Episode 031

Origins of the SOJ scroll.

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SHOW NOTES:

• A new record: Eddie in Florida devours 28 Episodes of THE VEINGEL podcast in one day!
• A note on leaving comments or feedback: please let me know if you want me to use your full name on the air…
• Have a question about the story or the writing thereof? By all means, ask away. Your wish is my command.
• Still no "story so far." Still haven't had time.
• Bruce Williams from Audio2u  will be answering a question I sent him, regarding the audio editing / mixing / mastering of this podiobook, on an upcoming episode of his shows: Sine Language  and Building The Pod. Can't wait.
  

 

CHAPTER 30

In an age before society scrambled to find scientific explanations for purported miracles, in the age of miracles-when miracles were performed, and witnessed, and needed-in that age-a devout man, belonging to a devout sect, among a devout people, stood shackled inside a cave so he could not run, and held a knife two-fisted by the hilt while waiting for further instruction from YHWY, the One True God.

Torch light burned invisible in the sunless chamber, overwhelmed amid the brilliant illumination of His messenger's voice—a voice which shone brighter than the white sand desert dunes at midday as the angel spoke.

By blood doth the sons of iniquity confess their fathers' sins, and so by blood let their judgment be written, that in those last days, the last of the children of man may hear. Thus sayeth The Lord thy God.

Hearing the angel's words, the abomination they'd captured from among the Sethites screamed in a tongue Nahor did not know, writhing against the bindings as the knife carved deep beneath its smooth and hairless limb. Nahor could neither halt the butchery any more than speed it up; his hands an instrument of another will.

Then the angel commanded Nahor to collect the blood in ink-pots as it streamed from the edges of the polished table toward the cave floor. And when the pots were full, which did not take long, Gabriel commanded the Naphil to speak. And the Naphil spoke much in the gibberish of its people.

By the blood once sanctified, made impure, so let it be written, these words, carried by His angel Gabriel from Him Most High to his loyal prophet Nahor, honored scribe among a loyal people whom have pleased God.

Nahor knew not what the biter uttered, but the Spirit of The Lord guided his hand as Gabriel forced the creature to confess. Despite the unintelligible source, the words issuing from the quill were in a tongue Nahor knew well, his native Hebrew, but the more formal liturgical version spoken by priests and recorded on vellum painstakingly produced in the unchanging manner in which God had commanded.

Finally, when the torches were not but smoldering embers atop twigs, Gabriel silenced the un-man, who went by Sarkatheel among his unclean people, and rested the quill in Nahor's hand. Now all but the final inkpot of blood stood empty; the ground wet with much more spilt. And yet, to Nahor's astonishment, the prisoner still lived.

Behold, Nahor, servant of God everlasting, of He Who authors worlds and ends. Thou hast witnessed a mystery; The Lord delights in thee. Listen now to His words: By faith shall your people reveal the judgment rendered unto the Nephilim on this day; by your deeds so shall they know of the Lord's wrath.

In those last days, the blood of the wicked will damn them. For it is written: ‘The blood is the life,' And so shall it be written in those last days: ‘The blood is their death.'

Now hear these words from the Lord thy God but know them not; for He shall send a prophet in those last days, and the prophet shall reveal a great truth to your people that they may know His love and take comfort when His judgment is nigh.

And again the man-beast cried out in anguish, and Nahor's faithful hand recorded its compelled prophecies in an unrecognizable script. Who understood the letters his hand conspired with the quill to render? Not Nahor, nor the words they formed, nor the unfathomable evils they might describe.

...Thus sayeth the Lord.

