The Hand In Shadow

The

Hand

In

Shadow

JD Lovil

Print Edition

The Hand in Shadow

Copyright © 2016 J D Lovil.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be copied or reproduced in any manner or medium, except with the written permission of the Author, or as small quotations in reviews, promotion, or other activities in pursuit of normal literary interests.

This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not buy it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please find it at your favorite online bookstore and buy your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

You can contact the author at

jdlovilpublishing@gmail.com.

ISBN: 9781386736769

Independently Published

DISCLAIMER

This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

CONTENTS

1 Castle of the Mind

2 Blood and Rain

3 Ghosts in Memory

4 Better than AA

5 The Hive

6 The Warning

7 The Agents

8. The Island

9 Daybreak

10 The Ride

11 The Immortal

12 About Reality

13 The Droning

14 The Training

15 The Accident

16 The Walking

17 The Taking

18 The Preparing

19 The Summoning

20 The Bringing

21 Words with Enki

22 Reflections on the Anunnaki

23 The Dreamtime

24 The Shaman

25 The King Fae

26 The Mountain Keep

27 The War of Heaven

28 The Vision Quest

29 The Preparation

30 The War

31 The Aftermath

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank Lee Dunning and Courtney Prather for their input in the creation and improvement of this book. I also want to thank the world full of interesting people who have kept my attention focused on the Big Picture, over the years of my life. They have helped me to turn the old Chinese curse 'May you live in interesting times' into a blessing of experiences and insights.

1 CASTLE OF THE MIND

John sat in a chair of stone, bathed in the blue lightning that descended from the ceiling, and rose from the floor. Each time the lightning touched him, it gave him the paradoxical effect of energizing him, even as it calmed him. He could feel the energy circulating within his body. Where it flowed, he felt a cleansing and a renewing.

The place he sat in was an area of shadow, and of light. This place was a cave, which had become a never-ending castle. It was the Castle of his mind, his own personal Mind Palace. This was the place he went to consider the world.

To his left, and to his right, was a corridor, which went on forever. As far as the eye could see, doors of Oak stood on both sides of the corridors. Before the chair, upon which he sat, was a fire of violet flame. Over the flame was a man-sized Ankh of silver, revolving slowly above the impossible fire.

The violet flame was impossible, for no fuel fed the flame. The castle was impossible because it went on forever. This palace existed only within the mind of John. It was also a place where only John could ever enter, or leave.

Beyond the flame was a great mirror. Distant figures moved within the mirror, a legion of forms reflected from some other place. Whatever John desired to see was always reflected there. This time, it was the movement of several soldiers, in a heavily wooded area. They were closing in on a run-down building beside a river. It looked as though it was a metal roofed warehouse of some sort.

He watched the raid on the warehouse from his chair. He watched the six unkempt inhabitants of the mysterious structure, as the soldiers engaged them. Two of the bad guys promptly fell to weapon's fire, costing one of the soldiers a wound in his left arm, a lucky shot from one of the six.

The soldiers finally boxed in the other four.  John could see them as they complied with unheard commands, lying down on their stomachs, and crossing their hands in the small of their backs. Just beyond them, John could see lab-ware. The lab equipment suggested that the group had a chemical laboratory, or a drug operation, in this building.

The view had changed, and now some fern-like trees were in the light. There was only a sparse cover on the ground of some weeds, and grass that looked vaguely related to Bermuda grass entangled in the weeds. Behind one of the nearest shrubs, John could see the snout of something that resembled a bipedal reptile.

John let the reflected scenes in the scrying mirror become the background noise, as Barney trotted up for petting. Barney was a Collie-Sheppard mix, sporting black and white colors. He was the only other creature that ever visited John in this place. Even John was not sure how that was possible.

John had taken up meditation in a big way after the death of his wife and daughter. It was that or a slow death from depression. He had surprised himself by how quickly he mastered the art of meditation. He was even more surprised when his meditation sessions surpassed the mundane world. They became something that merged his life with an arcane reality.

A few years ago, he was meditating in a room that happened to include an active video camera. After the meditation, he discovered something extraordinary. In the tape, he noted that the shadows swept across the room, and when they lifted, he was no longer in the chamber. After a time, the shadows returned. When they again disappeared, John had returned to his original position.

After discovering that the shadows had taken him somewhere else, John spent the next couple of months testing the phenomena. He finally concluded that he had somehow been transported to his Mind Palace. For the time when he was meditating, he disappeared from the external world. During that period, he only existed in his mind!

Shortly after that, he discovered that the shadows that transported him to his Mind Palace could also take him anywhere he decided to go. It was on one such experimental foray that he found Barney.

He had literally met Barney one day when he was preparing his boat for an outing on the lake. He had just completed loosing the restraints on the vessel when a scruffy and obviously homeless dog approached him. A few moments of interaction with this mongrel and John decided that his family could stand to increase in number by one. From then on, they were inseparable.

