Mitch Tells All
Jeff
"The place to start…okay, I know that some of y'all have heard some of this before. I mean, really, I'm not saying anything we don't all already know. But just so we're all on the same page: let's start with my first trip up to Shasta, with the Beehives. Back in Febuary. That's when I met Bigfoot Pete, and Ol' Vera. And, uh, Master Jiyu. Jiyu's a different kettle of fish entirely. Nice lady…anyway, first trip was when I saw the tunnels." Mitch ticks these items off on his fingers: Pete, Vera, tunnels. "Bigfoot Pete is a local guide up there. He's had some encounters, but, you know, he sees everything through the Bigfoot lens. Like, once I was meditating and sort of sending my consciousness out and I saw him and he saw me, my astral form I guess, and anyway he thought I was Bigfoot. He was with me when I met the Comte for the first time, but that was the second trip. Anyway, Bigfoot Pete has been living on and near the mountain for a while, he had a campsite he was living at, or he's staying in town. You wouldn't look at him twice, except he's…I don't know how to say it. One of the special people? Somebody marked by extended exposure to History-B energies? One favored by the gods? Like me. Me and the Oldtimer and Ol' Vera, and Andy Krane. Bigfoot Pete is a swell guy. Not much else to say about him. "Ol' Vera, on the other hand…" Mitch sighs. "Ol' Vera is soaked in History-B. She's known in this world as Nola Van Valer, founder of the Radiant School of Seekers and Servers, which is basically just a mailing list nowadays. Back in 1930 she met somebody she called Phylos, on the slopes of Mount Shasta, and he taught her and her husband and their friends a bunch of mystic blah-blah-blah. Phylos was an irruptor, I guess? One of the dumb angelic ones? "Incidentally, am I the only person who looks at the palimpsest nature of history and the mutable nature of reality and concludes that it's not necessarily meaningful to distinguish between a thing that happened and a thing that retroactively once-upon-a-time happened? Is there such a thing as an irruptor that isn't irrupting right now, or is that stain on history better understood as a discrete phenomenon?"
Mitch shakes his head. "Sorry. Getting afield, here. Ol' Vera founded a cult and wrote some books and the Beehives introduced me to her as a…example of a local Shasta mystic, I guess? When I met her, she told me I was one of the…I forget the words she used, her point was, hey, you're the guy who masterminded my mystic revelations back in the 20s, 30s, you haven't aged because of magic, and at the time I didn't have anything to connect that to, but it seems clear now she met my evil twin and he started her on the road to the whole cult thing. "Then Ol' Vera put the mental whammy on me and the Beehives, some kind of screen memory, next thing I know we're walking out of her little house…she's like eighty, ninety years old, she has a full-time nurse…we're walking out of her little house full of false memories of a blandly pleasant coffeeklatch, and I figure, shit, that wasn't very nice of her but she's an old lady, if I tell anybody Marshall's just going to have her assassinated or something. So I didn't mention Ol' Vera until now. Didn't tell the Beehives about her. Beehives seemed to think she was a SANDMAN asset. For the most limited definition of asset, somebody whose agenda is more or less in line with ours? They wouldn't have knowingly marched me into meet the High Priestess of the Red Kings, Northern California branch. "Last thing on the first trip was the tunnels. I said before I did some astral projection out there. I wasn't really trying to, I was meditating and I felt…keyed in to the whole thing, you know? I could explore the mountain a little bit and I sensed tunnels, golden tunnels, inside the mountain, and there was a golden chamber with magic lights and…I want to say seven angelic beings, and it matched up really suspiciously closely with some of the historic descriptions the Beehives gave me, enough that at the time I was suspicious I was interpreting the sensory input through that lens. That they'd primed me like that, without meaning to. Like if I'd seen Disney's Snow White right before, I would instead have seen, like, diamond mines and little singing men with mattocks. "There were petroglyphs I didn't get a chance to see, too. Anyway, that's the first trip, this past spring." Mitch sips his coffee, but clearly has more to say—he's not taking questions, yet.
