House of Cabal Volume One: Eden (18 page)

The real Everett approached from down the
hall. He wasn’t dying from cancer; he was in optimal health and
looked as young and gorgeous as he did in the regressions.

Chuck stood and took a step back. “What the
hell?” He feared he had suffered some kind of mental break. Was he
awake or still hypnotized?

Everett knew that Chuck wouldn’t be placated
this time, not without a full explanation.

Rod was angered. “What are you doing?” This
was not part of the plan.

“I don’t have a choice, Rod. We have to tell
him.” Everett addressed Chuck. “I’m sorry for the deception. I
thought it was necessary.”

“Necessary? Was it all just a lie?”

“Don’t say that!” Everett stepped forward
into the harsh light. “You recognize me, don’t you? Not from
pictures, from the regressions.”

He was wearing different clothes, stylish and
designer-made, but it was definitely him.

“The regressions are real,” Everett said.
“Real as anything.”

“I don’t even know what that means anymore.
And that doesn’t explain why Rod was pretending to be you. And
Everett. You’re forty-two years old. Why haven’t you aged a
day?”

II

Eden Sspider webbing had hidden the real
Everett from my sight. Now that he had revealed himself to Chuck,
his history spilled out before me, but still only in bits and
pieces. I saw that he inherited the mansion south of the dense
orchard back in 2000, after the House of Cabal (the destination on
the butcher paper) had fallen into the ocean, killing most of the
other guests. Since then, he’d lived on the first floor, hidden
away. Under the mansion was a laboratory, where he studied the
House of Cabal’s research findings regarding ectothemic
entities.

The bigger picture was coming together.

During the first interview session (on August
31
^st
, 2015), Everett had secretly observed Chuck and Rod
from behind the mirror.

"That's a great place to start,” Chuck said,
on the other side of the glass. “Why can't that be on the
record?"

"That's not for the public,” Rod said.
“That's for you."

Rod was getting close to triggering Chuck’s
hypnotic state.

Everett’s plan was running smoothly. He
lifted a stainless steel briefcase and readied himself. It wouldn’t
be long now, and they would begin the first Trinity Link.

He didn’t trust anyone besides Rod, not after
everything that had happened with the House of Cabal, but he needed
a third person to replicate the psychic link diagrammed in the
research documents. Chuck seemed like the perfect candidate, but he
could always be replaced with one of the other preconditioned
writers if something went wrong.

A sound in the observation room drew
Everett’s attention upward. Eden Spiders had spread from a crack
and were now coating the ceiling with webbing. The contents of the
suitcase and the time nebulation caused by a potential Trinity Link
had drawn them into the room. This was consistent with the
research, but it still gave him pause.

The spider webbing was the reason Everett was
so hard for me to see, the reason I was the first angel to find him
and his hideout. It interwove with timespace and obscured his
destiny thread. It hid him in a blind spot, but now that blind spot
was becoming visible.

The House of Cabal had created the spiders,
an acarine arachnoid species, as long ago as the mid-eighties. They
spliced the white bugs, the ones that now grew inside the oranges,
with the Anelosimus Eximius, a social spider native to South
America that creates huge web complexes and massive colonies with
thousands of members. The resulting Eden Spider colonies possessed
similar qualities; their webbing coated much of the second floor of
the mansion, blocking off whole rooms. They were sterile, but they
hadn’t died out over the years. Nothing spliced with the white bugs
ever aged.

Everlasting life was only the beginning of
the potential effects.

In the case of the Eden Spider, the webbing
showed the most promise. A myriad of applications needed more
study. I could see the scientists doing the research, but not in
sufficient detail. I still needed a more direct connection. One
thing I understood clearly: their research had ended abruptly with
the destruction of the House of Cabal.

Everett, with his Trinity Link experiment,
was picking up where they left off.

III

Everett, seeing the spiders spreading across
the ceiling, backed away to the door of the observation room. The
spiders hadn’t been aggressive all the years he had lived in the
house. Times were changing. They also had never descended to the
first floor before.

He glanced at Rod and Chuck through the
glass. He couldn’t leave the room until it was time. They were
still talking.

