Ash Return of the Beast

CHAPTER 19



Kane poured a cup of coffee for Ravenwood and one for himself and leaned back in his chair. He looked tired. He closed his eyes, gave them a good hard massage and let out a long slow sigh. “Well, Wheeler did ask the question of the day, didn’t he? What the hell really is going on here?”

Ravenwood raised an eyebrow. “C’mon. With all you’ve seen, and after everything I’ve told you, you really have to ask?”

Kane exploded, slamming his hand down on the desk. “Christ!”

“Feel better?”

He got up and paced back and forth, buying a moment to gain control over his frustration. “Okay,” he said, finally, plopping back into the chair. He folded his arms and leaned back. “Let’s see if you’ve got an answer for this one.”

“Shoot.”

“You saw that creep do the nasty with that poor son of a bitch, right?”

“Sex magic. Like I told you, but you didn’t believe me.”

“Yeah, well, maybe there’s a little flaw in your theory.”

Ravenwood was amused. “Really.”

“Yeah. Maybe there’s nothing magic about any of this.”

“What about the vanishing act?”

“What? Oh, yeah. Well, I haven’t figured that one out yet. But this sex thing––”

“The flaw in my theory.”

“Yeah. The autopsy on the other victims showed no sign of semen. If I remember right, you said that whole sex magic thing was based on some hocus-pocus that happened at the moment of orgasm. Right?”

“Right.”

“Okay. So tell me, how does a guy have an orgasm without… you know.”

“That’s a good question, Detective.”

“Ah, ha. See?”

“But I have an answer. And you probably won’t like it.”

Kane rolled his eyes. “Oh, of course you do and of course I won’t.”

“The answer is that I don’t think the hooded figure is a real person.”

“What? You saw it with your own eyes. What the hell do you think it was? An illusion? I’m no physicist but I’m pretty sure illusions don’t show up on video tape.”

“Not exactly an illusion. A phantasm. Sort of a mental representation of a real person. Or, in this case, maybe a better definition would be a mental projection from the mind of a real person. In some esoteric lore it’s better known as a doppelganger.”

“A doppelganger. What the hell do you think this is, a friggin’ Stephen King novel?”

“Stephen King didn’t make up the idea. Like other writers of paranormal fiction, he just borrowed it from a concept that’s been around for ages.”

“And you’re going to sit there and tell me doppelgangers are real.”

“Well, like Don Juan said to Carlos Castaneda, ‘What is real?’”

“Casta-who? What the hell are you talking about?”

Ravenwood shook her head. I should have known better. “Nothing. My point is, if that hooded figure is in fact a doppelganger––and I’m betting it is––then it explains both the lack of semen as well as the vanishing act.”

“I’ll probably regret this, but explain what you mean.”

“Pretty simple really. If the psychic energy of the person who is projecting the doppelganger is strong enough then the doppelganger can not only take on what appears to be a physical form, it can also interact physically with other people. Nevertheless, it’s still a phantasm. See? An illusion, a mental construct. It’s real but it’s not real.” She noted Kane’s jaw tighten. “I know you hate that, but there’s really no other way to describe it. At least not in simple terms. Trust me, your eyes would glaze over if I gave you the graduate-level explanation. So just take my word for it.”

“I’ll think about it. Just get to the point.”

“Well, since it’s not an actual living being, it doesn’t possess the full range of biological functions of a living being. Cut it with a knife, it won’t bleed. Shoot it with a gun, it won’t die. If you watch the video again you’ll notice the hooded figure didn’t display any sort of visible orgasmic reaction at any point during or after the penetration. It was a pretty dispassionate act. My guess is that all the orgasmic energy was transferred directly to who ever was projecting the doppelganger.”

She could see Kane was having a hard time buying her explanation but she also sensed he was at least giving it some consideration. After all, she thought, he doesn’t really have much choice.

“So,” he said, finally, “if I buy into this doppelganger thing then I suppose that’s also the explanation for the fact that the damn thing just appears out of nowhere and disappears into… God knows where.”

“Disappears back into the mind of the person who projected it.”

Kane shook his head. “Unbelievable. And I don’t mean that as a figure of speech. It’s just goddam unbelievable.”

Ravenwood grinned. “But you’re beginning to believe it.”

Kane didn’t respond.

“Well,” she said, changing the subject, “I’ve got something else to show you.”