"Then I went out again after the whole Houdini thing, right before the St. Francis operation. That was a bad time. I talked to Jiyu about the nature of reality for a bit, and she suggested I visit the summit of the mountain, so we got Bigfoot Pete on the horn and he and I hiked up. He didn't recognize me. I mean, he recognized me as a lodge brother, remembered meeting me before. But he didn't recognize me as the Bigfoot he'd seen that time I astral projected. He tried to tell me that story, cast it as his most recent Bigfoot encounter, actually. "We were hiking up and all of a sudden the Voice of the Archons is thundering in my ears, commanding me to escort him to the summit. That was my first hit of the Comte: disembodied voice telling me what to do. And it was the thing I was going to do anyway, which really pissed me off. Like, I almost aborted the climb then, just to spite the fucker. Pardon my French. "Anyway, the climb was more of a thing than I'd thought it was gonna be, slow going. But we made it and we were up on top, looking around, and then Bigfoot Pete froze up and I felt the Comte pop in, like he'd materialized or teleported or he'd been invisibly trailing us and dropped his spell. "The Comte is this little guy, pale, ageless. He was dressed like somebody took their King of France costume on a camping trip and ended up living in a cave for twenty years. Fur stole, crown. Crown had a glyph on it, the glyph was what froze Peter up. I tried to melt the crown first thing but it was magic, so it resisted my pyrokinesis until the Comte took it off his head and tossed it aside, where it melted into a little puddle of gold foil. "The whole time he was talking to me about how special I am and how he has information he wants to share with me and a secret mission and… then the asshole apologized to me on behalf of the Red Kings." Mitch makes an exaggerated shrugging gesture, like can you believe what I'm saying? I can't!
"Asshole says, my evil twin is out here in the world, that he was born in 1900 or so, went rogue, and that I'm a weapon the Red Kings manufactured to find him and kill him and I won't be able to avoid carrying out the Red Kings' desires. Asshole says, no matter what I try to do, I'm going to meet my evil twin and kill him and it'll all be according to Their plans. My evil twin will try to suborn me but he won't be expecting me to be able to light him on fire with my mind. Says the asshole, anyway. "Asshole also says we, SANDMAN, should recruit Bigfoot Pete, because he's on the trolley I guess. Asshole actually says 'SANDMAN,' for what that's worth. Then the asshole left… no, crap. Asshole gave me a runestone and left. I forgot. When I melted his crown that was keeping Bigfoot Pete down, he pulled out a runestone and he left that behind. I say he left, he physically went over the side of the mountain and started climbing down. I didn't try to track or follow him. I was pretty upset." Mitch shrugs again, this time in a what can you do? sort of way, indicating that he's open for questions at this point, if there are any.
Leonard
Jocasta looks down at her notes.
1. Beehive?
2. Evil twin?
3. Runestone?
"I have, uh, a few questions, I think. Let's work our way back: do you still have the runestone?" she says. She thinks to herself, maybe I should have shot him at the hotel.
Jeff
"It's in a shoebox behind my water heater, yeah."
Brant
“What is it with you and the elderly, man? I mean — I guess — I don’t know. Zeb, this Nola woman. Your twin.”
Jeff
"I dunno, man, I didn't ask for any of this. There's a bunch of old people that the Kings have used as cutouts and recruited and played or tricked....you know that as well as me, man. You know as much as I do."
Brant
“I’m confused by all these different, ah, special people. We’re special, right? The six — well, seven of us, with Abeille — we are special. We’re in the club. But this Pete person, and Krane. Nola. You say they’re special, too? Like you? Are they all people who are supposed to be in the club? Are they also … were they also ostensibly ‘created’ by the opposition to do something? Is that what makes them special?”
Jeff
"It's... there's two different clubs. Metaphysical clubs. The seven of us (Viv should be here, it's weird she's not) are one club. Right this second I regret ever bringing that club up, because it's muddying the waters and it's not something we need to focus on now or ever. But there's a second club that's me and Pete and Krane and Ol' Vera and the Oldtimer, and I don't know what that club is for, who else is in it I don't know, but I'm in it and... lodge brothers helping lodge brothers."
Leonard
“Okay,” Jocasta mutters, like she’s trying to work her way through an elaborate court transcript. “Maybe I’m not understanding this, or maybe I’m just not the right kind of enlightened, but are you saying that, first of all, an entity you are certain is working on behalf of the Red Kings told you that you were on a mission, also on behalf of the Red Kings, to kill your evil twin? Doesn’t that imply that you’re the evil twin?” She pauses and rubs her eyes with her thumb and forefingers. “And if Vera and the old man are pawns of the kings, however unknowingly or unwittingly, and you feel like you’re in fraternity with them…Jesus, Mitch. I don’t know. Are you suggesting there are factions inside the enemy, just like there are in SANDMAN? Or…” She leans back in her chair, idly sketching in her notebook. “Too much. Too many mirrors.”
