would nearly cost him his flight status in an instant of over-exuberance Instead of merely saying “bomb release,” the pilot toggled the torpedo and said “bomb’s away.”
The plane jumped, liberated from its five-hundred pound burden.
“Oh shit!” went the young pilot as joy turned to worry and he pulled the stick back grabbing for sky. This was a serious mistake that might result in a write-up. He might even be put in HACK.
The men both leaned hard against the windscreen of the TBF as she arched high and left, watching the tell-tail progress of the armed torpedo’s bubble trail through the water, expecting it to run up on Sebastian Beach and impale itself in the dunes, but it never did.
Two miles off shore it stopped dead in its tracks, blocked by something forgiving enough that the detonation never came.
“Whew, shit! Roy! Musta been a dud round!” the pilot screamed to his REO man.
“It hit something, Johnny.”
The pilot circled where the torpedo stopped before correcting his position heading due east at five hundred feet.
“What do we do?” the radio-rear gunner asked.
“Get back to Melbourne. Tell everybody there was a SNAFU in the quick release,” the pilot said. “Then we cross our fingers.”
“But the fish. What about the fish?”
“Must be a dud, Roy. It would have gone off otherwise,” the pilot said.
“Shit Johnny, that’s not an answer, and you know it.”
“Alright already. If someone bitches we’ll tell ‘em where to find it.”
“But that never happened…” went Smokey’s voice down a long dark tunnel.
“Because the man on the beach was George Wendell, hard hat diver,” I said.
“He called the air base, told them where it was, and offered his services to retrieve it,” Smoke said.
Next came images of a barge on the water, the time had shifted to a different day, perhaps only a few weeks following the training, bomb run.
The diver carried a bulky plastic housing over his equally cumbersome camera gear.
When his shoes hit the soft sand bottom he was standing before an underwater wall that stretched to the north and the south in a gentle curve.
He was in twenty to thirty feet of water.
The torpedo lay quietly on the bottom in a pile of worm-rock and rubble. It had impaled itself into the wall and broken away part of it, revealing the wall to be the shell of a limestone chamber. The torpedo had removed the covering wall section for about thirty feet on either side.
The diver carefully documented the position of the torpedo with respect to the wall with his camera, fixed straps below the weapon and signaled topside to haul her up. A winch carefully raised the torpedo off the bottom and onto the barge. But as it was coming free of the bottom, it swung around and the fin of the torpedo nicked the accumulated coral and worm rock from the stones that had been inside the chamber.
The diver thought he saw something familiar scrawled in the gash section of limestone. He approached the wall and shined a light on it.
There stood the relief carving of a man wearing an elaborate head-dress. The diver used a scrub pad and a chisel to remove more of the encrustation, and another face emerged, and yet a third. Some of the faces were human. Others were combinations of human and animal, others not recognizably either.
The diver looked to the south and the north and realized the arching chamber stretched farther than he could see in either direction. All one had to do to see the complete text of hieroglyphs was rip away the covering side of the chamber, remove the encrusted material, scrub the surfaces clean and photograph it.
The images blurred in a montage, showing the diver working alone with SCUBA tanks and his familiar hard hat gear over the next few weeks prying tunnel sections loose with crowbars and winches aboard his barge until the entire covering wall was ripped down, and cleaned to reveal the complete work.
Other images showed the diver handing the photos he took of the entire wall to officials from the US Navy who handed him stacks of cash for the pictures.
But there in his darkroom in an old concrete block house in Wabasso Beach, he always secreted away copies of his pictures.
Then, on a warm muggy afternoon in August, the man stood on the beach again watching the sky. His brow knitted with pain and anger.
A fan of thunderclouds rolled over him from the west, but their grey fingers didn’t reach the flat calm waters of the Atlantic. To the east the sky was still wide open and robin’s-egg blue; perfect for flying.
They came in a group of five from the southeast just after four o’clock. They were the same TBF Avenger type aircraft that had uncovered the wall, and the story, written in hieroglyphs, in the first place. It was a live-fire training mission. And with German sub threats all over the nearby waters of the Atlantic, who could argue with the need for more torpedo training?
At precise locations the torpedoes hit the water and sought out their critical points of impact all along that wall; points engineered by demolitions experts to completely destroy the edifice and the story written upon it. None of these torpedoes were dud rounds, it turned out.
Bits and pieces of limestone came tumbling down from the sky. They were blasted for hundreds of yards, some of them; littering the bottom with chunks of unrecoverable history; grotesque faces of gods, demons, lizards and men alike.
When the smoke and water cleared, the pieces of the immense puzzle were scattered all over the bottom, sometimes filling holes in the sand with monstrous images.
Spear-fishermen, and surfers who would infrequently see the broken pieces of the stone relief carvings underwater would give the place a name: “Monster Hole” and people would slowly but surely forget where that name came from, only later to ascribe it to sharks, and lurking, giant grouper that fed there, in the depressions blasted by torpedoes, and the remnants of a limestone ledge that once contained a message.