And when the angel had finished speaking, the use of the sharpened stake Nahor had been instructed to carry with him into the cave became obvious. As did the function of the heavy striking stone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 31

 

With Rocky out of his hair, and Cindy still tranced-out behind the techno-glass room divider in her cell, Henry stood over the Brotherhood's scroll, closed his eyes, and inhaled of the mystery-infused air. It reeked of ancient-ness, and of faraway geographies; an aroma of catacombs and bomb shelters and the basements of libraries. He was eager to get started on the translation, but not so eager as to rush the process. Marshall McLuhan, the great scholar and communications theorist wrote, in his book of the same title, ‘the medium is the message.'This medium: the parchment, the ink, the left-to-right clockwise-rolled scroll format, communicated a great deal.

Especially the ink.

A good ink, suitable for archival purposes, exhibited certain properties. First, it must be of high contrast and resist fading. Second, it must be resistant to manual erasure; substitutions and insertions should be impossible to hide. Third, an archival quality ink must not smudge or smear once dry, and dry time should be minimal. Nor should the ink be acidic; acid deteriorates the medium upon which it adheres, encouraging discoloration and flaking. Finally, resistance to bacteria and other hungry microbes is mandatory in an ink selected for its permanence. For these reasons, inks based on organic substances can be problematic. Which makes blood, for example, a very poor ink indeed.

A fact which hadn't deterred the author of the SOJ's scroll from composing in its telltale rusty brown.

Henry didn't know what to make of this gruesome attribute. Messages in blood occurred on the walls at a murder scene, not in a religious text (unless you counted the Koran which the fallen Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had printed in his own blood; Henry did not). He'd have to come back to it.

Next he turned his attention to the parchment itself. He recognized it as liturgical vellum, or gevil, a type of leather made from the skin of a deer or cow, of which many, many superficially similar scrolls were comprised. Unremarkable in and of itself, save for the odd pattern of uneven deterioration and wear the document had experienced. The margins appeared much more brown in color than surfaces nearer to the actual script. In fact, signs of aging, increased uniformly with distance as measured from the nearest quill stroke. Away from the margins, in the body of the text itself, each symbol glowed with its own ‘halo' of abnormally well-preserved writing surface. And because the individual characters and groupings of lines were spaced so closely together, the individual halos tended to overlap with their neighbor, combining to form one large swath of scroll in remarkable condition. Only the edges of the scroll, where no writing appeared-where no blood appeared-exhibited the telltale cracking, discoloration, and flaking characteristic of other ancient vellum scrolls. To Henry's eyes, it was almost as if a preservative of some kind had been mixed with the blood, which over time, had leeched out into the surrounding pores of the vellum in an ever thinning gradient of protection; he'd never seen anything quite like it in a document this old.

Until now, he'd been purposely ignoring the actual language of the composition in an attempt to be systematic. Even so,  it was blatantly Biblical Hebrew—more specifically—a variant known as ‘Golden Age' Biblical Hebrew, a dialect familiar to him and a thousand other scholars. Clearly, the SOJ didn't need his expertise to translate such a well known language, though this wasn't what troubled him about the familiar tongue (the undecipherable passages of the scroll probably appeared later, in the rolled up portion he'd yet to examine). What troubled Henry was the fact that Golden Age Biblical Hebrew went out of favor around 500 B.C.E.—2,500 years ago—suggesting an impossibly old age for the scroll, and placing it among the oldest vellum manuscripts ever discovered…if it were authentic, which by now, he was certain it couldn't possibly be, given the preponderance of suspect attributes.

Setting aside for the moment the ‘halos' of mint-condition writing surface around the lettering, and the lack of expected uniform deterioration, the scroll appeared to be, at most, a couple centuries old. Certainly not millennia.

So it had to be a fake. And not even a particularly clever one. There were methods for aging documents in a somewhat convincing manner. At the very least, a diligent forger might have gone to the trouble to obtain blank sheets of vellum manufactured close to the time period they were intending to emulate (Henry knew of several museum storage facilities where such minor artifacts were kept under less than a watchful eye). And yet, this amateurish con artist hadn't even bothered with this most elementary of ruses.

"They fucking insult me," Henry muttered under his breath, no louder than a whisper.

Then he nearly wet himself.

