Yesterday (Part Four - Ch. 74 & Epilogue Ch. 75) (Patreon)

CHAPTER 74

The antique wall clock had just struck midnight as Victor Sertres began to despair over Hebert's disappearance when his butler came to him with an unexpected announcement.

Jonah and Laura Samper were at the entrance asking to be received.

“Finally! but where is Hebert?” he asked himself as he walked to greet them in the foyer of his small palace.

And there they were. Sertres was surprised by their appearance, he had not imagined them like that. After so much time of hearing about them, he had expected them to be short and ugly or with some kind of disability, and what he found was quite the opposite. Jonah was tall and handsome, and Laura, almost as tall and handsome as he was, had beautiful eyes.

—I believe he was expecting us, —Jonah told Laura.

—Welcome! Pleased to meet you at last, —exclaimed Sertres, shaking hands cordially, —allow me to escort you to my office, please.

—Hopefully we won’t be too late —interjected Laura, keeping a polite tone.

—Not at all my dear —said Sertres gesturing to offer them a seat —in fact I expected you to arrive in the company of my dear friend Professor Walter Hebert, didn’t he contact you?

—Yes, —answered Laura trying to buy some time to analyze as quickly as possible the man’s mind before taking action, —he did, but he chose to stay in Madrid.

—So much for the Professor, —answered Sertres with a forced smile.

—He’s quite the character, —said Jonah, also trying to buy time for Laura.

—So what? Are you interested?

—Well, we are here, aren’t we? —answered Jonah.

—I suppose the professor must have given you some background information, but I want you to know that we’re going to treat you like royalty, you have my word. Ask for whatever you want, it’s yours. I will only need you to help me today, and after that, just relax and have a good life.

Jonah looked at Laura and she nodded her head. It was time to act.

—We want what was handed over to you, —Jonah said with a subtle change of tone.

—What? —answered Sertres in bewilderment.

—You heard me.

Sertres glanced at the two of them but did not say a word, although he couldn’t help twisting his face.

—We know more than you think, —Laura assured him.

—And you have no idea what you’re getting into, —Jonah continued.

—You’re the one who doesn’t know what you’re getting into, mister—asserted Sertres.

—Look, Mr. Sertres, I’m not going to waste time with you, Hebert already made that mistake with us, and I can assure you that by now the most elaborate thing his mind can come up with is a babble. If you don’t want to end up the same way, give us what we came looking for and we’ll leave.

—Don’t you realize we need each other? Jonah, you of all people should understand that —replied Sertres with renewed ambition in his eyes —You know power, you have tasted it, imagine being able to refine it, to dose it, to hold the fate of humanity in your hand, to do with it what no one else has been able to do. That technology is hope come true, the key to…

—Submission? —Laura interjected.

—No, —cried Sertres in exultation, —to guide it, to finally make sense of it. We can’t let Elias Harperin get away with this, they want to destroy us. That man wrote off humanity many years ago, but we are better than that, we can do better than that, we are capable of doing much better, together.

—By selling it? As pills? All for the money, for power?

—It’s not for the money! —Sertres replied angrily —It’s about Faith, you idiots! Do you think we were going to sit by while that enlightened man from the last century pursued his own mystical utopia? We had to intervene, they were slipping away from us. We cannot allow humanity to be deprived of the Faith and love of God. We will deliver to them that dream promised by the Church, the nourishment of Faith. And if to achieve this we need to finance ourselves at the expense of the richest, so be it.

—And what’s next, class warfare in the hereafter? In the name of Faith? —Jonah interrupted him.

—Don’t be naïve, please, —Sertres snorted, —Do you really think they would leave this historical event in the hands of just anyone? Make it public? Truth no longer exists today, it's a business construct managed in offices like this one. Thanks to the Harperin Corporation, among others, we live in a society that is further and further away from the true path, do you think they will stop there?

—The disappearance of your Church is what you fear, —Laura replied, —and you yourselves have favored that destruction by fighting to maintain another truth, your truth, at the expense of the evolution of the human being.

—And the time has come for you to step aside, —Jonah said.

—Seriously? Do you really believe such nonsense? Do you believe that Harperin conceived you to be the saviors of mankind? over the Church? Please! Don’t make me laugh, you’re nothing but two freaks, you’re not even human!