Barney was an adventurous canine, and he loved the water. He especially loved to ride safe and dry on a fast-moving boat, with the wind and spray in his face, and the sublime scent of water in his nose. It was on one such outing that John and Barney came face to face with the minions of the Unseen Masters. The enemy had divined, by some unknown means, that John posed a potential threat to their plans. They had sent a team of operatives to the lake that day to end the threat.

John and his dog narrowly avoided the Gunmen's bullets. Shadows slid from the waters around John's boat. The shadows first hid them, and then took John and Barney to a place beside a pleasant spring that John remembered fondly. John had never before tried to carry another living thing with him when he traveled in this way.

Somehow, the time that John carried Barney with him into Shadow established a link of some strange kind. Anytime that John felt the need of Barney's company, somehow he would appear. He would answer the call, even in John's Mind Palace.

With a comfortable sadness, he reflected that Alena and Morgana would have loved the dog. It was sad that they never had the chance to meet him. The mirror across the fire now reflected a familiar scene. John had watched this scene many times before. It was a sunlit meadow, and John, Morgana, and Alena were having a picnic on a warm May Day. This John had never lost his family. This John worked at a Laboratory in Phoenix. Every day, he enjoyed a life full of love, a life where all his losses were small ones. This John lived in another world, another Earth. He lived as near as a whisper and as far as the farthest galaxy from the John who had lost his version of that life.

John watched the scene play itself out, feeling the melancholy, which watching this lost life always brought to him, and he sensed a difference in the room. Glancing to the right, he saw a figure standing near. The figure wore a dark robe, with the hood up.

He saw the Monk standing here, in his Mind Palace, in the place that he thought could not be breached. The Monk he knew to be a friend, but he did not believe that anyone could reach this place.

How is it that you stand here, in my mind? John asked of the dark figure. The Monk threw back his hood and smiled. His eyes stared unfocused into the distance. The delicate tracery of the knife scar from cheek to the forehead was there, shining starkly by the violet light of the flame.

I come, bearing tidings and a mission for you, the Monk replied. The Resistance requires your special skills. The Unseen Masters are moving into the final stages of their plan, and if we cannot stop them, they will win the day. If they win, the world will fall into the darkness they bring. If they win, the cold Kingdom they forge will last until the final day of Earth.

It sounds like the end of the days of beer, and puppies, from the sound of it, John answered as Barney tried valiantly to find some part of the Monk to lick. I guess I am in. What do you need to be done?

The Unseen Masters are working on enslaving technologies. They have some microchip override technology, which will hack the human brain, and make every chipped human a passenger inside their heads, while they do whatever the Masters direct them to do. They have developed the tech, and they have engineered a variety of delivery mechanisms, the Monk replied. All that is left to do is to complete the coding for the program that will run the chips. It is a very complicated code. There are only a few people in the world who can handle the job.

I know a little about programming, but if you think I can create a virus to take out the code, you have the wrong guy, John said. Lots of other people in the Resistance must be better suited to deal with this problem.

We have people dealing with other approaches to the problem, but one of the programmers is fire-walled. It is highly unlikely that his code can be addressed before it comes online, the Monk explained. The other programmers and their work are being managed. We will have to take a more direct approach with the programmer closest to finishing his work. We are going to need you to fix the problem by eliminating the programmer.

You know I hate that type of Assignment, John complained. The Target is rarely guilty of anything except being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Isn't there a more worthy Target of my 'special talents' that will do just as well?

I am sorry to give you this one, said the Monk. There is no Target I can give you of the sort you want, at this time. Take solace in the fact that taking this one person out will prevent slavery for everyone on Earth for the rest of his or her life. I will leave the file on the Target in the usual place. The Target is a programmer with Ubaid Corporation, named Jerad Johnson. The file will contain his address, and his known schedule and habits. It will also contain his personal information, including his collaterals.

Okay, I will travel to the River House, when I finish here. Just out of curiosity, how the hell can you show up here, in my mind? Not that I mind, of course, but I didn't think anyone could do that.

As far as I know, no one else can follow you here, unless you desire it, answered the Monk. You know that I read an absolute and unchangeable future, unlike most of the other Precognitives that exist, including you.

You are instrumental in the events of my immediate future, and so, we have intertwined destinies, the Monk continued. I can fix your exact position by my precog talent, and because we have entangled destinies, I can find you wherever you are. You should be grateful. I can warn you of dangers ahead, but not if I cannot locate you.

Yes, Mother, John smirked. Do I have to worry about other people able to locate me? I intuit that I will need to be able to hide very well soon.

Fortunately for you, no one else should be able to follow you. They may get a vague sense of your general area. There are about a dozen Nullers busy making you the best-hidden man on Earth for the Resistance.