From over the same flush-mounted speakers in the ceiling that Cindy's tortuous screams had been piped earlier in the day, came Rocky's manic, accusatory voice: "What was that? You need something, Henry?"

"Uh…no. I'm fine. It's nothing." Only then did he notice the two low-profile video cameras, one in front of him and one behind, discretely mounted in the ceiling alongside the track lighting power junctions, and thus, easily overlooked. Somewhere there were sensitive microphones for recording sound as well, though Henry couldn't yet place them.

"You sure?" Rocky continued, "Because if your accommodations aren't up to your usual lavish standard, I want to remedy your discomfort.

"I was reading about Google the other day on someone's blog: Did you know they provide free, onsite massage for their employees? They actually have a salaried masseuse on staff-a millionaire masseuse, now, because she cashed in all her stock options. Apparently, perks like these in the workplace are a real boon to productivity. So anything we can do for you, Henry, like I said, just ask."

"I'm OK."

"You don't need anything? You sure? If you're hungry, I could have one my men order some pizza."

"No. I'm fine. I wasn't complaining about the accommodations. It's this scroll. It's a fake."

"Say again?"

"The scroll. It's a fraud. I can't imagine the Brotherh-our mutual employer-would be happy about the cost of retaining your services to have me wasting my expertise on an obviously bogus document."

"A fake… Right, right, right-well, that's interesting… You sure?"

"Ninety-eight-percent."

"Close enough for government work, but then, I wouldn't be here babysitting you if Uncle Sam's posse was up to snuff. Ask yourself Henry, do you really believe, that men with the power to hire other men to break the law on their behalf, would waste a second of their precious time investigating a document that some gecko-eyed, panty-sniffing, pervert-turned-preacher, could so conclusively dismiss as fraudulent in mere minutes? Is that not the height of arrogance? I mean, you haven't even opened the manila envelope I instructed you to review.

"You know what the Big Boss Man told me I should do in the event you stall?"

"No, I don't."

"He said I should, quote, ‘crack the whip,' to instill in you the proper sense of urgency… Is it just me, Henry? Or is ‘Cindy In Shackles' just about the perfect title for a porn flick?"

Henry pretended not to grok his implication. Said nothing.

His silence apparently didn't please Rocky. "Did anybody ever tell you you're about as compelling as a black and white television?"

Henry took that to mean Rocky wanted a response. "I'm unquestionably an introvert if that's what you mean."

"It doesn't matter, Henry. Just start making me look good. ‘Kay?"

"I will."

"Undoubtedly… Hey, real quick: ‘captive-cam-girls-dot-com?' or ‘cam-girls-held-captive-dot-com?' And this time you'd better answer."

"I prefer the second version."

"Me too…good, good, good—so: You take a look at whatever's inside the envelope, and then give that scroll another gander. If you still think it's a fake, let me know, and I'll pass along some news I'm sure the Big Kahuna would be very disappointed to hear. Deal?"

"Deal," Henry said. He heard a click and the absence of static from the speakers which let him know Rocky had ended the conversation.

He opened the manila envelope and took out two photocopied pages and a typed letter. The photocopied items were lab reports. The first, a carbon dating analysis, and the second, a DNA analysis which included some information on blood-type, similar to what forensics investigators might use to tie a suspect to a particular crime scene.

He examined the carbon-dating analyses first, of which, there were two: one for a millimeter square of parchment, the other performed on remnants of blood scraped from, as it was described in the report, ‘...undecipherable script from previously tested parchment scroll.' Henry carefully read the usual parameters describing testing conditions, machine calibration, and methods used until he found the estimation of the scroll's age—and just as importantly—the age of the blood / ink used to compose it. If the ages of the two samples varied greatly from one another, that would be rather conclusive evidence the scroll was a forgery. As would an age less than the scroll's manner and style of composition suggested.