Jeff
Mitch looks like he dropped a fork at a nice restaurant. "Yeah, I know … I mean, I dunno how much Comte said that should be taken at face value, first off. But the idea of there being another me out there lines up with the Oldtimer and Vera recognizing me. The thing about me being the Kings' unwitting pawn, man, maybe. Maybe we all are. The Oldtimer and Ol' Vera and Bigfoot Pete are all people who have been tricked and manipulated by them a bunch. Maybe that's what that is."
"But I don't think there's factions among the Enemy because I don't think the Enemy exists like that. The Enemy is a story that snaps into existence whenever things line up such that the Enemy was there all along; there's not a home base they have in a pocket dimension where they have meetings like these and talk about... what's to be done with Charley Helix, or shit like that."
Brant
Marshall reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a hankerchief. He blows his nose and then pockets it. His pupils are a bit dilated. "But — but even if they are just stories that manifest when the conditions are right — even if they're not like the Soviets, you know, plotting and planning over in some frozen shit-hole country somewhere — they could have factions if the story was that they had factions. Or if things line up in such a way that factions are required by the ontology. But that doesn't … shit, man." He sighs. "This is real FUBAR territory."
Jeff
"Jeez, yeah. I hadn't thought of it that way. Jo's right."
Rob
"My goodness!" Archie's been leaning forward, elbows on his knees, listening to Mitch's story. Now he leans back in his wingback chair. "First of all, thank you for sharing that, Mitch. That's … a lot to have been carrying around all this time. It must be discomfiting to be the recipient of so much, ah, personal attention from the other side. If we stick a pin in the more philosophical questions, just for the moment, how can we help you with this situation? Is there action we can take? Is there anything you need us or want us to do?"
Then Archie shifts into planning / thinking aloud mode. "It sounds like been you've been in contact with two individuals we can be confident are working for the competition: this woman - Vera? Van Valer? and this 'Comte.' Don't worry: we don't need to have the 'Zeb' argument again. It sounds like whatever work this woman did for the Red Kings was forty years ago. We can put her on a watch list, see what became of her cult, at the very least we ought to clue in the Beehives--sorry, Ostrander and Schroeder — but she doesn't sound too dangerous."
"This 'Comte' is another matter. Is he … a person? An irruptor? And he claims to speak for the Red Kings? I would be very careful about trusting, or even thinking too much, about anything he says."
Jeff
"Well, I wanted to talk about it after I got back, but that morning was the RFK posters, and then the whole thing at the con, and after that it just...I just wanted a break, and I put off bringing it up until Roger had a Comte encounter." Mitch nods toward Roger. "Guy seemed flesh-and-blood to me, acted like we were a couple of humans talking human-style about inhuman numinous beings, but I dunno."
Bill
Roger pipes up: “He felt much more like a spirit to me. He had to use another body to manifest, at least down off the holy mountain. And he knew uncanny things, like the spirits do. He was also an asshole, that I can corroborate.”
“I think he rode the frog thing like a loa rides the cheval. Like a kind of super ekkimu. And yeah, he was all prophetic and destiny crazy.”
“It’s funny though, he is so insistent that we work to go down the path of destiny. Like we could miss it, even though it’s fated. Very confusing. Plus he sounded as UFO-crazy as the Israelis. Everybody wants us chasing saucers.”
“He said something like we would have been going after the saucers, but something changed, so now we wouldn’t, so he came to make sure we would.”
“You can read the transcript.”
Jeff
"Makes my head hurt, trying to suss out motivations."
Brant
“So what’s the play here?”