There was a brief silence. Sertres looked at them defiantly, but Jonah stood up calmly and faced him.

—Hebert confessed as much to us, but we have decided that we can be whatever we want to be, —Jonah replied coldly. It is you and your need to sow fear, your unmeasured ambition that has brought us to this situation. Now you are going to tell me where you have it, by hook or by crook.

—The thing is… —answered Sertres angrily, —I hardly know you, but I’m already bored, are you going to help us or not?

—No, we’re not —Laura answered sharply.

Sertres swung his head sighing and the two twins could sense his anger. It struck them that he was personally offended by their refusal. At such moments he was motivated only by his pride. Seconds later he calmed down and looked back at them dismissively.

—Fine, you asked for it, —he said, holding up a small metallic tablet with his hand as he pressed his thumb to the center.

Nothing happened and Sertres looked at the device in surprise. He shook it and then pressed it again.

—Don’t even try, it doesn’t work anymore, —Jonah told him calmly.

—All the artifacts you possess from the Harperin Corporation have stopped working at midnight, —Laura concluded, satisfied, —and they will never work again.

Sertres looked at them in horror and cast a furtive glance at his office table.

—-We sensed it when we arrived, don’t bother, we were just giving you a chance, —Jonah said scornfully, putting a slight mental pressure on him.

Sertres stirred in his chair.

—They have left us alone, isn’t that what you wanted, for them to disappear? —Laura announced, increasing the pressure a little more, —What happens from now on is our responsibility. We will be the watchmen.

—But… —Sertres began to say.

—Do you really believe that the plan Harperin dreamed up and executed for so many years was limited to developing a type of technology, a few pills? —Jonah ironized. —For a man of faith, your materialism is remarkable.

—What are you going to do to me? —asked Sertres despondently.

—None that you don’t deserve, Victor, —said Jonah with a grin as he approached him. —Nothing you don’t deserve.

Jonah gritted his teeth and let his rage flow like electricity through his claw-tight fingers. He felt his lifelong resentment towards that gang of liars and egotists turn his fingertips into imaginary spikes and aimed them at Victor’s temples, picturing his eyeballs bursting in a frenzy of blood and innards. His hatred for the man and his putrid mind plunged him into a trance and he felt a pressure on his forehead, an energy taking control of his will, lifting him up, connecting him to a higher power…

Laura put her hand on his shoulder.

—Stop it, —she whispered. And Jonah reacted opening his eyes.

Sertres was staring at him, but he was no longer there. His pupils began to whiten giving him a ghostly look. Jonah pulled his hands away in fright.

—He’s still alive, —his sister calmed him, —but he won’t remember anything, neither him nor anyone else in this house. Let’s go.

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER 75

London, early Sunday morning, Laura has remained in the hotel and I need to walk around, it helps me to think. I have decided to write down everything that has happened to us. Every watchman needs to keep a record.

Adrian is still present in my memory, like a unfinished business. I still don’t understand what led him to undergo such a treatment, what he was hoping to find. His surprise, the fascination I saw in his mind during the moments we shared in the clinic have left a profound mark on me. What drove him to do this to himself? It was not the avarice I saw in Sertres. I wish I had been able to wake him up. Speaking with him would have taught me so much…

It’s been a month since everything happened and I still haven’t spoken to Pater.

Laura summed it up in one sentence a few minutes ago.

—It’s only natural that you miss him.

I nodded and let my thoughts wander. That’s often the best way for me to communicate with my sister, to let her just dive into my memory and for her to choose where to look herself.

I recalled the countless study afternoons shared with him, feeling the melancholy that the memories of the overcast Irish skies and the routines of school where I spent most of my childhood still lingered in my heart.

Years and years tormenting myself with the same questions, blaming myself for the same sins.

Was I so deviant that I didn’t deserve a family like everyone else? Was it all my fault? Did Pater really love me? Did anyone love me?

I stopped those thoughts. Clearly he knew nothing. It was all part of a plan to groom me. So subtle and compartmentalized that I didn’t even realize it myself.

—Jonah, give him a call, get over your misgivings, —Laura tenderly proposed to me before leaving the room.

—I will, but in due time.

Before talking to him I need to meditate on my new question: what am I?

I love to walk these streets when nobody sees me. I walk alone, sometimes counting the cobblestones, sometimes trying to interpret the graffiti on the walls. I am fascinated by the contrasts of this city, the history of its streets and the mystery of its legends.