Well that can't be…

Henry blinked a few times to make sure he wasn't hallucinating. Re-read the results: both the parchment and the ink samples were between nine and ten-thousand-years-old-and therefore one of the oldest examples of human writing ever discovered. Written language itself was assumed to have developed no more than 10,000 years ago in pre-Sumerian culture, the only surviving examples of which being cuneiform account ledgers carved into kiln-dried clay tablets. But this wasn't clay. Short of the ultra-high tech, vacuum-sealed, UV-shielding techniques available today, Henry couldn't imagine parchment lasting for much more than 2-to-3 thousand years, max. Let alone blood.

He turned his attention to the blood typing and DNA analysis:

Species: primate / human? Race: inconclusive. Type: AB+.

Human, question mark… Excuse me? Henry scanned for names of the laboratories that had performed each analysis: Alpha Analytic Labs in Phoenix for the DNA testing, and for the carbon dating, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. Reputable outfits, both.

But if you're going to go through the trouble of forging scientific documents in an attempt to authenticate your forgery, Henry thought, then why not show a little more confidence? especially when the species of the blood sample has no bearing on the purported age of the document?

With no answers of his own, he read the accompanying letter:

 

Henry,

 

Brotherhood material, you're not. But neither are you stupid. By now, I'm sure, you will have read the preamble to Nahor's Revelation, and begun to recognize the necessity of Cindy's capture and subsequent rough treatment: i.e., though you profess to seek the truth regarding the End Times, your allegiances may prove too strong to betray without further incentive.

Perhaps, in the process of completing your work, you will realize the error of your ways. Perhaps not. But irrespective of the fate of your soul, know this: your captor's eagerness to inflict abject misery upon Cindy is held in check only by your diligent cooperation in translating our scroll in its entirety.

 

Sincerely,

 

The Bostonian

 

My allegiances? Error of my ways?

Disciplined restraint gave way to panicked curiosity. Henry bent to work on the scroll's preamble, transposing the Golden Age Biblical Hebrew into handwritten English he scrawled onto a legal pad.

 

The Last Revelation Unto The Prophet Nahor:

By the blood once sanctified, made impure, so let it be written, these words, carried by His angel Gabriel from Him Most High to his loyal prophet Nahor, honored scribe among a loyal people whom have pleased God.

To the sons of Methuselah, son of Enoch, son of Jared. Hear My words, ye who are true to My laws. Take comfort in what shall be revealed to you. Know that you have pleased the Lord thy God, and shall be rewarded for your holiness now, even as you shall be spared my wrath in those last days when others are not spared. Hear My words faithful servants, and learn how you shall further please me, that you may enjoy the full measure of my favor.

From this day forward, you shall rid the Earth of the abominations whose blood, your blessed scribe Nahor doth use to preserve My Word. For mankind has cried out to Me, protesting the torments inflicted upon them by the biters, those bastard sons of the angels who left their estate. And I heard their prayers, but saw also their wickedness. And I sent waters from the founts of the oceans and down from the heavens to drown the reprobates and those who had succumbed to their evils. And yet still they live on, punishing My creation, mocking the covenant I have made, trumpeting their escape from the deluge I have promised never again to unleash. Therefore, loyal servants, shall you render unto them their fate.

You shall hunt the Nephilim with the unwavering constancy of your prayers. You shall capture them and empty their flesh of all their cursed blood, that they may know the second death, the everlasting torment in the fires of the pit. And you shall not rest, not even unto the hundredth generation, nor unto the thousandth, until the Earth is cleansed of their stain. Thus sayeth the Lord thy God whom you have pleased.

You will know them by their hunger. You will know them by their youth which does not fade. You will see their sin and their lust shall offend thee, and the brides of man shall go unto to them to be defiled and cursed while laughing like corrupted children. And you shall lure them and overwhelm them one at a time by force of numbers, and you shall drain their blood or pierce their heart, so their soul is cast down into the eternal pit of sulfur and flame where the fallen angels and the devil who is Satan burn forever.