“You’ve hidden for what, fifteen years? It’s
no wonder you’re reluctant, but everyone has a past. My readers
want to know the real you. I know it takes courage, but people
respect vulnerability. Trust me; people envy those involved with
moral deviation. People want a life filled with excitements, with
extremes, otherwise, why would they read my books?"

Rod sat back in his chair. “That’s the heart
of it.”

In the observation room, a spider dropped
onto Everett’s chair and then jumped to the floor. Everett didn’t
like how they jumped. Why couldn’t they just crawl like regular
spiders? Though he wasn’t prone to arachnophobia in general, the
Eden Spiders unnerved him because of the collective intelligence
they often displayed. He once observed them upstairs, moving in
unison like a flock of birds.

"Your story is next, Everett. You’re the
work. You matter to me. The House of Cabal is a fascinating
mystery. If you have some of the answers, that’s huge. But right
now it’s not about the House of Cabal; it’s about you. My goal is
to know the real Everett Grimes.”

As Chuck continued to talk, the spider on the
floor leapt to the crack at the door frame. Everett opened the door
just enough to let the spider into the gap. And then closed it
again.

Chuck saw the door move out of the corner of
his eye. “Are we alone?”

“Not in this house.”

A bouquet of legs sticking out of the crack
twitched for a few moments. “Sorry, little guy. I can’t have Chuck
seeing you.”

“Would you like me to start the tape
now?”

"Not just yet." Rod snapped his fingers.

That was Everett’s cue. He exited the
observation room with the briefcase, making sure that none of the
spiders escaped with him.

Chuck, in a hypnotic trance, stared off into
space.

“Are there any spiders on me?” Everett spun
around for Rod to look.

“None that I can see.”

“They got into the observation room.”

“That is a good thing. They are doing their
job.”

“I hope so.”

“The research talked about this.”

Everett popped the two locks, opened the
case, and removed a syringe filled with a pearl-white serum derived
from the white bugs.

“They sense what we’re about to do,” Rod
said. “The webbing will protect us and amplify the effects of the
regression.”

“If the research isn’t all insane.” Everett
was nervous. It had been a long time since he had felt nervous
about anything. It was all just theory until they witnessed it
working for themselves. “It said the webbing will protect us from
angels. What does that even mean?”

“It means what it means. The research has
been right about everything else. Have faith.”

Rod rolled up Chuck’s sleeve. Chuck didn’t
seem to notice, still staring off into space.

Everett injected the serum into the crook of
Chuck’s arm. “Hopefully, you’ll thank me later.”

He put the syringe back into the case. “I’m
going to put this in the other room so this whole place doesn’t
fill up with webbing. Chuck will freak if he sees any of the Eden
Spiders when he wakes up.”

Everett, expecting the spiders to have taken
over while he was gone, opened the door to the observation room.
They had yet to advance any farther than the ceiling. He sat in his
chair. They nested above him and could drop down at any moment. He
had to trust that they were there to help. According to the
research files, without the spiders, the regression wouldn’t
work.

Muffled on the other side of the glass, Rod
continued Chuck’s hypnotic preparation.

“It’s time to cross the first threshold. Let
my voice take you back in time, back to the night everything
changed.”

“I’m ready,” Chuck said in a daze.

Rod snapped his fingers again. Both men fell
into a deep hypnotic trance.

Everett came back out and sat at the table
with them. This was a momentous moment, and he took it in. He
looked at Rod, his only friend who was still alive and sane, and
then at Chuck, the biographer he hoped would set him free.

“I’m here with you in the gray. Nod if you
can hear me.”

Chuck slowly nodded.

Everett stared at his own finger tips, at the
swirling ridges of the pads of his right hand’s ring and middle
fingers. “Press play and record.”

Chuck pressed play and record. The click
sound of the buttons triggered Everett to join the two men in the
hypnotic regression. With that, the Trinity Link was formed.

Once linked, Everett began. “You look down at
yourself. There is no yourself to look down at, just gray
void.”