Monster Hole became anything just outside and to the south of the Sebastian Inlet, because a wall had been there telling of a city buried beneath the sand in the waters to the east. A wall blown to bits after that first training flight, and those that followed erased it all, the town, the ball courts, the temples; so that none of it existed anymore.
Yet the man who had been a conscientious and accomplished hard-hat diver, named George Wendell, he knew of the wall, knew that it contained an earth-shattering message that was being concealed for thousands of years: and they knew he knew. And what was worse was, they knew, that he knew, that they knew.
It didn’t take long for his life to spin out of control following a series of quiet, otherwise innocuous coincidences of misfortune, leaving the dazed and perplexed man with nothing more than the sort of rambling, idiot story told in bars that no one believed.
He had signed agreements with people called “handlers” in the War Department. These agreements precluded him talking to anyone about what he knew. Yet he did, and they knew he did.
“You wanna know about the strangest thing I ever saw underwater?” he would say.
A reporter visited his home and saw the artifacts and even glanced at the photos. But without a way to confirm any of it, the story quietly drifted into the backwaters of liquid memory.
The diver gave the pictures to his nephew, Rex, in 1977 before dying of liver cancer. And before joining the Army Rangers and dying himself during a parachute accident in the jungles of Trujillo, Honduras in 1989, Rex Tyndall gave them to Ryan Cogswell in the presence of Russ Bridges at South Beach Willie’s. He told Russ and Ryan the wild story of the stones passed down from his dead uncle, George.
Even then Ryan knew there was a relation between the hieroglyphs and the lights of 1981.
Rex warned Ryan that he thought the stones had been cursed with some sort of voodoo.
He wanted no part of the photos anymore than he wanted more questioning from agents of the CIA who suspected the duplicate shots existed and harassed him repeatedly for them.
I sighed and let go on the connection to the past, just as Smokey finished his summation.
“Well Smoke, you’ve been holding this in all these years,” I said.
“Hey Tim, I didn’t know what the hell to make of it. Then Ryan and I sort of lost touch after he got the thing translated,” he said.
“Same old Smokey,” I said.
Dave cut in; “Tim, you’re really not being fair here. Smokey came forward now, you know? How can you be mad at him?”
“I’m not. I’m sorry Russ. It’s just that people seem so scared when it comes to the important stuff. And this really is important. Christ Ryan gave up his life for it. Can’t we at least honor him for doing that?”
“How?” Dave asked.
“By admitting this happened. That there is a threat out there, a threat to all of us,” I said.
“How would that bring him back?” Smokey asked.
“Not bring him back but at least recognize among ourselves that the man was not crazy. That some, if not all of this stuff really happened. If we can accept that he was ahead of the curve on this, and I mean ahead of everyone else, then, the weird behavior that Jay was talking about is explained,” I said.
“Now you lost me, Tim. How does this explain bad behavior?” Dave said.
“Easy for you, Dave. Your marriage has always been solid. Not to mention the fact Loni knew what the hell happened to all of us. I’m sure she doesn’t blame Ryan, or wouldn’t, at least not the way we have,” I said.
“Nice of you to speak for my wife,” Dave said.
“Sorry, please don’t get offended but, she knew Trisha better than we did. She knew Ryan. Think of what Ryan and Trisha went through together,” I said.
“With what?” Dave asked.
“Don’t you remember what Ryan told us? He said they took them both, abducted them and made them have sex as part of their amusement or some sort of experiment,” I said.
Dave thought for a moment.
“Is your memory okay, Tim?” he asked. “Because I don’t remember that part.”
“Ask Loni. If she kept in touch with Trisha, chances are she’s told her,” I said.
“Wait a second, I was there too. And I don’t remember them saying that and I sort of think I would remember a little detail like that myself, you know. I am a pretty smart guy,” Dave said.
“Yeah, they do that…” I said, non-committal.
“Oh shit…” sighed Smokey. “I’m going inside and waiting for Sean, guys.”
“Fine, go,” I said.
“Do what, Tim. They do what?” Dave prodded.
“I haven’t gotten it worked out yet, and this is going to sound strange but they can alter memories,” I said. “Or shift versions of the past.”
“Tim…”
“I know. I know it sounds abso-fucking-lutely nuts. Believe me. I know,” I said.
“Alright, let’s take it for fact that they can do this. How do you know your memories haven’t been polluted, altered and such?” Dave asked.
I thought about Red Dancing Bear. It occurred to me that only Ryan and I remembered him well. Now that Ryan was gone, only I did.
“I guess we don’t,” I said wondering how any of us could be certain of our memories.
“When we were in the eighth grade, in Mrs. Maguire’s social studies, do you remember her class?” I asked.
“Yeah. Brittany was in there with me,” he said. “Although she never would speak to me, then.”
“Hell she didn’t speak to anyone but Ryan. She had a huge crush on him,” I said.
“So what happened in class?”
“Do you remember that puzzle she had of the Titanic disaster?” I said.
“The jigsaw, sure. Front page of the New York Times,” he said.