A passerby in the distance shakes his umbrella while the cab driver waits with his elbow sticking out of the window of his car for him to get in. London nights are cold in autumn, the kind that gets into your bones, but I don’t care, I’ve left the hotel warmly dressed.

I observe them attentively but I am still not able to fully grasp their thoughts as Laura already does. In the pedestrian I sense annoyance, in the cab driver boredom and some haste, but nothing else, everything becomes foggy and my eyes get cloudy if I try to focus more than that.

…And this pain in my neck and back which has been bothering me for a month is only getting worse.

What happened to us?

I don't know, I'm not the same since I have been near that box, but this new mental blindness kind of relaxes me, I don't feel the pressure of ambient noise like before. I can even walk and relax now, let myself be carried away by the temperature, by the simplest sensations. People don't scare me anymore.

* * *

My wandering takes me to familiar places.

I came here because I want to revisit all the places that were important in my past. They say that we all leave some kind of traces wherever we go, and I follow those of Elias Harperin.

Elias, that dreamer who started it all, patron of scientists and engineers, secret shaman of several secret orders, founder of the massive corporation that bore his name, progenitor of technologies inconceivable to today’s society, disappeared as if by magic sometime in the 1990s, and above all, a mystery.

Hardly anything remained of the Harperin Corporation. There was no trace of their existence on the Internet, and we had no luck in libraries either, except for a few newspaper archives where they were mentioned only in passing, but without any detail.

They had meticulously erased their tracks. Rumors and confessional secrets told in hushed tones by elders were left, but nothing in writing.

Only an elongated box remained. The Metatron.

And a statue.

Ever since we discovered it I have not been able to get it out of my mind.

It stood in a nook of St John’s Street, in Cambridge, very close to Trinity College. There, surrounded by a small flowerbed of fresh green grass, I found the dark bronze sculptural group on a stone pedestal. The pedestal bore a simple rain-blackened plaque reading the name “Elias Harperin”.

No more, no dates, no further clues.

His figure, serenely erect, dressed in a simple suit and smock, emanated venerability. He appeared surrounded by three children to whom he offered what looked like seeds in his hands. Two boys and a girl. If I didn’t know who he was I would have taken him for a professor, or a scientist, but understanding the code behind that figure gave it a new meaning. He was talking about us, my sister and me, and someone else, I was sure of it. He was offering us his legacy, the seeds of his knowledge, but for what?

Nothing about it was unusual to the layman’s eye, the only disturbing fact was that it was not in any catalog, in any guidebook, and that it had even been erased from Google Maps.

As if it didn’t exist.

But it was there, very close to where my private eye had found in some very old records that Elias had studied in his youth.

The legendary Cambridge School had been famous for several reasons since its founding by Henry VIII in 1546. Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Lord Byron, Niels Bohr, and an endless list of historical personalities, including many Nobel laureates, had studied there.

It had been the cradle for several secret societies, the most famous being the Cambridge Apostles. However, I was more interested in another, much more discreet one, the one founded by Elias Harperin during his stay there.

My sleuth could find out very little about it. He discovered traces of an old society called Helicon in the college records, a sort of metaphysical club that became very popular among students in the late 1920s, but Harperin was not mentioned except in passing.

Nothing in Harperin’s surviving biography justified that statue, but yet there he was, welcoming students to Trinity College in the heart of Cambridge, and offering seeds of knowledge to three children.

And while neither Laura nor I fully approve of the Harperin Corporation’s methods, it is certain that Elijah was a dreamer who envisioned a better world, a saving grace with which to confront the disaster that threatens us, and so we are determined to find them.

For Elias, this is my intuition, did not want his dream world to be governed like ours. He envisioned a society in which it would be much more difficult to lie, and that doesn’t strike me as a bad thing. I have been interacting more closely with people for some time now, and I don’t think they realize the damage lies do to them.

I see it every day, from the woman serving me coffee in the cafeteria, or the man driving in the next car. They pretend, they lie, they get used to it, and they build their lives looking for a balance between what they think they are and what they really are, distributing guilt and innocence according to their needs in each situation.

Wouldn’t the world be a much better place if we all understood each other instantly?

Whatever. As Laura keeps telling me, I still don’t know you well enough.

Next week: the conclusion!