And so My faithful children, whom the Lord thy God delights in because you have upheld My laws; whom I have chosen as select even among My chosen people; go forth and honor thy Lord and pour the blood of the Nephilim out upon the Earth, that their fathers the Watchers may hear their cries from the void and quake in anticipation of My imminent judgment.

For this you shall be rewarded. For you shall have upheld My Law. For you shall have removed the scourge. And though you are holy and I have anointed thee warriors upon the Earth, you shall be derided among men, and you shall suffer greatly under those who would twist the truths you so jealously guard. And they shall claim for themselves the salvation that is rightly yours.

But lo! You shall be spared when others are not spared. You shall know the fate of the disciples of the Teacher of Righteousness yet come, who is not the true Teacher, but who will deceive many. And this also shall be your reward, that when the last of the first generation of the biters is no more upon the Earth, so will the End of Days be nigh. And you shall know of this day by the sign I shall now reveal to you, through the hand of the blessed scribe Nahor, and with the blood of the first of their demise, who goes by Sarkatheel.

For it shall be written, ‘no man knoweth the hour,' and so in those last days I will send a prophet, and he will read My Word that no man may yet read nor has ever read, and you shall hear its mysteries and be comforted.

Behold: In those last days, the blood of the wicked will damn them. For it is written: ‘The blood is the life,' And so shall it be written in those last days: ‘The blood is their death.'

 

Rereading the Preamble to Nahor's Revelation aloud made the fine oily hairs on his arms dance like iron filings under a magnet, much as they had to the holy harmonics of the SOJ's chanting back at the auditorium. Evidence far more convincing to Henry, as to the scroll's authenticity, than a carbon dating analysis.

There could be no doubt. This was the genuine Word of God.

And what Words!

What beautiful, thrilling Words.

 

...I will send a prophet, and he will read My Word that no man may yet read nor has ever read…

 

And for a moment, the ominous threats and ultimatums of the accompanying letter were forgotten. Henry stood and blinked moisture into his eyes, holding onto the back of his chair for balance, dizzied by the weight of implication. I am the prophet, he realized. Sent by the Lord to reveal a Great Sign. I am the beginning of the End of Days…

So why?

Again, the gnawing question: Why had the Brotherhood felt it necessary to coerce his cooperation by threatening harm to Cindy? Was he not an honored and eager servant of God? The ultimate volunteer? And one would think Rocky ought to know better, given his boast about filling down time by reading personal growth literature; to incentivize an activity one carries out for the simple intrinsic joy inherent in the activity, diminishes the joy, and turns a hobby into a job-Motivational Psych 101.

The Bostonian's letter said it was a question of his ‘allegiances.' Allegiances to what? to whom? To Henry, not understanding was even worse than the accusation. ‘But neither are you stupid,' he'd written-suggesting he was indeed a blithering idiot-blind to something in the scroll which should have been glaringly obvious to someone thus anointed.

The angst made him feel steadier on his feet. He let go of the chair back and paced around the conference table in a slow orbit of contemplation. Thus far, only the Preamble was decipherable, and the Brotherhood knew no more than he did about the contents of their scroll. So he needed to look more critically at what he'd just translated. Needed to consider the myriad interpretations of Nahor's Revelation to see if he could start to make since his imprisonment… Maybe it was the Nephilim references? Had the Brotherhood feared how he'd react to the existence of blood guzzling human-gel hybrids? Did they worry this interesting nugget of bio-biblical trivia would-what?-send him to cower inside the nearest bomb shelter until the scourge had been removed? Or perhaps they realized their impersonation of an ancient Christian sect would eventually be exposed by the age of the scroll? By their own analysis, Nahor wetted the gevil with Sarkatheel's blood long before Christ walked the earth. Which begged the question: why pretend to be a Christian sect in the first place? The references in the Preamble to Methuselah, Enoch, and Jared were familiar to any student of the Torah, the holy text of the Hebrew God, worshipped by Jews and Christians, and (presumably) the Sons of Jared alike. Although Henry sensed this latter line of reasoning might bear fruit, it didn't seem to account for the extremes taken by the SOJ to enforce compliance.

