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From the Journal of Caleb Michael Smith

 

Josh and I were having dinner at The Eucalyptus ( http://www.the-eucalyptus.com/ ), an amazing place in the Artist’s Quarter Jerusalem. As we were waiting for the check, I got a powerful intuition to check out a particular warehouse in the center of the city. I do not know why I get these feelings and I hate them, but they have proven useful in the past. So, as Josh paid the bill, I dug out a generous tip from my wallet. I stood to leave to go look for a warehouse that I was not sure existed when I saw Joshua, Father Joshua, chatting up our waitress, who was a knockout if I do say so myself. I walked up to him and said with mock severity, “Joshua? New friend?” He looked at me and said “Caleb, this is Ahuva. Ahuva, this is my little brother, Caleb.” She extended her hand, flashed me a smile that I felt down below and said: “So nice to meet you, Caleb.”
“Pleasure”, I responded. Then I said to Josh, “Hey, I have got to check something out. Gotta go.” Josh said, “Wait, I’ll go with you.” I held up my hand and said that I would not hear of it and Josh put up no further argument, as I hoped he would not.
I left the restaurant and started walking without a plan. In half an hour I came upon a warehouse that did not look abandoned but looked abandoned at the same time. I walked over to a door and found that it was open, which was odd. As I stepped over the threshold I heard the words “Caleb Smith! Your gifts are coming to the fore!” and then, silence. As I stood there in the dark,fumbling for a small flashlight in my pocket, the warehouse lights came on followed by the sound of a steel door slamming shut. As I looked around and finally above me, I saw something that made my blood run cold….dozens of arms, cut off at the elbow hanging by zip cord from the ceiling. I felt something drip onto my shoulder. I looked up and saw a set of arms that were still bleeding…this kill was so fresh that it still bled! I know this was meant to scare me, but all it did was steel my resolve to find this killer (killers). After I called the police and the Association clean-up squad, I called Josh to let him know what I had found. When he picked up and said hello, I heard a feminine voice in the background call out to him with these words “Josh! The shower is ready!” Josh asked me what I needed. I told him that it would keep. So, there I stood, body parts hanging from the ceiling of a warehouse, wondering at the evil of the world, glad that my brother had completed the first major part of his mission.

From the Journal of Caleb Michael Smith

 

Got a call from my wife tonight. She and my sister, Patty, are safely living at our parent’s house. It was through the efforts of my grandfather and father that The Association has become so outrageously wealthy. It always “had money”, but the patents of my father and grandfather have been so lucrative and have been of such benefit to every Western govt on the planet, that our reserves are, more or less, unlimited. These reserves extend directly to my family’s finances and my family has been able to buy a huge tract of land between my house and my father’s/grandfather’s house, roughly 140 square miles. My great-great grandfather wanted to do this, but it was only recently that we could do it. My father wants to call it the “Smith Compound” and have all of his children and other extended family build their homes on it. Given the family predilection for depression and, in some cases, suicide, having a huge piece of land where the entire family can be close to one another makes us all feel better somehow.

From the Journal of Caleb Michael Smith.

As I wrote several weeks ago, my wife and my sister are at my parent’s house because Harry was concerned for their safety. Harry sensed that there was danger in the air and I have learned, after a lifetime of knowing him, to trust his sensing of things.
I went from an undergraduate to my first Ph.D. in four semesters, and I have not ever been able to figure out Harry. He is both my and Joshua’s best friend and still, I feel that I do not know him while he has always seemed to know things about me that no one should be able to know. He has always looked at me with a knowing grin, not even bothering to hide it! Yet, I trust him with my life; a trust that has been tested several times over the years.
Harry is a good man, a very good man (hell, he’s going to be my brother-in-law as soon as Joshua can perform the ceremony) but there is something very dark inside Harry…not bad, not evil (Ora is the embodiment of pure evil) but dark. Where most of us seem to have a light shining from deep within us, Harry has a shadow. How else can I put this? It is that darkness that I trust. It is Harry’s shadow-self that has always appealed to me as his friend and I do not know why. It is the darkness that allowed him to sense the danger that was surrounding Gemma and Patty. It is that shadow-self that has thrown itself in front of danger that I did not even see. My mother and father, the best judges of character I know, love Harry as their own son and have since we were children and, yes, they see the abyss inside of Harry. My father seems to understand it. Maybe, someday, I will, too.