She pulled a sheet of paper from her briefcase and laid it on Kane’s desk. “Remember this?”

He looked at the drawing on the paper. “Of course. The Lucifer Seal. The modified one with all the extra lines that now decorates the foreheads of six corpses. What about it?”

“I think I figured out what those additional lines are.”

“Is it important?”

“I’m not sure yet. But it’s interesting. Look.”

She moved the drawing aside and laid a different one down in its place.

Kane looked puzzled. “What’s all this?”

“Took a while to figure it out, but the symmetry…”

“The what?”

“The way the lines are laid out. The design is symmetrical. In other words, the right side is a mirror image of the left side. See what I mean? So I separated the right side from the left side so I could see each side separately.” She pointed to the two circles side by side. “Still, it didn’t look like anything I recognized. So, to simplify it even further, I eliminated that nine-sided perimeter. That’s when it hit me. They’re numbers. The lines are the numbers seven and four.”

“And what the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“You remember I told you about the original Lucifer Seal and the numbers incorporated into its geometry and that whole concept of Jesus and Lucifer being one and the same?”

“Vaguely. I remember you said the Lucifer Seal was practically unknown.”

“That’s right. Only initiates of the highest order in the Dark Arts would even know about it. That fact, along with these numbers, tells me our killer definitely has access to information that few people have ever been privy to, much less ever heard of.”

“I don’t get it. How do you know that?”

“Because of the sevens and fours. Whoever designed this alternative seal is telling us he understood the hidden meaning of the original, especially the Jesus-Lucifer connection.”

“I’m listening.”

She pointed to the single image at the top of the page. “What you’re looking at here are actually the numbers seven and four overlaid on top of each other and mirrored. But it’s not just a seven and a four. It’s really seventy-four and forty-seven overlaid on top of their mirror images.”

“And that means… what?”

“English gematria.”

“English what?”

Ravenwood gave a 60-second crash course on gematria, explaining that he could think of gematria as a kind of sacred numerology used by the ancient Greek and Hebrew priests and mystics.

“They, of course, used the alphabets and number systems of their own respective cultures,” she said. “See, words and phrases that turned out to have the same alphanumeric values were thought to be relevant to each other in some way. In more recent times, someone developed a way to use our Latin-derived alphabet in a similar manner with the English language. The code was simple.” She grabbed a pen and wrote on the paper:

A=1 through Z=26

“Using this code,” she continued, “you just calculate the alphanumeric value of any word or phrase.” She stopped to see if she was losing him but he seemed to be hanging in there, waiting for the punch line. “So, using this code, it just happens that the names ‘Jesus’ and ‘Lucifer’ both have the same gematria value of seventy-four. That’s interesting on several levels that I won’t go into, but there’s more.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

“In some Luciferic rituals, or what some might call Satanic rituals, the idea of reversals is a key component to the magick. For example, they’ll often turn the sign of the cross upside down. A kind of reversal, you see? And, by the way, the word ‘cross’ also has a gematria value of seventy-four, as does the word ‘messiah’. Reversal, opposite, anti. Get it? Anti-Christ?”

Kane rolled his eyes. “Clever. But––”

“Not done yet. Check this out. When you reverse the seventy-four you get forty-seven. Add them together and you get this.” She grabbed the pen again and wrote:

74 + 47 = 121 = ANTICHRIST

Kane’s eyes widened. “No shit? The word ‘antichrist’ has a value of one-twenty-one?”

“And we’re still not done. In the Bible, both Jesus and Lucifer are associated with Venus, otherwise referred to as the Morning Star. That fact has been a subject of theological controversy for ages. Now look at this:

74 + 74 = 148 = MORNING STAR

Ravenwood chuckled at the dumbfounded look on Kane’s face. “That’s nothing. Here’s the final kicker. Remember our discussion about the nine-sided shape of this symbol and the occult significance of the number nine?”

“Yeah, what about it?”

She wrote something on the paper and turned it for Kane to read:

74 x 9 = 666

She sat back in her chair. “Pretty cool, yes?”

“Pretty damn weird is more like it.”

“That, too. But what it tells us is that our purp knows his stuff. He knew the secret message of the Lucifer Seal. He’s either a powerful adept of the highest order in some ancient mystery school or someone else at that level is assisting him.”

“You think so?”

“There’s no other explanation.”

“I wish there was.”

Ravenwood nodded. “So do I.”