Leonard
"Well, if that many people we don't trust are telling us to track down little green men, we should probably just write them off," Jocasta says. "Beyond that...Christ." She flips through her sketchbook and stares at some drawings she made of kusarikku and girtablilu. "I think we have to stop questioning motivations and loyalties. We know that we...this heptad, this shichifukujin, is special, and we have to trust in it. Everything else, well...we know the Kings are real. We have seen their servants manifest in the world. We have heard their tales, lies or not. We have faced them and slain them. We know what they want and how they try to get it. We can trust that too. It may be that those factors are all we can trust. Maybe that's just my paranoid mind, or maybe it's just me finally waking up to the fact that there are people who counted on that paranoia paralyzing and confusing me the way it has far too many times before. But if we strip it back to first principles -- that we know and stand against the Red Kings, and that it's our job to keep doing it -- then we are moving in the right direction." She rummages in her bag for the crutch she reaches for every time a conversation makes her nervous, and gets as far as opening the small brass catch on her leather cigarette case before closing it again. "What we don't do is buy into anyone else's vision of the future -- the Red Kings or anyone else's. What we don't do is let our work be steered by men who think of the fight against them as secondary to their private passions, whether that's some corporate factory-farm utopia filled with charming and credulous dupes or...or anything else. We have the tools and the skills to fight the fight we were selected for, but if the brass has a strategy they won't share with us...or worse, if they have conflicting and contradictory strategies or no strategies at all , then it's up to us to define the contours of the fight."
[Jocasta wants to do a quick Occult roll to see if anything that's been said so far triggers a memory or a pattern or anything. Nothing I'm expecting, just want to make sure there's nothing she should know that I don't.]
"At the very least, Marshall," she sighs, "Let's hope that you fucked the spoon man's head up pretty good. If that's the future of humanity, count me out."
Michael
[Jocasta wants to do a quick Occult roll to see if anything that's been said so far triggers a memory or a pattern or anything. Nothing I'm expecting, just want to make sure there's nothing she should know that I don't.]
Occultism-17, go for it.
Leonard
>>>> SUCCESS by 5
[Made by 5.]
Michael
Jocasta first considers her earlier comment: "Are you suggesting there are factions inside the enemy, just like there are in SANDMAN?" Let's suppose that's true. Let's just sort of... pre-suppose it. Just as a thought experiment. What would that mean? Well, it would mean that some people who either fall under the spell of the Kings or even those who claim to come from History B, like Mitch's twin, like Zeb, can go rogue, rebel against the Kings for their own purposes, selfish (Zeb's love of liquor and food and women and History A music) or not. That they can be seduced by what this world has to offer, just as Anunnaki cultists from History A are seduced by what Their world has to offer. Jo considers the Illuminated that Mitch has listed: himself, Zeb, Nola, Peter, Andy. What if these people are especially crucial linchpins to the war between histories? After all, Zeb is very special, if he's a human irruptor who was born and raised in and from an actual (perceived) History B? What if Nola's help to Mitch's twin was essential for this twin's mission here? What if Andrew Krane's novels were meant to give URIEL a hand up to know what was coming their way? And Mitch, it's pretty clear what Mitch did on the roof of the St. Francis was in its way a refutation of the war between A and B. Mitch's seeking of a History C, of seeking a way to move the Kings out of the "stack" and make them less close to History A... well that seems pretty crucial to the war between worlds. Whether or not Mitch is an instrument of Them, was engineered by Them... well, it also definitely does seem like these Illuminated are at the very least liminal figures, able to bridge gaps between Histories, able to operate in either world. The irruptors always do seem to give Mitch a wide berth. As far as the saucers go, what the Comte said to Roger, "In the halls and chambers of the saucer, every man meets his nemesis," Jocasta remembers what she was thinking when she thought the people who put the chip in Charley's head might have literally been saucer people but that they also could have been Accelerationists looking to awaken Charley into a new paradigm of being and knowing: whatever the case, the saucer is like the alchemical forge, an alembic meant to burn away the old world and usher in the new. Jocasta now wonders if the History B folks want to collapse that memetic waveform, and make the saucers into their harbingers. In the halls and chambers of the saucer, every man meets his nemesis. The words echo in Jocasta's head. That's pure New Age/human potential stuff.
Brant
“So who are our players? Red Kings, naturally — and their agents. Nola. The — ah, the Comte? All the Carls and Riches of the world.” He counts off his fingers. “Rogue elements from History B? I guess? Mitch’s twin. That’s two. Then you’ve got this … cabal within SANDMAN. That’s Henry and whoever their agents are. Maybe everyone. Maybe we’re not even agents … maybe we’re just experiments. Sorry, no, disregard that. Anyway. SANDMAN or a cabal within SANDMAN. But if it’s a cabal, that gives us a fourth player, we’ll call it legitimate SANDMAN. And then who else? Us?”