From the Journal of Caleb Michael Smith

Today, Harry texted me to tell me that the lab results are in. He wasn’t sure of what to make of them, but we are, all of us, beyond being surprised by anything. So, here are the results: Most of the blood and tissue samples matched, as expected, the man in the car. However, some of the blood that was sent to the lab matched no known blood-type. Further, the blood cells, while certainly blood cells, showed certain physical properties not in mammalian blood cells, for example, these blood cells have mitochondria. What’s more, the blood that was not the man’s clotted when exposed to sunlight, but not when exposed to artificial light.
Most of the tissue recovered and sent to Harry’s lab was from the man, but, just like the blood, some of the tissue samples could not be matched to any animal on the Earth. I know. It’s too weird to believe, except that I have seen things that are weirder still. I am not at liberty to even write about those things in my own journal lest it fall into unfriendly hands.
The labs in Israel have told me that their results are “inconclusive”, which is code for the results are too weird to believe.
Damn, I miss my wife and dogs. I need them about now.

From the Journal of Caleb Michael Smith

Being a member of The Association has its benefits. Among many others is the ability to access huge amounts of information from sources not available to the common man. Today I took advantage of some of the resources at my disposal and was able to finagle a satellite photograph of the area where the man was killed in his car in the Negev Desert. I wrote last night that The Order is sick, evil, twisted in a way that is truly hard to wrap one’s head around. They are to the Schutzstaffel what the Schutzstaffel is to your average nursery-school class. However, like the SS, they are efficient and wildly attentive to detail. The dead man in the car was killed when he stopped to assist a man and a little girl in a part of the desert where they should never have been. This is the first clue; the dead man had lost, in the past year, his brother and his niece, both about the same age as the man and girl appeared to be. Seeing the odd pair in the desert set off a strong reaction in the man so he stopped. Second clue; the spot where the man was killed is right over an here-to-for unknown ancient temple dedicated to a demon-god whose name I have not yet deciphered, but Josh and I are working on it.
Third clue; the day it happened is the day of celebration of sacrifice for some pre-Columbian cultures. The connection looks, at first blush, to be a tenuous one, but I guarantee that the day was chosen for this reason……still waiting on results from Harry’s lab.

From the Journal of Caleb Michael Smith

Joshua and I spent the day taking photographs of the car in which the man was killed, leaving only his arms and a lot of blood as evidence. We took blood samples, tissue samples and documented everything to within an inch of its life. We approached the car very carefully, noting the footprints made by the first-responding police officers (the police work in Israel has been top-notch. They also approached the car very carefully and took photos at some distance to show that there were NO footprints around the car before they showed up). We recorded the fact that, indeed, there were no footprints of any sort before the authorities arrived.
Out several hundred feet from the passenger side of the car, Josh found a cross scratched in the dirt. Its orientation with respect to the car was upside down. This prompted me to look at the same distance on the driver’s side, the front, and the back of the car. Sure enough, there were crosses drawn upside down with respect to the car at each cardinal point of the compass.
Nothing The Order does is accidental or random. They are dirty, murdering scum (they actually make dirty, murdering scum look like girl scouts) but they are thorough and meticulous in a way that would make Swiss watch makers envious. The man they killed, as I wrote several days ago, was not chosen at random. I would bet dollars to doughnuts that this place, the site of the killing is no accident, either.
I have sent representative samples of the evidence to authorities in Jerusalem and to Harry’s lab in Boston. Harry and Doc Alchurch run the finest lab in the world. Waiting for results is almost too much.

This excerpt is from the second book in the series which I am in the process of writing right now.