He turned away from the table and walked over to the room divider. Cindy swayed in silence behind the chemo-luminescent barrier, her skin the sickly green of gutted firefly smear in the virtual dark, wide-eyed inside her glass cage like a serpent at the reptile house. He remembered her screams: clipped and distorted over the intercom, fading to a defeated whimper as they held her down and eroded her will with jolts from the car battery. Devout men had allowed that to happen. Men who knew they'd one day have to stand before God and account for her treatment. Men who trusted in the sanctity of their convictions with the same confidence they predicted Henry would oppose them. What gave them such faith? A faith so pure, so unwavering, not even his precious Cindy...Sinnnn-Deee…could weaken it. Whatever it was, he was determined to find out.

He sat back down at the conference table and reread his hastily scrawled translation from the legal pad. Yet again, the Holy Spirit infused scripture made his scalp tingle. A bit of a distraction. So Henry rewrote the entire passage in a simpler, unadorned language, devoid of the oratorical thunder present in his initial King James style rendition. More of an outline, really. He hoped that a more sterile, academic prose would be less of an impairment to his interpretive faculties:

 

Hi, Nahor. My name's Gabriel. I'm an angel. This here is Sarkatheel, a Naphil. I'm going to help you record a message from God using his blood.

Why you? Because the Lord loves a zealot. And you just happen to be the scribe for an entire hermetic order of zealots. Zealots whom He Most High would like to reward.

But before we talk about the fabulous prizes in store for spiritual descendants of your tradition, God has a job for you…

 

And so on.

Still fairly provocative rhetoric, but this wording drew attention to three passages which Henry had mostly ignored in the previous version. In particular-but before he could complete the thought, a sudden movement in his periphery caused him to look up from his work.

Cindy had emerged from her stupor.

She was on her feet, less than a foot from the hi-tech glass wall, staring directly at him. Which was, of course, impossible. Merely an illusion. No different than than eery eye tracking performed by the subject of a portrait photographed while peering into the lens. Only the infrared refraction polymer allowed Henry to see her, technology not in play on that side of the wall. Nevertheless, Henry stared back at her, transfixed. She was, after all, a beautiful gir-woman!-Henry scolded himself sub-vocally (no sense arousing Rocky's suspicion over the hidden room monitors with audible expressions of self contempt).

Cindy slowly brought her head forward, inching her face closer and closer to the glass. She probed the darkness like a tentative box turtle emerging from its shell, flinching backward a hair only after the tip of her nose made contact with the invisible barrier. Did she just?-No way! Henry couldn't believe what he was seeing: not quite a smile-more of a smirk-but an unmistakable labial semaphore of amusement either way.

She folded in her lips, applying imaginary chapstick. They reappeared a second later. Dry. Not moist. Slightly parted.

Now what was she up to? Yawning? No, because if she were, her eyelids would involuntarily sag, or shroud the eyes altogether. Nor was she showing all that many teeth, a natural result of the ‘fang baring' expression elicited by an authentic yawn, and which the ‘hand-covering-mouth' gesture, also absent, probably evolved to conceal (Body Language but one more in his arsenal of fluency).

Her chin arced up a degree as her mouth opened swab-for-strep-throat wide, a pose Henry found inexplicably awww-rousing. And then, at the height of his bewilderment, Cindy made clear her intentions with a single puff of air. As she exhaled, her warm breath condensed into a moist film against the cool surface of the glass, into which she wrote a single letter: an ‘i' which faded into vapor seconds later as if it had never been there. She followed it with an ‘f' a ‘u' a ‘c' an ‘a' and an ‘n' down-the-line to a final ‘e.'

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