The term 'Nullers' referred to a class of psychic talent, which could nullify the several types of psychic tracer talents out there. Some of the Tracers could locate a person as effectively as GPS could locate a person using the cell phone in their pockets. To waste a dozen such talents to protect John said volumes about his value to the Resistance.

Any idea how close this Jerad is to completing his coding? John wondered. How long before he has to take a dirt nap?

It is my understanding that he is no more than a week away from finishing his assignment, the Monk replied. I would suggest that you finish the job in the next three days, just to be safe.

Okay, got it. If I do this, you will owe me a pizza. Meat lovers, please.

The Monk smiled a crooked smile and nodded. Even though John was looking right at him, he did not see when the Monk left, much less how he had gone. One minute he was right there, and the next, he was gone. It was as if John had looked away for a second, but he never glanced away. How was that possible? He could not say.

With the Monk gone, John returned to his meditation. He let the energies wash over him, feeling his connection to the universe. He let the distant voices, which could always be heard at this stage serve as a backdrop to the state of meditation. Those voices were always just distant enough to be unintelligible. Somehow, they portrayed the emotions and a tiny bit of the thoughts behind them.

John breathed in, and out, each breath coupled with energies that surged with each inhale and exhale. He felt his mind slip deeply into a Theta state and breach the threshold between the conscious and unconscious mind, called the Delta state.

He was now in a waking dream state. Everything here carried meaning. Every blade of grass, every movement in the heavens, was a pure Truth. Suddenly, the corridors of his Sanctum filled with a multitude of beings, both human and other. Some of these beings were what the ordinary person would call spirits, or ghosts, moving about their astral circuits.

This crowding of the Mind Palace went on for a long while.  John continued to feed on the energy, as he watched the incomprehensible actions of some of them. As had happened every time that they appeared in the past, they all vanished in a second. A rising flood of emotions cresting, emotions that encompassed all the emotions that one can ever feel, rising from the barest impression to an overwhelming crescendo of almost painful volume, if emotions were noise, heralded their departure.

The disappearance of the ghost crowd was the signal that the meditation was drawing to a close. John spiraled upwards, out of a primarily Delta state. He entered into the Theta. He ramped up into the mid-range of the Alpha state, where he ordinarily stayed.

John stood up and looked around himself. Seeing nothing else to do, he whistled for Barney. Barney promptly came to stand beside him, wagging his tail, like a janitor on crack would wag a broom.

John brought his hands down. Barney took the signal to launch all sixty-five pounds of himself into John's arms. John summoned the Shadow to him. He directed the Shadow to take John and company to the River House, by the simple expedient of holding the destination in his mind. The Shadow closed in, and they were gone.

When the Shadow swirled away, John and Barney were at the aptly named House. Before them was a good view of the sedately flowing river, and a porch swing nearby invited John to sit. John did just that. Meanwhile, Barney dashed down to the river's edge, to see what interesting prey there might be on the riverbank to stalk.

John made a pot of coffee and poured himself a cup. Barney had returned by that time, but as usual, he did not want a cup of coffee, so John gave him a bowl of water instead.

Soon enough, he went into his office with the file that he had found in the usual place. He settled himself into the big leather office chair to read the file.

It seemed that Jerad Johnson was a married man. He had a wife named Evelyn, and they had one son and one daughter, ages seven and nine. The family could make this a dangerous operation because John refused to complete an assassination in front of minor children. He would have to wait for a chance to do it when they were absent.

Jerad attended the local Ubaid Corporate office in Tucson from 0800 hours to 1700 hours every weekday. He usually worked from 0800 to 1200 hours on Saturday. He rarely attended any functions or visited any recreational places, such as bars, clubs, or churches. Which meant that his home, or his work, were the only certain places to find him.

John was starting to feel the effects of a long day, so he changed from coffee to a single malt Scotch that he kept instead of sleeping pills. He began to think seriously about going to bed. Barney came in to lean against his leg. He seemed in total sympathy with the idea of going to dreamland.

Barney's vote for going to bed made it two to zero. John decided to succumb to the majority and put bookends around the day. Stretching out on the bed, it did not take long at all until he had descended into a profound and relaxing sleep.

HE IS WALKING DOWN a winding path, and in the brush on either side, he sees the movement of Ravens, and he hears the actions of unknown beasts. He walks around one more bend, and he sees a large man sitting beneath a vast and old Oak tree. The man has one blue left eye, but where his right eye should be was a crater, where something or someone had scooped out the eye. Within the crater was a swirling, perhaps of energy or shadow, it could have been a thing of order or an element of chaos. The man projects a sense of power, and also a haunting loss. Whatever the man is, John feels that he is formidable.

The man looks at John and speaks. "I see that you are the Hand in Shadow in this world. Know that what you must do is necessary, lest the Night-Wolf