 

“The little girl continued to stand in the woods behind Caleb’s house. She had gathered about herself those she had enthralled throughout the bleak centuries of her existence. These hopeless souls stood at the foot of the woods, eyes downcast, feeling an insatiable hunger for love and relief from pain, relief that might never come. That relief certainly would never come so long as the haunted girl, who had gone by more names than even she could remember, could not find what she was looking for.
The little girl was in pain, too, was hungry, too, and she had inflicted that pain she felt on as many as she could for as long as she could. So, she conjured up an image of The Man. He was a man she hated and she would see him killed for all eternity if she could. The image she conjured had him dead on the side of a road near a little town in Israel, another man standing next to him holding the man’s still warm heart in his hands, laughing as hard as he could.”

From the Journal of Caleb Michael Smith

Joshua and I are at the scene of the crime, in the middle of the Negev Desert, where the driver of a car who stopped to aid a man and a young girl, as reported by the driver himself to his wife on a phone call, was found dismembered, to say the least, in the vehicle. This killing was no accident. It was, is, a message to me, Josh and the rest of The Association, to back off.

(Added several days later) This man is no stranger to The Association. He was a full member of our group and was working with us to battle the evil we see making itself known throughout the world. Neither Josh nor I knew the identity of this man when we arrived in the desert. The gruesome nature of the killing which, no matter how many times I see death, I never get used to it, also tells other men who would assist us to reconsider their plans. The man who was killed was the best of men; a devoted husband and father, an active member of his Catholic congregation at Dominus Flevit Church in Jerusalem, and a man who sacrificed all in service to God. His loss will be felt by all of us, especially his wife and children.

The Association has more money than any normal man could even imagine and, as with all men killed or injured in service to our group and God, his family will never want for financial or other material support. In time, she will probably marry again from within our ranks so that she will have a partner who will love her and her children. Until then, our hearts go out to them.

From the Journal of Caleb Michael Smith

July 4, 20–. Sometime in the past.

In bed, next to my sleeping wife. It is 5:30 AM, the window at the head of our bed is open and the already warm sea breeze is washing over us both. The location of our house is an odd juxtaposition of the beautiful and the frightening. Our bedroom window, six feet wide, opening onto a huge deck that sits above a beach of brown and red sand and rolling waves, is on one side of the house. The back of our house opens onto The Devil’s Graveyard, the huge, wooded part of North Island that has been the site, oft times, of terrible things. Some have gone into it’s interior to never return. Some have ventured in and out, apparently safe, only to go mad within the year, venturing back in the woods to hang or shoot themselves. I deliberately built my house here, on the site of the first house on North Island, because of the site’s eerie location. If I was going to hunt down evil, and I have been for more than fifteen years, I wanted to be close to its source on North Island.
As for this morning, my wife is stirring, and we are going to have coffee on our deck looking at the surf and thanking God for all our good fortune.

From the Journal of Caleb Michael Smith

Joshua and I are out in the countryside. We drove a couple of hours out into the Negev Desert to check out a few ideas that he and I were kicking around last night. We moved from the Arthur Hotel to the David Citadel, because there was more room there and we wanted a “command center” of sorts where we and other members of the Association could meet and map out a strategy for fighting members of The Order. There have been reports of odd happenings in the desert. Vehicles traveling through the area have reported seeing a man (Western-White) standing on the side of the road, or some small distance from it, holding the hand of a small, blonde girl. The pair were not dressed for the desert and so looked very out of place. Several vehicles stopped to offer help, but the occupants got out to talk to the man and girl, the pair had vanished into the sands. No foot prints, nothing. This is the sort of thing that will set off alarms, not only on the algorithms I have scouring the internet, but more important, on the systems that The Association has running around the world. What has Josh and me out here, though, is not even our “kicked around ideas”, but a report from this morning of the siting of the man and girl. The driver who stopped to help them was not so lucky as the others. He was on the phone with his wife when he spotted them on the side of the road and told his wife what he had seen and that he was going to see if they were alright. When his wife had not heard from him in several hours, she called police who went to investigate. Police found the car, but not the man, girl nor the driver of the car. They did, however, find his hands and arms, up to the elbow, holding the steering wheel and what looks like every pint of his blood spattered on the inside of the car.