Marshall shoots a look at Roger. “You’re going to need to debug this place first thing tomorrow, you know that, right? Maybe we should do that before we even leave … if SANDMAN has bugged this place … I mean, I thought we’d be fine talking here if we were all on the same team. Club! Fuck.”
“Shit. What if they’re listening right now?” He looks around nervously. “No, that’s absurd. Active surveillance. No need. Too expensive.”
Leonard
"We only know what we know. The more we speculate, the easier prey we are for people trying to manipulate us to their ends." Jocasta doesn't say anything about her thoughts -- just yet. She pause to write in her notebook, under a series of boxes representing diverging realities: SHALL I PROJECT A WORLD? "I think we have to act as if...as if we're a unit lost behind enemy lines. We're cut off from our own side, and the enemy is all around us. We don't know what to trust, since all our communications are one way. We have to keep fighting. And maybe our unit will be reunited with our company, and we'll know them by their uniforms, and they'll have new orders and new strategy. But in the meantime, we just have to fight on our terms, and that means being open to the idea that the people on our side aren't always on our side, but also that there are people who want to defect from the other side." This time she does light a Slim. "Something to think about, though...if History B isn't 'real', if it's just retrocreated by the existence of enough people who believe in it and want to see it express itself anew, if just the right people talking about it can make it real...maybe the same thing goes for factions among the Red Kings. Maybe they're real and maybe not, but maybe they're becoming more real. Maybe right now at this very minute. You know?"
Brant
Marshall whispers under his breath, faintly: “Still in that fucking jungle.”
Jeff
"Uh... anyway, one thing we should do, like, next actions? We should go camping. Maybe meet Bigfoot Pete." Mitch lights a cig. "See what the sacred mountain looks like through y'all's eyes."
Mel
Charley pipes up at the mention of camping. “Camping! Can we go tomorrow?!”
Brant
Marshall looks at his Rolex.
"I think that's probably up to Archie." He clears his throat. "But, ah, Charley -- what did you make of Puharich? Did he tell you anything while we were in the garage?"
Marshall shoots a look at Roger. “You’re going to need to debug this place first thing tomorrow, you know that, right? Maybe we should do that before we even leave … if SANDMAN has bugged this place … I mean, I thought we’d be fine talking here if we were all on the same team. Club! Fuck.”
Bill
"I think that's probably up to Archie." He clears his throat. "But, ah, Charley -- what did you make of Puharich? Did he tell you anything while we were in the garage?"
"Remind me to debug the tents."
Mel
Charley was just about to bug Archie about visiting Bigfoot Pete when Marshall’s question interrupts that action. “I didn’t like him. But I was polite and he invited me to his new and improved secret school at um his Estate in New York.”
Brant
Marshall pinches the bridge of his nose. “Estate in New York,” he sighs. “Jesus Christ.”
Leonard
"Actually," says Jocasta, "that reminds me of something I wanted to pitch to you and Archie, Marshall. We can talk about the details later, but it might not be a bad idea, if Charley is willing, to have her look in on the place, and for us to do a little … friendly visit to New York SANDMAN. With the ground shifting as it seems to be, we might want to get a better sense of exactly how some of the other divisions are operating, see if people like Puharić are outliers or whether their approach is more widely influential."
Brant
“Dangerous. But we could possibly fold that into getting Houdini on the inside … ” He trails off and looks to Archie.
Rob
Archie answers Charley first: "We can't just up and go camping tomorrow, sweetpea. We're going to the farmers' market, remember? But some of us, or all of us, could make a trip to Mount Shasta at some point. If Mitch really thinks it's important."
"As for the rest... we've had a lot of revelations tonight. If we're going to tug at any of these threads, we need to tread carefully. We need to know more, a lot more, about all of this, and we shouldn't make any drastic moves, or changes to our routines, until we do."
Then back to Charley: "But you did a great job with Puharich, Charley. I knew we could count on you."
Brant
Marshall stands to leave. “I gotta go. Tomorrow we need to sweep this house, our offices — all our places. We have to sweep them for bugs. I suggest we have Charley do that with Roger’s help. Start here and work through all our places. And the offices.” He puts his jacket on. “I know how this sounds. But with the changing landscape we need to get back to first principles.” He pats his pockets and takes out his keys. “Shit. Guess I need to drive myself back.”