“I worked that puzzle a few times. It was fun. And I always remember looking at the date on it front page,” I said.
“So?”
“Think back to that puzzle, in particular, imagine it in your mind,” I said.
“Yeah, I got it.”
“Find the date of the disaster on the page. It was on the upper left hand corner. Read the year for me. Just think back to the puzzle, not what you know you think to be the year but try to read the year off that memory, of that puzzle,” I said.
He thought for a moment, then sighed.
“That damned puzzle was too easy for me,” he said giving up. “I never worked it more than once.”
“That’s probably why I liked it. It was my comfort zone,” I said.
“What’s your point, Tim?”
“In my mind’s eye, the year on that puzzle is 1911,” I said.
“But Titanic sank in…”
“1912. Right. Everybody knows that,” I said. “And you want to know what else is weird?”
“Sure,” he said.
“I remember being in college looking back to the face of that puzzle in my memory and the year printed on it was 1910, not 1911,” I said.
“Pot. Booze, that has to be it,” he said.
“Sure, not the alternative,” I said.
“Which is?”
“Look, history is laid out in a certain way. This happens, then that happens. Boom, you’re left with the Titanic on the bottom of the ocean,” I said. “We know it’s down there, Bob Ballard found it in, what year again?”
“Oh shit. I forget,” he said.
“Right. So do I. But, it went down,” I said. “You remember the lights of 1981 and the dead sea turtles.”
“Yes,” he said.
“You remember Myles Niederman turned up dead, and we were blamed for it initially,” I said.
“Yes.”
“But you don’t remember how it happened?” I said.
“Not really,” he said.
“You further don’t remember a conversation, whereby one of your best friends in the whole world told you he had been abducted by aliens and forced into a sex act with another good friend. You don’t remember it happening and yet I was there and I saw you standing there when the very same words entered my ears,” I said.
“So back to the Titanic?”
“In short I think they can alter the past to a certain extent. I think they have to, in order to be able to do what it is they do,” I said. “They may be able to move events around so that the time progression comes out the same in the end: Titanic is on the bottom. Ballard finds it. It doesn’t matter whether it went down in 1910, 11, or 12 so long as the thing ends up there in the end for him to do so.”
“Do what?”
“You saw the way they moved? They were in six places at once. What does that sound like to you, Dave? Think in terms of physics,” I said.
“Quantum, light speed and stuff like that,” he said.
“Ryan and I talked about this. Think how jumbled their lives would be if they didn’t shift time around, even just a little bit. Paradoxical accidents would be as common as a winter sniffle,” I said.
“So the Titanic thing, is what?” he said.
“Maybe it’s a synapse in my brain that keeps misfiring every time I try to bring up an image on a jig-saw, or maybe it’s a ripple in space time,” I said. “Brought on by their coming and going, brought on by their need to standardize time every so often; to calibrate things again; reset values so they have a standardized understanding of the time progression.”
“Whoa space cowboy! My head is about to explode,” he said.
“I’m not saying my memory of when Titanic happened has really changed. I’m saying consider it as an example of what might be happening, why our memories of events in the past might be different,” I said.
“Explain what you mean,” he said.
“If they are zipping back and forth from Alpha Centauri, their concepts of time are going to become all jumbled with regard to each other. Those who zip and come back see time differently than those who stay here. It’s a weakness of theirs. They have to recalibrate everything so they move along on the same page again. It’s a hazard brought on by their advanced capabilities. It would explain a few things,” I said.
“Such as?”
“Their need for pure DNA. Complete DNA; without big chunks of it missing from quantum corruptions and gamma rays,” I said. “They’re so smart they fucked themselves. They can’t copulate normally. They have to snatch DNA from other critters, from us, namely. Pisses them off big time.”
“But why would our memories differ?” Dave said.
“When you read about quantum physics, you learn theoretically that those who travel through time space at light speed, may return to the same place in time, so to speak, but that version of it, may be altered,” I said.
“With respect to who, the traveler or the one who stays?” Dave asked.
“Both. They would view and remember recent events differently. Their set of what exists now would overlap on some things but other things would be different. The farther out you go at light speed, for the longer time period, the worse this effect would be. Say, you come back from a long light-speed trip. You zip a trillion miles away and then zip back through a quantum worm hole to the second you left. Only, when you get back, Oswald missed and Kennedy, instead of being assassinated got impeached after he was found in a tryst with Marilyn. In our case, maybe the trip wasn’t that far, so, we remember events differently, or only slightly so. Something like that,” I said.
“Which would mean one of us, Tim, went up in the ship and not the other,” he said.
“Possibly, or our memories are foggy,” I said. Then I shook my head.
“What?” Dave asked.
“Something Trisha said to me. She said if I remembered something else that went on that night, that pertained to she and I, I … Christ, my head hurts,” I said.
“Hey man, take it easy,” Dave said.
A car pulled into the driveway and Gary came out on deck.
“Sean’s here, guys. C’mon, let’s see how our marine is doing these days,” he said.

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