IV

On September 2nd, 2015, after the second
regression ended and Everett revealed himself to Chuck, Rod gave a
sigh that turned into a rough cough that didn’t readily stop.

“You okay?” Everett looked like a concerned
son as he put a hand on Rod’s shoulder.

Chuck, his legs suddenly weak, sat back down
in his chair. “I need you to start from the beginning. I need to
understand.”

“Okay,” Everett said.

“I need this to make sense before I go
insane.”

“Okay. I’ll do my best.” Everett sat at the
table. “After the estate, after it fell into the ocean, I crashed
at Rod’s place for a while. I couldn’t go back to my old life. He
was the only person I was sure wasn’t part of the estate. There
were these House of Cabal actors who pretended to be my friends. I
couldn’t trust anyone. Together Rod and I found this place. Tracked
it down with some detective work.

“Lane and Kyle, these two actors still loyal
to the House of Cabal, they told me this mansion was mine. I’ve
tried to find what answers I could, but a lot is still a mystery.
So much was lost when the House of Cabal fell. And then last year
Rod was diagnosed with a brain tumor. I realized then and there
that the world had to know what happened, what the House of Cabal
had been doing.”

“Why? What had they been doing?”

“I don’t have the right to keep their
research a secret. The House of Cabal had discovered miracles. They
could cure every disease, every virus. Even repair genetic defects.
And that was just the beginning. The stuff they were researching…
It will revolutionize medicine. But maybe more than that. It could
revolutionize everything. A new epoch. So together, Rod and I came
up with a plan.”

“Your biography.”

“That’s part of it. A straightforward
biography might get people to start asking questions, but I want
this over. Part of what the House of Cabal did was explore the
brain and how memory works. One of their studies involved a lucid
regressive state formed when three people enter hypnotic regression
together. They called it the Trinity Link. Rod played the role of
the conduit, you were the witness, and I was the body of
Christ.”

“What?” Chuck said sharply. “What are you
talking about?”

“I’ll show you. Come with me.”

“Well…” Rod took a raspy breath while glaring
a Chuck. “Go with him. What are you waiting for?”

Chuck reluctantly followed Everett into the
hallway, through a door, and into the dim observation room. A
single chair faced a window that viewed the dining room.

Rod drank water at the dining table. The
lights were bright so that the mirror remained opaque on one
side.

“You were watching us?”

“The House of Cabal used this place during
the construction of the estate. They interviewed people here. Maybe
interrogated them.” Everett squatted and lifted a trapdoor to
reveal a ladder descending into cold darkness.

“What’s down there?” Chuck hugged himself,
the fear of the unknown chilling him.

“An abandoned laboratory. The computers have
been destroyed, but there are research notes. Huge filing cabinets
of them. And some of the biological experiments are still
alive.”

“I’m not going down there.”

Chuck noticed cobwebs and looked up to the
mass of webbing that covered the ceiling. Metallic blue spiders,
averaging five inches in diameter, clung to the webs. Chuck didn’t
know how many. They were everywhere. He backed into the hall. That
wasn’t far enough. He backed into the dining room, shaking.

“What the hell are those things?!”

Everett calmly closed the door. “They’re Eden
Spiders. I’m still trying to understand the research.”

“Eden Spiders?”

“They aren’t dangerous. I’ve lived with them
for years.”

Chuck wasn’t going to just take Everett’s
word for it. “I’m not going back in there, Everett. Don’t even
ask.”

“The Eden Spiders are connected to the
Trinity Link. It was an experiment. The webbing supposedly
amplifies the power of the brain to see remote locations. The real
breakthrough came when they discovered that the scientific
observer, the person watching, also amplified the effect. Rod acts
as the conduit, and you act as the observer.”

“You said something about the body of Christ.
That that’s what you are.”

“That’s their term, not mine. It comes from
the idea that the communion wafer literally transforms into the
body of Christ once it’s ingested. The Trinity Link isn’t
religious. It’s just, during the regression, I’m supposed to go
through some sort of transformation that removes me from linear
time. In theory I merge with my former selves. I know it sounds
insane; I only understand parts of it. The research notes become
more and more theoretical as they go on.”